No, I take that back. It was at the Norwegian Embassy, which was in a converted mansion along Fifth Avenue in the low Eighties. And the ballroom was where they held their receptions. This one was for the King’s birthday, or maybe the Crown Prince’s. Neither was there for the occasion. Why was the embassy in New York and not the capital? After the bombing of Washington, you see, the Federal government may have been content to relocate in Baltimore; the diplomatic community, however, would have none of that. I think they were nervous about living so close to that wide, black-glass crater. And it didn’t help that the local Baltimore vids were reporting the milly-milly each morning—that is, so many thousandths of a millirem riding on the wind from the southwest. Too much like the reports following Chernobyl. So when the new ambassadors and their staffs arrived, replacements for those who had died in the bombing, they migrated to New York, where their U.N. consulates were settled in and would remain for a few years more.
