My friend with the dirty face finished the soup and reached for a paper napkin. He wiped his lips. I watched him: he didn’t smudge a spot of the grime around his mouth. He just blotted the drops of soup up. He was dainty in his own special way.

“Nothing else you want to buy? I’m here, I’ve got time right now. Anything else on your mind, we might as well look into it.”

He balled up the paper napkin and dropped it into the soup plate. It got wet. He’d eaten all the mushrooms and left the soup.

“The Golden Gate Bridge,” he said all of a sudden.

I dropped the cigarette. “What?”

“The Golden Gate Bridge. The one in San Francisco. I’ll buy that. I’ll buy it for …” he lifted his eyes to the fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and thought for a couple of seconds “… say a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Cash on the barrel.”

“Why the Golden Gate Bridge?” I asked him like an idiot.

“That’s the one I want. You asked me what else I want to buy—well, that’s what else. The Golden Gate Bridge.”

“What’s the matter with the George Washington Bridge? It’s right here in New York, it’s across the Hudson River. It’s a newer bridge. Why buy something all the way out on the coast?”

He grinned at me as if he admired my cleverness. “Oh, no,” he said, twitching his left shoulder hard. Up, down, up, down. “I know what I want. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A hundred and a quarter. Take it or leave it.”

“The George Washington Bridge,” I argued, talking my head off just so I’d have a chance to think, “has a nice toll set-up, fifty cents a throw, and lots of traffic, plenty of traffic. I don’t know what the tolls are on the Golden Gate, but I’m damn sure you don’t have anywhere near the kind of traffic that New York can draw. And then there’s maintenance. The Golden Gate’s one of the longest bridges in the world, you’ll go broke trying to keep it in shape. Dollar for dollar, location for location, I’d say the George Washington’s a better deal for a man who’s buying a bridge.”