“I simply come as a friend,” Solomon said.

“That’s very nice,” Grelich said. “The murderer returns to weep over the corpse he has made.”

“I don’t quite understand your point,” Solomon said.

“The point is, where were you when I needed a friend? Where were you before I killed myself?”

“Killed yourself? You don’t sound very dead to me.”

“I tried. It’s an accident that I’m alive.”

“So might we all say. But something that is tantamount to an accident can be said never to have happened.”

“Sophistry,” Grelich shouted.

Solomon sat silent for a long moment, and then nodded his head. “I’ll accept that. The fact is, I was not a very good friend. Or rather, I was not a good enough friend at the time you needed one.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Grelich, momentarily uncertain of the line Solomon was taking.

“We are both responsible for what happened,” Solomon said. “You elected yourself a victim, I perforce became a killer. Together we obliterated a life. But we reckoned without God.”

“How do you figure?” Grelich asked.

“We thought we could produce the nothingness of death. But God said, “That’s not how it’s going to be.” And he left us both alive and able to suffer the consequences of the deed we attempted, but didn’t quite bring off.”

“God wouldn’t do that,” Grelich said. “That is, if He existed.”

“He does.”

“What kind of a principle could He make of that?”

“He doesn’t have to make a principle out of it. He is not restricted to His own precedent. He can do what he wants fresh every time. This time it’s for you to suffer, and you deserve it, since God never told you it was all right to suicide.”

Ritchie loved listening to what was going on. He qvelled (a word he would soon learn) to hear the aggressive, intellectual Grelich getting it in the neck from a guy like Solomon, who came on like a religious rapper and really knew how to dish it out.

But it occurred to Ritchie that all the talk was on Grelich, and none of it was on him.

“Hey, fellows,” he said, “it looks like this talk could go on for a while, and I haven’t even been introduced.”

Grelich sullenly made the introductions.

“Why don’t we get a bite to eat?” Ritchie said, now that he found himself able to speak. “I could use something, myself.”

“Is there a vegetarian restaurant around here?” Grelich asked.

“Christ, I don’t know,” Ritchie said. “There’s a pretty good Cuban café just a couple blocks from here.”

“I wouldn’t eat that treif junk,” Grelich said. “Not even if I weren’t a vegetarian.”

“So recommend your own place, big mouth,” said Ritchie.

“Gentlemen,” said Solomon, “we will take a taxi, which I will pay for, and we will go to Ratstein’s on the Lower East Side.”

The taxi dropped them on the corner of 2nd Avenue and Fourth Street. A corner place, Ratstein’s was open. Inside it was big—it must have had over a hundred tables, all empty except for two men at a front table, arguing over coffee and blintzes.

“We’ll sit in the back, at the Philosopher’s Table,” Solomon said, and led them to an oval table with chairs for eight.

“Schlepstein from NYU often shows up here,” Solomon said. “And sometimes Hans Werthke from Columbia.”

Ritchie had never heard of these men. And he didn’t much like vegetarian food. He settled for a plate of egg cookies and a celery tonic. Grelich ordered strawberry blintzes, Esther took rice pudding, and Solomon ordered the rice and vegetables dish.

Their waiter was a short, plump, middle-aged man with a fringe of pale thinning hair and a vaguely European look. He moved slowly on what appeared to be painful feet.

“I’ll need this table by 7 pm,” he said. “It’s reserved.”

It’s only 3 o’clock now,” Grelich said. “God forbid that your famous philosophers should have to sit anywhere else. We’ll be out of here long before they start their discussions.”

“Our customers are used to seeing them here,” the waiter said. “I am Jakob Leiber and I am here to serve you.”

The talk was general for a while, with one after another relating incidents of their day. From their conversation, Ritchie got an impression of an older New York, filled with old law tenements, push carts, micvahs, and study rooms for young scholars. He wondered if they weren’t talking about a New York of a hundred years ago, not today.

In the taxi down Second Avenue he had noticed the Hispanic food stores, perfumeries, lunch counters and laundries. What once might have been a Jewish neighborhood had become a Hispanic barrio or whatever they called their slum neighborhoods.

He commented on this to Esther. She told him, “Everything’s changed. I’ve heard Ratstein’s only stays open because of the support of some wealthy Jewish mafia types who live in New Jersey and need a place for lunch on their trips into the city.”

“That reminds me of this movie I saw,” Ritchie said. “There was this Jewish mobster and his daughter, and this other mobster, a young guy, falls in love with the first mobster’s daughter and goes back in time to kill the man who became her husband but didn’t treat her right. I forgot how they got the time machine, but it seemed pretty logical at the time.”

“Did he get the girl?” Esther asked.

“Sort of. But there was a complication.”

“There’s always a complication in invented stories,” Grelich said. “But life isn’t like that. Life is terribly simple.”

“I don’t agree,” Ritchie said, recognizing Grelich’s propensity for climbing out on an unstable premise and inviting someone to knock him off. “I was writing a story about a similar situation—it’s an old theme, you know—and all I found were complications. Christ, even my complications had complications.”

That got a mild laugh from Esther, and a chuckle from Solomon. Even Grelich gave a sour grunt of approval.

“Boychick,” said Grelich, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

“Well, scarcely a writer,” Ritchie said. “But I have published a few things in a magazine. An online magazine, no pay, but they get some good names.”

“You’re a writer?” Jakob the waiter asked. He had been listening to the conversation while serving the dishes.

“Well, I do write,” Ritchie said. His recent experiences with real professional writers, who posted messages and comments on his Message Board from time to time, had convinced him that his best policy was to make no public claims for himself, at least not until he had a few professional sales.

“A writer,” Jakob mused, drying his hands on his apron. “I’m in the publishing business myself.”

“You’re a publisher?” Grelich asked.

“No, I’m a translator. From the Rumanian. I have a Rumanian science-fiction writer I translate for.”

“You translate into English?” Grelich asked.

“Of course, English, what else? Urdu?”

Ritchie said, “What is this writer’s name?”

He couldn’t make it out even after several repetitions, so he decided to learn it later, and write it down, see if the name turned out to be of any importance.

“Has he published?” Ritchie asked.

“In English, no. In Rumanian, plenty. It’s only a matter of time before I sell him here.”

“You’re his agent, too?” Ritchie asked.

“I have that honor.”

Ritchie wanted to ask Leiber how good his agent contacts were, and whether he was taking on any new clients. But he couldn’t find a way of slipping it into the conversation. He decided he’d come back to Ratstein’s on his own some other time, go into the matter again, without Solomon and Esther, and, with a little luck, without Grelich. For a beginning writer it was always worthwhile checking out an agent, no matter what else he did.

“Anyhow,” Grelich said, “we’re here to discuss this situation I’ve got, with this goy lodged in my head.”