Everything was happening so fast it took his breath away. The miracle had increased in brightness and now he was sitting in a taxi on his way to Cafe Seventy in the East Sixties.
His phone call had been switched to her office very quickly and her voice had been decisive and a little sharp on the wire. But the instant he'd told her who he was no woman's voice could have taken on more graciousness and charm.
Informal, too. Delightfully ... no, intimate wasn't too presumptuous a word. There had been an unmistakable undercurrent of intimacy in her voice, as if she'd known him for a long time and they shared a secret ... a very precious kind of secret she preferred not to talk about within the four walls of a cold, briskly efficient magazine office.
It had meant, of course, that she was suggesting that they have lunch together, but before he could think of just the right words she herself had done the inviting. She had picked the cafe and the time—"About two ... I'm afraid it has to be a little late...."—and now, in about five more minutes, he would be there.
It was a very warm day and the air felt almost solid enough to cut with a knife. But the high humidity didn't bother him, because a breeze fragrant with springtime scents was blowing through the cab, even though the driver and no one on the streets—no one anywhere except himself—seemed to be aware of it.
When the cab drew into the curb in front of the cafe he added a tip to the fare that dispelled most of the driver's gloom. He got out, walked into the cafe as if he'd just decided while taking a stroll that the place looked all right, and so why should he stop to examine the three-dollar-minimum luncheon menu pasted to the window? He had an almost irrepressible impulse to tip the uniformed doorman too, just for the hell of it.
He saw and recognized her quickly enough, because she'd told him what kind of hat she'd be wearing and there was only one woman in the place that went with the kind of voice he'd heard on the phone.
It came as a distinct shock to him to discover that she wasn't alone. There was a man seated opposite her at the small table she'd chosen—or he had chosen for her—in a softly-lit recess on the left side of the cafe, about half-way to the back.
He disliked the man straight off, without precisely knowing why. He was about forty-five, with slightly graying hair cut rather short, a bland, almost mild-mannered way of smiling and nodding as he talked, and features which were distinctly on the handsome side. He was wearing a tropical worsted suit of expensive weave—the kind of suit you couldn't purchase readymade anywhere for less than a hundred dollars and you knew it was custom-tailored. Three hundred dollars would probably have been a more likely estimate of what the suit had set the man back. He wore a small red carnation in his buttonhole which the July heat had not yet succeeded in wilting.
Ralph became aware suddenly that she had raised her eyes and recognized him. But before he could respond with a nod and smile and draw closer to the table all of the blandness went out of her companion's face. His face hardened and an angry glint came into his eyes. He arose from the table, so angrily and abruptly that he overturned the chair he'd been sitting in.