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thinking of making some changes,” Michael said. “I’m busy all day long,
     but at night I can hardly remember what I did.”
    A loud knocking came from the door, and Michael said “Room service,” and stood up.
     The waiter wheeled in the cart and arranged the glasses and bottles on the table.
     The atmosphere in the room became more festive as Conor opened a Budweiser and Harry
     Beevers poured vodka into an empty glass. Michael never explained his half-formed
     plan of selling his practice in Westerholmand seeing what he might be able to do in some gritty place like the South Bronx where
     children really needed doctors. Judy usually walked out of the room whenever he began
     to talk about it.
    After the waiter left, Conor stretched out on the bed, rolled on his side, and said,
     “So you saw Dengler’s name? It was right there?”
    “Sure. I got a little surprise, though. Do you know what his full name was?”
    “M.O. Dengler,” Conor said.
    “Don’t be an idiot,” Beevers said. “It was Mark, I think.” He looked to Tina for help,
     but Tina frowned and shrugged.
    “Manuel Orosco Dengler,” Michael said. “I was amazed that I didn’t know that.”
    “
Manuel
?” Conor said. “Dengler was
Mexican?”
    “Michael, you got the wrong Dengler,” Tina Pumo said, laughing.
    “Nope,” Michael said. “There’s not only one
M.O.
Dengler, there’s only one Dengler. He’s ours.”
    “A Mexican,” Conor mused.
    “You ever hear of any Mexicans named Dengler? His parents just gave him Spanish names,
     I guess. Who knows? Who even cares? He was a hell of a soldier, that’s all I know.
     I wish—”
    Pumo raised his glass to his mouth instead of finishing his sentence, and none of
     the men spoke for an almost elastically long moment.
    Linklater muttered something unintelligible and walked across the room and sat on
     the floor.
    Michael stood up to add fresh ice cubes to his glass and saw Conor Linklater backed
     up against the far wall like an imp in his black clothes, the brown beer bottle dangling
     between his knees. The orange writing on his chest was nearly the same shade as his
     hair. Conor was looking back at him with a small secret smile.
3
    Maybe Beans Beevers didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, Conor was thinking, but he had gone
     someplace like that—someplace where everybody in sight just took it all for granted.
     To Conor it seemed that about ninety-five percent of the people in the United States
     did nothing but fret and stew about money—not having enoughmoney made them crazy. They zeroed out on booze, they cranked themselves up to commit
     robberies: oblivion, tension, oblivion. The other five percent of the population rode
     above this turmoil like froth on a wave. They went to the schools their fathers had
     gone to and they married and divorced one another, as Harry had married and divorced
     Pat Caldwell. They had jobs where you shuffled papers and talked on the telephone.
     From behind their desks they watched the money stroll in the door, coming home. They
     even passed out these jobs to each other—Beans Beevers, who spent as much time at
     the bar in Pumo’s restaurant as he did at his desk, worked in the law firm run by
     Pat Caldwell’s brother.
    When Conor had been a boy in South Norwalk, a kind of wondering and resentful curiosity
     had made him pedal his old Schwinn up along Route 136 to Mount Avenue in Hampstead.
     Mount Avenue people were so rich they were nearly invisible, like their enormous houses—from
     the road all you could see of some of them were occasional sections of brick or stucco
     walls. Most of these waterfront mansions seemed empty of anybody but servants, yet
     now and then young Conor would spot an obvious owner-resident. Conor learned from
     his brief sightings that although these Mount Avenue owner-residents usually wore
     the same grey suits and blue jackets as everyone else in Hampstead, sometimes they
     blazoned forth like Harry Beevers in