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inquisitive, curious friends in the Towers when they saw the fresh flowers—still fresh after more than a week, as though whatever upscale, emergency florist Alcibiades had had perforce to go to to purchase flowers at that time of night and charge what had to have been those kind of prices, would have had to provide not only the convenience of his after-hours availability but, too, something special in the nature of the blooms themselves, a mystery ingredient that imbued them with some almost Edenic longevity and extended scent—some of which Mrs. Ted had transferred from the cut crystal vase into which she’d originally put them and now redistributed in three equal parts into two other vessels.
    She was at pains to inform them that there had been but the single presentation from Mr. Chitral, that she herself had thought to place these remarkable flowers in additional vases so that she might enjoy them from various vantage points throughout the room. They cheered her up, she said.
    “Sure they do,” Florence Klein said. “Believe me, Dorothy, I only wish I had an admirer.”
    “He admired me for my parking space.”
    “I’m only kidding, ” Florence Klein said. “Don’t get so cock-cited.”
    “I’ll say this much for Latins,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “they always try to sell you a bill of goods. During the war, when Ted had the meat market, it was the same thing. He could have opened a liquor store with all the cases of wine those thieves gave him. They climbed all over each other to get you to take their black-market, Argentine meat. I wanted to sell.”
    Had Chitral heard of any of this he would have been offended. The bitch was good-looking enough for an old bitch, but who did these people think they were?
    Seducing her into selling her husband’s automobile was a non-starter, the last thing on his mind. It was insulting. One gave out of respect for the proprieties, the civilized gesture. Was he some nasty tango of a man? Had he kissed her hand? Had he offered serenades?
    But no whiff of imagined scandal reached his ears. No wink of conspiracy, no gentle nudge to his ribs in the elevator. Even on those rare occasions when they ran into each other at this or that Towers do, Mrs. Bliss barely acknowledged him. He thought he understood her reasons. He imagined she still felt shame for having sold her husband’s car. Chitral was a gentleman, no more given to grandstanding or bluffing than Hector Camerando or Jaime Guttierez. Taking his cue from Mrs. Ted Bliss, he affected a discretion as palpable (though of course not as nervous) as her own. He was not just a gentleman. He was a man of parts. In addition to his decorums, he had his sensibilities as well. In the matter of the automobile she may have been shamed as much by the windfall profit she had made from the sale as by the sale itself. All you had to do was look at her. She was like the woman of valor in Proverbs. Any idea of benefit from the death of a spouse would have gone against her nature. She had known he’d overpaid her. That’s why he’d told her about the parking space. It was a matter of record that the people in Building One could sell their garage privileges. He’d meant to make it seem like a package deal—which of course it was. The space would have been worthless to him without the car, the car of no value without the space.
    So the last time they saw each other without the mutual buffers of an amiable, pretend nonchalance was two years later, when Mrs. Bliss testified against him, a witness for the prosecution, in court. She never entirely understood how they worked it. Nor, for that matter, really understood why the government subpoenaed her.
    But don’t think the family didn’t fight to have the subpoena quashed. Frank, her son, and Maxine, her daughter, wanted her to have representation and even hired a lawyer for her, although when Mrs. Bliss learned what they were being charged she gathered her outrage, joined it to her courage,