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kind of like baked brie."
    "Jesus. You're a very nasty person. Forget I asked."
    "I'm going to lunch," she said.
    "I'll warn Donald Trump."
    * * *
    Before his own lunch Russell called his broker, a hustler at Corrine's firm named Duane Peters.
    "Got some new sophisticated financial instruments you might be interested in," Duane said. "A very hot new commodities futures index."
    "Tell me about it," Russell said. He liked the idiom of the financial world, the evocative techno-poetry of the arcane slang. Sophisticated instruments. Mezzanine financing. Takeover vehicles... Lately it seemed almost as interesting as the more familiar dialect of lit crit. In college he had scorned the econ majors who lined up for the bank recruiters senior year, and only a few years before now he had been horrified to learn that two-thirds of a graduating Yale class had interviewed for a slot at one of the big investment banks. He had cited this statistic over a dozen dinner tables to illustrate vague theses about the Zeitgeist and had commissioned a book called The New Gilded Age, an anthology of jeremiads by economists and sociologists decrying the greed and selfishness of the eighties. At that time he began to read the financial publications. And then, rather like a research chemist experimentally injecting himself with the virus he has isolated, he began investing small amounts. With his encouragement, Corrine had started as a broker after quitting her good-girl job at Sotheby's—after a stressful year and a half at Columbia Law School—and his new hobby had gradually become more and more interesting. It seemed so easy. He was winning on paper, though his total capital amounted to only a few thousand.
    "... buy stock on margin and then cover the stock with futures, the ideal being to hedge and bet so you're covered either way, cowboy. If the stock goes up you make money. If the stock goes down you make money. So whatever happens, you win."
    Is that possible? Russell wondered. Duane's explanation sounded too good to be true; it sounded, in fact, like a free lunch. But he didn't have the ante to play this particular game. Russell wished he could give Corrine his business, but his hunches and tips made her crazy.
    Two doors down from Russell's office, Washington Lee received a call from the receptionist announcing a visitor. There was nothing on his calendar, and unscheduled visitors struck fear into Washington's heart. He feared a certain wronged husband in particular, discarded girlfriends and rejected authors in general. His occasional inability to remember absolutely every detail of an evening's activities tended to sharpen his fear of the unknown caller. Two years before he had received an advance to write a critical biography of Frantz Fanon, which was still in the outline stage, and while he didn't really expect the publisher to send thugs over to collect the manuscript, this small festering patch of guilt only added to his sense of having dodged the bullet when another day ended without a major confrontation. The name that his assistant gave him now had a faint echo, but all these Muslim names sounded sort of familiar. Everybody had a story to tell, and if they were black they eventually sent the story to Washington.
    "Say who?"
    There was a mumbled conference at the other end of the line. "Rasheed Jamal, the author," the receptionist explained.
    Washington's hope went south. All in all, he would rather get a surprise visit from the FBI. Three stacks of unread, unsolicited manuscripts towered in the far corner of his office, Rasheed Jamal's possibly among them. Or else he had thoughtfully brought his precious manuscript with him, hand-delivery, the true story of his life ... a thousand single-spaced pages complete with crabbed corrections that would make them both millions and reveal the true killers of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was possible, too, that Washington had already read the book and turned it down. Authors who came to