Nina’s legs encircle it, hug it to the table leg. “I ran from it.”

“It.”

“The muggers. I guess I yelled and they gave up.”

There’s something about her eyes, relined since the incident, that taps him a little. He sees this frequently as a barman. She wants to tell him something. She pulls at her top, drags it around her like the room’s drafty. “Why don’t you say what happened,” he tries.

“I said what happened,” she says, getting sharp. She puts down the drink like the drink thinks so, too. “I was mugged, and thanks for taking me in, but I don’t need to be subjected.”

“Wait,” the guy says, with his new whiskey. “Did you say you were mugged? I couldn’t help hearing.”

“Tonight,” Nina says. “Almost broad daylight.”

“That’s so weird,” he says. “I was mugged three nights ago two blocks away.”

“I was mugged last year in Golden Gate Park,” says a woman whose boyfriend is in the bathroom. She has a dash of salt on the bridge of her nose, from the rim of a margarita glass, and nighty night, Martin stands up, knowing the avalanche has arrived. In bars such stories get told in a pileup, burying whatever else the drinks might otherwise have revealed. Martin grabs the toddy glass and skedaddles to Stanford’s side. Stanford is squeezing a lime into a tonic like he’s boarding up windows. They don’t even have to meet eyes.

“I was mugged in the park,” says somebody else. “Years ago after a show I was taking a shortcut on foot. Two kids I swear looked twelve pushed me down into the gravel and then held my head down like I was eating it. I thought I would die but my wallet was gone.”

“A guy in an Afro, nothing personal, flagged me down at like eleven thirty on Union. He had a bill in his hand saying Can you change me? When I took out my wallet he just pounded my hand against the brick and I let go and he was gone and now, everyone says I’m racist, but I wouldn’t take out my wallet if the Pope needed a five.”

“They do that, the distraction. In Guatemala my girlfriends and I, for a bachelorette thing, and the concierge ends up telling us they work with the street musicians, if you can believe it. Classic con. The percussionist so loud and when people are listening they cut into our purses with a razor. Holding a bag beneath—”

“Anything flashy. Bourbon Street, six million people around, this old man of fucking seventy-five if he was a day, and pardon my language. Seersucker. I remember he says, asking me after getting his cigar lit, if I was ever lucky enough to be on an airplane at sunset. It sounded so fascinating—”

“A man, filthy so I should have known—”