In another one, an empty gray room was totally bare except for a pillow in flight across the middle of the picture. The hand that had thrown it was there in the corner, but in its frozen openness it had lost all human qualities and was suddenly, disturbingly something else. She said she planned on calling the final version Pillow Fight.

Only one of her pictures was on actual display in their apartment. It was entitled Little Boy. It was a still life, painted in fragile, washed-out watercolors. On an oak table were a shiny black top hat (the type the Germans call a Zylinder) and a pair of spotless white gloves. That was all: tan wooden table, black hat, white gloves. Little Boy.

The first time I went to their home I stared at it for a while and then politely asked what the title meant. They looked at each other and then, as if on cue, laughed at the same time.

"That one's not from my childhood, Joe. Paul has this crazy thing he does sometimes –"

"Shh, India, don't say a word! Maybe we'll introduce the two of them sometime, huh?"

Her face lit up like a candle. She loved the idea. She laughed and laughed, but neither of them made any attempt to clue me in. Later she said she had painted the picture for Paul as an anniversary present. I had noticed there was an inscription in the lower-left-hand corner: To Mister from Missus – Promises to Keep.

They had lucked into a great big apartment in the Ninth District not far from the Danube Canal. But they spent little time there. Both of them said they felt compelled to be out and on the move as much as possible. Consequently, they were almost never home when I called.

"I don't understand why the two of you are always out. Your apartment is so nice and warm."

India shot Paul an intimate, secret smile that fled as soon as she looked back at me. "I guess we're afraid there will be something out there we'll miss if we stay home."

We met the first week in July, when they had been in town for over a month. They had seen the usual sights, but now I eagerly appointed myself their special guide and gave them every bit of Vienna I had accumulated (and hoarded) in the years I had lived there.

Those dreamy, warm days passed in a delightful blur. I would finish my writing as early as I could and then two or three times a week would meet them somewhere for lunch. Paul was on vacation until the end of July, so we moved slowly and sensually through those days as if they were a great meal we never wanted to finish. At least that's how I felt, and I could sometimes sense their happiness was growing too.

I began to feel as if I had been fueled with some fabulous high-octane gasoline. I wrote and did research like a mad machine in the morning, played with the Tates in the afternoon, and went home to bed at night feeling that my life couldn't possibly be much fuller than it was right at that moment. I had found the friends I'd been looking for all along.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, they put the cherry on top of the cake.

I was sitting at my desk on August 19, working on an interview I was doing on spec for a Swiss magazine. It was my birthday, and because birthdays almost always depressed the hell out of me, I was trying hard to work my way through this one with as few distractions as possible. I had had an early dinner at a neighborhood gasthaus, and instead of going to a cafй and reading for an hour, as I usually did, I raced home and restlessly pushed the sheets of typescript around my desk in a vain attempt to forget that no one in the world had tipped me a nod on my Day of Days.

When the doorbell rang, I was frowning at the minuscule pile of pages I had done. I was wearing an old sweatshirt and a pair of blue jeans.

An old man in a seedy but still-elegant chauffeur's outfit was standing there with his cap in his hand. He wore black leather gloves that looked very expensive. He looked me over as if I were last week's lettuce and said in a nice hoch-deutsch accent that "the car" was downstairs and the lady and gentleman were waiting. Was I ready?

I smiled and asked what he was talking about.

"You are Mr. Lennox?"

"Yes."

"Then I have been told to come for you, sir."

"Who, uh, who sent you?"

"The lady and gentleman in the car, sir. I assume they hired the limousine."

"Limousine?" I squinted suspiciously and pushed him a little to one side so I could peek out the door into the hall. Paul liked to play tricks, and I was dubious of anything he had his finger in. No one was out there. "They're down in the car?"

"Yes, sir." He sighed and pulled one of the gloves farther up onto his hand.

I asked him to describe them, and he described Paul and India Tate in evening clothes.

"Evening? You mean formal? A tuxedo?"

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, God! Look, uh, look, you tell them I'll be down in ten minutes. Ten minutes, okay?"

"Yes, sir, ten minutes." He gave me one last tired look and marched off.

No shower. Rip the tuxedo off the hanger way in the back of the closet. I hadn't worn it in months, and it was full of creases. So what? Seconds of trouble buttoning the silk buttons with shaky, happy hands. What were those two up to? How great! Fabulous! They had known it was my birthday. They had even double-checked the date a few days before. Why had they hired a limousine? I took a fat glug of mouthwash and spat it loudly in the sink as I was turning out the light and heading for the door. At the last second I remembered to take my keys.

A silver Mercedes-Benz 450 was purring majestically in front of my apartment house. Inside I could see the chauffeur (with his cap on now – all business) lit by the calm yellow of the dashboard lights. I stepped over to look in the back seat and there they were, champagne glasses in hand, the bottle sticking out of a silver bucket on the darkly carpeted floor.

The window on my side zizzed down, and India's wonderful face peeped out of that rich inner gloom.

"What's up, Birthday Boy? Wanna go for a ride?"

"Hi! What are you doing here? What's with this silver chariot?"

"Joe Lennox, for once in your measly little life, don't ask any questions and get in the damned car!" Paul's voice rumbled out.

When I got in, India slid over so I could sit between them. Paul handed me a chilled glass of champagne and gave my knee a short, friendly squeeze.

"Happy birthday, Joey! Have we got some big plans for you tonight!"

"And how!" India clinked her glass to mine and kissed my cheek.

"Like what?"

"Like sit back and you'll see. You wanna spoil the surprise?"

India told the driver to go to the first place on their list.

The champagne lasted until the end of the ride, which turned out to be Schloss Greifenstein, a huge and wonderfully forbidding castle about half an hour out of Vienna. It is perched high on a hill overlooking a bend in the Danube. There's a splendid restaurant up there, and that's where we had my birthday dinner. When it was over, I really had to work hard to keep from crying. What special people. I had never had a surprise like that in my whole life.

"This . . . this is some night for me."

"Joey, you're our boy. Do you know how much you helped us when we first got here? There's no way in the world we'd let you get away without a party tonight!"

India took my hand and held it. "Now, don't get all worked up about it. We've been planning to do it forever. Paul thought up the idea of coming here for dinner, but that's nothing. Wait till you see what I –"

"Pipe down, India, don't tell him! We'll just go."

They were already standing, and I hadn't even seen anyone pay the bill.

"What's going on? You mean there's more?"

"Damned right, buddy. This here's just the first course. Let's go – our big silver bullet's waiting."

More turned out to be three chocolate sundaes at McDonald's on Mariahilferstrasse, with the Mercedes waiting for us outside. India bought the driver a sundae, too. That was followed by a long coffee at the Cafй Museum across from the Opera, and then adjoining rooms for the night at the Imperial Hotel on the Ringstrasse. If you haven't been to Vienna, the Imperial is the place where the likes of Henry Kissinger stay when they're in town for a conference. The price of rooms begins at a hundred and forty dollars.