Somehow a serious betting pool took shape around the question of whether Gretchen’s tongue was pierced. She came back with a round of Maker’s for everyone but Adam. It impressed him that she wasn’t a little frightened of them by now. “Gretchen,” Brennan said earnestly, “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but if you open wide and say Aaah, you will make me a rich man.”

“You gentlemen have a good night,” Gretchen said, smiling. She cleared the last of their glasses and walked away. A few minutes later Adam stood up to go home, prompting a wave of questions about the staunchness of his heterosexuality. Instead of heading out the theater gate, though, he turned and went underneath the grandstand, where the kitchen and bar setups were, and when he found her, she rolled her eyes and smiled.

“Pay no attention to me,” he said. “I’m counting your tattoos.”

“Well, you won’t get an accurate count,” she said.

“I’m a very busy man. I have to get back to the table soon because I’m in charge of the centerpieces. We’re planting them in the Sheep Meadow. So I just need your phone number and I’ll be on my way.”

She turned and looked at him, her head at an inquisitive angle, and he could tell she was amused not by anything he’d said but by something else about him. “How drunk are you?” she said.

“Not at all. I just have to see you again. I don’t want to live in a world where women like you are never seen again.”

She stared at him as the bartender loaded up her tray. “Oh, this,” he said, grabbing his ring finger, “this comes right off.”

She laughed. “Leave it on,” she said. “I like married guys. Keeps things on a basic level. You’re happily married, am I right?”

“Extremely,” he said.

She pulled his hand toward her and wrote a phone number on it. “Wow,” Adam said. “What a world.”

The sun set in front of him as he walked west out of the park, the long shadows behind him gradually merging into nothing. He took his time; it was probably one of the five most beautiful nights of the year. In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam’s conception of his professional life that he wasn’t stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it. What Adam did was just an initiative based on that idea, an unusually bold manifestation of it. Why should he be restricted-or, worse, restrict himself-from finding a way to act on what he was enterprising enough to know and to synthesize? It took leadership skills as well, because you couldn’t pull off something like this by yourself even if you wanted to. In order to minimize the risk he had to command the total trust and loyalty of Devon and the handful of his friends he’d brought in on it from brokerages around the city. And that he had done. Devon had turned out to be a young man prone to anxiety but whenever he seemed close to the point of bailing, five minutes together was enough for Adam to reassure him they still had the whole thing safely in hand.

It wasn’t even his chief source of income, at least not anymore. His compensation at Perini had soared, and deservedly so. This was more in the nature of a self-administered bonus. In the course of his work he learned some things about a given company, things not of a public nature; based on this information he gave Devon an instruction on the buying or the selling of that company’s stock, spread out through about thirty small accounts with dummy names managed by Devon and the others; each account transferred its profits to different offshore banks, all of which then sent the money, in slow increments, to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla, where oversight policies were business-friendly. Adam’s share in the last year was less than half a million. It was a nice margin to have, certainly, and every little bit added to the range of possibilities in his family’s lives. But they didn’t depend on it. He could have ended the whole scheme at any time and, in terms of their daily lives, they very likely wouldn’t feel the money’s absence at all.

But it wasn’t just about the money, in any case. More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with: the night two weeks ago, for instance, when he and Brennan had sat there in the office having a Scotch after working late and had shared a laugh about Brennan’s former frat brother who worked at Bantex, who had just called him up scared shitless because his entire office had just been served with grand jury subpoenas. That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not. Every day he looked right into Sanford ’s face and confirmed with wonder that the old man was so blinded by affection that he didn’t even see him.

Inside an empty playground Adam found a water fountain and washed the ink off his hands. He made no effort to memorize the phone number first; he hadn’t even glanced at it. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this. He’d never cheated on Cynthia and never would, because that would be weak and stupid, and the risk so much greater than the reward. But sometimes there was a thrill in walking right up to that line, and in charming the other person into stepping over it. He figured it was probably all downhill after that moment anyway.

He turned left at 77th and from that angle he could see the windows of their home high above him as he approached; the only ones lit were downstairs on the kids’ floor. He took the elevator all the way up and walked into the moonlit living room. There was no note for him anywhere but he was pretty sure Cyn had told him where she had to be tonight and he’d just forgotten. The curtains blew toward him where the patio door had been left open. There was always TV but right now Adam just felt like talking to somebody; if he’d known he was returning to an empty home, he might have stayed out. He dropped his jacket on the couch and took the interior staircase, which was behind the kitchen, down to the second floor. All the doors were closed, as always, but there was some kind of noise escaping from Jonas’s room. He knocked; no answer came, but the noise didn’t stop either, so he knocked again and walked in. There were boxes and packing material all over the floor, and on top of Jonas’s dresser, incredibly, was a turntable with a vinyl record spinning on it. Adam couldn’t remember the last time he’d even seen one. Jonas, who had his headphones on, swung his feet down from his desk and smiled.

Adam pointed at the record player and then held his palms up to mime confusion. Jonas took the headphones off. “Mom and I decided to celebrate my birthday early,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful? Thanks, by the way.”

Adam, laughing, shook his head. There were two chairs in his son’s room and they were both filled with LPs in their covers, probably forty or fifty of them, none of which had been there the day before.

“The sound just doesn’t compare,” Jonas said. “It’s so warm. I can never go back to digital after this.”

Adam walked over to the still-spinning turntable and saw what was playing: the Buzzcocks. “April home?” he said. “I saw her lights on.”

“Her lights are always on. She’s out somewhere. She’s the Queen of the Night.”

Adam flipped through the record pile. There was a fair amount of music he recognized, which was itself a little perplexing. The greatness of The Clash was indisputable, he supposed, but were kids Jonas’s age really still listening to it? Wasn’t that the whole point of music-that you had your own? For Adam, music was tied to time: most ineffably it served as the soundtrack to high school and college. Beyond that he had never given it a lot of thought. The names in the pile began to get even older and more obscure: Television, Fairport Convention, Phil Ochs, the Stanley Brothers.