In the center of the restaurant the buildup of ricocheting voices was deafening, but here by the window they could hear each other and at the same time be sure that no one nearby could hear them.

“I wish I could show you the reports we have about you,” said Rachel, “but I can’t.” Big smile.

“Reports? How could—what reports?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this in so many words, but you come very highly recommended.”

It was against his better judgment, but Hoyt couldn’t resist pulling his chin down into his neck and opening his eyes very wide and saying, “I do?”

“Unh—hunh.” The smile—the maroon lips—the eyes that said so much more than her voice! She looked away in order to fish two or three or four sheets of paper, stapled together, out of a leather portfolio. She put them on the table and scanned the first sheet.

“Let’s see…‘unusually mature for a student his age’…‘refuses to be intimidated’…‘decisive and quick-acting in critical moments’…‘character traits should more than compensate for lagging academic performance’…”

Not even trying to conceal his astonishment, Hoyt touched the middle of his chest with the fingertips of his right hand. “That’s me?”

“Yes, and the source carries a lot of weight with Pierce and Pierce.” She gave him a profound if indefinable look, waited a few beats, and said, “The governor of California.”

Alarm seemed to spread throughout the lining of Hoyt’s skull with a feverish heat. He desperately ransacked his meager knowledge of the wiles of politicians to figure out the origin of what he had just heard. A prank? A warning? A threat? The maroon-lipped woman before him didn’t actually work for Pierce & Pierce? She was some whore doing the bidding of the damnable governor? Many things churned in his brain far faster than it would take to catalog them, and none of them was good.

It seemed an eternity before he was able to summon the presence of mind even to say the limp and the predictable: “You’re joking. Like hell that’s the governor of California.”

“I assure you it is,” said Rachel. “Or it’s from someone on his staff speaking specifically for him.”

She held the top sheet close enough to Hoyt for him to read the letterhead. “The State of California.” And beneath that “Office of the Governor” and “Sacramento” and so on.

“He’s quite a fan of yours, the governor is.” Seeing Hoyt’s consternation, she said, “Hoyt! Don’t be so skeptical! This didn’t just come from out of the blue, you know. The state of California has 224 billion bonds outstanding—forgive the Wall Street–speak—I mean 224 billion dollars’ worth of bonds. They’re one of our most important clients. They’d be one of any body’s most important clients. So when we get a recommendation like this from the governor of California, we take it very seriously.” She gave Hoyt her warmest smile yet. “I wish you could see the look on your face. I don’t know how you could be that surprised. Obviously you know each other, or he’s seen you at work firsthand. I mean, this is a very detailed report.” She looked down at it again. “I mean…like here: ‘He also shows his maturity in the way he handles sensitive information. He doesn’t divulge the nature of complex or delicate situations simply to call favorable attention to himself.’”

She looked up again. “I mean, nobody in my office has ever heard of a student recommended this highly before, or not by anybody in a position like the governor’s. Not to be blunt about it, but coming from him—I probably shouldn’t tell you this, either—it’s more like an instruction than a recommendation.”

Hoyt studied her face again, this time as much perplexed as aroused. “Be straight with me, Rachel—is this some kind of a joke?”

Rachel gave him another of her sophisticated smiles, and practically convulsed with suppressed chuckles. “One of the original Pierce brothers—Pierce and Pierce?—Ellis Pierce—used the word ‘loser’ in a sentence, and somebody asked him what he meant by loser, and he said, ‘A loser’s just like everybody else, except that he won’t shake hands with good luck.’ Or so it says in their biography, the one by Martin Myers? You know the book?”

Hoyt shook his head no.

“It’s called Fierce and Fierce,” said Rachel. “Cute…Stop staring at me like that! We’re talking about a job that pays ninety-five thousand to start. I don’t think that’s bad, to start.”

“Doing what?” said Hoyt as disinterestedly as he could manage, seeking to regain his much-vaunted cool.

She explained that there was an eight-week training program, after which one was assigned to sales, analysis, a trading desk, or whatever.

“All right,” said Hoyt. “Let me ask you something else I’d like a straight answer on. Aside from the fact that he considers me an awesome guy, why is the governor of California going to all this trouble for me? Or is this just some generous streak he’s got?” He searched her face for any hint of knowledge she wasn’t owning up to.

Completely deadpan: “I don’t know. It seems self-evident to me. I assumed you’d know the context and everything.”

Hoyt gave her a slanted, ironic smile, calculated to make her smile in complicity if she, too, was aware that this had to be a bribe. But she didn’t smile. She seemed genuinely puzzled by his expression. Then he surveyed her lips, the little ever-so-fragile gold chain with the tiny pearl, the only thing standing between him and…and…and this time such things didn’t resonate with his loins at all. It was the rational poker player in him that was inflamed now. No more irony…He sat there staring at her and nodding ever so slightly, but over and over and ever so sagaciously…Pierce & Pierce and $95,000 a year to start…He kept on nodding, ever so significantly, expressionless, in a gambler’s way.

Wait’ll he tells Vance about this! Unfuckingbelievable.

Rachel set her glistening dark lips in their most concupiscent smile yet. “I’m waiting, Hoyt. Are you going to shake hands with Fortune or not? She’s a much-maligned lady. That’s from Evelyn Waugh.”

Hoyt extended his hand, and Rachel took it. They looked into each other’s eyes, and Hoyt gave her hand a certain squeeze, but the hand he held was all business. The hand didn’t give him its room number, much less its key. All it said was, “It’s a deal, big boy.”

On the way up in the elevator, Adam said to himself—out loud, “Whoa-oh-oh…pull yourself together”…Not even Buster Roth was so brutish, he’d dare have somebody do something physical…but there were other ways of eliminating him, weren’t there? Somehow—they’d blame the whole thing on him. He wrote the paper for Jojo and pressured him into handing it in…Maybe they were going to tape what he said to Buster Roth…Why hadn’t he brought someone along…like Camille…She’d happily tell Buster Roth to stick his head up his descending colon until his shoulders disappeared. Camille! The very thought gave him a few volts of courage.

Before he knew it, the elevator door had opened and he was in Buster Roth’s lair…He was conscious of four or five men sitting on the leather and stainless-steel furniture…not students. Who were they?

He approached a fence made of panels of glass…seemed like a reception area…Four lean, sleek veal-gray workstations in a row and, at each, a lean, sleek young woman perched on a lean, ergonomic word processor’s chair. Adam could hardly believe it. They were gorgeous. As opposed to all the plastic veal in the place, they were definitely flesh and blood. Two of them, one with long dark hair parted down the middle, the other with long light brown hair parted down the middle, happened to swivel about, to get up. Adam felt inadequate to even approach these girls. They weren’t much older than he was, if at all, but they seemed to be from another order of human, in which everyone was glamorous and sex-savvy.

He caught the eye of the one with dark hair. Adam could barely croak out his appointment with “Coach Roth.” The girl turned to another young woman, whom she called Celeste, seated at a workstation, and Celeste turned to her computer and then to Adam, gave him a polite smile, assured him that Coach Roth would see him shortly, and gestured toward all the postmodern leather and stainless steel. Polite smiles they gave him, that and nothing more. They had written him off after the first glance. Each had sized him up as someone incapable of flirting…precisely because he had never even…gotten laid. They could tell! It showed! And the older he got, the harder it was going to be to do it, to admit he’d never done it before or demonstrate the same thing through his ignorance of technique and clumsy attempts at learning.