A Bronx jury . . . And all at once Kramer was no longer thinking of the same cluster of dark faces that Ray and Jimmy were thinking of ... He was thinking of those perfect smiling teeth and those sweet full lips glistening with brown lipstick and those shining eyes across a little table in the very heart of ... the Life . . . which existed only in Manhattan . . . Jesus ... He was broke after he paid the bill at Muldowny's ... but when he hailed her a cab out in front of the place and he held out his hand to thank her and say goodbye, she let her hand stay in his, and he increased the pressure, and she squeezed back, and they stayed that way, looking into each other's eyes, and1—God!— that moment was sweeter, sexier, more full of—goddamn it!— love, genuine love, the love that just hits you and . . . fills up your heart . . . than any of those slam-bang first-date scores he used to pride himself on when he was out prowling like a goddamned cat ... No, he would forgive Bronx juries a lot. A Bronx jury had brought into his life the woman he had been destined to meet all along . . . Love, Destiny, How Full My Heart . . . Let others shrink from the meaning of those terms . . . Ray whaling down his super-sub, Jimmy grousing morosely about Willie Francisco and Lester McGuigan . . . Larry Kramer existed on a more spiritual plane . . .

[...] Roland Auburn was now sitting back in Jimmy Caughey's chair with his knees akimbo and his forearms on the armrests, cracking his knuckles, looking straight at Kramer. His face was a mask. He didn't even blink. Kramer thought of the phrase that kept turning up in the probation reports on these young black male defendants: "lacking in affect." Apparently that meant they were deficient in ordinary feelings. They didn't feel guilt, shame, remorse, fear, or sympathy for others. But whenever it fell to Kramer's lot to talk to these people, he had the feeling it was something else. They pulled down a curtain. They shut him off from what was behind the unblinking surface of their eyes. They didn't let him see so much as an eighth of an inch of what they thought of him and the Power and their own lives. He had wondered before and he wondered now: Who are these people? (These people, whose fates I determine every day . . .)

Out on the floor of the bond trading room, the morning madness had reached its peak. As he headed toward his desk, Sherman felt as if he were swimming through a delirium.

"... October ninety-twos at the buck ..."

". . .I said we strip the fuckers!"

Ahhhhh, the golden crumbs . . . How pointless it seemed . . .

As he sat down at his desk, Arguello approached and said, "Sherman, do you know anything about 10 million Joshua Tree S&Ls?"

In the bank on Nassau Street, which he had entered hundreds of times, where tellers, guards, junior officers, and the manager himself knew him as the estimable Mr. McCoy of Pierce & Pierce and called him by name, where he was so esteemed, in fact, they had given him a personal loan of $1.8 million to buy his apartment—and that loan cost him $21,000 a month!—and where was it going to come from!—oh God!—he now noticed the smallest things ... the egg-and-dart molding around the cornice on the main floor . . . the old bronze shades on the lamps on the check-writing desks in the middle of the lobby . . . the spiral fluting on the posts supporting the railing between the lobby and the section where the officers sat ... All so solid! so precise! so orderly! . . . and now so specious! such a mockery! ... so worthless, offering no protection at all ...

A visit in the middle of the day— -- the Lion's old office had not only been on the corner, it had commanded a view of New York Harbor. What bliss it had been, as a boy, to go visit Daddy in his office! From the moment he stepped off the elevator on the eighteenth floor he was His Majesty the Child. Everyone, the receptionist, the junior partners, even the porters, knew his name and sang it out as if nothing could bring greater happiness to the loyal subjects of Dunning Sponget than the sight of his little face and budding aristocratic chin. All other traffic seemed to come to a halt as His Majesty the Child was escorted down the hall and deep into the CEO's suite to the office of the Lion himself, on the corner, where the door opened and -- —glorious! -- —the sun flooded in from over the harbor, which was spread out for him down below. The Statue of Liberty, the Staten Island ferries, the tugboats, the police boats, the cargo ships coming in through the Narrows in the distance . . . What a show -- —for him! What bliss!

Several times, in that glorious office, they came close to sitting down and having a real talk. Young as he was, Sherman had perceived that his father was trying to open a door in his formality and beckon him through. And he had never known quite how. Now, in the blink of an eye, Sherman was thirty-eight, and there was no door at all. How could he put it? In his entire life he had never dared embarrass his father with a single confession of weakness, let alone moral decay and abject vulnerability.

"Ah, Sherman." A far-off weariness. The horse is out of the barn. "I wish you had come to me as soon as this thing happened. Now, at this stage-—well, but that's where we are, isn't it? So let's try to go from here. One thing I'm quite sure of. You have got to find the very best representation available. You've got to find lawyers you can trust, imp//citly, because you're putting an awful lot in their hands. You can't just go wandering in to some people named Dershbein—whatever it is. I'm going to call Chester Whitman and Ed LaPrade and sound them out."

Chester Whitman and Ed LaPrade? Two old federal judges who were either retired or close to it. The likelihood of their knowing anything about the machinations of a Bronx district attorney or a Harlem rabble-rouser was so remote . . . And all at once Sherman felt sad, not so much for himself as for this old man before him, clinging to the power of connections that meant something back in the 1950s and early 1960s . . .

"Miss Needleman?" The Lion was already on the telephone. "Would you ring up Judge Chester Whitman for me, please? . . . What? . . . Oh. I see. Well, when you're through, then." He hung up the receiver. As an old partner, he no longer had a secretary of his own. He shared one with half a dozen others, and obviously she, Miss Needleman, did not jump when the Lion opened his mouth. Waiting, the Lion looked out his solitary window and pursed his lips and looked very old.

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

"You wanna know what I think? I think Bernie, without knowing it—don't get me wrong, I like Bernie and I respect Bernie -- —but I think, without knowing it, he really does think someone like McCoy should get special treatment, because he's white and because he's well known. Now, this is a subtle thing. Bernie's Irish, just like Tommy's Irish, and the Irish have a certain amount of what the English call deference built into them, and they don't even know it. They're impressed by these Waspy guys, like McCoy, even though consciously they may act and think like they're members of the IRA. It's not really important, but a guy like Bernie's got this deference thing to deal with, this unconscious Irish thing, and he doesn't even know about it. But we don't represent the Wasps, Larry. I wonder if there's even a Wasp living in the Bronx. There must be one in Riverdale somewhere."

The menu had little black-and-white ads across the bottom, little rectangles with old-fashioned borders and highly stylized logos for things like Nehi chocolate drink and Captain Henry's Canned Herring Roe and Cafe du Monde Dark Roast Coffee with Chicory and Indian Chief Balloon Tire bicycles and Edgeworth Pipe Tobacco and 666 Cold & Cough Medicine. The ads were sheer decoration, mementos of the old two-lane hardtop days in Louisiana bayou country. A sixth sense made Kramer flinch. This faux-Down Home shit was as expensive as the/awx-Bohemian Casual shit. He didn't even want to think what this was all going to come to, maybe fifty goddamned dollars. But there was no turning back now, was there? Shelly was sitting right across from him in the booth watching his every gesture and expression, and he had spent the past hour and a half projecting the image of a man who takes charge and is in control, and it was he, the manly bon vivant, who had suggested that they proceed forthwith to dessert and coffee. Besides, he felt an acute need for ice cream. His mouth and his gullet were on fire. The Cafe Alexandria didn't seem to have a single item on any course that wasn't a conflagration. The Creole Gumbo with Bayou Sand -- —he thought the word sand must be a metaphor for some gritty condiment, some ground-up root or something, but there was actual sand in the goddamned soup, apparently drenched in Tabasco. The Cornbread Cayenne—it was like bread with fire ants in it. The Catfish Fillet with Scorched Okra on a Bed of Yellow Rice with Apple Butter and Chinese Mustard Sauce—the Chinese mustard raised a red flag, but he had to order the catfish because it was the only semi-inexpensive entree on the menu, $10.50. And Andriutti had said it was an inexpensive little Creole restaurant on Beach Street, "really terrific." Beach Street was a crummy enough street to have a cheap restaurant, and so he had believed him.

It was a triumphant Peter Fallow who entered Leicester's that evening. Everyone at the Table, and scores more among those who packed that noisy bistro, even those who turned up their noses at The City Light, knew that it was he who had broken the McCoy case. Even St. John and Billy, who were seldom serious about anything other than one another's infidelities, offered congratulations with apparent sincerity. Sampson Reith, the London Daily Courier's political correspondent, who was out here for a few days, happened by the Table and told of his lunch with Irwin Gubner, deputy managing editor of The New York Times, who lamented that The City Light had the story practically to itself, which of course meant Peter Fallow, keeper and tender. Alex Britt-Withers sent over a vodka Southside, on the house, and it tasted so good Fallow ordered another. The tidal wave of approval was so great that Caroline smiled the first smile he'd had from her in a very long time. The only sour note was Nick Stopping. His approval was decidedly soft-spoken and halfhearted. Then Fallow realized that Nick, the Marxist-Leninist, the Oxford Sparticist, the Rousseau of the Third World, was no doubt consumed with jealousy. This was his sort of story, not this shallow comedian Fallow's -- —Fallow could now regard Nick's opinion of him with magnanimous amusement— -- and yet here was Fallow at the forefront, riding the freight train of History, while he, Stopping, was writing yet another piece for House & Garden on the latest Mrs. Posh's villa in Hobe Sound, or wherever.

"Hah! If I got paid overtime for all the hours I'm gonna have to put into this one—well, I could move to Park Avenue myself. But you know what? That doesn't matter to me. It really doesn't. All I care about is, whatever kind of life I lead, I want to be able to look back and say, 'I made a difference.' This case is so important, on every conceivable level, not just in terms of my career. It's just a ... I don't know how to say it ... a whole new chapter. I want to make a difference, Shelly."

He stopped and, still holding her hand, put it behind her waist and then pulled her to him. She was looking up at him, radiantly. Their lips met. He peeked just once, to see if she was keeping her eyes closed. She was.

Kramer could feel her lower abdomen pressed against his. Was that the knob of her mons veneris? It had come along this far, this fast, so sweetly, so beautifully -- —and damn! No place to take her!

Imagine! Him! The budding star of the McCoy case—and no place—no place at all!—in the very Babylon of the twentieth century!—to take a lovely willing girl with brown lipstick. He wondered what was going through her mind at this moment.

In fact, she was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first.