addition to the Sloan Guaranty Inemployees who regularly appear in the series, this novel includes a character developed for satiric effect. Abe Baranoff, aesthete and artistic entrepreneur, has arranged cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, and in an early chapter of the book he is seen greeting the arrival from the USSR of a troupe of trained otters. Baranoff is rendered ridiculous in other scenes in a broadly drawn caricature of the renowned producer Sol Hurok.