“Tasty,” Alex said, “right on time, as usual.” He smiled back at her, his eyes warm. Normally she wouldn’t have liked the nickname, Tasty-sort-of-rhymes-with-Lacie, but he had a way of saying it that sounded warm instead of dirty. “Hot date?”

“Kickboxing class. Who should be drawn and quartered?”

“That Cayne guy.”

“Who?”

“James Cayne. He was the CEO of Bear Stearns,” Ian said. “It’s a securities firm, the one the Fed just bailed out. They’ve had a lot of trouble lately. The whole subprime mortgage collapse? Started with their hedge funds.”

“Apparently,” Alex said, “while the company was tanking, he was playing in a bridge tournament. Guy’s company is responsible for half of America losing their houses, he’s playing cards.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Ian gave that sharp-edged grin. “There were market forces in play.”

“Hi, Jenn,” Mitch said.

“He should be killed,” Alex said again, pouring a martini from a stainless steel shaker and setting it in front of her. He stabbed three olives with a toothpick shaped like a sword and balanced it across the top. “Line him and that Enron guy, Ken Lay, and the rest of them up against a wall and shoot them.”

“Ken Lay is already dead. Heart attack.”

“OK, well, everybody else from Enron.”

Jenn said, “Bad day?” then laughed when all three of them nodded. “OK. Next round is on me.”

Her mother found it strange, the way her closest friends were guys. She was always asking unsubtle questions about which one Jenn was dating. Hoping it would be Ian, whom she’d never met but had come to believe must be a nice boy, a judgment that had a lot to do with the fact that he worked as a trader.

Jenn had always gotten along fine with women. But her friends, especially as she’d gotten older, they tended to be guys.