Swann, T.S. was not paying full attention to the midtown traffic swirling around him. First, he was nearly plowed down by a messenger on a bike—who slowed down just enough to flip an obscene gesture T.S.'s way—and then he took a wrong turn up Ninth Avenue and had to backtrack to St. Barnabas. He was still lost in thought as he ambled up the mottled sidewalk outside the neighborhood's huge new skyscraper. Suddenly, a strong arm gripped his elbow and a body moved in close behind him. T.S. did what any sensible New Yorker would do. He yelled, jumped two feet in the air and clutched the pocket that held his wallet.
"So very sorry, Mr. Hubbert," a distressed voice cried out. "I did not mean to startle you."
"Herbert!" T.S. rubbed his elbow and glared at Herbert Wong. "Why in the world are you skulking around like that?"
"I was not skulking," the retired messenger complained, spreading his arms wide. "I make very much noise. Please accept my deepest apologies." He bowed deeply.
T.S. did not believe him for a minute. Ever since he had, however briefly, questioned Herbert's prowess at martial arts, the elderly Asian man had embarked on a subtle quest to prove T.S. wrong. He was always sneaking up behind him or showing off his strength.
"I am forgiven?" Herbert asked, his face an impassive, dignified mask.
"Of course you're forgiven. I'm just preoccupied or I would have spotted you coming from a mile away." Herbert allowed T.S. this ego-placating fabrication and they walked toward St. Barnabas together, falling into a contemplative silence.
That was another thing T.S. really liked about Herbert Wong. Unlike certain other people, Herbert was perfectly content with quiet. T.S. had discovered this rare trait in Herbert years before, when he had interviewed him for a job at Sterling & Sterling. Herbert had entered the personnel manager's enormous office without a hint of nervousness, sitting down across the desk from T.S. in dignified silence. Nodding, he had waited patiently while T.S. scoured his application with customary suspicion. Unlike most other applicants, he had not blurted out incriminating details during this silence, nor revealed any desperation for a job. At the same time, he had not been secretive and had calmly divulged under questioning that his wife had recently died after a long illness which had stripped him of all his savings. He had lost his small dry-cleaning store as a result. He had no children and the rest of his family lived in Singapore, where he had been raised until he had emigrated to the U.S. as a young man. His only hobbies, it seemed, were traveling and the study of new subjects. He did not enjoy television.
T.S. had instantly felt an affinity with him and tried to steer him toward a more challenging job than the open messenger position. But Herbert had quietly insisted that he had tired of responsibility and that the messenger job was fine. He had put in fifteen good years at Sterling & Sterling before retiring the year before T.S. In those fifteen years, Herbert had never missed a day, never even reported late and had never botched a delivery. In fact, he had once kicked a mugger in the stomach in order to protect nearly one million dollars in bearer bonds for his employer, crippling the would-be thief until police arrived. Then he had insisted on such complete anonymity, for the firm's sake, that T.S. himself, personnel manager of all of Sterling & Sterling, had not heard about it until after his own retirement. Yes, Herbert was a rare man. He’d have made an excellent friend and T.S. was a little piqued that Auntie Lil had managed to practically steal the retired messenger from him.
Of course, Auntie Lil had never been much concerned with people's official standing in life and, if T.S. were to be completely honest with himself, he'd have to admit that a full friendship between a messenger of Sterling & Sterling and the personnel manager would have been deemed unacceptable by everyone, including himself. But now that he was retired, T.S. reflected, there was no reason why they couldn't be better friends.
"That man is gesturing wildly toward you," Herbert pointed out to T.S., breaking their easy silence. They stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Eight Street, waiting for the traffic light to change. Across the busy roadway stood Franklin, the gigantic homeless man with the Southern drawl. His big burly body was still encased in old-fashioned overalls, but