Running Dog

1

She parked at the very limit of a dead-end street overlooking Rock Creek. It was a warm evening, kids chasing each other in a playground just yards away. The house was red brick, fairly large, attached (how strange, she thought) to a common brown frame house that seemed totally out of place here. How strange and interesting. She approached the brick house, noting that the door-knocker was a bronze eagle.

Lloyd Percival made flattering remarks. He remembered what she'd been wearing on their previous encounter in the corridors of the Senate wing. And commented on the reduced frizz-content of her hair. They sat around a cherrywood cocktail table in a large room filled mostly with period furniture and decorated in spruce green Colonial wallpaper. The first hour was boring, at least for Moll.

"And Mrs. Percival?"

"Spends most of her time back home. Doesn't like Washington. Never has. We've grown apart, I'm afraid. Divorce in progress."

"What does she do?"

"She curls up with the Warren Report. She's been reading the Warren Report for eight or nine years. Nine years, I make it. The full set. Twenty-six volumes. She wears a bed jacket."

"You have two married daughters."

It went on like this. Percival had a second drink. He sat stoop-shouldered in a wing sofa, his deep friendly voice droning on. Even with his beady eyes and his small and somewhat flat-top head, Moll found his presence genial and even serene. He was the kind of man people feel at ease with. Large, shaggy and quietly ironic. She curled up in her chair, enveloped by the room's cozy mood.

"I still don't understand why I didn't have you screened. We screen people like you."

"My fried hair. Disarmed you."

"I know what you really want to talk about."

"Do you?" she said.

"You don't want to talk about my family, or my views on world affairs."

"Don't I?"

"Let me do something to that drink."

"No, it's fine."

"You want to talk about the hearings."

"Actually, no, you're wrong."

"You want to talk about PAC/ORD."

"You're so wrong, Senator."

"Not that I blame you," he said. "They've got mechanisms. Undercover channeling operations. They've got offshoots. It's damn shocking. At this late date, you'd think I'd be impervious to what those people dream up. Not so."

"Senator, the truth is I wouldn't think of asking you to divulge what goes on in closed-door hearings."

"What about this boss of yours?"

"Yes?"

"Grace Delaney," he said. "I hear unflattering reports. She's had dealings with radical groups, among other things."

"A woman with a past. Isn't that what makes us interesting? For men, it's lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It's the shadows behind us that do the trick."

"Your own, for instance, I would dearly love to hear about."

"I used to live with Gary Penner. Dial-a-Bomb?"

"I do recall, yes. The name's familiar."

"It should be, Senator. He blew up half your goddamn state about ten years ago."

They shared a laugh over that. Unfolding slowly, Percival's long body rose from the sofa. He shuffled to the liquor cabinet, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniel's back to the cocktail table with him.

"You understand nothing I tell you is to be attributed. It is not only unattributed. It is undocumented, unfounded and unreal. I deny everything in advance. Whoever leaked this stuff to you, whichever committee counsel, is not only breaking the law; he's totally misrepresenting the facts."

"What you're saying, really, Senator, is that you decided at some point that _Running Dog_ is precisely the publication this kind of story cries out for. No one else would touch it since you've no intention of providing the slightest clue to its authenticity."

"None of it ever happened. I repeat. It's all lies. I find it utterly inconceivable that such things could find their way into the pages, so on, so on, so on."

He told her that PAC/ORD-the Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements-had been set up, on the surface, as the principal unit of budgetary operations for the whole U.S. intelligence community. Dealing strictly in unclassified areas, the agency had been established in response to criticism of soaring intelligence expenditures.

Covert operations were beyond its scope. Hiring, firing, paying, promoting, budgeting. This was PAC/ORD territory, on the surface, and it did not extend beyond the legal, administrative and clerical areas. Thousands of people in a number of agencies. PAC/ORD was not unlike the personnel department of a large corporation.

On the surface.

Beyond that, however, the Senator's investigating committee had learned that PAC/ORD had a secret arm, the kind of cover setup known as a proprietary. This was Radial Matrix, a legally incorporated firm with headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia. Radial Matrix-the term itself was meaningless-was a systems planning outfit. They advised on, and installed, manufacturing and shipping systems. Their clients included firms across the U.S. and in a number of other countries. In the last three years they'd become a huge success, with several spin-off operations and activities. The only overt connection between PAC/ORD and Radial Matrix was a contract the latter had to install a new computerized wage system on behalf of the former.

The only overt connection.

Radial Matrix was in fact a centralized funding mechanism for covert operations directed against foreign governments, against elements within foreign governments, and against political parties trying to gain power contrary to the interests of U.S. corporations abroad. It was responsible for channeling and laundering funds for unlisted station personnel, indigenous agents, terrorist operations, defector recruitment, political contributions, penetration of foreign communications networks and postal agencies.

So on, so on, so on.

"If you study the history of reform," Percival said, "you'll see there's always a counteraction built in. A low-lying surly passion. Always people ready to invent new secrets, new bureaucracies of terror."

"Don't get carried away on my behalf."

"It's only fair to point out that these PAC/ORD activities are fairly small-scale, as far as I can tell, compared to the CIA extravaganzas that brought on the thirst for reform in the first place, and of course they're being run by some of the same people. My point is that these activities satisfy the historical counterfunction. They fill those small dark places. And they're illegal. Run counter to the spirit and letter of every law, every intelligence directive, that pertains to such matters."

One of the marvels of all this, the Senator continued, was that Radial Matrix, strictly as a business enterprise, was enjoying such enormous success. Surely this was an unexpected development to the folks at PAC/ORD, who couldn't have expected their modest creation to become such a world-beater.

Moll told the Senator she didn't think any of this was very startling, considering past developments and revelations. Percival had an answer for that.

One final level of operations.

Radial Matrix was currently run by a man named Earl Mudger. Handpicked by PAC/ORD, he was former commander of a fighter-bomber squadron (Korea) and long-term contract employee (Saigon desk, Air America) of the CIA. He'd had civilian experience, briefly, in the late fifties, with a firm specializing in production flow systems and automation.

Mudger turned out to be the right man for the job-too much so, it seemed. He fell in love with profits. The profit motive became more interesting to him at this stage of his career than pay records or secret bank accounts or whatever fancy paperwork is necessary to maintain agents in the field and deliver money into the hands of favored political leaders in this or that country.

The Senator poured himself another drink and put his feet up on the cocktail table. First traces of slurred speech.

"What's happened is that PAC/ORD has lost control of its own operation. Radial Matrix has become a breakaway unit of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Nobody knows what to do about it. Mudger's completely autonomous. They're afraid to move against him. Public scrutiny of the funding mechanism is unacceptable. And it could happen if they try to remove him. Anything could happen. Including disclosures of how Radial Matrix has managed to be so successful."

"I'd like to hear."

"Mudger hasn't forgotten his field training. He uses the same methods in business he used in espionage activities. In actual combat. That's why the firm's a whopping success. The man's made his own set of rules and won't allow anyone else to use them. He's got all kinds of links, organized crime and so on. And he's just sitting out there in the countryside running up profits. Recent scheme is diversification. Systems planning has apparently begun to seem dull, He wants to diversify."

There was a silence as they pondered this.

"What you have in Mudger," the Senator said, "is the combination of business drives and lusts and impulses with police techniques, with ultrasophisticated skills of detection, surveillance, extortion, terror and the rest of it."

"It's like what Chaplin said in connection with _Monsieur Verdoux_. The logical extension of business is murder."

Percival shuddered, a bit theatrically, to indicate his feelings on the subject. He leaned forward to freshen her drink. She waved him off, smiling politely. He got some ice cubes from the bucket on the liquor cabinet and carried them back in his left hand, watching them slide into his glass one by one. Streetlights were on outside. No further sound of children playing. Moll watched him drink quietly. He finished one, started another.

"I like tall women," the Senator said.

"So he wants to diversify."

"Let me ask you something."

"Sure."

"Did you ever smoke grass?"

"Did I ever smoke grass? Yes, Senator, in my time."

"I guess you must have."

"Being a woman with a past," she said.

"What I wanted to know. Do you have any with you?"

"Sorry."

"It's something, candidly, I would have liked to have done. Some years ago with my youngest daughter, when she was about twenty or so, I thought we should do this because I knew she smoked, I knew she smoked."

"You thought it would bring you two closer together."

"I really wanted to," he said.

"Where, in the Capitol rotunda?"

He finished his drink and poured another.

"I like tall women."

"I'd be interested in hearing more about this Earl Mudger person. If you want this thing to see print, you ought to tell me everything you know. He wants to diversify, you say."

"I wonder this."

"Yes?"

"What can I call you?" he said. "Candidly."

"Molt will do."

"Moll, can you keep a secret?"

"Sure, try me."

"I was in contact with a man. Never mind details, like name and such. We met at a party. First there was a party. New York gallery opening followed by a party. You know the agenda. The talk: politics, sex, movies and dog shit. You know the kind of thing. Then a second party that branched off from this. A small, small gathering of like-minded people. Very small. We had interests in common."

"Like what?"

"That's not part of the secret. That's a different secret."

"Please go on," she said.

"This man I met. The second party. I found out later he was a systems engineer. Did contract work for Radial Matrix. Strictly on the up-and-up. Not connected with their covert function. But this was learned later. At the party he had something to sell. Something I was interested in buying. We were like-minded people there. Conversation flowed mostly in one direction. And I learned about this man's proposal to sell. So we talked and made arrangements to talk again. In my position, being the position I hold, this was done discreetly, taking enormous precautions. But I did give him a certain phone number where he could reach me. This was done because he refused to be contacted himself. There was total insistence on this. What I also later learned was that in his work for Radial Matrix, strictly on the up-and-up, he and Earl Mudger struck up an acquaintanceship. See, Mudger was interested in making the same buy I was. Diversification. His plan to diversify. So then before we could even talk again the man I talked to is found stone cold dead in some condemned building in New York. But this is just between us. Deep background. Because I trust you."

"I understand."

"So now, I'd be willing to bet, there are two investigations going on. I'm investigating them. And I'd be willing to bet they're investigating me. Blackmail in mind. Purposes of blackmail. So we must tread lightly. Everything we do is subject to extreme cautionary procedures."

She watched his head fall forward. Two minutes later he snapped awake.

"I'm curious about the house, Senator."

"Do you have any grass or not?"

"I love looking at other people's houses."

"I want to smoke grass with a tall woman."

"Show me around, why don't you?"

"If I show you around, we have to go to the bedroom. You have to be shown the bedroom just as much as other rooms. All rooms count the same in a house when it's being shown."

"Show me the bedroom, Senator."

"Call me Lloyd," he said.

He struggled to his feet and held out his right hand. She took it and allowed him to lead her up a short staircase. At the top of the stairs he fell down. He got up, with her help, and then headed into the bedroom, where he fell again. She watched him crawl toward the king-size canopy bed.

"Where's your housekeeper? Don't senators have housekeepers? Some little old granny to button the trap door in your pajamas."

"Gave her the night off."

"Part of your seduction scheme, was it? Jesus, Lloyd, too bad. All that trouble for nothing."

"It's all lies. I repeat. We never had this talk."

She helped him up on the bed and waited until his breathing grew steady and he passed beyond the outer edges of sleep. Then she went down the hail and turned left, interested in finding the easternmost end of the house, the surface that abutted the brown frame structure next door.

The walls here were lined with antique sconces and turn-of-the-century handbills and steamship prints. She examined three small rooms. In the last of these were two banister-back chairs, a spinning wheel and a Queen Anne writing table. Moli noted the position of the fireplace. East wall. The screen was not in place before the open recess. It was leaning against one of the chairs.

Cleanest fireplace she'd ever seen. She moved closer, bending to inspect. It wasn't a working fireplace. No flue. Nothing but solid brick above. She leaned further into the recess. The back section was hardwood. Probing in the dimness, she touched a small latch. When she lifted it and applied pressure, the section swung open. A priest's hole. She moved through hunched way over, not actually crawling. Immediate sense of confinement. Near-total darkness.

This constricting space ended after she'd moved forward fifteen feet. Standing full length she felt along the walls on either side. Her hand found a dimmer-switch and she eased it out and turned it about ninety degrees.

She found she was standing on a grillwork balcony overlooking an enormous room of Mediterranean design. She walked down a closed staircase lined with stained glass panels, abstract. The floor below was parquet with a centered rectangle of peacock tiles. There were large tropical plants.

On the walls were perhaps fifty-five paintings. Pieces of sculpture stood among the plants. There were small displays of pottery, jewelry and china. A stone fountain depicted a woman on her knees before an aroused warrior. Mounted in a tempered glass segment of one wall was a bronze medallion scene of Greek courtesans. There was a large bronze on the tiled rectangle: two men, a woman.

Moll moved first along the walls, looking at the paintings and drawings. Very nice, most of them, all labeled. Icart. Hokusai. Picasso. Baithus. Dali. The Kangra school. Botero with his neckless immensities. Egon Schiele with his unloved nudes. Hans Beilmer. Tom Wesselmann. Clara Tice.

She crossed the floor several times, studying the sculptures, the pottery, the section of hand-carved choir stall-naked woman with gargoyles. She realized there were no doors or windows. He'd had the whole house sealed from the inside, all openings bricked and plastered over. Portable humidifiers for the plants. Elaborate lighting system. The only way in or out was through the fireplace in the "real" house.

Her camera case was in the car. She debated getting it. Now that she'd found the collection she didn't know what to do about it. Maybe Grace Delaney was right. It lacked ramifications. It wasn't political. It was strictly private, isolated from the schemes and intricacies. She was inclined to let the Senator win his point. Radial Matrix was the story here.

On another level she was curiously indifferent to the objects around her. This was despite their high quality, the dramatic space, the secrecy of the whole setup, the handsome trappings, the subject matter itself. The strongest thing she felt was a sense of the work's innate limitations. She recalled what Lightborne had said about old and new forms. The modern sensibility had been instructed by a different kind of code. Movement. The image had to move.

From his window Selvy could see a colorless strip of the Anacostia River. He hadn't shaved in two and a half days, the first time this had happened since his counterinsurgency stint at Marathon Mines in southwest Texas, a training base for paramilitary elements of various intelligence units and for the secret police of friendly foreign governments.

Shaving was an emblem of rigor, the severity of the double life. Shaving. Proper maintenance of old combat gear. Seats on the aisle in planes and trains. Sex with married women only. These were personal quirks mostly, aspects of his psychic guide to survival.

He'd broken the sex rule and now he had nearly three days' growth. But the routine still applied. The routine in one sense was his physical movement between New York and Washington, and the set pieces of procedure, the subroutines, that were part of this travel. In a larger context the routine was a mind set, all those mechanically performed operations of the intellect that accompanied this line of work. You made connection-A but allowed connection-B to elude you. You felt free to question phase-i of a given operation but deadened yourself to the implications of phase-2. You used expressions that contained interchangeable words.

The routine was how your mind had come to work; which areas you avoided; the person you'd become.

He'd known from the beginning that Christoph Ludecke was a systems engineer. When the break developed-Senator linked to transvestite-the dead man's occupation was among the first things looked into.

He'd also known that systems planning was the cover Radial Matrix used in its role as funding mechanism for covert operations. Obviously. Radial Matrix-an abstraction personified by Lomax, his sole contact-was the entity he worked for.

The connection was unexpected. It didn't fit the known world as recently constructed. It was a peculiar element in a series of events otherwise joined in explainable ways.

This was where the routine was important. He stuck to the routine. The routine enabled him mentally to bury this queer bit of intelligence, Ludecke and Radial Matrix, a conjunction of interests that could only lead to areas he wasn't privileged, or competent, to enter. He wasn't a detective, after all. He didn't build models of theoretical events surrounding a criminal act. Nor did he concern himself with policy.

Ludecke was linked to the Senator. It wasn't within Selvy's purview to meditate on additional links, even when they might pertain to his own ultimate sustenance. Especially then. This was why the routine existed.

In his right hand, as he stood looking out the window at nothing in particular, was the.41 magnum, loaded with expandable bullets. Selvy's regard for the implements of an operational mode became a virtual passion where handguns were involved. He went regularly to the range to work on sight alignment and trigger control. He dry-fired, he used live rounds. He practiced grip and finger positions. He worked on various steadying exercises.

This, too, was the routine.

He kept the chambers clean. He took precautions against fouled bores and corrosion. He owned any number of lubricants, brushes, swabs, preservers, conditioners, degreasers and removers.

To Selvy, guns and their parts amounted to an inventory of personal worth. He controlled the weapon, his reflexes and judgment. Maintaining the parts and knowing the gun's special characteristics were ways of demonstrating involvement in his own well-being.

These pieces, laid out at his fingertips, resembled nothing more than routine hardware. Still, there was order in this grouping; distinct precision. He could see how each surface was designed to adapt to at least one other surface. The interrelationships accumulated and spread. Things fit.

Where the routine prevented Selvy from seeking human links, it prompted him to study the interactions within mechanisms.

At the range he worked on stance, breath control, eye focus. The idea was to build almost a second self. Someone smarter and more detached. Do this perfectly and you've developed a new standard for times of danger and stress. He stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the proposed line of fire. He tried to avoid locking his elbow. He fired, focusing his master eye, the right eye in his case, on the gun's front sight.

The handgun is intimate. A functional accessory. You wear it. It fits you or doesn't, and vice versa.

He found it reassuring to handle the parts, to know their names and understand their functions. Attention to detail is a form of vigilance. There were no shadings in his willingness to use the stopping power at his disposal. This was very clear, this resolve. It affirmed his bond to the weapon itself.

Evening. The room was dark. He didn't move from the window to turn on a light.

Sex with an unmarried woman. Two and a half days without a shave. Minor lapses. He saw the humor in his idiosyncrasies. The routine still applied. That's what mattered most. The routine applied to the extent where he didn't actively speculate on who that might have been who was standing in the doorway of that run-down bar directing automatic fire across the room, or what the reasoning behind it was, or who was supposed to get hit.

In a storeroom on H Street, Moll Robbins went through _Running Dog's_ files, such as they were, on Earl Mudger.

From bases in Japan he led strikes by F-84Es against selected enemy targets in Korea. These strikes were operational tests of refueling procedures as much as combat missions. He also coached the football team, 116th Fighter-Bomber Wing.

Still in Korea he resigned his commission and spent a year in special paramilitary programs run by Air Force Intelligence, an open-ended term of duty.

He left to return to civilian life as Vice-President, Distribution, Process Management Systems, a firm with headquarters in Oklahoma City.

Three years later he appeared as chief training officer at Marathon Mines, an abandoned silver mining site in rough country north of the Rio Grande, where antiguerrilla specialists taught survival techniques and conducted war games.

In Laos he was a contract officer attached to Air America during operations secretly directed by the CIA.

In Vietnam, still on a contract basis, he recruited and directed CT teams against the Vietcong. Later he helped set up a network of provincial interrogation centers, where Vietcong suspects were tortured. Then he ran a cover operation in Saigon, hiring mercenaries for special operations.

It was while Mudger was on loan to Special Forces for unknown duties that he became something of a legend in Vietnam. Apparently he established a feudal barony complete with loyal ARVN soldiers (loyal to him, not the government) as well as pimps, black marketeers, shoeshine boys, war refugees, bar girls, deserters, pickpockets and others. It was suspected to be a drug operation with a thriving sideline in blackmarket piasters. As head, Mudger dispensed land, money, food and other favors.

He also set up a private zoo in the jungle outside a village called Tha Binh. He managed to stock it with tigers, wolves, elephants, peacocks, snakes, leopards, apes, zebras, monkeys, hyenas and hippos.

Virtually all this information Moll found in a single clipping, mdst of it color background for an AP dispatch that detailed Mudger's exploits during the fall of Saigon. Waving a Browning automatic he commandeered a C-123 transport, rigged for defoliation, and crammed most of his people aboard, along with seventeen of his animals, on the day before the city fell.

Lomax put his feet up on the jump seat. He opened his briefcase and took out a red folder.

THE DORISH REPORT

A confidential reporting service

He turned to the first page and began reading.

Sir:

An investigation has been conducted pursuant to your request and authorization concerning Grace B. Delaney, Managing Editor, Running Dog magazine, a property of RD Publications, which person resides at 116 East 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10021, in order to ascertain Grace B. Delaney's background, reputation and responsibility. The results of our investigation are set forth below under headings designed to facilitate your perusal and analysis.

The headings were: Identification, Background, Personal Relations, Credit, Litigation and Finances. Lomax scanned Personal Relations before any of the others but eventually found Finances to be more to the point. Tax matters in particular.

At the bottom of the last page was a statement in italics:

_This report is made available to you at your express request, as you have employed us for that purpose. It is a privileged and confidential communication, and the in form.ation contained herein is not to be disclosed to others, verbally or otherwise_.

It concluded: The Dorish Report, Investigative Confidentiality for the Special Needs of the Seventies.

Trying to hail a cab on H Street, Moll watched the black limousine gradually come to a stop in front of her. The driver was square-jawed, dark suit and cap. The man sitting in the rear, opening the door toward her, was wearing sports clothes and moccasins. He smiled pleasantly.

"Come on, I'll take you."

"Where?"

Shrug.

"To the Senator," she said. "That it?"

Smile.

"The Senator wants to apologize, does he?"

Smile.

"I'll have to take a raincheck," she said. "Tell him next time."

"No rainchecks. We don't give rainchecks."

"Tell him thanks anyway."

"It's urgent," the man said.

His face didn't quite indicate that. The smile was still there but only technically, no longer bearing traces of pleasantness. But it wasn't urgency that had replaced it. Just impatience, she thought. Still, the strangeness of it kept her from walking away. She was feeling a little disassociated. Limousine, driver, Senate aide. If Percival wanted to talk to her, it would be foolish, considering the revelations of the night before, to put him off.

She got into the car, sorting a number of thoughts at once. She noticed they were heading west on K Street. The man in sports clothes lit a cigarette.

"He's at his Georgetown place, is he?"

The man patted his sideburns, one at a time.

"Taking some time off, is he, from his onerous duties on the Hill?"

They passed Washington Circle and were on a freeway skirting the channel. They turned onto a bridge approach and Moll twisted in her seat and looked out the back window, realizing that was Georgetown they'd just left behind.

She began reading road signs aloud, not knowing quite why. At a certain bend in the road, sunlight filled the interior of the car and when she glanced down at the material covering the back seat she saw it was covered with dog hair.

Soon they were passing Falls Church and heading into intermittent countryside, fields of black Angus grazing. The car slowed occasionally for extended stretches of motels, plant nurseries, supermarkets, auto and truck dealerships. Streams and brooks were called runs here. Roadside shops advertised Civil War relics.

2

Lightborne wore a hat with a little feather stuck in the band. It was a gift from one of his customers, who thought it would go well with his Norfolk jacket. He wore the hat just this one time, an after-dinner stroll through the gallery district. It made him feel like a veteran sportswriter covering the Army-Navy game on a clear and brisk November day. Or like a man out for a Sunday drive in his Buick Roadmaster in the year 1957.

The phone was ringing when he got back to the gallery. It was Richie Armbrister, the twenty-two-year-old smut merchant, calling from a special hookup aboard his customized DC-9, which had just landed at JFK.

"I'm back from Europe, Lightborne. We came down in the dark. I hate nighttime landings."

That squeaky voice sent little tremors rippling through Lightborne's nerve apparatus.

"Hear that music? That's my disco. People are dancing. They danced right through the landing. Listen, I want to ask. Is it still warm? Full-length, I mean. The business you mentioned. How hot's the trail?"

"I'd say very warm, Richie, without fear of overstating."

"Good, listen, we'll talk. I'm coming over there. It's a layover, for maintenance. I definitely want to explore this thing. The more I talk to people, the more I hear about profit potentials with first-run. I made new connections in the European capitals. Features. They're feature-crazy. Exhibitors are hollering for more product. So I think I want to get my toe in the water, Lightborne. Eventually distribute worldwide maybe."

These last remarks Richie delivered in a subdued and earnest manner. An encouraging development. Lightborne was heartened.

"Betty's Azalea Ranch," Moll said.

The man read a newspaper.

"Topside Pool Supplies."

About a hundred yards beyond the Centreville Free Will Baptist Church, the limousine turned into an unmarked dirt road. Half a mile in, they passed a one-story L-shaped building, both wings very long, no landscaping out front. Farther on, maybe two miles, the car stopped in a grove of scarlet oaks near a large stone house. Two Shetland ponies stood in a split-rail cedar corral. There was a pond to the side of the house and some stables beyond that.

They got out of the car. Molt watched a small helicopter setting down in a field nearby. Two men hopped out, both wearing skin-tight jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses and Stetsons. They walked toward the back of the stone house as the helicopter slowly rose, slanting now toward the deep woods in the distance. The men were Orientals, she was quite sure, looking boyish in those narrow pants and small-scale western hats.

Earl Mudger stood in the doorway. Molt was aware her escort had paused, leaving her to approach the house alone. Mudger wore a blacksmith's apron and heavy-duty gloves. He was a thickset man with curly hair trimmed close, with ashblond eyebrows and a strong jaw, slightly jutting-the picture of a man who wouldn't yield easily to aging. His eyes were a fine silky blue. He had a bent nose, broadly columned neck and something of a surfer's numinous gleam-his eyes and hair and brows shining just a bit, as though bleached by the elements.

She followed him to a wicker table set under an oak tree. He took off his gloves and apron and tossed them onto one of the extra chairs. An old woman, an Oriental, brought out lemonade and some cookies. Moll could tell Mudger fancied himself a charmer. Tough but winsome. She set her face to Executive Chill.

"Let's us talk some."

"Fine," she said.

"Fact number one, everything Percival told you last night was exaggerated by a factor of seven."

"What did he tell me last night?"

"I can replay it for you any time, Fact number two, it doesn't matter anymore because I'm no longer involved with PAC/ORD, or Radial Matrix, or Lloyd Percival. Born free, that's me. No more attachments. I'm shaking loose. Time to retire."

"A life of meditation," she said.

"Fact number three, you've got the alliances all mixed up, assuming you believe what the Senator's been telling you. Did you ever wonder how Percival's select committee gets their input? Lomax is Percival's man. Lomax is the source of everything the committee knows."

"Who is Lomax?"

"Man in the limousine."

"I've mistaken him twice for the Senator's man. Once in New York, I _think_. Now here."

"You weren't mistaken," Mudger said. "Loyalties are so interwoven, the thing's a game. The Senator and PAC/ORD aren't nearly the antagonists the public believes them to be. They talk all the time. They make deals, they buy people, they sell favors. I doubt if Lomax knows whether he works for PAC/ORD or Lloyd Percival, ultimately. You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what's happening. But they allow it. That's the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies."

"I assume you feed Lomax false information."

"Tell you what," he said. "Sometimes this is so much fun, I'd do it for nothing."

"Who is Glen Selvy?"

"No idea."

"Howard Glen Selvy?"

"Not a leaf stirs."

"Bullshit," she said.

"I like your smile."

"I'm not smiling."

"I thought that was a smile. I mistook that for a smile. Have some lemonade, why don't you?"

"These are Vietnamese, these people you've got here?"

"We have some Vietnamese here, definitely."

"That you got out just in time."

"I've had hairier moments. So have they. Compared to the life most of these people have had, getting out of Saigon was on the level of an escapade."

" Ho Chi Minh City," she said.

"Yeah, Ho Chi Minh City. A lark with firecrackers."

Moll nibbled on a cookie and drank some lemonade. She couldn't shake the feeling she'd crossed an invisible frontier into another way of life. The rules were different here. Sitting in the shade. White wicker and lemonade. Ponies motionless in their small corral.

"Back that way along the road," she said. "Radial Matrix?"

"Right."

"Thriving, by all accounts."

"Systems. It's one of the areas we still excel in."

"'We' meaning Americans."

"Nothing but,"

"In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?"

"We did some of that, We were a link, As I say, I've unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing's geared to electronics. There's a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There's a general sponginess, a lack of conviction."

"You had your own zoo in Vietnam,"

"Checking up on me."

"A little," she said.

"My pride and joy, that zoo. We got to the point where we were making exchanges with real zoos halfway around the world. We had an animal dealer from Michigan come all the way out to see our operation. I had more gibbons than I could use. I was laying off gibbons the way bookmakers lay off excess bets. I had this rare type lynx, Eurasian, almost extinct, this one variety, and we bred it successfully in captivity. I tell you what, that made my war."

"Victory after all."

"We won far's I'm concerned. Revise the texts."

"What sort of retirement plans-forgive the skeptical look,"

"Domestic bliss," he said. "My wife's off having a baby, matter of fact."

"Nice."

"I'm fifty-two years old."

"Interesting."

"Wife number three."

"Not bad."

"She's a gook," Mudger said.

Apron and gloves. Helicopter landing in a field. She recalled what Percival had said before his sour mash whisky slowed him to a crawl. One set of rules. Mudger's. Nobody else gets to use them. Vietnamese in cowboy hats.

"Not that I don't have something to fall back on," he said.

"Aside from domestic bliss."

"I've got a shop in the basement. Sometimes I go down there and work half the night. Do a little planing, a little sanding. Lock things in vises. It's good for the soul. Punch holes in metal, do a little buffing. So anyway I got to fooling around with a small machine of my own devising that tests the hardness and content of steel. Machines that size do hardness alone, normally. I can tell you high carbon, low carbon, how much nickel or manganese. Is this boring?"

"Sort of."

"The machine has a thing called a diamond tip penetrator. I trademarked it as the Mudger tip."

"A little better," she said.

"I'm building a large shop about twenty miles south of here. If things work out, I'll be filling contracts for Radial Matrix."

She watched him light up a little at the irony of that.

"This is what's called negotiating a termination," he said.

He laughed, eyes not leaving her face. She judged him the kind of man deeply pleased by the appreciation of others. He would be a studier of faces, eager to gauge people's reactions to things he said. Robust men were always like this.

"It's real work," he said. "Doesn't involve secret transmitters, hot mikes, all the rest, Like for instance"-she watched his face shade with amusernent-"I can let you hear dialogue and other noises pertaining to last night's amorous activities."

"Involving whom?"

"You and the Senator, of course."

"Never happened. Sorry to disappoint."

"It doesn't necessarily have to happen," Mudger said. "All we need's your voice and his, which we have. The rest is purely technical."

"You make it happen."

"Sure."

"In this case has it already happened or is it pending?"

"I don't know. Lomax would know."

"Being the Senator's man, Lomax might push the wrong button. Scramble the voices beyond recognition. Or erase the tapes."

"It's a little more complicated than that."

"You've got me thinking I've done something wrong."

Mudger seemed to grow serious. He sat sideways in his chair, left arm extended, resting on the table, his right arm hanging over the back of the chair.

"When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals," he said. "Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can't escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It's a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we're guilty, then we're guilty. But it goes even deeper doesn't it? It's the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we're committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at this widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That's enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there's no one to explain it to us."

That night Mudger stood behind the bar in his living room, mixing himself a drink. He put his glass down on the red folder, the Dorish Report. Lomax sat near the French doors, looking at a magazine. The doors were open, revealing a small Buddhist shrine in the garden beyond the patio.

"Been meaning to ask."

"What's that, Earl?"

"Why was the subject carrying a gun?"

"I don't know."

"He's over there in Percival's office, reading, isn't he? Or hanging around some art gallery. I'd like for you to tell me why he's carrying a gun."

"Earl, he shouldn't have been."

"Is he some kind of cowboy? What is he, a junior G-man? Because I thought we trained people better than that."

"It was contrary to procedure."

Mudger was sitting at the bar, his back to Lomax.

"This business with guns. He's, what, some kind of sportsman? Shoots fucking bear with a handgun?"

"He was on the Lower East Side. Maybe he thought it was dangerous."

"He was right, it turned out."

They both laughed.

"Who'd you press into service?" Lomax said.

"I called Talerico. He's in Canada these days. We've done things for each other before. Always worked out. Tal said he'd see what he could do."

"That's what he did?"

"He got some guy from Buffalo. His old jurisdiction. Supposed to be a weapons expert. Famous for midnight raids on National Guard armories."

"Who?"

"Augie the Mouse."

They both laughed.

"So Augie goes in there wailing," Mudger said. "He's got his fancy little two-pound Kevlar vest. He's got yellow glasses and ear protectors. He's wearing everything but platform shoes. And he's wailing, he's got this AR-18 and he's strafing the place, he's busting it up."

"What happens, he gets hit."

"He gets hit but doesn't know it. When he gets home he takes off his armor and sees this little hole in it. So he starts feeling his chest, his belly. He tells his driver maybe it got deflected into his lungs. He starts coughing and spitting, looking for blood. Finally his driver shakes out the vest and this small lead mushroom hits the floor. Which isn't the worst of it. Ignorance of technique. The worst of it is that he's supposed to isolate the subject before going to work. The subject's supposed to be a-lone. Not a sin-gle wit-ness in sight."

"You got the Saint Valentine's Day massacre."

"Jerk-off. I told Talerico. Where'd you find this jerk-off?"

"Augie the Mouse."

Mudger laughed, hitting the bar with the palm of his hand.

"Tell you what, it was my fault. Ought to have used different people."

"Such as?"

"_Tieu to dac cong_."

"That's not your average man in the street they'll be dealing with," Lomax said. "I have to tell you I felt a little surge of pride or satisfaction or what-have-you when I got word he walked out of the bar without a mark on him. Plus putting a bullet in the Mouse. I felt gratified, Earl, truth be known. Certain amount of my own time and effort invested there. This is the best penetration I've run, frankly. I don't think your adjusters will find this is just another day's work."

Mudger shrugged. The phone at his elbow rang. He picked it up, listened a while, said something, listened some more. Lomax went out on the patio. It was a warm night. He stood in the garden watching Mudger put down the phone and say something over his shoulder at the same time. Lomax walked back into the room, belatedly realizing what it was Mudger had said.

"Congratulations, Earl."

"Where's your glass? We'll have another drink."

"How's Tran Le doing?"

"She's fine. She's great. Never better."

"I couldn't touch another drop, honestly."

"An eight-pounder," Mudger said over his shoulder.

"What is it, a fish?"

"Where's your glass?"

"Maybe just a wee snort, to mark the occasion."

"Where's your fucking glass?" Mudger said.

Lightborne stepped off the train and walked through a tunnel under the tracks. On the other side he entered the depot. Klara Ludecke was sitting on a bench near the newsstand. In her lap, for purposes of identification, was a copy of _Running Dog_ magazine. Lightborne's spur-of-the-moment idea.

He nodded and she followed him back out. Early evening. They walked toward the underground passageway he'd just come out of. The sole on Lightborne's right shoe started flapping.

"I'm authorized," he said, "to hand over the agreed sum in cash once the film is in my hands."

"I'll be happy to see it go."

"Can I assume it was your husband who gave you my name?"

"My husband gave me three things. He gave me your name. He gave me an address in Aachen. And he ye me the key to a storage vault located at that address."

In the passageway Lightborne lowered his voice, wary of the effects of echo.

"Have you seen the footage?"

"He wanted me to have nothing to do with it."

"Did he tell you anything about it at all?"

"He only told me Berlin, under the Reich Chancellery, during the Russian shelling."

On the opposite platform the flapping sole began to annoy Lightborne, and he suggested they sit for a while on one of the plastic benches.

"And so the film has been in a vault in Germany all these years."

"Air-conditioned storage vault," she said. "To preserve it properly."

"I myself first heard of the item some thirty years ago."

"When my husband was killed I knew that was the reason. He refused to sell at their price. At first they agreed on a price and when the screening was to be. Then Christoph demanded half payment in advance. This was turned down and he no longer wanted to talk with them. They put pressure in so many ways. He still refused. We see what happened."

"Whose price?" Lightborne said. "Who put pressure?"

"I don't think you want to know."

"Do you know?"

The train from New York went roaring by, knocking them back a little in their seats, rippling the pages of the magazine she held once more in her lap.

"I know the name of a company in Virginia. I insisted to tell the police there is something to find there. They treated me as though I were a child. Sex crime. Obviously it could be nothing else. They were almost too embarrassed to discuss it with me. Only sex, it could be. The things sex killers do. One knife wound in the body, I reminded them. Where is the mutilation, the mess? So exact, this sex killer? No, no, they tell me. He picked up the wrong fellow. It happens all the time."

Another train approached, heading south. They went down the steps near the taxi shack, fleeing the vibration and noise, and ended up strolling in little circles in the parking lot.

"After Christoph was buried, I went to Germany. It was done half in rage. I wanted the film, to possess it myself. I thought to own it would make my husband real again. As though it would give me power. As though the murderers would be taunted. Having it in my hands would make everything real. He died for something. Here it is. This round container with straps. Now I understand. Of course," she said, "I've calmed down since then. Now I only think to sell it. I want to be paid for my husband's death."

"Yes, and it's much, much better to conduct this kind of transaction in an atmosphere of mutual composure."

She laughed wryly.

"All I want now is to see the last of it. They've put their listening devices in my house, they've broken in when I was not at home, they've made phone calls at all hours. I'm sick of this business. Deeply ashamed and disgusted. I know I'll be cheated out of the movie's true value. Still, I want to be rid of it as soon as possible."

"There's no question of cheating," Lightborne said. "My client doesn't operate that way. Once you hand over the film, you'll be given a transferral fee. Then my client's technical people will check to see just what we have. Is it a camera original, the master, as I've been hearing? Can we make a workprint for editing? Can we correct whatever defects? There's a dozen questions like this, most beyond my own scope. If there's no soundtrack, can we add one? What about final printing?"

"I only know Berlin, the Reich Chancellery, when the Russians shelled the city."

"Then of course the ultimate question. The content itself. What is actually on film. Once this is looked into, you and I can discuss further monetary installments."

"I know I'll be cheated. It doesn't matter. As long as you take it away."

They crossed the street and walked slowly past a row of shops. Lightborne went into a paint store, just closing for the day, and asked if he might borrow a rubber band. He looped it twice over his right shoe to keep the sole from flapping. Then he and Klara Ludecke went back through the tunnel to the depot and sat on the bench near the newsstand.

"There is a single container," she said. "It's quite large, metallic. I think steel. I don't know how many reels are inside. Meet me on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Two weeks from today, noon, south side of the street. I'll place the object in your hands."

"Where, exactly, on the south side of the street?"

"Walk up and down. I'll find you."

"I'd like to ask," Lightborne said. "If you know anything about the history behind all this, I'd be interested in hearing."

"You're interested in the Nazis?"

"In the period, the era. The great collapse. People in overcoats listening to Bruckner. Hitler handing out vials of poison."

"This is theatrical, the swastika banners, the floodlights."

"The wedding banquet," he said. "The execution of Fegelein in the garden. The burial of the wolf hound and her pups."

"You respond to the operatic quality, the great flames."

"Yes, the Russian guns in the distance, the strange celebration in the bunker when they mistakenly thought Hitler was about to kill himself."

"The last meal was spaghetti," she said.

The New York train pulled in, the 7:13. Lightborne decided he was sufficiently interested in the circumstances surrounding the movie to wait for the next train, assuming she could tell him something.

"Christoph's father was an officer with a tank unit that defended against the Russian advance on the Oder."

"Marshall Rokossovsky, maybe."

"I was fond of him. Heinz Ludecke. A shy, humorous man. In the war he had a cousin-I don't know his name. He was a stenographer attached to the Führerbunker in Berlin. The main task of this cousin was to record conversations between Hitler and Goebbels."

"Yes, they liked to reminisce," Lightborne said.

"In the confusion at the end, Heinz was taken prisoner by the Russians but managed to escape with false papers. Eventually he ended up in a British camp for refugees and foreign workers. Here he came across his cousin, who carried Belgian papers and a parcel which he obviously regarded with the greatest concern. It seems Hitler's valet had been ordered to burn all of the Führer's possessions and effects. This parcel alone had been smuggled out of the bunker by Heinz's cousin and he insisted that Heinz take possession of it on the theory that he was less vulnerable to interrogation and arrest."

"They didn't burn his portrait of Frederick the Great," Lightborne said. "He gave specific orders the portrait was to be spared."

"You hardly need me, Mr. Lightborne."

"I'm sorry, go on."

"It might be best if you produced your own movie."

"Please continue, Mrs. Ludecke."

"Heinz managed to resume a more or less normal life. His cousin vanished completely, never to be seen again, as in a fairy tale. Of course all this I learned from my husband. Whether or not Heinz ever viewed the film, even Christoph never found out. When Heinz died, not so long ago, Christoph went to Germany and took possession of the movie, something he could not do while his father was alive because Heinz would not relinquish it."

"Why didn't he destroy it, I wonder."

"He was devoted to Hitler, and remained so all his life. If he saw what was on the film and if it is the filth some people believe it to be, I'm quite sure he would have destroyed it. Most likely he never saw the movie. I don't know. Perhaps there's another answer. The film itself may provide the answer. Or it may do nothing of the kind. In any case it was after my husband acquired the film that he started the fresh rumors of its existence."

"To heat up the market."

"To create a fever, yes. Not the happiest of strategies, was it?"

"A sad business," Lightborne said with feeling.

"You know the circumstances?"

"Merely in outline."

"He was wearing my clothes when he was killed."

"To avoid detection. Those people were putting pressure."

"It was something he did from time to time."

"A preference."

"He would go into the city."

"I see."

"He said it was only the clothes. He didn't have relations with men, he said."

"Was he telling the truth?"

"I don't know," she said. "They knew him in that district. Truck drivers near the packing plants. They called him the Red Queen, for the dresses he wore, always red, my dresses. I knew. I permitted it."

Lightborne sensed he was supposed to be touched by this. People with their enlightened attitudes. The best he could do was nod his head slowly, suggesting thoughtful consideration. Good time to change the subject.

"I'm forced to wonder, Mrs. Ludecke. Why a two-week wait before you hand over the container? Frankly I'd hoped to have it in my hands today or tomorrow."

"I'm considering another offer."

Lightborne grinned, a nervous reflex.

"Lovely," he said. "All this talk about being so eager to get rid of it. That's wonderful."

"I had to allow the other party some time. The other party asked for time. It was common courtesy."

"Common courtesy, that's wonderful. I'm always charmed by alliteration. The child in me."

She seemed amused by her own bold tactics. Caught in the midst of all these vortical energies, she'd found, at least for the moment, an approximation of calm, or perhaps it was objectivity, a view of herself uninfluenced by tragic emotion.

"It was funny about Heinz's cousin," she said. "Heinz said that people in the British camp asked his cousin over and over and over again: 'What was Hitler really like?'"

3

Selvy sat on the roof of his building, eating a peach. There was a warm breeze from the west, where the sun hung on a tremulous rim, all ruddle and blood. When the metal door began swinging open, twenty yards away, he moved the peach to his left hand. It was Lomax, in his polyester knit trousers and white belt and shoes, trailed by three kids who lived in the building.

"How do I get rid of them?"

They followed him to the ledge where Selvy sat.

"What you supposed to be doing here?" one kid said.

"This ours, white."

The smallest kid rubbed his sneaker against the side of Lomax's shoe, scuffing it slightly.

"They followed me up four flights," Lomax said.

"The limo's been stripped by now," Selvy told him. "Your driver's long gone."

"I came in a cab."

"What is it, unofficial visit?"

"How long have you lived here? Have you lived here all this time? Why don't you live where everybody else lives?"

All this time the kids had been crowding around Lomax, baiting him, ridiculing his clothes. Selvy noticed he was sweating, really irritated. The small one scuffed his other shoe. Selvy watched him clench his fists. He was very tense. He didn't know what to do.

"It getting dark, white."

"You're being where you don't live, man, and it getting dark."

"Pizz on you, white."

The small one scuffed his shoe again. One of the others ran his hand along the top of the ledge, coming away with ash and tar. He moved in now, feinting with the other hand, then reaching out to smudge Lomax's tartan slacks, a move half aggressive, half defensive, the kid drawing away quickly, his action comically stylized, head bobbing. Lomax pulled a Walther automatic out of the waistband holster under his jacket. He was shouting, waving the gun in their faces. They backed off slowly, eyes white in the dimness. The small one chewed gum. They didn't know whether to be impressed or scared. They seemed to believe Lomax. He was riled enough to start shooting. As they got close to the door they relaxed a little. A trace of swagger crept back into their style. They went through the door strutting a little, shaking their asses.

Lomax was still shouting, calling them names. Selvy watched him holster the gun, his hand trembling a bit. He quieted down finally and took out a handkerchief and spat into it a few times. Then he put his right foot up on the ledge and began cleaning the scuff marks off his shoe. Selvy finished eating and tossed the peach pit over his shoulder into the air shaft.

On the 8:13 heading back to Grand Central, Lightborne considered two aspects of the situation. First, whoever held the footage had to contend with an element of danger. Second, Christoph Ludecke tried to sell the thing outright-half payment up front-without allowing the buyers an advance screening. Aside from being naïve, this attempt indicated that the movie wasn't quite the commodity it was rumored to be. Ludecke wanted to get what he could and disappear. It also indicated there were huge sums involved.

A little later that evening Lightborne's phone rang. The man at the other end didn't identify himself by name.

"You're acquainted with Glen Selvy."

"Yes," Lightborne said.

"He's been acting as my representative."

"You collect."

"That's right," the man said. "And Glen told me recently you might have an unusual item to offer."

"Certain commitments have been made."

"But the matter hasn't actually been settled."

"Depends on interpretation," Lightborne said.

"I gather the widow is proving difficult. She and I have talked. My problem is that I'm not in a position to verify the item's value. I need someone to handle details. Of course if you're already acting on behalf of another collector, we've got nothing to discuss."

"It might be I could work something out," Lightborne said. "How do I reach you?"

"You don't."

"Why not let Selvy handle it?"

"I don't know where he is. He hasn't shown his face for days. Doesn't answer his phone."

"Well, then."

"She wants to hear from me."

"There's the matter of my own fee," Lightborne said. "I'm happy to mediate, to bring people together, to work out touchy details. But this is turning into an operation where the utmost delicacy is required. The risks involved are considerably more than I'm normally willing to expose myself to."

"You want adequate recompense."

As they bandied vague phrases, Lightborne realized why the voice at the other end sounded so neutral, so free of cadence, ornament or regional flavor. The man had been trying all along to disguise it. Lightborne was tempted to point out that he'd always had a pretty fair idea as to the identity of Selvy's principal. It was a small world, smut, and even those who spent time in the more affluent haunts were sooner or later known to all the rest, the marginal drudges, eking out their mean existence.

"History is so comforting," he told the man. "Isn't this why people collect? To own a fragment of the tangible past. Life is fleeting, and we seek consolation in durable things."

This was Lightborne's speech to new collectors. Whether or not it applied to such an object as a ribbon of film was a question that didn't engage his interest right now.

"Pretty sunset," Lomax said.

"Isn't it, yes."

"Why don't you live where everybody else lives?"

"Get to the point."

Lomax offered him a cigarette.

"You're being referred to as the subject."

"An adjustment's in progress then."

"They want to adjust, definitely."

"Frankie's Tropical Bar."

"Right," Lomax said. "Someone from out of town. Some jerk-off. You parked one in his vest, case you didn't know."

"The weapon was firing _him_."

"Right, that's right, a regular jerk-off."

"Why is it felt, Lomax, that I rank as a subject?"

"Call me by my first name."

"I don't know your first name."

"Arthur."

"What's behind the adjustment?" Selvy said.

"You first of all made an arrangement with Ludecke's widow. You and she are trying to market the Berlin film together."

"Joke."

"Her house was miked. You deactivated the damn thing. It was felt in some quarters this was highly incriminating."

"It never occurred to me, frankly, it was one of our devices. No reason I know of for us to be listening. If we're listening, Arthur, why don't I know about it? Find a bug, you ought to squash it."

"It wasn't appreciated, tampering with audio surveillance. The feeling in this outfit concerning devices of any kind is close to religious. You ought to know that."

"What else?" Selvy said.

"Secondly, your involvement with _Running Dog_ was taken into account."

"Elaborate."

"That woman you've been seeing. What's to elaborate?"

"You know, it's interesting, the first thought I had that night was that she was the subject. Her article on Percival. Then I thought, Christ this is insane. No way. I'm half hallucinating this thing. They wouldn't come down that hard. Insane, totally."

"You were the subject," Lomax said. "Of course it wasn't supposed to happen that way. You were supposed to be alone. And you were supposed to be unarmed. But you were holding. Why were you holding? There's no justification for that."

"I mean shit, Arthur, you nearly shot three kids just now. Do you need a gun, your job?"

"It's the business, I guess."

"The business."

"Or maybe we're just gun-totin' folks."

Selvy waited for Lomax to stop chuckling.

"We go to bed."

"You go to bed," Lomax said. "Thanks for your candor."

"But that doesn't involve me with the magazine."

"Our information's different. Our information's that you were pointing Robbins in the right direction. I think recent events prove this to be the case. But that's all behind us. I came on my own, by cab, to let you know they want to adjust, period."

"What recent events?"

"She found the collection, Robbins."

"Not with my help," Selvy said. "Not with any help from me.

"That annex sensor you rigged in the fireplace. The readout indicates that wasn't Percival going through on the night in question. Much lighter person. She was there that night. I can play you the tapes."

"What's my motive?"

"Motive, obvious, sex, clearly."

"Sex, clearly."

"It's been known to happen," Lomax said. "The lady wants to make a name. She's tapping away on her Olivetti. The exposé of the half century. When she hits a dead spot, you fill it in for her. Hump, hump, tap, tap. When she needs a tactical lead, you provide it."

"You said information. Your information's different. But this is speculation, it's gaming."

"Hard information behind it. Granted, they didn't wait for all the input. They tried to adjust a hell of a lot sooner than they should have. But you _were_ Robbins' source, weren't you? So in retrospect it was justified. Technically you can fault them for being premature. It was handled badly. We've been doing that. There's been some 'slippage. I'm frankly concerned."

Selvy was tired of this. It brought things to the surface, or close to it-things he didn't care to know about. Textures, entanglements, riddles, words. It compromised the routine.

"What I came for, ultimately," Lomax said in the midst of a deep breath. "There's a new operation in progress. This time you're looking at something different is my understanding."

"What am I looking at?"

"An assassination team of former ARVN rangers."

"How many?" Selvy said.

"Two in number."

"Carrying what?"

"I'm not sure."

"Been nice chatting," Selvy said.

"They're part of a kind of special project. A pet project. Pulled out of Vietnam at the very end and then brought over here."

"I'm glad to hear they're gainfully employed, the little fuckers."

Lomax stood with hands in pockets, the edges of his sport coat drawn back. There was an alligator stitched on the breast pocket of his knit shirt. A plane banked over the river after takeoff from National. Lomax checked the tar on his pants.

"Want you to know," he said. "I'd like to undo it completely. Whole process."

"Don't."

"I'm thinking of getting out myself. Stand clear for a while. Get a perspective."

"Sure, your dogs, the puppies."

"Buy a place in the country."

"They need room to run," Selvy said.

By midnight he was on Interstate 95 north of Philadelphia. In the back seat of his Toyota were some clothes and a couple of cartons packed with various possessions. He smoked and listened to the radio. Fixed limits and solid dark. After a while he turned off the radio and rolled down his window. The highway was almost empty but a roar filled the interior of the car, an air blast so integral to travel on major routes that he couldn't break it down to component sounds. So much his own car. So much the sparse additional traffic. So much the power of night.

Moll Robbins sat looking into the keys of her typewriter. On the wall to her left was a neon display, bluish white, a smoking gun. At her elbow, which rested on the table before her, was a glass of iced tea and half a cruller. The limp white page in the typewriter was blank.

When she got up and looked through the peephole to find it was Selvy who'd just knocked, she discovered she didn't fully welcome the visit. Something in her resisted his appearance just now. Bad timing, that was all, probably.

"What time is it?"

"I don't know," he said.

"I'm awake, oddly enough."

"I like your robe. It's not your kind of thing, though, is it?"

"The gunfighter. Sit down, I'll get you something. It's not a robe, it's a tea gown. I'm drinking tea."

"I'm drinking whisky," he said.

"What else? The gunfighter's special. NYPD's been looking for you, hill and dale, ever since you rode into the sunset. I get calls regularly. Precinct, homicide, missing persons."

"They know my name?"

"Nope."

"What'd you tell them?"

"You were a pickup. I picked you up. You were too cute to resist."

"Plausible," he said.

"Sure, good girl, except you're not Clark Gable and I'm not Jean Arthur. Any of it begin to make sense to you?"

"Afraid not."

"The police have some leads, apparently."

"Cops don't know shit. Forget cops."

She poured him a drink. He looked drawn and spare and a little dangerous, reminding Molt of the first time he'd turned up at her door. She left the bottle and sat across the room, studying him.

"Something new in here."

"What?" she said.

"Neon."

"Guess I couldn't resist. More flash. Transience and flash. Story of my life. I realize looking around this place that I don't have any furniture in the strict sense. I stack clothes in those modular boxes in the bedroom. I work at a folding table. I have a wall unit. It's just as well, isn't it? If you don't live in a house on your own piece of property, there's no point owning real things. If you're floating in the air, ten-twenty-thirty stories up, might as well live with play objects, shiny balls and ornaments."

"It's a gun. I didn't see at first from this angle. A sixshooter."

"I saw it the day after. Couldn't resist. Also the story of my life. Not being able to resist."

"Resist what?"

"Whatever I don't see clearly."

He gestured toward the typewriter.

"If I'm interrupting, say so."

"I wasn't getting anywhere."

"Where do you want to get?"

She leaned well forward, peering at him, her hands hanging down over her knees, almost as though she was getting ready to slip off the end of the ottoman, an impromptu comic bit.

"Who are you, Selvy?"

He sat back in his chair, an intentional countermotion, a withdrawal, and smiled in deep fatigue, self-deprecatingly. He appeared to be disassociating himself from whatever significance the question by its nature ascribed to him.

"Who is Earl Mudger?" she said.

"Don't know."

"Who is Lomax?"

"Lomax. Don't know."

"Of course I have my own versions of the answers to all these questions."

"I can't corroborate."

She reached over to the table for her iced tea. It was the middle of the night. She was remotely tired, knowing it wasn't the kind of weariness that leads to immediate sleep. The reverse probably. Getting to sleep would be labor, prolonged exertion. The ice in her glass had melted, making the tea flavorless.

"What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it's sexual. I want to know this. Is it homosexual?"

"You're way ahead of me," he said.

"Isn't that why the English are so good at espionage? Or why they seem so good at it, which comes to the same thing. Isn't it almost rooted in national character?"

"I didn't know the English controlled world rights."

"To what?"

"Being queer," he said.

"No, I'm saying the link is there. That's all. Tendency finds an outlet. I'm saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates. Although I don't mean to say it so Freudianly."

"I'm open to theorizing," he said. "What else do you have?"

"I have links inside links. This is the age of conspiracy."

"People have wondered."

"This is the age of connections, links, secret relationships."

"What would you think of this?"

"What?"

"If I told you this," he said.

"Tell me."

"_Running Dog_ is a propaganda mechanism."

"Who for? You're kidding."

"I don't know who for."

"That's bullshit, Selvy."

"You're right, I'm kidding."

"I don't like that smile."

"Just a little joke."

"Granted, it's a crappy magazine. Granted, we play to people's belief in just what I've been talking about. Worldwide conspiracies. Fantastic assassination schemes. But we are not anybody's mechanism."

"I'm not even smiling, look."

"I mean granted, we do things in the schlockiest way imaginable. You'd better be kidding."

"A kidder," he said. "I like to kid."

"Whose mechanism?"

"Can't you take a joke?" he said. "Don't you know when someone's joking?"

"Because it makes me think of how we named the goddamn magazine. Except we meant it ironically, of course. Using the Hanoi line then current. The familiar taunt."

"What taunt?"

"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."

"All comes back."

"Perfect name for a radical publication, considering the temper of the times. The name had impact then. It fairly sparkled with irony."

Moll this time slipped down the side of the ottoman to sit crosslegged on the floor.

"We almost named it _H. C. Porny_. H. C. Porny was a cartoon character we'd planned on using. He was supposed to represent the government. More precisely the government plus big business. Short, fat, leering old man. We'd hoped, see, to replace Uncle Sam as a national symbol."

"H.C. meaning Hard Core."

"Our cartoonist OD'd, unfortunately. OD meaning overdose. And that was the early end of H. C. Porny. Where were you then, Selvy?"

"Fasting."

"I'll bet you were. Praying and fasting. People had flag decals. Everybody had something. People had bumper stickers. AMERICA -LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. So this friend, it's clear as day, this well-meaning friend gave me a sticker of my very own, which I thought was so devilishly clever I immediately proceeded to affix it to the bumper of my little Swedish car. VIETNAM -LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. And don't two guys come staggering out of a bar on Eighty-sixth Street while I'm stopped for a light? And don't they see my sign and start pounding on my car until the whole thing gets out of hand and there's a mob of people and I end up with a broken ankle and my car half wrecked?"

"Passions quicken in wartime. We see this time and again."

"Sure, sex was in the parks and streets. What lovely urgent folly. But what were you doing, pal? We're waiting to hear."

"I was preparing for the desert."

"You were oiling your goddamn.38."

"That was my desert period."

"You were leaping through burning hoops for a better America."

She watched him close his eyes and go to sleep. It took only seconds. Pure of heart, she thought. She found some brandy in the cabinet and sat a while drinking, watching him sleep. The digital clock in the wall unit had stopped days earlier at 4:01. 4:01 sounded about right. She finished the brandy and got up off the floor, creaking a bit. Selvy's head was tilted left. She put her hand to his face: sleep and warmth. Then the other hand, framing him. He opened his eyes finally. She waited for him to adjust to his surroundings.

"What would you do differently, knowing what you know now?"

"What do I know now?" he said.

There was an interval of dusky sex. Both half asleep, alternately active and listless, they lay diagonally across the bed, breathing deeply and evenly, muttering at times. It must have been a dream, she thought later, seeing him naked in the dawn, a dream in first light, crouched rigidly by the window, body leaning slightly forward, arms enfolding his knees, head lowered, a dream in gray space, motionless, absolutely still, she thought later, as though he'd learned from some master of the wilderness how to suspend even the rhythms of his breathing.

4

The maroon and gold pimpmobile, double-parked outside a nude-encounter studio, drew a crowd of admirers, largely because its rear window was custom-fashioned to resemble a lightning bolt.

It's Times Square Saturday night. Everybody's in costume. Cowboys, bikers, drag queens, punk rockers, decoy cops, Moonies, gypsies, Salvation Army regulars, Process evangelists in dark capes, skinhead Krishna chanters in saffron robes and tennis sneakers. Glitter and trash everywhere. Hot pants, blond wigs, slouch hats, silver boots. Late-season heat blasts. Waves of humid air pour over the crowds. Horns blowing, engines revving, music wailing from loudspeakers in record stores. There is swamp fever in the air. Everybody's soaked through with sweat, eyes glassy and distant. Priests, doormen, movie ushers, French sailors, West Point cadets, waitresses in dirndls, Shriners wearing fezzes.

The two men seemed composed, totally untroubled by the heat. Selvy had first noticed them an hour ago and about a mile away, near the Coliseum. Now they were standing on a corner watching the quasi-Hindus dance and chant. They were both small, both in western boots; one wore dark glasses. They thought the chanters were funny. They stood laughing at them, pointing occasionally.

Selvy crossed the street. A kid with a walkie-talkie moved with him nearly stride for stride as he headed north on Broadway. Magic massage. Topless pinball. Scandinavian skin games. The kid was gangly, maybe sixteen, with the supercharged look of a once bright child who'd failed to develop. The walkie-talkie had an antenna that measured roughly ten feet, tall enough to scrape the bottom of theater marquees, and so the boy kept toward the edge of the sidewalk, often balancing on the curbstone itself. At Forty-fifth Street, he put the set to his mouth.

"Code blue," he said. "Prepare to activate all units. People in the street, take your positions. Camera one, code blue. This is a take. Give me a reflector over here. This set is closed. Camera's rolling, you people. Everybody's live. We are shooting live. This is a live action scene. Prepare sound stage to record. All right, you cab drivers, let's hear it. Watch those cables, everybody. Closing the set to all but essential personnel. Nude scene, nude scene. Get it moving, everybody, please. Am leaving the district. Repeat. Am leaving the district."

Overloaded with static, random brain noise, he stepped off the curbstone and went striding diagonally across the street, trailed now by four smaller kids. Selvy found an Irish bar on Eighth Avenue. He knocked back a couple of Jim Beams and waited for something to happen.

The blank of tool steel was cherry-red. Earl Mudger held it to the anvil with a pair of tongs, rough-forging the shape he wanted with a double-faced hammer.

He took off his gloves and put on a pair of goggles. He held the steel blank to a grinder belt, further shaping and sizing, removing excess metal.

Leaving the goggles hanging from a hook, he went into the next room, where there was a band saw, a drill press, a lathe, a grindstone and a small heat-treated furnace. He heated the steel blank for twenty minutes, then immersed it in quenching oil.

Back in the smaller of: he two basement rooms he set the blank on the metal base of the testing machine he'd designed himself. It was fitted with wheels, gauges, handles, weights, a fulcrum arm and a precisely sized diamond tip, and it measured the hardness of steel. First time the blank tested out high, as he'd anticipated. Too brittle at that level. He reheated it for an hour. After it cooled he tested again. About right this time. It wouldn't break or chip easily. It would hold its cutting edge.

He took off his apron and lit up a cigarette. Then he lay supine on a long workbench, watching the smoke drift toward the ceiling. Upstairs the baby was crying.

The man next to Selvy drank beer. He wore a touring cap well down on his forehead, almost touching his nose. His bills and change were set before him in a small puddle of beer.

"You a TV type?"

"No," Selvy said.

"The old Madison Square Garden used to be right across the street there. We used to get TV types coming in here all the time. Knick fans, Rangers. I mention it because I'm promoting something sensational. Madison Avenue should give it a look."

He waited for Selvy to ask what he was promoting. Selvy kept an eye on the mirror. They were in the bar. He saw them take a booth near the men's room. One of them had a mustache, very sparse. The other, with sunglasses, had a tapering face. Both wore light windbreakers.

"What I'm doing is a contest to the death. Man versus polar hear. Combat supreme. Polar bear is vicious. Polar bear can decimate a herd of reindeer in like a matter of minutes. I'm lining up this guy Shunko Hakoda. A sumo wrestler. He goes three-fifty, easy. His agent's hedging right now but I think we got the numbers. Meanwhile I'm negotiating with the president of Malawi to hold the fight there. I'm envisioning a large cage in the middle of a soccer stadium. You're asking yourself where we'll find a polar bear in Malawi."

Selvy eased off the bar stool and walked out. He headed back toward Times Square, taking the same route. Naked karate. Pagan baths. A battle-scarred Cadillac moved slowly down Broadway, a man's foot hanging out one window. It weaved on past, bumpers caked with mud, streaks of dirt across all four doors. Selvy watched it plow into the back of the maroon and gold pimpmobile. Tinkling glass. Little puffs of dust. The onlookers were overjoyed. They glanced at each other wide-eyed as if to confirm the dimensions of the event. In seconds the owner-pimp emerged, wispy beard, a trifle hassidic in his mink hat and understated black velvet suit. He moved in little scat steps, half a dancer, aggrieved and restive in this sidewalk crush, already eyeing the Cad, which sat throbbing in a patch of broken glass and chunks of rusty dirt dislodged from the fenders.

Selvy was pinned by a dozen spectators. He reached out for an awning support in order to avoid being swept in a given direction against his will. Over the heads of some teenage girls he saw the two men at the edge of the crowd, earnestly discussing something. He couldn't tell whether they'd spotted him. Also hard to tell what they might be carrying under those loose-fitting windbreakers.

The doors of the Cadillac slowly opened and bodies of various sizes and types became visible. The car was full of Hispanics (official police designation), maybe ten or eleven, at least three of them children. The crowd turned its attention back to the pimp.

Selvy used the awning support to stand fast while most of those around him took about four involuntary steps into the street. Traffic was halted at the scene of the accident. Whole masses of onlookers were rocked one way or another by sudden imbalances elsewhere in the crowd. A police siren sounded at a steady volume with the car unable to make progress in the stalled traffic.

Selvy forced people aside and made it to the nearest open doorway. He climbed a long flight of stairs. The walls on both sides were full of graffiti. At the top he turned and looked back. Then he walked down the corridor. He passed several rooms with small curtained booths, a few people milling about. He passed another room with a man standing in the doorway.

"Photograph live nudes," the man said sleepily.

Selvy turned right into another corridor. He stopped by a window. Down on the street a mounted policeman was moving through the crowd. He passed another open door. Gadgets, novelties, devices, creams, ointments, marital aids. Wholesale only. At the end of the corridor was a black metal door with two words painted on it in vivid red: NUDE STORYTELLING.

Selvy looked behind him. Then he opened the door and stepped inside. The outer office consisted of a desk, a telephone and a couple of chairs. A chubby black man in a porkpie hat sat at the desk, smoking a cigar. He had a racing form spread in front of him.

"Be a short wait," he said.

"Who's doing the storytelling?"

"Not me, guarantee."

"How much per story?"

"Cost you upwards of thirty-fi' dollars for a half-hour story, depending."

"How much minimum?"

"I let you get away with fifteen down. What I'm saying, the basic story is fifteen. Activities can run you a little more."

"All right," Sehvy said.

"You a cop, Jim?"

"Just want to hear a nude story."

"Because if this is a sweep of the area, you ought to be sweeping anywheres but here. What I'm saying, it's all seen to."

"How long do I wait?"

"Pick out a chair, Jim. There's a story in progress."

Mudger trued up the cutting edge with a coarse hone. He found this mysteriously pleasing. There was a lightbulb directly overhead so that he could determine the best sharpening angle by noting the shadow cast by the blade on the stone, and its gradual disappearance. Sight, sound, touch. He maintained a steady pressure as he moved the blade-edge into the stone.

The shape of tools. Proportions and heft. The satisfactions of cutting along pencil lines, of measuring to the sheer edge of something and coming out right, of allowing for slight variations and coming out right, of mixing fluids and seeing the colors blend, a surface texture materializing out of brush striations.

Cleaning up grit wheels. This made him happy. He liked the touch of rough surfaces. He liked the sounds things made when excess finish was removed. Sandpapering, grinding, buffing. He liked the names of things.

It was midnight. He went into the washroom. Standing over the commode he tried to spit into the stream of urine as it emerged. On the third try he connected, watching the blob of spit go skipping into the bowl.

He set to work on the handle. It would be burl maple. The names of things. Subtly gripping odors. Glues and resins. The names. Honing oil. Template. Brazing rod. The names of things in these two rooms constituted a near-secret knowledge. He felt obscure satisfaction, something akin to a freemason's pride, merely saying these names aloud for Tran Le or her grandmother or the two men, Van and Cao. Carborundum. Emery wheel. Tenon and drawbore. You couldn't use tools and materials well, he believed, unless you knew their proper names.

Cleaning up grit wheels. Hand-stitching a leather sheath. Doing your own heat-treating.

Sharpness: dry-shaving a square inch of your forearm with a freshly honed blade.

By heat-treating the steel blank himself, he knew he was sacrificing some of the exactness a commercial firm would provide. But he preferred it this way. _His_ instrument start to finish.

He fitted a brass guard to the steel. Then he took two slabs of burl maple and roughed out a fit. He sanded, applied epoxy and set rivets. Ought to hold forever.

When the unit was dry he leveled out the finger grooves and used the belts and sanders to get the handle down to a tighter, firmer fit.

He buffed the wood and brass to a fine sheen. Then he alternately polished and sharpened the blade, finally using various buffing wheels to get the edge and finish he wanted.

Sharpness: the sight of blood edging out of a cut in your thumb.

He climbed the back stairs to the kitchen and opened a can of beer, taking it with him up one more flight to the bedroom. He moved quietly past the cradle and looked at Tran Le curled in bed. Her face was touched pearl gray by a night light nearby. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, a Saigon bar girl at fourteen, leaning against a parked jeep eating an Almond Joy when he first set eyes on her eight years ago. He took off his shirt. When he sat on the edge of the bed, she turned toward him.

"Sleep," he said.

"Where Van is, Earl?"

"Out of town. With Cao."

"Business."

"They be back maybe tomorrow, next day. You sleep."

"Sleep," she said.

"Maybe Van come back with gift for his sister. This because Van know she such a good little wife. Earl tell Van. She is de sweetest little wife in de whole wide world."

Mudger's rudimentary speech often degenerated into stock Negro dialect, catching him unaware. All those recruits he'd trained and pained. The less power you have, the more dominance you maintain in secondary areas. Speech rhythms, foot speed, hair texture. He finished his beer sitting on the edge of the bed. He needed only a couple of hours sleep. Then he'd watch the sun come up.

The woman was young with a healthy reddish face, oval in shape, and large brown eyes. Her hair, center-parted, billowed evenly to either side. She wore an ordinary shift and sandals.

Selvy watched her walk to the outer office. The room was medium sized with a few vinyl chairs, a coffee table and a lamp constructed out of a football helmet. In a corner was a folding bed, doubled up, on casters.

"Stony, is this all?"

"What you see."

"They said two minimum."

"Man's been waiting."

"I'm kind of beat, frankly."

"Tell him a story, Nadine, Man's entitled."

"Being I'm new, I won't make waves. But ordinarily there'd be a tussle over this. Two's the minimum, Stony, and you know it."

"Do him a quickie, hon, and we'll all go home."

She sat across from Selvy. Her knees had a tender sheen. He liked shiny knees. He also liked her voice, a modified drawl. It took her a second or two to gear up to the introductory routine.

"Goes like this: you're allowed to pick one story out of the following three. More, you pay extra. Each story runs ten minutes, depending. Longer of course for activities. Okay. 'Flaming Panties.' 'The Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, Ho Ho Ho.' And the 'Story of Naomi and Lateef.' The second one's mostly gay, just so we get our preferences right."

"Wouldn't I want a man to tell it?"

"Look, who knows?"

"You're new here."

"My second full week and I'm ready to bow out. Quit while they still love you. How much did you give Stony?"

"Fifteen down."

"Just checking," she said. "You have to do that with horseplayers. Okay, pick one."

"I'll try 'Naomi and Lateef.'"

"You're only the second person to pick that. Most everybody picks 'Flaming Panties.' It's really sick, too. The mind that comes up with stuff like that."

"They're not your stories."

"I don't make them up. I just recite them."

"I thought they were your stories."

"If I made up 'Flaming Panties,' I don't know, I think I'd run a sword through my body. It is _the_ sickest."

Selvy heard the man in the outer office talking to someone. He seemed agitated, although the words weren't clearly audible through the closed door.

"If you get stimulated by the story, pay attention, you can give me an extra ten if you want, or an extra twenty, depending. We leave it up to customer preference. What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said.

"That's just Stony making life hard for the kid who brings his sandwich."

Selvy nodded.

"The 'Story of Naomi and Lateef,'" she said, standing momentarily to unzip the shift down the back, then stepping out of it and sitting down again. She looked at him impatiently.

"What?" he said, "If you keep your clothes on, it means you're a cop."

"I see. I didn't realize."

"Nude storytelling, it says on the door."

"Everybody, that means."

"You're catching on," she said.

"There are some people I'm trying to avoid, more or less."

"We all get naked. If you don't, you're a cop. That's what they told me. I'm also supposed to say we recommend the twenty-dollar activity, which is the one we need the bed for. That goes in at the part we came to before."

"I've got a better idea."

"Of course if you're ashamed. We get all sorts. Maybe we can work out a compromise. I don't think a person ought to be forced to get undressed in front of a stranger. It's just everybody's so casual about their bodies."

"There are some people I'm trying to avoid. What say you and I go out and get something to eat. Come on, put on your dress, we'll go. Is there a back way?"

"Whoa, big fella."

"I'll take the twenty-dollar activity. Just not here, okay? We'll grab a bite, come on."

"Come, go; eat, sleep; dress, undress."

"Nadine. Is that your name?"

"Yes."

"How old are you?"

"Never mind."

"You'll never reach twenty if you hang around here much longer. I'm your last chance."

"At least you're smiling. You'd better be smiling."

"Come on, we'll go to Little Rock."

"What a thing to say."

"Get your clothes on."

"My sister lives in Little Rock," she said.

Dressed, she led the way through a series of storerooms. They emerged in a larger room occupied by a woman wearing black boots, a long black military shirt and an iron cross hanging from her neck. The shirt included a red armband with a black swastika set inside a circular field of white. The woman sat smoking, her feet propped on the top rung of a small ladder.

"Passing through."

"You're the new one."

"Nadine Rademacher. Hi. How's business."

"Sucks," the woman said.

"Enjoy your break."

"Who's Johnny Lonesome?"

"Just a hanger-on," Nadine said. "Can't get rid of the kid."

In the corridor they passed the same man Selvy had seen earlier, standing in a different doorway this time.

"Photograph live nudes."

"Angelo, why don't you go home?" Nadine said.

"Busload of Japanese coming down from the Hilton."

At the top of the stairway Selvy asked Nadine to wait a moment. He followed the same route he'd taken after entering. Turning the corner into an empty hallway he palmed his.38 and held it flat against his thigh. Went past the window, the room full of novelties. Opened the black metal door. No one there. Stony's racing form on the desk. He walked through into the studio. Empty. He holstered the gun and went out to find Nadine.

The street was even more crowded than it had been. Apparently there'd been action. Squad cars, an ambulance, a TV crew. People made faces for the camera. Selvy scanned the crowd, then led Nadine along the front of the building and down a cross street to the nearest restaurant. It was a dark cellar, a steak place, and the waiter wore spats. Only two other tables were occupied. An extramarital affair at one. Judge Crater at the other.

"My drama teacher talked me off L.A.," Nadine said. "He kept saying New York. New York actors. Character actors. People with faces."

"He seemed to think faces were important, did he?"

"He kept saying faces. People with faces. He said I wouldn't learn anything in a place where there's just one basic face."

The waiter glided by.

"Kitchen's closing if you want to order."

The old man nearby, with long white stringy hair, sipped his complimentary cordial.

"So you're an actress," Selvy said.

"Aspiring."

"That place you work at."

"It was all a storage area. Is that what you mean? Why is it set up so everything's so hard to get to? They kept materials there. Books, rubber and leather, film equipment, editing equipment, everything. Then somebody in the organization decided to open it up to street trade, even though it's hidden away on the second and third floor. It's the accountants, Stony said. A tax matter. You're not a cop. We established that. Am I right?"

"Right."

"Talerico," she said, fixing him with a meaningful look.

"Familiar."

"There's two of them. Paul. That's the one who's here. One of the New York families, as you can well imagine. Pornography, trucking, vending machines. Don't you love it? That's the legitimate end. The other one. That's Vincent. He's upstate or somewhere. They're cousins, I think."

"I know the names," Selvy said.

"Vincent's in charge of acquiring, Stony said. Acquisitions. He specializes in first-run movies. When they can't get rights by bargaining, they send Vincent. He gets the film. He just takes it. Then they make their own prints. Then they distribute,"

She hunched way down in her chair, conspiratorially, her face just inches above the table top.

"They call him Vinny the Eye. Don't you love it? It's so dumb, I love it. I've only seen Paul. He was in the other day. Everybody went around saying, '_Paul's here, Paul, he's in the building_.' I was disappointed in Paul. I was not impressed. It was disillusioning for a country girl like myself. I think Vinny's the Hollywood one. The dresser. The fancy gangster type. It's really dumb. I wish he'd come around so I could see him."

When the food came she didn't waste time, obviously hungry. Watching her eat relaxed him. It occurred to Selvy he hadn't been hungry in years. He'd experienced weakness and discomfort from lack of food, But he hadn't desired it really, except to ease the discomfort. He tried to recall the last time he'd felt a real desire for food.

"Are you seriously going to Little Rock?" she said.

"Thereabouts, sure, why not."

"Ever since I've been working in that place I keep thinking the whole world smells of Lysol."

"You owe me a story, you know."

"'Naomi and Lateef.'"

"I might change my mind," he said.

"All I know, I'm not doing 'Flaming Panties.' That story's so sick I've been changing it little by little. A little every day. I don't care who complains. It's a story that relies on combinations. Incest is just the beginning. It _starts_ with incest. Then near the end it just becomes reciting words. Some words I just won't say. It piles on the phrases. It becomes red meat."

"Your customers."

"They laugh, mostly. Some get embarrassed. You'd be surprised."

"Sitting there naked, laughing."

"Sheepish nudes, I told Stony."

"So some words you just won't say."

She finished chewing the last bite of baked potato.

"Who are you trying to avoid anyway?"

Selvy looked toward the old man, who sat rigidly staring into space.

"_Tieu to dac cong_."

He gave her a delayed smile, self-consciously weary, and signaled for the check.

Outside a police towaway crew was about ready to haul the battered Cadillac. Tourists were interested in the pimpmobile. A man, two women and two children posed for pictures, using the car as background. When they were finished, two other women and three children moved into position along the front door and fender. A conventioneer wearing an enormous name tag crouched in the gutter, inserting a flash cube in his Instamatic.

Earl Mudger stood on the patio, facing east, barechested despite the chill, a mug of coffee in his hand. He liked being the first one up, coming down in the dark to start the coffee perking. He would roll his shoulders as he moved around the house, would swing his arms occasionally, feeling the stiffness ease away. Ever since he could remember, in whatever house or barracks he'd lived, with whatever people, family or military, he'd always been the first one up.

With pale light intensifying, aspects of sunrise visible through the trees, he went back into the kitchen. On the counter lay a manila folder and a spool of magnetic tape. He poured more coffee into his mug and sat on a stool, opening the folder and scanning the topmost page, a document headed: _Department of the Treasury, District Director, Internal Revenue Service_. Beneath this was a white label with a long series of numbers arrayed across the top, followed by Grace Delaney's name and home address.

Mudger began turning pages, glancing at audit forms, photocopied documents, photocopied checks and bank statements, agent evaluations, notices of "unfavorable action." He closed the folder and regarded the tape spooi. It contained confidential information on the accounts of roughly five hundred taxpayers and had been acquired by Lomax from the same source, an IRS supervisor who had access to restricted files. Among the data was further information relating to Grace Delaney's account.

Mudger finished his coffee and went downstairs. He rechecked the fit and worked some more on the handle section. Then he put on his magnifying glasses and studied the blade.

The knife was a modified bowie. It had a broad sweeping single-edged blade with a clipped point. Overall length was about eleven and a half inches. The blade measured seven and a quarter.

There was a display panel, a hinged triptych, fastened to the wall above a work table. Mudger's knives were exhibited here, some he'd made himself, others turned out by custom knifemakers.

They had sex in the front seat of Selvy's car, which was parked in the barren dells near the West Side Highway. It was an act they knew would take place as they walked through the dark streets to the car. It helped dispel certain disquieting energies. Times Square Saturday night.

"My hotel's right near that restaurant. Why are we doing it here?"

"I'm a little crazy tonight."

"Try reaching that ashtray and push it closed."

Stale cigarette butts. Smell of various plastics that made up the interior of the car. They straightened up finally. She sat on the driver's side, back resting against the door, her feet up on the seat. Selvy looked straight ahead. A silence, followed by:

"Naomi is this buxom Israeli girl who we find bathing one day in a stream that runs through her kibbutz. She has giant white breasts, etcetera etcetera, nipples, etcetera. So then along comes Lateef, who's an Arab army deserter. Well, to tighten the script, they meet and fall in love and just screw and screw and screw, doing it where they won't be discovered. Forbidden love with a capital F. I'm skipping the details, understand. There's a lot about Lateef's Arab pecker, which you probably don't mind if I glide over. Anyway one day we find them having a picnic on the Golan Heights. It's very star-crossed and tender."

"Wait a second."

He was looking in the rearview mirror. Nadine turned her head, intending to lean back out the open window and check what it was he'd seen.

"Don't do that."

Nobody said anything for the next four or five minutes. Selvy kept his eye on the mirror. He seemed engaged in deep and melancholy thought.

"It's getting daylight," she said.

He got out of the car, walked around to her side and stood leaning against the door, smoking.

"We ought to get my clothes. One thing, I won't mind leaving that hotel. More Lysol. Night clerk's insane. Pigeons in the elevator. One more week here, I'd be ready to fall on my sword."

He was interested in knowing precisely what instruments, devices, tools they might be carrying. It would put things in perspective, having that information. It would clarify the relationship, subject to adjusters.

"Glen with one _n_," she said. "If you're bent on avoiding someone, how come you're standing in plain sight outside the selfsame car that you're getting ready to drive away in?"

He reacted as though coming out of a trance, a state of detachment from his present surroundings. Yet there was an element of alertness in his features, his whole body, as though at the center of that dazed state he'd found a level clearer than any thus far accessible to him.

He was facing east, watching the tops of buildings take on color in the hazy light.

1) A gut-hook skinning knife.

2) A fillet knife with a rosewood handle.

3) An Arkansas toothpick with a buffalo-horn handle.

4) A bowie weighing fifty-one ounces, with a ten-inch blade, scalloped butt cap and brass collar.

5) A throwing knife, minus handle.

6) A hunter with a cholla cactus handle.

7) A hunter with a dropped-point blade and a stag handle.

8) A boot knife with an ivory handle.

9) A stiletto.

10) A palm dagger.

11) An English-style bowie in a strictly decorative buckskin sheath.

12) A survival model with a hollow steel handle to accommodate codeine pills and water-purifying tablets.

13) A combat knife with a mahogany handle.

14) A combat knife with a brass guard and a five-inch blade.

15) A combat knife, walnut handle, set in a leather sheath.

16) A combat knife with a double-edged point and a seven-inch blade.

17) A combat knife with a double-edged point and an eight-inch blade.

5

The coffee table was new, inset with a plexiglass terrarium full of dwarf trees and shrubs. Grace Delaney talked into the phone, girlishly twirling the cord with her free hand. Eventually she went into her swivel routine, ending up facing the window. She hadn't yet poured skin cream on her hands, so Moll stayed put, studying the bonsai, marveling at the other woman's ability to produce convincingly intimate laughter.

Grace turned toward her, placing the phone in its cradle.

"We were saying."

"You miss a sense of solid footing."

"Moll, a single unnamed source."

"We go with that all the time. That's why Percival handed me the story. We're totally irresponsible. He knows it gets picked up elsewhere once we run it."

"We ain't running it, swee' pea. It's essentially a blind item, the way you've written the thing. It's couched in the most excruciatingly vague terms."

"I use names," Moll said. "I name Mudger. I name Radial Matrix."

"It's convoluted and tricky and elusive beyond anyone's ability to salvage. It's a ten-thousand-word blind item. Clunk. It goes down like pig iron."

"What do you want changed?"

"I told you, it's unsalvageable. We can't build this elaborate dream structure using a single unnamed source who's already told you he denies everything in advance. The Senator's intent on moving you off his collection. That's about the only basis this story seems to have."

"He doesn't know I'm _on_ to his collection."

"Knucklehead, of course he knows."

"Grace, goddamn."

"Want some coffee?"

"No."

Delaney opened a desk drawer and gestured questioningly.

"Okay," Moll said. "What is it?"

"Vodka."

"Okay."

She took the silver flask and drank.

"He knows, Moll. Of course he knows. He's got resources. He's got people all over the place. He's a fucking senator, isn't he?"

"I don't like these plants."

"Don't be stupid. They're beautiful."

"Too carefully sculptured. They don't look real."

"Go do your sex piece," Delaney said. "That was the original idea, wasn't it?"

"It's what led me precisely to the thing I ended up doing."

"Time's awastin', Moll."

"We've gone with riskier things."

Delaney reached for the hand lotion. Her secretary came in, a middle-aged woman named Bess Harris. Moll gave her the flask as she went by, and she put it on the desk. Grace picked it up and drank.

"Want to hear my theory?" she said. "This is my world view. What the whole thing's about, ultimately. Lloyd Percival and Earl Mudger and you and me and Bess and all of us. The bottom line."

"Go ahead," Moll said.

"All men are criminals. All women are Mafia wives."

"Stupid. Very stupid."

"I was married to the same man for eleven years. I did his bidding. Not fully realizing. His _silent_ bidding. Somehow, mysteriously, unspokenly. It's built into the air between us. It's carried on radio waves from galaxy to galaxy."

Bess Harris drank from the flask.

"Not for a minute," Moll said. "I don't believe word one.

"I'm a Mafia wife."

"Grace, shut up."

Delaney took the flask from her secretary and drank.

"The ultimate genius of men. Do you care to know what it is? Men _want_. Women just hang around. Women think they're steaming along on a tremendous career, toot toot. Nothing. Nowhere, I'm telling you. Men _want_. Bam, crash, pow. The impact, good Christ. Men want so badly. It makes us feel a little spacey, a little dizzy. What are _we_ next to this great want, this universal bloodsucking need of theirs? Bess, get the hell out of here. What are you doing here?"

"It doesn't reach me," Moll said.

"I have been backed into so many bloody corners, it's reached the point where I just react automatically. I am so tired. I am so up against it. Barn. I am so old. You wouldn't believe."

"You're not reaching me."

"They're crazy. That's their secondary genius. They're totally, rampagingly insane. Examine it. Really think. They're nuts."

"Who are you talking to?" Moll said.

"And we're their wives. We live with them."

"Because you're not talking to me."

"Examine it. Your own life. Dig really deep. It's there. One way or another, it's their game you play. Just so you know that. Just so you don't believe otherwise. Because forget it, you're not your daddy's little girl anymore."

"I know, Grace. The radio waves. The galaxies."

"Think it out. Dig down."

"Give me the flask, Grace."

"I am so old and tired."

"You won't go with the piece," Moll said. "Tell me so I can get out of here."

"I was against your idea about Percival's collection for the reasons I pointed out to you. Whatever they were. Lack of design, of political implications. This is a different issue, granted, this piece here, because there is design, there _are_ implications, there _is_ a web of sorts, a series of interconnections. But I can't and won't run it."

"Because you're old and tired," Moll said.

"Because it's too shaky. Too iffy. Not enough footing. I do miss that. A sense of solid footing."

"Thank you."

"Are we still friends?" Grace said.

Moll took a cab to the magazine's West Side office, where her own cubicle was located. She went to work reediting a piece written by a professor of Eastern European studies. He asserted that Russian parapsychologists, at the prodding of the KGB, were close to perfecting a system of assassination by mental telepathy. Moll, actually, didn't doubt it. She started playing with titles as the phone rang.

"Your old lemonade-drinking buddy."

"Who?"

"Earl Mudger."

"What do you want?"

"I'm heading your way."

"That so?"

"To do a little business. And I wonder if maybe you and I can get together and finish our talk."

"Weren't we finished?"

"Tell you what, I didn't think we'd hardly begun."

"Call me," she said.

"I'm thinking next Tuesday's probably when I'll be there. That sound about right?"

"Call me."

What you couldn't get from the printed page, the news clipping or court transcript, was the force of someone's immediate presence, the effect it had, someone's voice, mannerisms, the physical element, the eyes and body. Grace Delaney, for instance. Her eyes, her inflections, the way she'd moved in her chair as she was speaking. These told Moll there was a hidden reason why she didn't want to run the piece on Radial Matrix. Glen Selvy in long johns, his crooked mouth and frozen gray eyes. Mudger's blue eyes. Earl Mudger's voice talking about Lomax and Senator Percival, the fact that the former is the latter's chief source of select information, in a blacksmith's apron, his high shoulders, the twist in the bridge of his nose. Mudger's voice on the subject of his zoo in Vietnam. Mudger's eyes glancing at the old lady setting lemonade on their table, white wicker, the Shetland ponies grazing. Eyes, bodies, voices. The personal force. It's never the voice that tells the lies. Beware of personality. Dynamic temperament, beware.

These musings took place alongside Moll's search for a catchy title. KGB linked with ESP was too much alphabet. Telepathic hit-men. The idea was to work it into a larger framework without telling the whole story in the title. Or were you _supposed_ to tell the whole story in the title?

Briefly she saw the man with ear protectors and tinted glasses standing in the door of Frankie's Tropical Bar, the weapon jumping in his hands as he fired.

Selvy had trouble concentrating. The miles were slowly unrolling at the back of his brain, leading him toward a vanishing point, deep sleep, the end of conscious scrutiny. He stood by the window of the small cabin. The place was called Motel in the Woods. The girl was in bed, asleep. It suited him to think of her as the girl. The girl is decent company. The girl does not complicate matters.

They would be here in a couple of minutes.

It was interesting that he'd done it again. Sex with an unmarried woman. Well, he'd been a little crazy that night. Sex with an unmarried woman in the front seat of a car parked on a city street and all the time he was being pursued by a pair of highly motivated combat veterans. Foreigners. Indifferent to local sex customs.

In a way his whole life in the clandestine service was a narrative of flight from women. To restrict his involvements to married women was to maintain an edge of maneuverability. He was able to define the style of a given affair, the limits of his own attachment. It suited him. Life narrowed down to intense segments. The equal pleasures of arrival and departure. They felt the same way no doubt, some of the women in question. Their comings and goings were regulated by external factors. It added force and depth and degree to sex. Selvy used these outer pressures to keep his role within certain welldefined limits.

He tried to concentrate.

The girl did not compromise the routine to any great extent. The girl was decent company. Would not unsettle things. Would not open up avenues of neurotic involvement. She was breathing quietly now, dreaming, he hoped, of some pastoral scene.

When he heard the microbus come up the bumpy motel road, he slipped out the door and walked through the darkness to the last cabin on the path to the woods. This cabin he knew to be unoccupied. His car was parked in front of it.

He stood at the edge of the woods, ten feet from the car. He watched the VW bus pull up at the adjoining cabin, also vacant. They got oitt, looking weary. They left the front doors open. One of them headed this way, checking his car, Selvy's. The other went back to the bus, probably to turn off the headlights.

Selvy walked out of the woods, showing the.41 magnum. The first ranger reacted but Selvy had the gun to his face, still walking, coming on, and the ranger back-pedaled, his arms at his sides now, flush, apparently to indicate nonresistance. He backed into the side of the car, went down and then tried to scramble to his feet. Selvy, keeping an eye on the second ranger, put the gun right to this one's mouth, muzzle first, cracking teeth and driving the man back to his haunches against the front tire.

To keep him there, Selvy hit him across the left cheekbone with the gun butt. The other ranger was climbing into the back of the microbus. Selvy took an old pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket. He turned this one on his stomach and bent one leg way up behind him, limber little devil, cuffing the ankle to the opposite wrist. The second ranger closed the rear door.

Selvy searched this one, finding only a small knife with a slender tapering blade. He dropped it in the window of his car. Then he went to the VW and opened the rear door just a crack, inserting the mag in the opening, showing about four inches of barrel. No reaction. Not a sound. He opened the door slightly wider.

The ranger was squatting in the dark, holding a knife in his right hand, an inch above floor level. He was motionless. He was still as a wood carving. He waited there, facing Selvy, head-on.

The latter nodded and closed the door. He went into the vacant cabin and stood by the window. The ranger came out of the microbus and dragged and lifted his buddy into the front seat. Then he got in next to him and backed slowly down the motel road and out toward the highway.

Lomax sat at a corner table watching Earl Mudger make his way across the dining room of the Executive Towers Motor Inn, off Arlington Boulevard.

"It's about time we heard some news from the field. It's overdue. What are you drinking, Earl?"

"News. There's news."

"I just have to outright say it. I think it's a mistake. Selvy may have been leaning some. But I don't think he had an arrangement with the Ludecke woman."

"Who's Selvy?"

"The subject," Lomax said. "I think he may have been edging toward something. But I don't think he was there. I think he may have been helping the Robbins woman put some moves on the Senator. Personal reasons. He wanted off that assignment."

"He squashed my bug."

"Earl, he may not have known."

"He was trained to know. He knew. Of course he knew."

Lomax groomed his sideburns with the tips of his fingers. The waiter brought drinks and menus, He said something they didn't catch. People sitting nearby were turning to look at the bar. Mudger and Lomax glanced that way. Two men and a chimpanzee were seating themselves at the bar. They didn't react to the attention they were getting, and in moments people went back to their food and drink. The chimp wore a leisure suit with flared trousers.

"The FCB matter," Mudger said.

"She's still playing. She has to play. IRS has been breathing heavy ever since her days as a Panther bagwoman. They're looking at fraud."

"Can we get them to ease off, if and when?"

"No," Lomax said. "It was all I could do to get the file and tape."

"Does it matter?"

"I don't think so. She has to believe we have influence there, and she's aware they want to prosecute. We're buying time, that's all. Considering our lack of resources these days, it's all we can really hope to do."

"Been meaning to ask. How is it you're using these Dorish Reports? Granted, we're a corporate entity. But don't we have our own intelligence? If we don't, why don't we? I hate to think we have to use the same investigative service General Motors uses, or Chase Manhattan."

"It's ironic, Earl, but Selvy was in the process of putting together a report on FCB. We phased into adjustment before he was finished. With Selvy out, Earl, we really have no one fully capable."

"How did that happen, in fifty words or less?"

"How that happened, Earl, is when you broke away from PAC/ORD that was the end of our supply of trained investigators. We're not at all strong in the investigative area, Earl, these days. We're strong in the paramilitary area. We've got counterterrorists we can call on, for whatever it's worth, more or less around the clock."

"You think I failed to anticipate."

"In a matter like the FCB matter, we don't need but a single capable investigator. We don't really have one, sad to say. Thus the Dorish Report. Thus getting down on all fours to beg favors from an old friend at IRS."

"Tell you what let's do."

"You want me to shut up," Lomax said. "You think I'm being a little preachy. Okay, good beef here. Let's order."

Lomax chided himself for being slow to realize that Mudger was in a foul mood. He couldn't help being disappointed. He'd expected a word of commendation for his resourcefulness in gathering intelligence on the FCB matter. Now he'd have to wait for the right moment to bring it up again, or forget it completely.

FCB was the way they referred to Grace Delaney. It meant Flat-Chested Bitch.

Mudger kept looking over at the chimp. The restaurant manager was talking to the two men who flanked the animal. It seemed to Lomax from this distance that he was content to let them stay as long as nothing unseemly happened.

"I'm making moves," Mudger said. "That's how you keep going. You renew yourself. Systems planning is fundamentally lacking in one important respect."

"You've said. People."

"People, correct."

"Earl, it's peaked."

"I've been studying pornography for a long time now. Hell of an interesting field. Dynamics involved. The psychology. Interesting element. Strange arrays of people. Pacts and alliances and accommodations. That intrigues me. Systems is all formulation. Essentially sterile concepts. I miss human interest. The war was full of human interest."

"The thing has peaked, Earl."

"Multimillions. Close to a billion, including the soft stuff."

"You've had success employing unique methods. You go into smut in a big way, you'll find these methods aren't so unique."

"Don't I thrive on challenges?"

Lomax patted the top of his head.

"Isn't it all business? When you come right down to it? Isn't the whole thing just a slam-bang corporate adventure? Arthur? Isn't it?"

Lomax didn't like these moods.

"The profit on hard-core movies is awe-inspiring. You can make an X for fifty thousand and get a return in the millions. You don't even have to make. Alternatives exist. I've got people. I'm already tied in. All I need is product."

Mudger turned once more to glance at the bar.

"The chimp is ape family," he said after a while.

"I didn't know."

"Did you know that?"

"No," Lomax said.

"Most intelligent member, although some would dispute that."

"I'm a dog man."

"Some would say gorilla."

"Dessert, Earl?"

"Did you ever watch animals? Steadily watch? Because there's things you can learn from watching animals go about their business."

"I've got dogs. I watch dogs."

"If you said wolves."

"Domesticated. That's my range."

"Wolves. You ever watch wolves? I can remember outside Tha Binh."

"I admit to snakes. I watch snakes."

"Snakes are good," Mudger said. "You can do worse than snakes."

"But only at the zoo."

The waiter brought coffee.

"There's news all right," Mudger said.

"Where from?"

"Van's in the hospital. All busted up. Shattered cheekbone. Teeth and gums."

"Which one is Van?"

"He's the one whose sister I'm married to."

"Sorry," Lomax said.

"Christ, it's hilarious. Cao doesn't know where the hell they are. All I have is Mercy Hospital."

"Not what city."

"Not what fucking state," Mudger said. "He'd like for someone to tell him what fucking state he's in. He knows about four words of English. Van, with easily double that vocabulary, has a mouthful of wires and little silver wheels."

"I told you that about Selvy."

"They're out there somewhere. One of them's got a busted face. The other one, it's all he can do to call Tran Le on the phone. Don't you know she doesn't take his number down? All she gives me is Mercy Hospital."

"I told you. Selvy. They took him light."

"He'll make the same mistake if he thinks whatever happened is any real indication. They took him light, okay. But those boys can deal. I've seen them. They're not your typical ARVN grunt. He's up to his ass in it. And it's climbing fast."

"I say he'll handle it."

"You say he'll handle it."

"The thing about Selvy. Selvy's more serious than any of us. He believes. You ought to see where he lives. Where he used to live. Buried in some rat-shit part of the city. Isolated from contact. He'd do it for nothing, Selvy. The son of a bitch believes."

"Believes what?"

"Believes in the life."

"The life," Mudger said.

"Eleven weeks at the Mines, incidentally."

"Was he at the Mines?"

"I told you. Selvy. Best I've ever run."

Lomax signaled for the check.

"How will they find him now?"

"I'm a bitch if I know," Mudger said.

"Unless he drops into Mercy Hospital for an appendectomy, how the hell will they find him?"

Lomax paid the check and went, to the men's room. On the way out, Mudger stopped at the bar. The chimp was eating mixed fruit out of a plastic bowl.

"How much you want for the animal?"

"Not for sale," one of the men said.

"Name your price, go on."

The man turned on his stool.

"Not for sale. No sale."

"You shouldn't dress the animal up. It's degrading to the animal, having to wear clothes."

"What are you?"

"You think it's cute, coming into a bar with an animal. It's a joke, dressing the animal up and coming into a bar."

"What are you, a Christian Scientist?"

"It's a joke," Mudger said.

"A Jehovah Witness. They don't give blood."

The other man turned toward Mudger.

"He's asking. What are you?"

"Tell him to piss up a rope," Mudger said.

"He's asking politely."

"Tell him to piss up a rope."

Mudger put his middle finger to his thumb as if to flick an insect off his sleeve. Instead he delivered a quick blow to the second man's ear. The man reacted as if shot. Then he turned back to the bar, head down, right hand covering his ear.

"Tell him to piss up a rope," Mudger said.

Lomax was standing alongside, watching. The man turned to his companion, speaking over the chimp's head.

"Piss up a rope, Stanley."

Sitting in the passenger seat as Lomax drove, Mudger looked out the side window. His gloom hadn't lifted. He thought of his own animals, the ones he'd managed to take out of Vietnam. He'd had to leave them behind on Guam, every one, under enforced isolation. In the end, practical considerations and endless technicalities forced him to abandon the animals to the whims of local authorities. There were things you couldn't do once the shooting stopped.

He thought of Saigon women in their silk blouses and sateen pants. Beds draped with mosquito nets. The relentless drenching heat.

He thought of people sharing hammocks in open-fronted huts outside Tha Binh. VC gongs sounding through the night. Parachute flares from a C-47 lighting up part of the sky. The roiling din of Medivac choppers landing nearby.

He thought of GIs heading down jungle trails with transistor radios, tossing gum wrappers into the bush. Occasional rounds from an M-6o machine gun. The sandbagged checkpoints. The fresh weapons being broken out of crates. The _punji_ sticks smeared with human feces.

6

Richie Armbrister flashed a look at his laser-beam digital watch. The elevator gate opened with a crash and he followed Lightborne into the gallery. They went directly to the living quarters in the rear, where Lightborne began boiling water for tea.

"So, delay number two. What's going on, Lightborne? I paid money."

"And it's in a safe place. And the lady will get it as soon as she hands over the film can."

"With the film inside it."

"I remain confident, Richie."

"I have things. I have a number of projects."

"I understand," Lightborne said.

"Do you know how long I've been away?"

"Go back to Dallas, Richie."

"I've never been away this long."

"I'll handle it from this end."

The wrist watch, or chronometer, was the sole outward sign of Richie's wealth, excluding his DC-9. He wore heavyweight khaki trousers, scuffed cordovans and a crew-neck sweater with a reindeer design, the wool unraveling at both cuffs.

He appeared younger than twenty-two, looking a little like a teenager with a nervous disability. High forehead, prominent cheekbones, large teeth. He seemed intense, overcommitted to something, his voice keening out of a lean bony face-a face Lightborne could never look at without wondering whether he was dealing with a genius or a half-wit.

Not that Richie's accomplishments were to be questioned. He'd built an empire almost singlehandedly. He'd perfected the technology of smut, opening up channels of distribution and devising ingenious marketing schemes. At the same time he'd managed to remain legally immune, hidden in a maze of paper.

"I leave Odell behind."

"Who?" Lightborne said.

"I leave Odell here. Odell is my technical man for all film projects. You and Odell stay in constant touch, Lightborne. That way I know what's going on."

"I'm all in favor."

"Odell is my cousin."

"I understand, Richie."

"He's one of the few people around me that I would use the word knowledgeable."

"I know how much value you attach to that word."

"What with the people I'm usually surrounded with."

"Plus he's a relative."

"They're imbeciles. They dribble. They have to be told over and over."

"Believe me, Richie, I understand, I'm in sympathy, I empathize completely."

Lightborne poured steaming water over the tea bags. If Richie wanted to live in the barricaded warehouse where his materials were stored, that was fine with Lightborne. He himself, in Richie's position, might have chosen a quiet street in Highland Park.

If Richie elected to surround himself with people he'd known all his life-the bodyguards, the advisers, the relatives, the hangers-on, and the husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of all of these-Lightborne wasn't inclined to raise trivial objections, although in the same position he would have set up a board of administrators. Men and women skilled in diverse corporate fields. Perhaps an academic presence as well.

"I don't know about staying, Lightborne. Do I have time for a cup of tea?"

"It's your plane, Richie. The plane doesn't leave until you're ready."

"I'm ready. I'm anxious to scram."

"Drink your tea. I have a gift."

"There's an element in this business," Richie said. "They're taking more and more. They're very grabby. And something's been going on. My bodyguard thinks he's been seeing the same face, wherever we go, for the past three days. Not that his expertise is worth two dollars on the open market. But I'm better off home. Where I know where I am."

"You tell Odell I'm standing by."

"I'll be waiting for word. I'll be expecting. This is the big thing today. First-run movies. People want to tone up their fantasies. Feature-length is the right direction. I'll be waiting, Lightborne. I'll be looking forward."

"Finish your tea, Richie."

Earlier in the day, after searching in hardware stores, millinery shops, Fourteenth Street rummage dumps, Lightborne had finally found what he was looking for. He found it in a grocery store on Thompson Street, not far from his building. With Thanksgiving not too far off, the place was well stocked with specialty items. The Danish butter cookies, Lightborne noticed, came in circular metal containers, precisely the kind of thing he was looking for. He chose the super economy size.

"A little something I bought for your trip, to munch on the plane going back."

"What is it, candy?"

"Cookies," Lightborne said.

After displaying the shiny can, he wrapped it tightly in plain brown paper, very tightly, so that anyone watching Richie emerge from the building would have no trouble noting the circular shape. He used gummed tape, masking tape, glue and string to keep the wrapping intact.

"Cookies. Festive cookies. To make the trip go faster."

How much more pleasant it was to talk with Miss Robbins, who arrived about half an hour after Richie left. Not that he disliked Richie. Richie had human qualities. More than once he'd given Lightborne a token of his continuing friendship. String ties. A set of coasters depicting scenes of the Alamo. It was only fitting that Lightborne eventually reciprocate.

He asked Moll Robbins if she'd prefer another chair. She was sitting in the chair with the broken springs and had sunk considerably into it. She waved him off, eager to hear why he'd asked her to drop by.

"I'm still the chief skeptic in this enterprise."

"I remember your saying."

"Do you remember Glen Selvy? The man who was here the night I first mentioned the Berlin film."

"Yes."

"The man bidding on behalf of a certain someone."

"I remember," she said.

"That certain someone's been in direct contact with me."

"Lloyd Percival."

Lightborne sat back, stroking the side of his jaw.

"You've been active."

"On and off," she said.

"I was surprised when you said you hadn't finished the series."

"I got sidetracked."

"But you're back with it."

"It would seem."

"Then I'm glad I called," he said. "It's my feeling that a journalist on the scene tends to advance whatever is meet and just in a given situation."

"Hip hip."

"Of course my own role must be handled circumspectly. This isn't Lightborne the dealer in erotic junk, outgoing and colorful. This is a source close to the situation. This is a wellplaced source. My name mustn't see print."

"I give the usual assurances."

"This footage is arousing mighty appetites. Let me tell you, I've been turning it in my mind. The utterly compelling force of the man. He wasn't impotent, you know, despite earlier claims to that effect."

"Hitler, you mean."

"He had a remarkable impact on women. They sent him love letters, sex poems, underwear. His motorcades, women hurled their bodies at his car. Like a pop hero. Some modern rock 'n' roller. Women threw themselves beneath the wheels."

"Surface affection," Moll said.

"Girls were constantly offering to yield their virginity to him. We see his speeches, where women fell into states of hysteria. We see collective frenzy. He had hypnotic powers over women. I think this is clear."

"You're suggesting there's some basis."

"The rumors have never specified the old boy," he said.

"You're building a case."

"Think of the value such footage would have. And the man with whom I originally discussed this matter, I recall him clearly stating that I wouldn't be disappointed in the identities of those who appear."

"Dead, I recall your saying."

"This matter is fraught with every kind of pressure. I myself have put certain forces to work. I've also taken action to deflect attention. I feel "more secure now, people knowing there's a journalist in the vicinity."

"How do people know?"

"I think they know."

"You feel they have ways of knowing."

"They know. I think they know."

He turned off one of the two lights in the room. Moll decided her chair was in fact uncomfortable and pushed up out of it, moving to a metal folding chair near the bookcase.

"He had youthful fantasies about a blond girl in Linz," Lightborne said. "There were other blonds later who were more than fantasy. He may have had an eye for blonds. Also an eye for actresses. His niece of course. An all-consuming affair. When you get serious with nieces, this is suggestive of a deep fire in the man." Pause. "He made drawings. He sketched her parts. At close range."

"That showed bad taste."

Lightborne made a worldly gesture.

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp and porn."

"But wasn't he in terrible shape at the end? Totally spaced on medication."

"My point exactly," Lightborne said. "I've made that point. He was enfeebled. I think it was his right arm, shaking wildly. They were using leeches for his blood pressure. He'd aged shockingly."

"You concede this is evidence against."

"I 'insist on it," he said. "I'm advancing theories largely for my own delectation. I admit. I'm making noises, merely."

"I never thought of him as a lover."

"Not your type."

"In addition to which I have to say I don't really understand why droves of people would pay money to see some gray old staticky footage of a funny-looking man running around naked, even if he was who he was."

"I've made that point. It's a vital question. _Who cares?_ Yet I'm getting vibrations from all over. People with money and power. Forces are collecting around this thing, jumpy footage or not. You look a little bored, Miss Robbins."

"Not at all," she said. "It's just that I don't see what the appeal is. It's a little distasteful, frankly. Not that I'm above such things, Mr. Lightborne. But, really, all this activity for what?"

"Because it's him. Hitler. The name, the face. All the contradictions and inconsistencies. It would take an hour to list them."

"All great men. We know about great men and their public and private selves."

"Very furtive mind. Many doors locked. Hints, whispers of unnatural sexuality. Hush-hush even today. Women associated with Hitler tended to commit suicide or at least to attempt it. After his death, women all over Germany killed themselves. Suicides unnumbered."

"Are you trying to depress me?"

"The bunker was an interesting mix. You had secretaries, orderlies, SS guards, kitchen staff, so on. There were women brought in off the streets by and for the SS men. You had visitors from military units. There was a drunken revel, a sex thing, in the SS rooms. How many people involved I don't know."

"Maybe that's it. The footage."

"They thought he was dead. They were celebrating. But he didn't do it till later. True, maybe that's it. But I'm holding out hope for better."

"The old boy himself."

"We live in curious times," Lightborne said reflectively.

He thanked her for coming and promised to keep her closely informed. They walked through the darkened gallery toward the door. Moll bumped into a table and Lightborne apologized, asking her to remain there while he turned on a light. She noticed he didn't go for the wall switch but instead walked to a corner of the room to turn on a small lamp, the bulb perhaps twenty-five watts.

"It's getting so I don't like well-lighted rooms, or talking on the telephone. I never had a suspicious nature. Old age, I guess. First signs of deterioration."

"You've got a long way to go, Mr. Lightborne, I would judge."

"First signs."

"We're all a little wary."

He nodded, standing in the dimness. She recalled the first night she'd been here, the room getting progressively darker as he went around turning off lights, giving her clues to Selvy's destination that night.

"Go into a bank, you're filmed," he said. "Go into a department store, you're filmed. Increasingly we see this. Try on a dress in the changing room, someone's watching through a one-way glass. Not only customers, mind you. Employees are watched too, spied on with hidden cameras. Drive your car anywhere. Radar, computer traffic scans. They're looking into the uterus, taking pictures. Everywhere. What circles the earth constantly? Spy satellites, weather balloons, U-2 aircraft. What are they doing? Taking pictures. Putting the whole world on film."

"The camera's everywhere."

"It's true."

"Even in the bunker," she said.

"Very definitely."

"Everybody's on camera."

"I believe that, Miss Robbins."

"Even the people in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in April 1945.

"Very definitely the people in the bunker."

"You believe that, Mr. Lightborne."

"I have the movie," he said.

He'd moved gradually to the end of the room, about twenty feet from the source of light, standing against a blank wall, suddenly disproportionate in shape, an illusion sustained by his own shadow on the wall behind him. His body seemed tiny. He was all head.

"Have you looked at it?"

He moved toward her a step or two, as though to whisper, a strange gesture considering the space between them.

"I haven't even opened the can."

He laughed.

"I'm waiting for technical help."

He laughed again.

"I'm afraid the whole thing will crumble if I open the can the wrong way. It's been in there over thirty years. There's probably a right way and a wrong way to open film cans when the film's been in there so long. There might be a preferred humidity. Safeguards. Recommended procedures."

"Who is your technical help?"

"Odell Armbrister."

This time Moll laughed.

"Richie's cousin," he whispered.

"Who is Richie?"

"Richie Armbrister's cousin. The Dallas smut king. The boy genius. That lives in a warehouse."

"Fascinating," she said.

Lightborne sank into a chair, wearied by these disclosures.

"Fascinating, yes. An interesting word. From the Latin _fascinus_. An amulet shaped like a phallus. A word progressing from the same root as the word 'fascism.'"

He was whispering again.

On a straightaway on U.S. 67, Glen Selvy, both hands on the wheel, decided to close his eyes and count to five. He didn't hurry the count. At five he even paused for half a second before opening his eyes again.

He was going eighty.

PAC/ORD had recruited openly. They needed administrators, clerical people, personnel investigators, career panelists, budget directors. As Selvy progressed through batteries of tests and interviews, he began to realize he was part of an increasingly selective group of candidates. Everybody else filed into Rooms 103, 104 or 105. Selvy's group convened behind an unmarked door.

There were weeks of further culling. Periodic technical interviews, or polygraphs. A progressively clearer picture. At intervals, candidates were asked to state their willingness or unwillingness to continue the program.

Selvy went on salary in a PAC/ORD division called Containment Services, Guidance and Support. For six weeks he checked personnel files and evaluated job candidates. This led to another series of tests, including thorough physicals. At intervals, he was asked to state his willingness or unwillingness to continue the program.

He saw her waving: Nadine Rademacher.

She was standing outside a Howard Johnson's located near a highway interchange. She got into the car smiling and hefted her suitcase over the back of the seat as Selvy drove off.

"Nice seeing Joanie. You could have done worse than show up for a little home cooking. Where to next?"

"Where to next."

"All these ramps and levels. You be sure to pick a good one now."

"I think we ought to just keep going in the same straight line we've been going in ever since New York."

"Have we been going in a straight line?"

"Ever since New York."

"I'm glad to see you, Slim. Were you afraid I wouldn't think you'd show up?"

"We'll have to go through that question point by point some time."

"It's a tricky one."

"Where to next," he said. "Check the glove compartment."

"You're looking kind of tired and glum."

"There's a map."

"Tell you what I don't like. It's this little nip in the air. It's too early and we're too far south."

Her hand came away from the glove compartment holding the small dagger that Selvy had taken from the ranger about a day and a half earlier. She waited for him to notice.

"What's that?" he said.

"Hey, bub."

"I use it for fingernails. A grooming aid."

"Is this what they call an Arkansas toothpick?"

"This is smaller."

"Being we're in Arkansas."

"You thought you'd ask."

"What's it for?" she said. -

"I slash mattresses when I'm depressed."

They sent him to Marathon Mines. Here he attended classes in coding and electronic monitoring. There was extensive weapons training. He took part in small-scale military exercises. He studied foreign currencies, international banking procedures, essentials of tradecraft. For the first time he heard the term "funding mechanism."

His instructors conveyed the impression that he was part of the country's most elite intelligence unit. It was manageably small; it was virtually unknown; there was no drift, no waste, no direct accountability. He heard the words "Radial Matrix."

A great deal of time was spent studying and discussing the paramilitary structure of rebel groups elsewhere in the world.

They analyzed the setup the Vietcong had used. The parttime village guerrilla. The self-contained three-man cell. And _tieu to dac cong_, the special duty unit considered the most dangerous single element in the VC system. Suicide squads. Special acts of sabotage in ARVN-controlled areas. High-risk grenade assaults. Assassination teams.

They studied the Algwian _moussebelines_, or death commandos, groups undertaking extremely hazardous operations independent of local army control. They discussed the action of the FLN bomb network that operated out of the Casbah, maintaining a state of terror for nearly a year despite its limited numbers.

Selvy thought it curious that intelligence officers of a huge industrial power were ready to adopt the techniques of illequipped revolutionaries whose actions, directly or indirectly, were contrary to U.S. interests. The enemy. This curious fact was not discussed or studied. He heard the phrase "internal affairs enforcement."

Groups attached to various agencies, U.S. and foreign, trained at the Mines. From people belonging to some of these groups, Selvy kept hearing about the exploits of the original chief training officer-the man, more than any other, responsible for the techniques and procedures currently employed. Earl Mudger. Said to bse in business these days somewhere in the East.

"Remember chocolate cigarettes?" Nadine said.

Selvy drove along a two-lane road until they found a restaurant. It was a long rroom with a state trooper at one table talking to a waitress in sneakers.

"Miss the lights?" Selvy said.

"Gotta be kidding."

" Times Square."

"Arm, leg, hip, breast,"

"You think that woman might come over and take our order sometime before sundown."

"She's visiting, Glen1,"

"What's he doing?"

"I think he's sniffing."

"That's what I think."

"I think he's getting; ready to kick dirt."

"Call her over," he said.

"What's the rush?"

"Get back to our straight line."

When the food came they ate quietly. A small white worm moved over a lettuce leaf in the center of Selvy's plate. He ate around it.

"I used to work in Sample's Café in Langtry," Nadine said. "I think it's uncanny the straight line goes past my sister, goes past my dad."

"You want to see him, don't you?"

"I don't know," she said. "He was pretty close to being an all-out bastard, no holds barred. It was only my mom made things bearable. When, she died, Joanie took off like a bat. It took me a little longer… I was always slow to notice what was going on. But I see it a little clearer now. The man just isn't very nice."

"Lives alone?"

"You ought to see the house. It's a shack, just about. Half the things in our house my mom made out of old feed sacks. Dish towels, face towels, napkins, even a lot of our clothes. Pillow cases. Feed sack pillow cases. Feed sack dresses and skirts."

"Recycling."

"Poverty," she said.

About half a mile from the main highway they passed an abandoned farm. Selvy eased the car into some weeds. He reached into a carton in the back seat and removed the smaller of his two handguns, the.38. He walked through the front gate to a deep-water well not far from the main house. Holding the gun flat on his upturned palm, he tossed it about two feet into the air and watched it fall into the well. A blunt muffled sound came up to him.

Looking into the setting sun, Nadine squinted at him as he walked back to the car.

"What's this business about a straight line?" she said.

Back in Washington, he realized something was different. A man named Lomax came to his hotel. There was no mention of PAC/ORD or Containment Services. People he'd worked with didn't return his calls. He no longer seemed to be on salary.

Lomax took him for a ride in a black limousine. He said that Radial Matrix had severed all relationships with official agencies of the government. Systems planning would still be done out of headquarters in Fairfax County. All clandestine work would issue from this operation and its spin-offs. There was no other headquarters. There was no table of organization. There was no structure, no infrastructure. Only the haziest lines of command.

Lomax repeated what Selvy had learned at the Mines. Rebel movements drew their strength from the fact that their political and their military functions were one and the same. Here, Lomax told him, business operations and clandestine activity are combined in very much the same way. One doesn't support the other. One _is_ the other.

Selvy traveled in North America, then throughout Europe and parts of Asia. He gathered information on Radial Matrix competitors. He made undercover payments to representatives of prospective Radial Matrix clients. He paid secret commissions to agents of foreign governments. He arranged the disappearance of a trade commissioner on holiday in Greece. He financed the terrorist bombing of a machine-tool plant. Legitimate business expenditures.

Lomax called him back to the States. They needed a reader. Temporary assignment. Selvy's name had popped out of the computer.

Four days a week he went to a white frame house in Alexandria. A woman named Mrs. Steinmetz gave him private lectures, with slides, on art history. She accompanied him on visits to the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn. She showed him reproductions of sexually explicit art and discussed the esthetics involved.

Two days a week he went to a suite in an office building near Union Station. Here a Mr. Dempster explained House and Senate protocol and procedures. He gave Selvy reading matter on the subject. Eventually he provided a résumé- background, education, past employment, so forth. All of it was verifiable, none of it true.

The head of Percival's staff was impressed. He arranged an interview with the Senator. The Senator kept returning to the subject of Selvy's art background. He arranged a luncheon, during which Selvy was hired.

The black limousine turned up again. Lomax told him that until further notice he'd be paid by dead-letter drop. There was a pension scheme in the works.

For a month Selvy did staff work in Percival's office. The Senator arranged a small dinner at his Georgetown house. Selvy remained after the other guests left. They had a few. They talked. They had another. The Senator showed him a room with a spinning wheel and an antique desk. Then he led him through the fireplace to the interior of the house next door.

"This is my true life," he said. "This is what I am."

They came out of the hills into ranch country, unbroken skyline and spare plains. They traveled slowly, stopping when possible along the main road for food and rest. Some days they went only twenty miles. Selvy didn't sleep much. The nights were cool.

On a small rise he spotted a curve in the road up ahead. He closed his eyes and counted to seven, easing the steering wheel left at four, when he'd estimated the car would reach the bend.

Richie Armbrister sat naked in the sauna. The man on the bench facing him was also naked. Through the steamy haze, Richie tried to get a good look at his face, without actually staring. The man was plumpish. Early forties, probably. Some gray at the temples. He seemed perfectly relaxed, which indicated he belonged here, or thought he did.

They exchanged a faint smile through the steam.

Richie got up and put his head out the door. In the passenger compartment a party was going on. People danced in the disco area while others sat around eating snacks and drinking. The co-pilot emerged from the flight deck through a beaded curtain and accepted a sandwich from Richie's bodyguard's girlfriend.

It was this bodyguard whose eye Richie was trying to catch. Daryl Shimmer. A rangy Negro skittering over the dance floor, all ripples and blind staggers. Richie wondered why this passionate concentration, so typical of his entourage, was forever being applied to ends other than his, Richie's, peace of mind.

Failing to attract Daryl's attention, he closed the door, took a pitcher and poured more water on the heated rocks. Then he sat back down.

The man leaned toward him in the fog.

"We want to talk about a can of film."

"We being who?" Richie said.

"You and me."

"I don't want to do any talking about any can of film."

"It's on this plane. I think I speak for both of us."

"You think you speak for both of us when you say what?"

"That's it's on this plane."

"Nothing you mention is on any plane I know of."

"Richie, be a grownup."

"Do we know each other?"

"I'm called Lomax."

"Why are you here?"

"I could tell you I was supposed to meet another party. Aboard a different plane. There was a mixup. I found myself on the wrong plane. That's one version."

"Nobody checked? Nobody asked you?"

"Apparently I'm one of those people who blends well. I'm not noticeable. That's something I've had to learn to live with. Blending well. Failing to stand out."

"They know I'm here. Daryl and those. In case you're wondering."

"There's another version."

"I don't want to hear it."

"You're fully grown, Richie. You're not going to get any bigger. It's only right we treat each other as adults."

"Yeah, but for right now I have to start getting ready because we'll be landing soon."

"Certainly."

"Landing is bad enough with clothes on."

"I understand," Lomax said. "We'll continue later." Richie got dressed and went out to the passenger compartment. He was stopped by a young woman named Pansy. She was Daryl Shimmer's girlfriend and for weeks she'd been trying to prevail upon Richie to get Daryl a dune buggy with chromed exhausts for his birthday. Richie was in no mood.

"Look around," he told her. "All these Vic Tanny imbecues with their goggles, their male jewelry, their sculptured hair. It's like helmets they're wearing. It never moves, short of an earthquake. Get them out of here with their dipping shirtfronts, with their space boots. I want normal for a change. I want ordinary. People with real hair. I want less orgasmics around here. Everybody looks like they're climaxing. I walk into the warehouse, there's live bands, people writhing. I get on the plane, they're still shaking, it never stops. What happened to normal? Where is normal?"

About fifteen minutes later, as the plane approached DFW, Lomax sat in a swivel chair, belted in, munching on roasted nuts. People were still dancing. He glanced over at Richie Armbrister. With the plane descending toward the runway, Richie had assumed a bracing position. His shoes were off. There was a pillow squeezed between the fastened seatbelt and his stomach. Another pillow lay across his knees. He'd bent his upper body well forward, head resting on this second pillow. His bony hands were clasped behind his knees.

Nadine crawled across the motel bed. Reaching over Selvy's body, she pointed one end of the cylindrical reading lamp right at his face.

"What are you?"

"Explain," he said.

"I'm analyzing your features."

"Racially, you mean. As to type and so forth."

"What are you?"

"An Indian."

"You don't look like an Indian."

"I've trained myself to look different. There's exercises you can do. Muscular contractions."

"Those aren't Indian features, Glen. You're not Indian stock."

"You can look different if you train. You start with a good mirror. It's like anything. Quality tells. You get yourself a quality mirror."

"If you're an Indian, that's not your name, what you've been telling people all these years. What's your real name, your Indian name?"

"Running Dog," he said.