new friends. He waited. He expected the silence.

Jimmy said, “I guess I could use some fresh air. Where do you want to meet?”

“How do you feel about church?” the reporter said.

Fresh air? It was like being in an auditorium-sized pool hall. It was a ballroom in a hotel on Cathedral Hill. The cigarette smoke burned Jimmy’s eyes and constricted his throat from the second he came in. It was like walking into a house afire.

But it was church. A pastor, a skinny man with a big, booming voice, was at a pulpit up front on the elevated platform with its white tacked-on pleated skirt. His voice was not just big but had a kind of authority, a kind of weight, a been there/done that intensity. He was talking about Peter, Saint Peter, and overcoming the past.

Jimmy squinted, looking for his date in the haze.

Duncan Groner was alone in the last row of hotel ballroom armless stackable chairs, against the wall, under an eight-foot-long mural of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the driving of the golden spike. He had a fat, round, red eraserless pencil stuck over his ear and a long reporter’s notebook on the empty seat beside him. And, Jimmy would learn in a second, a buzz on.

The banner strung up behind the preacher said: Western States Roundup Alcoholics Anonymous. Yee-haw.

Groner gave him a wave over, moved his reporter’s notebook for him to sit.

“I thought San Francisco had a smoking ban.”

“They do,” Duncan Groner said. “They cut ’em a little slack. For the conventions. Especially this one.” He had a cigarette of his own in his hand, a Player, a thick, unfiltered, English fag, smoked down to the nub. In his other hand, he had a tall coffee in a paper cup. He swirled it around a couple times and took a sip.

“Thanks for coming, Brother. God loves a cheerful giver.” Groner’s face matched the gravelly voice, ears a little gnomish, flappable, a bulbous nose, a weak chin, droopy dog eyes. Here was another old Sailor. He looked to be in his sixties, wiry, lanky. He wore loud checked wool pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a press on it. And tan-and-white saddle shoes. He looked like he should be at the horse track with a stingy brim hat pushed back on his head. Or the dog track. “God says the past doesn’t matter,” he said. He snatched up his notebook and flipped back a page. “Or rather that ‘the slate is wiped clean.’ ” He swirled his coffee again and took another hit. “God doesn’t even care if you’ve inadvertently polluted your shorts at one time or another.”

“Even advertently,” Jimmy cracked.

“Oh, Mother of God, a free-willer!” Duncan Groner said, loud enough for a woman six rows forward to turn. “Sorry,” he said. And lifted his coffee cup to her.

With a surreptitious slip of the fingers, he extracted a brass flask shaped like a kidney from his pants pocket. He kept it at his side, popped open the cap with his thumbnail, tipped it, and poured a dollop into the coffee cup kept down at his side and clipped the cap down again. And then he made the bottle disappear. For this, at least, he had the dexterity of a surgeon. He swirled the coffee again. Jimmy could smell the bourbon. A man twenty rows up turned and looked. Maybe he could he smell it, too.

Groner continued, “You have to accept that there is a Superior Being, a Higher Power, something greater than you.” He flipped closed his notebook. “What they don’t say is how can you not drink once you know that little piece of information.”

“I believe the answer to that is, God loves you,” Jimmy said.

“He doesn’t know me,” Groner said.

The reporter had what he needed for whatever he was writing, so they slipped out, retired to the hotel bar across the lobby. It wasn’t even ten yet. The bartender and a busboy went to restocking the bar after the two lone customers had been served, an old-fashioned for Groner and a Virgin Mary for Jimmy.

There wasn’t much restocking to do.

“I bet you love this convention crowd,” Groner said.

The bartender smiled hatefully.

Groner stirred his drink with his finger. “By the way,” he began, “George Leonidas isn’t buying any of it. No sale.” He lifted the drink to toast Jimmy and then all but drained the old-fashioned in the first “sip.”

“He thinks you’re insane,” Groner finished.

“That’s usually the intention,” Jimmy said. “With third parties.”

“Up here, we