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when I didn’t. Hailing a cab: I didn’t know if I needed to whistle or shout, and when I did I felt people look at me like I was doing it wrong. Restaurants: There was an awkward moment when I ordered tap water instead of the expensive Italian water. Sidewalks: I often felt like I was in the way, not walking fast enough, or standing in the wrong place. Revolving doors: Timing is everything.
    Ah, but those apprehensive days were before the East Brooklyn caterpillar blossomed into a La Paz moth of gentry. People with money like me have special license in New York to be foreign. You get points for being exotic. So I was both excited and a little nervous about being newly exotic and back in my hometown, even if it really was my hometown only on paper.
    Even I knew Manhattan hotels were mostly in midtown, in the Times Square area. If there is any place in Manhattan that makes even an exotic person nervous and out of place, it is Times Square. I do not even think I have to explain why—most people have seen this place on TV. Standing in this flickering, blinking canyon of a thousand billboards, one cannot help but feel intimidated by the prospect of having to actually read them all.
    My research said nice hotels had begun to appear in many places around town, so I had reservations at a swank boutique hotel in a nice quiet neighborhood on Second Avenue in the twenties.
    The lobby was exactly as it had been pictured on the Web, with frosted glass columns, plants, and free coffee service. The room was also as pictured on the Web, only much smaller. That was OK. I didn’t need a suite, even if I could afford one if I wanted to. Believe me, even though I banked a couple million just before leaving Brooklyn, it somehow did not seem like that much once I bought the hacienda in La Paz and began sinking money into fixing it up. If you throw money around at fancy hotels, next thing you know there are casinos, limos, and pricey women. Spend money like that and ill winds will blow you into desperate circumstances. I was careful with my wealth. You never know when you’re going to need it.
    It was late afternoon. My plan was to go to the Grant Industries headquarters on Sixth Avenue in the Forties the next morning. You are probably wondering how I came to get an appointment with the great Robert Tyson Grant, yes? Ah. Well, I did not. I knew that if I were to try to make an appointment, a complete stranger, he would never see me. Were I Donald Trump, yes, I am sure Grant would have invited me into his palatial offices and offered me a glass of champagne and a fine cigar. I was not an idiot—I know a man like Grant only sees important people like himself. First, I would try just dropping by to see him, leave my card with a note on the back about the finger of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra. After that, I would call and ask for an appointment. If that did not work, I would wait for him to leave his offices and intercept him on his way to his limousine.
    So how would I fill the rest of the day? There was a Spanish restaurant on Twenty-third Street, El Quixote, where I felt sure I could sip a glass of Valle de Guadalupe nebbiolo.

CHAPTER
    SIX
    EVEN AS I WAS CHARMING a girl named Nancy at the El Quixote bar, Robert and Dixie were on a date in Greenwich Village, a part of Manhattan that is a little more freewheeling than the Upper East Side where Grant lived. Greenwich Village was not a place where all the headwaiters and wine stewards knew him. It was not a place where men wore blazers to dinner, and women pearls. Subways were not an afterthought in Greenwich Village. “The Village” had jazz clubs, students, quaint restaurants, porn shops, and off-off-off-Broadway shows. It was a bastion of smiles, not smirks.
    The birds and the bees were chirping and buzzing about Robert and Dixie’s romance. Thus they were given to youthful impulse, to the kind of abandon that would take them out of their lofty uptown circles down to where nobody knew