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punctual.” Underneath this note was tucked a peacock feather.
    â€œLady MacGuffin’s head-feather,” Max said when he noticed me twirling it in my lap. “A rare item, indeed.”
    â€œI was wondering what that was,” said Mama.
    â€œI was glad to see you take your time reading those. Too often people skip
over important documents, contracts and whatnot, rather than
dig in
, really
sink their teeth in
and read.”
    â€œI absolutely agree.”
    â€œToo often they just, as they say,
sign on the dotted line
.”
    â€œWithout reading what they’re signing.”
    â€œA shame.”
    â€œToo common.”
    There was a long silence.
    â€œWhat did you think of them if I might ask?”
    â€œYour?” Mama said.
    â€œReferences.” He smiled queasily.
    â€œOh,” said Mama. “Well, I wasn’t very impressed, Mr. Horatio.”
    â€œMax, please.”
    â€œI can’t say I was impressed, Mr. Horatio.”
    â€œIf we can just settle on Max.”
    â€œHalf of it is illegible. The other half’s signed by people with only one name.”
    â€œThose so-called one-names are what we call VIP personalities. That Russ, that Russ you see there—that’s Russ Banham, owner of the biggest nightclub in Fantasma Falls. Sebastian Foy is
the
most important talent manager in the City. As for the illegibles, well, keep in mind, there’s a certain smudge factor here. I’m a traveling man, things get smudged. That’s just a reality.”
    â€œLobster savannah,” the waiter announced.
    â€œRight here,” said Mama, with a smile.
    He set down the platter with the butter-soaked cruise ship of lobster and laid down the rest of the dishes: the two pink one-and-a-half-pound lobsters, the pale corn, and small dishes of butter. “Enjoy.” The waiter smiled seriously and disappeared.
    â€œBig names or not, Mr. Horatio, they don’t mean much scribbled on toilet paper.”
    â€œLet’s—let’s,” Max said, pumping his knee. “Let’s just pause here to let the food happen?”
    â€œBefore such cuisine, how could we not?”
    But Max missed this riposte, distracted, as he was, by the seafood’s arrival into the realm of his senses. Anyone could see it: how much the impending feast had replaced the tug-of-war with Mama as the true, and only, business of the moment. He sniffed and rubbed his hands and even licked his lips, like a cartoon wolf over a captured infant. Without removing his eyes from the platter, as if the dead, pink creature might still slither away, he cautiously unrolled the Armison’s Famous Eatery bib and tucked it into his collar, the news of hunger everywhere in his face. “Let’s just let the food happen,” he muttered again at the volume of a prayer.
    What followed was not so different from one of the documentary films they sometimes screened at the Sea View County Theatre, those movies in which a grassland lion stalks and devours a baby elephant. Armison’s provided every patron with a silver-plated nutcracker: Max ignored his, assaulting the animal with his hands. There were three clean
snaps
, then he beheld the lobster’s sinewy tail. He eyed it with the respect of a predator and smushed it into the bottom of his butter dish, held it there. Two gulps later, it had disappeared. An emission somewhere between a hum and a groan was the sound of his chewing. The tail gone, Max hunkered down and vacuumed all meat and juice out of the remaining animal, sucking the pink-white fins, cracking the joints, lapping up the green mush of roe. His eyes, during this feast, remained in a state of vivid disuse: glassy, black, unfocused. He belched, sucked air through his nose. Whenever he required water (often, given the intense rate of his ingestion) he sent his free hand on a blind mission for the glass, scuttling over the tablecloth, and finally grabbing it, kept