Chapter One


It was almost impossible to get to Lexington and Sixty-third Street.  The wind was howling, and the snow drifts had devoured all but the largest cars.  The buses had given up somewhere around Twenty-third Street, where they sat huddled like frozen dinosaurs, as one left the flock only very rarely to venture uptown, lumbering down the paths the snowplows left, to pick up a few brave travelers who would rush from doorways frantically waving their arms, sliding wildly to the curb, hurling themselves over the packed snowbanks, to mount the buses with damp eyes and red faces, and in Bernie's case, icicles on his beard.

It had been absolutely impossible to get a taxi.  He had given up after fifteen minutes of waiting and started walking south from Seventy-ninth Street.  He often walked to work.  It was only eighteen blocks from door to door.  But today as he walked from Madison to Park and then turned right on Lexington Avenue, he realized that the biting wind was brutal, and he had only gone four more blocks when he gave up.  A friendly doorman allowed him to wait in the lobby, as only a few determined souls waited for a bus that had taken hours to come north on Madison Avenue, turned around, and was now heading south on Lexington to carry them to work.  The other, more sensible souls had given up when they caught their first glimpse of the blizzard that morning, and had decided not to go to work at all.  Bernie was sure the store would be half empty.  But he wasn't the type to sit at home twiddling his thumbs or watching the soaps.

And it wasn't that he went to work because he was so c...