Or both?

“No girl ever told me that,” he said. He gave her back the joint.

He was feeling an irresistible rush of sexual excitement. Was she feeling it, too, or just playing a game with him?

She sucked the last of the smoke from the roach and dropped it in the ashtray. “Most girls are too shy to talk about what they like,” she said. “The truth is that even a kiss can be too much, right at the start. In fact . . .” She gave him a direct look, and at that moment he knew that she, too, was lost. She said in a lower voice: “In fact, you can give her a thrill just by breathing on it.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Even better,” she said, “is to breathe on it through the cotton of her underwear.”

She moved slightly, parting her knees at last, and he saw that under her short skirt she was wearing white panties.

“That’s amazing,” he said hoarsely.

“Do you want to try it?” she said.

“Yes,” said Walli. “Please.”

• • •

When Jasper Murray returned to New York he went to see Mrs. Salzman. She got him an interview with Herb Gould, for a job as a researcher on the television news show This Day.

He was now a different proposition. Two years ago he had been a supplicant, a student journalist desperate for a job, someone to whom nobody owed anything. Now he was a veteran who had risked his life for the USA. He was older and wiser, and he was owed a debt, especially by men who had not fought. He got the job.

It was strange. He had forgotten what cold weather felt like. His clothes bothered him: a suit and a white shirt with a button-down collar and a tie. His regular business oxford shoes were so light in weight he kept thinking he was barefoot. Walking from his apartment to the office he found himself scanning the sidewalk for concealed mines.

On the other hand, he was busy. The civilian world had few of the long, infuriating periods of inactivity that characterized army life: waiting for orders, waiting for transport, waiting for the enemy. From his first day back Jasper was making phone calls, checking files, looking up information in libraries, and conducting preinterviews.

In the office of This Day a mild shock awaited Jasper. Sam Cakebread, his old rival on the student newspaper, was now working for the program. He was a fully fledged reporter, not having had to take time out to fight a war. Irksomely, Jasper often had to do preparatory research for stories that Sam would then report on camera.

Jasper worked on fashion, crime, music, literature, and business. He researched a story about his sister’s bestseller, Frostbite, and its pseudonymous author, speculating about which of the known Soviet dissidents might have written it, based on writing style and prison camp experiences; concluding it was probably someone nobody had heard of.