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.

"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.

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.