In their suite high over the city, he moved like a thief past the empty receptionist’s desk. He heard Bernie dictating inside his office but was not ready for confrontation. Only in the refuge of his own lair could he relax. On his desk was a note from Bernie, two days old, suggesting that they have a talk. Well, that was why he was here. He crumpled it and tossed it into the basket.

He wandered to the window and looked toward the Ferry Building. He heard the faint tinkle of the Powell-Jackson cablecar. It was his favorite car. He had ridden it interminably when he was fourteen, armed with an old German Rolleiflex, enticed by a photo-book of Ansel Adams into another hobby, snapping candids of captive passengers.

Too many hobbies, everyone had said, except his dad, who patiently financed them. Photography, ship-models, cars, dinghy-sailing. A pattern of dilettantism: Chaucer, the guitar, Model A engines. Finally, master of nothing. Something seemed always pulling him on before he became an expert. He consumed interests like a fat man at a smorgasbord.

He wandered into their law library. He sensed that the bound rows of U.S. Code, which saw so much more of him than of Bernie, were glowering down at him. Even the coffee machine hidden between the stacks rumbled disapproval.

He poured a cup of coffee, disliking the stale cardboard smell of it, but willing to drink anything to delay facing Bernie. They used to have the girls make coffee, but they paid legal secretaries so much now that it was like hiring a neurosurgeon to pull a splinter, and cheaper to subscribe to the catering service. The result seemed to gag no one else in the firm. He sipped the coffee, sitting with his feet on the library table, until finally guilt drove him to his partner’s office.

Bernie’s desk hung high over Sutter Street, where, he claimed to clients, he could look down on his commercial beginnings in his father’s flower stand. Mitch could not remember his ever having actually worked there, but it was part of Bernie’s self-made myth of the self-made man, so he never argued. Now he let him finish dictating a complaint to the Airport Commission about a rise in hangar-rent for the “company” plane.

Bernie shut off the machine.

“Let’s carry your boat as an asset,” he suggested. “You’ll be entertaining clients aboard—”

Mitch fixed him with a cold stare, shaking his head.

Bernie, unruffled, insisted: “Why not? A boat’s more personal, like a toothbrush?”

Mitch leaned over his desk, looked into his eyes, and said with great clarity, “Bernie, are you listening? Do you read me?”

“Five-by-five. You’re breathing Lavoris in my face.”