He walked with the sun in his eyes and saw only silhouettes. There were strangers in his apartment. He walked quickly to Idrie’s and bought four slices of bean pie, then two bagels at the grocery store.

When he was back, he first looked around the room suspiciously, then he threw the bags onto the table. Max took out a bean pie.

“What’s this?”

“It’s Italian,” Josef said.

“They really know what they’re doing, those Italians,” Max said, chewing, and Josef fought back a smile.

Ludwig pulled apart the rubberlike bagel. “And this here? This Italian too?”

Josef nodded.

“That’s a bagel, you idiot,” said Max. “Josef here is putting us on.”

At night, when he was alone again, he thought of Lauren. Ten days had passed since they’d met, and he hadn’t heard anything from her. He wasn’t sure what Lauren was looking for, whether it was just a friend in the global ham radio community or a man. And he didn’t know which he wanted either. Unlike most women, she didn’t seem to have her mind set on anything in particular, or to be inspecting him for positive and negative qualities. This inspection was usually driven by the suspicion that there had to be something wrong with him if he was still unmarried.

Nevertheless there seemed to be something about him that women liked. Arthur called it the James Cagney factor: that crooked grin of his, sloping down toward the right side of his face, a movie-star bad-guy grin. The fact that on top of the dangerous smile he was also short—some women found it downright irresistible.

He mostly hung out by the bar, half standing, half sitting. That way he was always free to make a quick exit. There was a kind of woman who acted like she was just trying to order something but was glad to be pulled into a conversation. He would buy her a drink; the barstool made him look as tall as any other guy. Then he would pay her compliments, one after another, like dropping coins into a jukebox so the music wouldn’t stop.

He hadn’t paid Lauren a single compliment. He wouldn’t even have been able to come up with one. She wasn’t pretty, after all. And what it was that actually excited him—how could he put that into words? It had to do with who she was inside. You’ve got character. You’re smart.

A man couldn’t say something like that to a woman.