ack were what looked like the first
chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.

Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter
Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed
Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans,
spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers,
priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion.

"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born."

Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty
pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line
for it--_The Virgin of Persepolis_ by Leon Lenn--and mailed it off to
a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was
cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of
the novel.

Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly
and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd
pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime.

Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this
time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and
bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index,
containing three times as many clauses as a lease.

This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check
for nine hundred dollars.

* * * * *

Len tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully,
conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women
do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a
year?

It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working
stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been
wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.

The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter
stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and
sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered
housecoat, was lighting a cigarette.

"How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always
received one.

She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes
killed Anaxander."

"Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?"

"I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it
was that raped Marianne in the garden?"

"No, who?"

"Ganesh."

"You're kidding!"

"Nope." She po