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afternoon at three o'clock, outside (the rendezvous had seemed appropriate to Bond) the Reptile House at the Central Park Zoo.
    Bond pressed the button that let down the glass partition and leaned forward. 'The Astor, please.'
    'Yes, sir.' The big black car weaved through the curves and out of the airport enclave on to the Van Wyck Expressway, now being majestically torn to pieces and rebuilt for the 1964-1965 World's Fair.
    James Bond sat back and lit one of his last Morland Specials. By lunchtime it would be king-size Chesterfields. The Astor. It was as good as another and Bond liked the Times Square jungle—the hideous souvenir shops, the sharp clothiers, the giant feedomats, the hypnotic neon signs, one of which said BOND in letters a mile high. Here was the guts of New York, the living entrails. His other favourite quarters had gone—Washington Square, the Battery, Harlem, where you now needed a passport and two detectives. The Savoy Ballroom! What fun it had been in the old days! There was still Central Park, which would now be at its most beautiful—stark and bright. As for the hotels, they too had gone—the Ritz Carlton, the St Regis that had died with Michael Arlen. The Carlyle was perhaps the lone survivor. The rest were all the same—those sighing lifts, the rooms full of last month's air and a vague memory of ancient cigars, the empty 'You're welcomes,' the thin coffee, the almost blue-white boiled eggs for breakfast (Bond had once had a small apartment in New York. He had tried everywhere to buy brown eggs until finally some grocery clerk had told him, 'We don't stock 'em, mister. People think they're dirty'), the dank toast (that shipment of toast racks to the Colonies must have foundered!). Ah me! Yes, the Astor would do as well as another.
    Bond glanced at his watch. He would be there by eleven-thirty, then a brief shopping expedition, but a very brief one because nowadays there was little to buy in the shops that wasn't from Europe—except the best garden furniture in the world, and Bond hadn't got a garden. The drug-store first for half a dozen of Owens incomparable toothbrushes. Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette's own product, Tripler's for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner's because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie's to look over the new gadgets and, incidentally, make a date with Solange (appropriately employed in their Indoor Games Department) for the evening.
    The Cadillac was running the hideous gauntlet of the used car dumps, and chromium-plated swindles leered and winked. What happened to these re-sprayed crocks when the weather had finally rotted their guts? Where did they finally go to die? Mightn't they be useful if they were run into the sea to conquer coastal erosion? Take a letter to the Herald Tribune!
    Then there was the question of lunch. Dinner with Solange would be easy—Lutece in the sixties, one of the great restaurants of the world. But for lunch by himself? In the old days it would certainly have been the '21,' but the expense-account aristocracy had captured even that stronghold, inflating the prices and, because they didn't know good from bad, deflating the food. But he would go there for old times' sake and have a couple of dry martinis--Beefeaters with a domestic vermouth, shaken with a twist of lemon peel—at the bar. And then what about the best meal in New York—oyster stew with cream, crackers, and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central? No, he didn't want to sit up at a bar—somewhere spacious and comfortable where he could read a paper in peace. Yes. That was it! The Edwardian Room at the Plaza, a corner table. They didn't know him there, but he knew he could get what he wanted to eat—not like Chambord or Pavillon with their irritating Wine and Foodmanship and, in