They were nodding, a little more sanguine now. Brace yourselves, he thought.

“. . . but time has made serious inroads on rent control, and both working-class and middle-class tenants are being priced out of the market. All new housing, including conversions of factory and warehouse space to residential use, has to come under rent control, and the process of decontrol has to be stopped in its tracks and reversed. Otherwise where are we?” God, the looks on their faces! He kept his own straight for as long as he could, then let his merriment show.

“Jesus Christ,” Irv Boasberg said.

“Guys, I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. Look, I’m not about to make a policy statement, on or off the record. At this stage you probably know as much as I do about what I’d be likely to do as mayor of New York.”

“If nothing else,” Davis said, “you just demonstrated a subtler sense of humor than the last man to hold the office.” Or a stronger suicidal streak, he thought, talking up rent control and preservationism to three titans of New York real estate.

“S W E E T H E A R T, Y O U ’ L L E X C U S E M E , ” Maurice Winters said, and pushed back from the table. “I’ll be right back.” He didn’t wait for a response, but headed straight for the men’s room. When his bladder prompted him, social graces were a lux-ury he couldn’t afford. He had to respond in a hurry.

And then, of course, he would wind up standing in front of the urinal trying to trick his prostate into getting out of the way long enough to allow the stream to flow. Magically, peeing became the only thing more difficult than resisting the urge to pee. It was a hell of a thing, getting old, and the only thing that made it remotely attractive was when you considered the alternative.

Which was something he’d been forced to consider more and more lately, ever since he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Eight months now. Back in August his internist did a PSA and made an appointment for him with a urologist, and then the fucking Arabs killed three thousand people for no reason whatsoever, and he canceled the appointment and forgot to make another until his internist called him, all concerned, and got him into the urologist’s office for an ultrasound and a biopsy in early November. Both procedures were literally a pain in the ass, and they only confirmed what everyone had pretty much known from the PSA, which was that he had prostate cancer, and that it had very likely metastasized.

There were choices, the urologist assured him. You could have surgery or you could have radiation, and if you took the latter course you could have radioactive seeds implanted that avoided some of the worst effects of radiation therapy. What he’d recommend, himself, was surgery first, to remove the prostate and if nothing else make urination less problematic, followed by a course of radiation to zap whatever adventurous cancer cells might have migrated outside the walls of the prostate gland.

And then, should the cancer return, then they could knock it back with hormonal treatments. What that amounted to, he learned, was chemical castration, although nobody liked to call it that because it sounded as though they were going to cut off your balls. Which they sometimes did as an alternative, as it saved you from having to go in for the shots, and it was guaranteed one hundred percent effective. Not at curing the cancer, but at shut-ting down your production of testosterone, which propelled the cancer.

It also shut down your sex life. Coincidentally, Winters had run into an old friend, a law school professor in his eighties who’d still been sexually active until he’d had the shots as a last-ditch effort to delay the cancer long enough to—what, die from something else? “I dreaded this,” the fellow told him. “I thought this means the end, you’re not a man anymore, you’ve got nothing to live for.

But the shots took away everything, including the desire, the inter

est. I couldn’t do anything, but I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t care!”

Wonderful.

If not caring was such a blessing, he could take a fistful of sleeping pills and not care about anything.

He did some research, and the surgery the urologist wanted to do wasn’t like having a hangnail trimmed. Assuming you didn’t die on the table, you could look forward to a minimum of several months of incontinence and impotence, either or both of which could turn out to be permanent. So you walked around leaking pee into an adult diaper, and you still had the desire for sex but couldn’t do anything about it, and, the best part of all, the cancer came back and you died anyway.

He talked to two men who’d had radiation, and they both said the same thing: If I’d known it was going to be anywhere near that bad, I would never have put myself through it.

Wonderful.

“Finally,” the doctor said, reluctantly, “there’s watchful waiting.

You come in every three months for a PSA, and we keep a close eye on it, and see how it goes.” Why, he wondered, did he have to come in for those PSAs? “So we’ll know how you’re doing.” But if he’d already decided that he wasn’t going to have any treatment, regardless of his PSA score? “Well, we want to keep tabs on this thing. We want to keep our options open.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “looking back, I’ve got just one regret. If I had it all to do over again, I’d never have gone into criminal law.” He’d waited, and the poor schmuck had to ask what he’d have chosen instead, and he said, “Malpractice litigation. It barely existed as a specialty when I got out of law school, but if I’d seen the handwriting on the wall I could have cashed in. And even if I didn’t make so much money, think of the emotional satisfaction!” And he got the hell out of there and never went back.

He was taking herbs now, which maybe did him some good and maybe didn’t, he’d have had to take another PSA to tell. It was only a needle stick, any doctor could do it, but for what?

He hadn’t said a word to anybody. Except his old law professor, but he wasn’t going to tell anybody, and, hormone shots or no hormone shots, it didn’t look as though the guy was going to be around too long. Except for Ruthie, there wasn’t really anybody he had to tell.

Sooner or later he’d have to tell her. They’d been married forever, they went down to City Hall two days after he found out he’d passed the bar exam, and if he lived seven more years they’d celebrate their fiftieth. He’d be seventy-four, and it would be nice to live longer than that, it would be nice to last until ninety if you could walk and talk and think straight, but he’d settle for seventy-four. If somebody offered him a deal, seventy-four, no more no less, he’d sign on the dotted line.

The urologist couldn’t offer him that deal. He stood as good a chance on his own, thank you very much.

And, in the meantime, he’d just enjoyed every minute of a wonderful dinner with a beautiful woman, and he wasn’t done enjoying the evening, not by a long shot.

And, miracle of miracles, he’d managed to empty his bladder.

Washing his hands, he looked at himself in the mirror. Everybody said he looked terrific, which was a neat trick because he was a fat old man who hadn’t looked so great when he was a thin young man, so how terrific could he possibly look, cancer or no cancer? But he didn’t look so bad.

He went back to the table, and evidently he’d been gone long enough for the waiter to bring dessert and for Susan to answer her own call of nature, because she was absent and his cheesecake and her fresh strawberries were on the table, along with a pot of coffee and two cups.

He sat down and regarded his cheesecake, and his mouth watered. He picked up his fork, then decided he could wait. It wouldn’t take her that long, she didn’t even have a prostate gland.

He reached for the coffee, stopped himself when he felt a hand on his thigh.

Jesus Christ, she was under the table! What did she think she was going to do down there?

And wasn’t that a stupid question?

If there was any doubt, it was erased quickly enough. Her hand moved to his groin, her fingers worked his zipper, and in seconds he felt her breath on him, and then she had him in her mouth.

He sat there, thrilled beyond description, and wondered if any-

one in the room had a clue what was going on. Someone must have seen her get under the table. Did anyone know? And did it matter?

Oh, hell, nothing mattered but the sheer pleasure of it. It wasn’t just that he was getting a secret blow job in a public place from a beautiful woman, but that it was a remarkably artful blow job in the bargain. And she was in no hurry, either, she was taking her time, the little angel, she was making it last.

Well, she was already having her dessert, wasn’t she? Feeling devilish himself, he took a bite of the cheesecake.

“I ’ V E H A D M Y P R O B L E M S with Rudy,” Fran Buckram said, “but most of them were with him personally, not with the directions he took. Most of my policies probably wouldn’t differ all that greatly with what you saw for the past eight years.”

“We’re in better shape than we were eight years ago, Fran. Of course we’ve got a financial crunch we didn’t have this time last year, thanks to 9/11.”

“And that’ll be a lot better or a lot worse by the time 2005 rolls around, so there’s not much point in telling you how I’d respond to it. I can’t contrast my style with Michael’s because he doesn’t have one yet.”

“Rudy Lite,” Hartley Saft suggested.

“As a manager, well, I’d do what I did at One Police Plaza, and in Portland before that. Pick good people, make them accountable, and then let them do their jobs. Keep my eyes on them and my hands off.”

They were nodding. Good.

“I’d try to run the city more for the benefit of the people who live in it and less for the convenience of those who drive in to do business and then go home. That might mean pedestrianizing parts of Midtown Manhattan, it might mean limiting truck deliveries to off-peak hours. I’d need to run feasibility studies first, but those are both attractive options.”

More nods. They were less certain about this, but open to it.

He elaborated, giving them an informal version of the speech that brought him $3,500 when he delivered it to civic groups and fraternal organizations. He’d increase the budgets for the Parks Department and the library. He’d keep support for the arts a prior-ity, but he’d hold off telling a museum curator what to hang on his walls. All in all, he’d be guided by the principle that a city had to serve its citizenry, guaranteeing their personal security and well-being while providing the most supportive framework possible for their growth and self-realization.

He broke off when the waiter brought Hartley Saft a brandy and refilled the coffee cups, and when the man was out of range he said, “Without being obvious about it, you might want to glance over at Maury Winters’s table.”

“He’s all by himself,” Boasberg said. “What did she do, walk out on him?”

“If she did, it didn’t break his heart. She left him the cheesecake, and I have to say he looks happy with it.”