The Laws of our Fathers

MAY 4, 1970

Seth

I wanted to call my father for reassurance, but Eddgar insisted there was no point.

'He's going to deny it,' Eddgar said. 'Either way. If he's gone to the Feds, they'll tell him to lie.'

'They'd never go.' I'd been saying this for days, of course. Even I had to recognize some likelihood that my father, in his desperation over the money or my situation, might have made such an uncharacteristic move. But on balance, I continued to regard it as impossible.

'So where does it come from, Seth?' Eddgar asked me. 'How does the F BI know? They seem to think you were abducted. You had to have told someone. Lucy?' Eddgar asked. 'What does she know?' Both June and he had been put out that I'd taken a traveling companion. It showed a lack of discipline to allow whim to influence my plans. They had no choice, though, but to accept my terms. I insisted, truthfully, that Lucy knew nothing.

'So who?' Eddgar asked. He peered at me, sallowed by the cheap lamplight. I had settled heavily on one of the beds, weighing it all.

'Maybe it's because I didn't show for induction. Maybe they're after me already.' It was possible I'd made a special target of myself with my anti-draft activities on campus. Maybe one of the Selective Service System's snitches had reported on my plan to flee and the Bureau had swung into action. But that didn't seem convincing to any of us.

'I went over the conversation with Michael three times,' Eddgar said. 'He called me because the way they were talking made him afraid something had happened to you.'

Michael, of course, could have gotten the wrong drift. And there were other possibilities. I recollected my conversation with Graeme on Saturday. I'd told him enough to make it clear I knew more than I was saying about the bombing. Graeme could have law-enforcement contacts. It would fit his polymorphous view of the world to be living outside conventional boundaries. But that wasn't the prospect that really troubled me as I sat there.

'What?' June demanded. She'd detected something. Perhaps in my posture. Perhaps I'd slumped a bit. Eddgar too was staring.

'Damn it all,' said Eddgar. 'At a time like this he's holding out on us. Lord. Lord! We're in this deep, Who'd you talk to, Seth?'

When I told them what I'd said to Sonny, Eddgar groaned and held his head. June, too, had an excruciated expression.

‘I didn't say anything about you guys. I didn't tell her the plan. She just wanted to know how I was handling my parents. So I said the word, you know? I said, "Kidnapping." But it's not her. It's not possible. She'd never sell me out. Christ, her mother is Zora Milkowski. She grew up with nightmares of the FBI.'

'Half those old Commies are Bureau agents now,' Eddgar said. 'Hoover keeps the CP in business.'

'It's not Sonny.'

Eddgar refused to accept that. And his doubts of course dented, if only slightly, my confidence in her. Maybe I'd scared her by seeming so far gone. Maybe she'd done what she thought was best for my sake.

Eddgar paced to think. He and June talked a bit.

'We aren't going to know,' he said at last. 'Not for certain. Perhaps it's your parents. Maybe it's Sonny or someone else. Or just the draft. But if we assume the worst,' Eddgar said, 'then the FBI will be right there when you pick up the money. They'll surveil the whole thing. They'll follow you until they're sure there's no explosive device, or that it's been deactivated, and then they'll take you down.'

Eddgar described this prospect with arrogant certainty about the predictability of the police. I was sure there was a saying somewhere in The Little Red Book about knowing the enemy. In the meanwhile, I thought through what he'd said. I was trying to calm myself, to remain rational. The memory of Hobie, with his puffy, drugged-out look, up against the wall in that checkerboard hellhole, remained with me. And I was guilty about being indiscreet with Sonny. I felt obliged to find a way to go ahead.

'So then I'll have to admit I was scamming, right? I'll say I needed the money to get to Canada. They're not going to bust me for kidnapping myself, right?'

Eddgar considered me briefly. 'They will prosecute you for evading the draft. If the Bureau grabs you, you'll end up in the army. Or the slammer.'

I had been oddly free of fear until that moment. Guilt and shame abounded, but I had, with certain obvious yearnings, followed the model of June and Eddgar, coldly working through the practicalities. Now I felt plain panic.

'I'm out,' I said.

'Wait,' said June. 'Wait. Are we looking at this the right way? We're overstating the risks. Seth, you've said from the start your parents wouldn't contact the law. So it's probably something else that brought the Effin' BI around. Even if we assume it's Sonny, they don't have any hard information. Right? Isn't that what you said? The guys who came out tonight have already gone home for the day. They'll work on it in the morning, if they have time. And even on the odd chance your parents did go to the FBI, we told them you'd pick up the money tomorrow. That's when the Bureau will set up.' June turned to Eddgar. 'Seth should fly to Las Vegas tonight.'

'Fly? How am I going to afford that?'

'Can you get hold of a credit card?' June asked me.

'You mean someone else's?' At some point I was going to have to stop being easily shocked by June.

'Too risky,' Eddgar said. 'Much too risky for Seth.'

'Then suppose Seth doesn't pick up the money,' said June. 'What if it's someone else?'

'We said I'd present my driver's license.'

'So we get someone who fits your description,' she said. Photo IDs were still in their inception.

'Like?'

'How about Michael?' She looked to Eddgar for approval. 'Michael?' I asked. 'What does Michael want to get involved with this for?'

'He needs a distraction,' said June dryly. I didn't have the courage to see how Eddgar absorbed that.

'And what happens if they grab Michael?' I asked.

'They won't draft him,' June said.

'They'll hold him for kidnapping,' Eddgar said.

No one said anything. June and I both watched Eddgar as the digits tumbled in his mind.

'First,' said Eddgar, ‘I agree with June. The risk is minimal. Minimal. But we want none.' Between them, they began to debate how that could be accomplished. As they responded to each other, I was visited again by the sensation I'd had when I entered the room, that I was seeing something charged and private and vaguely perverse in actually witnessing the Eddgars in their moment of collaboration. Anyone else remained to some degree an intruder.

The plan emerged by turns between them, traded back and forth. Michael would be told that the F BI was looking for me because of the draft and that the money in Las Vegas was needed to support me in Canada. He would know no more, and could say nothing if questioned. To protect him from kidnapping charges, in the unexpected event that anything went awry, I would go to Las Vegas with him. I would be seen in his company, a happy volunteer, on the same plane, at the same motel, the rental car counter. For my safety, though, I would observe the pickup from a distance, part of the giddy gambling throng in the Roman Coin's mammoth casino. If anything misfired, if the Bureau or hotel security or the Las Vegas police stepped in as he received the money, I would depart instantly, mix into the crowd, and go North. If worst came to worst, if Michael was held, I could call the FBI and my parents and explain what I needed to explain when I reached Canada.

Even after this scheme was fully described, deliberated, quilted together between them, a strangled voice reared up in me. Crazy, it said, this is crazy.

'It's an insane thing for Michael,' I said.

'He'll do it,' said June. She stood up and ran her hands down her thighs to smooth her dress. Her face was harshly contained. 'I'll talk to him,' she said.

When I got back to Robson's, the dinner rush was beginning. Sonny was behind the lunch counter, holding a coffeepot and flirting in a harmless way with an old guy in a flannel shirt, a heavyset man with rough skin. The hour and the needy way he savored her attention, like a flower turning toward the sun, made me think he was a widower. She touched his hand to still him when she saw me. My look appeared to alarm her. 'You fucked up,' I told her.

'What? What did I do?' She placed the coffeepot back on the Bunn machine behind her. She was a little pale with weariness -she'd been on her feet for twelve hours now – and, as ever, in no mood to contend with criticism. She asked why I wasn't gone.

'You told someone what I told you this morning. And now I'm in shit up to my eyeballs.'

'Told what? What are you talking about?' 'You know what I mean.'

The old man at the counter had stopped stirring his coffee to watch.

'What is wrong with you?' she asked. Her full brows were drawn into her eyes in a pained way. She clearly hoped for better from me.

We went out back again, but now stood at a distance in the graveled alley. June and Eddgar had warned me repeatedly that it was a bad idea to come back here. But I had insisted Sonny was the logical choice. She would come through, I said. If she'd made a mistake, she'd be eager to correct it. They capitulated only because they were desperate for the credit card and had no other sources for the money, Eddgar's hearings having left them and their organization broke. I, of course, had other motives. I needed to know for myself.

'What kind of shit are you in?'

'Deep.' I told her she must have mentioned my kidnapping to somebody.

'No one. No. One.' 'What about Graeme?'

'Graeme? He left last night. He'll be in San Raphael all week. Have you ever heard of Primal Scream therapy?'

Eddgar had warned me. 'She'll lie to you,' he said. 'She'll deny everything. Watch,' he'd said. I had girded myself, but now I was helpless not to believe her.

'Well, the FBI is on me.'

'Already? Oh Jesus.' She naturally assumed that the FBI was pursuing me for draft evasion and could not comprehend what kidnapping would have to do with that. I shook my head repeatedly rather than explain: I was not going to make the same error twice. Down the alley, she crossed her arms over the white uniform to protect herself from the evening chill. She remained peeved.

'So what do you need, Seth? Is there something I'm supposed to do to help, or did you just come back to accuse me of selling you out?'

‘I need a credit card.'

'A credit card?'

'Just go inside. When somebody pays with a credit card, bring it out here. I'll be back in five minutes. Less.' June was parked around the corner, at the end of the alley, in the car. She wore a headscarf and dark glasses, something in the nature of a disguise. The travel agency where she'd booked the tickets was right there on Campus Boul, ready to close. She'd called ahead explaining she would have to leave her children home alone and they'd promised that June would be in and out in five minutes. The plan, by which we'd pay with this hijacked credit card, seemed almost sensible to me. I had not calculated beforehand the subtle psychological effects of declaring myself an outlaw. I already cared less about anyone's judgments of me, including my own.

'You're crazy,' she said.

'I need this. I'm telling you, I need this.'

'Why?'

'Don't ask why. You're always telling me you care for me. You have to save your life, but you care for me. Well, now my life needs saving.'

'You can't explain? You're going to charge something on someone else's credit card?'

'I need to get on an airplane, Sonny. I have to get away.' I was going to offer more, but I stopped. The skein of tenuous connections

Cleveland and Hobie, my parents and the army and my freedom could not be tied together in my mind. Instead, again, it was simply she and 1.1 had fomented, with barely any masking of my intentions, one more scene between us, one more insistent demand that she show that she cared for me. I might as well have been some guy in the back seat of a Chevy saying, 'Prove it.'

'Look, I'll fade this,' I said. 'If it goes to shit, you tell them I must have picked your apron pocket when you came back here to talk to me. You'll be protected.'

'Protecting me's not the point, Seth.'

'Well, what is?'

'This is crazy.'' A wind came up then and snatched the little paper tiara off the top of her head. She watched it skitter down the pavement, then let her abundant dark hair down and shook it out. A minute passed while she bundled it back into the net. When she finished, I could feel the remoteness that had settled upon her. I had finally, fully destroyed myself with her. Looking down the alley, with the crisp white apron rising on the breeze, was the dark gorgeous girl I'd met on the bus a year before, who'd been reluctant at first to have anything to do with me and who now knew she'd been right. She'd always been intrigued by the mad, imperfect piece of me, the fact that I could let go of more than she could. But now she had witnessed the havoc that wreaked. Her rejection set a siren of regret singing in me. In spite of everything I had done to my parents, it was the first time I realized I was out of control, that the untamed parts of me were destroying what the saner self really wanted.

'Look, I'll give you the money,' she said finally.

'It's too much. You can't afford it. There are other people.'

'Other people? God, Seth, what are you into?'

'It's almost four hundred bucks. So I need the credit card.'

She stood there, frowning deeply. ‘I have it. Most of it. I've been saving a lot. I wanted to give Zora something before I left. She can wait.'

‘I need it now.'

‘I have it now. Gus will cash a check. Just wait.'

When she handed over the lump of bills, I knew we had settled accounts. So far as she was concerned, everything was complete.

'I'll pay you back.'

'Someday,' she said. 'Look, I've got to get inside. I have half a dozen orders up. Gus is ready to kill me.' She kissed me somewhat officiously on the cheek. 'I'm worried about you.' 'You probably should be.'

She pulled the grate closed behind her as she returned to the restaurant, a slip of white closed off from me by the hard sound of iron. She was gone now for good.

'Control the random element,' June said.

Lucy waited outside in the car while June went over it all again. Michael and I sat beside each other on one bed in the motel room and June stood, facing us. Eddgar, of course, was gone, present only in the commands which June relayed in her domineering, efficient way.

'For the next twelve hours you are Seth. You are Michael. Be rigorous about it. Be serious. What's your name?' 'Seth Weissman,' Michael answered. She pointed at me. I frowned but she pointed again. 'Michael Frain,' I said.

'Now switch IDs. Right here.' We swapped wallets; Michael's was a worn lump, with Western tooling. June gave me Michael's air ticket.

She went over the rest of it. Timing. Surveillance. How to handle the money. In his intense, focused way, Eddgar had envisioned every detail. He was like an architect, building the entire structure in his imagination.

'There won't be any trouble, Seth,' she said to Michael. 'But if there is, remember: not a word. Don't hassle with them. Don't give them an excuse to trump something up, or to smack you around. Just keep silent. When you get your phone call, we'll figure out how to handle it. Michael,' she said to me, 'you listen to this, too.'

I'd heard, but looked away, disturbed by her command, her aplomb. Colonel June. How many off-sites – basements, warehouses, cousins' apartments – had she stood in giving orders to her commandos? Union actions. Work stoppages. Soledad. The ARC. There was no trace of nerves, no sign of doubt. Her shoulders were square, her lithe frame hardened. It would have been better, I knew, if she enjoyed this less. 'Let's get this over with,' I said.

Down in the Bug, Lucy waited. The cool night was settling in as always. It occurred to me – a thought heretofore lost in so much else – that I was leaving this landscape, too. The hills, the fog, the California majesty that always seemed like magic to a flatlander. I pined a bit.

‘I am completely weirded out,' said Lucy in the car. 'This is the weirdest thing. Nobody tells me like any-thing.'

'Michael and I are doing something,' I said. 'That's all. He's helping me with something. Just be cool.'

We headed for the airport, where Lucy would drop us. Money was tight for a third ticket and, more important, I would need the car in Canada. We'd agreed, therefore, that she would drive to Las Vegas. She'd arrive by morning. We would meet her at the motel, a cheap place the travel agent had found down the Las Vegas strip. This plan, of hasty origin, had taken no account of the fact that Lucy had never driven a stick shift. In the motel parking lot, I'd given her a half-hour lesson, actually applauding every time she brought the machine through the pressure point without stalling it out. She seemed to feel immensely rewarded by my confidence that she could do it. Hobie had always refused to let her drive Nellybelle.

'Just get it in fourth and keep going,' I told her, leaning into the car from the walk at the airport. A jet was screaming by at just that moment. The air was full of sound and engine fumes.

'Right.' She bit down on her lip. 'I'm already telling myself that I can't pee till Las Vegas.'

I clapped Michael on the shoulder to make sure he was still all right. June had chosen to say goodbye to us at the motel-room door, as we headed out. She was wary of Lucy, of raising curiosity about her role. June was just here to bid farewell to me, we'd said.

'Come here, Seth,' June had called as we passed out the motel room door. Still not in the drill, I turned around as well, and as result was left gawking as she flowed sinuously into Michael's arms and drew him to her. For all my imagining, the sight of the two of them together was astonishing. Eddgar's wife. Silent Michael. He had come to her willingly, and clutched her with evident desperation. As her head was gripped to his chest, her eyes were wide open and caught some of the light. She looked at me directly, coolly I thought, enduring the moment and seeming, if only for the instant, more interested in my reaction than her

Lucy's route took her down the central valley to Tulare, Bakers-field, and Barstow, then, in the cool of darkness, across the desert, between the far-off hulking crags of the foothills and the mountains. She has told me the story many times. Occasionally she could see the lights of other cars approaching from miles off and felt comfort in the notion of company. It took longer than she could imagine for these vehicles to arrive, and then they flashed past in a tremendous snapping break of wind and were entirely gone. For quite some time she was convinced she was seeing things in the terror of the desert night, odd shapes gripped to the front grilles of the passing autos, forms which for all the world looked like bodies strapped above the bumpers. They were ice bags, she realized finally, secured across the front grilles as a precaution against engines overheating in the desert.

For the most part, she was alone. She heard the wind, the sound of her own speed; she smelled the dry, dusty odor of what was outside. She tried to control her mind, not to think of what might happen if she broke down, questions we should have asked before we sent her out there. There was no music that reached the radio in those days when cars were equipped to receive solely AM. From the speakers came only spitting static and occasional voices, clear then gone, as she spun the dial while she tried to watch the road. She hurtled on, amid the vast acres of the great open flatland between the mountains, where little blowing tendrils of scrub grass, weed, and sage skated by and where what life there was took place beneath the rocks, at the level of the taproots. Cacti with spiny arms and flowers like dracena rose up periodically, as did the huge robotic forms of power-line towers. When dawn came, she could almost see every shaft of light accumulate in the open spaces like snow.

In her weary state, and after hours of the hallucinogenic sameness of the landscape, she was unprepared for Las Vegas. It was not far from the A-bomb testing ranges only recently abandoned during the Kennedy years. Suddenly, it was there on the horizon, its lights pinking the sky for fifty miles, like some radioactive miscreant that had slouched in from the desert. I saw it many hours before, from the air. Our plane swooped overhead before we landed, above a landscape of signs towering over the low casinos. The entire garish spectrum that could be emitted by neon raged at the eyes, a wild combination like dissonant music.

'God,' said Michael, with his face at the plane window, 'who gets the electric bill?'

Our mission was to pick up the money as soon as possible. For that reason, we headed straight to the Roman Coin from the airport. After arithmetic, it had made the most sense to rent a car, something I'd never done in my life. The reservation was in my name. I stood beside Michael as he presented my driver's license.

‘I grew up in DuSable,' the rent-a-car clerk told us. 'But I don't know Shadydale.' She nodded to the license. 'Where is it exactly?'

I thought Michael would quit at that point. If a return flight were departing at that moment, he would have left the counter and climbed aboard.

'U. Park,' I said. 'On the Stony side. We grew up together.'

An Italian girl from the South End, named DiBella, she barely knew where U. Park was. She had a long face and straight dark hair. Very attractive. You had to wonder if she'd come here to be a showgirl.

'Jeez,' Michael said, wilting in the car. I drove. 'Jeez. What else can somebody ask me?'

I tried to imagine questions my driver's license would prompt when he showed it at the cashier's cage. No, he was not that Weissman. Just in town for one day. He was playing blackjack. I told him about U. High so he might have something to say about the weird social circles of the well-to-do, the children of intellectuals, and the black kids who, in my day, only wanted to fit in with someone. We made the short trip down Paradise and traveled south along the strip on Las Vegas Boulevard, which some of the signs still referred to as US 91. The avenue was lined with tropical-shaded buildings of exotic architecture – parabolas and cones. Before them, gargantuan signs of astonishing brightness announced hotel names and their resident stars – Paul Anka and Vic Damone were both here, singers whose homogenized American sounds I found as bland as Purina, music that I more or less took as the anthem of the enemy. A number of places gaudily advertised bare-breasted French showgirls, decadence of a kind I found more intriguing.

We drove past the Roman Coin so we could see it. It was big as an arena, a huge concave of stressed concrete that suggested some huge-winged fowl. It was set back from the road behind a lawn of thick-leaved Bermuda grasses that had been cultivated in the midst of the desert. Aloft a huge reader board sign boasted Jerry Vale's name in four-foot letters. I dropped Michael half a block away, as the Eddgars had suggested, in order to foil any snooper. Michael seemed relatively composed. I still had no idea what June had said to get him to do this, except that his manner suggested he knew it was dangerous.

'I'll say this for the last time,' I told him. 'You don't have to do this for me.' I received the same stoical shrug I'd gotten on the airplane. He was powerless to resist June anyway. He was in jeans and a Western shirt of a yellow plaid, with imitation mother-of-pearl snaps. The blondish hair snaked about him, but just the dry air of the desert somehow made him look more at home than he did in Damon, living on the edge of the volcano. He stared at me in the rental car, stuck for words, as usual. It was a Chevy Bel Air with bucket seats, a car five times the size of my VW. I felt as if I were operating a tank.

‘I figure,' he said, 'I figure you'd do it for me, if we'd traded places.' It was a confident testimonial to our friendship which I'd never have made, but he was gone with that and on his way to meet his fate, striding down the broad walk toward the hotel.

I drove past him and pulled into the Roman Coin, following the circular drive beyond the doormen and bellboys, in their red vests and bow ties, and followed the signs around the back where the desert had been paved over in an endless parking lot. My body rattled with fear. I had to do this, I told myself. It was a test of courage: I wouldn't think I'd avoided Nam out of sheer cowardice, I'd know I could make myself do anything. I found that this idea, which I hadn't quite pronounced before, had been circulating, like some advertising slogan, in the intervals of thought all day. I walked into the back of the vast hotel, jiggling the car keys.

The casino, when I reached it, was vast. Beneath the intense illumination, the stainless-steel corps of electrified slot machines, the wooden tables, the bettors, the intermittent islands of green felt were all set down on the flamboyant carpeting on which golden Caesar's heads repeated endlessly on a field of blood maroon. I had arrived humming some harmless tune I'd picked up from the lobby Muzak, but that was lost in the tumult of the casino: the outcry of a thousand voices – a number always reaching a raucous crescendo in the fortunes of a game – and the bells and occasional sirens screaming up from the slots where the old dolls, with change in paper cups, banged away at the machines. I had heard about this world from friends at home, guys whose fathers had grown up in the North End and liked to come out here so they could talk tough about losing money. No windows. No clocks. The quality of the light never varied with the hour, but about now, as the night was waning, there was nonetheless a certain soiled feeling. Some of the gamblers stood with their ties loosened and collars opened. Dressed in the Roman theme, the waitresses danced by in little toga getups, their tushes projected into tempting visibility on the stilts of their high heels. At odd moments, the sounds of the brass section of a tired band carried in from one of the lounge shows.

So here was lumpen America, everybody I felt better than. The women paraded by in their Capri pants and stiff hairdos. East met West here, North and South. There were probably two thousand people in the casino and they all felt great. After nine months in Damon, California, these Americans – the people Nixon had been talking to while he ignored me – seemed as strange as creatures from another planet. Big-bellied guys with belt buckles the size of my fist and slick dudes from LA in Nehru jackets. Painted women of a kind I had not seen for months on the streets of Damon – models or showgirls or high-priced hookers – glided by in long gowns. With my hair well past my shoulders, and my outfit of sandals and standard-issue denim, jeans and jacket, I was the odd duck now. Not that anyone cared to notice. They were given over to their own intense preoccupations. That was the worst part. Here they were, Americans with permission. And what was it they craved? Not guns and bombs, not race wars or killing in the jungles. Just cheap thrills and lounge acts – they wanted to see Elvis in their best duds and get a chance to risk more than they could really afford. It was June, I speculated suddenly, who'd thought of Vegas, who'd been here in the past and who privately enjoyed the recollection of it like some forsworn perversion.

At the side of the room, the lights glimmered on the domes of the chafing dishes of an enormous buffet piled with pink and yellow foods. It was cordoned off by the loops of a red velvet rope, strung between shining stainless-steel standards. Hunger came upon me with the intensity of lust. I watched some good-sized cowpoke, wobbling on the hob heels of his boots, fill a plate and I followed, but a security man in a maroon coat eyed me narrowly and I backed off with a lingering sniff, feeling like some Dickensian waif.

Across the casino, I finally caught sight of Michael. He was loitering nervously, walking here and back about one of the plaster pillars, which was dressed up with climbing circles of vine. The bank of cashier's cages, done in the heavy brass of old-fashioned banks, waited just beyond him. When he saw me, Michael did his best, as we had been instructed, to remain circumspect. Give the FBI no clues. I was perhaps 200 feet away. I nodded once. He waited a few more seconds and then pushed off toward the windows. He seemed to have chosen the one he wanted to approach in advance. I couldn't imagine how he'd made that selection – a lucky number? Or had he actually assessed which teller seemed the most casual or worn down by the hour?

I tried not to stare, shifting location every now and then to preserve my sight line, and glancing about occasionally to be certain no one was watching me or Michael. I was near a crap table, where an enormous fellow with lizard boots and a rhinestone bolo on his string tie was having a spell of good luck. The pit boss came by to ask him to take his cowboy hat off the table, while a stout woman in a rayon dress a bit too tight for her bulk stood silently beside him, her dyed high heels swinging from her finger. Looking back to Michael, I could see a dark-haired woman nodding to him through the brass bars. Then he reached back for his wallet.

I knew it would be a wait. The signal could be going out right now. If the Bureau was poised, she would have had to do no more than meet somebody's eye. And there were watchers anyway: pit bosses and bouncers; guys who, according to legend, looked down from portholes above with shotguns to make sure no employees surrendered to the temptation of grand theft. I prepared myself to push off, to walk at no particular speed back to the Chevy. June had warned me: Just go. They would take care of the rest. But I felt no special peril. It was as anonymous as watching an event in a large stadium. In the interval, Michael turned away from the cage and peered into the smoke of the casino, catching my eye for an instant and heaving an enormous breath for my benefit. Beside me, a great cry went up again. The Texan at the crap table had made his point.

When I looked back a moment later, Michael had left the cage. I was afraid he'd been refused, but I saw then he was cradling two stacks of chips in his large hand. At the side of the casino he passed into a men's room labeled satyrs in gilt. In there, he would enter a stall and pour the chips into an envelope preaddressed to the San Francisco post office box, already affixed with the postage and Special Delivery stickers. If the FBI was going to intercept him, Eddgar had predicted it would be in this interval. The money, Eddgar said, would be important to the government. But Michael was out in a moment, the manila envelope now beneath his arm.

According to June, the FBI tail would not be conducted as in a thirties movie – one dumb s.o.b. riding along the curb as Michael walked away. They would use a number of cars, passing him up, lagging far behind, crossing directions. My assignment was countersurveillance. Memorize license plates. Watch. Michael's job was to find a mailbox. He would be walking south. There was to be no contact of any kind between us until we were certain he was safe. I circled out of the parking lot and saw him walking calmly in the thick evening foot traffic of the strip, where couples lingered. Beneath the marquee of one of the hotels, a man with his wallet in his hand counted what was left, while his wife beside him refused to look. Michael disappeared into another hotel. I drove around the block, and when I caught sight of him again, he was still ambling peacefully, the envelope now gone. Tomorrow, the money would be in San Francisco. Cleveland would make bail. Hobie would be safe. I would be safe. We could recover from what we had done in the name of freedom.

At moments, Michael on foot made better progress than I did in the heavy traffic. Eventually though, as we moved farther north, it loosened up and I pushed on ahead. I'd seen nothing that merited alarm. Not one car had reappeared. None of the pedestrians, whom I'd scrutinized repeatedly, were noteworthy. There were a lot of powder-blue suits and white shoes, a striking prevalence of the new miracle fiber, polyester, but no one who seemed to have the markings of the FBI. At the Eden's Garden Spa Motel, I parked in the rear and edged back to Las Vegas Boulevard to watch Michael make his approach. There was a faced slate retaining wall that bounded the property and I sat atop it, checking the scene. We were well past the point of any danger. I wanted to tell Michael to knock it off, but he walked past me without glancing my way. 'In the back on the right,' I told him. 'Key's under the mat.'

He walked down the long drive, and in a moment the Bel Air appeared beside me. He nodded to me vaguely and pulled into the traffic. No cars had followed him in. There was a man walking a German shepherd who'd watched the dog lift his leg on a parking sign, but he was gone now and never returned to sight. If anyone was on Michael, they could not let him just drive away. Ten minutes later, he pulled back in. We both knew now that we were okay.

I met him in back. Floodlights from the third-story roof illuminated the lot. The night was still. He hugged me then, a rare effusiveness but no surprise under the circumstances. He was leaner and harder than I might have imagined, and smelled of several days' sweat. It occurred to me that he had learned something from the more outgoing styles of Lucy and Sonny and Hobie and me. He'd had his own breakthroughs.

'God, oh mighty,' I said. 'You okay?'

'Little shaky.'

The motel reservation had been made in Michael's name. By June's rules, it was my job to claim the room.

'This is so stupid,' I said. He nodded sadly as I left, but was still without any apparent inclination to disobey.

The motel room was inexpensive – $19 a night. In those days the casinos underwrote the room charges, even at a place like Eden's Spa. I stood in line, waiting my turn at the reception desk, too exhausted to feel much yet in the way of relief. I remembered Lucy driving the desert. Questions I'd never bothered with now surged at me. What if she got lost? What if the FBI had some bulletin out about my car? I realized again that I would never understand these few hours in my life.

The motel was a poor compromise between the hobbled architectural imagination of the fifties and Las Vegas's Italianate excess. A tree – a fully leafed deciduous variety – grew in the lobby. It mashed itself against the ceiling, three floors above. At its base, various igneous rocks had been piled in a grotto arrangement through which recirculated water splashed. From across the room, I could spot goldfish, swishing their tails to remain still in the current, and coins, black against the concrete. Two weary guys, businessmen by the looks of them, with the lost, dejected appearance of men on the road, were seated on a round circular sofa that circumscribed the tree, absorbed in conversation and pointing to the fish.

A group of New Yorkers emerged from the adjoining lounge and entered the lobby like a brass band. They were determined to have a grand time, calling each other's names at top volume. 'Paulie. Joey. Joanie. Lookit here.' Showy clothes and the reek of department store fragrances. They were making sly jokes -about sex, no doubt, from the way the women screamed together and smacked their manicures on the men's arms. I'd seen Vikki Carr's name in lights as we drove in, and all of them were gabbling about her by first name, as if they knew her, which I tended to doubt. Each man had the dimensions of a freezer and the women, no matter how sturdily built, wore skirts cut far up their thighs. Americans, I thought again. There was, after all, a lot I wasn't going to miss. One of the men, in a persimmon-colored jacket, was carrying a highball glass, which he left on the corner of one of the unoccupied reception counters as he went out the door.

When I got to the head of the line, I gave Michael's name. 'Okay,' the receptionist said. She walked away and returned with a painfully thin man in a sport coat, who had thick glasses and a sloppy mustache. He made a slight gesture toward someone behind me.

When I looked back, the two men by the fountain seemed to snap awake. In a crystalline moment, I watched them cross the carpeting, knowing that this was precisely what I had envisioned back at the Roman Coin. One fellow reached inside his pocket and I could read the words on his lips even before he spoke: FBI.

They were still thirty feet away. I held up one finger, asking for a second, and slid off, walking deliberately to the doors, faster than I should have but still not in full flight. They waited until I pushed through the glass vestibule and reached the parking lot. I flew. It was a few seconds before I heard a voice crying out, 'Stop! You there, son. Stop.' Amazingly, I had gained as much as fifty yards on them. I tore back through the parking lot to where I'd left the car. Michael would be waiting. I was going to be all right. I forced myself to remain cool. We had enough time.

When I got to the space where we'd parked, the car was gone. I was briefly too shocked to move. Then after a panicked instant, I realized I must have turned myself around. With the agent still yelling behind me, I headed for the other side of the building. I ran in my sandals. When I came around the rear corner, there was a wall where five or six cars were parked. A high cyclone fence adjoined the desert.

'Stop him!' the agent yelled this time. 'FBI. Stop him!' He seemed farther behind than before. Apparently he had lost me when I surged around the building.

'Who? Dis one?' I heard. Suddenly, through the night, someone was reaching for me, standing now in the breach between a Ford and a car nearby. It was one of the New Yorkers.

'Tony, be careful,' a woman called. He came to me through the night, his group nearby. The woman's bleached hair glowed under the parking-lot lights.

'Where you going, bud?' Tony asked me. He was wearing a sand-colored leisure suit and a shirt marked by colored shapes like lightning bolts.

'Tony, for Godsake,' the woman yelled, 'he might have a gun.' I heard her as she turned to speak to her friends. 'Always on the job,' she said.

'This don't god no gun,' Tony said. 'Come on here. This gentleman back here wants to have a word with you. Whatsa matter?' he said. 'You don't like to talk wit the FBI?'

I said nothing. I made no move. The time – the few precious seconds I had unconsciously counted – whittled away while this man and I stared at each other. He had a massive face with walrus jowls, set with a confidence that was not particularly malevolent. It simply said, I am a man and you are not. I have been alive long enough to know what to do here and you do not. I was immobilized by the sheer force of his experience. I had been caught. Busted. I was completely bewildered by the thought. The agent arrived then, blowing hard.

'You are one dumb son of a bitch. Do you know that's how people get shot? Do you know what kind of trouble you can get yourself in?' He shoved my shoulder roughly. 'Lie down on the ground. Lie down there. Go on, damn it all'

He ran his hands along my legs, inside and out, as I was prostrate on the asphalt with its strange worldly scent. He pulled Michael's wallet from my pocket and tugged on my hair.

'What am I supposed to call you? "Jesus?" You smell bad,' he said to me. I'd bathed last night. I remembered June. I was not going to say anything. They told me to get up.

I had been caught, I kept thinking. I realized I had walked into a new plane, another reality. Each instant now would be a piece of fresh time. One of them pushed me from behind and they walked me toward the front of the motel, leading tne along by the shirt collar. Tony introduced himself to the agent. From the Two Two One in Newark.

'You know Jack Burk? In the RA in West Orange?'

'Jack? Jack was in my class in Quantico.'

'No shit? He's my brother-in-law.'

'How do you like that? How is old Jack?'

'Pig in shit, that one. He god Hoover's picture on the wall next to the Sacred Heart.'

The second agent watched us coming, looking out the window of a blue Ford Fairlane with black-walled tires. He'd turned the dome light on inside the car. He wore a straw fedora and let his arm dangle out the open window, an unfiltered cigarette, which he idly raised to his mouth on occasion, between his fingers. He was parked in the front of the motel, blocking the driveway. He'd been waiting for me, of course. I'd never had a chance. The one who'd caught up to me introduced Tony, and the two agents fawned over him for a while. A siren keened down the strip.

'Cavalry's on the way,' the second agent said. 'Tammy's 10 – I'd half the county.'

'Oh brother,' said the agent who held me.

'You take him in. I'll stay to explain. Fourteen's coming. You sure you got who you want?'

The agent flipped open the wallet he'd taken from my pocket.

'Michael Frain,' he said.

'He's the one.'

The agent grabbed me by the collar again and jerked me around to face him for the first time.

'We been looking for you, Michael,' he said.