The room gets quiet for the car crash, the missing vicar, blood on the trees. Padgett brings her drink to a slurpy finish but nobody, she is grateful, cranes to recognize the substitute they got stuck with at the last minute. Instead they talk about Cogwheels, the tents, the cliffs. The ocean rippling like skin. Rachel finishes her drink with a half shudder. “One more?” Martin offers. “Then I should throw you out, probably.”

“OK?” Ben checks with her.

“The drinks are good,” Rachel says, pretending she has to be nudged into drinking more.

“Variation on an old classic,” Martin says, “called the Horse’s Neck,” and the couple is gone in seconds, first Rachel and then, confused and fumbling too much cash into Martin’s hand, the husband. Martin frowns after them, knowing it was something he said but not knowing what, not an uncommon confusion for him. The barman tilts out the couple’s glasses and the ice slithers into the sink. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“I’m right here,” Padgett says, slouchily.

“Can I tell you a thing? Those, Ben and Rachel there, are customers, and if you were nice to them—”

“I don’t work here, Martin. They’re not my customers.”

“I was more saying it as a general sort of approach to things.”

“I don’t really approach things,” Padgett reminds him, but she has in fact walked to the bar, to show Martin her empty tumbler. A piece of ice crackles in her mouth.

“Yeah, but.”

“Martin, when I want advice, you will know it, because the world will have ended.”

“You could just be, to my friends at least, a little, I’m going to say warmer.”

“They’re not your friends.”

“OK, but—”

“You just said customers.”

He does not say that customers are friends if you’re at work, if your work is not booming, if you owe a lot of goddamn money. She’s too rich to get that, probably. Martin just looks at her, the blending of two old San Francisco families, and wonders, as with the mansion, the best way to get in, or maybe he should just keep walking. But he doesn’t say anything.

She looks at him as if saying the sentence, “Pour me another and leave me alone,” and he does, he does. The drink has a sharp taste but a calming texture, all the soft threads of ginger like a loose ghost in the bubbles. She sips it, two strong sips, and feels the walls of the bar shimmer as if in a breezy breeze.

“Stay for the party,” he says quietly.

“Put some music on.”

Martin holds up a device. “I have to set up his network.”

“A speakeasy party and they don’t want the jukebox? What kind of lousy, no-good—”