Three months out of law school, Peter Schick sat in the outer office of the Criminal Courts Bureau, of the New York District Attorney's Office, watching the action and waiting to be called into his third job interview of the day. He crossed his legs and glanced at his watch and then at the round clock on the wall. His watch was running but the clock had stopped. At the two Wall Street firms where he had interviewed that morning, the clocks worked, the secretaries were cool and competent, and the furniture was polished wood and real leather, not painted metal and cracked vinyl. The office staff here looked toughened and tired, and drawn from the less prestigious minorities of the city.

He discovered he had been picking nervously at a crack in the covering of the tan couch and stopped. There were no magazines to read. He went back to staring at the woman sitting on the edge of a desk across a narrow aisle. She was making call after call on the desk phone. She kept the receiver crooked against her shoulder and made an occasional note on a yellow pad, afterward shoving the pencil into the thick mass of lustrous black hair that, from Schick's location, concealed her face from view. She was wearing a black skirt of some rustling material; it was slit and rode entrancingly up her thigh when she crossed her legs. The legs were marvelous, tapering without fragility, wrapped in shimmering mist-colored stockings. She wore a black kid glove on her left hand, like a gunfighter.

Schick adjusted his position slightly, so as to improve his view of inner thigh for the next leg cross. But something must have lit up the invisible radar that is the secret possession of the girls; she snapped her head around and gave him the stare.

He felt his jaw drop and a blush rising up his jaw. The woman was a classic cover-girl beauty-large black eyes over razor-sharp cheekbones, a wide lush mouth, the skin a delicate pink bisque. Schick took in that there was something wrong with one of her eyes, a crazy light in it, or perhaps it was slightly, but fetchingly, crossed. He felt the blush rising to his cheeks and pointedly looked away from her at the unmoving clock.