Little fellow you’d never catch wearing elevator shoes. Or those two-hundred-dollar elephant-hide ones either. The car that drew up for them had a chauffeur in it, but wasn’t a limousine. Since Buddy had become an investment broker without leaving off being a lawyer, and had subsequently become a consultant without leaving off being a broker—after which Bunt was unsure of the details except that Buddy would never leave anything behind—his father had taken on the style of business money with real money, wherever this saved him time, but always kept the style subservient—like making the chauffeur-hire give him a smaller car. And he had never been persuaded—how Maeve had tried!—to make his success physical to himself. Sitting by his father on the familiar way in from Kennedy, his excitement grew; this time he knew why. The city demanded conclusions of him. False or true didn’t matter; he’d lived in sight of its demands all his life. First came the blind warehouses, black with the dirt of years, full of mysterious industrial guilts heaped in wood and slag and zinc.
