A pause. Then the doughnut's soft patient voice from Paris, by satellite: "Sherman. Please. For 300 million bonds nobody's got to do anything on hot flashes."

"Of course not, of course not. It's just that I know I've explained ... I know I've ... I know ..."

He knew he had to talk himself down from this giddy urgent plateau as quickly as possible, become the smooth calm figure from the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce that the Trader T doughnut had always known, a figure of confidence and unshakable puissance, but ... it was bound to be his car. No way out of it! Mercedes, RF, a white man and woman!

The fire raged inside his skull. The black man stropped away on his shoe. The sounds of the bond trading room closed in on him like the roar of beasts:

"He's seeing them at six! Your offering is five!"

"Bid out! The Feds are doing reverses!"

"Feds buying all coupons! Market subject!"

"Holy fucking shit! I want out!"

As the shitstorm grew louder and Jimmy Caughey rolled his eyes in ever more hopeless arcs, Kramer thought of a brighter future. Tonight he would meet her at last ... the Girl with Brown Lipstick.

Muldowny's, that restaurant on the East Side, Third Avenue at Seventy-eighth Street . . . exposed brick walls, blond wood, brass, etched glass, hanging plants . . . aspiring actresses who waited on tables . . . celebrities ... but informal and not very expensive, or that's what he heard ... the electric burble of young people in Manhattan leading ... the Life ... a table for two . . . He's looking into the incomparable face of Miss Shelly Thomas . . .

The wide eyes of Sir Gerald and his managing editor were too much for Fallow. They sent a surge of poetic license up his brain stem.

"I must confess, I couldn't resist a look. So I decided to retrace the route Mrs. Lamb and her son had taken when they first moved into the Edgar Allan Poe Towers."

In fact, after the warning, Fallow hadn't dared go near the stairway. But now lies, graphic lies, bubbled up into his brain at an intoxicating rate. In his intrepid trip down the stairs he encountered every sort of vice: fornication, crack smoking, heroin injection, dice games and three-card monte, and more fornication.

Steiner and Highridge stared, agape and bug-eyed.

"Are you serious?" said Highridge. "What did they do when they saw you?"

"Nothing but slog away. In their sublime state, what was a mere passing journalist?"

The words were just gushing out, in torrents, all the marvelous things about his bravery and talent for the fray that he had no one to tell about. He couldn't go on like this to Jimmy Caughey or Ray Andriutti or, any longer, to his wife, whose threshold for crime highs was by now a stone wall. But Miss Shelly Thomas—I must keep you high! She drank it all in. Those eyes! Those glistening brown lips! Her thirst for his words was bottomless, which was a good thing, because she wasn't drinking anything but designer water. Kramer had a glass of house white wine and was trying to keep from gulping it, because he could already tell this place was not as inexpensive as he had thought. Christ! His goddamned mind was double-tracking a mile a minute! It was like a two-track tape. On one track he was gushing out this speech about how he handled the trial—

"But you didn't challenge me. Is that the term?"

"Yeah. No, I didn't. Well, for one thing, I don't think it's right to challenge a juror just because he's— -- she's intelligent and well educated. I mean, I'm sure you noticed there was nobody else from Riverdale on your jury. There wasn't even anybody else from Riverdale on your panel during the voir dire. Everybody is always moaning over the fact that we don't get more educated jurors in the Bronx, and then when we get one— -- well, it's almost like wasting a resource or something to challenge one just because you think she might be sensitive. Besides ..." Did he dare try it? He dared. "... I just ... to be honest about it ... I just wanted you on that jury."

He looked as deeply into those big mauve-rainbow eyes as he could and put as honest and open a look on his face as he knew how and lifted his chin, so she could see the fullness of his stemocleidomastoids.

She lowered her eyes and blushed clear through autumn in the Berkshires again. Then she raised her eyes and looked deeply into his.

"I did sort of notice you looking at me a lot."

Just then the waitress returned. "Have you had a chance to decide?"

She was a perfect confection, too. Young, blond, curly-haired, brilliant blue eyes, the perfect aspiring-actress type, with dimples and a smile that said: "Well! I can see that you two have decided something!" Or did it say, "I'm young, pretty, and charming, and I expect a big tip when you pay your big bill"? Kramer looked into her twinkling face, and then he looked into Miss Shelly Thomas's. He was consumed by feelings of lust and poverty.

Sherman leaned forward and put his head down again. He found himself staring at the shiny tops of his New & Lingwood half-brogues. The colossal vanity of his bench-made English shoes sickened him. What availeth a man ... He couldn't remember the quotation. He could see the pitiful brown moon on the crown of Felix's skull . . . Knoxville . . . Why hadn't he moved to Knoxville long ago? ... a simple Georgian house with a screen porch at one end . . .