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his hot dog came out as a meteor shower of pink and yellow and green. He laughed, a glottal sound that became a tubercular cough, then turned and walked west, his naturalhunch propelling him forward, this Fagin with his greasy black hair swaying slightly.
    “Christ,” Harry said. He went to the sausage cart and bought a bottle of water and took a handful of napkins and very gently dabbed at his lapels. The stain was dark with sick yellow streaks. The water made it worse, smearing it into the fabric.
    He walked for several blocks, waiting for the adrenaline to subside, before he realized, with a stab of nausea, that he’d left the cake back at the hot dog vendor. He turned and ran back as fast as he could, winded after the first block.
    When Harry got there, the cake was gone. He asked the gap-toothed sausage woman, but she simply shrugged. Forty-nine dollars and twenty-eight cents. Harry was suddenly aware of how much he was sweating, a steady runoff that soaked his shirt and overflowed his brow. He examined passersby for clues, then looked north and saw a form curved over a subway grate as if protecting something. Harry wiped his forehead with his hand and walked closer and saw it was a woman, greyish black hair running wild, sitting in a stained orange parka held together with geometric lines of duct tape, hunched over the cake, eating with one hand, shovelling it into her dark cave-like mouth like a child.
    “What do you mean, someone
stole
it, Harry? Someone stole the cake?”
    “A homeless woman.”
    Harry had started back to the bakery but realized that the cake had been specially baked to order. There was no point in buying a replacement because it wouldn’t fit the theme of Gladys’s party.
    “She just walked up and grabbed it?”
    “Gladys, it doesn’t matter how she stole it. It’s gone. A mentally ill woman in an orange parka ate your cake over a sewer grate. There is no fucking cake.”
    They stood in angry silence, he and Gladys. There had been, he noted, an increasing number of silences like this one, charged and dangerous, precipitated by something large or small. A place where something awful could suddenly flower, like a toxic mushroom cloud in a fifties documentary.
    Gladys took her coat and left, cakeless and resentful, for her party.

FOUR
    T HE LOGICAL PLACE to start looking for his father’s money was Dale’s office. Harry had toyed with the number three million for long enough that it had assumed the status of fact, a rumour repeated until it was truth. While his father may have been worth less, he could also have been worth more (as he occasionally was in Harry’s head). But a $13,000 legacy was inconceivable. Perhaps there would be clues to his ruin in his personal files.
    Harry intended to go to the BRG offices to collect Dale’s things and talk to Prescott Lunden. But he didn’t want to go in empty-handed. He wanted a little context—on the office, on his father, on his investments. So he first called Dick Ebbetts, who had worked with Dale at BRG, and Dick agreed to meet him for lunch. Dick was a stubby, coarse man—Harry’s mother’s description, though an accurate one. He was crude and poorly tailored, but he was considered a value savant and that was why he was tolerated at BRG, a money management firmthat specialized in preserving Old Money. Ebbetts had never been part of the social world at BRG and was retiring, and for that reason Harry thought he might be the most discreet place to start in trying to find out what had happened to his father’s money.
    It was inconceivable that Dale had the net worth of an undergraduate. There had been the two divorces, of course, both of them expensive. But his tastes were surprisingly modest, although he had all his clothes made, even his shoes. And he spent a fortune at Scaramouche, where he ate at least twice a week, walking there and back regardless of the weather. But that was it. He didn’t like to travel and had no interest in