Karp waited, but Crane said nothing more.

"And you're not going to share it with me?"

"Not until you're in for real," said Crane.

The waiter appeared and asked them if they wanted dessert or coffee. They declined. A brief silence descended. Then Karp said, "Well, in that case, thanks for the nice lunch."

"I don't believe this!" Lerner blurted out after a moment.

The other two men turned to him, startled. Lerner had said almost nothing during the meal.

Now he stared at Karp, tight-jawed. "What is it, Butch? You worried about your pension already? Got a family? Lost the edge? No, you can't believe that. You're not dumb. You know you're living on borrowed time…"

"What're you talking about, Joe?" asked Karp irritably.

"You know what I'm talking about. You think I don't know what goes on up there? You've been lucky. But you're dead-ended. Bloom has you in a box, and he's squeezing. How long can you last? Another year or two? Three? Sooner or later he'll get you out. You'll be lucky if he doesn't scam you into something that'll get you disbarred."

"Joe, I don't need a lecture about Bloom."

"No? Then why the hell don't you jump at this? You're actually telling me you're gonna keep working for fucking Sandy Bloom instead of coming in with Bert Crane and closing the homicide of the century?"

"It's more complicated than that," said Karp lamely. But Lerner had virtually repeated one side of his own internal arguments. The complication was, of course, The Wife. And The Kid. And Moving. Karp had already wrecked one previous marriage because, among other things, he had moved his first wife away from Southern California, where she had been comfortable and happy and working at something she enjoyed, to New York (because he'd wanted to work for the DA there), where she hadn't much of anything but Karp himself; which proved, in the event, insufficient.