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as Vernon on the day Vernon had met Daphne. So Vernon offered him a job on the spot. Unlike Daphne, Bobby accepted on the spot.
    Vernon could easily have supplied each of them with an office, but they insisted on staying together. He called her Daffy; she called him Booby. They argued about everything—penny stocks, IPOs, short selling. Actually, they brawled a lot of the time. So what? Vernon said to Samantha. Let them brawl; they’re brilliant.
    And they, in turn, thought Vernon walked on water. He had saved them from running people down on skateboards and standing indefinitely on street corners.
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    Vernon lived alone in a penthouse condo overlooking the Thames with white walls and three fireplaces, filled with angular, streamlined furniture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and other seriously Swedish or German designers. He had never married. He was thirty-six years old. He did enjoy the company of women, two of them, one named Janet, a good-looking brunette who thought marriage for them was in the cards or the stars. Why she thought this he couldn’t imagine as he had never suggested it and never would. The other woman was a high-class whore named Taffy, whom he actually preferred to Janet, certainly on the sexual front—as well he should, when he was paying five hundred quid for two hours of her time. Taffy looked like her name—smooth and golden—tasted like it, stretched like it. She was inventive (but then, again, for that price, she ought to be).
    Vernon loved his life. He loved coming home to the white walls and slick furniture, the polished floors, the aquarium he had paid thirty thousand pounds to have installed in one wall, flanked by paintings by Pollock and Hockney. His cat oversaw this arrangement. He knew Barney’s seemingly relaxed position—tail encircling torso, paws curled into chest—masked a busy mind trying to work out how he could get in there. He had found Barney wandering along by the river near the Town of Ramsgate pub. Probably the cat remembered better times, when alleys were full of dumps and jellied eels was the plate du jour. He admired cats’ self-sufficiency; they weren’t always barking at him to be let out. Barney’s “out” was the patio, where he could look at the Thames and the night. The patio was utterly glamorous and exotic. There were palm trees and hibiscus and fruit trees. He was not a gardener but he did take very good care of everything and the plants and trees flourished. He bet it was the London rain, which more often was thick mist or drizzle, so that his plants were fanned with water, not beaten with it.
    Janet didn’t like cats; she felt they were sneaky. “On the contrary,” Vernon said, “they’re perfectly open about flouting rules or stealing shrimp from your plate.”
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    Actually, he didn’t. It irritated him to death that she really thought “you-know-what-I-mean” was an answer.
    At this point in his evening return he always made a pitcher of Manhattans if he was feeling really Art Deco, or martinis, if he was feeling like a drink. Now he was finishing stirring their ten-to-oneness. He tapped the stirrer against the pitcher and poured the drink into a stemmed glass to which a paper-thin peel of lemon had been added. He sipped. It was cold and quick, knife-edged.
    In the last couple of weeks, when he drank this home-coming martini he had thought up his new dotcom start-up. He had been to a number of AA meetings, not for his own sake, but to see what they were selling, and for God’s sake, were they ever selling! No wonder this organization was so successful. What they had on offer was: one, salvation; two, friends for you everywhere—in every city, every country on the globe; and three, childhood’s return. At the very least these three things and a whole lot of others. Members probably stopped drinking because they couldn’t