back into the waiting elevator.

“No problem,” the kid said.

Jimmy stopped at Public Relations on the way down.

In the lobby he nodded and smiled at the receptionist on his way to the door and waved his annual report.

She looked disappointed again.

He looked back at her.

“What’d it close at yesterday?”

“Seventy-seven and an eighth,” she said. “Up a quarter today, Mr. Turner.”

He half expected her to salute.

“Outstanding!” Jimmy said.

He took the corporate report out to the parking lot, sat on the hood of the Mustang and opened it. There were the same pictures of the founders and the directors. Kurt Rath, Vasek Rath’s son, had a page of his own as CEO. He was in his thirties, looked like a Luftwaffe pilot. Jimmy ran the math. Rath the-Younger was just a few years old when Bill Danko and Elaine Kantke died. Vasek Rath had died twenty years ago, five years after the merger, leaving his son enough stock to take control when he came of age.

In the picture, Kurt Rath was trying to manage a bit of a smile but knew not to give away much.

A look that made Jimmy want to buy a hundred shares.

Alone on the putting green at the most exclusive country club on the Westside, Jimmy sank a twenty-footer, clean, straight, no suspense.

“I meant to do that,” he said.

He dropped another ball and lined up his shot. Behind him, Kurt Rath, CEO, strode toward him followed by a nervous younger man, the club’s starter.

“Is this him?” Rath said.

The starter nodded.

Jimmy turned. Who me?

“This idiot jammed us both up,” Rath said.

Jimmy still stood over his putt.

“Yeah? How’d he do that?”

“I have a standing twelve noon tee-time Thursdays. I’ve had it for six years. Everybody knows it. And this moke says someone in my office blanked it this morning, which is impossible, and now you’ve got it.”

Rath’s partner stepped up. He looked like a nice guy, nice smile, good build, nice tan. He looked like the kind of guy you could beat every Thursday.

“Hey, how’s it goin’?” Jimmy said to the beatable man.

The man nodded back. He was already embarrassed by what he knew was coming next from Rath.

“Look,” the CEO began again.

“Take it,” Jimmy said.

Rath had expected a fight. It took a moment for him to regroup.

“I own a little R-S stock,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you having a bad day.”

Rath nodded four or five times, started away.

Jimmy dropped his head to concentrate on the long putt.

He sank it. Rath looked back about the time the ball snapped into the cup.

“You want to join us?” Rath said.

Who me?

Jimmy walked after them and caught up and shook Rath’s partner’s hand.

“Sonny Ball,” Rath said.

Jimmy shook Sonny Ball’s hand. Rath never offered his.

After the round, they had a drink.

Rath was going back to work so for him it was just a grapefruit juice with a splash of cranberry juice on top, like a dash of blood.

He wasn’t talking. And Jimmy hadn’t learned anything from Rath on the greens, except that he lifted his head and he was better at long putts than short. Jimmy didn’t really know what he was looking for. He’d long ago stopped being restrained by that, by what somebody else would see as a lack of purpose. He just went where it seemed he should go, heard what he heard, saw what he saw.

And thought about it at night instead of sleeping.

Rath drained his drink and spit a cube of ice back into the glass and stood up.

“Enjoyed it,” he said. “People never kick my ass, even when they can.” Sonny Ball looked into the Scotch he was having.

“It was only a couple of strokes,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I remember,” Rath said.

Rath patted Ball on the back as he left. When he was ten feet away, he half turned.

“Call my office. We’ll get you over for lunch.”

He meant Jimmy.

“Outstanding,” Jimmy said.

For a while, he chatted with Ball, a retired United pilot with a good long story about Bangkok, but he didn’t learn anything about Rath-Steadman there either, the old days or the new. Then the rich old men started filling the place, bright clothes, bright colors on men you knew had terrorized and ball-busted “their people” yet had survived it, the company life, the dictator’s life, the acid in the mouth and the unsatisfied knot in the gut that usually killed off these guys long before now.

Jimmy finished his martini, stood to go, leaving the two fat olives on the spear.

A pair of moons hung