"Oh, I know these chaps," said Steiner, "and the old ones are the worst. They've made their fifty million or their hundred million—that's what the Texans call a unit. Did you know that? They call a hundred million dollars a unit. I think that's delightful. A unit, of course, is a starting point. In any case, this sort of chap makes his great colossal pile, and he goes to a dinner party, and he's sitting next to some pretty young thing, and he's getting a bit of the old tingle—but she hasn't the faintest notion who he is. A hundred million dollars!—and she's never even heard his name, and she isn't interested in who he is when he tries to tell her. What can he do? He can't very well go about with a sign around his neck saying financial giant. At that point, believe me, they begin to lose some of their purported scruples concerning publicity."

Fallow believed him. It was not for nothing that Steiner had founded The City Light and kept it going at an operating loss of about ten million dollars a year. No longer was he merely another financier. He was the dread buccaneer of the dread City Light.

The first course arrived. Fallow had ordered a vegetable pate. The pate was a small pinkish semicircle with stalks of rhubarb arranged around it like rays. It was perched in the upper left-hand quadrant of a large plate. The plate seemed to be glazed with an odd Art Nouveau painting of a Spanish galleon on a reddish sea sailing toward the ... sunset. . . but the setting sun was, in fact, the pate, with its rhubarb rays, and the Spanish ship was not done in glaze at all but in different colors of sauce. It was a painting in sauce. Ruskin's plate contained a bed of flat green noodles carefully intertwined to create a basket weave, superimposed upon which was a flock of butterflies fashioned from pairs of mushroom slices, for the wings; pimientos, onion slices, shallots, and capers, for the bodies, eyes, and antennae. Ruskin took no note of the exotic collage before him. He had ordered a bottle of wine and was becoming increasingly expansive about the peaks and valleys of his career. Valleys, yes; oh, he had had to overcome many disappointments. The main thing was to be decisive. Decisive men made great decisions not because they were smarter than other people, necessarily, but because they made more decisions, and by the law of averages some of them would be great. Did Fallow get it? Fallow nodded. Ruskin paused only to stare gloomily at the fuss Raphael and his boys were making over the big round table in front of them. Madame Tacaya is coming. Ruskin seemed to feel upstaged.

Ruskin swelled up to his story. He ordered some red wine, a heavy wine that started a delicious fire in Fallow's stomach. Fallow ordered a dish called veal Boogie Woogie, which turned out to be rectangles of veal, small squares of spiced red apples, and lines of pureed walnuts arranged to look like Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Ruskin ordered medallions de selle d'agneau Mikado, which was perfectly pink ovals of leg of lamb with tiny leaves of spinach and sticks of braised celery arranged to resemble a Japanese fan. Ruskin managed to down two glasses of the fiery red wine with a rapidity that was startling, given the fact that he did not stop talking.