He shook her hand and held it, Josef thought, far too long. “Your idea isn’t bad,” he said to Josef in German. “We’re just waiting for the green light. Then you can get started.”

Schmuederrich meant the mobile radio. Josef had finally told Max his idea, but now he regretted it. Regretted that he was handing them good ideas now too.

“What an unpleasant person,” said Lauren after Schmuederrich had walked off into the crowd. He told her he agreed, and he was happy—apparently Schmuederrich’s special charm didn’t work on women like Lauren, and that spoke in her favor.

He had never taken a woman back to Harlem with him. They usually wanted to go out in brutal Times Square, or to see a show on Broadway. The shows in Harlem didn’t appeal to them. They flashed defensive smiles when he told them that the rich white people who lived on Park Avenue had been driving up to the Cotton Club in their limousines for years, a club where Negroes worked as waiters or as performers but weren’t allowed in as patrons. What he meant, however, was the normal Harlem in which he lived, where in summer people set up tables on the sidewalk and played chess. Maybe the women he went out with feared that they themselves were in some way part of the exoticness when the appeal continued to escape them. Better to go to Times Square. To Coney Island. To Broadway.

The streets were packed, a taxi would take too long. He decided to take Lauren on the subway. There he looked at her without inhibition, almost as though she were his possession. For four stops this possession pitched and swayed back and forth before his eyes. She smiled at him, and for a second time he noticed the age difference, her smile impossible for him to read—was it bold or just friendly?

Back aboveground on 116th Street she called out a bit too loudly, “Oh, how beautiful it is here!” People turned and looked at them, smiling. The street was lined with stately brownstones. Once more he felt how some muscle within him relaxed whenever he returned to Harlem from the window-display glamour of Midtown.

“The Dutch used to live here. Then the subway was built, and it was easier for them to get downtown, and once they started going often enough they finally decided to pick up and move down there for good. They left their buildings here.” He knew all of this from the museum.

She looked at him attentively. He went on. “But did you know, Lauren, that the rents for Negroes are higher than they are for the few white people here? It’s because they can’t find apartments anywhere else. The landlords take advantage.”