Part I

The limousines were pulled up and down 60th Street disgorging their curiously dressed passengers into the Pierre Hotel for a costume party, the annual Pimps, Whores, and Gangsters Ball. Of course the people going into the hotel were not pimps, whores, and gangsters at all. They were the very crème de la crème of New York society who gathered every year for this gala event to support the Humanitas Foundation, a most worthy philanthropic organization.

In the main ballroom, the costumed guests mingled affably in a bizarre array of interpretations of their adopted personae. The corporate executives mostly attempted to look like Dago Petes from the thirties; the fashion designers and other assorted members of the creative community affected huge, plush hats, velvet capes, coke spoon necklaces and other pimp paraphernalia that seemed to have been rented from the wardrobe room of an old blaxploitation movie. It was the women, however, who really shined in their streetwalker garb. Society dowagers tottered about on eight-inch stilettos, their highly visible bras and bustiers acting as counterpart and complement to their leather or gold spangled micro miniskirts. They giggled in giddy abandon at their own wantonness as they circulated through the ballroom, brazenly flirting with the uncomfortable gangsters and the far more appreciative pimps. It was all such good fun.

However, there was a certain pall hanging over the room. Not a few of the gangsters had been forced to answer uncomfortable questions before congressional committees and Federal judges the preceding year. Was it their fault that the invisible hand of the free market had reached down and spanked some of their irrationally exuberant investors? Those poor fools in the government would never understand. Who had ever audited their bottom line?