On Thursday nights at Elaine’s, the big table across from the bar was kept for the guys—the regulars who had been coming for years, whom Elaine had fed when they were broke, the starving writers who might not have made it in New York without the nurturing and bonding that went on in an uptown neighborhood saloon. They wandered in and out during the evening, bitching about their agents and the promotion budgets for their most recent books, moaning about the pitiful advance sales and the huge reserve for returns on their royalty statements.

There were guys who were getting a million dollars a book now—sometimes more—and others who were getting twenty-five thousand and pretending it was two hundred. There were guys who had given up on writing fiction and were churning out screenplays for the movies and television, and there were guys who were doing it all—books, magazines, television series—the works. They were bonded by the common knowledge that nobody—not their wives, sweet-hearts, or publishers—believed they really worked for a living, and, sometimes, they weren’t too sure of that themselves.

Stone often sat with the bunch these days, and he liked them. He wasn’t exactly sure he was working for a living either, so they had something in common. Most Thursday nights, somebody would bring a girl, and they were always smart and pretty. Stone envied them their girls.

This Thursday night, drained of desire by Cary, relaxed, and depressed, Stone got drunk. He had three Wild Turkeys before dinner—which was, in itself, a big mistake—drank most of a bottle of wine with his pasta, and, when Elaine said she was buying, couldn’t resist a Sambuca or two. He switched to mineral water for a while, until he felt steadier, then started on cognac. By the time he and a couple of other guys closed the place at 4:00 A.M., he was ambulatory, but only just.

He walked carefully from the place, uncharacteristically gave the burn on duty a buck, and thought for a minute about whether he should walk. He usually walked; it was good for the knee and for the gut, but tonight walking seemed out of the question. He flagged a cab, gave the driver the exact address, explaining that he wished to be driven to the door, not to the corner, then hunkered way down in the backseat and tried to keep from passing out. That was what he was doing when the shooting started.

They had pulled up to the light, and the cabbie had decided he felt like talking. “You follow baseball?” he asked, half-turning toward the backseat.