The Bonfire Of The Vanities Part 5

"Had it with what?"

Rawlie picked up his telephone and pointed to the mouthpiece. "See that? That's an electric doughnut."

Sherman stared. It did look sort of like a doughnut, with a lot of little holes instead of one big one.

"It just dawned on me today," said Rawlie. "All I do all day is talk to other electric doughnuts. I just hung up from talking to a guy over at Drexel. I sold him a million and a half Joshua Tree bonds." On Wall Street you didn't say a million and a half dollars' worth of bonds a million and a half dollars' worth of bonds. You said a million and a half bonds a million and a half bonds. "That's some G.o.dd.a.m.ned outfit in Arizona. His name is Earl. I don't even know his last name. Over the past two years I bet I've done a couple dozen transactions with him, fifty, sixty million bonds, and I don't even know his last name, and I've never met him, and I probably never will. He's an electric doughnut."

Sherman didn't find this amusing. In some way it was a repudiation of his triumph over the shiftless young Argentinian. It was a cynical denial of his very righteousness itself. Rawlie was a very amusing man, but he hadn't been himself since his divorce. Maybe he was no longer such a great squadron warrior, either.

"Yeah," said Sherman, managing a half smile for his old friend. "Well, I gotta go call some a my my doughnuts." doughnuts."

Back at his desk Sherman settled down to the work at hand. He stared at the little green symbols trucking across the computer screen in front of him. He picked up the telephone. The French gold-backed bond...A weird, very promising situation, and he had discovered it when one of the fellows, quite casually, mentioned the bond, in pa.s.sing, one evening at Harry's.

Back in the innocent year 1973, on the eve of the heaving c.r.a.pshoot, the French government had issued a bond known as the Giscard, after the French President, Giscard d'Estaing, with a face value of $6.5 billion. The Giscard had an interesting feature: it was backed by gold. So as the price of gold went up and down, so did the price of the Giscard. Since then the price of both gold and the French franc had shot up and down so crazily, American investors had long since lost interest in the Giscard. But lately, with gold holding firm in the $400 range, Sherman had discovered that an American buying Giscards stood to make two to three times the interest he could make on any U.S. government bond, plus a 30 percent profit when the Giscard matured. It was a sleeping beauty. The big danger would be a drop in the value of the franc. Sherman had neutralized that with a scheme for selling francs short as a hedge.

The only real problem was the complexity of the whole thing. It took big, sophisticated investors to understand it. Big, sophisticated, trusting trusting investors; no newcomer could talk anybody into putting millions into the Giscard. You had to have a track record. You had to have talent-genius!-mastery of the universe!-like Sherman McCoy, biggest producer at Pierce & Pierce. He had convinced Gene Lopwitz to put up $600 million of Pierce & Pierce's money to buy the Giscard. Gingerly, stealthily, he had bought the bonds from their various European owners without revealing the mighty hand of Pierce & Pierce, by using various "blind" brokers. Now came the big test for a Master of the Universe. There were only about a dozen players who were likely buyers of anything as esoteric as the Giscard. Of these Sherman had managed to start negotiations with five: two trust banks, Traders' Trust Co. (known as Trader T) and Metroland; two money managers; and one of his best private clients, Oscar Suder of Cleveland, who had indicated he would buy $10 million. But by far the most important was Trader T, which was considering taking half the entire lot, $300 million. investors; no newcomer could talk anybody into putting millions into the Giscard. You had to have a track record. You had to have talent-genius!-mastery of the universe!-like Sherman McCoy, biggest producer at Pierce & Pierce. He had convinced Gene Lopwitz to put up $600 million of Pierce & Pierce's money to buy the Giscard. Gingerly, stealthily, he had bought the bonds from their various European owners without revealing the mighty hand of Pierce & Pierce, by using various "blind" brokers. Now came the big test for a Master of the Universe. There were only about a dozen players who were likely buyers of anything as esoteric as the Giscard. Of these Sherman had managed to start negotiations with five: two trust banks, Traders' Trust Co. (known as Trader T) and Metroland; two money managers; and one of his best private clients, Oscar Suder of Cleveland, who had indicated he would buy $10 million. But by far the most important was Trader T, which was considering taking half the entire lot, $300 million.

The deal would bring Pierce & Pierce a 1 percent commission up front-$6 million-for conceiving of the idea and risking its capital. Sherman's share, including commissions, bonuses, profit-sharing, and resale fees, would come to about $1.75 million. With that he intended to pay off the horrendous $1.8 million personal loan he had taken out to buy the apartment.

So the first order of business today was a call to Bernard Levy, a Frenchman who was handling the deal at Trader T: a relaxed, friendly call, the call of a biggest-producing salesman (Master of the Universe), to remind Levy that although both gold and the franc had fallen in value yesterday and this morning (on the European exchanges), it meant nothing; all was well, very well indeed. It was true that he had met Bernard Levy only once, when he made the original presentation. They had been conferring on the telephone for months...but electric doughnut? electric doughnut? Cynicism was such a cowardly form of superiority. That was Rawlie's great weakness. Rawlie cashed his checks. He wasn't too cynical to do that. If he wanted to belly up because he couldn't deal with his wife, that was his sad problem. Cynicism was such a cowardly form of superiority. That was Rawlie's great weakness. Rawlie cashed his checks. He wasn't too cynical to do that. If he wanted to belly up because he couldn't deal with his wife, that was his sad problem.

As Sherman dialed and waited for Bernard Levy to come on the line, the rousing sound of the greed storm closed in about him once again. From the desk right in front of his, a tall bug-eyed fellow (Yale '77): "Thirty-one bid January eighty-eights-"

From a desk somewhere behind him: "I'm short seventy million ten-year!"

From he knew not where: "They got their f.u.c.king buying shoes on!"

"I'm in the box!"

"-long 125-"

"-a million four-years from Midland-"

"Who's f.u.c.king around with the W-Is?"

"I tell you, I'm in the box!"

"-bid 80-"

"-buy 'em at 6-plus-"

"-pick up 2 basis points-"

"Forget it! It's nut-cutting time!"

At ten o'clock, Sherman, Rawlie, and five others convened in the conference room of Eugene Lopwitz's suite of offices to decide on Pierce & Pierce's strategy for the main event of the day in the bond markets, which was a U.S. Treasury auction of 10 billion bonds maturing in twenty years. It was a measure of the importance of the bond business to Pierce & Pierce that Lopwitz's offices opened right out into the bond trading room.

The conference room had no conference table. It looked like the lounge in the English hotel for the Yanks where they serve tea. It was full of small antique tables and cabinets. They were so old, brittle, and highly polished, you got the feeling that if you flicked one of them hard with your middle finger, it would shatter. At the same time, a wall of plate gla.s.s shoved a view of the Hudson River and the rotting piers of New Jersey into your face.

Sherman sat in a George II armchair. Rawlie sat next to him, in an old chair with a back shaped like a shield. In other antique or antiqued chairs, with Sheraton and Chippendale side tables beside them, were the head government trader, George Connor, who was two years younger than Sherman; his deputy, Vic Scaasi, who was only twenty-eight; the chief market a.n.a.lyst, Paul Feiffer; and Arnold Parch, the executive vice president, who was Lopwitz's first lieutenant.

Everyone in the room sat in a cla.s.sic chair and stared at a small brown plastic speaker on top of a cabinet. The cabinet was a 220-year-old Adam bowfront, from the period when the brothers Adam liked to paint pictures and ornate borders on wooden furniture. On the center panel was an oval-shaped painting of a Greek maiden sitting in a dell or grotto in which lacy leaves receded fuzzily in deepening shades of green into a dusky teal sky. The thing had cost an astonishing amount of money. The plastic speaker was the size of a bedside clock radio. Everyone stared at it, waiting for the voice of Gene Lopwitz. Lopwitz was in London, where it was now 4:00 P.M. P.M. He would preside over this meeting by telephone. He would preside over this meeting by telephone.

An indistinct noise came out of the speaker. It might have been a voice and it might have been an airplane. Arnold Parch rose from his armchair and approached the Adam cabinet and looked at the plastic speaker and said, "Gene, can you hear me all right?"

He looked imploringly at the plastic speaker, without taking his eyes off it, as if in fact it were were Gene Lopwitz, transformed, the way princes are transformed into frogs in fairy tales. For a moment the plastic frog said nothing. Then it spoke. Gene Lopwitz, transformed, the way princes are transformed into frogs in fairy tales. For a moment the plastic frog said nothing. Then it spoke.

"Yeah, I can hear you, Arnie. There was a lotta cheering going on." Lopwitz's voice sounded as if it were coming from out of a storm drain, but you could hear it.

"Where are you, Gene?" asked Parch.

"I'm at a cricket match." Then less clearly: "What's the name a this place again?" He was evidently with some other people. "Tottenham Park, Arnie. I'm on a kind of a terrace."

"Who's playing?" Parch smiled, as if to show the plastic frog that this wasn't a serious question.

"Don't get technical on me, Arnie. A lot of very nice young gentlemen in cable-knit sweaters and white flannel pants, is the best I can tell you."

Appreciative laughter broke out in the room, and Sherman felt his own lips bending into the somehow obligatory smile. He glanced about the room. Everyone was smiling and chuckling at the brown plastic speaker except for Rawlie, who had his eyes rolled up in the Oh Brother mode.

Then Rawlie leaned over toward Sherman and said, in a noisy whisper: "Look at all these idiots grinning. They think the plastic box has eyes."

This didn't strike Sherman as very funny, since he himself had been grinning. He was also afraid that Lopwitz's loyal aide, Parch, would think he was Rawlie's confederate in making sport of the maximum leader.

"Well, everybody's here, Gene," Parch said to the box, "and so I'm gonna get George to fill you in on where we stand on the auction as of now."

Parch looked at George Connor and nodded and walked back to his chair, and Connor got up from his and walked over to the Adam cabinet and stared at the brown plastic box and said: "Gene? This is George."

"Yeah, hi, George," said the frog. "Go ahead."

"Here's the thing, Gene," said Connor, standing in front of the Adam commode, unable to take his eyes off the plastic box, "it feels pretty good. The old twenties are trading at 8 percent. The traders are telling us they'll come in on the new ones at 8.05, but we think they're playing games with us. We think we're gonna get action right down to 8. So here's what I figure. We'll scale in at 8.01, 8.02, 8.03, with the balance at 8.04. I'm ready to go 60 percent of the issue."

Which, translated, meant: he was proposing to buy $6 billion of the $10 billion in bonds offered in the auction, with the expectation of a profit of two thirty-seconds of a dollar-6-on every one hundred dollars put up. This was known as "two ticks."

Sherman couldn't resist another look at Rawlie. He had a small, unpleasant smile on his face, and his gaze seemed to pa.s.s several degrees to the right of the Adam commode, toward the Hoboken docks. Rawlie's presence was like a gla.s.s of ice water in the face. Sherman resented him all over again. He knew what was on his mind. Here was this outrageous arriviste, Lopwitz-Sherman knew Rawlie thought of him that way-trying to play the n.o.b on the terrace of some British cricket club and at the same time conduct a meeting in New York to decide whether Pierce & Pierce was going to stake two billion, four billion, or six billion on a single government bond issue three hours from now. No doubt Lopwitz had his own audience on hand at the cricket club to watch this performance, as his great words bounced off a communications satellite somewhere up in the empyrean and hit Wall Street. Well, it wasn't hard to find something laughable in it, but Lopwitz was, in truth, a Master of the Universe. Lopwitz was about forty-five years old. Sherman wanted nothing less seven years down the line, when he was forty-five. To be astride the Atlantic...with billions at stake! Rawlie could sn.i.g.g.e.r...and sink into his kneecaps...but to think what Lopwitz now had in his grasp, to think what he made each year, just from Pierce & Pierce, which was at least $25 million, to think of the kind of life he led-and what Sherman thought of first was Lopwitz's young wife, Snow White. That was what Rawlie called her. Hair as dark as ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow...She was Lopwitz's fourth wife, French, a countess, apparently, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with an accent like Catherine Deneuve doing a bath-oil commercial. She was something...Sherman had met her at a party at the Petersons'. She had put her hand on his forearm, just to make a point in conversation-but the way she kept the pressure on his arm and stared at him from about eight inches away! She was a young and frisky animal. Lopwitz had taken what he wanted. He had wanted a young and frisky animal with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow, and that was what he had taken. What had ever happened to the other three Mrs. Eugene Lopwitzes was a question Sherman had never heard brought up. When you had reached Lopwitz's level, it didn't even matter.

"Yeah, well, that sounds all right, George," said the plastic frog. "What about Sherman? Are you there, Sherman?"

"Hi, Gene!" said Sherman, rising from the George II armchair. His own voice sounded very odd to him, now that he was talking to a plastic box, and he didn't dare even take a quick glance at Rawlie as he walked over to the Adam commode and took his stance and stared, rapt, at the machine on top.

"Gene, all my customers are talking 8.05. My gut feeling, though, is that they're on our side. The market has a good tone. I think we can bid ahead of the customer interest."

"Okay," said the voice in the box, "but just make sure you and George stay on top a the trading accounts. I don't wanna hear about Salomon or anybody horsing around with shorts."

Sherman found himself marveling at the frog's wisdom.

Some sort of throttled roar came over the speaker. Everybody stared at it.

Lopwitz's voice returned. "Somebody just hit the h.e.l.l outta the ball," he said. "The ball's kinda dead, though. Well, you kinda hadda be there." It wasn't clear what he meant by that. "Well, look, George. Can you hear me, George?"

Connor hopped to it, rose from his chair, hustled over to the Adam commode.

"I can hear you, Gene."

"I was just gonna say, if you feel like stepping up to the plate and taking a good whack at it today, go ahead. It sounds okay."

And that was that.

At forty-five seconds before the auction deadline of 1:00 P.M. P.M., George Connor, at a telephone in the middle of the bond trading room, read off his final scaled-in bids to a Pierce & Pierce functionary sitting at a telephone at the Federal Building, which was the physical site of the auction. The bids averaged $99.62643 per $100 worth of bonds. Within a few seconds after 1:00 P.M. P.M., Pierce & Pierce now owned, as planned, $6 billion worth of the twenty-year bond. The bond department had four hours in which to create a favorable market. Vic Scaasi led the charge on the bond trading desk, reselling the bonds mainly to the brokerage houses-by telephone. Sherman and Rawlie led the bond salesmen, reselling the bonds mainly to insurance companies and trust banks-by telephone. By 2:00 P.M. P.M., the roar in the bond trading room, fueled more by fear than greed, was unearthly. They all shouted and sweated and swore and devoured their electric doughnuts.

By 5:00 P.M. P.M. they had sold 40 percent-$2.4 billion-of the $6 billion at an average price of $99.75062 per $100 worth of bonds, for a profit of not two but four ticks! they had sold 40 percent-$2.4 billion-of the $6 billion at an average price of $99.75062 per $100 worth of bonds, for a profit of not two but four ticks! Four ticks! Four ticks! That was a profit of twelve and a half cents per one hundred dollars. That was a profit of twelve and a half cents per one hundred dollars. Four ticks! Four ticks! To the eventual retail buyer of these bonds, whether an individual, a corporation or an inst.i.tution, this spread was invisible. But To the eventual retail buyer of these bonds, whether an individual, a corporation or an inst.i.tution, this spread was invisible. But-four ticks! To Pierce & Pierce it meant a profit of almost $3 million for an afternoon's work. And it wouldn't stop there. The market was holding firm and edging up. Within the next week they might easily make an additional $5 to $10 million on the 3.6 billion bonds remaining. To Pierce & Pierce it meant a profit of almost $3 million for an afternoon's work. And it wouldn't stop there. The market was holding firm and edging up. Within the next week they might easily make an additional $5 to $10 million on the 3.6 billion bonds remaining. Four ticks! Four ticks!

By five o'clock Sherman was soaring on adrenaline. He was part of the pulverizing might of Pierce & Pierce, Masters of the Universe. The audacity of it all was breathtaking. To risk $6 billion in one afternoon to make two ticks- two ticks-six and a quarter cents per one hundred dollars-and then to make four ticks-four ticks!-the audacity!-the audacity! Was there any more exciting power on the face of the earth? Let Lopwitz watch all the cricket matches he wants to! Let him play the plastic frog! Master of the Universe-the audacity!

The audacity of it flowed through Sherman's limbs and lymph channels and loins. Pierce & Pierce was the power, and he was wired into the power, and the power hummed and surged in his very innards.

Judy...He hadn't thought of her for hours. What was a single, albeit boneheaded, telephone call...on the stupendous ledger kept by Pierce & Pierce? The fiftieth floor was for people who weren't afraid to take what they wanted. And, Christ, he didn't want much, compared to what he, a Master of the Universe, should rightfully have. All he wanted was to be able to kick the gong around when he pleased, to have the simple pleasures due all mighty warriors.

Where did she get off, giving him such a hard time?

If Middle Age wishes the continued support and escort of a Master of the Universe, then she must allow him the precious currency he has earned, which is youth and beauty and juicy jugs and loamy loins- It made no sense! Somehow, for no explicable reason, Judy had always had his number. She looked down on him-from a wholly fictive elevation; nevertheless, she looked down on him. Still the daughter of Professor Miller, E. (for Egbord!) Ronald Miller of DesPortes University, Terwilliger, Wisconsin, poor stodgy Professor Miller, in his rotting tweeds, whose one claim to fame was a rather mealymouthed attack (Sherman had once plowed through it) on his fellow Wisconsinite, Senator Joseph McCarthy, in the magazine Aspects Aspects in 1955. Yet, back there in the coc.o.o.n of their early days together in the Village, Sherman had validated her claim. He had in 1955. Yet, back there in the coc.o.o.n of their early days together in the Village, Sherman had validated her claim. He had enjoyed enjoyed telling Judy that while he worked telling Judy that while he worked on on Wall Street, he was not Wall Street, he was not of of Wall Street and was only Wall Street and was only using using Wall Street. He had been Wall Street. He had been pleased pleased when she condescended to admire him for the enlightenment that was stirring in his soul. Somehow she was a.s.suring him that his own father, John Campbell McCoy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget, was a rather pedestrian figure, after all, a high-cla.s.s security guard for other people's capital. As to why that might be important to him, Sherman didn't even know how to speculate. His interest in psychoa.n.a.lytical theory, never lively, had ended one day at Yale when Rawlie Thorpe had referred to it as "a Jewish science" (precisely the att.i.tude that had most troubled and infuriated Freud seventy-five years earlier). when she condescended to admire him for the enlightenment that was stirring in his soul. Somehow she was a.s.suring him that his own father, John Campbell McCoy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget, was a rather pedestrian figure, after all, a high-cla.s.s security guard for other people's capital. As to why that might be important to him, Sherman didn't even know how to speculate. His interest in psychoa.n.a.lytical theory, never lively, had ended one day at Yale when Rawlie Thorpe had referred to it as "a Jewish science" (precisely the att.i.tude that had most troubled and infuriated Freud seventy-five years earlier).

But that was all part of the past, of his childhood, his childhood on East Seventy-third Street and his childhood in the Village. This was a new era! This was a new Wall Street!-and Judy was...an article left over from his childhood...and yet she lived on and grew older, thinner...handsome...

Sherman leaned back in his chair and surveyed the bond trading room. The processions of phosph.o.r.escent green characters still skidded across the faces of the computer terminals, but the roar had subsided to something more like locker-room laughter. George Connor stood beside Vic Scaasi's chair with his hands in his pockets, just chatting. Vic arched his back and rolled his shoulders and seemed about to yawn. There was Rawlie, reared back in his chair, talking on the telephone, grinning and running his hand over his bald pate. Victorious warriors after the fray...Masters of the Universe...

And she has the gall to cause him grief over a telephone call telephone call!

4. King of the Jungle

Thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpa-the noise of the airliners taking off pounded down so hard, he could feel it. The air was full of jet fumes. The stench cut straight through to his stomach. Cars kept popping up from out of the mouth of a ramp and threading their way through the swarms of people who were roaming about on the roof in the dusk looking for the elevators or their cars or other people's cars-steal! steal! steal!-and his would be the leading candidate, wouldn't it? Sherman stood with one hand resting on the door, wondering if he dared leave it here. The car was a black Mercedes two-seat sports roadster that had cost $48,000-or $120,000, according to how you wanted to look at it. In a Master of the Universe tax bracket, with federal, New York State, and New York City taxes to pay, Sherman had to make $120,000 in order to have $48,000 left to spend on a two-seat sports roadster. How would he explain it to Judy if the thing were stolen from up here on the roof of a terminal at Kennedy Airport?

Well-why would he even owe her an explanation? For a solid week he had had dinner at home every night. It must have been the first time he had managed that since he started working for Pierce & Pierce. He had been attentive to Campbell, spending upward of forty-five minutes with her one evening, which was unusual, although he would have been surprised and offended if anybody had ever pointed that out. He had rewired a floor lamp in the library without any undue fuming and sighing. After three days of his model performance, Judy had given up the daybed in the dressing room and come back to the bedroom. True, the Berlin Wall now ran down the center of the bed, and she wouldn't give him an inch of small talk. But she was always civil to him when Campbell was around. That was the most important thing.

Two hours ago when he had called Judy to say he would be working late, she had taken it in stride. Well-he deserved it! He took one last look at the Mercedes and headed for the international arrivals area.

It was down in the bowels of the building, in what must have been designed as a baggage area originally. Strips of fluorescent lights struggled against the gloominess of the s.p.a.ce. People were jammed behind a metal fence, waiting for pa.s.sengers coming in from abroad to emerge from Customs. Suppose there was someone here who knew him and Judy? He surveyed the crowd. Shorts, sneakers, jeans, football jerseys-Christ, who were these people? One by one the travelers were straggling out of Customs. Sweat suits, T-shirts, windbreakers, tube socks, overalls, warm-up jackets, baseball caps, and tank tops; just in from Rome, Milan, Paris, Brussels, Munich, and London; the world travelers; the cosmopolites; Sherman lifted his Yale chin against the tide.

When Maria finally appeared, she wasn't hard to spot. In this mob she looked like something from another galaxy. She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes. The price of the blouse and the shoes alone would have paid for the clothes on the backs of any twenty women on the floor. She walked with a nose-up sprocket-hipped model-girl gait calculated to provoke maximum envy and resentment. People were staring. Beside her marched a porter with an aluminum dolly cart heaped with luggage, a prodigious amount of it, a matched set, cream-colored leather with chocolate leather trim on the edges. Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman. She had only gone to Italy for a week, to find a house on Lake Como for the summer. He couldn't imagine why she had taken so many bags. (Unconsciously he a.s.sociated such things with a slack upbringing.) He wondered how he was going to get it all in the Mercedes.

He made his way around the fence and strode toward her. He squared his shoulders.

"h.e.l.lo, babe," he said.

"Babe?" said Maria. She added a smile, as if she weren't really annoyed, but obviously she was. It was true that he had never called her babe before. He had wanted to sound confident but casual, like a Master of the Universe meeting his girlfriend in an airport.

He took her arm and fell in step with her and decided to try again. "How was the flight?"

"It was great," said Maria, "if you don't mind being bowed by some Brit for six hours." It was a couple of beats before Sherman realized she was saying bored bored. She gazed into the distance, as if reflecting upon her ordeal.

Up on the roof, the Mercedes had survived the thieving mult.i.tudes. The skycap couldn't get much of the luggage into the car's sporty little trunk. He had to stack half of it up on the back seat, which wasn't much more than an upholstered ledge. Terrific, thought Sherman. If I have to stop short, I'll get hit in the base of the skull by matched flying cream-colored vanity cases with chocolate-brown trim.

By the time they got out of the airport and went onto the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan, only the last low dull glow of daylight was visible behind the buildings and the trees of South Ozone Park. It was that hour of dusk when the streetlights and headlights come on but make little difference. A stream of red taillights rolled on ahead of them. Over on the side of the expressway, just past Rockaway Boulevard, he saw an enormous two-door sedan, the sort of car they used to make in the 1970s, up against a stone retaining wall. A man...spread-eagled on the highway!...No, as they drew closer, he could see it wasn't a man at all. It was the hood of the car. The entire hood had been pulled off and was lying on the pavement. The wheels, seats, and steering wheel were gone...This huge derelict machine was now part of the landscape...Sherman, Maria, the luggage, and the Mercedes rolled on.

He tried once more. "Well, how was Milan? What's going on at Lake Como?"

"Sherman, who's Christopher Marlowe?" Shuhmun, who's Christuphuh Muhlowe?

Christopher Marlowe? "I don't know. Do I know him?" "I don't know. Do I know him?"

"The one I'm talking about was a writer."

"You don't mean the playwright?"

"I guess so. Who was he?" Maria continued to look straight ahead. She sounded as if her last friend had died.

"Christopher Marlowe...He was a British playwright, about the time of Shakespeare, I think. Maybe a little before Shakespeare. Why?"

"Which was when?" She couldn't have sounded more miserable.

"Let's see. I don't know...The sixteenth century-15-something. Why?"

"What did he write?"

"G.o.d...beats me. Listen, I thought I was doing well just to remember who he was. Why?"

"Yes, but you do know who he was."

"Barely. Why?"

"What about Dr. Faustus?"

"Dr. Faustus?"

"Did he write something about Dr. Faustus?"

"Mmmmmmrnm." A tiny flash of memory; but it slipped away. "Could be. Dr. Faustus...The Jew of Malta! He wrote a play called He wrote a play called The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta. I'm pretty sure of that. The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta. I don't even know how I remember The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta. I'm sure I never read it."

"But you do know who he was. That's one of the things you're supposed to know, isn't it?"