"How long?"
"I'll be able to sneak out an hour after he gets back."
"He'll be back any minute.... Unless he's going to hop into New Year. Bunion and Over."
"Metatarsal," she said and hung up.
Lennox shook his head in disgust with himself. Then he brightened and went upstairs. There was a good broad arm-rest for standees in the back of the house. He leaned against it and tried to focus on the stage. Some kind of mood piece was in progress, filled with long, poetic pauses. Lennox napped comfortably until the applause at the end of the act woke him up.
He was thirsty. He had two stingers in the saloon alongside the theater, one with green mint and one with white to determine whether his palate had lost its famed sensitivity.
"I am happy to announce," he announced to the bartender, "that my palate has lost none of its famed sensitivity." He pointed to the glasses. "That is Spearmint '34. A very good year. That is Wintergreen '26. Its pert bouquet is unmistakable to a palate of famed sensitivity."
Lennox walked east to The Brompton House. New Year's horns were beginning to blare in the streets with the sound that boys make when they blow through blades of grass pressed between their thumbs. Lennox paced massively. He had reached the Gibraltar stage of drunkenness, a mixture of Johnsonian gravity and pathological lying.
In the bar of The Brompton House, jammed by the overflow of respectables from the grill room, he ordered a pitcher of French 75s and two glasses. Olga was nowhere in sight, but Lennox knew better than to trust to his sight. He tapped a handsome bald gentleman with leaden complexion and kindly features who was seated alongside him.
"Would you be good enough to lend me your stool, sir? Just for a moment."