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you call ahead and see who had booked? Would we have gone somewhere else if Mailer and Ingrid Bergman hadn’t been in tonight? Would we have gone somewhere where you could be certain I’d taste the high life, where I’d be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars and best-selling writers? Because that’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been dangling New York in front of me. Like a reward. One great big temptation.”
    “Well . . . you never could resist temptation.”
    “I did Frank. I was polite to Dorothy, but I sent her packing.”
    “Dorothy wasn’t part of it. OK? Nothin’ to do with it. Manhattan, what you call the high life . . . sure. Why the fuck not? But Dorothy acted on her own. You must have said something to impress her. It wasn’t that damn painting in the lobby was it? Piece of fucking shit Nat Carver spent thousands of dollars of company money on. Only he and Dorothy ever liked it.”
    Wilderness said nothing to this.
    “Tempting you with a taste of the high life? Of course I am. I’m trying to get you to see what life can be like with a little folding green in your pants pocket. I want you to take the job, for Christ’s sake.”
    “I haven’t said no yet, Frank.”
    “And you haven’t said yes. Think about it, Joe. It’s a big opportunity. A really big one. Think big. Think back to Berlin. That day in the summer of ’47, when we sat round the table at the Paradise Club—the day you introduced me to Yuri—you, me, and Eddie . . . who was it said ‘we have to think bigger’? Sure as hell wasn’t me. You did think big, Joe, you did. How many times in ’48 did you tell me not to panic? To stick with it, to sell when I should sell and buy when I should buy. Joe, you had an unerring instinct for the right thing to do in a crisis. When the Russkis were bouncing us around like we were made of fuckin’ India rubber, closing this, closing that, printing money that fell apart in your fingers, trying to pay us in dogshit and sawdust, you stood your ground. Nothing intimidated you. You were the man. You were going places, the world was your fuckin’ oyster . . . you were the man . . . but Joe, don’t tell me that life since then has gone the way you wanted it . . . I’m the one with the fuckin’ Cadillac and an apartment on Park Avenue. I’m the one drivin’ the fuckin’ Cadillac!”
    Sheer bluster seemed to exhaust him for a moment. He drew breath and resumed in a softer tone.
    “You’re different. That’s undeniable. You’re not the Gorblimey kid I met fifteen years ago. There’s a sophistication about you that’s more than skin-deep. But . . . I know you’re not happy, you’re not satisfied, you’re not rich, you inch along with a blue-collar pride in your own independence, when you know damn well that without your wife’s BBC salary you’d be broke, and without Alec Burne-Jones looking out for you at every step you’d have had no career in the service after Berlin. And you know Joe, the real question is what career might you have had if you’d just blown him out, blown them all out after ’48 and taken your chances. I don’t know and you don’t know. The only time in your life you ever played safe. The only time you didn’t take a chance. All I’m saying is take one now.”
    Wilderness looked around him for a moment, getting his bearings by the street signs, gazing up as he began to speak and then levelling to look straight at Frank.
    “The Gorblimey kid, eh? Frank, as you’re so fond of adopting slang, let me ask you this. When was the last time you stood at the corner of Seventy-First and Lexington and had somebody knock you on your tuchus ?”
    “Joe . . . I’m not saying you blew it.”
    “Oh, but you are.”
    “OK. Maybe you blew it. Maybe you didn’t. But look at it this way . . . Steve and I are giving you what so few of us ever get in life. A second chance.”
    “A second chance?”
    “Don’t make it sound like I tossed you a turd. This is big