Running Dog

1

Lightborne, at sixty-six, took to using a walking stick on his frequent strolls down West Broadway and through the SoHo gallery district. This one spring evening the sole of his right shoe-he wore penny loafers-began flapping soon after he started out. This somewhat undermined the effect he'd sought to create with his walking stick.

He headed back, gingerly, walking on his right heel. Entering a cast-iron building, he rode to the fourth floor in a selfservice freight elevator, a drafty contrivance he feared and hated. The vast metal door to his loft bore the legend in red paint:

COSMIC EROTICS

THE LIGHTBORNE GALLERY

He walked through the gallery and stepped past a partition into the area of the loft he used as living quarters. The furniture was dark and heavy, embellished with scroll motifs. An end table leaned a little. The front legs of a desk rested on matchbooks for balance. From a drawer in this desk Lightborne took a small bottle of Elmer's Glue-All and tried to ref asten the sole of his right shoe.

About twenty people would be arriving at eight-thirty. They were the core of his clientele and he had some new things to show. Only one fresh face likely to appear. This would be Moll Robbins, a journalist planning a series of articles on sex as big business.

The others were collectors, a couple of people who represented collectors, and the inevitable self-conscious dabblers who were captivated by the novelty of it all. Lightborne didn't mind the latter group. They tended to regard him as an eccentric scholar, a font of erotic lore, and were always inviting him places and giving him things.

Finished with the shoe, he took a pair of grooming scissors and snipped at his sideburns. Then he commenced brushing his hair into a near-ducktail arrangement. Lightborne's hair was silvery gray tinged with a kind of yellowish discoloration, and he liked wearing it long. Finally he put on a string tie and belted corduroy jacket. Not that there was any reason to concern himself with appearance. These get-togethers at the gallery were always informal. The collectors preferred it that way. He served them Wink in paper cups.

Moll Robbins, as it happened, arrived before the others. She wore jeans and a bulky sweater, a tall lean woman who walked in a sort of lazy prowl. Hanging from a strap over her right shoulder was a large leather case.

Lightborne showed her around the gallery, which wasn't the usual clinical space of right angles and clever little ramps. It resembled instead an antique shop in serious decline. There were small tables filled with bronze and porcelain pieces, with stacks of drawings and prints, with books and woodcarvings, vases and cups. There were several pedestals to hold the more interesting pieces, and on the wall were a number of oil paintings as well as enlarged photographs of Hindu temple façades and the lucky phalluses of Pompeii. Along the walls were bins of drawings, more prints, more photographs, and several glass cases full of rings, bracelets, necklaces.

Moll Robbins roved a bit uncertainly through all of this, fingering the lid of a porcelain teapot (Chinese emperor with concubine, apparently), peering at a coin under glass (Greeks, male, dallying).

"Innocent, somehow, isn't it?"

"It doesn't move," Lightborne said.

"Doesn't move?"

"Movement, action, frames per second. This is the era we're in, for better or worse. It seems a little ineffectual, what's here. It just sits. It's all mass and body weight."

"Pure gravity."

"Sure, a thing isn't fully erotic unless it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this today for eroticism to be total."

"Something to that, I suppose."

When everyone had arrived, Lightborne closed the huge doors and began to circulate. Moll took off her sweater and draped it over the erect member of a plaster vicar, noting that Lightborne was spending most of his time at the side of a wellgroomed and neatly dressed man, early thirties, seemingly a business type, the kind of junior tycoon who delights in giving crisp directives to his subordinates.

She spoke with several people, finding them subtly evasive, not exactly reluctant to discuss their interest in erotica but unable to focus their attention on the subject. They seemed rushed somehow, distracted by some private vision, high-type horseplayers, secretly frenzied at the edges.

Lightborne introduced her to the man he'd been talking to. Glen Selvy. Then was led away by several other people.

"What got you interested, Mr. Selvy?"

"What gets anyone interested in sex?"

"We don't all collect," she said.

"Just a pastime. Line, grace, symmetry. Beauty of the human body. So on, so forth."

"Do you spend a lot of money, collecting?"

"Fair amount."

"You must know quite a bit about art."

"I took a course once."

"You took a course once."

"I learned enough to know that Lightborne's better stuff is kept under wraps."

"What can you tell me about Lightborne that he wouldn't want to tell me himself?"

Selvy smiled and walked away. Later, when most of the people had gone, Lightborne talked with Moll in his living quarters. He answered all her questions, explaining that he got started in the business in 1946 when he was down and out in Cairo and managed to come into possession of a ring depicting the Egyptian god of fertility, highly aroused. He sold it to an ex-Nazi for a pretty sum and eventually learned that it ended up on the finger of King Farouk. After that, one contact led to another and he traveled through Central America, Japan, the Mideast and Europe, a worldwide network, buying and selling and bartering.

"What about your friend Selvy? I'm curious. He doesn't look quite the type. What's his collection like?"

"My lips are sealed."

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Some people are here to look. Some to buy. Some to buy for others."

"Fronting."

"Sure."

"Buying on behalf of a person or group that doesn't want his, her or its identity known to the world at large."

"That's grammatically very clumsy but otherwise correct," Lightborne said.

"Do you know who Selvy buys for?"

"Actually I only suspect."

"Someone I may have heard of?"

"Selvy's been on the job three months or so. Fairly good at it. Has a basic knowledge."

"That's all you're saying."

"It's a business full of rumors, Miss Robbins. I get word about things sometimes. So-and-so's turned up a bronze statuette in some sealed-off church cellar on Crete. Hermaphrodite: Graeco-Roman. I hear things all the time. I get word. The air is full of vibrations. Sometimes there's an element of truth. Often it's just a breeze in the night."

Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say goodnight. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge dusty armchair.

"My man in Guatemala tells me to expect choice items this trip."

"About time," Selvy said.

"Dug up from tombs with his own two hands."

"He's found more tombs, has he?"

"The jungles are dense," Lightborne said mysteriously.

"My principal is certain your pre-Columbian stuff is fake. Do you want to hear what he has to say about the handicraft?"

"Tell him this trip."

"This trip it's different."

"Different," Lightborne said.

He poured three cups of coffee. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy's voice and manner. His reactions were just the tiniest bit mechanical. It was possible he was deeply bored by this.

"In the meantime," Lightborne said, "I can show you a lady with an octopus."

"Another time."

"It's a porcelain centerpiece."

"Seriously, anything stashed back here? If not, I'm off."

"You say seriously. Did I hear you correctly?"

"You heard."

"I was telling the young lady about rumors. The part rumors play in a business like this. Six months ago, for instance, I heard a rumor about an item that could prove to be of interest to any number of people, including your employer perhaps. The odd thing about this rumor is that I first heard it about thirty years ago, originally in Cairo and Alexandria, where my list of acquaintances was colorful and varied, and later the same year, if memory serves, after I went to Paris to live. The item in question was the print of a movie. To be more exact, the camera original."

Lightborne offered sugar, wordlessly.

"I was telling the young lady that movement, the simple capacity to change position, is an important erotic quality. Probably the single biggest difference between old and new styles of erotic art is the motion picture. The movie. The image that moves. This assumes you consider movies art."

"Oh, I do," Moll said.

"In the same league with painting, sculpture, so on."

"Absolutely."

"All right then," Lightborne said. "For several months I kept hearing rumors about this very curious film. People in the business. Collectors, dealers, agents. It's a world of rumormongers. What can you do? But then the noise died, The little hum, it faded away to nothing. I don't think anyone noticed. The rumor was implausible to begin with. Hardly anyone took it seriously. So, silence for thirty years. Not a word on the subject. Then, six months ago, the rumor is revived. I hear it from three people, none of them in contact with the other two. Precisely the same rumor. A film exists. Unedited footage. One copy. The camera original. Shot in Berlin, April, the year 1945."

Lightborne nodded to indicate a measure of absorption in his own commentary. He went to the refrigerator and got a box of Graham crackers. He offered them around. No takers. He sat back down.

"In the bunker," he said.

He took a cracker out of the box and dunked it in his coffee.

"Spell that out," Moll said.

"The bunker under the Reich Chancellery."

"And who appears in this footage?"

"Things get vague here. But apparently it's a sex thing. It's the filmed record of an orgy, I gather, that took place somewhere in that series of underground compartments."

Selvy gazed at the ceiling.

"I don't believe it myself," Lightborne said. "I'm the chief skeptic. It's just the curious nature of the thing. The recent rumor is point for point the same as the original, despite a thirty-year gap between the two. And the few people who believe the thing, at least as a possibility, are able to make some valid historical points. I happen to be a student of the period."

Robbins and Selvy watched the soggy bottom half of the cracker in Lightborne's hand detach itself and fall into the cup. Lightborne used a spoon to gather the brown ooze and eat it.

"In any case I thought it might be useful to trace the story as far as I could, maybe with luck even to its source. Eventually a contact in the business, someone I trust, put me in touch with an individual and we arranged a meeting. He didn't volunteer his name and I didn't ask. Man in his thirties. Slight accent, Nervous, very jumpy. He said he knew where the footage was. Said prints had never been made. Guaranteed it. Said the running time would qualify it as full length, more or less. Then he grew melancholy. I can see his face. A performance, he said, that would surely take its place among the strangest and most haunting ever given. He also said I wouldn't be disappointed in the identities of those taking part. All this and yet he wouldn't give a straight answer when I asked if he'd seen the footage himself or were we dealing in hearsay."

Lightborne stirred his coffee.

"The idea we agreed on was that I would act as agent for the sale. I have the contacts, I know the market, more or less. We further agreed that with sex exploitation reaching the level it has, certainly there'd be no problem finding powerful and wealthy groups who'd be utterly delighted at the chance to bid for distribution rights to something this novel. Think of it. The century's ultimate piece of decadence."

"And it moves," Moll said.

Lightborne sat back and crossed his legs, holding the cup and saucer to his belly.

"So," he said, "a small-time dealer in erotic knickknacks, some good quality, some not so good, and here I am with a chance to act as go-between in some monumental pornography caper. I begin to send out feelers, veiled hints, to this part of the country, that part, to this fellow in Dallas, that fellow in Stockholm. As things begin to happen, as the market heats up, my man suddenly disappears. I have no idea how to reach him. He always insisted he would contact me. So I call people, I make inquiries, I hang around our usual meeting place. Finally I hear from the same man who put us in touch at the outset. X is dead, he tells me. Not only dead-murdered. Not only murdered-done away with under strange, very odd circumstances."

"How odd?" Moll said.

"He was wearing women's clothes."

Selvy looked at Moll Robbins, at the same time motioning for Lightborne to pause.

"What's in that case you've got?"

"Nikon F2," she said.

"It stays inside, okay?"

"I don't know, you've got a fairly nice profile, Mr. Selvy. Might look good somewhere near the tail end of a story, just to break up lines of print."

"It stays or you go."

"And a Sony cassette recorder," she said.

"Take it out, please. I'd like to see it."

"Mr. Lightbome, this is your residence. You invited me to come here. You placed no restrictions."

Selvy picked the leather case off the floor, opened it, took out the tape recorder, turned it over, removed the battery case, opened it, took out the four small batteries and set them on the nearest table.

"Quite a routine," she said. "You must be handy around the house."

"No words, no pictures."

"It wasn't necessary, you know. I'm not about to tape your insipid voice if you don't want it taped."

Lightborne reacted to all this by taking his cup and saucer to the sink and washing them out. Returning, he pushed the box of crackers toward Moll. This time she took one, halving it neatly before taking a bite.

"After this depressing turns of events," Lightborne said, "the whole matter dried up and total silence prevailed. But I wanted to give you a little background, Glen, because just yesterday the smallest whisper reached my ear. If things get interesting again, I think your employer ought to be informed."

"Sure, absolutely."

"As for you, Miss Robbins, you'll have to forgive a garrulous old man."

"It's been interesting, really."

"Who do you work for?" Selvy said.

"_Running Dog_," she said.

He paused briefly.

"One-time organ of discontent."

"We were fairly radical, yes."

"Now safely established in the mainstream."

"I wouldn't say safely."

"Part of the ever-expanding middle."

"We say 'fuck' all the time."

"My point exactly."

"Was that your point exactly? I didn't realize that was your point exactly. I didn't know you had a point exactly."

Selvy got to his feet, saying goodnight to Lightborne and then bowing toward Moll Robbins, clicking his heels together as he did so. She followed as far as the gallery area in order to pluck her sweater from the rigid appendage where she'd left it earlier, returning then to thank Lightborne for his time. He watched her replace the batteries in the tape recorder.

"I was wondering," she said.

"Yes?"

"Is he always in that much of a hurry? Could be a plane he's got to catch. Or commuter train maybe."

"Glen's not the type to hang around and make small talk."

"Of course if I found out who he buys for, and if it's someone interesting and important, and if I use this information in one of the pieces I'm doing, it wouldn't do you any good, would it?"

"Wouldn't do me much harm either," Lightborne said. "The collector Glen represents hasn't shown much interest in the stuff I've been coming up with. According to Glen, he may be on the verge of dropping me completely."

They walked out into the gallery and Lightborne went around turning off lights. He looked at Moll from a distance of thirty-five feet or so.

"You mentioned trains and planes."

"Just wondering aloud," she said.

"If you were heading Glen's way, and this is only speculation, you'd probably choose to fly. Although if you didn't like flying, you'd be able to take a train."

"I don't mind short flights. Anything over an hour, I get a little restless."

"I think you'd be all right."

"Trains are fun. I like trains."

"Three and a half hours on a train can be a little tiring."

"You could be right."

"Although Penn Station. If the old structure still stood. That would make it worthwhile. Just walking in the place. A gorgeous piece of architecture."

"I was also wondering," she said.

"What else?"

"What would I need in the way of clothes?"

"It might be slightly warmer."

"Slightly warmer, you say."

The last light went out and Moll stood in shadow in the open doorway, unable to see Lightborne at all.

"I'm only speculating, understand."

"You're not a meteorologist," she said.

"I only know what God wants me to know."

When she was gone, Lightborne locked the door and went back into the living area, where he took off his jacket, his string tie and his shirt. He went to the wash basin, took his razor out of the cabinet and then removed the top on an aerosol can of Gillette Foamy, noting a bit of rust on the inner rim. He had an appointment first thing in the morning and thought he'd save time by shaving now.

Moll Robbins hailed a cab on Houston Street and twentyfive minutes later was on the phone in her West Seventies apartment, talking to Grace Delaney, her managing editor.

"Do we still have a Washington office?"

"It's called Jerry Burke."

"What's the number?"

She put down the phone and dialed again.

"Jerry Burke?"

"Who's this?"

"I understand you have terrific access to the corridors of power."

"What time is it?"

"This is Moll Robbins in New York, Jerry. We haven't met, I don't think, but maybe you can help me."

"You do movie reviews."

"From time to time, yes, but this is a different sort of thing completely. I'd like you to help me track someone down."

"You were full of shit about the new _King Kong_."

"I don't doubt it, Jerry, but listen I'm looking for a man named Glen Selvy, white, early thirties, six feet one, possibly in government down there. There must be some kind of giant directory of government drones that this man's name is listed in. If you could look into it or ask around or whatever, I'd be forever in your debt, within reason."

"Six foot one?"

"I thought it might be important."

"What do I need his height for?"

"Detective work," she said. "All the particulars."

Glen Selvy drove from the airport to a four-story apartment building in a predominantly black area near the Navy Yard. He'd been living here for several months but the place looked recently occupied. It was severely underfurnished. A number' of unpacked cartons were arrayed near the bed. There was a floor lamp with the cord still tied in a neat bundle at its base.

This quality of transience appealed to Selvy. It had the advantage of reducing one's accountability, somehow. If you were always ten minutes from departure, you couldn't be expected to answer to the same moderating precepts other people followed.

He took off his suit coat, revealing a small belt holster that contained a lightweight Colt Cobra,.38 caliber. The Smith amp; Wesson.41 magnum, with six-inch barrel and custom grips, he kept wedged in a carton near the bed.

Late the next day Moll got a call from Jerry Burke.

"I've been through a number of registers. No results at all. Then I remembered the Plum Book. _Policy and Supporting Positions_. Many, many government jobs. Descriptions. Names of incumbents."

"Excellent," she said.

"Your man isn't listed there."

"Damn."

"But I came across an appendix in a Senate bulletin and there's something called Congressional Quota Transferrals and it's chock full of names and next to each name there's an alphabetic code that refers you to page something-something. Anyway on this one little list I found a Howard Glen Selvy. According to his code letters he's on the staff of Senator Lloyd Percival."

"Jerry, that's terrific."

"He's a kind of second-level administrative aide."

"Isn't Percival in the news these days?"

"It's been going on for a while, really, but in closed committee sessions. He's investigating something called PAC/ ORD. It's ostensibly a coordinating arm of the whole U.S. intelligence apparatus, strictly an above-board clerical and budgetary operation. Whatever Percival's digging for, it hasn't been leaked."

"Secret hearings."

"Every day," he said.

"What do the letters stand for?"

"What letters?"

"PAC/ORD," she said.

"Not many people in Washington could answer a question like that."

"Not many people in the whole world, I bet."

"Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements."

"Has to be evil, with a name like that."

"Or why else would Percival be involved?"

"He's a righteous type, is he?"

"Never mind that," Burke said. "What I'd like to know is why you're interested in this guy Selvy."

"It's just he's so cute," she said.

2

Glen Selvy in a three-piece suit walked slowly around the quarter-mile cinder track. There were birds everywhere, wheeling overhead, hopping mechanically in the grass.

Fifty yards away a black limousine turned into the quiet street that skirted the athletic field. Selvy headed over there, watching the back door swing open, his mind suddenly wandering to a nondescript room, a bed with a naked woman straddling a pillow, no one he knew, and then sex, her body and his, relentless crude obliterating sex, bang bang bang bang.

Lomax had a penchant for rented limousines. This was fine with Selvy, whose own car was a cramped Toyota. It was safe to assume the chauffeur didn't come with the car; he'd be someone Lomax knew. Maybe the thinking was that inconspicuousness no longer amounted to much. Or that in a town like Washington a limousine was not readily noticeable. Maybe it was Lomax himself. A personal style. A departure from established forms.

Lomax was pudgy, his hair mod-cut, graying a bit at the temples. He liked to pat and smooth and lightly stroke his hair, although it was never mussed. He was dressed for golf today, Selvy noticed. A set of clubs leaned against the far door.

"I learned something yesterday," Selvy said. "Lightborne knew Christoph Ludecke. Before Ludecke was killed, he and Lightborne had several meetings."

"In what connection?"

"Ludecke claimed to have access to some movie that apparently the whole smut-industry power structure would love to get the rights to. So Lightborne was all set to act as agent for the sale."

"Help from an unexpected quarter," Lomax said.

"Sure, Lightborne. Who figured Lightborne would link up to any of this? It explains the whole thing."

"Does it?"

"The Senator's connection to Christoph Ludecke. Now we know. One way or another he knew Ludecke had this footage. One way or another his phone number, or one of his phone numbers, his least traceable phone number, which we nevertheless traced, ended up in Ludecke's little book. That's the absolute central fact, the core of his involvement. Percival wanted the movie for his collection."

"Does he do movies?"

"This would be the first."

"What's so special about it?" Lomax said.

"It's a genuine Nazi sex revel."

"Wonderful."

"Supposedly shot in the bunker where Hitler spent his last days."

"Grand," Lomax said. "Simply grand."

Off the road a creek meandered east into the distance. In a park a group of young Orientals practiced the stylized movements of _t'ai chi_, a set of exercises that seemed to some degree martial in nature. The tempo was unchanging and fluid, and although there were eight of them involved it was hard to detect an individual dissonance in their routine. Almost in slow motion each man thrust one arm out while moving the other back, this second arm bent at the elbow, both hands extended, fingers together, as though the arms were hinged weapons and the hands not terminal attachments but rather the pointed ends of these weapons. Moves and countermoves. Front leg bending, rear leg stretching. Active, passive. Thrust and drag. A breeze came up, the lighter branches on the trees rising slightly as their leaves tossed in the agitated air. Eight bodies slowly moving in a revolving lotus kick. The creek reappeared at the end of a stretch of elms, swifter here, running in the sun.

"We've got more than enough leverage to use against the Senator."

"I don't make policy," Lomax said.

"We've got the smut collection to use against him. His interest in this movie is just an added twist of the knife."

"I execute policy, I don't make it. I do fact-gathering."

"We know he's got pieces that once belonged to Goering."

"People ask me questions. I frame a reply in terms of giving an answer."

"Among other notables," Selvy said.

"When the time comes, it comes. If he presses these inquiries, we'll tell him what we know and how we'll use it. His constituency will go bananas. Picture the media. Over a million dollars' worth of sexually explicit art."

"No way he can move against us."

"But I don't make policy," Lomax said. "I just gather information."

"Who makes policy? Tell the policy maker. We have whatever we need on Percival. Meanwhile I keep moving paper in his office."

"Double cover," Lomax said.

In the current parlance, Selvy was a reader. He was reading Senator Percival. At the same time he and Percival had a clandestine alliance. No one else in the Senator's office was aware that Selvy had been hired not to help direct the paper flow but to do Percival's art buying.

"But you shouldn't call it smut," Lomax was saying.

"Did I call it smut?"

"You said earlier, his smut collection."

"You've seen the photos, I take it."

"Interesting photos," Lomax said. "You're getting better at it."

"Less rush this time."

"There's nothing shameful about the human body, you know. Some pleasant surprises in that collection. Some very nice things. I'd say the man has taste. Don't call it smut. You called it smut."

Three Irish setters ran in a field near Reservoir Road, scrambling over each other when one of them changed direction abruptly. A group of schoolgirls played field hockey, wearing elaborate uniforms, their laughter and shrieks seeming to reach the limousine across a particularly clear segment of space, an area empty of distorting matter, so that the listener received a truer human voice, the vivid timbre of animated play.

"We found the woman," Lomax said.

"Where is she?"

"Traveling."

"Whereabouts?"

"The old country."

It was cherry blossom time.

Moll found Washington spiritually oppressive. Government buildings did that to her. Great weight of history or something. Guided tours. Schoolbooks. The last Sunday of summer vacation. I don't feel well, mom.

She wore thong sandals, a loose cotton dress and a hip sash-an outfit she used whenever she felt a deceptive appearance was called for. A date with a man she suspected she might dislike, for instance. She believed herself to be attractive, although not quite this way. Clothes, used in this manner, were a method of safeguarding her true self, pending developments.

Her auburn hair, normally curled and friz;ed and shriveled up, had an even more electrified look today. Deep-fried hair. Probably caused by humidity, the condition was extreme enough to be taken as a style.

Along a corridor in the Senate wing she moved in her somewhat wary manner behind a group of reporters who were trying to keep up with Lloyd Percival. The Senator, still wearing orange makeup from an earlier TV appearance, answered only certain questions, and those curtly, talking out of the side of his mouth. He was sixty, a large man, beginning to go fleshy, with something of a burdened look about him, small tired eyes blinking above those folds of loose skin.

He wheeled right, strode past an enormous mahogany clock topped by a bellicose eagle, made another right toward a flight of stairs, and as though by hidden signal the reporters stopped pursuing and dispersed, leaving Moll to follow alone, right into an elevator reserved for senators and staff, out into another corridor, around a corner, keeping about seven feet behind him, just so he'd know she was there.

"Out with it."

"Moll Robbins."

"Print or broadcast."

"_Running Dog_ magazine."

"_Running Dog_," he said.

"Yes."

"You people still in business?"

"Barely."

"Capitalist lackeys and running dogs."

"Someone remembers," she said.

He pushed open a large door, looked inside, looked back at Moll, cocked his head, paused and shrugged, saying: "What the hell, come on in."

It was an enormous ornate men's room. No one else in sight. Spotless tile, gleaming fixtures. Faint aroma of balsam fir and lime. Percival stooped over a wash basin.

"I have to get this makeup off."

"I saw it," she said.

"What, the show?"

She waited for him to raise up a bit so he could hear above the gushing water.

"That man seemed confused."

"Who, the moderator?"

She waited for his head to emerge again.

"Yes."

"He's always confused. The fella's all image. He can't talk about something like PAC/ORD. He's a bunch of little electronic dots, that's all he is. The fella's so folksy he ought to do his news show in a living room set, wearing slippers and smoking a pipe, in front of a crackling fire."

Moll took a towel from a shelf and put it in his outstretched hand.

"They ought to hire a kindly old lady to bring him disaster bulletins on a tray with his raisin cookies and hot chocolate."

"See, we thought at _Running Dog_ we'd do something different."

"How different, I'd like to know."

As they spoke Moll had a distant sense of Memorable Event Taking Place, and could hear herself describing it to friends-"_So we're in this U.S. Senate men's room and he's got his head down inside a Florentine marble wash basin and i'm checking out the urinals to see if they have state emblems on them, like Delaware pisses here, and this one's Kansas_"- A toilet flushed down at the end of a long row of stalls.

The stall door opened and an elderly black man came out, fastening his trousers. Moll watched him approach.

"How are you today, Senator?"

"About as well as can be expected, Tyrell, under the circumstances."

"I know the feeling," Tyrell said.

He took a brush out of his white jacket and moved it through the air behind Percival's shoulders and midback, eyeing Moll for the first time, at least openly. It was a look, combined with a haughty shrug, that said, _I don't know what you're doing here but this is the wrong place to be doing it_.

In the corridor the Senator walked at a more reasonable pace.

"We'd like to take a relaxed approach," she said.

"My so-called human side."

"It's fairly common knowledge you spend much of your free time at your Georgetown house. That might be the place to talk."

"I have aides who screen people like you. Why weren't you screened?"

"Will you do it, Senator?"

"_Running Dog_-Jesus, I don't know."

"Our problems are strictly financial. We don't get many complaints about content or format."

"You run nudes?"

"Occasionally."

"Male and female?"

"Female."

"Pubic hair?"

"Airbrush."

They seemed to be coming to a door that led to the street.

"Nice to know the old values aren't dead," he said.

They stood blinking in the sunlight.

"I don't want to talk about the closed-door hearings."

"Truthfully, I'm not the least interested. I want to discuss your other activities, Senator. Your reading habits, your family, your thoughts on contemporary life. Your hobbies, your pastimes, your diversions."

She took a cab to the airport, and about a minute before the plane taxied out to the tarmac to be cleared for takeoff, Glen Selvy walked up the aisle toward her seat, spotting her and nodding. About fifteen minutes into the flight he returned, told her there was an empty row of seats toward the rear of the plane and asked her to join him.

She gave him her limpest category of response, a visual autopsy, but eventually followed.

"Travel to Washington often?"

"Film gala at the Kennedy Center. I do some reviewing. In New York to see Lightborne?"

"I may get around to seeing Lightborne, yes."

"Nice old turkey," she said.

She dozed the last ten minutes of the flight. When the plane touched down she was startled, coming awake abruptly, her hand reaching out to grasp Selvy's on the arm rest. He looked at her without expression, making her feel he'd been observing her precisely that way all the while she was asleep, and she found she liked that.

They shared a cab and sat in stalled traffic for a long time, finally reaching midtown just as daylight was fading. Moll suggested they find a jazz club she used to go to years earlier, somewhere in the stunned landscape of East Third Street. It turned out to be long gone but they found a dive around the corner and went in for a drink.

Selvy took off his tie and jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He began drinking shots of Jim Beam. First he sipped a fraction of an ounce off the top, downing the rest athletically in one swallow. The grimace and flush of pleasure hardearned. Moll started out with scotch and water. Feeling guilty about the water, she switched to rocks.

They talked a while about various things they'd drunk in different places they'd visited around the world. A man sitting nearby, with a bandage around his head, said he was too drunk to go home by himself. This meant they would have to take him home. It was the code of Frankie's Tropical Bar, he said. The man was Dominican. He said he didn't care whether they took him to his home or their home, as long as they took him home. He said he knew who killed Trujillo.

"I believe in codes," Selvy said.

They went out to find a cab. The man with the bandage around his head walked right into a fat woman. She hit him in the mouth. He looked around for something, a weapon. He saw a bicycle and picked it up. In the dark he couldn't tell the bicycle was chained to a fence. He started toward the woman, intending to ram her with the bicycle or to throw it at her. He was jerked back toward the fence and fell on top of the bike, catching his hand in the spokes.

Moll took Selvy by the arm and led him along a line of cars waiting for the light to change. At the end of the line they found a taxi and got in. They headed uptown and then west. Selvy dropped her in front of her building and then went on-somewhere.

Early the next morning he turned up at her door. He strode in, a noncommittal look on his face, and scanned the premises.

"Welcome to Falconhurst," she said.

Brown walls. Espresso machine. Silverplated telephone. Acrylic stepladder. Black banquette. Spherical TV. White plastic saxophone.

"The walls are brown."

"I considered mulatto."

"Chocolate-brown."

"But finally decided what the hell."

"The previous tenant was gay, wasn't he?"

"They're his walls," she said.

"You ought to put some plants on the stepladder."

"I kill plants."

"That type, are you?"

"They die in my embrace."

She was wearing a floor-length rugby sleepshirt. On her feet were tennis sneakers, laces undone. The shirt accentuated her height in ways she thought interesting. She watched Selvy open the refrigerator and take out a bottle of Coke, which he drained in two quick gulps. He hadn't shaved and looked a little menacing. He stood with his back to the refrigerator, arms folded, watching her.

It occurred to Moll he didn't look much like the man she'd first seen at Cosmic Erotics, the junior exec with the crisp manner. The night of drinking had given him a strange pale aura, a quality of relentlessness. It was almost a form of competence, this ability to suggest a dark force in one's own makeup. She'd sensed it while they were drinking at Frankie's Tropical Bar but the aftereffect was even more telling, this spareness about him, a hard-edged overriding disposition, the kind of single-mindedness she didn't confront in the course of an average day.

Howard Glen Selvy. Second-level administrative aide. Assistant to the assistant.

The small bedroom looked out on a vacant lot that might have been a Zen garden of rubbish. As she knelt at the edge of the bed, Selvy, behind her, put his hands under the long garment she wore and moved them along her calves, lifting the shirt as he did so. Moll bent back to raise her knees and he slipped the garment up over them and his hands moved to her thighs and hips as the phone rang, and to her belly then, and breasts, his forearms tight against her ribs, lifting her a little. She crossed her arms to pull the shirt over her head, the phone ringing, and then sat in the middle of the bed to watch him undress, which he did with a curious efficiency, as though it were a drill that might one day save his life.

There was an element of resolve and fixed purpose to their lovemaking. He was lean and agile. She found herself scratching his shoulders, working against his body with uncharacteristic intensity. He began to sweat lightly, to take deeper breaths, and his stubble scraped her face and neck. She took her left hand away from his lower back and stretched the arm way back and began tapping on the brass post at the head of the bed, hitting it with her knuckles in time to the rhythm of Selvy's breathing, and then her own, as the sounds they made began to blend.

They were tied up in a ball. They were compact and working hard. Who is this son of a bitch, she thought.

She sat naked in the dining area, her legs extended along the length of an antique church bench, or at least a section of one. Selvy stood leaning against a bookcase, wearing long johns and drinking another Coke. She hadn't noticed the long johns when he was undressing; obviously he'd removed them in one motion with the trousers that concealed them. She thought he looked great like that, leaning as he was, head tilted to drink, in that archaic underwear, an English lancer on the eve, of Balaclava. She took another bite of yogurt, glancing at the telephone as it began ringing once more.

"Is that the office?"

"Yes," she said.

"What do you want to do?"

"Play tennis."

"Great."

"Except it's impossible without waiting for hours or joining a private club or suddenly coming into great wealth and building your own rooftop court."

"Ridiculous."

"You know where we can play?"

"Last night in the cab after I dropped you off we went by some courts in this remote little area in Central Park, a hundred feet off the road but in a place where you can't stop the car. We'll walk. It's easy from here. No problem."

"You're crazy."

"Do you have an extra racket?"

"Nobody plays tennis in Central Park just by walking out the door and making a left turn."

"Come on, get dressed."

She spooned a final bite of yogurt out of the carton she held between her thighs and then went into the bedroom to get some clothes on, hearing Selvy dial a number on the phone. When she was dressed she found him waiting by the bedroom door. He went inside to dress and she called her boss, Grace Delaney, at the office.

"I couldn't answer when you called."

"Obviously."

"Percival's willing, I think. I also think he'll talk to me at his place in Georgetown, where the collection's almost got to be."

"You don't really believe he'll let you anywhere near it."

"I believe he will, Grace."

"Put your dreams away," she sang, "for another day."

"Well, he _will_, I talked to him, we sort of struck up a tiny little rapport."

"Why are you whispering?"

"We went to the men's room together."

"Spare me the details."

"See you later maybe."

"Who's there that you're whispering?"

"I'm taking care of a sick friend."

"What's he got, the clap?"

"Always a joy to talk to you, Grace."

Rackets in hand they walked through the park in a northeasterly direction. Selvy pointed out a clearing in some trees beyond a children's play area. They could make out two courts, both empty.

"Ever get bombed on sake?"

"Sure," he said.

"Once, on one of those high-speed trains to Kyoto, I think it was, I nearly did myself in."

"Dutch gin's good for doing yourself in."

"Where?"

"I was in Zandvoort for the Grand Prix."

"Grand Prix of volleyball, I suppose."

"What do you mean?"

"Look," she said.

"Those aren't tennis courts, are they?"

"Those are volleyball courts," she said.

They decided to play anyway. Because the nets were so high, they hit underhand shots exclusively and did a lot of dipping and knee flexing, using strange body English. A small girl watched from the top of a sliding pond nearby. Eventually a certain lunatic rhythm began to assert itself. The players got the feel of things. They appeared to enjoy playing within these limitations and started keeping score more diligently.

Moll chased an errant serve down a small hill and when she came back up to courtside found that Selvy was about forty yards away, heading across the lawn, racket in hand, toward a black limousine that was parked on the grass. The back door opened and he got in. She watched the car bump down off the curb back onto the roadway and then swing left and pick up speed, passing behind a knoll and out of sight.

The small girl standing atop the sliding pond also watched, from a somewhat better perspective. Moll looked at her and shrugged. The girl pointed, her index finger tracing the direction of the car. Finally her arm dropped to her side and she came sliding down the shiny ramp and walked off toward a group of parents and other children.

Moll stood for a while, scanning the area, two tennis balls in one hand, the racket in the other. One of the children shrieked, in play, and when Moll turned in the direction of the sound she saw Selvy walking toward her along a paved lane between two rows of benches. He was still fifty yards away when she said, softly: "You forgot your racket."

She was back on the church bench, wearing Selvy's long johns this time. He came out of the bathroom, still a little wet, with a towel around his waist, grinning at the sight of her in his underwear.

"I just used that towel."

"Doesn't matter," he said.

"Get a clean towel."

"I'm fine. I'm happy. Leave me alone."

He sat at the table, facing her, his thumbnail nicking the label on the bottle of Wild Turkey she'd set out.

"We may be the start of a new kind of human potential group," she said. "Wear each other's clothing."

"It's probably been done."

"Get in touch with each other's feelings by exchanging clothes. I see it becoming big. Huge rallies in ballparks and concert halls. When people join the movement they have to fill in forms telling what size clothes they wear. We need a name for it."

He leaned across the table and poured an inch of bourbon into the glass she held in her lap. Then he filled his own glass and got some cold cuts out of the refrigerator and sat back down.

"Apparel Personality Exchange," she said.

"Some mustard on this?"

"APE."

"You're in the wrong business," he said. "You ought to be promoting, merchandising."

"My father was an advertising immortal."

"It shows."

"You mean the apartment. Really, I'm not all that consumer-oriented or brand-conscious. It's just a phase I went through about a year ago. I bought a lot of shiny stuff and maybe I regret it. But my father, getting back to that, he did the midget campaign for Maytag. It made him an immortal."

"I guess I missed it."

"Wash a midget in your Maytag."

"I did miss it."

"We used to argue all the time. It was awful. I thought he was the absolute lowest form of toad in the whole sick society. I was living with Penner then. And I'd see my father twice a year and we'd have these all-out screaming fights about the consumer society and revolution and all the rest of it. I remember seeing _Zabriskie Point_ about then and that scene at the end when the house blows up and all those brightly colored products go exploding through the air in slow motion. God, that made my whole year. That was the high point of whatever year that was. And I tried to get old Ted Robbins to go see it, just out of spite, out of petty malice, all those packages of detergent and powdered soup and Qtips and eye liner and that whole big house, boom."

"Who's Penner?"

"Remember Gary Penner? The demolitions expert who traveled all over the country blowing up things. Dial-aBomb."

"Yes," Selvy said.

"Feared coast to coast. FBI wanted him badly. He was J. Edgar's secret obsession. I lived with Penner for seven months. _Running Dog_ was in its prime then. We used to run statements from Penner about once a month hinting at what bank or whatever target in what city was due to get it next. I actually wrote the statements. Oh, it was a weird time. Weird times were upon us. Penner was _the_ strangest son of a bitch. I mean he was wrapped up in explosives beyond human comprehension. He was also the meanest bastard you'd ever want to come across."

"But you like mean bastards."

"Fortunately I like mean bastards."

"He got it how?"

"Some woman shot him, finally. Motel in Arizona. About a year after we split up. _Running Dog_ did an obit with a black border."

Feeling a sneeze coming on, Selvy got up, moved away from the food on the table, whipped the towel off his waist and got it up to his nose just in time. Then he tossed the towel in the direction of the open bathroom door. They looked at each other. She downed all but a few drops of bourbon. Then she put her thumb under the elastic band of the long Johns, pulled it away from her belly and poured the last of the liquor down into the opening. She watched Selvy react interestingly and involuntarily. She got up, put the glass on the table and walked toward the bedroom, touching him lightly as she passed.

When Moll woke up later it was early evening. A soft rain was falling. It seemed to hang out there rather than actually descend. She felt a chill and reached down to the floor for the sheets and bedspread. She started to place them carefully over Selvy's body, in order not to wake him, when she realized he was watching her. She bit his shoulder and licked at his nipples. He moved, resettling himself, eyes closed now, as she kissed his lids and brows and moved the tips of her fingers across his chest.

"I know whose limousine that was," she said.

He faced the ceiling, eyes closed.

"Senator Percival, wasn't it?"

With her finger she traced a hank of hair around his left ear.

"I know you work for him, Glen. He's an avid collector of explicit art. You scout for him and do his buying."

Her hand on his chest rose and fell with the beat of his even breathing.

"He can't do it himself, obviously. You do it for him, following his instructions, presumably, and using administrative cover. Look, we may or may not end up using Percival in the series I'm doing but if you can help me get at the collection, great, fantastic. If not, I understand. I may be able to manage it myself."

She watched his eyes come open.

"I even know your first name," she said.

Before she knew what was happening, he was kneeling between her legs and hefting her up toward him, his hands at her hips, making her arch, and then was in her, cleanly, and driving, using his hands to force her body tighter onto his. Her head back on the pillow, pelvis way off the bed and knees up, she watched him grimace and stroke and then had to close her eyes, abandoning the visible world to enter this region of borderline void, his nails burning into her hips.

When she woke this second time it was the middle of the night. She half dreamed various things, a run-on series of images, and slept, and woke again. She kept picturing Selvy in a military setting, a barracks usually. He's standing around in white cotton boxer shorts, a dog tag around his neck. Maybe she was mixing Monty Clift into it, in _From Here to Eternity_. She pictured Selvy doing a hundred pushups in his white shorts. She pictured him sitting on a cot, spit-shining his boots. She pictured him running laps, his rifle at high port, sweat beginning to dampen his combat fatigues.

Without turning his way or reaching an arm across the bed, she knew he was no longer there.

3

People who don't make the trip every day have a tendency to grow silent as the train passes through Harlem. It isn't shock or gloom so much as sheer fascination that brings on the hush. The pleasure of ruins. The eye's delight in finding instructive vistas. It's so interesting to look at, so numbly colorful, especially from this distance, and while moving through.

Selvy got off at the Bronxville station and took a cab along Palmer Road. They turned left across an overpass and into a quiet street in the less expensive section. Kiara Ludecke lived in a small attractive house on this street.

His instructions weren't specific. She'd been traveling in Europe. Why and precisely where. He didn't care to get involved in side issues, such as her husband's murder, being concerned only with the dead man's connection to the Senator and the leverage it provided.

Her face was a near circle, though pretty. She was somewhat broad of figure, maybe thirty years old, and spoke in an accent that was pleasant to hear even in its odder journeys through certain words. She led him to a dark parlor and then sat waiting in a straightbacked chair, hands folded on her knees.

"You've been away, Mrs. Ludecke."

"To Aachen, in West Germany."

"Your husband was born there."

"Yes, in 1944, I believe."

"Why this particular time to travel? Your husband had just been murdered. You spoke once to the police and then disappeared."

"My husband has relatives there, still. I wished to see them. You must understand I needed to be close to people who loved him. I was not capable to deal with things."

"You've come back-why?"

She made a sweeping gesture to indicate the house, possessions, legalities, disengagements.

"You're not staying."

"It would be impossible."

"Are you going back to Germany?"

"I don't know. Perhaps that's what I'll finally do. At least my husband's family is there. His own father died seven months ago but there are brothers and sisters who have been very kind to me, and Christoph's mother as well."

"Your husband was a systems engineer-correct?"

"You're not one of the policemen I talked to after it happened."

"No," he said.

"Who are you?"

Clipped to his belt holster was a device called a fieldstrength meter. He took it out, raised the small antenna attached to it, and then tuned the meter to sweep the frequency band. Checking the needle he probed the north side of the room. From the bookcase he took a 1961 World Almanac. Embedded in the narrow space between the spine and the binding was a small audio device. Selvy disengaged the single transistor in the oscillator circuit. He looked at Klara Ludecke. She didn't know whether to be surprised or angry.

He took out his wallet and showed her a set of credentials linking him to something called U.S. Strike Force, Internal Projects.

"Special investigative unit."

"What is special about me?"

"Your husband didn't die under what I'd call normal circumstances, Mrs. Ludecke."

"When is murder normal?"

"Beyond the fact that he was murdered, there were unusual details."

"Abnormal, perhaps you would prefer to say."

"Words."

"Abnormal," she insisted.

"Yes, why not?"

"Anyone would agree. A grotesque death. And it's interesting that you haven't spoken a word about the people who killed him. Circumstances so abnormal that this small detail is completely overlooked."

"No, wrong."

"Perhaps this aspect of the crime isn't part of your special investigation. You're not interested? It's too routine for specialists. You're bored with that question?"

"I'd like to discuss the matter of acquaintances."

"Would you really?"

"Your husband's work took him to Washington on occasion.'

"This is correct. Washington and the surrounding area."

" Washington in particular."

"I wouldn't say that, no."

"According to the original police inquiry-"

"The police," she said. "The police know nothing. Sex crime, that's all they know. It's the people in the special investigation who know what's important and what isn't. They know where to look. How deep, how shallow. The police. They photograph the body. They make chalk marks on the floor. They check their files on deviates and the killers of deviates. That satisfies them. They have such experience in these areas. Who am I to complain?"

Klara Ludecke raised her eyes to an angle level with his.

"How special can this investigation be if you haven't even asked about Radial Matrix?" she said.

Selvy picked up a plastic disk from the coffee table in front of him, a scenic paperweight, three-dimensional vista of rolling hills, and studied it a moment. He watched the woman rise from the chair and walk through the dark parlor and along the equally dark hallway, where she opened the front door and held it, not taking her eyes off the opposite wall as he walked past her into the sun.

Later that same day he rode an escalator down to the Capitol subway with Lloyd Percival.

"You're due at Lightborne's when?"

"Tomorrow night," Selvy said. "Auction."

"What, more Guatemalan stuff?"

"Apparently."

"We see nothing but stiff pricks lately. What I wouldn't give for a single mushy prick. Might be a whole new approach. Jesus Christmas, what happened to the esthetic element? Tell Lightborne. The subtlety, the complexity, the simple charm. All he seems to show us are junkyard pieces."

"He knows, Senator."

"Just heard from some friends in Amsterdam. Someone's come up with a plaster-and-polystyrene copy of a Bernini I've always admired."

"_Saint Teresa in Ecstasy_."

"Right, some young Dutch sculptor."

"Lightborne's got a vicar he did."

"What kind of vicar?"

"A vicar with a stiff prick, Senator."

"Why did I ask?"

"Anyway."

"Anyway what this Dutch fella's done is to lift the folds of Saint Teresa's habit way up around her thighs and to place her knees well apart without changing the original position of the feet. Hell, it was already there. All he's done is highlight it. Her ecstasy always was sexual."

They were the last two people to step onto the small electric conveyance and it started immediately.

"Bernini might not agree."

"Don't quibble, Glen."

"Not to mention Saint Teresa."

"Are you a prude?"

"Possibly."

"Interesting fella. You're an interesting fella."

"What about the angel?"

"He's changed the configuration of the arrowhead but only slightly."

"To make it more phallic."

"Marginally so," Percival said.

"The sacred and profane."

"Special form of eroticism, isn't it? Always been attracted to it myself. It pleases the Lord that only a few of us have the wherewithal to pursue such attractions."

They got off the subway and took an elevator to the third floor of the Dirksen Building.

"Magazine wants to make me look human."

"Which?"

"_Running Dog_."

"Stay away," Selvy said. "It's not my department of course."

"Why?"

"They'll burn you."

"How do you know?"

"They're after controversy. They're dying and need a fix. Even if they do the piece they promise, you'll be hemmed in by autopsy reports, photos of entry and exit wounds, who killed Brown, who killed Smith, who killed Jones. They deal in fantasy."

They walked down a corridor toward the Senator's office.

"It's not your department of course."

"Absolutely not," Selvy said.

"Your duties are strictly administrative."

"Their editor's unstable. Grace Delaney. A lush. Used to spend all her time raising bail for well-hung Panthers."

Lightborne leaned forward to grimace, inches from the mirror, checking his teeth for traces of the grilled cheese sandwich he'd had for dinner. He turned on the cold water, wet his index finger and then ran it several times across his clenched teeth.

He cleared a space in the gallery and set out folding chairs and a bench, deciding finally not to bother hauling the armchair out here. He went around turning on lights. In his jacket pocket he found a slightly bent Tareyton King and he blew on it several times to remove microscopic lint and then began searching for a match, the cigarette held between thumb and middle finger, an idiosyncrasy he'd copied from a titled Englishman he'd once done business with. With no matches to be had, he finally turned on the hotplate and was waiting for it to warm when the first of the bidders arrived.

Eventually eleven people sat in the gallery as Lightborne made final adjustments. Glen Selvy carried a chair out of the living area and sat against a wall, slightly apart from the others. Lightborne showed a carved wood fertility figure. Noted its characteristics and advised as to period, precise handiwork involved, where found and how. A well-tanned man named Wetzel was the sole bidder.

A copper statuette with a lesbian theme also went without competitive bidding. Wetzel captured a bronze satyr-once owned by Fulgencio Batista, Lightborne said-after an encouraging flurry of bids against three other people.

Lightborne pushed a trunk on rollers into the auction area. He undid the belts, used an enormous key to open the trunk and then, with the help of a couple of men sitting up front, removed a three-foot-high volcanic stone phallus that pointed upward from a base of a pair of testicles larger than bowling balls.

The piece was variously chipped, pockmarked and discolored. It had character. Lightborne invited the bidders to take a closer look, and most did. Then he delivered a brief interpretation of the piece and opened the bidding.

Wetzel said, "That thing is about as pre-Columbian as an Oldenburg clothespin."

"Who said pre-Columbian? I said it was dug out of a tomb in the jungle. Who specified a date?"

"Your man chiseled the damn thing in his backyard."

"He knows tombs no one else knows," Lightborne said. "They're in the densest areas. You can't get in there except on foot, hacking."

"Hacking," Wetzel said.

"Professor Shatsky was supposed to be here to authenticate. He's late, evidently."

"Shatsky."

"The Jewish Museum."

"What the hell does the Jewish Museum know about Guatemalan pricks? This particular prick isn't even circumcised."

Lightborne made a gesture of pacification.

"Go easy on the Anglo-Saxonisms," he said.

An hour later the whole thing was over. A full-fledged disaster. Lightborne poured some Canadian whisky into a shot glass and sipped it. He got out a box of marshmallow cookies and ate three of them whole, washing them down with small amounts of rye.

Bottles of Shasta and Wink sat on tables in the gallery. Someone's cigar still smoldered in an ashtray. Lightborne took the bent Tareyton out of his pocket and used the acrid cigar to light it. He locked the door, turned off the lights and slipped behind the partition.

A sixty-watt bulb hung over the wash basin, swaying a little in the breeze from an open window. Lightborne poured some more rye and sat by the phone. He dialed the operator and asked her to get a Dallas number, person to person, collect.

After some delay the call was accepted by Richie Armbrister, known as the boy wonder of smut, a twenty-two-yearold master of distribution and marketing who lived and worked in a barricaded warehouse in downtown Dallas.

Armbrister controlled a maze of one hundred and fifty corporations which numbered among their activities and holdings a chain of bookstores, strip joints and peep movies coast to coast; massage parlors and nude-encounter studios, southwest U.S. and western Canada; outlets for leather goods and mechanical devices west of the Mississippi; sex boutiques, topless bars, topless billiard parlors across the Sunbelt; a New Orleans car rental firm with topless chauffeurs. He took few vacations and had no hobbies.

"Lightborne, how are you? Always a pleasure to speak to a knowledgeable person, what with all these second-raters who work for me."

"I understand the business is getting tight, Richie. I mean legally speaking, as far as successful prosecutions."

"They'll never find me. I have too much paper floating around. I'm very well hidden, believe me. Holding companies in four states. Dummy corporations. I don't exist as a person. I'm not in writing anywhere. I'm sitting behind all that paper."

"Legal fronts, wonderful."

"So speak," Armbrister said, his high-pitched voice seemingly on the verge of cracking.

"Remember the business we talked about some months ago."

"Sure."

"It's hot again," Lightborne said. "I got a phone call that sounds encouraging."

"You're encouraged."

"It could be nothing."

"I'm still interested. Full-length movies. First-run. The field's been denied me so far. Some bad luck. A series of small incidents. Organized crime, you know. The families. They're involved in full-length."

"It could be nothing, Richie."

"But the trail is hot again."

"It's warm. I'd say warm, realistically."

"What do you need, Lightborne?"

"To show some money."

"All my money's tied up in cash."

Lightborne realized he was being called upon to laugh and with an effort he managed to do this.

"Hey, I bought a plane," Richie said. "I'm going to Europe to do some business. We gutted the whole passenger section and redid it. It's big, it seats thirty-one, a DC-nine. Maybe I'll stop in New York on the way back. We'll get serious about this thing."

"I know Europe well," Lightborne said with no particular conviction.

"First we go to England to look at the theater setup. Then Hamburg or Stockholm, I forget which, for the shops, to see if we can push our rubber line. Then maybe Amsterdam for bondage items, to check out their expertise."

Lightborne was suddenly exhausted and wished only to stretch out on his cot and go to sleep. He stared into the dimness, nodding to the rhythms of the voice on the other end. There was a remark, a brief expectant silence, and then Richie's manic laughter came swimming across the continent.

"Ha ha," Lightborne said at the first opening.

The next day he walked into a railroad diner near Chinatown. He was a couple of minutes late and breathing heavily as he hurried the length of the room and sat next to Selvy at the counter.

"We discussed footage, you recall."

"Yes," Selvy said.

"Would he be interested?"

"Oh, he'd be interested."

"Tell him it could be on."

"I'll tell him."

"Tell him to forget about past failures."

"It's on. I'll tell him."

"Never mind the stuff from the jungle, tell him."

"This is different," Selvy said.

"Of course it's still sight unseen. It's still a question of plausibility."

"You were the chief skeptic, last time we talked about it."

Lightborne ordered soup and absently ran the edge of a matchbook under his fingernails.

"Common knowledge there was a steady flow of women in and out of the SS guard rooms in the bunker," he said. "All told there were hundreds of people in the bunker. It was an elaborate operation, running the country from down there, what was left of the country."

"All those people, things could happen, you're saying."

"On the other hand when we talk of the old boy himself, this is when I become highly skeptical once more."

"Hitler."

"He was too feeble to take part in anything like that. He was partially paralyzed, he was under sedation much of the time. In his last days he wasn't well at all. Eva Braun. Eva Braun certainly wasn't a candidate for a mass sexual exercise. Not the type. Of course she liked movies. She once worked for a photographer. But that's of little matter."

"Very little," Selvy said.

"On the other hand there were the early days with Geli Raubal. His niece. Story goes he forced her to model for dirty pictures. Close-ups and such."

"Who drew the pictures?"

"He did," Lightborne said.

"Hitler."

"So you have this pornographic interest. You have the fact that movies were screened for him all the time in Berlin and Obersalzburg, sometimes two a day. Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He liked lewd movies too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs."

"You're building a case. You're tilting."

"It could be nothing."

"You're a student of the period."

"Did I say that?"

"I believe I recall, yes, you said that."

"You see, he's endlessly fascinating. The whole Nazi era. People can't get enough. If it's Nazis, it's automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia. He whipped his niece, did you know that?"

"Hitler."

"He used a bull whip, story goes."

Lightborne broke a saltine cracker and dropped the pieces into his tomato soup.

"Not that I don't remain skeptical," he said. "I remain highly skeptical."

"About the existence of the film itself or just the people taking part, their rank and such?"

"About both of those plus one other thing, which is the commercial prospects such a document would have. I call it a document to dignify it. Is there really any demand for such a thing? Is this what people want out of pornography? Maybe it's too historical. Maybe it _is_ a document. I'm asking myself. What do people want? Is there a strong fantasy element involved? Will this kind of material help people upgrade their orgasms?"

Selvy couldn't help laughing.

"I like your walking stick," he said.

"Someone noticed. You're the first. Up until now, nobody saw it. I paid money. This is African wood, right here. The handle is a monkey if you notice."

"Nice stick, very."

Lightborne called for the check, noting that his companion had only a cup of coffee before him on the counter.

"Don't bother," Selvy said. "He pays."

"And you think there's a chance he'd be interested."

"Oh, he'd be interested all right. I know it for a fact."

The routine. Cab, terminal, plane, terminal, car. He moved through it apart from other people, sitting in aisle seats, standing at the edge of waiting lines, unobtrusively watchful, last on, first off. He found a place for his car on Potomac Avenue and headed into the building, skirting two small boys playing on the stairs outside his apartment.

"Hey, you the landlord?"

"No."

"Where you belong?"

"Hey, white."

"What you be doing here?"

"Hey, white."

"Where you belong then?"

He took a shower and waited for time to pass. He didn't mind the waiting. Somewhere to be at 1500. No one he knew, or might talk to in the intervening period, would ever suspect the nature of his business. It was carried on beneath the level of ordinary life. This is why it made no difference where he lived. It was all the same, mere coloration for the true life, for the empty meditations, the routine, the tradecraft, the fine edge to be maintained in preparation for-he didn't know what. In preparation for what?

He lived in the off-hours. He created his own operational environment, having little outside direction, no sense of policy. Periodically he reported to a house near the Government Printing Office, where he was given a technical interview, or polygraph, or lie detector test.

He was a reader. He read his man. There was nothing cynical in his view of the world. He didn't feel tainted by the dirt of his profession. It was a calculated existence, this. He preferred life narrowed down to unfinished rooms.

That afternoon at three Selvy stood outside a restaurant on M Street, Palacio de Mexico, as the limousine approached and the back door slowly swung open. There was a fully grown St. Bernard on the front seat next to the driver and three St. Bernard puppies mauling each other across the length of the rear seat. Lomax had squeezed himself into one of the jump seats and he motioned Selvy toward the adjoining one.

"I took them running," Lomax said.

"They haven't stopped."

"They needed the exercise. Dogs this big. It's crazy, having them in the city. Maybe I'll buy land somewhere."

" Fairfax County."

Lomax took one of the puppies in his lap and began stroking its neck. The car moved past the Executive Office Building.

"I saw Kiara Ludecke," Selvy said.

"And?"

"She wants to know why she's a widow."

"Only natural."

"That's what I thought. Only natural she'd get around to asking."

"Is she in contact with Percival?"

"I doubt it."

"Any clue as to what she was doing back home?"

"Relatives, she says."

"I hear different," Lomax said.

The car headed west now, turning sharply on its approach to the Key Bridge. A long silence ensued.

"Why would she mention Radial Matrix?" Selvy said.

Lomax tossed the puppy back onto the seat.

"She mentioned it, did she?"

"She mentioned Radial Matrix."

Lomax took a box of throat lozenges out of his pocket and put one in his mouth. The car headed south on 29, the Lee Highway. Lomax pushed his way onto the rear seat and began playing with all three puppies, letting them scramble over his head and neck. Up front the fully grown dog sat looking straight ahead.

"The lady's natural curiosity raises a question," Selvy said. "It's not in my jurisdiction but, still, I've wondered lately."

"Mo here's gonna be stronger than a goddamn moose."

"Who killed Ludecke?"

"I'm looking at Percival," Lomax said.

Selvy thought this was stupid to the point of imbecility. He watched Lomax try to extricate himself from the roistering dogs.

"The Senator's just a high-toned smut collector. His thrills are vicarious, strictly. Murder is too powerful an idea for someone like that, even on a contract basis."

"Stay on Percival."

"That line of investigation has nothing left to yield. He wanted the Berlin film. He knew Ludecke had it. It doesn't go beyond that."

"I'm looking at Percival," Lomax said. "And don't call it smut. You keep calling it smut."

Selvy glanced out the window at a frame house with a plastic pool on the lawn and about half a cord of firewood stacked under the front porch.

"There's an outside chance some magazine may do a piece on the Senator's collection."

"Christ," Lomax said.

"There goes our advantage."

"Ain't it the truth."

"So?"

"I'll get back to you."

"In the meantime," Selvy said.

"In the meantime, go to New York."

The limousine pulled into a gas station and then swung across the road and headed back toward Washington.

"I just got back from there," Selvy said.

Both men knew this wasn't a complaint. It was an indirect form of acquiescence, a statement of Selvy's willingness to blend with the pattern, to travel an event to its final unraveling.

All the way back Lomax remained slumped in his jump seat, talking to the dogs.

4

The office was cluttered and bright, a sizable room with a fireplace that didn't work. Grace Delaney sat behind a teak desk, swiveling gradually toward the window behind her. Moll presented her argument, with gestures, trying not to be distracted by police cars wailing down Second Avenue. Men with guns. That was the aspect of things no one would be able to change. She sensed she was losing Delaney to the view.

"That's it, Grace. Finis. Das Ende. I can be in Georgetown before the dew is on the rose, or whatever."

_Running Dog_'s offices were divided among three sites. A duplex in an East Side brownstone. A suite in an office building way across town. And someone's house in Sunnyside, Queens.

This of course was the brownstone, top floor, rear, looking south, view of ailanthus trees and small' gardens. Grace Delaney was a carefully tailored woman, slim and angular, whose face and hands often appeared to be flaking. She faced the window now, her back to Moll, who sat on the liquor cabinet, waiting for Grace to think of something to say.

"All right. Personal level. It's not the kind of thing that turns me on."

"What do you want, a nude torso in his freezer?"

"It's not political. It has no ramifications."

"You're wrong, Grace."

"Could be. Prove it to me."

"He's got a man on staff who runs around the country buying this bric-a-brac. That's travel dollars plus the guy's salary."

"This sun feels so good."

"Obviously taxpayers' money."

"You're boring me, Moll."

"Sex is boring?"

"I guess I miss conspiracy."

"Like how?"

"A sense of evil design."

"Well, Percival's investigating this PAC/ORD operation. That's where the evil design lies, presumably."

"That's it, see, I miss an element of irony."

She swung around in her chair to face Moll.

"Our investigation into Percival's affairs should yield precisely what the Senator's investigation into PAC/ORD will eventually yield. I niiss the symmetry of this."

"Grace, we're not weaving Persian rugs."

Delaney took a silver flask out of her desk and had two quick snorts, her head jerking mechanically.

"Conspiracy's our theme. Shit, you know that. Connections, links, secret associations. The whole point behind the series you're doing is that it's a complex and very large business involving not only smut merchants, not only the families, not only the police and the courts, but also highly respectable business elements, mostly real estate interests, in a conscious agreement to break the law. Or haven't you heard."

"I heard."

"If you examine the matter, Percival's got nothing to do with any of this. He's an art collector with a taste for the erotic. I see it, if at all, as a fun thing."

"What can I say?"

"I don't see it as major."

"You're telling me not to pursue it."

"I miss ramifications."

"One last talk with the man."

"He won't let you anywhere near his collection."

"I have possible access without him."

"How?"

"Mysterious source."

"Close to the Senator?"

"Close enough."

"I have my doubts."

"Let me work on it."

"Knucklehead," Delaney said.

Her voice was husky and a little intimate and sometimes made insults sound like endearments. Often she purred obscenities. In her carefully tailored way, surrounded as she was by photos and layouts, by crushed paper cups, overflowing ashtrays, cellophane mobiles, by books and scattered magazines, she managed to suggest the rigor that dwells at the heart of successful concealment. Moll watched her pour lotion on her wrists and over the backs of her hands and then slowly, dreamily even, begin rubbing it in. They knew about this even in Sunnyside. It was the way she dismissed people.

It was late afternoon when Moll hailed a cab that took her past the Little Carnegie, where a special Chaplin program was playing. She found Selvy waiting in her apartment and decided not to ask how he'd gained entry. Bad taste, such questions. An insult to the ambivalence of their relations.

Her sweater crackled as she fulled it over her head. Static cling. Current in the tips of her fingers. When he touched her, she jumped. They crashed together onto the bed. The mild shocks ceased as their bodies came to resemble a single intricate surface. She began tossing her head, free and clear of garments, straddling him, noting the blends and scents rising.

Their eyes locked. A reconnoitering gaze. She sensed his control, his will, a nearly palpable thing, like a card player's unswerving determination, the furious rightness of his victory.

She ran a finger along his mouth. He lifted her then, driving with his hips, pounding, so high she tumbled forward, a hand on either side of his head for balance. They remained that way, reaching the end slowly, without further bursts and furies. On hands and knees she swayed above him, licking her lips to moisten them against the dry air.

Propped on an elbow he watched her walk out of the room. When she came back she brought a can of beer, which they shared,

"You have a third baseman's walk."

"I walk crouched," she said.

"Like you've been spending a whole career too close to home plate, expecting the hitter to bunt but always suspicious, ready to dart one way or the other."

"Suspicious of what?"

"He might swing away."

"So that's my walk. A third baseman. What about my body?"

"Good hands," he said. "Taut breasts. A second baseman's."

"I just remembered something."

"Won't get in your way when you pivot to make the double play."

"We're going to the movies. I just realized. There's a Chaplin program at the Little Carnegie and we've got four and a half minutes to get down there."

_The dictator in uniform_.

_Each of his lapels bears the double-cross insignia. His hat is large, a visored cap, also with insignia. He wears knee-high boots_.

_The world's most famous mustache_.

_The dictator addresses the multitudes. He speaks in strangulated tirades. A linguistic subfamily of German. The microphones recoil_.

_The story includes a little barber and a pretty girl_.

_An infant wets on the dictator's hand. Storm troopers march and sing_.

_The dictator sits on his desk, holding a large globe in his left hand. A classic philosophical pose. His eyes have a faraway look. He senses the vast romance of acquisition and conquest_.

_The celebrated scene_.

_To a Lohen grin soundtrack, the dictator does an eerie ballet, bouncing the globe, a balloon, this way and that, tumbling happily on his back_.

_The dictator weeps, briefly_.

_The little barber, meanwhile, studies his image as it appears on the surface of a bald man's head_.

_The dictator welcomes a rival tyrant to his country. The man arrives in a two-dimensional train. The leaders salute each other for many frames_.

_The prerogatives of dictatorship are easier to establish, they learn, when there is only one dictator_.

_There is a ball in the palace. The dictator and his rival eat strawberries and mustard. A treaty is signed. The two men team up_.

_The dictator goes duck-hunting and falls out of his boat_.

_Mistaken identity_.

_The barber, or neo-tramp, who is the dictator's look-alike, assumes command, more or less, and addresses the multitudes_.

_A burlesque, an impersonation_.

In a restaurant nearby, Moll said, "The really funny thing is that I remember the movie as silent, and it's not of course. I even forgot the speech at the end. Incredible. But I guess the visual memory is what dominates. I'll tell you what I never, ever forget when it comes to movies."

"What?"

"Who I saw a particular movie with."

"Who you saw a particular movie with."

"I never forget who was with me at a given movie, no matter how many years go by. So you're engraved, Selvy, on the moviegoing part of my brain. You and Charlie Chaplin forever linked. Charlie said he would never have made _The Great Dictator_ later on in the war or after the war, knowing by that time what the Nazis were capable of. It's a little naïve, in other words. He also said something strange about the dictator being a comedian. But Charlie's so related in my mind to silent film that I completely forgot this was a talkie. Ten, twelve years ago it must have been. Probably more. Fifteen maybe."

"Shut up and eat."

"I do run on at times."

"Just a bit," he said.

Over dessert she said, "Let's go drinking downtown."

"Serious drinking."

"Our original hangout. Some serious drinking. A couple of roustabouts out on the town."

"What's it called, I forget."

"Frankie's Tropical Bar."

"Can we find it?"

"Ask any cabbie. It's famous."

"The guy with the bandage on his head."

"Who tried to throw a bicycle at that fat lady."

"It all comes back," he said.

"Local color. Good talk. Festive music. Disease."

At two in the morning they were still there. Two men and an elderly woman sat at the other end of the bar. On a step leading down to the toilets another man sat sprawled, mumbling something about his landlord working for the FBI. The FBI had placed cameras and bugging devices not only in his apartment but everywhere he went. They preceded him, anticipating every stop he made, day or night.

"Ever get swacked on absinthe?"

"Missed out on that," Moll said.

"Serious derangement of the senses."

"I went through a disgusting mulled wine phase several years ago. It started in Zermatt and I allowed it to continue much too long and in far too many places."

"Doesn't beat a Caribou," Selvy said.

"Yes, very nice. But not to be mentioned in the same breath as a Bellini, which goes down especially well if you happen to be lounging on your terrace in Portofino, overlooking the bay."

"Nothing beats a Caribou."

"This is boring," she said. "Stupid way to converse."

"You're in Quebec City. Picture it. Twenty-two below zero Celsius. People running around everywhere. It's Carnaval. Somebody hands you a glass that's pure alcohol plus red wine. You take a drink. Three days later your body comes hurtling through a snow-blower."

"Dull. Stupid and dull."

Huge stains, as of disruptions in the plumbing, covered part of one wall. The place smelled. There were inclines in the floor, some unexpected grades and elevations. An unfinished mural_palm trees-covered a section of the wall behind the bar.

"Where are you from?" Moll said.

"Originally?"

"Originally, lately, whatever. Or are you the kind of person who sees himself as a man without a history_no past, no relatives, no ties, no binds. You're the kind of person who sees himself as a man without a history."

"But you like that kind of person."

"I like that kind of person, true."

"Because they tend to be mean bastards," he said.

"And I like mean bastards."

"They tend to be very, very mean."

"And I'm attracted to that, yes."

The bartender was a Latin with a terrible complexion. His shirt cuffs were folded over twice. He seemed to tiptoe back and forth, a stocky man, his head wagging. The lighting in the room was dim.

" Arak," she said. "I got wiped out on arak-where?"

" Cyprus."

" Cyprus, that's right. Although I don't think I've been to Cyprus. No, I've never been to Cyprus. So that's not right. You're clearly mistaken, Selvy."

"It wasn't Cyprus and it wasn't arak. It was ouzo and it was Crete."

"Well, now, I admit to having been on Crete."

"And it was ouzo, not arak. You've never touched a drop of arak in your life."

"I don't think I like ouzo. So why would I want to get wiped out on it?"

"You thought it was arak," he said. "But it wasn't. And it wasn't Crete either. It was Malta."

"It was malteds. It was chocolate malteds."

"Right. That's correct. You're making sense for a change."

"Do I get to see the collection?"

"Not a chance," he said affably.

"Is it in Georgetown?"

"Forget it."

"He'll see me. I know he'll see me. Whether or not he'll grant me a real live interview is a whole 'nuther question. But I couldn't care less about the whole thing unless I know the collection's in his Georgetown house. I just want to get near it, understand. I want to know I'm close. So is it in Georgetown? I want to know I've got half a chance."

Selvy was drinking Polish vodka. He drained his glass and pushed it several inches toward the inner rim of the bar. The man sitting on the step near the toilets hadn't stopped talking about the FBI. He was able to see the cameras and listening devices. They were installed everywhere he went. If he went to another bar around the corner, they would be there. If he took a bus uptown, he'd see the little bugging devices, the little cameras under the seats and along the metal edges of the windows. People kept telling him he had the DTs. But the DTs were when you saw rats and birds and insects. It was little cameras he saw. Tiny transmitters. And they were everywhere.

The bartender filled Selvy's glass. The old woman at the other end of the bar started an argument with one of the two men who were with her. It was her son, evidently. The bartender stared at Moll.

"Headhunter Zombie," she said. "It's coming back to me. This hotel bar someplace-the Dutch Leewards? Where are the Dutch Leewards? You mix in papaya, peach nectar, some dark rum, some more dark rum, some light rum, some lime juice, some shaved ice and I think some honey. Add a dash of bitters."

The first three-round burst took out the bartender and sent glass flying everywhere. Moll felt herself thrown to the floor. There was a second burst, a three-part roar, little explosions everywhere, things flying, and she was aware of Selvy's hand leaving his hip with a gun in it. This had happened earlier, two seconds perhaps, and was just registering, and there was blood also registering, coming down on her from the top of the bar. She flattened herself against the angular surface where the bar and the floor joined, digging in, her whole body, glass registering, crashing everywhere, and the old woman's voice.

Selvy took a head-on position, prone, to avoid presenting too wide a target. He noted muzzle flash. Gun bedded in his hand, he moved his fingertip to the trigger and applied pressure, straight back and unhurriedly, letting out his breath but not completely, just to a point, holding it now as the gun fired, oniy then exhaling fully.

He watched for motion out on the sidewalk. Single gunman, he was almost certain, auto-firing in short bursts. For a brief moment he lost a sense of where the man was, then realized he was standing in the doorway, trying to sort out the chaos inside. AR-18. Severe muzzle climb. Son of a bitch is wearing ear muffs and shooting glasses. Thinks he's on a firing range.

Answering the burst, Selvy fired twice. The whole place was breaking apart with noise, bullets, flying glass. The man who'd been sitting on the step crawled moaning toward the door, trailing blood, one arm limp. The gunman was out of the doorway, moving, hit possibly. Selvy had the distinct impression he'd been hit.

He got to his feet and stepped over the crawling man. He heard a car move off. The old woman lunged at him and he gave her an elbow that drove her to the floor. There was still a roar in his head but the street was quiet and he didn't bother checking for blood. It was academic really, whether he'd hit the man. No concern of his. A technicality.

He returned the.38 to the break-front holster on his belt. Moll came out on the sidewalk. Her expression was comical. She seemed more amazed by the fact that he'd been carrying a gun than by the rest of it, the man spraying the place with automatic fire, the dead and wounded.

"I saw him," she said. "I looked up at the end. What was he wearing? He looked so strange. He stood there trying to see into the room. He was wearing something on his ears and face."

"Tinted glasses. Shooting glasses, for ricocheting bullet fragments. And ear protectors, for noise."

"Who was he? There are people dead in there. What the hell happened?"

"I don't think he was familiar with the weapon. He was letting the muzzle climb when he fired. That weapon's designed to prevent that."

"But who the hell was he? What happened?"

"He had his right elbow at the wrong angle. He had it pointed way down. Your elbow should be straight out, parallel to the ground, firing that particular weapon."

"Jesus, will you stop?" she said. "Will you tell me what happened?"

Her sweater and shirt were covered with the bartender's blood. She stood there trembling. He gave her a crooked little smile and shook his head, genuinely regretful that he wasn't able to bring some light to the situation.

A couple of kids came out of a doorway to approach Selvy near the shattered front of Frankie's Tropical Bar.

"We see the whole thing."

"How much you give us to testify?"

"We make a deal, man."

"It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun."

"No, man, it was Stevie Wonder. You see his headset? He was shooting to the music."