They capped the bottle, and Tepel started to put it back. But they decided to keep it. And, holding on to each other, and telling each other to be careful, they came down the narrow, steep steps from Tepel’s cubbyhole to the floor of one of the smaller diamond exchanges. Three guards were stationed in front of the doors and windows, all with dogs. But the dogs didn’t growl and the guards waved as the two men crossed the floor between empty glass cases lined with black, gray, and green velvet. Behind the stalls, black safes caught what light there was, and the paintings of deer, vines, and pine trees showed on the shiny black doors of the vaults.

They drank sparingly as Garfield drove east on the Expressway. Just after Jericho, where they took the turnoff that led away from the ocean and toward the Sound, Tepel said, “I don’t believe any of this, mind you. But it’s a beautiful night . . . look at that moon.” Garfield stared straight ahead.

“Look at the moon!”

Garfield looked and nodded.

“The moon is worth the trip,” Tepel said.

Garfield didn’t say anything.

“You don’t believe this either, do you?”

“I don’t know. Right this minute, I don’t believe anything, except we’ve got too far to go to get there, and too far to get back, and I’m missing The Rockford Files.”

“You remember,” Tepel said softly, “the first time we took this road?”

Garfield remembered perfectly. It was his first summer in America, two years after Theresienstadt. It was blazing hot and they’d chartered buses for a picnic at Orient Point. All the girls were bare-­armed, as they’d never have been in the old country, and their smooth pale skin, the fine hair on their forearms, and glimpses of their underarms when they stretched or reached for something, which they did again and again, drove Tepel wild, and he kept drinking warm beer and singing and poking Garfield whenever he spotted a very pretty one. Then Garfield saw Ada in a tight aqua blouse with capped sleeves and breasts that looked soft even in the stiff bras in style then. She sat on the other side of the aisle on the bus, and Garfield stared at the back of her neck, at her soft fat upper arms, at her breasts, and round thighs that he could barely see through her full skirt. Finally he leaned across the aisle and with a frown of concentration on his face, he touched her arm very gently.

“I’m sorry,” he’d told her in Yiddish. Ada had smiled gently at him, and Tepel stopped laughing because he knew that this was the first time in six years that Garfield had touched a woman.