Aaron Horwitz

A bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, twenty-four years old, whose job was to entertain clients and make them feel like the most important people in the world. He would have done it for nothing.

Once he had what anybody would call a supremely bad day. A friend asked him to rate it out of ten, one being the worst. He said eight.

He was not only a showman - though he did the moonwalk along the tops of bars, and once at a museum drew his own masterpiece on a mist-covered window beside a Rembrandt. He took hold of people and would not let go until they were happy. He met a man in a toy shop and moments later the two of them were having a hula hoop contest. He told a concierge to stop crying over a man who had left her, and rang her at half past two in the morning to make sure she had. He talked hostesses at four-star restaurants into finding tables for eight, and their telephone numbers out of them as well, and once persuaded a masseur working the street to let him do the massaging instead.

His father told him he could talk to a brick wall. He allowed that this was true, but said he preferred talking to a mirror - and then did, and fell over laughing.

Killed at the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001. The first aircraft struck the north tower at 8:46 and the second the south tower at 9:03; the south tower came down at 9:59 and the north at 10:28. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were killed there.