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across their path from the cab to the doors. The tourist ladies wore green cotton dresses. All the little boys had hats like Daddy’s. I gave mine up when I was twelve. It was a Sunday hat, for church. I never wore it in New York. Lots of people don’t take their kids to New York. It doesn’t mean anything.
    The elevator had chrome doors on the first floor. On the twenty-seventh, they were metal doors painted maroon. A clever sign-painter had fit the whole name of the law firm on the frosted glass of the door. We went in and I asked the girl for Mr. McArdle. “The first one,” I said. She acted snooty, like a whole dancing class at once. She gave us the second one.
    He was about forty, with a soft body and a pale round face. His eyes were wet behind black-armored spectacles. “Well, boys,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “We want McArdle number one.”
    “My father isn’t an active part of the firm any more.” He smiled, like a man selling laxative. “I assure you, I’m almost as good a lawyer as he.”
    He was playing us for teenagers. I said, “Sure. We’ll take Krishman. Samuel Krishman. Not a coat-tail relation.”
    He frowned, mouth and eyebrows both. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you—”
    “Tell him Willard Kelly,” I said.
    It didn’t mean anything to him. He looked down at the card on his desk. “You gave your first name as Raymond.”
    “That’s my father.”
    “Raymond is your father?”
    “You’re a goddamn imbecile, mister.” I pointed at the phone. “Pick it up and tell Samuel Krishman Willard Kelly’s son is here.”
    “I’ll do no such thing.”
    I went over and picked up the phone. He reached for it and I said, “Bill.” He looked at Bill, who was coming around the desk, and he sat back, paler than before. “You won’t get away with this,” he said. But he was gabbling. It was just a sentence you say when people push you around and get away with it.
    There was a row of buttons on the phone, under the dial. I pushed the one that said, “Local.” Nothing happened. I dialed zero. Still nothing happened. I dialed some other number, I don’t know what. A guy came on and I said, “What the hell is Samuel’s number? I can’t remember.”
    “Eight,” he said.
    I broke the connection and dialed eight. An old man came on. I said, “I’m Willard Kelly’s son. I’m not as dumb as Andrew McArdle’s son, but I’m stuck in his office.”
    There was a pause, and the dry old voice said, “What was that name?”
    “You heard it right. Willard Kelly.”
    “Is Lester there?”
    “McArdle two? Yes.”
    “Tell him to show you to my office.”
    “Tell him yourself. He won’t believe me.”
    I straight-armed Lester the phone. He took it like it had bitten him once. He listened and agreed and hung up and said to me, “You could have been more civil.”
    “Not to you.”
    He showed us down a corridor that was green on one wall, rust on the other. White ceiling, black linoleum. Pastel doors. The one at the end was tan and closed and didn’t say anything. He handed us to a girdled brunette with a plaster hairdo. She played electronically and let us in.
    When I was a kid I believed in a Business Pope. I thought there was a strict mercantile hierarchy, grocery stores and movie houses down near the bottom, factories and warehouses in the middle, Wall Street up near the top. And a Business Pope running the whole thing. I visualized the Business Pope as a shriveled ancient white-haired Pluto in a black leather chair. Black-capped chauffeur to the left, white-hipped nurse to the right. Every line on his face would record a decade of evil and cruelty and decay. I knew just what he would look like.
    That was Samuel Krishman. No chauffeur and no nurse. Black leather swivel chair. A mahogany desk of wood so warm it glowed. Maroon desk blotter. Two black telephones. Discreet papers, embarrassed to be white.
    He said, “Pardon me for not rising.” Five