He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.
He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before.
I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser." Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. “What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.
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