Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

condensation from people’s damp clothes and damp selves. “Look,” she said, “there’s not much in the way of decent bars on this side of the avenue till you get right down to Lincoln Center. But I know a good one almost straight across the Park. We can cut through there, if you don’t mind getting rained on a little.”
    “Sure, why not?” Matiyas looked around him equably. “After being cooped up all day, a little fresh air is good. Even when it’s a little wet as well.”
    They paused at the corner of 66th and Central Park West, waiting for the light to change. Across the street from them, to the left, the ever-present white holiday lights of Tavern on the Green were already turned on, outlining the building, and twined through and around the trees, an unsubtle glow against the sullen overcast and the uplifted limbs of the surrounding trees. “You ever eat in there?” Caroline said as the light changed and they crossed the street.
    Mike nodded as they bore rightward toward the underpass that avoided the inflowing traffic onto the transverse road. “Once,” he said. “Never again. The place is full of posers. Especially the ones who insist on sitting out there.” As they came up out of the underpass, he jerked his head leftward in the direction of the restaurant’s glass-walled conservatory wing, blazing with light across the undercut transverse road and through all the intervening trees. “So everyone can see them, and know how much money they’ve got to blow on mediocre food…”
    Caroline grinned as they hung a left onto the first of the paths inside the Park’s low outer wall, heading eastward. To her, even the least-native New Yorkers seemed to turn into restaurant critics within days of their arrival: Matiyas was no different. “I guess you have a better class of posers where you come from?”
    It was as nosy as she planned to get, but even so, he gave her a look of slight amusement, almost as if he’d known what she was thinking before. “Well, class is always something of an issue,” he said, “in the older parts of the world, no matter how we pretend otherwise. You see those who flaunt old titles and have nothing else to recommend them: and others who work hard and wear the titles only as ornaments, for public functions—like tiaras. The princess who runs MTV Europe… the prince who brews the best beer in Bavaria…”
    “You know those people?”
    Matiyas shrugged. “You run into them at parties. Or their kids, at school.”
    “Very high-end,” Caroline said, as they came around the rightward curve of the path and headed toward the center of the Park. “So what’s a guy who rubs shoulders with royalty doing laboring in the concrete canyons?”
    He flashed a grin at her. “Well, you can rub shoulders all you like, but rubbing money off, that’s another story! I did some web development work in Munich and Frankfurt… but the pay wasn’t great, the advancement was slow, I was bored. Then—” He grinned a little more broadly. “Well, they call Frankfurt ‘Manhattan-am-Rhein’, you know: the skyscrapers, the busy lifestyle. I thought, why not try the real Manhattan? So here I am. It took a while to get the work visa, but it was worth it. The pay’s better, and besides, it’s useful being foreign here: the company wants people with ‘the international outlook.’ Whatever that is.”
    “Maybe just that they actually believe in other countries…” Caroline said, amused. “At least insofar as they can make money off them…”
    He laughed again, a soft appreciative sound, and once again Caroline got goosebumps. Or maybe it’s just the weather, she thought: the coat she’d brought this morning was soaking up the rain a bit, chilling her down.
    Fortunately the rain was already letting up a little as they passed south of the Sheep Meadow and into the center of the Park. Despite the dull gray weather, the place was pretty enough, here at the tail end of the glory of the