Searches & Seizures

1

THIS BUCK NIGGER comes running up calling my name. “Mist’ Main, Mist’ Main,” he’s yelling. He looks familiar but I can’t place him, so right there’s my clue. Because I know everybody I have had dealings with, their names and faces, their heights and weights, each identifying characteristic, every wart and all pimples, perfect pitch for human shape and their voices in my head like catchy tunes. What a witness I would make, a police artist’s dream with my eye for detail, the crease of their gloves and the shine on their shoes like so many square inches of masterpiece in an art historian’s noggin. Not “male Caucasian, mid-twenties, sandy hair and slightly built, five foot ten inches and between 130 and 135 pounds.” That’s given, that’s understood; I do that like the guess-your-age-and-weight man at the fair. But the weave of his trousers and the pinch of his hat, which hole he buckles his belt and the wave in his hair like the force number on the Beaufort scale. A marksman’s eye for his pupils and its length to a fraction of the cuff rolled back on his sweater. I have by heart the wrinkles on his trousers and know the condition of his heels like a butcher his fillets. Everything. The roller coaster of his flies when he sits, where his hands get dirty, which teeth need attention, the sunsets on his fingernails. Everything.

“Mist’ Main, Mist’ Main.”

But I forget. When it’s finished I forget, chuck it in the mind’s wastebasket as you’d throw away a phone number in your wallet when it no longer has meaning. Well, what am I? The rogues’ gallery? A computer bank? Must I walk around with sin like a stuffed nose? Of course I forget. But something familiar, tip-of-your-tongue, like at least you recognize the number is your own handwriting.

“Mist’ Main?”

So what does it cost me to be polite? “Dat you, Rastus? Dat you, boy, sho ’nuff?”

“Mist’ Main, it’s Billy. Billy Basket.”

Or go along with him for a while? “Billy Basket, you old field hand, you fuckin’ cotton chopper, you. How you doin’, muthah? Gimme skin, gimme five, put ’er there, my man.” He sticks out his paw but I don’t take it. I don’t shake hands. I will handcuff myself to anyone regardless of race, creed or color because that’s business, but I won’t shake hands. I dislike holding men.

“I seen you cross the hall and I wanted to tell you hello and thank you.”

Court is about to be convened. “Sure thing,” I say, “see you later, alligator.”

“Don’t you remember me? You went my bail last year. You believed in me when they said I done that rape.”

“Yeah, sure. I try to see the good side in everybody. Now I remember.” I do. “Couldn’t place you there for a minute. Now I see the size of the cock on you it all comes back. You guys are really hung, you know that? Like pictures, like drapes in palaces. See you, kid. Next time you get into trouble. Now you know the way.”

I take off. Basket calls after me. “I wanted you to know in case you missed it in the papers,” he says as I slip into the courtroom, “they found the guy who done it. They cleared my name. I was innocent all along, just like you believed.”

Innocent? Guilty? What difference does it make? Six of one, half dozen of the other. As a matter of fact, innocence is bad for business, a pain in the ass. Stuff the jails I say, crowd them. Shove in the innocent with the guilty. I don’t want to see educational programs in the pens, I don’t want to know from rehabilitation. That shit knocks down recidivism. Shorter sentences, that’s something else, a different story entirely. Shorter sentences are good for business. That gets ’em back on the streets again, the villains and stickup guys. That’s what we call turnover, and I’m all for it. Billy Basket is making me late for the hearings. I might not get a good seat. Adams or Klein or Fetterman will be over the prospects I’ve spotted like the muggers.

“Go, go,” I tell him. “The sun’s shining, the parks are full of white girls with their heads on the grass and their skirts hiked. Near bushes they lie, tanning their titties. What the hell you doing here, you dark fool? Go. Run, Spot! Run in the park!”

I’m Alexander Main the Bailbondsman. I go surety. Generous as a godfather or an uncle in films, each day paying out pledge like a rope in the sea, flying my streamers of confidence. Like the bunting of anniversary my cracking pennants of assurance. Dealing in signature, notary’s round Braille, in triplicates engaged, fair copy, dotted line where my penciled x’s (never omitted: there, levitating like a phenomenon, a chipper fragment of askew alphabet above those two and a half inches of devastating dots at the bottom of the contract, drawing the attention, rubbing their noses in it, even the hard guys and two-time losers, even the saboteurs, and people finally out of aliases who haven’t used their real names in years — who can barely remember them but who use them now, you can bet) pull their names like trumps. Signed, sealed and deliverance.

I love a contract like the devil, admire the tall paper and the small print — I mean the print, the lawful shapes and stately content. Forget word games, secret clause, forget hidden meaning and ambiguity, all those dense thickets of type where the fast ones lie like lost balls. Your forest-for-the-trees crap is myth, the sucker’s special pleading. I’ll fuck you in letters nine feet high if I’ve a mind. I beat no one with loophole. Everything spelled out, all clear, aboveboard as chessmen: truth in advertising and a language even the dishonest understand. No, I’m talking the look of the instrument, texture, watermark, the silk flourish of the bright ribbon, the legend perfected centuries (I’ll tell you in a moment about the Phoenicians), the beautiful formulas simple as pie, old-fashioned quid pro quo like a recipe in the family generations. My conditions classic and my terms terminal. Listen, I haven’t much law — though what I have is on my side, binding as clay, advantage to the house — but am as at home in replevin, debenture and gage as someone on his own toilet seat with the door closed and the house empty. I have mainpernor, bottomry, caution and hypothecation the way others might have a second language. I have always lived by casus foederis; do the same and we’ll never tangle assholes.

Well, it’s the blood. I had a cousin a usurer, an uncle in storm windows. An aunt bought up second mortgages, bad paper. Crap artists the lot, dealing in misunderstanding, leading folks on like bad daddies walking backwards in water with their hands out to kids wading inches beyond their reach. Not me, but we’ve something in common: that we take people’s word, I suppose, so long as it’s in triplicate. But not my style finally the cancerously compounding interest with repossession at the end of the rainbow. Hit them up front, I say, and be done with it. Not for me the jumped car and crossed wire, the hot shot at dawn or midnight. I eschew schlock, fingerprints on the screen of the burned-out TV, the old man’s greasy veronica where he’s dozed in the wing chair, all that wall-to-wall with its thinned nap where the weight’s come down like the lawn mowers of time. To hell with merchandise, houses surrendered after they’ve been lived in seventeen years. Junk, jetsam. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I have no sense of smell, except for the stinks I imagine in my head.

The Phoenicians. Lebanon and Syria now, Phoenicia that was. My people — I am Phoenician — wrote the first bailbond. (It’s “Ba’al” incidentally, from the Hebrew, not “bail.”) The notion that the system began in medieval England is false. What happened was that the Crusaders brought the practice back with them from the desert. Phoenician justice was swift: a trial immediately followed arrest; the suspect was taken before the judge or Lord (the Ba’al), evidence was heard and the man was punished or went free. But once a foreigner was arrested, a Canaanite. The charge was he’d fired a crop. The man denied it and said he had witnesses, relatives who had returned to Canaan and could prove that he’d had nothing to do with it. They would swear, he said, that he’d been with them miles from the scene at the time. Well, it would take time to get word back to Canaan that we were holding one of their lads. A messenger would have to be sent. A three-day camel trek, another few days to find the relatives and convince them to return, another three-day camel trek (“trek” is a Phoenician word; “track” comes from it, “race track,” “railroad track”) to get back, ten or eleven days in all. Now, there were no jails in Phoenicia. The concept of captivity didn’t come in until much later, a Hellenic idea. Where do you keep a guy like that, a guy accused of setting fire to an entire crop? Do you take him to your tent, an alleged incendiary? A man who might have burned fields, what could he do with canvas? There was no jail, only justice. If your eye offended they plucked it out, if your kick they tore your leg off. So where do you put a fellow up who claims he’s innocent?

Like all great ideas the answer is simple. You don’t. This was a nomadic people, this was a people lived in a sandbox like somebody else would live in Pennsylvania — gill-less they were, tough, with a horned, spiky skin that took the sunburn and converted it to energy, maybe even into water itself, adaptive, resourceful, shagging the evolutionary moment like a fly ball — whose very beasts, you’ll remember, went without water thirty and forty days, a people who invented oasis. You think not? You think maybe God spread a little golf course in the desert like a prayer rug? You think? Invented oasis. The process is lost, all gone now the old techniques, but probably using the sand itself, working in the medium of sand. Sand and lenses. Taking a camel’s eye, say, and the desert’s own hot sun and igniting the sands, focusing, burning them molten, turning them liquid, making them water, seasoning them with their own piss and the camel’s blood. Planting seeds, maybe shooting off into the mess, stirring it at night when it cooled. More piss, more blood. Resourceful, resourceful, sand and water alchemists, collecting whatever rain there was, oiling it with their sweat, conservationists of the bleak, minding the broth, getting it going, one green shoot by one green shoot, nursing each, growing a world. Maybe I exaggerate — I’m proud of my people — but something like that.

So let the kid go, this Canaanite, resourceful and Semitic as themselves. Just because he could be guilty, the elders reasoned, it wasn’t a good idea to have him around. He might, out of spite, put out their oasis. But make sure he comes back. Take something of value. His rings, say, or his animals. Turn this bad apple and good scout back out into the desert with fair warning, fixing him with that stare which had fired the sands. “All right. Ten days. Come back or we fetch you.”

“Hey, Phoenician,” a lawyer calls, “over here.” It’s Farb. He’s standing with a white male, aged thirty-three or — four, well dressed and very nervous. It can’t amount to much, but in my business you don’t cut a lawyer. I pat Farb’s shoulder.

“Shoplifting, right?”

“How about that Phoenician?” Farb says. “Does he know a thing or two?”

“She never did anything like this,” the guy says. “We even have a charge account at the store.”

“Who’s up? Cooper?”

“Cooper,” Farb says, “Cooper, I think.”

“He’ll fix your wife’s bond at five hundred,” I tell the man. He’s biting his nails. “You can make that. What do you need me?”

“He doesn’t want it on his record that he put up collateral with a court,” Farb says.

“You got kids?”

“A son.”

“Seven years old, eight?”

“He’s nine.”

“Your wife’s people, they’re alive?”

“Yes, but…”

“They live in Cincinnati?”

“They’re divorced. I don’t understand what…”

“He’s determining the risk,” Farb explains.

“What risk? I’m good for the money. What do I look like?”

“Everybody’s got a good suit, sonny. They come to court like they’re sitting for portraits in banks.”

“Don’t get excited,” Farb counsels his client, “answer his questions. There’s nothing personal.”

“There’s everything personal,” I say. “She got siblings, your wife? A brother she’s close to?”

“There’s a sister in California, but I don’t…”

“They write letters, they call long distance? Presents, does your sister-in-law send the kid presents? Does she remember his birthday?”

“Usually. I think so. Yes, usually.”

“I’ll ride the river with you, a bridge over troubled waters. My fee is ten percent of the bond. Like show business, like your wife was a movie star instead of a shoplifter. I take the fifty up front. You got fifty bucks? Yes? Done. I’ll see you when Cooper sets the bail. Take this form meanwhile. Fill in the blanks as if you were your wife, and have her sign where I’ve penciled the x.”

“Thanks, Phoenician,” Farb says.

“Rudy, you used to be a big shot, Rudy. The syndicate you had, ax murderers.”

“I’m slowing down, Phoenician. Doctor’s orders.”

It’s true. He looks shitty. I recall talk. He’s been to the hospital for tests. “Rudy, I appreciate your business, but you’ve got to specialize. The way you’re going with this nickel-and-dime we’ll both starve. I’ll give you a tip. In the next year the big thing in crime will be ripping off the guys who collect for insurance companies in the bad neighborhoods. That’s the new action, Rudy, that’s the wave of the future. It’s going to be bigger than cab drivers. If you like I’ll put the word out that Rudy Farb is the best defender of debit-man murderers in the city. The kids will come running, they’ll pay your retainer in loose change they took from the body. Think it over, Rudy, think it over, kid. See you in court.”

So I’m Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men’s difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba’albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors’.

So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him your subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

Yes, and the private too. Tell me. If a man climbs his bathroom scale in the morning and the dial spins, settling finally on his weight, and then suddenly he shivers, say, or barks his morning hack and jiggles the scale and the dial goes spinning again though his feet have never left the scale, jerking a few pounds more or a few less, I ask you this: does that man in those few seconds weigh more? Less? Has he become momentarily weightless? This is philosophy. Do saints have more rights than ordinary men? Which is more important, Arcturus or Jupiter? Do people living in Nome, Alaska, get less out of life than Parisians? The Phoenician loves his philosophy, is charmed by the sharp propositions that precede the thick texts and weighty arguments. As for the rest, the proofs that win, the arduous, numbing connections — I have no patience, or perhaps the equipment is wanting. But the examples, ah! I’ve a weakness for example, a sweet tooth for instance and all the gossip inherent in idea. A joke better than a story, an hypothesis richer than a case. I’m queer for conditions, I say, a scientist distracted by personality. Farmer Brown has an apple, Farmer Jones a pear. If a pear has a sixth more market value than an apple, how much apple must Farmer Brown give to eat a quarter of Farmer Jones’ pear? The Phoenician loves such problems. Make it figs and he’ll hug you.

But I am merely a bailbondsman. I spring you, something neutral in the freedom I sell. At least you won’t be cornholed, or beaten by the guards, or have to eat the civic slime. For the time being and the duration of due process you’re your own man still, and may it serve you better than it did before. For the time being. Yes, I am chained to the calendar. I live by it. What your watch is to you my calendar is to me. As it happens, I got calendars all over the place, tools of the trade. I get them from garages (French maids in satin uniforms, their bloomers like white carnations), funeral directors (Audubon prints, Niagara Falls), banks (kids with fishing poles, covered bridges in New England), the Hong Kong tailors (panoramas of the harbor), insurance companies (views of downtown Hartford); from trucking firms and liquor stores and laundries. I hang them all in my shop, a storefront across from Cincinnati police headquarters. What views I have! Not a window in the place — the Venetian blinds, always drawn, across the width of the shop — but everywhere I look nature in its green abundance and staggering formations. You’ve come a long way from Phoenicia. But I don’t look. All I see are the numbers like seven columns of sums, the red Sundays like a bankrupt’s homework and the glowing, feverish holidays, New Year’s, Washington’s birthday, clean March, April, June and August. May’s flush Memorial Day and July’s gaudy Fourth and all the burning rest. I note who’s to appear where, circle when they show and the case is closed, and make a thick arrow where I’m disappointed. My calendars are like maps and I am secretary to the year itself, up on all its appointments.

The shop looks as if it had once been something else — the source of its own calendars, perhaps, like a liquor store or a real-estate office. It never was. It was always what it is now. Like the sixteen other bondsmen’s offices in the three blocks around police headquarters and the municipal and federal courts. Your bailbond architecture is storefront gypsy, nigger church. The city has a referendum coming up next year, a proposal for a bond issue that would provide a new civic courts complex on some cleared land near the stadium. If it passes I’ll have to move — a nomad still — and if I can’t buy out the small one-man grocery I got my eye on, what I put up will look just like this place, a replica like a little tourist attraction. I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a bond in one of those chrome and naugahyde bank manager places with their big notched-leaf plants and their clear aquariums with cruising iridescent fish. I need wooden desk from the high school teacher’s office, a broken set of unmatched folding card-table chairs, squat black telephones, a pencil sharpener on the lintel of the window, green metal wastebaskets, dirty linoleum, walls that will take the nails to hold my calendars and a bare floor that can stand up to my small, heavy safe. I need a toilet and washstand in something that used to be a closet, the scaly ceiling and the cheap glass ashtrays, plugs for space heaters and a transom over the front door like the place where they put the old air-conditioning unit in a barbershop. And a place for my arsenal. (I’m armed. I have what the cops have: pistols, mace, a helmet, handcuffs, a rifle, a cosh, even a bulletproof vest.) And shelves, of course, for my library of statutes from those three quarters of the fifty states where bailbonding is still legal. Like a clinic for the poor, something crummy and vaguely volunteer in the air. And tough.

And this is what I seem to look like. Mid-fifties, a hairline like a tattered flag, and something in my mug placid and vicious, some kinky catered lust perhaps, used two times a month, say on fourteen-year-old black chicks, my cock moon-pulled, tidal-torn, and you think here’s a guy that turns the tables on those girls, who produces not the fifty he’s promised but the fiver that will not even cover their expenses, and a boot in the blackbird’s ass if she whines, power and cynicism planted there on my municipal kisser and in my eyes that puts me beyond law or retribution or redress, the mien of the mean, the phiz of the respectably ferocious, like a hunter who drinks sour mash. I look professional, you see, a cross between a railroad conductor and a deputy sheriff. You’d expect to see yourself fun-housed in my sunglasses. This is the look of me, the reputation I propagate with my cliché of a face, my death’s pan, the features actually trained into the face. Because the truth is your hood looks up to the impassive: he loves the anesthetized look of the deputy, the sober cosmetics of the hanging judge. Give the public what it wants; the customer is always right. Yes, and business never better. No complaints. Let them scream law and order, yell crime in the streets like the tocsin of a leper. Our times — here’s to ’em. Here’s to the complicated trade routes of the drug traffic, to micro-dot tabs of LSD, to folks’ vengeant itchiness as the discrepancies bloom apace and injustices shake the earth like underground faults. Here’s to moonshots and the confusion of priorities. To TV in the ghetto and ads in the glossies and whatever engines that raise expectations like the hard-on, and drive men up one wall and down the other. To hard times and our golden age of blood!

I’m in the corridor of municipal court by 8:30 each morning, a half-hour before the judge begins to process everybody who was arrested the day before. The old hallway smells of disinfectant, though I can no longer smell it, haven’t smelled it for years, or tasted anything for years either — the twin senses reamed out long ago by ammonia, C-N, all the dirt poisons (I do not taste the liquor I stand the lawyers to, or feel its warmth, though I go ah, smack my lips, applaud on my belly my pantomimed thirst) steaming in pails, the heavy, old-fashioned wringers colorless as the pails themselves, as the bleached gray mops and handles.

I see my colleagues, the other bondsmen. They confer with lawyers, approach relatives, those sad-ass poor who huddle there each morning, the faces changed daily but somehow the same, the questions the same, the complaints, the whiny tales of wages docked, not appreciating their small holiday, their kids wild in the hallway and the guards tolerant. (Can they chip marble or leave marks on such tough city property?) There’s no smoking but the Phoenician smokes, not tasting it though his cough seems to betray its effects — I seem marked for lung cancer — like some novice at the beach who does not feel the sun which that night will sear him, turning him red as those useless days on my calendars.

Though I’m here at 8:30, by detaching myself from any single lawyer or group of relatives, by drifting around the hallway from clutch to clutch, I manage somehow to seem to have arrived later than the rest, to make a series of entrances, the spurious authority of the regular on me, the old-timer. It’s only here that I smoke, where no one else may. (I fixed the guard. Years ago I started to give him a hundred bucks a year for the dispensation. I take it off my taxes, a business expense, the cigarettes too.) I move about the crowded corridor, size up the still invisible prisoners by the impression their families make on me, kibitzing one and all, determining in advance whose business to seek out, whose to renounce. I like to see family there because that means roots, strong community ties, and cuts down the risk that a guy will skip, though too much depth on the bench is no good. A good mix is what I like best — a brother or brother-in-law there with the wife, maybe a first cousin. A solitary parent is good, even a girl friend if she’s attractive, one or two kids if they’re well behaved. I also take in the lawyer, culling the shyster from the bespoke, the man who’s already on the case — or even better, the guy on retainer, who doesn’t come downtown often. He’s the fellow I nod at, making my bid like a dealer at auctions, though I’m more amiable with the others. I come on strongest with my fellow bondsmen, distracting them, though from time to time there’s real business to discuss, something so big we have to split the bond. But standing in no one place very long, getting a feel for what I want by floating around like a guy at a party casing possibility.

Dan Tucker’s in the corridor, a gray and handsome man, taller than the half-dozen bondsmen who circle him, chatting him up, trying to find out what an important corporation counsel like himself is doing in the halls. He sees me and waves.

Dan and I go way back. During the thirties Dan was an ambulance chaser, a divorce man, a writer of wills, a house closer. It was in this very building that it happened, that I took fire. In the thirties they stole bread, they took sweaters in winter and galoshes in the rainy season, pails of fuel. The shoplifters were men — hunters, practically. A gentle age, the Depression. So it was, I forget exactly, but a day in winter, some cold day following some colder one, and there they were: the bread and sweater thieves out in force, or at least their relatives, the bread thieves and sweater swipers and fuel filchers, all that lot of conditional takers, nickers of necessities without a mean bone in their body — if anything the opposite, tender-hearted as raw liver, or their relatives I mean, that sad boatload of the dependent. Old Dan Tucker was there, well dressed as now, dapper in his graduation suit but coming in as much to get warm, you understand, as to round up a client. Who could pay? There wasn’t a retainer between the sorry lot of them, let alone a fee, so Dan was in off the street to chat up a pal probably, though there weren’t even any other lawyers around (that’s how bad times were, so bad that trouble drew no troubleshooters, rotten luck no retinue) and, dapper as he was, a little sad himself, as though if times didn’t change soon he might be busted for grabbing a loaf or an overcoat himself one day, and not many bail-bondsmen there to speak of either, for it’s a trade which follows the ego. Freedom and fraud go hand in hand, I think, liberty and larceny, hope and heists, spirit and spoils. So no bailbondsmen there to speak of, maybe one or two old-timers from the roaring twenties, bewildered now that Prohibition was off and gangland killings were down at par value. And the Phoenician’s angry, plenty mad, and the madder he is the more he needs to make himself an oasis. He’ll have an oasis. Let there be an oasis in this desert of mood, this sandy blandness of meager evil.

“Oyez, oyez,” he shouts, erupts. “Make a circle, oyez. The pregnant here and the orphaned there, small orphans closer to the radiators, hold those smaller orphans’ hands, you taller orphans, be gloves to them, that’s it, that’s right. Now the feverish on that side and the coughers on this. Let’s get some order here. Where are my old people, my widowed mothers and my gassed dads? All right, all right, perfect the circle. Now the rest of you form according to your mood, despair to anger like the do re mi. The innocent next, the falsely accused, all those cases of mistaken identity and people whose alibis will stand up in court. Oyez, oyez. Are you an orphan, boy?”

“Sir, I’m not.”

“Who’s inside for you then?”

“It’s my brother, sir.”

“Stand next to that tall orphan. Oyez, are you formed? Are you arranged, oyez?” They shuffle a bit. “Is your tenuous connection to guilt orchestrated proper? I’ll find you out later but I’ll take your word. Can I have your word? Can I?”

They nod, excited.

“Good. Oyez. In a few minutes the hearings begin. They’ll let your people in, but they won’t let them go. It’s jail for the poor man, crust and water for the down-and-outer. I’m Alexander Main the Bailbondsman and you need me, oyez. See that man? The tall bloke in the stripy suit? Recognize him? Know who he is? Tip of your tongue, right? You know him. A big shot, the biggest. You read his name in the papers before you stuff them inside your clothes to keep the draft off. He goes to the night clubs. His photo’s in the columns. He’s had his picture taken more times than you’ve had hot dinners. His brother’s inside now, the cops have him. They keep him apart from your people, the brave men who steal to feed and clothe you. He’s with them now but he won’t be with them long. The judge will set his bail and I’ll pay it. A guy lucky enough to have work and see how he takes advantage? And what work! You know what he does? What this man’s brother does? He’s high up in the Cincinnati Reds and he defrauds the railroads and the club too. Worked out some deal on the fares with certain railroads and pockets the dough for the tickets. It’s very complicated, very tricky. I don’t know, I think the infield and bullpen travel on a child’s ticket. A buck for the line and two for the lining of his pocket. You know what that adds up to in a season? Thousands, oyez, thousands. So what’s he doing here, then? Stripy suit? He’s asked me to go his brother’s bond. Fifteen thousand and he could pay it himself, so what does he need me with my Jew’s hard terms and my tricksy vigorish? Because the rich man’s money is tied up is why. Because the rich man’s money is tied up and earns more than the lousy ten percent it would cost him to undo the knots. So his brother — if they are brothers; they live together, they say they’re brothers — comes to me.

“Do what the rich do, you suckers. Do what the rich men do, my brothers. You, lady, you got a ring there, your wedding band. Should your husband rot in jail while Stripy Suit’s pal goes free? Give me the ring, my brother. I’ll go his bond too. The band for the bond. What have you got? I’ll take real estate, furniture, canned goods. Who’s still got a car? Anybody got a car? Raise your hands you got a car.”

“I have a car. It’s up on blocks. Its tires are flat. There’s no money for gas.”

“I’ll take it. This day your husband will be with you in paradise. I’ll take it. Done, oyez. Who else? Anybody else? Pianos then, a fiddle. An heirloom, maybe, from the good old days. A pile carpet, stamp collections, a rare song your grandmother taught you. Suckers, brothers, his lordship here comes because his principal’s tied up. These are your husbands and sons and fathers who are tied up. If this rich bastard won’t touch what is only his principal — they are brothers, they must be, in this light suddenly I see the resemblance — surely you won’t touch yours which is flesh and blood. Here’s pen, here’s paper. Write down what you have, make a list of what’s left, what you’ll trade for your sweethearts.”

And they did. These good family people did and I took their possessions. And old Dan Tucker just stood by lookin’. And never raised a protest against a single thing I said. Dan and I go back.

The court is convened and we file in.

Slim pickings today. Basket and Farb have wasted my time and Dan Tucker is there only to have a word with the clerk. I salvage what I can, sign up Farb’s shoplifter and a few punks — maybe two hundred fifty, two hundred seventy-five bucks’ worth of business — then go to my office, call the main switchboard at the University of Cincinnati and give the operator the extension.

“Yes, please?” A secretary.

I wink at my own. “Your opposite number, Mr. Crainpool,” I tell him, my hand over the mouthpiece. “Put the chancellor on, Miss.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“It’s his bailbondsman, Miss.”

“Who?”

“Miss, it’s the chancellor of the University of Cincinnati’s bailbondsman here, Miss.”

“The chancellor is in conference,” she tells me nervously.

“Suits me.”

“Just a minute, please. Is this important?”

“Life and death,” I say, shrugging.

“May I have your name, please?”

“The Phoenician. You tell that schoolteacher the Phoenician bondsman wants a word with him.”

In seconds he’s on the phone. Conference dismissed.

“Yes?”

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“I read about the troubles, Doctor, and I’m calling to see if there’s anything I can do.”

“The troubles?”

“I take the campus paper. I have it delivered special in a taxi-cab. There’s going to be sit-ins, break-ins, rumbles you could read on the Richter scale. The Black Students’ Organization will fire the frat houses and sear the sororities. Weathermen in the meteorology lab, safety pins in the computers, blood on the blackboards. Professors’ notes’ll be burned, they’ll rip the railings in the cafeteria and pour weed-killer on the AstroTurf. What, are you kidding me? Mass arrests are coming. The night school students are spoiling for a fight.”

“The night school students?”

“They want the professors to take naps. They ain’t fresh in the evening classes. They need shaves, they say, their suits ain’t pressed.”

“Listen, who is this?”

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. If you don’t read your student newspaper, try your Bible. It’s Alexander Main, the Phoenician bailbond salesman. Listen to me, Doctor, the University of Cincinnati is a streetcar college. You don’t know what passion is till you’ve smelled it on the breath of the lower classes. Your kid from the middle class, he’s fucking around, his heart ain’t in it. His heart’s in the jukebox, his deposit’s down on a youth fare to Europe. Think, where does the big-time trouble come from? S.F. State, City College. It’s your greaseballs and Chicanos, Chancellor. I got my ear to the ground. The University of Cincinnati is the biggest municipal university in the country. She’s coming in like an oil well, it’s going to blow. Already I smell smoke. State troopers are coming, the Guard. Fort Benning is keeping the engines warmed. Are you ready for all this, Doctor? Where you gonna be when the lights go out? I’m telling you straight, you heard it here first, I think they got their eye on upwards of twenty-five hundred kids. What’ll your forty-five-grand-a-year job be worth you got twenty-five hundred students in jail who can’t make bond?”

“Where do you get this stuff? I never heard anything like this.”

“No. Sure not. I sit at the blower. All alone by the telephone, waiting for a ring, a ting-a-ling. I thought by now you’d have made your arrangements. But no, every day I come back from lunch I ask my secretary, Mr. Crainpool, ‘The chancellor ring yet, Mr. Crainpool?’ Mr. Crainpool says no. I call the phone company. ‘Is this line in working order?’ They tell me hang up, they’ll call back. The Bells of St. Mary’s, Chancellor! Loud. Clear. Could wake the dead. I know in my heart it’s only the service department of Ohio Bell, but I think no, maybe this time it’s the chancellor of the University of Cincinnati calling to do a deal. I wave Mr. Crainpool aside. ‘I’ll get it, Mr. Crainpool,’ I say, ‘it could be the big one.’ I pick up the phone. ‘This six-seven-eight, five-oh-one-two?’ All hope founders, zing go the strings of my heart. ‘Everything’s A-OK,’ I tell him. ‘Check,’ he says. ‘Roger and out,’ I offer.

“But you know something? I lied, I told a fib to the fucking service department of Ohio Bell. Because it ain’t A-OK. Pas de doing with the university. The chancellor is not making his arrangements. You play golf, Doctor? What’s your handicap? Wait, I’ll tell you. Your handicap is that when this place goes sky-high you won’t know where to turn! Do the deal, my dear Doctor of Philosophy. Twenty-five hundred kids at an average bond of three hundred dollars. That’s three-quarters of a million dollars, Doc. Who’s going to approve that kind of dough? Your trustees? With their politics? ‘Let the bastards rot,’ they’ll say. Right. And from that moment on the world can forget the University of Cincinnati. After all you did. All that work down the drain.

“All right, let’s be serious, let’s be serious business people. I can’t take on twenty-five hundred kids by myself. It’s not the money; I could probably raise that. A bondsman has tie-ins with insurance companies, loan associations, sometimes he can even get banks to pick up some of his paper. The sky just could be the limit in certain circumstances. So it ain’t the money. It’s the number. How can I keep an eye on two thousand, five hundred crazies? I can’t. Humanly impossible. Statistically out of the question. I’m sorry; that’s it, it’s useless to argue. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll spring five hundred. It’s asking a lot, but I’ll do it. I’m overextending, but don’t concern yourself. I’ll want a retainer from the university. A buck a head.”

“This is incredible. Are you actually a bondsman?”

“Thirty-eight years in the same location. Centrally located, convenient to all courts and many jails. Look, here’s what I’m doing. I’m having a contract drawn up. Mr. Crainpool will hand-carry it to the university. If you like what you see, sign it. If not don’t, and you haven’t spent a dime. You’ll have the specimen contract inside twenty-four hours. That’s pressing me, but we have to get off our duffs, Chancellor, the sky is falling.”

I hang up, slip the contract I’ve already drawn up out of my desk, sign it, have Mr. Crainpool witness it and tell him to pop it by the university on his way to work tomorrow. Mr. Crainpool lives out that way. A respectful, very soft-sell letter accompanies the document spelling out our mutual undertakings. Chances are nothing will come of it, but in these times who can tell? I do take the campus newspaper; something like what I outlined to the chancellor could happen. A bright bondsman stays on top of things.

“What’s on, Mr. Crainpool? Anything come up while I was at court?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all? Sometimes the merest inquiry or the most innocuous information can lead to the biggest action.”

“No, sir.”

“Where’s all this fucking crime in the streets I keep hearing about? I sometimes think the people around here aren’t pulling their oar.”

“No, sir.”

“They’re letting us down, Mr. Crainpool.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You remember when Covington was wide open?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s what this reminds me of.”

Covington is across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Till they cleaned it up a few years ago it used to be the wildest town in America. Gambling, strip joints, after-hours places, whorehouses, the lot. It may have been the only small town in the country with its own press bureau. Articles used to come out regularly in the men’s magazines—“Covington, Kentucky: Sin City, U.S.A.” It was terrific. It was terrific, but it was an optical illusion. Organized crime, you could starve to death. The only licensed bondsman in town used to complain to me. He’d cross the river and sing the blues. I told him when he first moved out there, “Harry, you’re wasting your time in the suburbs. They’ll never amount to a hill of shit. That’s syndicate money, that’s family. That’s no place for the little man.”

“Button your sweater, Mr. Crainpool, please. How many times do I have to tell you?”

I like him to look cold. It gives him the look of a clerk in Dickens and lends tone to the place. I even made him a high stool he can sit on when a client comes into the shop. He slips on these arm garters and a little green eyeshade. I try to get him to wear a muffler but he’s allergic.

“You’re supposed to call Edna,” Mr. Crainpool says.

“Right, Mr. Crainpool. Thank you.”

There’s no need for Mr. Crainpool to dial it for me; I remember the number. Oh, my flat Phoenician head, my definitive, paradigmatic eyes like the cutouts in masks — all my archaeological features like the beaked profiles of birds, the ledges of my lids deep as window sills, my ears, pressed back as a hairdo: all this information in me, my face built for remembering, my black eyes that can hold accusation and grudge in them, commodious, flexible as the infinity of configurations in the interiors of airplanes. Of course I remember the number.

“Is Edna up, Mrs. Shea?…What, don’t recognize my voice yet? And meself after callin’ yer daughter these many times these many months?…Well, if you don’t, you don’t. You’re a good woman, Mrs. Shea, sad fortune gave you your daughter and your cross.…What’s that?…No no, ’tisn’t Fatha, Mrs. Shea, ’tis Mr. Main. Through whose good offices your daughter sleeps under your roof instead of in some godless cell, or walks where you and me both know she oughtn’t! Be so good as to wake her for me, Mrs.…Edna? Alexander, Edna. Mother tells me you were in bed. Been taking those pills then, have you, Edna? Good, sweetheart. How many have you got left?…What’s that?…Then go see at once, you filthy pig. Wait. Put Mom on the extension.…Mrs. Shea, hasn’t Edna gone through the bottle Mr. Crainpool left? How many?…As much as that? Edna, you fiend, Mummy tells Uncle Al you’ve still got twelve tabs in the bottle. You haven’t been taking your medicine, dear.…Oh, la, you answer pretty good for a girl who’s supposed to be doped up. You haven’t been taking the pills, Eddy. Never mind putting on that where-am-I voice for me. You came to the phone too quick. You want me after you, girl? You want me to have you fixed? You want your tongue rolled in the acid bath, or the knife taken to your taste buds? That’d fix you pretty good, wouldn’t it, dearie? Don’t you know even the first thing about appetite — a girl with one like yours? Think, sweetheart, if you beat this rap and they let you out in the streets again, you wouldn’t even be able to smell a playground. You’d rub up against the first diamond wire fence you came to. Pathetic, pathetic, child. You’d wait for recess and find when the whistle blows it’s only some factory you’ve been hanging round.”

“They make me sleepy,” Edna whines. “I can’t think. They make me goofy.”

“Mnephenedrin? They relax you, doll. They keep you away from the bus stations and off the superhighways, and Uncle Al doesn’t have to worry about you. Enjoy the pills. Pretend you’re on vacation.”

“I get nervous.”

“All right, Edna, if you’re not going to cooperate I’ll have to send Mr. Crainpool out with the cold serum. You’re leaving me no alternative. One injection and your nose will run till your trial comes up. Your head will be stuffed. Your throat will tickle like poison ivy. You want that, darling?”

“I’m not going off anywhere.”

“Mama, you still on the phone?”

“I’m here.”

“Two pills for Edna today. One with her orange juice, another tonight. Drop it in the back of her mouth yourself so you can see she’s really swallowing it. All right, Edna, listen dear, it’s only another two weeks. Do as I say. You think all I’m trying to do is protect an investment? Kid, I like your style. I take an interest in your case. You’re a credit to the deviates, darling. I don’t want to see a really innovative cookie like you shut up with a lot of tough broads. They menstruate, Edna. Every babe in the Ohio whoresgow — that’s my name for it, daughter, the whoresgow — has blood on her. An odor so strong it would come right through Mr. Crainpool’s serum. I’m telling you, Eddy, the state gives out sanitary napkins. The toilets are choked with ’em. More egg in the air than at all the breakfast tables in the world. You want to go to a place like that? Now stop that crying, Edna; don’t go soft, kid. I’m just laying the cards out on the table for you, covering aspects you might have missed. You’ve got a good lawyer. With your psychiatric record you don’t have a thing to worry about. Chances are they won’t even lock you up; you’ll be an outpatient right in Cincinnati. Do you know where the clinic is, Edna? I’ve saved the best for the last, dear. Do you have any idea at all where they built that clinic? Right next to a nursery school!…Of course I’m not kidding, sure I’m telling the truth. Take your pill, doll. Go back to bed. In a couple of weeks we’ll wake you and take you to court. Okay? Say okay, sweetheart. Tell me okay.”

“Okay.”

“Good. That’s a promise, Edna. That’s a bond, honeybunch. Sleep now, sweetie. Night night.…Mama, are you still there? The orange juice, Mama. Go get it for her please.”

Mr. Crainpool grins slyly when I replace the receiver. “There’s no such serum,” he says.

“Botheration, Mr. Crainpool, this is intolerable! Listening to my private conversation, were you?”

“Wasn’t private, was a business call.”

“Blow on your hands, sir. Button your sweater. Look cold.”

“It’s almost April.”

“Out there, Mr. Crainpool.” I point to the Venetian blinds, so tightly shut that their louvers make a solid creamy wall. “Out there it’s almost April. In here it’s the Dark Ages. There’s capital punishment, men languish in prison for debt, hang for a stolen horse, poaching, a loaf filched for love. Severed heads, could you but see them, perch taking the weather on the flagstaffs above Riverfront Stadium, and not the pennants of the National League. The executioner’s head like a black bullet in its hood. Yes and class divides like the surgeon. It Moseses us left and right. You eat too much, Mr. Crainpool, you’re too well-fed. Easy on the starch and sauces, sir. Make yourself wan and drawn, if you’d be so kind.”

Mr. Crainpool chuckles. His master is a strange old codger.

“Cool the cackle, Crainpool. I’m talking about image. How would tapers look in here, do you suppose? A bit much, you think? Eh? Oh well, you may be right. We must learn to make do with what’s given — fluorescent tubing, running water and the rulings of the late, unlamented Warren Court.”

The door opens and a little bell sounds. Like in a bakery or an old candy store. I don’t suppose much of this registers on my clients, but perhaps I get to them subliminally.

Mr. Crainpool, per his training, scratches arduously in a ledger. I look up casually and greet the newcomer, a man in a checkered sports coat, loud matching shirt and tie, new style cuffs on his flaring trousers. He has a sort of crew cut and looks for all the world like an off-duty cop. (I cast no aspersions. I like cops, but they do look vacuous sometimes. That air they have of concentration that comes from having to remember their lines, the unnatural vocabulary they’re lumbered with, that abject, dispassionate diction of the trade, having to say words like “Negro” and “alleged” and “suspect,” speaking as they do increasingly these days for Xerox and the tape recorder, for bookkeeping and the public record. And that sense of direction cops have, having always to be oriented, going about like human compasses, knowing the avenues, forced to think in terms of east and south, his left, my right — that’s what does it.) So this fellow looks abstracted. We often get them in here. They tip us off about raids and sometimes consult us about the nature of the charges to be brought. One man’s collusion is another man’s professional courtesy. (But the cops don’t really like us. They envy us our powers of arrest, stronger even than their own. And we don’t have to deal with the technicalities of extradition, and carry guns lightly as credit cards.)

“Top of the morning,” I tell him pleasantly.

“Top of the morning yourself.” This man is not a policeman.

“Raise the blinds please, Mr. Crainpool. A little sunshine on the tough here. You had me fooled, son.”

“You the Phoenician?”

“I am Mr. Alexander Main, the bailbusinessman.”

“I’m from out of state.”

“You’re lost?”

“I’m Mafia, Pops.”

“Mafia, wow.”

“Wow? This is how you talk to a mobster?”

“One call on the hot line and you’ll never talk out of the side of your mouth again. Me and the Don of all the Dons are like that. I call him Donny. Behave yourself. Nice folks don’t come in off the street on a bright and sunny morning and say ‘I’m Mafia, Pops.’ Who are you, son? Where are you from?”

“Chicago. They call me ‘the Golfer.’”

“The Golfer, eh? What do you shoot?”

“People,” we both say together. I turn to Mr. Crainpool. “Mr. Crainpool, do you hear this dialogue? What a business this is! The nearer the bone you go, lifewise and deathwise, the saltier the talk. Peppery. You could flavor meat with our exchanges.”

It’s true what I tell Crainpool. I’m called on to make colorful conversation in my trade. Don’t think I enjoy it. I’m a serious man; such patter is distasteful to me. When day is done I like nothing better than to ask my neighbor how he’s feeling, to hear he’s well and tell him same here, to trade what we know about the weather, to be agreeable and aloof and dull. Leave poetry to the poets, style to the window trimmers. I’m old. I should have grandchildren. But I turn back to the young man who will tire one day, should he outlive his apprenticeship, of such cheap excitements. We’re doing business. He’s come from Chicago and expects his money’s worth. “All right,” I tell him, “you’re Mafia. What do you want, you gonna put a jukebox in here? I got to change the beer I been using thirty years? What?”

“There’s a man in town. We don’t know where he is, but the pigs do. He’ll be picked up. We want you to spring for him.”

“What? On your recognizance? Do you hear this, Mr. Crainpool? I put up my money—if the man is even bailable — then the Golfer here takes him out in a hole-in-one, and when the yobbo doesn’t show up for his trial I’m out of pocket.”

“You won’t be out of pocket. The cops don’t know what they’re getting. His bond won’t be set higher than a few thousand — five thousand. We advance you the cash forfeiture. You make five hundred bucks.”

“Young fellow, no. I don’t need the business.”

“Mr. Main, it’s Command Performanceville,” he says softly.

Oh, he’s very sinister. “Why didn’t you say Command Performanceville in the first place? Command Performanceville’s another story. For Command Performanceville my commission is thirty percent.”

“Drinks all around,” he says agreeably. “I’ll put you in the picture.”

“I read the book, I seen the picture. Your man downtown calls my man downtown who tells me your lad is under arrest. It’s strictly offside vis-a-vis the other bondsmen, but I get to him first, arrange the bail, and he steps out into the sunshine a free man.”

“A hundred percent.”

“That will be sixty-five hundred dollars please.”

“C.O.D.”

“C.O.D.?”

“Phoenician, Mr. Main, I’m a sporty young man. I drive fast cars fast. How would it look I was picked up for speeding and the cops found sixty-five hundred bucks on me? Use your keppeleh. Did we know you drive such a hard bargain?”

“I drive hard bargains hard.”

“Of course, of course. You’ll be paid. The handle plus thirty percent. You’ll get registered mail. Who’s more honest than a syndicate man?”

“Then why do you speed?” I ask gloomily.

But there’s reason on the young fellow’s side. We shake and he leaves. The little bakery bell jingles behind him. Mr. Crainpool looks at me reproachfully, sorrow in his eyes like the toothache. “Something on your mind, Jiminy Cricket?”

“No, sir.”

“What would happen if I refused? Fetterman would do it, or Klein. Adams would. Does Macy tell Gimbel?”

“It’s only fifteen hundred dollars after the forfeit.”

“Oh ho. I see where it is with you. It’s all right to finger a man, just make sure you get a good price. Mr. Crainpool, kid, my finger comes cheap. If they ask how I do it, say it’s my terrific turnover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We would rather be a banker in a fine suit. We would rather conduct discreet business over drinks at the club. Heart to heart, man to man, gentlemen’s agreements and a handshake between friends. We would prefer silver at our temples and a portrait in oils in the marble lobby. But…”

Even Crainpool gets the benefit of my colorful rhythms. This is what is distasteful, not the high hand and the strong arm. The rhetoric. To be laconic, taciturn, the quiet type. To speak modestly and thank my clients for their custom. Nothing can make up for this, not the viciousness or the seamy excitements or my collective, licey knowledge of the world. Boy oh boy, what goes on. My thoughts explode in words. I tell Crainpool.

“Do you know, Mr. Crainpool, the progress of the liver fluke through a cow’s intestine to a human being? That’s a picture. The trematode worm forms itself in shit, is discharged in a cow’s stool. It can’t crawl, it can’t fly. All its mobility is concentrated toward one end, the act of boring. So, good nature’s corkscrew that it is, it infiltrates the foundation of a blade of grass. Everything else in the cow pat dies off — every microbe, every virus. Just the flatworm, rising out of its matrix of shit like a befouled Phoenix to nest in the basement of a single blade of grass, only that survives. Even the cow moves on, wants distance between its manure and its lunch. Well, the rains come, the sun shines, the grass grows. The fluke hasn’t hurt it; it’s only along for the ride. Till finally it’s at the top, which is the only part of the grass that the sheep will touch — his heart of artichoke and palm. A connoisseur, the sheep. And that’s all that that trematode has been waiting for, some nasty radar in him that Reveres his logy instincts and tells him the sheep are coming, the sheep are coming. Lying in ambush all that time till the grass is high enough to munch. Then the paralyzed little creature goes crazy. It hasn’t stirred its ass all the while it’s been on the grass, mind, but now suddenly it leaps out of its wheelchair and walks, runs, does fucking triples, commandos the sheep’s liver, where it’s wanted to be all along, you see. Swimming the mile, doing the decathlon, dancing, dining, diamonds shining, making right for the liver, riding there like an act of vengeance, like a bronco-buster, spoiling the sheep’s piss, poisoning the ground the sick sheep shits. Only now it’s metamorphosed, now it’s some viper butterfly to sting the heels of the barefoot kid on one of those fucking calendars of ours. Nature’s nasty marathon, its stations of the cross and inside job.

“And the same with people. What the liver fluke can do man can do. The fix is in, takes two to tango, all crime’s a cooperation. This I wanted to see. I’ve seen it, show me something else. Phooey. A Phoenician’s phooey on it all.”

Crainpool listens and nods, but his eyes are glazing. Not much interested in the overview, my Mr. Crainpool, not much feeling for the morphology of our business.

I dreamed of Oyp and Glyp again last night. Perhaps I should tell Crainpool. Would cheer him up. Well, I won’t, don’t. Bother Crainpool’s moods. I’ll be his Nature as Nature is mine. Ah, Nature, who can send us so many dreams, which do you choose? Do we dream of feasts? Three-star Michelin picnics on a checkered cloth on soft, spongy zoysia, wicker work baskets with wine in linen and gorgeous chicken sandwiches on a windless day? Of beautiful women yielding to us in lovely water, or riding behind us bareback on horses in splendid country? Do we hear wit in our sleep, or does Nature deposit millions in our account or furnish our houses as we would wish them? Does She show us new colors or sound new notes or whisper good news? Would She grant us a view of the stars close up, or entertain us with the contemplation of beasts? Where is there to be found in dreams new masterpieces to study or even the slow motion of the ordinary cinema? No. She is too niggardly, gives us rag-shop, rubbish, engineers trivial enigma we forget on rising. Better altogether to leave us dreamless — but no, not Nature. She sends us Oyp and Glyp. I can’t really remember where they were in my dream, but it was someplace high, I think, mountains (though the view was not spectacular), above Nature’s three-mile limit, smug, warm behind their beards — they do not have beards in life; they’d grown them there, though these were matted ice and hair, an awful aspic. I saw them from below. (I was not even with them.) Such heights no place for a Phoenician; God gave us men to match our mountains. Oyp and Glyp. They’re alive. Alive and loose and flouting my extraditionary will. But there’s my comfort if the dream speaks true. They are still together, and to find one is to find both. It wasn’t so with Evans, it wasn’t so with Stern, it wasn’t so with Trace. The Phoenician’s scattered, his Diaspora’d enemies drifting outward like the universe. It took years to find them. I put them together like a collection.

“Will there be any special instructions for me today, sir?”

“Do your accounts. Update your inventory. Bookkeep me my criminals. Advance the calendars. Mullins has run out of postponements. We can pull off November now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Destroy it. Don’t just leave it lying about as you did October.”

“No, sir.”

“I want November off my walls and out of here.”

“I’m rather fond,” Crainpool says slyly, “of the angler in hip boots. He looks like my brother.”

“Sure, kid, take it.” I think Crainpool keeps a scrapbook of the pictures on my calendars. That angler doesn’t look like his brother. He has no brother. I think Crainpool associates the pictures with the month’s crimes in some mnemonic way. November would be a rapist and three car thieves, a pair of armed assaults, a little breaking and entering, a dangerous driver and a berk who threw away a suitcase of traffic tickets. Crainpool’s Wanted poster Americana. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps there’s more connection than I’ve thought about between the pictures on those calendars and the life of crime. “It’s all yours, sirrah, a fringe benefit.”

“Yes, sir, thank you.”

“Stay by the phones, it’s a telethon. When that cop calls, tell him I’m at the jail. Have him leave a message with Lou who the guy is I’m supposed to see.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Crainpool?”

“Shouldn’t you take the call yourself? The officer might be reluctant to pass on such information through a fellow policeman.”

“Reluctant? You forget the liver fluke, sir. Where would the liver fluke be if he attended the cow’s compunction or the sheep’s scruple? Screw his sensibilities and reluctances. I’m down at the jail.” I take my hat and go out. The little bakery bell tinkles pleasantly and I smile. I have made my joyful noise in the world.

The jailhouse is two miles from municipal court — a big reason for that referendum next year — and I call there regularly. I like the idea of having places to be to conduct my business. I have the route salesman’s heart. It gets me outside. There are many such places: the jail (and its interview rooms where I consult with my clients), the courthouse, police headquarters, various law offices, the chambers of certain judges, even the main post office (one of the best ways to trace a jumper is to keep in touch with the postal authorities; sooner or later some of them send in one of those change-of-address cards requesting that their mail be redirected to a particular P.O. box in a distant city), the homes and apartments of their relatives, and, when I’m on the road tracing these mugs, the world itself. I don’t drive — I know how but I don’t — and always take public transportation (you might spot someone you’re looking for or overhear something you need to know; you can’t do this in a closed car).

The jailhouse is my favorite. It relaxes me to go there. There’s a lot of shit and sycophancy in this business. It’s “Yes, Your Honor” and “No, Your Honor” even when the guy is on your payroll. The lawyers are worse; they think we’re scum. I keep half the town’s lawyers in booze, but have yet to be invited to have a drink with one. I always send a nice present when their kids get married but have never been within goddamn hailing distance of one of those weddings. So the jail relaxes me. It’s all cops there. Cops and robbers. And though I’m as deferential to the guards as I am to the biggest judge or hot-shot pol, somehow I don’t mind so much.

It’s a big facility, eleven stories high with rough gray stone and bars so black and thick you can make them out even on the top story, law and order’s parallel lines. I love the jail. It’s a building which constantly hums, murmurs, the cons at the windows of the lower floors ragging the pedestrians or shouting obscenities across the areaway to the women’s block. And the woman shouting back, soliciting Johns from the eighth floor. The invitations and promises tumbling all that way somehow lose their viciousness, space moderating the human voice. It’s as though they were all outside at recess and the rest of us indoors with flus and colds.

Some old gal spots me getting off the bus. (Whores must have incredible vision.) “Dey’s dat nice Mr. Bondsman,” she yells. “Hidy, lover. You still got dat golden prick on you? Man got a golden weewee,” she explains to the street.

“Whut you sayin’, fool? Him? Ain’ nuthin’ weewee ’bout it. It de Trans’lantic Cable. You kin get J’rus’lem on it. One time I call up Poland, talk to de Prince.”

“Dat de hot line den in dat white man’s pan’s?”

“Yeah, dass ri’, dass it all ri’.”

“If dat so,” another voice adds, “let dat boy get up de vigorish an’ get us all a partner.”

“You means a pardon.”

“Shit, fool, I know what I means. I means a partner. I gettin’ tired dis ole cellmate dey gimme. She ain’ no bad lookin’ girl, ya unnerstan’, but she got fingernails on her like de railroad spikes. She makin’ my po’ ole hole bleed.”

A crowd has gathered in the street to listen. Another face has come to the window and takes the place of the woman who has just spoken. “Dat ain’ blood, honey, dass gism. Dis gal got fo’ty years ub de gism packed up her crack. I jus’ heppin’ her to get it out. She got so much gism we habbin’ us snowball fights up heah.” The men laugh.

I squint against the sun and look up at the women, staring into their eclipse. I can’t recognize them, though I go with whores from time to time. If they know me it’s because I’ve become part of the jail’s unofficial personnel, as the lawyers have. They wouldn’t dare speak this way to the guards, or even to the prison’s cooks and bakers. Nor, I’ve noticed, do they tease each other’s visitors. Only strangers and those of us who can help them.

The girls have had their turn. Now it’s the men’s chance at me. An enormous black face appears at a barred window on the third floor. He sticks his arms through the bars and holds them out in front of him, suddenly turning his head and bending, pressing his ear against the bars as if he’s listening to them. He makes some sort of imaginary adjustment on the bars with the fingers of his right hand, then strums them with his left. He begins to sing in a loud, terrible voice.

“I got de blooooooz,

I got de blooooooz,

Oh boy oh boy, do I got de blooooooz!

I got de blues in de mornin’

I got de blues in de ebenin’,

I eben got de blues in de afternoooooon.

I got de blooooooz,

I got de mornin’, ebenin’, afternoon blues.

I got de blues in Febr’ary,

I got de blues in fall,

I got de blooooooz on Thursday, April twelfth.”

A white face appears in the cell next to his. “I’m in a jungle,” he screams. “I’m in a fucking jungle. I’m locked up in a fucking jungle with a bunch of fucking coons. I feel like Dr. David Fucking Livingstone.”

The black man opens his fingers and turns fiercely to the white man. “You made me drop my guitar, you pink-toed bastard. How in hell I supposed to practice without I got a guitar? How they gonna scubber me I ain’t got my twenty-string guitar? It’s useless to me now all busted up on the cement. You think they treat Leadbelly this way?”

“Use your accordion,” someone calls. “Let them discover you on the accordion.” There are many white faces at the windows now.

The singer disappears, returns, thrusts his arms through the bars again and starts to make crazy, waving, squeezing movements.

“Lady ub Spain, ah adores you,

Lady ub Spain, ah adores you.”

He breaks off. “It ain’t the same,” he says disconsolately.

“Then take up track!” a prisoner shouts. They laugh.

Below them I applaud. “Very funny, ladies,” I call. “Very amusing, gentlemen.”

“You liked it?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Vastly entertaining dot dot dot.’ ‘Four stars dot dot dot — Alexander Main, Cincinnati bailbondsman.’ You’ve got a big hit, kids. Boffo!”

“You think they’ll hold us over?”

“Months. Years.” I do a two-step, a little shuffle. I break into song:

“There’s no business like show business,

Like no business I know.

One day they are saying you will not go far,

Next day on your dressing room they hang…you.”

“Sheeeit.”

“You think so?” I hold my palms out and up to them. I turn them over. “You see that? Recognize that? Any you people remember what this stuff is? Sunshine. Look, watch this.” I breathe deep. “Fresh air. Smells good. I’ll tell you something else. I ever need to take a crap I get to lock the door. No lids. Sit on a toilet seat like a kid’s inner tube. I go out to lunch they hand me a menu. There’s a napkin on my lap so I shouldn’t get crumbs on my suit. After lunch, I feel like it I walk in the park, sit on a bench, look at the girls. If I wanted I could throw a ball over a wall and chase it. I could walk a mile for a Camel. I got a radio next to my bed pulls in all the stations and there’s never any interference on the TV from the electric chair.”

“Go peddle your papers, motherfucker.”

“He is.”

“I am.”

“Sheeeit.”

“There are seven million arrests in the United States annually — I’m giving you the latest year for which we have statistics — a hundred and sixty thousand people in the jails, prisons, pens and work farms at any given moment. I’m giving you the latest moment for which we have statistics.”

“Sheeeit.”

“Eighty thousand of you monkeys are in a pretrial or preconviction stage. Eighty thousand. Do you follow what I’m telling you? One out of every two could be out this afternoon if he went bail. I’m coming inside. I’ve arranged with the guards to see as many of you as I can. They’ll be no trouble. Just call the guard and tell him you want to see Mr. Main.” I have a sudden inspiration. “Tell the screw to take you to the visitors’ room. What the hell, I’ll do the lot of you. This town’s been kind of boring with you mothers off the streets.” There are catcalls but I shout above them. “I talk this way in the public streets because this ain’t privilege but constitutional rights we’re discussing. Don’t ask me how it happens, but you creeps have constitutional rights. God Bless America and I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

The screens in the visitors’ room give it the look of high summer. I wave to the guards, chipper Phoenician that I am. An act of the purest good will because it makes no difference to these sober, side-armed fellows. They have no more regard for me than for their charges. The public makes a mistake when it assumes that all its officials are on the take. Many of these men, low fellows bribed by their very jobs, don’t get a penny off me.

“Give us a fiver, Phoenician,” one hisses before the men arrive. “You’ll never miss it, sir.”

“I never heard that,” I tell him, waving the paper container of coffee at him that I got from the machine. “You never said it and I never heard it. Now, where are my boys and girls? Whatever can be keeping them? If there’s been any infringement of their constitutional rights—”

“Naw, naw,” Poslosky, the chief guard, says. “Nothing like that.”

They begin to file through a thick door on the other side of the screening. “Paul, they’re on the other side. I want to go in there with them.”

“Aw, Phoenician, you know the regulations. You shouldn’t be here at all. You’re supposed to see them in the interview rooms. I’d get in trouble.”

“All right, kid, you’re down for five percent of whatever I take in, but we got to go backstage.”

“Phoenician, I mean it, you could cost me my job one day.”

“Good. Terrific. Then you’ll come work for me. What do you say? You’ll be my field representative in the southwest in charge of wetbacks and Indians. I’ll turn you into a real policeman. A hundred fifty bucks for every jumper you kill. I’m getting old, Paulie, slowing down. You don’t know what all those Big-Boys and Burger-Chefs do to a man’s stomach when he’s out on the road looking for the bail jumpers. What’s going to happen to the business when I’m gone?” I put my arm around his shoulder and we go out of the room and into the corridor.

“I shouldn’t be taking you back there,” Poslosky tells me, “I mean it’s really off-limits.”

I steer him toward a barred gate. The guard there stands up when he sees me. “Hey, Phoenician, I got a message for you.”

“Not now, Lou.”

“I think it’s important, I kinda recognized the voice. A chief, I think. About some guy named Morgan.”

“Later, Lou, please. I’m running late. Open the gate.” He presses the button and the gate slides open. “Lou, I’ll get back to you.” We go through another gate and pause before a thick metal door. “Open it,” I tell Poslosky.

“No kidding, Phoenician, civilians strictly ain’t allowed back here.”

“Civilians? That’s the way you talk to a man who’s been in the war against crime all his life? Unlock the fucking door, I’m reviewing the troops.”

Inside, in addition to the guards, there are seven men and four women. I hadn’t expected a crowd, but it’s a poor showing. I rub my hands. “Most bondsmen wouldn’t take this trouble,” I tell them. “What can I say? It’s the way I’m built. Painstaking attention to detail. We try harder.” I recognize no one. Most of them have probably been refused bail already. Others couldn’t find anyone who would put it up for them. They mill about listlessly. Some have come just to get out of their cells. I go up to one. “How’s the grub?”

“I’ve tasted worse.”

“My compliments to the chef. Beat it, I wouldn’t touch you. All right, anybody else like the food here? No? Who’s been refused bail? Come on, come on, don’t waste my time.” I grab a nigger. “Hey, didn’t I already turn you down for bail?”

“No, sir, Cap’n, I never got no hearing.”

“No hearing, eh?”

“No, sir.”

“Must have been pretty bad, what you did, if you didn’t get a hearing. What’d you do, slice up on someone.”

“No, sir.”

“Shoot? Chain whip? Don’t stand there and tell me you used poison. Dropped a little something extra in the soul food?”

“I didn’t do none them things.”

“Well, my bad man, you must have done something pretty awful if you never got a hearing.”

“They say I slep’ with my child.”

“Who says that?”

“My wife. She swore the complaint.”

“And you want to get out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bad?”

“I can taste it.”

“Yeah, taste it, I know what you mean. How old’s your daughter? This is a daughter we’re talking about? They don’t say you buggered your boy?”

“No, sir, my daughter.”

“Well, you look to me to be a young man. What are you — twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

“I be twenty-eight the Fourth of July.”

“Yankee Doodle Dandy. How old’s the kid?”

“She nine, sir.”

“Now you told me you were married. This isn’t some woman you’re living with. You two are legally married?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Ever been divorced? I check all this stuff out. It won’t help you to lie.”

“No, never. My wife and me been married since we both seventeen.”

“So this little girl — what’s the little girl’s name?”

“Ruth.”

“So Ruth is your and your wife’s blood daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“She go to school?”

“ ’Course she go to school. What the hell you talking about?”

“Take it easy, Romeo. What school does she go to, what grade’s she in?”

“O’Keefe School, she in the fourth grade.”

“O’Keefe’s a white school.”

“They buses her.”

“What are her marks?”

“She smart, she get good scores.”

“Ever been to a P.T.A. meeting?”

“Sure I been. Ruth the president of her class.”

“The president of her class, eh? Tell me, what school did she go to before they started busing her to O’Keefe?”

“Lamont School.”

“She do pretty well over there?”

“She on the honor roll.”

“Your wife work?”

“She cleans.”

“What do you do?”

“I work in my cousin’s car wash.”

“This cousin — he your cousin or your wife’s cousin?”

“He my cousin. My wife’s people don’t amount to much.”

“Okay. Give me the name of your lawyer. I’ll see to it you get bail.”

“Hey. You means I gets out of here?”

“Sure.”

“What it cost me?”

“That bother you?”

“I just works in a car wash.”

“Well, it’s a pretty serious charge. I’d say they’ll set your bail at two thousand. It costs you ten percent of that, two hundred. You got two hundred dollars?”

“In the bank.”

“You give me a signed note saying I can draw two hundred dollars out of your account.”

“I gives you that you gets me out of here?”

“All there is to it. There’s just some papers you have to sign.”

“Papers.”

“You people shit your pants when you hear papers. Don’t worry. I ain’t selling livingroom bedroom suites or color TV’s. I’m Alexander Main, the freedom man. The Great Emancipator. No. These papers have nothing to do with money. They simply state that you waive extradition proceedings and consent to the application of such force as may be necessary to effect your return should you make an effort to jump bail.”

“What’s all that?”

“That if you try to get away I can kill you.”

“I ain’t gonna try to get away.”

“Of course not. You’re a good risk. That’s why I’m going your bond.”

“Gimme that paper. Where do I sign?” He fixes his signature laboriously, as if he were pinning it there.

“Fine. You’re as good as out.”

“I wants to thank you.”

“Sure. I understand. It’s true love, the real thing. You miss that kid.” I turn to the others. “Next. Who’s next? Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, it’s A. Main, the freedom man, selling you respite for ten percent down. Tired of the same old routine? Ass got cornhole blisters? Long to get back in the blue suede shoes? Bailbonds, bailbonds here. Bailbond, mister?”

“Yeah.”

“What’re you in for?”

“He’s on remand for murder, Phoenician,” Poslosky says.

“Murder? Who says murder? Is that true, son?” The kid, a dark, sullen-looking mug just out of his teens, stares back at me. You could skate on his eyes. “Come on, boy, think of me as you would a doctor. If I’m going to help you, you’ve got to put your balls in my hand and cough.”

“He killed a fourteen-year-old for winking at his girl.”

“He killed an enemy, an affair of honor. Since when is it murder to kill an enemy in an affair of honor? Not guilty. It’s the unwritten law.”

“They weren’t even engaged, Phoenician, they didn’t even go steady. It was their first date,” Poslosky says. “All the kid did was wink.”

“It’s the unwritten law. This is America. Since when is there one unwritten law for the married and another unwritten law for the single?”

“He set the boy on fire,” Poslosky whispers.

“Arson is a bailable offense. I see no reason why this man should be held without bond. It was an enemy he set fire to in an affair of honor. The word gets about in these things. What are the chances of someone else winking at his date? The risk’s negligible. Are you highly connected, son?”

“Highly connected?”

“Are your people rich?”

“Nah.”

“Not so fast, son. Hold on there. You’d be surprised what constitutes an estate. Is Father living?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a start, that’s a good start. Does he own his home?”

“He’s paying it off.”

“Where is this house?”

“Brackman Street.”

“Above or below the fourteen hundred block?”

“Below. Six Brackman Street.”

“Six, you say? River property? Six is river property.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t say ‘yeah’ as if this were some vacant lot we’re talking about. This is bona fide river property.”

“It’s an old house.”

“On an older river. What size lot?”

“I never measured.”

“When you cut Dad’s grass — just give me an estimate on this — how long does it take you to go from the front to the back, from one side to the other? Do you use a power mower or a manual? Just give me a rough estimate.”

“I never cut no grass.”

“Too big a job? That could be in your favor if it was too big a job.”

“Yeah, it was too big a job.”

I whistle. “How many bedrooms?”

“Two.”

“Two? Only two on an enormous estate like that?…Are you an only child? This could be important.”

“Yeah, there’s just me.”

“Better and better. Look, son, think carefully, try to remember, is Mom dead or alive?”

“Yeah, I remember. I’m an only child and Mom’s dead.”

“Son, you’re an heir. You’re a son, son.”

“The old man hates my guts.”

“There are deathbed reunions. The ball game isn’t over till the last man is out. All right, let’s inventory this thing. We’ve got a good piece of riverfront property, a magnificent two-bedroom house and an only child. Now. Tell me. You look a stocky, sturdy guy. You take after your father? You built like Pop?”

“I’m taller. We weigh about the same.”

I squeeze the flab around his belly, palm his gut like a tit. “A hundred ninety? One ninety-five?”

He shakes me off. “One seventy-two.” The fat fuck lies.

“We’ll call it one eighty. How old’s your daddy?”

“I don’t know, he don’t invite me to his birthday parties.”

“Easy, son, easy. Pa in his sixties? Fifties?”

“I don’t know. Fifties.”

“He smoke?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s good. I’ll tell you the truth, I’d have been a little worried if you’d told me he was in his sixties because that would have meant he’s beaten the actuarial tables. There’s no telling how long you can go once you’ve beaten the actuarial tables, but in his fifties, and a smoker, that’s something else…All right, is there insurance?”

“Who knows?”

“Fair enough. Is he self-employed or does he work for someone?”

“He’s a baker. He’s got a little bakery.”

“Hey. You didn’t say anything about a bakery. That’s terrific.”

“It’s a dump.”

“It’s a small business. It’s a small business and it’s insured. Okay, up to now we’ve been talking about potential collateral. What would you say he’s worth, right now, alive? Any stocks or bonds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. Do you ever see him reading the financial pages? Does he rail at Wall Street?”

“No.”

“All right. Does he read the sports section? Following scores often indicates an interest in the fluctuation of dollars.”

“He reads the funnies.”

“I’m beginning to get a picture. Owns a piece of riverfront property which at today’s prices could be worth fifty or sixty thousand to a developer. He has a small business which means he probably banks his money. He an immigrant?”

“Yeah.”

“Sicily? Italy?”

“Yeah, Sicily, Italy.”

“An immigrant. Came to this country in the late twenties as a youngster. Saw the stock market crash and learned a good lesson. Worked and saved till he owned his own small bakery. Banks his money, likes to see it grow — watch the numbers get bigger. Sure. By this time there could be thirty or forty thousand in his account. At the inside your pop’s worth a hundred grand, not counting any possible insurance.”

“Gee.”

“Plus maybe a car, probably a small delivery truck.” The kid nods. “The equipment at the bakery, of course. The industrial ovens alone could be ten or fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Gosh.”

“That kind never throws anything out. The old-country furniture might be worth another couple grand. These are optimum figures. All in all between a hundred and seventeen and a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. Round it off at a hundred twenty.”

“Christ.”

“This is a great country, sonny. But those were optimum estimates. In my business you’ve got to be conservative. It might not be more than ninety thousand.”

“That old bastard sitting on ninety thousand bucks.”

“Wait, wait, I’m still figuring. Now, you know, when you come right down to it Poslosky here is right. You’re in for a capital offense, and while my arguments for your release might go over with the judge, the bond would have to be a high one.”

“How high?”

“Fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“That’s a lot.”

“We could swing that. I just showed you.”

“It ain’t my money, it’s his.”

“I could talk to him, bring him around.”

“Will you do that?”

“No.”

“What do you mean no? What’s all this about?”

“You’re a shitty risk.”

“What are you talking about? I acted in anger. Like you said yourself, people will steer clear of me. It couldn’t happen again.”

“That’s not it.”

“What? What then?”

“You never cut the grass. You haven’t got good ties to the community. Next, who’s next here?”

There’s a tall, good-looking white man in his late thirties. Well dressed, he’s the only one in the room not in prison garb. I go up to him. “Sir, it looks to me as if we might have a case of false arrest here. Excuse me, I just want to take a swig of this coffee, I think it’s getting cold…Now. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” He walks abruptly away from me and I follow. “Don’t get sore, that’s just my way of scraping acquaintance. Please don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not talking to this creep,” he tells Poslosky.

“This is the bondsman,” Poslosky says. “If you want to get out you’re going to have to work with him.”

“I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

“Why is this man dressed like this, Lieutenant?”

“Maybe he hasn’t been processed yet, Phoenician.”

“He just came in,” the guard from his cellblock volunteers. “I brought him down to see the bondsman. I’ll get him fixed up as soon as we go back.”

“Like hell,” the chap says. “You’re not getting me in one of those outfits. I haven’t been convicted of anything. I can wear my own clothes.”

“Shut up, bigmouth,” Poslosky says.

“Hold on, Lieutenant,” I say mildly, “he’s right. He knows his law. The law states that a prisoner may wear his own clothes while he’s waiting to be brought to trial.”

“Well, sure,” Poslosky sputters, “but—”

“As long as they’re neat and presentable.”

“I know, but—”

I throw the remainder of my coffee at the guy’s suit. “There,” I say, “now they’re not neat and presentable.”

Poslosky roars with laughter and the guy starts for me. Almost has me, too, but the guards grab him. “All right,” I say, “I think he’s going to be a good sport about this. You can let him go. He won’t touch me. You won’t touch me, will you, Morgan?”

“If you know who I am and still did that, you’re a fool,” Morgan says.

I turn to Poslosky. “That’s it for today, Lieutenant, I think. I’ll get back to you about the golliwogg once the bank releases his dough. They can go back. All but Morgan. I’ll go Morgan’s bail. We’ll work something out so it’s processed immediately.”

“You haven’t asked any questions. You don’t even know what he’s in for.”

“Morgan? Morgan’s all right. Morgan’s a good risk. I know a little something about the case and I give you my assurance he’s bondable.”

“I’m not going with this guy.”

“We can’t keep you once your bail’s been paid.”

“I don’t want it paid.”

“The state has no rights in it,” I tell him quietly. “If you’re bondable, you’re out.”

“I’ll jump bail.” Poslosky looks at me.

“Nah. That’s exuberance talking, the flush of freedom. The guy’s got terrific community ties. Roots like beets. Bring him along, then.” This is a violation of procedure and Poslosky visibly balks. Morgan’s guard stands up against his man like a Siamese twin. Sotto voce I say to Poslosky: “Ontday ooyay ohnay oohay oovyay otgay?”

“Oohay?”

I whisper into his ear and remind him of the message Lou said he had for me. I offer a few Phoenician flourishes. Poslosky looks over at Morgan who by this time is almost cuddling his guard.

“Well, if he’s such a big shot—”

“Shh.”

“Well, why’s he so reluctant to leave?”

I take him aside. “Poslosky, you have an inquiring mind. I like that in a policeman. All we know for sure is that City Hall wants him the hell out of this place. My best guess is that he’s a plant from the Enquirer here to do an exposé on conditions.”

“The son of a bitch, I’ll exposé his head.”

“No, that would be playing into his hands. Look, I don’t know any more about it than you. I heard something was up and I’m just putting two and two together from the message Lou tried to pass me. I bet Lou tells us we’re to zip down with the guy in a paddy wagon to Judge Ehrlinger’s chambers, arrange a quick pro forma bond and get him the hell off our backs before his suit dries. They give it a twelve-minute investigation and charges are dropped this afternoon. If he’s held a minute longer than necessary I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

“All right, we’ll see what Lou has to say.” Poslosky tells the guard to hold on to the prisoner and we step outside to speak to Lou.

Word-for-word, I swear to you. My people haven’t been in this business thousands of years for nothing! Morgan, the wagon, Ehrlinger — Ehrlinger, a hack, is special-duty magistrate this week — everything. Poslosky is electrified. He gets on Lou’s phone and arranges for a wagon and a couple of guards to be waiting when we come out with the prisoner. Inside five minutes we’re on our way. I sit up front with the driver. Poslosky himself helps me into the wagon and closes the door for me. He shakes my hand through the open window.

“Thanks, Phoenician.”

I lean out. “Lieutenant,” I tell him coolly, “I’m no goddamn do-gooder. If conditions in this jail are ever exposed, the Bail Commission will be letting everyone but the murderers out on their own recognizance. Those Commission bastards are cutting my throat as it is.”

“The revolving door,” Poslosky sighs.

“Too true. We’re goners, Poz, they’re wiping us out. Cops, bondsmen.”

“The fucking Supreme Court,” Poslosky says, “the fucking Miranda decision.”

“Yeah, Pus. Gee, kid, I could stick around here talking philosophy with you all day, but we better get that mother downtown before Ehrlinger wets himself.”

“Yeah. So long, Phoenician.”

At the courthouse Morgan walks between me and the cop to Ehrlinger’s chambers. I study him closely but can’t tell how much his anger is antagonism to me or appreciation of his situation. “You know,” I tell him amiably, “I’m pretty ashamed of what I did back there. What a temper. I want you to send me the cleaning bill for your suit. I’ll pay.”

“Shit, if the coffee stains don’t come out, you’ll buy me a new goddamn suit.”

He knows from nothing. “Sure,” I say, “I promise.”

A judge’s chambers, even Ehrlinger’s, give me a hard-on of the spirit. All that oak paneling — brown is your color of civilization — dark as bark, those long earthen fillets of wood like a room made out of cellos, the faint oily odor of care (I remember the smell), the deep brass fittings like metals in museums, the lovely heavy leathers adumbrating strap, blood sports — geez, it’s terrific. The desk big as a piano, and the deep, clean ashtrays on its wide top. And the souvenirs. These guys have been officers in wars, served on commissions. Their official surfaces trail a spoor of the public history: a President’s pen ammunitions a marble bore, Nuremberg memorabilia, a political cartoonist’s original caricature framed on the desk in love’s egotistic inversion, the flier’s short snorter aspicked in paperweight; toys, some pal industrialist’s miniature prototype — all respectability’s groovy junk. And cloudy, obscure prints on the walls, deft hunts and European capitals in old centuries, downtown London before the fire, Berlin’s Inns of Court. A fat globe of the world rises like an immense soft-boiled egg in an eggcup, girdled by a wide wooden orbit that catwalks its equatorial waist. Red calf spines of lawbooks glow behind glass. Only the flag distracts — an absurd bouquet drooping from a queer umbrella stand on three claw feet with metallic, undifferentiated toes. The judge’s black robe is snagged on a hatrack.

Ehrlinger is at his desk pretending to write an opinion when the clerk admits us. The man has been a district judge for years, will never rise higher, but he is absolutely incorruptible, so inflexible that he is never more dangerous than now when, sitting in his capacity as the week’s special-duty magistrate — who hears in camera special pleadings that violate the court calendar — he is asked to alter the conventions.

Like many humorless men, Ehrlinger loves to be entertained. I play the fool for him and he likes me for it.

“Yes?” He looks toward us annoyed and glances at Morgan’s papers that the clerk has just placed on his desk. “Can’t this wait? This man’s just been arrested. The police can hold him for twenty-four hours. Why couldn’t he have his bail hearing tomorrow with everyone else?”

“Influence,” I break in quickly. “You know these crooks, Your Honor. They have friends in low places.”

“Oh, it’s you, Phoenician, is it?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Well, let’s get on with it, then.”

“Wait just a moment, Your Honor. There’s something I’ve always wanted to do, sir.”

“What? What’s that?”

“No, no don’t pay any attention to me, sir. Just go on writing that precedent-making opinion.”

“Here, what’s all this about then?”

I rush to the hatrack where Ehrlinger’s robe is hanging. I lift its hem, draw it back and lean in under it, manipulating my right arm free of the robe and holding it up. Still bent down and hidden in the garment I pivot toward the judge. “Hold it.” I clench my exposed hand into a fist. “There! Got your picture, Your Honor!” I creep back out of the robe and stand up beaming.

“Oh, Phoenician,” Ehrlinger says. “Tarnation, sir, a man your age. All right, now, all right,” he says like Ted Mack on The Amateur Hour, “that will do. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” He turns back to the file and I wink at Morgan. Ehrlinger studies the file for a moment and looks back up. “Well,” he says, “according to this there have been no previous arrests. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” Morgan says.

Ehrlinger grins. “Punched him, did you?”

“I’m afraid I did, sir.”

“Fetched him a good one?”

“I guess so, Your Honor.”

“Well, strictly speaking, you’re supposed to keep your hands to yourself, and since these students had a permit for their rally it was quite proper for the police to bind you over.”

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Still—” Ehrlinger says.

“When I heard him urging those kids to burn their draft cards—”

“Couldn’t control yourself.”

“No, sir.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Well, when I was your age I’d like to think I’d have done the same.”

“Hold on.”

“He was a pimply, long-haired freak. To tell you the truth, Your Honor, it was more like slugging a girl.”

“Well, you can’t say he didn’t have it coming.”

“I’m even kind of ashamed.”

“Jesus!”

“Broke his jaw, did you?”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Under the circumstances it would be hypocritical of me to congratulate you, Mr. Morgan, and the law’s the law. There were a lot of witnesses at that rally. I’m afraid you’ll have to appear.”

“I know that, Your Honor.”

“Still, I’ll try not to make it too hard on you. We’ll set a fifty-dollar bond.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. I didn’t anticipate any of this, so I don’t happen to have that much cash on me.”

“I understand.”

“Fifty dollars? Fifty?”

“I’m glad you brought him by, Phoenician. You showed good judgment. There’s no sense in a man like this having to spend even an extra minute in jail.”

“He broke his jaw!” I shout.

“Yes,” the judge says.

I turn to Morgan. “He was making a speech?”

“Yeah,” Morgan says, “terrible things.”

“A rabble-rouser?”

“Until I clipped him.”

“Judge, this man broke a boy’s jaw. No matter what you or I may think of the young man’s politics, it’s perfectly apparent that the kid was a student leader, a public speaker. Who can tell what disastrous effect Morgan’s punch might have on that young fellow’s future platform performances? Suppose he meant to go into radio? Or be a singer? To let Mr. Morgan off on a pledge of just fifty dollars — why it’s…it’s condoning, it’s tantamount to a dereliction of duty.”

“Always having me on, Phoenician,” Ehrlinger says blandly. “That’s humor, so it’s all right, but blatantly to try to up the ante at a patriot’s expense just to line your pockets with a few paltry dollars, that’s something else. No. To be perfectly frank, Phoenician, I know as well as you do that the bail in these circumstances is five hundred dollars. It’s my little joke on you.”

It’s useless. “Sure. That’s a good one, Your Honor.”

“Just turn your documents over to the clerk on the way out. Your appearance is in three weeks, Mr. Morgan. Will that be all right?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.”

Outside I take out my checkbook. “Wait a minute,” Morgan says, “what are you doing?”

“Writing a check.”

“Hold on,” he says uncomfortably, “money doesn’t change hands unless I fail to appear.”

“Yes, that’s right. Sign here, please. By my penciled x.” He’s glaring at me now, but he signs the forms and I give them to the clerk together with the check. We step into the elevator together.

“Your fee’s what? Ten percent? Here’s your five bucks.” He holds the bill out stiffly to me but I make no motion to take it. I study him carefully. “What is it, the suit? It don’t cost five bucks to clean a suit. Give me two-fifty change.” I hand him two dollars and fifty cents and he tries to give me the five-dollar bill again. “Go on,” he says, “take it.”

“It’s been taken care of.”

“What do you mean it’s been taken care of?”

“It’s been taken care of. There’s a gentleman waiting for you outside. A professional golfer I think he said.”

Morgan’s face drains. “What for?” he asks hoarsely.

“How should I know? Maybe he needs you to fill out a foursome.”

“You son of a bitch,” he screams, “you sold me out!”

“That’s right. I pick up a cool twelve fifty on the deal.”

“Cocksucker!”

He comes for me and I draw my gun and press the emergency button. The elevator jerks to a stop. “You’re Mafia and you don’t carry cash and you don’t pack a gun. Me, I’m an honest man and am lumbered with both. All right, I figure we’ve both been screwed. That’s why I’m doing you this favor.”

“Some favor.”

“You bet some favor. I was supposed to get fifteen hundred bucks for you. How the hell could I know all the cops wanted you for was for smacking some goddamn hippie? Painstaking attention to detail, we try harder. Bygones are bygones. The favor is I warned you.”

“The guy’s outside, you said. What am I supposed to do?”

“It’s a courthouse here. Confess a crime. Expose yourself to a meter maid. Up to you. I’m getting out on three. You’re not.” I press three. We stop and the door opens. “Vaya con Dios, Uncle Sam.” As I step out I bang a button, but before it can shut I lean my weight against the door. “One more thing. If you should happen to get away from that palooka, just remember your appearance is in three weeks. I’ve got fifty bucks tied up in you. If you don’t show up, I’ll come get you.” I release the door, it closes behind me and we’re quits.

2

The bailbondsmen of Cincinnati, Ohio, eat their lunch across the Ohio River in what is now an enormous restaurant a mile south of Covington, Kentucky. Called The Grace and Favor, its name sounds like an English pub, but it bears no resemblance to one. Built in the early twenties, it has had several avatars: speak-easy, night club, gambling casino; briefly a dance hall during the big-band era and then a roadhouse when that style went out after the war; a night club again in the fifties until the public had learned by heart on television the songs and routines of the stars who appeared there, then a sort of caterer’s hall where the Jews of Cincinnati bar mitzvah’d their sons and sprang for the enormous weddings of their daughters; a place where the Republican Party sponsored $1,000-a-plate dinners and the Democrats $25- and $50-a-ticket closed-circuit viewings of rallies staged in Hollywood and New York, with a cash bar available — until, in the mid-sixties, it finally became a restaurant, though it had always had a kitchen, food being a necessary concomitant of such places, prepared to serve at a moment’s notice the high roller’s steak and the gunman’s lobster.

Probably because of its various incarnations, The Grace and Favor enjoyed a certain geisha ambiguity: no matter what its function at any given moment, there were always people around who remembered when it had had another; who saw a dance floor where the tables and banquettes now stood, or remembered the crap tables and chemin de fer and roulette where the dance floor used to be; who could still see the queer metallic aisles and pews formed by the rows of slot machines; who could conjure up through the altered walls and windows and raised platform (which was once space sunk feet beneath the ordinary sea level of the surrounding room) prior configurations, where coppers’ bullets, shattering mirrors, might have brought seven years bad luck had not the management seen to it that no such continuity was likely in the place’s chameleon transitions. But no one, save the émigré English gangster who built it and who was now an old man, had witnessed all of it, though some, even some here at the long table reserved for the bondsmen, had been there at the beginning. There had been lacunae. They’d had to leave town, perhaps, or been called to war, or suffered strokes; one thing or another had taken them away at a time when the establishment was undergoing one of its many transformations. Now, in perhaps its most effete phase, as a restaurant for Cincinnati businessmen and clubwomen, it did its biggest business at lunch. (It was genuinely immense. Its main room alone could handle 500 diners without giving the appearance of crowding them.) The new Interstate Federal Highway that led across the new bridge that spanned the Ohio River and actually provided it (since advertising is banned along federal highways) with its own broad grass-green reflecting sign (“Grace and Favor ½ Mi.”) and exit ramp (no one, not even the most cynical of the bondsmen, knew how this had been finagled, though the speculation was that perhaps one of those $1,000-a-plate dinners had made it possible) made it as accessible as any restaurant in Cincinnati.

The bondsmen came in taxis, five or six to a cab, and rubbed their loud, heavily padded, sports-jacketed shoulders — they dressed in a sort of mid-fifties style, like customers in delicatessens on Sunday mornings — with the furred shoulders of the clubwomen and sober-suited buyers from the downtown stores. The London broil for $1.50 was a specialty. It was what they all ate, the distinction in their appetites if not their characters apparent only in the way they wanted it prepared and what they chose to gulp it down with.

The Phoenician was not with them today, and since word of Ehrlinger’s joke had already been leaked, some of the bondsmen were disappointed that he was not there to take their ragging. None made any comment, however. This was not their usual social gathering. It was a new departure, more or less a formal business meeting, scheduled weeks ago. They had never had a business meeting and were a little uncertain how to begin. In the trade all their adult lives, these were men who had never tired of the infinite eccentricity that came their way, who by the simple process of constant witness had become expert raconteurs, sheer access to “material” democratizing any differences in imagination and delivery chat might once have existed between them. They looked around the table at each other, their glance finally settling on Lester Adams, a tall, speckled, taciturn bondsman in his seventies.

Adams had got into bailbonds in the thirties when his farm was taken from him by the banks. He had come to Cincinnati to look for work and found $100 in the street on his first day in the big city. He was on his way to the courthouse (his small village of Bend, Ohio, had no jail, though it had a J.P. who functioned also as a law enforcement officer and Lost and Found service) to return it, carrying it openly in his hand because he had never seen such traffic before and was a little afraid he might be run over by a truck and the money found concealed on his person and people would wonder what a simple, destitute farmer like himself was doing with a hundred dollars cash in his pockets. He was looking for the Lost and Found, which was, he reasoned by analogy, in the immense courthouse. He waved the bill in front of him as he came down the corridors, snapping it like a flag of safe passage, the ostentation of the gesture only slightly less painful to him than his fear that people might think he came by it wrongfully, until he was stopped by a lawyer who was looking for a bondsman to put up $75 bail for his client.

The lawyer, who had seen Adams waving his money, touched his sleeve to get his attention. “Bondsman,” the lawyer said, and Adams, thinking the man had said “Bendsman” and that it was a question, immediately answered “Yes.” The lawyer explained his client’s circumstances and Adams, who hadn’t followed a word of what the man was saying but who was chagrined not to have recognized a fellow townsman, thought: In the big city not a whole day and whole night and so shook that I not only don’t remember this feller though we come from the same village but don’t even recognize that he looks familiar to me, and nodded in agreement to everything the lawyer said, figuring out only as the lawyer went on and it was too late, and that it was his own pleasant nodding that had made it too late, that his old friend seemed to want to borrow seventy-five dollars of the farmer’s found hundred to help out a friend of his own — possibly, Adams imagined, another fellow Bendsman. When the lawyer’s client was produced, he thought: Yep. I’m in worse trouble than I thought, for this feller don’t look no more familiar to me than the first. Not in the big city a whole day and whole night and already I can’t remember nobody. Spoiled, he thought, cursing himself, spoiled rotten, bigger headed ’n a sow’s belly.

So he was already prepared to turn over the hundred dollars to the lawyer and the twenty-five dollars change to the Lost and Found as soon as he could get away from him and find it when the lawyer said, “What about the form?”

Adams shook his head sadly. “Ain’t got no farm. Lost the farm.”

“Never mind,” the lawyer said, “I’ll be right back.” He was as good as his word. In a few moments he was back with a piece of paper. “This’ll do,” he said. “I got it from the clerk. Here. Sign.”

And though Adams couldn’t read very well he could write his name all right — wasn’t that how he’d lost the farm in the first place? — and he imagined that this was something to do with the loan, it not seeming at all strange to him that in the big city, where everything else was turned around, it was the lender who should fix his name to an IOU rather than the borrower. Then he saw that it was going to be all right when the lawyer’s client signed too. “When do I give the seventy-five dollars?” he asked.

“What?” said the lawyer. “Don’t worry, he isn’t going anywhere. Hey,” said the lawyer, “Baxter, pay the man.” And Baxter, the lawyer’s friend and fellow townsman, handed Lester Adams $7.50 for which Lester didn’t even thank him, so concerned was he that not only could he not place the lawyer and the lawyer’s friend, but couldn’t even remember Baxter now that he knew his name.

It was all over in a few minutes; Baxter and the lawyer left the building and Adams was standing there with one hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. He was so confused by now that he couldn’t move, and others approached him — all asking, it seemed, to borrow money. Under no obligation to these new borrowers since none claimed kinship with him, he was still too good-natured and too timid to have to tell them that he himself had no money and so he refused no one, and when he left the courthouse that day he had not only the hundred found dollars but eighty-four additional dollars that the new borrowers had pressed on him!

Now Lester Adams was no dope. He knew a good thing when he saw one, and though he did not understand what had happened he understood that there had been a misunderstanding. When the corridors finally cleared, he approached one of the policemen and told him the story from the beginning and asked him if he could make anything out of it. The policeman couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes, but when he finally did he explained it all to Adams, careful to omit nothing, not the most trivial detail, since the cop felt that only the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, could drive home to the farmer what an outrageous hick he was, and this, meant as cruelty, was the best lesson anyone could ever have had about the ins and outs of bailbondery.

“I’ll be damned,” Adams said to all the policeman had told him, “I’ll be goddamned. That’s some business! Why, I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a wicked city like Cincinnati there’s always some feller or other in trouble.” With some of his one hundred eighty-four dollars he hired a private tutor, and inside two months he had not only improved his reading skills but could read and understand the most complicated legal documents, and inside three he was licensed by the State of Ohio to set himself up in the bailbond business, and by the fourth he had already had to go out after Baxter, the original borrower, shoot him in the leg, and bring him back by force to the courthouse to stand trial as best he could on one leg. In the years since he had killed eleven men, was no longer a hick and could tell stories of depravity that curled hair.

Taciturn still, yet his imagination so greased by daily contact with the surreal that over the years his character had seemed to turn itself inside out as you would reverse trousers to sew their seams, it was Lester Adams who opened the conference. “They’re killing us, gentlemen. The social scientists and New Left coalitions and civil libertarians. The Supreme Court — and don’t kid yourselves, the Burger Court not only is not all that different from the Warren Court but in certain respects is even more dangerous, because where the Warren guys merely built up the rights of the indigent, this so-called conservative crew is inventing rights for the fat cats. Anybody here who wouldn’t rather go bail for the president of GM than Pete the Tramp? All that’s happened is that now they have a legacy. With a legacy these strict constructionists are going to wall up our assholes. History is stubborn; once its mind is made up it’s made up. Compassion is an historical inevitability and we have no better chance of bringing back laissez-faire than we do public whippings.

“So they’re killing us. The 1966 Federal Bail Reform Act which gave federal courts the discretion to act as their own bondsmen and accept a ten-percent bond up front has already put us out of kidnapping, skyjackings and political assassinations. It’s put us out of bank stickups where the robbers have crossed state lines. It’s pushed us off antitrust, and it’s going to take the big antipollution cases that are coming up right out of our fucking mouths. Crime, gentlemen, is increasingly political. It’s thrown us out of the more apocalyptic riots and raised the bridge on espionage — which admittedly has never been big for us — and it has the potential to squeeze us out of narcotics, to say nothing of the new pattern of conspiracy prosecutions which I see emerging. With all these grass-roots Legal Defense Funds, this could have been the most lucrative fiddle of all.

“Mark my words. As crime turns increasingly against the state and the people get the wind up, all that’s going to be left for us poor bastards are the petty thieves, wife beaters and dog poisoners. The chicken stealers — that’s our meat. Vagrants. Shit, colleagues, even abortion’s legal today. Five and dime, gentlemen, penny ante times, a métier of small potatoes like a little Ireland. In fact, there’s some doubt in my mind that even this will be permitted us. As heart wins the battle of history and bail commissions throughout the length and breadth of the land each day secure releases for ‘good risks,’ we’re going to be left with only the two- and three-time losers. You’d do better to take a flier in a Bronx uranium mine. We’re dead ducks, fellows, law’s dirty old men.”

“We know all that,” Barney Fetterman said. “We know all that. What do we do?”

Ted Caccerone stood up. He had a Coca-Cola in his hand. There was A-1 sauce on the side of his mouth, and crumbs from the open-faced bun on which his London broil had lain. “We undersell. We cut our fee to seven and a half percent.”

“A gas war,” Art Klein said, “we’ll have a fucking gas war.”

“We won’t be so quick to shoot,” Paulie Shannon said. “Somebody jumps bail on us we bring him back alive, we talk him down like an expert in the control tower, we come on like social workers, we change our hard-guy image.”

“We take turns at the courthouse, we draw a number, stand on line, everything courteous. We get rules, choreography. Like in gin rummy the dealer gives the other guy first shot at the face card.”

“Who’s in?” Adams asked.

“I am,” said Shannon.

“Me too,” said Klein.

“It’ll have to be worked out,” Ted Caccerone said, “but I guess I can go along.”

“Something has to be done, that’s for sure,” Walter Mexico said. “Some sort of committee ought to study some of these suggestions we’ve been hearing, formalize them, and then we can put it to a vote.”

“Would you chair such a committee?” Adams asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Where’s the Phoenician?” Barney Fetterman said.

“It’s got to be rationalized,” C. M. Smith said. “Blunt the competition, is that what we’re saying?”

“Just about,” said Lester Adams.

“Lapels shouldn’t come off in our fingers in the corridor, is that the idea? Okay, who’s going to be on the committee?”

“We’re the committee,” Adams said, “this is the committee.”

“Where’s that Phoenician?”

“We don’t jump the gun,” said Paulie Shannon, “we pool our resources. I think it’s the only way. I’m glad this is your thinking. I think a lot’s been accomplished today.”

“But we’ve all got to commit ourselves to this, that’s the important thing. Otherwise it’s no good. We’ve got to behave like brothers. Where’s that goddamn Phoenician?”

“That fucker. He’s off beating our time.”

“He plays Sooner with us we’ll wipe him.”

“Where is the son of a bitch?”

3

Alexander nods to the guard. The old man frowns, bored as ever. Main notes his shoes, the heavy, cumbersome shoe shape like some pure idea of foot in a child’s drawing. The broad black leather facing, a taut vault of hide, a sausage, all its tensions resolved as if ribbed by steel or some hideous flush fist of foot. The shine speaks for itself. There is discipline in it, duty, and he wonders if there is a changing room somewhere where the men polish these stout casings, get them that lusterless, evenly faded black that has no equivalent in nature.

The shoes are made to go with the heavy serge of the uniform, the now formless trousers that may have been formless when new, the long drop to the dark ankles, black themselves, black on black on black, undifferentiated as the cloths in a stage illusion. Alexander wonders if the guard has back trouble, if he soaks his feet in hot salt water. These oiled and bare wood floors, pale as match sticks, faintly dipping, uneven. Marbles set down on them would tumble erratically, collect in some unpredictable pool of gravity. This same force would suck at the man’s feet, pulling at them painfully through the solid soles as he stood all day in his area. Alexander senses the old man’s crotchets, his distaste for stragglers, his ambiguous desires for female art students whose backs, propelled forward in their chairs, reveal an orbit of the elastic tops of underwear above their blue jeans, sliver of the moon, cantaloupe slice of pantie, square inches of backflesh forgotten behind them in their young concentration like Cinderella’s slipper. Does he even see the exhibits? Has he a favorite? Or is his concern only for the glass cases themselves, for whistling, loud talk and no smoking?

As he often does, Main feels an odd envy of the man, of his circumscribed conditions. It suddenly strikes him that the guard is the only person on his Christmas list who is not a lawyer or judge, cop or custodial officer, clerk of the court or prison official. And though the guard gets nothing that Main has especially picked out for him, only the box of good cigars or bottle of Scotch or top-grade Florentine leather wallets bought in bulk for his least important contacts, this makes him, he supposes, his friend. A friendship that is entirely one way, for to the extent that he considers Main at all, the man almost certainly thinks of him as a crank. There must be others, drawn as he is, to this place, or to some other like it. Though Alexander has never seen them, has seen only the schoolchildren and illicit lovers and the vague flirts and lonely, overanxious men.

He loves the cool, big room, its antiquated radiators and old-fashioned exhibit cases, its antiquated space, the corny visual aids, the large type on the yellowing cards by the exhibits. He loves the teeth.

“Afternoon,” Main tells the guard.

The man nods and Main steps away from him and goes toward the case. “These specimens,” reads the legend, “were obtained from drugstores in the Far East. The apothecaries regarded them as ‘dragon’s teeth,’ no matter what they really were. The teeth shown here probably came from cave deposits in the Karst of South China, for they are like the teeth of the Middle Pleistocene animals found in the region.”

He sees the tooth of the giant panda, large as a small seashell, the impression across its broad grinding surface like a curled fetus. Next to it a pair of molars from an orang-utan, the shape and shade of old dice, three deep holes in each like a goblin’s face, history throwing a six. There’s the dentin of a wild pig, dark as root beer, the pulp chambers in cross section like the white veins in liver. He sees the enormous tooth of a rhinoceros, taking the card’s word for it. It does not even resemble a tooth; it is deep, chambered as a lock. In another case there is a comb of kangaroo jaw, four teeth blooming from the bone like cactus.

He moves along a ledge of the extinct, peers at the camel-like jaw of the Macrauchenia Patachonica: “a member,” says the card, “of the peculiar South American ungulate orders. This genus was camel-like but others were horse-like. Thus the litopterns show parallelism with the more familiar true camels and horses.” The keyboard of teeth float in the petrified gum like tulip bulbs. And the lower jaw of a ground sloth, relative of the Megatherium, the teeth driven like stakes deep into the bone, all shapes, one a figure eight worn down to the ground, another like a tree stump, a third like a pipe, a fourth with a crown the texture of target cork. The teeth are in terrible disrepair. (They died this way, Alexander thinks, biting their pain.) A root thicker than the wire in a coat hanger rises a full inch above the awful terraces of decay which surround it. There are teeth long and thick and curved as tusks — these were inside a mouth, Main thinks — huge as jai alai bats.

As always, Alexander ignores the skeletons, the carefully wrought xylophonic carcasses, immense scaffoldings of spine, he supposes, from a hundred animals, so that what he sees is some ancient committee of beast he finds it difficult to believe in (though he is fascinated by the individual parts: the shield-like pelvis, the separate vertebrae, long as the hilts of swords, a hinged jaw like the underedge of a key). Comically a megathere squats upright pawing a prop tree, its odd squat like some plantigrade, prehistoric crap. No. It is the teeth. The tiny spines in the skull of a young jaguar, curiously white, sharp as toenail. Skin still adheres to the palate, the concentric tracery distinct and fine as what he touches with his tongue at the roof of his own mouth. It is teeth that he comes back again and again to see, as if these were the distillate of the animal’s soul, the cutting, biting edge of its passion and life.

He is thinking in geological time now, in thousands of millions of years — thinking Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, saddened at the sixty-million-year-old threshold of his own immediate past, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Quaternary. From seaweeds, younger only than the earth’s crust, through invertebrate animals, fishes, land plants, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds and men. He is weeping.

The guard approaches him. “Are you all right, sir?”

“What? Oh. Yeah,” the Phoenician says, “I’m a sentimental old fool.” He starts past the guard, his friend.

“I was wondering something,” the guard says.

“What’s that?”

“Well, it’s just that you spend so much time here.”

“Yeah, well,” he tells the keeper, “I’ll tell you why that is. I’m a dentist.”

He was late for lunch. (As so often on museum days, his sense of time — he is an early riser, beats others to appointments, brisk as a candidate when it is time for the next, goes late to bed, paper work in the toilet, on the bus home, carrying no brief case but all pockets stuffed with correspondence, pens, notepaper, stamps ready in his wallet — turned tragic, pulling long faces, the past slowing his blood, thickening it, stopping his watch.) He did not even have time to go back to the office.

The bus stop he’d chosen, looking back over his shoulder as he walked from one the two blocks to the next, was outside a drugstore. A woman waited with a shopping bag.

“Missus,” Alexander said, “have you been waiting long?”

“About ten minutes.”

“Just miss a bus?”

“It was pulling away when I came out of Kroger’s.”

If he hurried he would have just enough time to call Crainpool.

“Crainpool?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s up?”

“It’s been very quiet.”

“No messages?”

“The man who was in earlier stopped by.”

“What? The mobster?”

“He said Mr. Morgan gave him the slip. He holds you responsible.”

“Does he, now? Has there been an afternoon mail?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“There was nothing from Chile, nothing from Iran.” Crainpool chuckled.

“East Germany?”

“No word from East Germany.”

The Phoenician cracks down the receiver so hard that the drugstore clerk looks up at him. Loose, he thinks, fugitives at large — the phrase, as always, chilling, raising goosebumps. He thinks of swamps, caves, passes in mountains. Loose. At large. He thinks of settlements so inland in terrains so forbidding that the inhabitants have no language. The chatter of apes, perhaps, the signals of birds. As always, the idea of such remoteness abstracts his face, neutralizes his features, a sort of paralysis of the attention. People watching him wish to help.

“Is there something you wanted, sir?” the clerk asks. At large, loose.

“Hmn?”

“Is there anything I can get you?” Loose.

“What have you got that’s binding?” He sees his bus outside and rushes to board it.

They are in Hilgemann’s Restaurant at the girl’s request. At his they have chosen to remain indoors rather than to dine outside in the beer garden. Though it’s warm enough, the long bare vines snaking among the trellis make him nervous. He could never have been a farmer; he is a bailbondsman because he can exercise some control over his crops of criminals, his staggered harvests so nearly continuous that he feels he does not deal in time at all. (His calendars are only a sort of map, like the precinct maps in police stations.) So they are inside, in an Ohio approximation of Bavaria, leashed to reality by the sealed blue hemispheres of Diners Club, American Express’s bland centurion and Master Charge’s interlocking gold and orange circles decaled on the window like bright postage. He sees airy clubs, spades and hearts between the spindles of the heavy, low-backed captain’s chairs, notices the sweet intrusion of a stuffed deer’s head — no teeth there — and the elaborate plaster-of-Paris mugs that hang from their handles above the bar and that gravity arranges in identical angles, a fringe of falling men, with here and there a lidded pewter beer mug like a tiny hookah or an early, complicated steam engine. Once Herr Hilgemann offered to present the Phoenician with his own, and to have his name inscribed on it. “I’m not a joiner,” he told him. He sees without appetite the heavy portions of thick, stringy meats — flank and chuck and pot roasts, and sanded schnitzels, worms of anchovy curled on them like springs. Thick gravies wound the table linen. There are constructs of pastry, geometric lattices of chocolate, baked bridges of caramel, fretworks of crust, flake, cherries in cross section like the intimate slivers of biopsy. Among these moist ruins Main chews the sandwich he cannot taste; he does not want the fearful cutlery in his mouth, those heavy tines.

He is amazed at the girl’s appetite. The lunch, as Miss Krementz might have guessed, is unnecessary; this could have been handled in the office, or on the phone. He might have asked her, as he had asked others, to write a composition for him: “Why I Think——Will Not Jump Bail.”

He doesn’t even feel like explaining it to her. He feels like taking a nap, like dreaming of fugitives, for though they are his nightmares, at least in his dreams he is with them, learning their plans, seeing them in their new settings and fresh disguises.

“All right,” he says, and puts down his sandwich. By the time he is ready to speak he has already decided against her boyfriend. “Arson’s one of the highest bonds there is. It’s a very high bond. You set fire to a building—”

“But he didn’t.”

Alexander shrugs. “You set fire to a building you bring the insurance companies into it. They’re the ones who determine the prices; not me. I admit it isn’t fair. Every sort of minority pressure group exists in this country, but who gives a second thought to the arsonist? Fire Power! I’m just thinking out loud.”

“His lawyer says we’ve got to get him out, that there’s too great a presumption of guilt if he stays in before the trial.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, what do you say? Have you made up your mind?”

“I have to give you a test.”

“A test.”

“It’s routine.”

“What do I have to do? Hey, wait a minute, I’m not looking for a part in your picture. Don’t get any funny ideas.”

“What, the crap you eat? You’d blow me out of bed.”

“Okay, I just wanted that understood. I’ll give you a cashier’s check. We’ll go to the bank and have it drawn up.”

“You have to pass the test.”

“I have to pass the test.”

“It’s a very stupid test.”

“All right. Let’s get it over with.”

“It’s not scientific. It isn’t for an educated person like yourself.”

“Go ahead.”

“Actually it’s an insult to your intelligence.”

“Try me, for God’s sake.”

“How much do you love Mr. Hunsicker?”

“What?”

“How much do you love him? Do you love him a bunch?”

“Certainly. Of course I do.”

“A whole bunch?”

“Yes. What is this?”

“Oodles and oodles?”

“This is crazy.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Show me with your hands.”

“With my hands?”

“Just spread them out real wide and show me.”

She opens her arms. She might be a fisherman demonstrating the length of a large bass.

“That’s all?”

“No. More. Much more.”

“Show me.”

She opens her arms so wide Alexander can hear her shoulder blades crack. Her tits come forward into her food.

“That’s not so much,” he says.

“You’re making a fool of me. There isn’t any test.”

“I can’t do it. He’s a marked man. Your boyfriend’s ruined. You shouldn’t think badly of him. Innocent men are sometimes lousier risks than guilty. How do I know if he sets fires? I like the prosecution’s case, but that doesn’t mean anything; they could still lose. The thing is, in your boyfriend’s state of mind he doesn’t think they will. I saw him. He’s very depressed that this has happened to him. I don’t think he’ll go the course. Too much money is involved; it’s too big a risk.”

“Why did you put me through all this?”

“You got a good lunch, what are you kicking? What did the other bondsmen’s food taste like? You want dessert?”

“I want to get out of here.”

“I’ll get the check in a minute. No, you were thinking a little earlier I was trying to put the make on you. I ask you, what chance would a person like myself have with a girl like you?”

“None. Thanks for the lovely lunch. See you.”

“Yeah. My wife is dead, did you know that?”

“I’m sorry to hear that. That’s like, you know, tough shit.”

“Right. That’s just what I told her when we learned she was dying.”

“You really are one dreadful son of a bitch.”

“No. What are you saying? What do you know about it? You want dessert? How about some of that creamy shit with the nuts?”

“You actually think you can get me to go to bed with you.”

“One lunch? You set some value on yourself. I never remarried.” She makes no move to leave. Perhaps she thinks he will still do a deal with her. “I play the field, go with the whores now and again to get my rocks off. Cincinnati has some lulus. Do anything for money, some of those girls. Now if one of my whores died, I’d put money in the jukebox and sit at the bar with my hat on my head like Walter Winchell.”

“You must have loved her very much, your wife,” Miss Krementz says levelly.

“Yes, well, she was very ordinary, very plain. We married each other in our middle years. You know what I couldn’t stand about being married? The picnics. All those trips to the damn beach. With the blankets and the towels and the sandwiches in wax paper. Warm Coca-Cola. Wearing swim trunks. Being barefoot on the pebbles, or the sand in my shoes if I kept them on. It wasn’t any better in the backyard. Stretched out in Bermudas on the folding lawn furniture. I come from a desert people, a hot culture, sand in my blood like lymph, but it’s as if I was running a temperature the whole time I was married, as if your Mr. Hunsicker did a job on me with the oily rags. Sweat on my belly like the fat on soup. My jockstrap was grimy, it gave me a rash. Sundays. We were together four years but all I remember are the fucking Sundays. Lounging around. Trying to figure out things to do, bored at the barbecue and settled at the fence like a lost ball.

“Not only Bermudas — pajamas. Do you know how much I hated pajamas by the time it was over? I like pajamas, I always did. Who wants to lie with his great red balls over the place, with his cock drifting like a weather vane or the needle on a compass? No, I’m a pajama guy. In motels, hotels, I love a pair of pajamas. But they have to be starched, they have to be fresh. I like a crease in them like the morning paper. But when my wife was living I wore them for a week, a guy who never slept in the same pajamas two nights running, soiled as handkerchiefs and smelly as socks.

“I don’t know, a year is supposed to have four seasons. I only recall the heat waves, being uncomfortable, doing stuff I never wanted to do, that she never wanted to do. Nobody could want to do that crap. People need to be comfortable, but you get two people together and all of a sudden there’s got to be plans, activities, you bust your ass figuring new ways to get stuck in the traffic. Her leukemia went my bail. Now I jerk off or go to the whores, specialists like the one man in Boston who can do this terrific operation. Or I give myself a treat and get one of those pricey call girls from the university. The ordinary is out forever.

“I see guys like me in restaurants — like the two of us here — old goats with tall blond bimbos with bangs on their foreheads like a cornice and terrific tans. You wonder, father and daughter? Uncle and niece? Never. They’re guys from out of town with the nerve actually to ask bellboys where the action is. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Why are you telling me all this? What makes you think I’m interested in your life?”

“You’re not? Don’t you want to know how people live? What’s the matter with you? What are you, twenty-five years old? How much can a kid like you have seen? You got a fever too? Did Mr. Hunsicker shove wadded newspaper up your ass and spritz it with charcoal lighter? All right, we’ll skip the love life. This is how I feel on this fine spring day: like I could only recover with drugs the sense of my possibilities. Like I’ve never been to the laundry in my life. You eat like a horse and I’m full. This is the reason I asked you to lunch and turned down your buddy’s bond. To lay this on you. Now you know some of how I feel. It isn’t privileged information; a lot know this much about me. There’s more, but I’ll spare you. Say, you got any pictures of yourself? You’re a beautiful girl. I’d like to have your snapshot. I’ll give you four dollars for it.”

“You’re crazy.”

“The hell I am. Crazy people are excited. You think I’m excited? Then I can’t have been making myself clear. Listen, I’ll tell you something. If we had this conversation yesterday I might have made the bond. Maybe not, maybe yes. Something came up. I crossed a scary man today. I was slipshod. My altiloquent style takes too much energy. I’m the best in the business, but I’m seven thousand years old and slowing down. Also I missed an important meeting with my colleagues. They’re planning ways to beat history, natural selection, doing in progress over a suggestion box and London broil in Covington, Kentucky. They think I’m against them. I’m not against them; I’m ahead of them. London broil! Those damn fools. They’re chewing extinction and don’t know it. London broil. A half-hour ride all the way to Kentucky and they eat London broil. And you know why? You want a sign of the fucking times? Because Kentucky fried chicken ain’t been on the menu for years!”

He took out his wallet, put seven dollars on the plate beside the bill and stood up. “What sign are you? Do they still ask that? What sign are you?”

“Me? Sagittarius.”

“Sagittarius, yeah?”

“What sign are you?”

“Pliocene.”

The Phoenician put the girl in a taxi. He had the beginning of a hard-on.

Stepping out of the bright cool sunshine, Alexander Main opens the door to his office, jiggling the gay sleigh bells above his door. “Get to work, Mr. Crainpool,” he calls out absently to the arm-gartered man. “Get to work, you idle scoundrel. While the cat’s away, is it? If you’ve finished what you were doing, find something else. We don’t pay out our good money…’ello, ’ello,” he says in his inspector’s voice. The mug from Chicago is sitting at his desk. “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” the Phoenician asks dully.

“Where’s Morgan? What did you tell him?”

“Listen, type, you owe me money. The bail came to something under the five thousand you mentioned.”

“Where is he?”

“You want to know where he is?”

“That’s right.”

“He got away from you?”

“You told him I was outside.”

“Let me understand. He got away from you and we’re back at square one?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Then I’m still on the payroll?”

“Where is he?”

“I’m still on the payroll?”

“You know where he is?”

“Yes?”

“If you can produce him.”

“Let’s see. The bond came to fifty bucks. Thirty percent for fingering him is another fifteen. That makes it sixty-five dollars I’m owed.”

The gangster takes out his wallet and lays two twenties, two tens and a five down on his blotter.

“Very well.” He takes the bond agreement from his pocket and shows it to him. “Yes. Municipal court. Room nine. His appearance is in three weeks.”

“You’re something else, brother.” He shoves one of the tens back in his pocket.

“Welsher!” Main shouts. “Do you see, Crainpool, how this soldier contrives to worm out of our agreement? Indian giver!”

“Oh, you’re really something else,” he says. “You’re just lucky I’m a professional and that no one’s paying me to do you. I don’t play benefits. But I’m going to have long talks with my superiors about you. Oh, yes, I’m going to make detailed reports about you, Mister.” His tone changes and he looks at Alexander with something like surprise. “Fifty bucks? His bond was only fifty bucks? Shit, don’t they know anything in this burg?”

“A backwater.”

“Okay, bad information. We got this call he was busted and they sent me down.”

“What the hell, a day in the country for you.”

“Sure, right.”

“An outing, a little fresh air. Come back and see us now you know the way.”

“Right,” he says. “In three weeks.”

He goes out.

“Well, Mr. Crainpool, was that exciting enough for you?”

“I’ve seen better.”

“Yes. And you’ll see better yet.”

“Will I?”

“Twenty-twenty, sir, close calls and closest. Now then, what have you got for me?”

Crainpool points to a calendar. “Tomorrow’s the first.”

“Yes. I’ll call on Avila, I think.”

“You’re always the one who gets to go out,” he whines.

“Yes,” I say, “that’s the thing about freedom.”

Avila’s offices are downtown. He is not a criminal but a divorce lawyer, and his place of business reflects this. It is in with the good stores and better office buildings in that three- or four-block section of the city that is our Fifth Avenue.

The day is a reproach to my heart, as though, like all old men on a splendid day, I precede Nature, am there by sufferance, time’s professional courtesy. I have left my topcoat behind, but no matter. God sees through me, knows it’s only old Alexander Main down there in His high-rent Cincinnati, no boy, no boulevardier, only the sullied Phoenician with sin and history like shit in his gut. God sees through my bright caps, knows what’s beneath them, sees right down to the gums, the pink base of my being, the cloudy tracings in which the teeth stand parallel as staves. And under the gums the cementum-sheathed roots hooking bone, seeking wild handhold and purchase like some apraxic mountaineer. God knows my jaws.

Still, here I am. If nothing else my money entitles me. (I have written my will. I am to be buried with my cash. It will line my coffin like salad, so that one day the archaeologists will find me, lightning will strike, the earth move, the state push through a thruway, the new ice age bulldoze me a thousand miles south, scientists of some distant time catalog me, my bones like leftovers in the wormy lettuce of my fortune, Alexander’s ragtime bond, gone surety for himself, in on bail. Perhaps, if they still exist, space will be found for me in the case of some future museum, the fingertips of schoolboys on my glass, smudging the watch face of my crystal isolation.) Meanwhile I usurp pleasure from the fine day, shudder in the faint chill of the spring breeze blowing through Cincinnati’s Lego boulevards, in our Lego America. Down the big street I go where the skin of one building merges with the skin of the next in Siamese connection, a long Chinese wall of architecture, past an outdoor cafe with a little low white fence propped on the wide white street like a playpen that must be folded each night and taken in from the weather. Awning shows. As if Cincinnati were a port city, some sailcloth town. A waiter moves in and out among the tables, not in uniform but in a light gray suit, wearing an old boy’s tie beneath a vest crisscrossed with watch chain and trophied with the keys of elective societies.

I gaze in at the clean store windows — there’s our century’s real art, in its window trimming — like sets for a perfected life. I enjoy other people’s good taste. Things are set off, isolated in high fashion’s splendid cages — a beautiful desk and beautiful chair off-center in an immense window. In another, on a luscious rug, across the arm of a superb Wassily chair, is a Braemar cashmere, pale green as the open spaces on dollar bills. A kiosk bristles with bright announcement — a Ukrainian dance troupe, Lipizzaner horses, the Black Theater of Prague, the Stones, the Black Watch — the posters projected on the tall cylinder like foreign countries painted on a globe. I am surprised they are printed in English and not French. Even the air smells French — chestnuts, Gauloises and gasoline. Ahead of me a girl steers down the street with her hand deep inside the back of her boyfriend’s trousers, using his ass as a tiller.

I pass another sidewalk café. An elegant woman sits beside a man who wears the whitest turtleneck I have ever seen. His cavalry twill trousers are custom-made, bespoke slacks. Elbows on the table, the two lean toward each other in intense affinity over their empty coffee cups. I look down to read the message in the crumbs of their brioches on the white cloth, a Morse code of dough and crust. Further on, workmen in ladder trucks lift Easter decorations into the thin trees, long strips of gold foil in light rigid frames, exactly the size and appearance of bedsprings. When I passed here two days ago they were up only to Pogue’s Department Store; now they have gone another two blocks, inching their way the long length of the avenue like a golden blight.

I enter the new office block and refer to the huge directory that takes up almost the entire width of one black marble wall. I locate the number of Avila’s suite — I have never been here before — and tell the operator I want the eighteenth floor. He stops the car between floors, turns to me and takes a crude wooden box from his pocket. There is a sort of Hawaiian scene painted on it. He is going to show me a magic trick. “You smoke?” Without waiting for me to answer, he lifts the lid and demonstrates that the box is empty; then he opens it again and there are four cigarettes in it. They look stale and have lost tobacco at both ends. He laughs. He has plastic hearing tubes in his ears like tiny drains. “Maybe I get you one of this. Three dollar.”

“Say, do that one again.”

“You smoke?” He lifts the lid and the box is empty. He opens it again and there are the four stale cigarettes. “Three dollar. I get you one?”

“Nah, it’s a trick,” I tell him.

Avila’s suite of rooms is as much a stage set as the store windows. Behind the façade of the steel and glass skyscraper the architect has contrived dormers, queer shapes to the rooms, here let in and there let out like a suit off the rack. I am eighteen stories above the street, but I could be on the second floor of someone’s two-story colonial in the suburbs. On the walls of the anteroom (I have no appointment; the secretary has asked me to wait) are great blown-up photographs, grainy as money, large as flags. The furniture here is not like office furniture at all. I recall the waiter’s good suit. It’s too much for me — spring, style, the future.

The secretary says I may go in and I head down a corridor like a hallway of bedrooms. Avila greets me outside a door, a man in his mid-thirties, jacketless in black trousers and vest, long lengths of bright white shirt-sleeve dropping through its arm-holes like acetylene. He shakes my hand and leads me by it into his office — how passive I have become — which looks as if it has been decorated by emptying three or four of those store windows. His desk is a drawerless slab of white marble five feet long and a yard deep on legs of Rhodesian chrome. At the wall to my right is an antique breakfront, old lawbooks behind golden grillwork like a priest crosshatched in a confessional. A cigarette lighter on his desk like a silver brick. A large round stand-less lamp white as a shirt-front bubbles on the marble, and the carpet, long pelts of creamy wool, has the appearance of bleached floorboard. An eighteenth-century French console table doubles itself against a mirror. Only the chair I sit on is invisible to me. Taste. Taste everywhere. A tasteful office in a city pickled in taste.

Avila does not go behind his desk but takes a seat at the other end of the room in a chair upholstered in nubby hand-woven linen. He wears his clothes well. I see him sockless as a Kennedy in wet tennis shoes; I imagine his rich man’s articulated ankles. I see him on his low, wide bed, the giant strawberry print of his king-size sheets. I see him pluck parking tickets from the windshield of his sports car; I see him hand them to his secretary to pay.

“Look,” he says, “I wasn’t expecting you. As a matter of fact, I was just going downstairs for a trim.” He has an actor’s indeterminate haircut. “The barber’s right in the building. Why don’t you come with me? We can chat while I’m in the chair.”

It’s out before I can think. “But it’s perfect. Nothing needs to be done to it.”

“Oh,” he laughs, “appearance is nine-tenths of the law. I have a standing appointment with my barber every day at this time. A divorce lawyer depends a lot upon transference. Like a psychiatrist.”

We are in the same elevator I have just come up in, but the man who showed me the trick is gone, sucked into history. It bothers me that I will never see him again. I don’t know how I know this.

The barbershop is dazzling. Long slabs of yellow Formica jut out the length of one mirrored wall and the width of another like quick-lunch counters in a restaurant. It’s a beauty parlor here, bright as a plastic surgeon’s consulting room. Boxes of Kleenex, jewelers’ trays of combs, dop kits, big pink sponges, blue satin barber sheets, magnums of cologne, an assortment of brushes with tufts sleek as swatches of mink and chinchilla, a definitive collection of Band-Aids, eyebrow pencils like the city desk at Women’s Wear Daily. There are laquers, shallow dishes of tint, a stand of Q-Tips upright in a clear box like a forest above the snowline. There are nests of wig, surgical adhesive, pots of mascara, blushers, eyelash curlers set on their sides and curving into each other like spoons in a service for eight. There are logjams of emery board, hot stringents and cold creams, fingernail clippers like tools in a surgery. Triple strands of fluorescent tube marquee the mirrors. I am excited here: I wish I could smell the lotions and shampoos and suddenly I lift a Max Factor pan stick and lick it with my tongue as if it were a kid’s push-up ice cream.

Avila sits amused and content in a barber chair and a woman in white slacks makes a few passes at him with her scissors and comb. As she steps back to appraise him, I accuse him of his handsomeness; I tell him that his bone structure is his fate.

“What? No. I am very nondescript.”

I see myself caromed off the mirrors, fractured in space like a break shot in pool. I see the checkered reflection of my checkered jacket. It is expensive, even new, but it is gross. I have no taste, only hunger. I have never been fashionable, and it’s astonishing to me that so much has happened in the world. The changes I perceive leave me breathless. I am more astonished by what remains to happen. I have erratic, sudden premonitions of new packaging techniques — breakfast cereal in spray cans, insulated boxes of frozen beer, egg yolk in squeezable tubes. Avila’s barber sheet could be a shroud. I can’t stand looking at myself, so I pop into an empty chair at Avila’s side.

A barber sets his newspaper aside. He approaches me. “Haircut?”

“Leave me be,” I say too loudly. “Can we talk here?” I ask Avila.

“Of course we can,” he tells me mildly.

“ ‘Of course we can.’ Counselor, counselor, what a style you have! Yes, I like it. Niggerizing the neighborhood, spilling confidence like soup.” Going on the offensive shakes off a little of my passivity. “What a professional ethic you got there! ‘Can we talk?’ ‘Of course. What, is it a public library that we should lower our voices?’ Right. Smell that fart? I claim that. That came out of Alexander’s ragtime asshole, Main’s brown bellows. Why should I deny the obvious? No two men’s farts smell alike in the entire universe. Like snowflakes and fingerprints. Learned counsel’s point is well taken. We can talk here.”

“What are you on about?”

“Yes, well, we never did business till now, or you’d know my thoroughness, my eye for detail, my fastidious methods. I take more pains than aspirin. Tomorrow is April first, lest we forget.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Withers is to appear in court.” I raise my voice so that everyone in the shop can hear. “That’s Withers, the banker. Eugene Withers who could not make good on his alimony payments of twenty-five hundred dollars a month and who was thirty thousand dollars in arrears when our paths crossed in the courts. Eugene Withers, the president of Ohio First Federal Savings Bank, lest we forget. Incidentally, if any of you barbers, manicurists or shoeshine guys do business with him I would suggest a small run on his bank. Pass it on. Withers.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Avila says. “Where do you think you are?”

“He’s not in town.”

“Well, he’s probably upstate on business. Why don’t you wait for me in my office?”

“You know this for fact that he’s upstate on business? I’m not his ex-wife. I have no fond memories of President Withers in bed to tide me over while the arrears pile up. I call and call his bank. ‘Not here,’ they say, ‘we’ll take a message.’ Where upstate is he? I’ll put in a little person-to-person.”

“Charleen, call the guard, please,” Avila tells his barber. “I want this man out of here.”

“The guard? Call the guard? Charleen, dear, guards are my bread and butter. From baby sitters to electrocutioners, they’re all in my pocket, Charleen. Andy Frain stood up at my wedding. Call, call him, we’re old friends. Now, lawyer, the man’s trial is tomorrow. I want to be there to meet his train, his boat, his private plane. If he doesn’t show, I’ll look him up. See my gun? You want me to make him an April Fool?”

“You’d better leave, I think.”

“You give me a number where I can reach him.”

“I’ll see to it that your license is revoked.”

“My license? How are you going to do that? How are you going to revoke carte blanche? You think the system’s an Indian giver? Listen, LL.D., you could be disbarred easier. Poor Withers. Twenty-five hundred a month. Some lawyer. Twenty-five hundred a month for a broad who went down on every depositor in Ohio First Federal Savings. She gave it away to every guy who opened an account. In all the branches. Or are you talking about my license for the gun? I got papers on it like a naturalized citizen or the warrantee on your toaster. I got instruments for it like General Eisenhower’s honorable discharge.”

The man stares at me; he’s never seen such a performance in all his fancy practice. But suddenly I have run out of steam. I finish lamely. “Make sure he’s around. See to Withers.”

In the lobby I wait for each of the elevators to appear. I promise myself that should the old man be in one of them I will buy his trick, but the man is gone.

Back on the street. He’s tired. He’s made very little money for a Monday. It’s late, but not late enough to call the desk sergeants. When is the best time to call? Midnight when they’ve closed the books? Too late. The others will have skimmed the cream. The only sure thing would be to buy all the desk sergeants, but that would be prohibitive. Best to make it almost a social call, work it that way. Too much money shouldn’t change hands. If bondsmen had a trade journal I’d write a paper on it. This afternoon in Covington they voted to cooperate. Threats were made in my absence. My little leverage is leaking.

The street has changed. Not so much money here, not as much taste, but even more style. The shops burst with an egoism of the present tense, the bright letters of the bright wood signs molded in a sausage calligraphy like those quick, clever strokes that leg and backbone animals in balloon-blowing acts. Or black, no capitals, a svelte, spare geometry of case. He remembers these shops, could tell you stories, recalls like a perfect witness their former, failed incarnations. The woman’s shoe store, Bootique, was once Kefauver’s campaign headquarters, then a bookie joint with empty cigar boxes and tire irons half-heartedly showing form’s flag in a casual, lip-service hypocrisy in the front window. After that nothing at all for a time — though once, initially, Tyson’s Liquors, as he still thinks of it, really. Most of the shops won’t last the year. But never till now, the witness thinks, so uniform, locked into style’s faddish contagion, a terminal domino theory. What discrepancies he perceives between will and doom, these tenants’ signs like life’s campaign buttons. He looks for reasons but sees only the irrational, a self-conscious hedonism. The signs, these shops, this business and that enterprise, this landscape, seasonal as the pictures on one of his calendars, are all jokes. The toy shop, with its expensive Creative Playthings and Chinese boxes and big stuffed animals and folk dolls and folk tops and folk sticks and folk hoops and folk balls and miniature green and black boilers of real steam engines for curator kids who never existed, is called — in rainbow letters, yes, it is the rainbow sequence: yellow catching green, green blue and so on, on the glass—“Kinder Garden.” And the butcher shop, sawdust on the floor like cereal and the butchers in boaters, and skinned, unrefrigerated rabbits, plucked chickens and carcasses upside down on hooks that could hold coats, is “The Meating House.” A fabric shop: “Knits and Bolts.” An Italian restaurant: “Pizza Resistance.” “Sole Food”: a fish ’n chips. “Diaspora Travel.” A head shop: “Headquarters.” A cinema: “The Last Picture Show.” “Save Face”: a beauty parlor. A health food store: “Mother Nature’s.” “The Basic Premise”: a realtor. A carry-out chicken place: “Marcho Polio.” “Rock ’n Roll”: a lapidary and bakery. A tie shop: “Get Knotted.” A rug store: “Underfoot.” “Captain’s Courageous”: a men’s hat shop. A watch repairman’s: “Time Out.” “Howard Johnson’s.” (How the hell did that get there?) Even a small moving company: “Gutenberg’s Movable Types.”

They spoke of the breakdown of law and order, of crime in the streets, but what a discipline was in these streets, what a knuckling under and catering to the times. It is beyond his capacity to conjure up the future, he cannot even imagine what the safety razors will look like twenty-years from now, or a snow shovel. He passes a drugstore and sees a sign on the window: “Established 1961.” He laughs before he realizes that it is no joke. If it were a question of just this one neighborhood — but it isn’t; it’s spread now even to the shopping centers, even to the ghettos. In his own area—“Alexander Main, Licensed Bailbond Broker”—he has seen wide-windowed tour buses, the sight-seers’ attention close-order-drilled by the tour guide. What can they be looking at? Survivors for a lousy generation and a half? In history already? So soon? He’s not young. He’s seen good times and bad, but never times like these, time itself doing in a season what once it had taken a decade to accomplish. Shall he get paint? Send Crainpool to the window with a brush? Have him paint in…what? “Bail Out?” “I Been Working on the Bailbond?” “A Surety Thing?” It’s as if he lives trapped in the neck of an hourglass. Style, he thinks. As a young man he wanted it, hoped that when he wakened it would be there like French in his mouth. Now he sees it as a symptom of a ruinous disease.

He needs sleep, a nap. He pushes past the strollers and lovers and shoppers — it’s past three, the high school kids are out, the students from the university are — moving in the garishly dressed crowd like someone hurrying down an escalator. He brushes the arm of a young man in an ordinary white shirt with a master sergeant’s chevrons sewn to the sleeve. He dodges a girl in an ammunition belt, kids in flags, yarmulkes, the girls braless, their nipples erect, puckering their T-shirts as if they moved in perpetual excitation, the genitals of the young men askew, crushed packages in their tight jeans, both sexes horny, literally, their sex antlered inside their binding clothes. He sees colors which till now have never been printed on cloth. He sees all the good-looking young who seem some new species in their furred shoes, their boots, bags suspended from the shoulders of the young men, oddly courierizing them. The girls in pants, the ground rounds and roasts of their behinds, the lifting tension of their crotches making it appear as if they are actually suspended in their trousers, like parachutists perhaps, sunk in them up to their hips and the small of their backs. There is something strangely military about this crowd. Perhaps it is the stripy patterns of their clothes, like the tricolors of decorations.

The Phoenician yawns and a young man turns to him. “Hey uncle, I dig your sport coat.”

“What, this?”

“No, it’s nice.”

“You think this is nice? You should see my doorman’s uniform.”

“You got a doorman’s uniform? Wow.”

“Yeah, well my daughter’s getting married Sunday and I’m giving her away.”

“Getting married? No shit?”

He talks to him as if asleep. (So accustomed am I to chatter, to giving as good as I get, coming on strongest, dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque. How long has it been since I’ve had a conversation? A long time. Since my wife died.)

He spots a taxi rank — black, right-hand-drive Austins imported from London: “Guv’s Taxi Company, Ltd.”—and goes over to the first cab, gets in and sinks back into the leather seat.

“Cor blimey, Guv, where to?”

He does not want to return to the office, does not want to go home. “Take me,” he says, inspired, “to a swell hotel.”

A doorman opens the cab for him and he steps out, pays the driver, goes through the revolving doors and checks in. He remembers he has no pajamas and asks the room clerk if there’s a men’s store in the hotel.

He tells the salesman he takes a D.

“Any particular style, sir?”

“Crisp. Linen. Crisp.”

He pays for the pajamas and returns to the desk to pick up his key.

“Luggage, sir?”

He holds up the new pajamas. The clerk hesitates. “What do you want? You want me to pay in advance? What’s the damage?” He looks down at the card he has just signed. “Twenty-eight bucks? Here.” He pushes the bills toward the man who at first does not pick them up. “What is it, you think I’m a troublemaker, a suicide? Furthest thing from my mind. Gimme my key. Gimme my key or I’ll get the manager.” The clerk extends the key and a bellboy steps forward. The Phoenician puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a dollar and gives it to the bellboy. “Save you a trip,” he says and, holding his new pajamas, moves off in the direction of the elevators.

He loves a hotel room. This one is large, new. He is on the twenty-third floor. Through the wide clean Thermopane he can see the ball park, the clipped chemical grass, bright, glowing as emerald, green as eyeshade, has a perfect view into the stadium’s open skull, the variously colored stands folded like nervous system along its sides. Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva. It is a corner room and commands the south and west; he can see Kentucky. He does not draw the drapes, bunched tight, coiled on a recessed track that runs along the ceiling above the windows, pleats on pleats in a loose reserve, a collapsed bellows of fabric. The blue drapes match the blue bedspread which looks as if it has never been used — looks new, as everything in this room does: the deep modern chairs, webbed as baseball gloves and with seats like the pockets in catchers’ mitts, the two-foot-high cherrywood strips set into two beige walls textured as taut canvas, the aluminum grill of the heating and air-conditioning unit flush with the top of the long window seat by the enormous western wall of glass. He admires the desk (of the same smooth cherrywood) that levitates against a wall, its drawers suspended, hanging in air like holsters. He sits in the red low-backed chair and moves his lap into position beneath the desk, opening a drawer, seeing with satisfaction the stack of thick white stationery, the golden logotype of the letterhead, the two ballpoint pens, the yellow Western Union blanks. He clears the menu, textured and greasy as a playing card, from the surface of the desk, removes the tented cards that announce check-out time and give instructions about the operation of the TV, and places them in a drawer beside the treated shoe-polishing cloth and folded paper laundry bag with its tough kite string and green laundry ticket, a framed gum reinforcement hole at the top. He trails his fingers in the pile of brochures, shuffling them like a magician preparing a card trick. He closes the drawers which move back silently along their grooves. On the right the smooth wooden desk — the wood in this room does not feel like wood, it is level as glass — becomes a chest of drawers, then a treaded slab on which to place suitcases. There are five lamps in the room: on the desk, on the chest, beside his bed, on a low white table; a chrome floorlamp with a tall narrow shade. The television swivels on a chrome stem before the southern window. He turns it on, and from his bed the figures on the screen seem to stand in the sky. He reaches over to the control panel — there is an electric clock, a radio, a speaker like a patch of brown canvas, rows of switches, buttons — and clicks it off. He walks into the bathroom, sees plastic jewel cases of soap, towels of different size and thickness like a complicated terry-cloth cutlery or a pantry of flag. He runs his hand along the rail angled like the trajectory of a banister above the tub, and touches the beautiful basin with its queer fittings. Like a dignitary cutting a ribbon, he tears the paper strip that packages the toilet seat. He pees long and hard into the bowl, drilling his urine solidly into the faintly blue water.

He loves a hotel room.

I love a hotel room. This is in my blood. Oasis in my Phoenician genes, way station in my ancient heart.

He returns to the bed and picks up the phone by the night-stand, first pulling out the tray at the base of the phone to study the information on the card there. He dials.

“Room service? Mr. Main in two-three-four-one. How late do you serve?…Excellent…No, nothing now, thank you. I may get hungry around three this morning.”

He dials a different number. “Is this the housekeeper?…Housekeeper, if I should want some laundry done, could you…What?…Oh, I want the valet, do I?”

“Valet? Have you same-day service?…What about dry cleaning?…Thank you very much, valet.”

“Message desk? Are there any messages for Mr. Main in two-three-four-one?…Yes, dear, would you please?…The red light? Where might that be?…Yes, I see it…No, it isn’t flashing. I thought it might be broken. Could you test it, please?…Yes, there it goes now. What’s the message?”

And the bar and the garage and the Avis desk. He makes inquiries about a baby sitter and calls the cashier and asks about cashing a check. He finds out, too, that he can leave his watch and valuables in the hotel safe.

Then he dials nine-nine. “Who,” he asks, “is the house doctor?…I see. Can you tell me anything about him?…Well, like where did he intern?…Could you find this information out and call me back? Or leave a message with the message desk? Or give me his room number and I’ll do it myself…Isn’t that nice, we’re on the same floor.”

He calls the doctor. The man has interned with the Sheraton chain.

And one last call. “Operator, this is Alexander Main in two-three-four-one. I want to leave a call for seven A.M.…Thank you. Goodnight to you, too, sweetheart.” It is not yet four in the afternoon.

He did not ring up for theater tickets or dial the florist. He didn’t call the hairdresser or ring 32 to request a Remington shaver or 64 to find out about an interpreter. He didn’t put a call through to rail and air reservations or to the hall porter to inquire about kenneling his pet. He never rang the secretarial service. But he was reassured that these services and others were available, that he sat in his room linked, hooked up as a President to his needs, oddly loved, certainly trusted, his cash and checkbook and cards like letters of credit to the world. He could have anything he wanted — carpenters to build him boxes, models from stores to show him new fashions, women, passport photographers, even locksmiths. He was totally self-contained, desert-islanded but not deserted, certainly not lonely, his options open, more dilated here than at home or at work or in the street. How silly of the hotel to call him its guest. His credit established he was something far more privileged and potent.

In this mood he showered, not bothering to close the stall, careless of the water he deflected against the mirrors and walls, of the puddles he made on the tiled floor. Private, possessed by his privacy. In this mood rubs himself dry with the enormous bath towel and leaves it crumpled in a heap beneath the sink, takes one by one the pins from his new pajamas, their odor of freshness like the smell of health, their new resins like a pollen of haberdash. He draws the drapes, touching them, feeling their heavy, opaque lining, pulling them so tight that it might be a half-hour beyond dusk instead of barely four o’clock. He goes to the door to leave his shoes in the corridor for the porter to polish, already anticipating the morning when he will hook them in like a croupier. He removes the bedspread, tosses it in a corner, feels the cool bleached sheets, white as letterhead, the soft blanket. He sleeps. I sleep. He dreams. I dream.

4.

He smells the gold before he sees it, a vague, involuntary pinch of nostrils, some pepper reflex. He feels the gold before he sees it, coarse-grained as the friction strip on a matchbook. He tastes the gold, warm, faintly curried, greasy as magnets, drawing his tongue like a poultice, carbonating his saliva. He hears the gold, its hum of precious engined molecules, its rare hiss just beyond range. It must be all around him. Its heaviness thickens the air, himself, stranding his stance, sucking at his legs and feet like ground beside a precipice.

He hears noises, hopes it is animals, knows it is men. No one has actually said anything. (It is this silence which is so minatory. Animals, forgetting themselves, would chatter.) He hears — what? Exploration. The silences presiding decision. Then a stone shoved against, the pressure of a shoulder against a wall, its resettling like elastic relaxing to its neutral length. Then taps, randomly scientific, reasoned, and shortly abandoned, a fury of the indiscriminate and something giving way, some rolled stone blossoming sesame; the source of the sounds abruptly shift, ventriloquized, higher, further off. But he takes no comfort from this, for if the noises are now more different, they are more regular too, the scuffle gone out of them, and he hears…footsteps. And their proximity again adjusts.

He knows where he is — in some payload of labyrinth, maze’s choice darkmeat like the eye of a hurricane — and that he is subterranean, in some architectonic cul-de-sac, an archipelago of walls and red-herringed ectopic space. He pictures the stone baffles and barricades, the inverted, earthen, conical screw of tunnel, wedges and bottlenecks and groins of space, all the false spurs, all the difficult dark. And through it all he hears them, now far, now near, unraveling the puzzle of place as if they were walking along a map, taking no confidence when momentarily he thinks he hears them where he has heard them moments before. Soon they are close enough for him to distinguish their tools, their levers and scrapers and mallets and spades, and to hear, too, in the aftermath of their progress, a queer dragged rustling. Then hears seals popping, stone scraped, wooden beams lifted and shoved back along grooves, some final hammering and the adjustment of stone tumblers in some huge lock. It is as if he hides in a hollow — the linchpin center, say, of a cube puzzle on a counter in a drugstore.

He sees their light before he sees them, refracted, rolling off the walls like a sand dune, breaking like a wave, caught, confirming as it comes the gold surfaces he had smelled, felt, tasted and heard before he had seen. He calls out, “Don’t hurt me. I’m your bondsman.” They keep coming. They are here.

In addition to the dish of blazing oil one of them carries, they have brought torches, and these they now ignite, planting them in standards already there. The torches mitigate the gloom, but it is the contents of the chamber which dispel it, laserizing the light, unfurling it like flags in wind and flinging down impression in a brilliant tattoo.

“Can you see anything?” one asks.

“Yes,” says the other, “wonderful things.”

Their first impression is aesthetic, then, the Phoenician thinks. He stands beside the tomb robbers, sharing their awe. It gives him a queer feeling. No criminal himself, this is the first time he has ever been tempted. He’s a little nauseous. Yet he is thrilled, privileged; something stupendous is about to happen. This is what he sees:

First the giant sarcophagus, the carniverous stone high as a man and long and wide as a car, a goddess in nude profile at each corner — Isis, Nepthys, Neith and Selkit — their arms spread like traffic cops’, their hands almost touching, death’s and state’s holy ring-a-rosy, an electric net of intersecting wings stretched like necklaces between them. Articulated tiers of carefully wrought scales and feathers hang from their armpits and along their outstretched arms, and bloom behind their breasts and cunts and asses like webs. Hieratic columns are etched behind these like sums in a foreign mathematics. The Phoenician squints but cannot read them, can make out only water fowl and horse, owl and implement, musical instruments, boat and bowl and fish and wheat, and an incoherent zigzag of joined m’s like an illegible signature or a level lightning. He is furious with himself. This is how he has felt staring into museum cases.

There is architecture on the walls, chemistry, astronomy. White Osiris sits on a throne in the air beneath a high hat like a bowling pin. Anubis, the black-headed jackal, stands behind him, resting a red, avuncular hand on his shoulder while bird-faced Horus looks on. Two of the gods trail hairdos like the comb of a cock.

One thief points to a wall; the other walks up to it and rubs his hand along a gilt bas-relief of two figures, a man and a woman, who sit in profile on a couch. The man clutches a sheath of arrows in his hand like a batter in a batter’s box, the woman a small fan of arrowheads. The tomb robber fondles the woman’s headdress.

“Geez,” says this perfectly ordinary, human young man, no ghoul or monster but only one of the locals seen everywhere around Thebes and Karnak and Luxor these days, with none of the vandal’s malice or nonconformist’s zeal, out of work perhaps, for these are hard times, the slaves getting all the plum jobs, having the construction trades sewn up — and welcome to it, too, he thinks. The Phoenician notices something funny with one of the man’s hands. It’s clear he can be no apprentice to an artisan, and to judge from his sharp, cheap, city clothes there is nothing of the farmer about him. “It’s like it was knit right there on the wall or something.”

“Come on, don’t stand there gawping or I’ll have your guts for garters. We’ve got work to do,” says the first, an older man, the pro in the outfit, the Phoenician thinks, down from played out Giza or Saqqara probably, or Heliopolis, lured by rumors of these new untapped fields in the south — maybe an escaped slave’s drunken tale, confirmed by a primitive, illiterate map drawn by the slave himself, who may even have been killed for it, for this one looks a tough customer. Yet there’s something dedicated about him as well. Tough as he is, he was just as taken aback by that first sight of the tomb, his dry runs through the reamed ruins of Imhotep’s masterpiece or his posed tourist attitudes at the sites of the crumbling mastabas not having prepared him for anything like this.

No. All he’d been truly prepared for (treasure being merely a concept to one who’d stood in plenty of treasure houses but had seen no treasure, or seen it only piecemeal, behind ropes in public rooms or flashing by quickly in a parade, or seen it only as a proposal, looking over a shoulder at the draftsman’s roughs and sketches on a drawing board; real collective treasure, a Pharaoh’s fortune, being just something one has heard of in rumors, third- and fourth-hand accounts that lost detail and sank deeper into wild myth each time they passed from mouth to mouth, as geography is merely a concept to one who has never traveled) were the architect’s mazes and torils and culs-de-sac, the dim blind alleys and traps and suckers’ avenues that led nowhere and kept him busy till the sun came up and the hired priests that guarded the tombs were flashed into wakefulness. Such impediments had turned him into the scout or hunter or Indian he was preparing himself to become by forcing him to discriminate between the real spoor and the counterfeit, testing himself in each of Lower Egypt’s violated pyramids, hanging back, then straying from the rest of his party who rushed forward with the guide to view the now empty storerooms and holy chambers and chapels where the Pharaoh’s painted double stood in mimic life in the picture-book rooms viewing his faded family album, fooled into feasting on images of food, hunting cartoon deer and fishing cartoon fish from cartoon rivers, copulating with cartoons and waiting for the dead man’s soul to invade the ka’s body like a virus. (And perhaps it could have happened, except that the tomb robbers always got there first, breaking the chain of expectation, spoiling eternity with the fierce needs of the present.) Hanging back from the rest of his party to wander those useless funhouse corridors and minefield spaces, an illiterate who has trained himself to read a stone’s insincerity, a musician of structure with perfect pitch for the false note, who fell to this place like water guided by gravity or a magnetized needle ignoring every direction but north.

“We’ll do the amphoras first,” the older tomb robber says.

“The amphoras?”

“Those big alabaster jugs. Come on, have you got the water-skins?” The rustling I heard, thinks the Phoenician. “All right, give them here. Tip it. Careful, careful, you’re spilling it.” The Phoenician smells the precious perfumes, sees a glowing prism on the floor of the tomb, a puddle of spilled perfume reflecting light from the burning torches. It smells of the colors themselves, of red and yellow and blue and all the declensions of the spectrum, and is trampled by the first thief’s sandals so that it looks as if he is standing in a broken, burning nimbus. “Tip it back. I’ll get the other waterskin ready.”

“Why mess with this stuff? It’ll only weigh us down. Let’s just take what we came for and clear off.”

“I’m the one who decides what we came for. You’re just the bearer. What do you know about the traders in Rosetta and Avaris? A Pharaoh’s unguents and liquors, that’s what’s wanted. Tip the other one.”

“This one’s heavy. It’s too heavy.”

“Get your back into it. Shove, shove. Heave ho.”

“It’s too heavy, I tell you.”

“Here, hold the skin. I’ll try. Woof, you’re right; it is heavy. All right, we’ll just have to go into it. Hand me the iron bar. Give me the mallet. I’ll tap this fucker like a maple tree.” The older thief kneels and fixes the sharp end of the bar halfway down the length of the tall cask. “Move that standard over,” he snaps, “I can’t see what the hell I’m doing.”

The second thief moves a candelabra of torches to within a yard of the kneeling tomb robber. Behind the sarcophagus a wall shines suddenly, and the Phoenician can see a panel decorated with the twelve sacred baboons of the night. They sit on their brown, swollen genitals as on basketballs, decorous and pacific as ladies on seats in public toilets. Silver furred over their blue bodies and silver banged above their long doggy profiles, they contemplate symbols that look like the detached slides of slide trombones. There are black squares, brown, brown and black moons like slivers of overturned melon, silhouettes of thick cleavers, pairs of pillars in the same black and brown alternatives, a mysterious geometric alphabet, dark herons, one-legged chiaroscuro runners and odd wingless fowl that float in long vertical columns like figures in strange bankbooks.

What’s going on here, the Phoenician wonders, for whom fine print and subordinate legal clause, loophole and condition and contractual exigency are as clear and straightforward as the exit signs on superhighways. Then he sees the fine translucent alabaster vessel with its gorgeous banded layers — teeth and checks and regiments of painted slaves, friezes of pumpkin and rows of something like nails in colors he has never seen and does not recognize but which remind him of vast latitudes of campaign ribbon. It is here, just beneath the first buxom curve of the high jug, that the first tomb robber means to make the puncture.

“Spread the lip on that skin wide as you can. Here, stand right here, we want to catch as much of this gism as we can. I’ll try to do the hole clean but the goddamn thing may shatter. Whatever happens don’t let the flame anywhere near this shit or we’ll go up like sunshine.”

The Phoenician moves against a wall, his back, he imagines, grazing the strange painted symbols. He feels an odd warmth through the cloth of his shirt. Is it brown craftsmen in white kilts preparing funerary furniture, sawing wood, one man holding the piece steady while the other leans toward him awkwardly, his saw extended like the bow of a cello? Long-eared Anubis in his jackal’s head bending over the mummy on its couch, touching the chest, making the embalmist’s final adjustments like someone straightening a pal’s tie? Osiris, fastidious as a hostess, checking the offerings on the dead man’s table, the decoy food and painted drink? The wailing, grieving women of the house, their breasts bared, arms raised in a semaphore of grief, dust on their heads and in the limp springs of their hair? His flesh takes their electric impression.

“Get ready to catch the juice. It’ll come out like high tide.”

He makes one deft, powerful stroke. The thick shaft goes in neat as a needle, but he was wrong to have worried about the flow. The amber liquid, whatever it is, is viscous, slow and thick as glue. It comes in measured plops, filling the chamber with a sweet sick smell, the odor of vital essence, a human butter lined with brine and the scraped, rendered slimes and marrows. A Pharoah’s liquors indeed, stuff of his godhead, ejaculatory final ethers. The Phoenician and the two tomb robbers reel and sway in a sort of instant drunkenness that sobers as it stuns.

“Wow,” says the kid, “those Rosetta and Avaris traders must be cuckoo. Who’d want this crap around?”

The older man giggles. “Collectors, man. Souvenir hounds. First editioners. That lot.”

“One sip and you’re dead.”

“They don’t drink it, fool; it ain’t any aperitif. They put it in their cellars with the rest of the hard stuff.” He dips his finger into it and holds it under his nose for a second. “A very good dynasty. Yech.” He wipes his hand off on his clothes. “There, that’s enough, close the skin, plug it. I’ve got to stuff something into this bunghole or the smell will put us out.” Closest to the source, the older tomb robber starts to gag. “Quick, get me a rag, a strip of that weave. Over there. On top of that chest in the treasury. Hurry up, will you?”

“That’s no rag. That’s cloth-of-gold. That’s priceless.”

“I’m puking my guts out and the connoisseur here gives me an estimate. Stand aside, I’ll get it myself.” He gropes toward the chest, stumbles over a low couch, blunders momentarily against the brake on a golden chariot which skitters across the floor and crashes into a wall. Recovering his balance he rips the cloth from the top of the chest, knocking a gilded alabaster statuette of the king to the stone floor and shattering it.

“You got good moves,” the other tomb robber says. “Jesus.”

“Forget it. Just plug that hole so we can get to work.” The young tomb robber shrugs, crumples the cloth and stuffs it into the amphora’s open wound. It protrudes from the hole, a golden run of gut. The Phoenician thinks of the gold weave sopping up the Pharaoh’s sublime jams and gravies, an inside-out alchemy that turns gold to dressing. But the smell is stanched and the air clears. What little lies uncollected on the floor is defused when the second tomb robber thinks to pour some of the perfume from the first waterskin over it. “You didn’t use too much, did you?” the older thief asks.

“A couple drops. We can fill her up again from the first whatdoyoucallit, amphora.”

“Okay. Go ahead, pour. Hold it, that’s got it. Good man. Here, set these skins in the antechamber where we can pick them up again when we leave.” They seem pleased to discover that they can cooperate. With a lift of his chin the second tomb robber indicates a gold life sign like a giant key ring that lies on a funerary chair. The older man nods, the kid scoops it up to place with the waterskins in the antechamber, and then both of them simultaneously rub their hands together. They are giddy with greed, high on their mutual visions of untapped plunder, their initial reserve and caution turned by their preliminary success. They know that they are already rich men. They move through the tomb expansively, magnanimous as high rollers.

“The crowbars?” the second tomb robber suggests.

“Crowbars it is,” says the first. “No, not that. Use this.” He strides up to the sculpted, life-size double and wrenches the shepherd’s crook from where it rests like a riding crop on a ledge of hip and along a rail of upturned palm.

“That’s class,” the second says. “Is it real gold, you think?”

“Thirty three thousand-karat.”

They start the short stroll to the sarcophagus, but their initial jauntiness fades as they approach. They come up to it much as they might to a living Pharaoh, tentative, as if each hides behind his own presence, concentrating, queerly chaste, made innocent by the magnitude of the violence they are about to do.

They move silently toward opposite ends and silently raise their tools to the sealed lid. The older man seeks a purchase for the flat wedge of his crowbar, tilts at the seam experimentally, pumping in brief arcs as he would prime a tire jack. It slips out and the second thief swears.

“Easy, old son. This ain’t no beer can.”

“Let me try.”

“No, hold on. I’m not even budging it. You come on over to my side. Maybe if we both try.” The second thief stands behind the first, gets a grip on the long handle as if he were holding a rope in a tug of war. “When I give the signal, push in and up.”

“Wait up,” the young one says, “I better wipe my hands first. They’re all slippery from that Pharaoh grease. Okay. What we really need is a block and tackle.”

“We ain’t got any damn block and tackle.”

“What’s this stuff?”

“I don’t know — yellow quartzite probably. You set? Push…in and up.”

“No good. It’s like trying to drive a spike with your bare hands.”

“Get the mallet.”

“Are you kidding? It’d take months to chisel a hole in that thing with the mallet. Why don’t you give it a karate chop?”

“Shut up. Give me a minute to think.”

The boy, satirically deferential, retires to a throne chair from which he first removes a small ivory casket. He puts it on the floor and props his feet on it. “I don’t know,” he says, “we’ve already got more than I ever bargained for. There must be half a million bucks worth of junk right in this casket I’m resting my tootsies on. Why don’t we just grab what we can and scarper?”

But if the first thief has even heard him he gives no indication. He is walking around the sarcophagus, touching it here, tapping it there, looking for invisible levers. He is the complete cynic who has trained himself all his life to think in an idiom of Achilles vulnerabilities. He simply does not trust walls. He has a cryptographer’s imagination. In his fingers there is a touch for weak link like a blind man’s for Braille. He is a piano tuner of a man who in some other age or different circumstances might have found the Northwest Passage or the source of the Mississippi. He makes his slow, halting circuit of the sarcophagus. “It’s bonded solid,” he says.

“Yeah,” says the second tomb robber, “I could have told you that. Let’s scarper, mate.”

“But it’s still on its original platform.”

“Its original platform.”

“Look down here. See? The nine inches at the bottom are gilded wood. They must have moved the thing in on rollers, then pulled the rollers out and left it.”

“No shit,” the kid says wearily, “so that’s how they did it. The pyramids, now that’s some engineering feat. I mean when you think of the unsophisticated equipment they had. And all the patience…”

“We brought a file. Get the file.” The second tomb robber rises lazily, pokes around in the small pile of tools, finds the file and hands it without interest to the older man. “Bring that torch, hold it down here so’s I can see. I want to study the paint…Yes…No, a little closer. Watch it, don’t singe me…Yeah, see there, where the gilt bunches like badly hung wallpaper? That’s the fault line. That’s where the wood’s rotting. Where’s that mallet? All right.”

And he drives the file into the dead center of the dead wood, where it sinks like a knife into tender meat. Stretched out on the floor and working at arm’s length, he chips away like a sculptor at the rotting wood. But the file is only a foot long, the sarcophagus wide as a car. He sends the blunt end of the crowbar in after it, pounding at the boxcar connections, trusting as always in the mushy physics by which he lives, the leading edge of the file to be deflected by whatever is hard in there and drawn to whatever is soft. He calls for the second tomb robber’s crowbar and fits its blunt end to the protruding wedge of his own. He works in this way for more than an hour — a file, an iron, an iron, the ka’s shepherd’s crook and the mallet — and is almost through to the other side, but not quite, when he runs out of tools.

“Now what?” the kid asks.

“The bunghole. Bleed me a quart of that stuff. Fetch it in one of those vases.”

The older robber takes the substance and butters it along the leading edge of the platform. From time to time, to annul the smell, he has the kid wipe his face with a handkerchief that has been drenched in perfume from the first waterskin. “Now. Clear away anything that can burn. Get the torch.” He offers fire to the soaked wood; slowly it scorches, and the gilt blisters like a toasted cheese sandwich, and finally the fire takes hold. The front third of the platform is burning. The smell is horrible. “All right. The tunnel I’ve made inside the platform should act as a fire-brake.” He pulls the shepherd’s crook gingerly out of the odd train he has made and quickly substitutes the mallet, shoving it in as far as he can. “Go get the flail out of the double’s fist. You should be able to unscrew it. Good. Stand here behind the sarcophagus with me. We’ll watch the fire. When it burns through to the tools we’ll shove. The front should tip forward fifteen to eighteen inches. That’s a tremendous weight. Maybe the shock will jar the goddamn lid loose. Even if it don’t, we’ll have gravity working for us. We’ll worry it like a loose tooth. All right, when I say shove I want you to push up so hard your palms come out your wrists.”

The second robber stands by Neith, the first by Selkit watching the flames crawling along the bottom of the platform like fungus, and at exactly the right moment he yells “Shove!” and puts all his weight into it. “I said shove, you lousy skyver, shove.” And now they both put all they have into it and the massive sarcophagus falls forward the full eighteen inches, making a sound of metal slamming stone. The shock is all the older man could have wished, for the Phoenician can see the thick lid actually stretch, bounce in some irreparable way that sets off tremors in the stone seam that start at the far ends of the lid and meet each other in a ragged, barely visible line. A crack. Hairline but enough, more than enough for this genius, this Columbus of breakage and entrance who would go through it as if it were a door or gate, whose very nature partakes of something like the quality of gas. He puts his crook down and looks up. “Whatever can I have been thinking of?” he asks abstractedly. “We don’t need these toys. Reach in there, mate, and pull our tools out.”

“They’ll be hot.”

“Nah, the breeze cooled ’em off when this big mother fell forward.”

The young robber fishes the tools out carefully and the older one picks up his crowbar and mallet. “See? The fire’s about burned itself out,” he says. “Better let me work at this for a while, kid.” Sure enough, he goes — this man who has lived life like a key — for the seal’s jugular, playing that hairline crack, driving his mallet and crowbar like a poolsharp, playing the angles, putting actual English on his strokes.

“I think it’s coming,” the younger man says, and gets up from the throne where he has been resting and takes up his tools. Together they pry and pull and probe and shove, wordless as movers negotiating furniture around the bends in stairs. The lid is loose, and then it’s off.

The Phoenician moves away from the wall and comes up behind them. There is no glitter of gold and jewels, only a sort of opaque mass.

“It’s empty,” the second tomb robber shouts.

“No,” says the first. “Those are the palls. You don’t know shit about death, kid. Those are just the linen palls. It’s Death’s hope chest in there, sonny. Here, look.” He stirs the palls and reveals a coffin shaped not like a man so much as some trophy of a man, tight and stern and scowling as an Academy Award. Its skin is a tattoo of hieroglyph and chevron. In the dim light the mummiform coffin gives the appearance of someone fat dressed in unflattering swatches of chain mail. Its surfaces break up the light of the torch held down to investigate, disperse it in weird blue and gold tints on the faces of the robbers.

“Pay dirt,” the second tomb robber proclaims after a pause.

“Nah,” says the older thief, “it’s wood. You don’t know wood from Shinola.” He appears to feel around the side of the coffin with his fingers and apparently presses some button or lever which triggers a springlock, popping the coffin open like a lady’s compact. Another mummiform coffin is revealed in hand-in-glove relation to the first.

“The five hundred hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!” says the young tomb robber. He places his hands on the tiled, golden scales of the second coffin, palming its lumpy contours as if he were copping a feel.

“That’s just gold-plated wood,” the first robber murmurs, “inlaid with glass paste.”

So, the Phoenician thinks, not only a mind like a key but a geologist as well. A tailor’s affinity for fabric; there’s Geiger in him, some litmus vision.

Now the older thief feels around the edges of this coffin, his chin raised and an expression on his face as if he is judging the taste of his food. He is exactly like the attendant in a filling station whose fingers seek a clasp which will raise the hood of your car. He finds it, and the lid of the second coffin snaps into the contours of the first.

The kid tomb robber laughs. “It ain’t any Pharaoh’s mummy at all, it’s a nest of fucking matrioshka dolls.”

“Pay dirt,” the first tomb robber says. “That’s gold, my old son, nothing but gold.”

“Did you ever?” The boy whistles.

“It’s useless to us. We couldn’t even lift it.” Nevertheless their eyes travel up the long horizontal shell of the dead king — this priceless golden Easter egg of a Pharaoh which seems to float in its sarcophagus as in a bathtub — taking in each detail, its crossed arms and big golden gloves that grasp the shepherd’s crook and flail, Pharaoh’s and Osiris’ carrot and stick, its great head in three dimensions like some coin of ultimate denomination. They study the weird sphinxy headdress, oddly like hair turbaned in wrapped bath towel. Its open eyes seem not blind so much as distracted, as though its pupils, large and black as handballs, witness something going on extraordinarily high in the sky. Its sweet lips look as if they taste their own goldenness.

“Okay,” the older man says, “here we go, then,” and again he touches something, and the last veil groans marginally upward, its great weight lying on it like gravity. “Lift, lift,” the first thief commands, “get the crowbar in, get some leverage. Now prop the lid with your bar. A little more. That’s got it. There.” The mummy itself, exposed now, lies under the final raised lid as under some gold tent protected from sun, and the Phoenician and the kid see what they have come for: the Pharaoh’s funerary mask which has been placed over the head and shoulders of the mummy just as Anubis’ jackal’s head had been fitted onto his human body. For all the delicately wrought human features of the mask, the mummy is mysteriously bestialized by it.

They stare at the fantastic face, prefigured in each of its protective coffins but only as a paper silhouette prefigures flesh. They have not been prepared for this; all they can do is stare. They are looking at Egypt’s most precious materials — gold, lapis lazuli, faïence, quartz and chalcedony. The Phoenician himself cannot take his eyes from the raised lapis lazuli brows that describe an arc from the nose almost to the ears, or from the lapis lazuli lined eyes like the unjoined halves of spectacles. He peers closely at the eyes themselves, stares at the canthi where the angles of the upper and lower lids meet, at the red wattles at the outer and inner edges there, the queer caruncles of God.

The second tomb robber looks at the vulture and cobra, symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt, which seem to grow out of the Pharaoh’s forehead, rising spectacularly, ribbed and thick and aloft as the underedge of erections.

The first tomb robber gazes at the long blue faïence beard that looks like a plaited hocky stick. “All right,” he says, breaking the spell, “let’s get to work.”

He takes up a position behind the mummy, and for all his previous delicacy now grabs hold of the mask with both hands and pulls at it roughly. It comes off like a saddle. He puts it down, takes a knife and slashes the bandages.

“Hey, man,” says the second tomb robber, “don’t do that.”

The first tomb robber lays the knife in the coffin and tears at the bandages with both hands, opening the Pharaoh like a package. The cloth squeals apart and he plunges his hands inside and pulls out necklaces, gold rings, bracelets, fingerstalls, a scarab brooch, golden pectorals, a spilled piñata of Tiffany implement. “He was gay,” he laughs. “This was no king; this was a fucking queen.” He reaches inside once more, gropes and brings out a bandaged parcel, holding it up, rapidly unwinding it, tumbling the linen strips like a fisherman dealing line. It is the Pharaoh’s natron-dried, embalmed heart. He raises it above his head. “What a good boy am I!” he shouts, and shoves the heart into his garments with the rest of the jewelry. “Now, mate, now we scarper!”

“Hoy,” says the other.

It is too late. Perhaps the noise of the sarcophagus slamming to the floor had alerted them, or the pounding on the coffin seals, or the older man’s shouts, or maybe they’d been tipped off, but when the thieves gathered their booty and made for the antechamber the flics were already there, out of breath — they’d been running and, not knowing the way as expertly as the first tomb robber, stumbling — but in sufficient numbers to put escape or even struggle out of the question. The Phoenician looks around for officials, and everywhere among the men shouting orders at each other and pressing forward to get a better look at the haul or to inspect the damage he thinks he can make them out. There are chief inspectors, priests (part clergyman and part guard assigned to protect the tomb), higher-ups, ministers and deputies from the court, important civilians who sat in the highest councils — all the grace and favored, singers, guests, even popular athletes.

It is what he expected. It is a big bust, and his only worry is that harm might come to the tomb robbers through some dumb grandstand play by one of these social commandos before they can be safely hustled out of there. “Hoy,” he shouts in the confusion, “let’s play this one by the books, men. It’s too big to blow in the heat of anger.”

He needn’t have worried. Obviously acting under the highest orders, the police were almost rougher with the spectators than with the suspects. Quickly they collected the evidence, organized the crowd and marshaled them all out of there. They even thought to leave a detail behind until the shrine could be put back together and resealed.

The arrest was swift and correct. A brief announcement was made to the public and the prisoners were put under special guard. The Phoenician requested that he be permitted to stay with them, but, as he anticipated, this was out of the question. They did permit him to remain in the building where the men were being held, however, a concession that came as something of a surprise. He offered money to the jailer who had told him he would be allowed to stay, but it was politely turned down.

In the morning a guard shook him gently awake on the bench where he had sacked out, and even offered him coffee. “Nice day for a hanging,” the fellow said by way of small talk.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” the Phoenician answered. “Say, are there many people around?”

“Outside, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“The town’s packed. You can’t get a room. Everybody’s very excited.”

“What’s their mood? Are they upset, are they likely to turn ugly?”

“No, I don’t think so. They’re leaving this one strictly to the government.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Well,” said the guard, “you ain’t seen what the government can do when it’s worked up.”

On the surface, at least, the arraignment was as proper as the arrest. The judge — the Phoenician, circulating, heard talk that he was a fair man — listened impassively to the charges and then requested that the prisoners, Oyp and Glyp, stand.

The Phoenician was astonished. So accustomed had he become to seeing them in their disguises, to recognizing them under their dyed hair, through their patiently grown mustaches and beards and behind their surgical alterations and new postures (Glyp had even trained himself to be left-handed), to discounting the red herrings of their changed diction and the falsetto of their acquired tenor, that he had not known them in their reverted states. He had to laugh. If they’d been snakes they’d have bit me, he thought. I’ll be a goddamn purloined letter. Of course it had been dark in the tomb, and most of the time he’d been more interested in what they were doing than in them, and of course they’d been under a good deal of pressure so that their speech rhythms had become those he’d never have anticipated — the iambs and dactyls of action and assault being different in kind from those of evasion — but still and all he was amazed that he’d had no clue at all, not the slightest suspicion, and so their identities staggered him. He was so breathless that when the time came for him to speak he was able to do so only with the most supreme effort, and even then only after the tipstaff, seeing his distress, had brought him a glass of water.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I’m Alexander Main, and I wish to go bail for these two.”

“There is no question of bail, Mr. Main,” the judge said gently.

“There’s always a question of bail, Your Honor,” he said respectfully. “I appreciate that in the circumstances the bond will necessarily be a high one, but whatever it is I will pay it. I think I can assure the Court, too, that whatever date is fixed upon for the prisoners’ appearance they will be here.”

“There is no question of bail, Mr. Main.”

“Your Honor,” he pleaded, “look at these men. They aren’t master criminals. They’re ordinary. They’re banal men. The state hasn’t argued in its charges that they’ve conspired with others to do this thing, or that they acted as agents, or even that they had contacts with or commitments from known fences in their misadventure. Fortunately, no one was killed or even hurt in their abortive attempt. Also, all the property’s been recovered; it’s been checked against the catalogs and it’s all there. Luckily, those pieces which were damaged were the least valuable pieces in the tomb, and I’ve been given to understand that even these are subject to restoration. I’m told that the cloth-of-gold is even now being dry-cleaned.” He paused. “In short, sir,” he said slyly, “I think that all we’re faced with here is a case of a couple of second-story blokes in under their heads.”

The spectators laughed appreciatively at the Phoenician’s joke. Even the judge smiled, but when he banged his gavel to restore order all he did was repeat that there was no question of bail.

Main was undeterred. He demanded an explanation of the fair man. He asked if under Egyptian law tomb robbers were excluded from bail.

A guard moved toward him, but the judge waved him off. “Under Egyptian law, no,” he said.

“Are there precedents, then, for such an exclusion?”

“There are no precedents, Mr. Main, because until last night no tomb robbers had ever been apprehended.” Now the judge paused. “But since we’re on the subject of precedents I would remind you that no precedent ever had a precedent, and that all precedents arise from the oily rags and scraps of tinder condition, law’s and experience’s spontaneous combustion.”

The Phoenician didn’t wait for the implication of this to register with the crowd. “Does the State have evidence that Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp have been linked with other tomb robberies?” he asked crisply.

“None that has been presented to us.”

His next question was dangerous, for he knew the true state of affairs. Hoping that the Egyptians didn’t, however, he decided to ask it. “Are these men wanted for other offenses?”

“Not to our knowledge.”

“Well then, may we not assume that this is a first offense and that the case is much as I presented it and these two much as I described them — amateurs whose ambitions exceeded their capabilities? I don’t mean to prejudice the prosecution’s case. Indeed, as the police report states, I was there, an eyewitness. I saw it all and fully expect to be subpoenaed by the prosecution to give my evidence. I intend to go even further.” He looked around the hearing room, at the judge, the spectators, and finally directly at Oyp and Glyp themselves. “I shall this day present myself to the police, voluntarily to assist them in their inquiries. I shall do this,” he pronounced softly, “but under sworn testimony I shall also feel compelled to reveal what is already known to your investigators — that these two did not even bother to bring the proper equipment with them, that they had few tools and those they had massively inadequate to their undertaking. Where was their block and tackle? Where were their drills and blasting caps?

“In view of all this — their amateur status, their faulty preparation and makeshift maneuver, the fact that it was a first offense, that no one was physically harmed, that the suspects were unarmed, that they did not resist arrest, the failure of the State to establish agency or even to locate possible receivers, and the fact that the actual damage they caused to property in dollars and cents (I’m reasoning that the artisans who will be responsible for restoring the objets d’art are slaves) barely manages to meet the legal definition of felony, and finally the all-important admission by the court that there is nothing in either Egyptian statute or custom which would justify the withholding of bond in this case — in view of all this, I respectfully request that the court fix an appropriate bond forthwith.”

The judge glared at him, but when he spoke he was as soft-spoken as before. “Mr. Main,” he said patiently, “have you any idea of what bail, if I should agree to set it, would have to be in this case?”

“I have already indicated that I understand it would be high.”

“Yes. It would.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“Will you? Whatever the omissions in our law, there is a statute that is relatively specific in these circumstances.”

“Your Honor?”

“I will give you the exact wording of the statute…Here, this is the pertinent language, I think…blah blah de dum blah de dum…Oh, yes: ‘that the forfeiture be equivalent in value to the value of the intended theft.’ ”

The Phoenician whistled.

“Ignoring the worth of the treasures that were undisturbed in the tomb and fixing a value only on those objects found on the prisoners’ persons or waiting to be picked up by them in the antechamber, that would come to — well, I haven’t the exact figures, but I should think in the neighborhood of, oh, say twenty billion dollars. That’s just a ball park estimate.”

“I’ll raise it,” Main rasped. He didn’t see how but he would. People were in debt to him for favors — the nigger, Billy Basket (who only this morning had fallen all over him trying to thank him for going his bond), that other one, the guy who worked in his cousin’s car wash. It would only be for a short while. He would stay with Oyp and Glyp. He would hire an army to stay with them. It was true that the Mafia was down on him right now, but there were others, retired guards and nightwatchmen in Cincinnati who would help him baby-sit the two of them. Oyp’s and Glyp’s freedom would be nominal only, but it was necessary that he buy it for them. “I’ll raise it,” he repeated.

“Has it occurred to you that your fees alone would cost Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp two thousand million dollars? That such a figure might be prohibitive for them?”

“There’s two of them,” Main shouted, “it’s only a thousand million apiece!”

“The police report lists them as indigents,” the judge said calmly.

The Phoenician glared at the two. Tinhorns, he thought. Cheap no god fucking damn good chiselers, lousy pikers. He swallowed hard. “A personal favor,” he said. “It’s on the cuff. I waive my fee.”

“There is no question of bail,” the judge said.

“Why?” Main demanded. “Nothing in the statutes prevents it.”

“There are laws and there are laws,” the judge said, “crimes and crimes. Degrees of guilt like figures on thermometers. There are acts which so far exceed the permissible that to define them in statutes would be to register them in the imagination. And we’re talking now of legislators who would have to write these laws, who would subject them to discussion and argument, with all its qualification and demurrer and contingency. We’re talking of what would, ideally, occur to the best of men. To acknowledge that the best of men, thinking ideally and plotting academically, platonically and picturesquely, could conceive of these actions, would be to admit that ordinary men, with none of the superior man’s built-in checks and balances of the heart and mind, could do the same, opening up the unthinkable to refinements, twists, debasing the depraved and declining the corrupt like a verb wheel of evil, some irregularized grammar of the monstrous that would turn the unspeakable into only a sort of French. And what of men who are not ordinary? Who live below the timberline of grace? What of bad men? What of the vicious, of villains, the ugly customer and the mad-dog killer? What of them? What perversions of the senators’ only abstract paradigm of evil would they be capable of? What argot and babble and moral solecism and sheer bone-breaking noise? What’s unthinkable requires no legislation, eschews statute and repudiates law. There’s no question of bail.”

“Ostriches,” Main shouted. “You’re ostriches. You bury your Pharaohs in the sand with their eggs.”

“How can the unthinkable be defined?” the judge asked sincerely.

“Unthinkable? What’s unthinkable? How many Pharaohs have died? Fifty? A hundred? Their tombs are like slums. Everywhere busted windows and the plumbing ripped out to get cash to buy dope. Everywhere the rats nibble the masterpieces for the lead in the paint. The doors are broke down and the stairs are missing, the furniture’s askew and what’s too heavy to carry gets broken up. And every generation the neighborhood changing and every dynasty the desert a little less safe at night. Good God, there aren’t any playgrounds, kids play wall ball on the Pyramids, write Fuck on the Sphinx. What’s unthinkable? Bond these men. What’s unthinkable?”

“For a crime like theirs?” the judge growled. “Not just breakers and enterers but ghouls, and not just ghouls but ghouls against the state, and not just ghouls against the state but ghouls against God. Handling His things, picking and choosing among His leftovers like junkmen. Derelicts who’ve never seen the inside of a museum assigning value to God’s wardrobe and effects, fingering His empty garments, trying them on. ‘Take this, not that, these, not those. How do you think I look in this, Oyp?’ ‘Not bad, Glyp. Rakish, in fact.’ Oyp had Pharaoh’s heart in his pocket.”

“I told you, Oyp!” Glyp shouted. “I told you not to do that!”

“They siphoned His juices like there was gas rationing. They wiped it up from the floor using His cloth-of-gold as if it was toilet paper. They slashed bandages and let in air, diluting the natron. A dozen embalmers worked an entire season preparing His soil, polishing His seed to last an eternity. They divoted His course with their knives and crowbars and banged His sarcophagus like boys do drums.”

Yes, thinks Main, what a bond this would make! What a feather in my cap!

“They set His platform on fire and tilted it like cheats at pinball. They clumsied His corpse and sat on His throne like Weathermen in an occupied boardroom. They used his Double familiarly and snatched His crook and filched His flail. And not just ghouls against God who goosed and grab-assed above their station, but who stoppered His cycle, who condemned God not even to Hell but to nothingness, who exiled Him, annihilating His soul and sending it to graze in no man’s land beyond the twelve-mile limit. Bond them? Bond them?”

“There’s something else,” the Phoenician says. “There’s something else, though.”

“Please,” the judge says, “there can be no bail in this case.”

“They’re wanted in another state.”

“Please?”

“They’re wanted in Ohio.” He produces the warrant which he always carries and hands it to a bailiff who brings it to the bench.

The judge examines it. “There can be no bond,” he says.

“They’re fugitives,” Main shouts. “I’ve been hunting them for years.”

“No bond.”

“They got away from me. They’re the only ones who ever did.”

“No bond. Bond is refused.”,

“It couldn’t happen again,” Main pleads.

“Bond is refused!” The judge bangs his gavel, and the Phoenician knows the hearing is over. Then the judge makes an astonishing statement. He instructs the guards to release the prisoners. If there are crimes, he says, that are so unthinkable that no laws can proscribe them, then they must be of such magnitude that no punishment can redress them. Oyp and Glyp were free to go.

The Phoenician trembled. The fugitives were fugitives still, fugitives once from his scrutiny and control, then from his intercession, and now from earth itself. Fugitives from the bullying freedom he needed to give them who till now could stand between the law and its violators, having that power vouchsafed to him, the power to middleman, to doodle people’s destiny; the power, like a natural right, to put killers back on the streets and return the lunatics to their neighborhoods; the good power to loose the terrible, to grant freedom where he felt it was due, more magisterial than a king, controlling the sluices and locks of ordinary life, adjusting at whim the levels and proportions of guilt to innocence, poisoning the streets with possibility. But Oyp and Glyp were fugitives from fugitiveness itself, and because they were, there were limits to his power and his own precious freedom.

He groaned in his bed, chewed a piece of his pillowcase, twisted in his smooth hotel sheets, moaned, objected, knew helplessness, awoke and was embarrassed to discover that his dream was not just a dream but a wet dream. And sure enough, when he switched on his bedside lamp and looked, there was his cobra cock and, still spilling from it, the white sweet venom of his come.

He did not speculate about the dream’s meaning. He’d lived with its meaning for years, since his hair had thinned and his belly bloomed, since his legs had begun to go and his reflexes climb down from true, since his aches and since his pains and his BM’s became irregular and he could see into the stream of his weakened piss. Not that death held any particular horror for him, nor the cessation of his personality seem an offense against Nature. Indeed, he might quite welcome that. He was sick of his slick contempt, his ability to win which had never left him, his knack of topping the other guy. It took a dream to beat him, and even then he was the dreamer, the judge no more than dummy to his ventriloquist. But the other thing, the other thing. Curiosity was killing the cat. Oyp and Glyp were his only failures, but Oyp and Glyp in life were as they had been in his dream: punks, losers. Their collective bond — this was something which surprised him whenever he remembered it, or contemplated one of those expensive safaris which would take him across the country or out of it when a rumor ripened and fell his way — had been less than eleven hundred dollars. Not masterminds, not arch criminals, just ordinary car thieves. Probably they were already dead, or living through an anonymity that was as close to death as one could come. Split up by now almost certainly, gone their separate sordid ways. Perhaps in some Mexican or Central American jail, too poor or too guilty to obtain lawyers, more sinned against than sinning and, because they were dim, without the mother wit to enlist the help of their embassy, thinking, We’re wanted men anyway, why jump out of the frying pan into the fire? Best to stay here, rot for the twenty to thirty years these greasers gave us than get ourselves extradited, go back, make all that fuss, be locked up in Ohio or maybe even some Federal pen because we jumped bail. Doesn’t that bring the Feds into it? Shit, we’re warm enough here, don’t even speak the lingo, which is an advantage since nobody kicks us around too much because we don’t understand.

He’d spent five times what he’d lost on them already. And put in how many weeks of sleep dreaming of them?

But now his dreams — this dream — had turned, exalting them. Why, they were exalted! Mystery. Mystery. The reason he was a bondsman. The meaning of his life. The way he came to terms with what engined it. Mystery. Why he lived with the cops and the robbers. Why he bothered to eat with his bondsmen colleagues in Covington. Why he was a regular around City Hall, the municipal courts, the Federal halls of justice, on a first-name basis not just with the small-time hoods and criminals of passion but with their families as well, their partners and girl friends. Crime was the single mystery he could get close to. Did he know astronomy? Had he the brains for the higher mathematics or the physics of even thirty or forty years ago? Could he read Spanish or follow a score? Did he know history or even what the symptoms of his own body signified? Could he write a prescription or mix paint?

And it was not true what he told his clients: that their guilt or innocence did not matter to him and that his only consideration was whether they would run or stay put. It mattered very much, almost as much as his power to free them. All that did not matter was the verdict, but in his own mind he always reached a verdict, and he was certain that by virtue of his unique relationship it was at least as accurate as the law’s. Mystery. Mystery kept him going and curiosity killed him. His limited detective heart made him a Cincinnatian, kept him in this city of exactly the right size. And still he bit off more than he could chew, a tapeworm working in his brains. Mystery.

He showered, washing the scum from his long old balls, dried himself with distaste on the already damp towels, disposed of his pajamas in the wastebasket, dressed. Only then, when he was strapping on his watch, did he see the time: it was only eleven o’clock. He picked up his room key, went down in the elevator and left it wordlessly with the night man at the desk.

Hungry, he went into the coffee shop and ordered soup, a ham sandwich, coffee, melon. (What did they taste like? Mystery.) The dream had moved him forcibly. He had already forgotten Oyp and Glyp, as he forgot all clients once he was finished with them. They weren’t in it anymore. It was their crime: that was what exalted them, freed them from him, that he couldn’t get out of his mind. Why couldn’t he, who dreamed the crime, dream the success of his plea to the judge? Mystery. (Did he know the chemistry of even fifty years ago, classics, the future? He didn’t even know natural history; without the cards by the specimens in the cases in the museum he could not have told you about the teeth which so fascinated him.) Now a dream precipitated his actions, forced his hand, gave him hunches in the dark like a numbers player.

He paid up and cleared out, turning down the doorman who offered to get a taxi for him. “I’ve had my taxi ride today,” he said. “Where’s the bus stop?” Though he knew, of course, knew the routes and times of the last buses, knew the city inside out, knew all the fixed, specific mystery of Cincinnati, Ohio.

He took a Vliet Avenue bus to Rosendale and transferred to the Koch-Demaret which took him up Glad Boulevard and by the park, then past Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati whose tall twin buildings, Physics and Chemistry, faced each other like upended keys. The bus entered a narrow wedge of ghetto. Three blacks in big hats whose wide brims flopped down over their eyes stood down from the curb and waved at a request stop. The Phoenician knew the driver would not stop for them. He wondered how it would work out, what crises and bloodlettings were still to take place, and tried to imagine what assassinations of which leaders yet unborn would have to be endured, and conjured issues, slogans and even men as meaningless and dissociative as scores in a vacuum. He thought in headlines of distant centuries: TRENT REPUDIATES GENNIS, CALLS FOR AMORTIZATION OF EPICENTER. INDIANA WIPPENITES STARCH SCARVES, MARCH ON STATEHOUSE. MERPEN PLEADS HUNDRED AND SEVENTH. REMEMBER NEBRASKA!

But even these were built on analogue. He was depressed by language, the finite slang of his century. SHOTCHKA QUENTZ VISARBLEMENTHS. He needed new endings, new punctuation, a different grammar. There would be people, and they would believe things he could not even imagine. There would be two sides to every question. Trent would be right and Gennis would be right, though in its lifetime the public would never know the whole story. Amortization of the epicenter would be only a short-term solution to whatever problem it had been created to solve. A stopgap, at best only a first halting step. And it was all very well to remember Nebraska, but a time would come when it would be best to forget old wounds. There would be different holidays, epic festivals celebrating heroes who would not be born for a thousand years yet. And in all the countries in the world, on all the calendars the dates of their births would be in red! What would they have pulled off? What drugs were coming? What soups and styles, and how would the center line on the highway be made when the paint mines dried up and the pigments rationed? Or legislated against, green outlawed and blue controversial and orange repealed?

How he envied them, the man in the street, the pockmarked dropout of some future millennium, how he was sickened at the thought of the punch lines of jokes he could not understand even if they were patiently explained to him. What answers they would so casually have! Their 90 IQ’s would encompass wisdoms that the greatest minds of today could not even begin to comprehend. The more things changed, it was said, the more they remained the same. That was bullshit, just one more justification and excuse, another good word put in for death.

It was a terrible thing Oyp and Glyp had done. How I envy them! How glad I am I was there to see it!

It was his stop. He got off and walked the half-block to the Vernon Manor Hotel.

Although it was a residential hotel, with its wide horseshoe drive and massive quarter moons of carefully tended lawn, its groundfloor ballroom with its sequence of tall leaded windows like five big fingertips, the Vernon Manor had the look of a resort hotel of the Twenties. It might have looked more in place along the shore. Far from downtown, it seemed an awry speculation to the Phoenician whenever he came upon it. He rather liked the hotel, enjoyed the old ladies in their seventies with their clean thin hair that always reminded him of the fish-scale blue one sees in chemical toilets on airplanes. He enjoyed the big white uniformed colored women who pushed their wheelchairs or steadied them on their sticks as they bobbed along, or helped them into their cars and took the wheel to drive them to their doctor appointments. Not all the residents were cripples, but all seemed frail, their survivorship underscoring their frailty, their neatness and grooming a testament to the care they had to take of themselves. They seemed vaguely but limitedly moneyed, on budgets, their strict accountancy signaling necessity rather than a careful husbandry for the benefit of sons and daughters and grandchildren (they seemed as bereft of these as of husbands). It cheered the Phoenician to think of their clever economies, shrewdened them in his eyes. They were like hunters who killed to eat. He pictured them still awake, in front of their television sets or entering figures in ledgers from the financial pages, sipping hot water and lemon to outwit their bowels, warm milk their insomnia. What did they make of the world? (Mystery, mystery. He did not know them. Old ladies did not come to him for bail.)

In the lobby he moves toward the small bank of elevators where the night porter snoozes in a chair.

“Sir?” the night clerk says.

Main goes up to him, stands by the darkened candy cases, the low revolving tree of post card, the wide magazine rack, tomorrow’s Enquirer, the headline showing through a window in the yellow vending machine. He looks around at the glass signatures of the signs above the beauty parlor and dress shop, drained of neon and dusty as empty alembic. He glances past the night clerk into the message boxes, the few keys that spill out of their mouths like tongues.

“May I help you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not a guest?”

“No.”

“I’m afraid the dining room is closed. We serve our last meal at ten.”

“That’s all right, I’ve eaten.”

“Are you visiting someone in the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask if you’re expected?”

“I’m not expected.”

“It’s almost one. I’ll have to ring up and announce you.”

“Tell Crainpool Mr. Main is downstairs.”

The clerk shrugs, goes to the switchboard, plugs into Crainpool’s room and speaks softly into the thin prosthetic gear that runs from his ear to his chin. He looks up at Main and frowns. “I’m afraid I woke him. He says he’ll be down as soon as he can get dressed.”

“I’ll go up.” The clerk is about to protest, but Alexander has already turned and shaken the porter awake. “Five,” he says. He has to repeat himself to the groggy man. In the elevator he glances at the framed menus high on the wall, reads the cheerful Good Morning! from the closed coffee shop. It is old news.

The elevator door opens in a cul-de-sac. There is gray and faded floral carpeting, hard upholstered benches where the old people sit while waiting for the elevator. He turns left and left again and goes down the long corridor past the housekeeper’s closets and old-fashioned hollow metal doors that belly the hall. Crainpool’s room is at the far end of the corridor. There are hotel offices across from him and a housekeeping closet next door. He turns the knob on Crainpool’s door, but it is locked. He bangs on it with his fist.

Crainpool, already in his trousers but still in his pajama tops and an old blue bathrobe, opens it. “Mr. Main.”

“It’s after hours, Crainpool. We don’t have to be so formal after hours.”

“Has something happened? Have there been mass arrests on the campus? I was sleeping; I didn’t see the eleven o’clock news. Do we have to go downtown? Just give me a minute to put on my clothes.”

“Nice place you got here.”

“It’s comfortable.”

“Small, compact, but I expect it meets your requirements. Just get lost in someplace larger.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rattle around.”

“I guess I would.”

“Yet your needs are taken care of.” He pounds the swollen metal door. “Hotel has a laundry and dry-cleaning service, I suppose.”

“It does, yes, sir, but it’s pretty expensive. I don’t often use it.”

“Wash out a few things in the sink each night, do you? Hang ’em to dry on the rod in the bath?”

“Well, yes, sir, I do.”

“Yes. I see. I see you do.” He has strolled into the small bathroom. Underwear swims in the sink; two shirts hang on hangers above the tub, dripping water half on the tile and half in the bath; handkerchiefs stretch over the radiators like canvas on Conestoga wagons; a pair of pajamas dry on a wooden rack in the corner.

Main unzips his fly and pees into his employee’s toilet. He does not close the door or raise the seat. “These pajamas,” he says.

“Sir?”

“I was saying these pajamas,” he calls over the splash of his pee, “what happened to the nightshirt I gave you for Christmas? Don’t you use it?”

“Well, I thought that was meant as a joke, sir.”

He walks back into the room. “A joke? Why would you think it was a joke? And the nightcap, did you think the nightcap was a joke, too?”

“Well, sir—”

“The trouble with you, Crainpool, is that you don’t take things seriously. Playful yourself, you assume that everyone else has your sense of humor. A joke! That was a business investment, Mr. Crainpool, a business investment. I took it off my taxes. I thought that nightshirt and cap would solidify your image, help put you in the proper frame of mind for what’s wanted. A joke indeed! Like the garters, I suppose. Like the quill pens and the high stool. I’ve taken a great many pains, Mr. Crainpool — and gone to considerable expense, too, I might add — to reinforce your clerk’s ambience, to clericalize you. Yet you persist in your taste for the newfangled. I suppose you’ve been thinking in terms of electric typewriters and Xerox machines. What’s next, sir, conference telephones, gadgets that take your calls? ‘Mr. Crainpool is unavailable right now. Your message will be recorded and played back for him when he returns. Please begin speaking when you hear the electronic bleep…Bleep.’ ”

“No, sir.”

“ ‘No, sir.’ You’re damned right, sir, no sir. And what happens to the thick ledgers with the careful rulings inked down the center of the page? The big gray and black cardboard boxes with their snaps and clasps and their colors running like a melted zebra? To the huge checkbooks like a family album? What do we do, throw them all out, I suppose?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Crainpool says, trying not to giggle.

“Yes, sir. I should think you would be. It isn’t as if I’ve tried to trespass in your private life…Well, have I?”

“No, sir.”

“No. You didn’t see the eleven o’clock news, you said. That implies that you have a television. Television is provided, is it not? You needn’t answer; I see it. Television is provided. Three networks and an educational channel at your disposal. There is the telephone. I see an air-conditioning unit. I rode up here in an elevator.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was under no obligation to provide you with such lavish mod cons. None of the advantages you enjoy — there’s the electric light, there’s the flush toilet — were actually coming to you.”

“No, sir.”

“My first thought was to set you up in a boardinghouse. Such places still exist, you know, though admittedly they are scarcer now than when you first came into service.”

“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is trying very hard to keep a straight face.

“Go on, go on, continue dressing.”

“Then we’re going downtown?”

“Then I thought, no, though a boardinghouse would be the proper place for you and would go a long way towards bringing out those qualities in you which I was looking for, it might have certain drawbacks. You might not have liked your neighbors — or you might have liked some of them too much, fallen in with the wrong sort, made yourself vulnerable at the dinner hour or in the lounge on Sunday. You’d have had to share a bath, don’t forget.”

“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is buttoning his shirt.

“You wouldn’t have had your own phone. You’d have been roused at all hours to take other people’s messages. The walls in such places are paper thin. A fellow roomer’s radio could have kept you up half the night.”

“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true, sir.”

“Then I found this place for you, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“Yes. Then I found this place for you. A quiet residential hotel. Genteel. Yet with all the latest up-to-the-minute features you could possibly wish. Say, I like that carpet in the hall. Do all the floors have it?”

“Some do, but the patterns vary, I think.”

“You think. Only what you see when the elevator opens to take on a passenger. I take it, then, that you have no close friends in the hotel. Only the odd nodding acquaintance in the lobby and coffee shop.”

“That’s about it, sir.” He has begun to put on his tie.

“So I thought. No, don’t bother about the tie.”

“I’ll just get my jacket, sir.” He puts on his jacket and looks at the Phoenician. “I’m ready.”

“Ready?”

“To go downtown with you.”

“No, no, it’s after business hours; I already told you that. Shop’s closed. You’ll have to remember these things, Mr. Crainpool.”

“We’re not going downtown?”

“We’re not.”

“I see.” Crainpool leaves the hall where he has been waiting for the Phoenician and returns to the center of the room. “Would you like to sit down, sir?”

“Thank you, Crainpool. Too bad there’s only the one chair.”

Crainpool sits primly on his bed. “To what do I owe this honor?” he says at last.

“To bad dreams. To my poor scores in the hard subjects. To your vulnerable history.”

Crainpool blushes and it is the first time in years. Their cat-and-mouse had settled years before into a rhetoric, glancing off Crainpool like punch lines rained down on fools in comedy turns, touching him as little. Over the years he has become a stunt man, his bruises routinized, his flexible rubber bones deepsea’d fathoms beneath his skin and his nerves and pride Atlantisized, lost continented. The blush is not embarrassment but fear, and Main recognizes it because he has seen it once before.

“Aren’t you satisfied with my work, Mr. Main?”

“Perfectly.”

Now his face goes redder still, and Main sees ideas squeezing in his brain like turds. “Oyp and Glyp,” he says breathlessly, “you found Oyp and Glyp.”

“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”

“Dead?”

“Or captured. Split up, perhaps. Gone straight, could be. Married with kids. Working in factories or fueling jets on the runway. With the Highway Department, waving red flags to stop the traffic while the road’s being fixed. Or selling door-to-door, or moving The Watchtower. Hired hands, maybe, or taken up cooking. In Dobb’s House management, Dairy Queen. Studying the motel trade.”

“You have information?”

“Who has information? Nah, they’re dead.”

“Have you given up on them, sir?”

“The bailbondsman’s statute of limitations, Mr. Crainpool, the Phoenician’s sanctuary, Main’s pardon — they have it all.”

“Gee.”

“That surprise you?”

“I thought you’d found them, or even just one of them.”

“Never find ’em. They’re vanished. Cut my losses like a tailor. God told me that in a vision.”

“Yes, sir. Good advice.”

“What, that? That’s how He answers all prayer.”

“Oh,” Crainpool says. “That lawyer called, Avila. He told me to tell you that Mr. Withers is back and that he’ll appear as scheduled.”

“Anything else?”

“Just before I closed up, the desk sergeant from the Fourth District called in with some leads about the arraignments. I tried to reach you at home.”

“Something interesting?”

“Well, they’ve picked up a suspect for that bank robbery. They think they have enough evidence to hold him. I left a message with your answering service and asked the girl to call before you left in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Would you like some coffee, sir? There’s only the hot plate, and it’s just instant, but I could make some if you’d like.”

“You’re losing the thread.”

“Sir?”

“You’re losing the thread. Of the conversation. I make this extraordinary late-night visit and an absolutely unique allusion to your past to which you duly react, and now you’re losing the thread of the conversation. You’re not out of the woods yet, you know, Mr. Crainpool.”

“I know that, sir,” he says shyly.

“That’s better. Tell me, Crainpool, did you blush like that when you beat up your wife and put her in hospital?”

“I didn’t have the opportunity to study myself, sir.”

“No, of course you didn’t. Did you have the opportunity when you heard three weeks later, and you were already out on my bond, that there was a fire in her ward and that she’d burned to death?”

“Mr. Main,” Crainpool says, “that was sixteen years ago. You spoke of the statute of limitations.”

“Certainly. And you’ll be able to take whatever advantage of it you can once I turn you over to the police. Be sure to mention it to them. Tell your lawyer.”

“You’re turning me in? Jesus, Phoenician, that was sixteen years ago that happened. I’ve been your goddamn slave eleven years. You’re turning me in?”

“Which among us craps jellybeans, Mr. Crainpool?”

“Sixteen years and you’re turning me in?”

“No, lad, I’m killing you. I’m going to kill you.”

“The statute of—”

“That’s between you and the State of Ohio. We have a contract.” He pats his breast pocket. “Nothing about any old statute of limitations in this. You jumped my bail. Do I have to read it to you? Good God, man, you’ve worked for me eleven years. You’ve seen thousands of these contracts, you have the relevant clauses by heart, all that stuff about consenting to the application of such force as may be necessary to effect your return.”

Crainpool jumps up from the bed. “Let’s go,” he says crisply and smiles. “I consent!” He begins to laugh. “I consent, I consent. Draw your gun and stick it in my ear, I consent!”

The Phoenician studies him. “You’re putting up an even bigger struggle than I anticipated. Best sit back down, son. Sit down, honey.”

“But I consent,” Crainpool whines.

“My life should retain credibility,” the Phoenician says.

“Listen, Mr. Main,” the man pleads, “let me off.”

“Hush, Crainpool.” He looks at his man. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“What I’m thinking? I’m scared stiff.”

“Please,” Main says reassuringly, “be calm, take time. Nothing will happen yet. What are you thinking?”

The frightened man begins to speak, but hesitates. “Yes?” Main coaches.

“That our arrangement wasn’t such a bad one,” Crainpool says finally.

The Phoenician sighs, disappointed. “You’re trivial, you’re a trivial man,” he says. “Me too. Well-a-day, Crainpool, me too. All I can think to do right now is satisfy you. I put myself in your shoes and I think, ‘He’s mad, he won’t do it, he’ll never get away with it.’ I’d want scenario, demand explanation like a last cigarette, civilized denouement like a detective’s professional courtesy in the drawing room and even the murderer’s glass filled. Do you feel any of that?”

“I do. Yes. A little. I do.”

Main looks at Crainpool suspiciously. “I hope you do. There are conventions, ceremonies. The mechanics are explained but never the mysteries. Foh. Look at me. I’m a parade. At bottom I’ve a flatfoot’s heart: This is how I broke the case. You need to know anything like that?”

“Sure,” Crainpool says.

“You’re not just stalling for time, are you?”

“Not entirely.”

“Because to tell the truth I haven’t made my mind up yet. Not absolutely. I’m more likely to kill you than not, but nothing’s been finalized.”

“How’d you break the case, sir?”

“Don’t patronize me, you son of a bitch!”

“Take it easy.”

The Phoenician stands. “You won’t rush me, will you?”

“No.”

“You won’t fling the pillows at me?”

“I’m wanted, I’m a wanted man. You didn’t break in. The clerk called and I agreed to see you.”

“That’s right. Look, kid, stall. Stall for time, don’t make sudden moves.”

“All right,” Crainpool says kindly, “how do you think you can get away with a thing like this?”

“That’s it, that’s the way. Good,” the Phoenician says, “good.”

And he begins to tell him, feeding him detail, inventing his plausible arrangements as he goes along, reassuring himself as he annihilates loophole, shutting off Crainpool’s harbors and posting guards at his roadblocks, at his gangways and airline check-in counters, watching Crainpool’s trains. And it is all true, even if it is only a sort of foreign language he has learned to speak, the flashy grammar of body contact, a shoptalk of which he is weary because no one has yet bested him at it, least of all this dim Crainpool. And he sees that the man takes it all in, held, not just stalling but actually interested, a disciple to his own destroyer. Puppy! The Phoenician punishes him with strategy, game plan, pressing Crainpool’s nose to the blackboard where the y’s and x’s of opposition spray chalk in Crainpool’s spread, admiring nostrils. It’s what has held him all these years, kept him in town while the Phoenician was off rounding up jumpers; not only what kept him when Main wasn’t looking, but what brought him to the office earlier than usual at such times, and what held him there later, after hours, waiting for a phone call that would check up on him, wanting to hear even if only at long distance what normally he got in person, feeding on comeuppance, humiliation, wisecrack, connoisseur of the Phoenician’s abuse. I am his life’s work, the Phoenician thinks. I have rehabilitated him. He has gone straight man.

So he pours it on, showers Crainpool with spurious inevitability, moves him to object only to shut him off at the pass.

“Such force as may be necessary to effect my return,” Crainpool says triumphantly.

“Asshole. I’ll return you. You’re a fucking deposit bottle.”

“Suppose I shout? Suppose I shout, ‘Don’t shoot, Mr. Main, I surrender’?”

“You fucked up fucking fuck. I shout louder. ‘Call the police,’ I shout, ‘Crainpool’s got my gun.’ ”

“Shmuck. What about the police? Why didn’t you bring them to arrest me?”

“First principles. Shmuck yourself, I’m a bondsman. My reputation depends upon doing my own enforcing.”

“You harbored me. Eleven years you harbored me.”

“I harbored somebody who called himself Crainpool. In the five years it took me to catch up with you, you’d aged beyond recognition. You’d lost hair. You were seventy-five pounds lighter than when you jumped my bond. Your mama wouldn’t have known you.”

“The perfect crime,” Crainpool says appreciatively.

“You’re in season. It isn’t even crime.”

The man nods; he is satisfied that it can be done. Probably he’d never doubted it. But he still doesn’t understand why. “I was your slave,” he says.

“I paid top dollar. You got annual raises, paid vacations, fringe benefits. The first bondsman’s clerk in the State of Ohio with his own retirement plan.”

“I don’t want to die,” Crainpool says. “My God, Mr. Main, why would you do this?”

“Because,” he says quietly, “you’re the only man in the world I’m allowed to kill.” He has drawn his gun.

Crainpool begins to whimper, and the Phoenician is moved. He owes this forlorn man more than the fringe benefit of his theatrics. “How,” he asks, “can there be indifference? How can there be suicides? Why are there old men? Help me, Crainpool. Why is life so lovely? The night sweeter than the day and the day more joyous than the night? Who alive can grieve? How dare there be good weather, seasons when the world is at room temperature? Where are my muscles, my smooth skin? Why doesn’t desire die? Why is it that it’s the one thing which remains intact, that has some fucking strangle hold on immortality? Who sabotaged us and gave our will insomnia? Why am I more interested in others than others are interested in me? What am I to make of their scents, their firm bodies and their healthy hair? Of the snatches of conversation I overhear, the endearments passed like bread? Who wired this tension in me between ego and detachment? Why do I have this curiosity like a game leg? How can I cross-examine the universe when it jumps my bond?”

He begins to feel a little of what he has been saying. Crainpool is alive too, and his determination to kill him momentarily wavers. He sees it as a stunt, one more thing to impress this man who has lived eleven years with and for such impressions and who would, in the instant he squeezed the trigger (first the wild warning shot overhead or out the window to establish alibi — Crainpool would understand, having lived so long in ringside connection to technique, a first-nighter in aisle and orchestra to the Phoenician’s thousand performances, would perhaps even roar “Author, author. Bravo, bravo” to his own death — to make the point that in this small room, in these close quarters, he could not possibly have missed his man and had given him a chance to come quietly), probably smile, appreciation riding his lips like dessert, recognition sparking campfires in his eyes.

“Look at me, Mr. Crainpool. I take all the papers. I. F. Stone wrote me newsletters. I have Scientific American. The Journal of the American Medical Association is on the floor by my bed. National Geographic is in the toilet, American Heritage next to the toaster. Time-Life gives me the prepublication discount. Au courant I am as a deb with my nose for trend and influence and my insider’s thousand knowledges. What does it mean? Everything I don’t know and will never know leans on me like a mountain range. It creams me, Crainpool. It potches my brains and rattles my teeth.”

“You, Mr. Main? You’re a smart man. I wish I had a tenth your brains.”

“Yeah. Same here. I wish I had a tenth yours — anyone’s, everyone’s. I’d fatten on your memory and experience like a starver, suck at your inputs and engrams as at sweet fruit. What’s the future going to be like, Mr. Crainpool? What will people whistle a hundred years from now? What snatch of song will run through the beautician’s head as she leans forward over a customer’s hair? Tell me and I’ll let you go. What will the priorities be? What ruins will yet be uncovered, what treasures from what sunk ships will rise from which seas? What cities will be built and destroyed and uncovered again? Whose teeth will come up in the earthquake and go in the case?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Me too. Nothing. Me too. The ocean beds are squeezing together, did you know that? They tow the continents like tugboats. Asia will be a day’s hike from Australia, and a man standing in Italy will cast a shadow in Yugoslavia. Nations shall be resolved like a jigsaw, Mr. Crainpool, and what we call land will one day form a perfect circle, a globe within a globe that sits on the oceans like a skullcap. What a seashore that will be! Like a wet nimbus, Crainpool! Who’ll drive the Golden Spike that first day? What language will he speak?”

He fires the first shot. It goes out Crainpool’s open window and clears the four-story building across the way. “That will merely wake some of them,” he says. “Wait, you’ll hear.” They listen together and can barely make out the sound of one or two doors opening down the corridor. Somewhere a window scrapes open.

“Is everything all right?” someone shouts from the dark street.

The Phoenician levels the gun at Crainpool’s chest in case he calls out. “No,” he whispers. Then to Crainpool in his previous tone, but more excited, “But that’s just the world, the earth. Have you considered astronomy, have you given any thought to physics?”

“No,” Crainpool says dryly. His voice is parched.

“Physics breaks my heart, astronomy gives me the blue balls. I dassn’t bother with mathematics. I better not think about chemistry.”

“No.”

“You asshole, Mr. Crainpool. We’re blind. We ought to have white canes and dark glasses. There should be pencils in our caps. We should sit in the weather against tall buildings and use the caps as offices. Listen, listen to me. They’ve proof that all life is merely four simple compounds arranged on a spiral string of sugars and phosphates. We’re necklaces, Crainpool, sugar and spice and everything nice. We’re fucking candy. And your cocksucker and muffdiver are only guys with a sweet tooth. Listen, listen, there’s a theory now that certain things move faster than light. They think that atoms were lighter millions of years ago, gravity stronger. We live in a universe that puts on weight, that builds its body like a Sumo.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I don’t lead.”

“Please, Mr. Main—”

He is talking very quickly now. “I hear tell that matter enters our universe from another universe. That we get our physical laws from some universe in another country. That gravity comes like the post, imported like teak and coffee beans. Physical law like an unfavorable balance of payments. Our ways are not their ways, Mr. Crainpool. Jesus, atoms, atoms and the crap between stars.”

“Why are you killing me?”

“Hush. Einstein’s theory posited objects of infinite density within an infinitely small space. You see? Their atoms would be so fat and their gravity so dense that not even light could escape from them. That was a darkness, fella. Can you imagine such a darkness? That was a darkness so dark it was invisible. You could read your newspaper through it. Listen, listen to me. Wheeler and Ruffini predicted that by their x-rays we would know them — are you keeping up, are you getting any of this? — that they’d give themselves away circling visible stars, nibbling at them with their infinite gravity, drawing at them, giving the stars a toothache.”

“I don’t know why you want to kill—”

“They’ve been seen! In recent months. They’ve been detected. The black holes in the universe.”

“I don’t want you to shoot me, Mr. Main.”

“And for every black hole there’s a white hole. That’s what Hjellming thinks, how he accounts for the quasars. Are you reading me, Crainpool? The universes are leaking into each other. There’s this transfusion of law in the sky. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. Upright and respectable here in this universe I inhabit. I’m honest, but the fucking laws are leaking, the physical constants bleeding into each other like madras. God Himself nothing but a slow leak, some holy puncture, Nature’s and reality’s sacred flat. Matter and anti-matter. Inside our universe is another. Dig? Chinese boxes of universes. When I kill you in your room here tonight, maybe that’s virtue next-door. You think?”

“Why? Please, Mr. Main, why?”

“Shut up about why. I don’t know why!”

Crainpool changes his tactics. He stops whining and becomes almost angry. “You always have to have the last word,” he says. “You always have to do things big, don’t you? Big shot. You’d kill me for nothing, for the sake of your style.”

“My style? Nah.”

“You would. You think you’re so hot.”

“Me? No, I’m catching cold, I’m in a draft, I’ve got this chill. Brr, Crainpool, it’s the Ice Age in me, record snowfalls and not enough antifreeze in the world to grow a calory. My atoms, my gross thick atoms. Can you see me? Can you make me out?”

“I see you. I make you out. Like you said — you’re a parade.”

“Don’t believe everything they tell you, killer. I don’t give a fart for me. You can have my personality for a Green Stamp. My ego wore out years ago. Call Goodwill Industries, I’ll put it in a box on the front porch they can pick it up. Crainpool, dummy, this isn’t heroics, it ain’t no grandstand here. I’m a functional illiterate, I don’t know my ass from my elbow mystery-wise. If I can’t stand being a fool, it’s got nothing to do with pride. Screw the bubble reputation, I say, fuck fame and shove I. Gobble genes and blast being. I pass.”

Crainpool has had to strain to hear this last, leaning so far forward that he can almost pluck the gun from Main’s lap. “Then it makes no sense to kill me,” he says.

“All I wanted,” Main says so quietly that the clerk has to watch his lips to understand him, “was to know things. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. I took delight in the impersonal. I’ve lived with curiosity like the seven-year itch. That’s what attracted me to you guys, you mugs and malefactors, you villains and cutpurses. Who done it? What’s the motive? Cherchez la femme. What’s that? What does crime come to at last? Nothing. Crummy hornbook, lousy primer. Slim volume, Crainpool, pot fucking boiler, publisher’s remainder. You taught me nothing, mister. And where did I get the idea that by getting next to aberration I could…But what hurts, I mean what really hurts, is that if I had a brain as big as the Ritz I still wouldn’t know anything. We die dropouts. All of us. Disadvantaged and underachievers. I have questions. I’m up to here with questions. I never needed to be happy; I only needed to know. Simple stuff. A dopey kid of the next century could tell me. If I could only live long enough I would sit at his feet as if he was Socrates and he’d tell me…What? Whether Dubuque ever made it into the majors. If there’s crab grass on distant planets. Who won the war and what they were supposed to be fighting for and old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. He’d rattle off the damn fool slogans of his time and I’d take them in like the Ten Commandments. What do I do with my wonder, I wonder?”

Crainpool stands up. He squeezes himself between Main and the bed and walks toward the door. “Please,” he says, “I’ll see you in the office. Go on home, Mr. Main, get some sleep.” He opens the door for him.

“What?”

“It’s pretty late, Mr. Main.”

“You off the hook?”

“I think so.”

“Out of the woods?”

“That’s the chance I’m taking.”

“And you’ll see me in the office.”

“Yes.”

“In the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Phoenician smiles wearily. “You let me talk myself out, do your stalling for you.”

“You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Main. You’re a reasonable man, Alex.”

“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”

“Well, as you say, who can know what happened? I’m glad you closed the books on them. It was time.”

“That’s right.”

“You had a perfect record otherwise.”

“Sure.”

“They don’t change that.”

“No.”

“Do you want me to call a taxi for you?”

“Do you think they’re really dead? I mean, I’ve got no actual proof. It’s just a feeling.”

“You know those two. If they were alive we’d probably have heard something. We were bound to. Leopards don’t change their spots.”

“I guess.” He raises his pistol and aims it at Crainpool’s hand which is still on the door. “There was always someone to hunt,” he says. “A mystery I was good at. My line of country. But if Oyp and Glyp are dead—”

“Come on, Mr. Main, don’t—”

He fires and the bullet chips the knuckles of Crainpool’s hand. Astonished, the clerk raises the hand to his mouth and stares wild-eyed at the Phoenician. The blood makes it appear that he has been eating cherry pie.

“Run,” the Phoenician commands, hisses. “Run, you bastard.”

“What?”

“Run. Down the stairway. Run, run.”

“What are you doing?”

He raises the pistol again, and Crainpool turns and flees. The Phoenician walks into the corridor. Doors are ajar down the long line of rooms. Oddly they give the hallway the appearance of stalled traffic. Old women stand before them in nightgowns, their hands at their hearts. The Phoenician can just make out Crainpool’s back as he shoves open the door to the emergency stairway. “OYP,” he shouts, “AND GLYP,” he shouts, “ARE DEAD,” he shouts. He starts after the clerk in his old man’s gravid trot. “LONG,” he roars, “LIVE CRAINPOOL!”

He hurries to the stairwell through the door that Crainpool has just moved through. He is panting; the hand that holds the pistol shakes. He leans over the railing and sees a blur of Crainpool as the younger, faster man reaches the bottom stair. He points the pistol downward and fires without looking. Ah, he’s missed. Good. He puts the gun in his jacket and walks lazily down the stairs. He enters the lobby and, feigning breathlessness, calls to the night clerk behind his counter. “Did you — did you see him?”

“What the hell’s happening?”

“Did you see him?” He taps his pocket. “I’ve got a warrant for his arrest. Did you see which way he went?”

The clerk shakes his head. “He went out. I don’t know. He went out. He was bleeding,” he says. “His hand was all blood, his mouth.”

“Yeah, he was too fast for me. I missed. I catch him I’m going to fuck all over him.”

He goes through the revolving doors and out into the street. The air is lovely. He looks left and right. Which way, he wonders. North? To the suburbs? East towards the railroad tracks? Or did he double back? Head downtown maybe? To the street where he himself had walked that afternoon? Where the people were more like film stars than the film stars were, as everybody was these days, handsomeness creeping up the avenues of the world like the golden bedsprings in the Cincinnati trees?