There was no sign of either of the two men who had been sitting at the bar. Both the golden one and the dark man seemed to have disappeared the instant the grenade went off. They were gone by the time I had pulled myself up off the floor. The bartender had been cut in half by the blast. His two customers had vanished.

As the firemen extinguished the smoldering blaze, the police laid out four dead bodies on the sidewalk and covered them with blankets. The medics were treating the wounded. They lifted the model, still unconscious, onto a stretcher. More ambulances arrived, and a crowd gathered around the scene, buzzing.

“Goddamned I.R.A.,” grumbled one of the cops.

“Cheez, they’re tossin’ bombs around here, too, now?”

“Coulda been the Puerto Ricans,” another cop suggested, his voice weary, exasperated.

“Or the Serbo-Croatians. They set that bomb off in the Statue of Liberty, remember?”

They questioned me for several minutes, then turned me over to the medics for a quick checkup at the back of one of the ambulances.

“You’re lucky, mister,” said the white-jacketed medic. “You didn’t even get your hair mussed.”

Lucky. I felt numb, as if my whole body had been immersed in a thick enveloping fog. I could see and move and breathe and think. But I could not feel. I wanted to be angry, or grief-stricken, or even frightened. But I was as calm as a stupid cow, staring at the world with placid eyes. I thought about the young woman who was being taken off to a hospital. What made me try to save her? Who was responsible for the bombing? Were they trying to kill her? Or one of the men at the bar?