The Paris stock exchange, the bourse, was open for trading only two hours a day, 1 to 3 P.M., which was 7 to 9 A.M., New York time. So on Monday, Sherman arrived at the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce at 6:30. By now it was 7:30, and he was at his desk with his telephone at his left ear and his right foot up on Felix’s portable shoeshine stand.

The sound of young men baying for money on the bond market had already risen in the room, for the market was now an international affair. Across the way was the young lord of the pampas, Arguello, with his telephone at his right ear and his left hand over his left ear, talking to Tokyo in all probability. He had been in the office for at least twelve hours when Sherman arrived, working on a huge sale of U.S. Treasuries to the Japanese postal service. How this kid had ever even gotten his finger into such a deal, Sherman couldn’t imagine, but there he was. The Tokyo exchange was open from 7:30 P.M. to 4 A.M., New York time. Arguello was wearing some kind of go-to-hell suspenders with pictures of Tweety Pie, the cartoon character, on them, but that was all right. He was working, and Sherman was at peace.

Felix, the shoeshine man, was humped over, stropping Sherman’s right shoe, a New & Lingwood half-brogue, with his high-shine rag. Sherman liked the way the elevation of his foot flexed his leg and sprung it out and put pressure on the inside of his thigh. It made him feel athletic. He liked the way Felix humped over, shell-backed, as if enveloping the shoe with his body and soul. He could see the top of the black man’s head, which was no more than twenty inches below his eye level. Felix had a perfectly round caramel-brown bald spot on the crown of his skull, which was odd, since the hair surrounding it was quite thick. Sherman liked this perfect round bald spot. Felix was dependable and droll, not young, resentful, and sharp.

Felix had a copy of The City Light on the floor beside his stand, reading it while he worked. It was open to the second page and folded over in the middle. Page 2 contained most of The City Light’s international news. The headline at the top said: BABY PLUNGES 200 FEET—AND LIVES. The dateline was Elaiochori, Greece. But that was all right. The tabloids no longer held any terrors for Sherman. Five days had now passed and there had not been a word in any of the newspapers about some dreadful incident on an expressway ramp in the Bronx. It was just as Maria had said. They had been drawn into a fight in the jungle, and they had fought and won, and the jungle did not scream about its wounded. This morning Sherman had bought only the Times at the little shop on Lexington. He had actually read about the Soviets and the Sri Lankans and the internecine strife at the Federal Reserve on the taxi ride downtown, instead of turning at once to Section B, Metropolitan News.

After a solid week of fear, he could now concentrate on the radium-green numbers sliding across the black screens. He could concentrate on the business at hand…the Giscard…

Bernard Levy, the Frenchman he dealt with at Traders’ Trust Co., was now in France doing a last bit of research on the Giscard before Trader T committed their $300 million and they closed the deal and had a print…the crumbs…Judy’s contemptuous phrase slipped into his mind and right out again…crumbs…So what?…They were crumbs of gold…He concentrated on Levy’s voice on the other end of the satellite carom:

“So look, Sherman, here’s the problem. The debt figures the government has just released have everybody on edge here. The franc is falling, and it’s bound to fall further, and at the same time, as you know, gold is falling, even though it’s for different reasons. The question is where the floor’s going to be, and…”

Sherman just let him talk. It wasn’t unusual for people to get a little squirrelly on the verge of committing a sum like $300 million. He had spoken to Bernard—he called him by his first name—almost every day for six weeks now, and he could barely remember what he looked like. My French doughnut, he thought—and immediately realized this was Rawlie Thorpe’s crack, Rawlie’s cynicism, sarcasm, pessimism, nihilism, which were all ways of saying Rawlie’s weakness, and so he banished doughnut as well as crumbs from his mind. This morning he was once more on the side of strength and Destiny. He was almost ready to entertain, once again, the notion of…mastery of the universe…The baying of the young titans sounded all around him—

“I’m sixteen, seventeen. What does he want to do?”

“Bid me twenty-five of the ten-year!”

“I want out!”

—and once more it was music. Felix was stropping the high-shine rag back and forth. Sherman enjoyed the pressure of the rag on his metatarsal bones. It was a tiny massage of the ego, when you got right down to it—this great strapping brown man with the bald spot in his crown down there at his feet, stropping, oblivious of the levers with which Sherman could move another nation, another continent, merely by bouncing a few words off a satellite.

“The franc is no problem,” he said to Bernard. “We can hedge that to next January or to term or both.”

He felt Felix tapping the bottom of his right shoe. He lifted his foot off the stand, and Felix picked it up and moved it around to the other side of his chair, and Sherman hoisted his mighty athletic left leg and put his left shoe on the metal shoeshine stirrup. Felix turned the newspaper over and folded it down the middle and put it on the floor beside the stand and began to work on the left New & Lingwood half-brogue.

“Yes, but you have to pay for a hedge,” said Bernard, “and we’ve been talking all along about operating under very blue skies, and…”

Sherman tried to imagine his doughnut, Bernard, sitting in an office in one of those dinky modern buildings the French build, with hundreds of tiny cars buzzing by and tooting their toy horns on the street down below…below…and his eye happened to drift down to the newspaper on the floor below…

The hair on his arms stood on end. At the top of the page, the third page of The City Light, was a headline saying:

Honor Student’s Mom:
Cops Sit On Hit’N’Run

Above it in smaller white letters on a black bar it said: While he lies near death. Below was another black bar saying, A CITY LIGHT Exclusive. And below that: By Peter Fallow. And below that, set into a column of type, was a picture, head and shoulders, of a smiling black youth, neatly dressed in a dark jacket, a white shirt, and a striped necktie. His slender delicate face was smiling.

“I think the only sensible thing is to find out where this thing bottoms out,” said Bernard.

“Well…I think you’re exaggerating the, uh…the, uh…” That face! “…the, uh…” That slender delicate face, now with a shirt and tie! A young gentleman! “…the, uh, problem.”

“I hope so,” said Bernard. “But either way, it won’t hurt to wait.”

“Wait?” Yo! You need any help! That frightened delicate face! A good person! Did Bernard say “Wait”? “I don’t get it, Bernard. Everything’s in place!” He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic, so urgent, but his eyes were fastened on the words lying on the floor below.

RF—Mercedes-Benz—the data on the pages of a million newspapers—went through Sherman’s solar plexus like a tremendous vibration. His license plate began: RFH. With a horrifying hunger for the news of his own doom, he read on:

That was as much as he could read. Felix had folded the newspaper at that point. The rest was on the lower half of the page. His brain was on fire. He was dying to reach down and turn the newspaper over—and dying never to have to know what it would reveal. Meantime, the voice of Bernard Levy droned on from across the ocean, bouncing off an AT&T communications satellite.

“…talking ninety-six, if that’s what you mean by ‘in place.’ But that’s beginning to look rather pricey, because…”

Pricey? Ninety-six? No mention of a second boy! No mention of a ramp, a barricade, an attempted robbery! The price had always been set! How could he bring that up now? Could it be—not a robbery attempt, after all! He’d paid an average of ninety-four for them. Only a two-point spread! Couldn’t lower it! This nice-looking lad dying! My car! Must focus on it…the Giscard! Couldn’t fail, not after all this time—and the tabloid sizzled on the floor.

“Bernard…” His mouth had gone dry. “Listen…Bernard…”

“Yes?”

But perhaps if he took his foot off the shoeshine stand—

“Felix? Felix?” Felix didn’t seem to hear him. The perfect caramel-brown bald spot on the crown of his head continued to go back and forth as he worked on the New & Lingwood half-brogue.

“Felix!”

“Hello, Sherman! What did you say?” In his ear, the voice of the French doughnut, sitting on top of 300 million gold-backed bonds—in his eyes, the top of the head of a black man sitting on top of a shoeshine stand and engulfing his left foot.

“Excuse me, Bernard!…Just a moment…Felix?”

“You say Felix?”

“No, Bernard! I mean just a minute…Felix!”

Felix stopped working on the shoe and looked up.

“Sorry, Felix, I’ve got to stretch my leg a second.”

The French doughnut: “Hello, Sherman, I can’t understand you!”

Sherman took his foot off the stand and made a great show of extending it, as if it felt stiff.

“Sherman, are you there?”

“Yes! Excuse me a second, Bernard.”

As he hoped, Felix took this opportunity to turn The City Light over in order to read the lower half of the page. Sherman put his foot back on the stand, and Felix hunched over the shoe again, and Sherman put his head down, trying to focus on the words lying on the floor. He bent his head down so close to Felix’s that the black man looked up. Sherman pulled his head back and smiled weakly.

“Sorry!” he said.

“You say ‘Sorry’?” asked the French doughnut.

“Sorry, Bernard, I was talking to someone else.”

Felix shook his head reprovingly, then lowered it and went to work again.

“ ‘Sorry’?” repeated the French doughnut, still baffled.

“Never mind, Bernard. I was talking to someone else.” Slowly Sherman lowered his head again and fixed his eyes upon the print way down below.

“Sherman, are you there? Sherman—”

“Yes, Bernard. Sorry. Uh…tell me again what you were saying about price? Because, really, Bernard, we’re all set on that. We’ve been all set for weeks!”

“Again?”

“If you don’t mind. I was interrupted here.”

A big sigh, from Europe, by satellite. “I was saying that we’ve moved from a stable to an unstable mix here. We can no longer extrapolate from the figures we were talking about when you made your presentation…”

Sherman tried to pay attention to both things at once, but the Frenchman’s words quickly became a drizzle, a drizzle by satellite, as he devoured the print visible below the skull of the shoeshine man:

“…and so I say we let it sit for a few weeks, let the particles settle. By then we’ll know where bottom is. We’ll know if we’re talking about realistic prices. We’ll know…”

It suddenly dawned on Sherman what the frightened doughnut Frog was saying. But he couldn’t wait—not with this thing closing in on him—had to have a print—now!

“Bernard, now you listen. We can’t wait. We’ve spent all this time getting everything in place. It doesn’t have to sit and settle. It’s settled. We’ve got to move now! You’re raising phantom issues. We’ve got to pull ourselves together and do it! We’ve thrashed out all these things a long time ago! It doesn’t matter what happens to gold and francs on a day-today basis!”

Even as he spoke, he recognized the fatal urgency in his voice. On Wall Street, a frantic salesman was a dead salesman. He knew that! But he couldn’t hold back—

“I can’t very well just close my eyes, Sherman.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.” Thok. A little tap. A tall, delicate boy, an honor student! The terrible thought possessed his entire consciousness: They really were only two well-meaning boys who wanted to help… Yo!…The ramp, the darkness…But what about him—the big one? No mention of a second boy at all…No mention of a ramp…It made no sense…Only a coincidence perhaps!—another Mercedes!—R—2,500 of them—

But in the Bronx on that very same evening?

The horror of the situation smothered him all over again.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t do this one by Zen archery, Sherman. We’re going to have to sit on the eggs for a while.”

“What are you talking about? How long is ‘a while,’ for God’s sake?” Could they conceivably check out 2,500 automobiles?

“Well, next week or the week after. I’d say three weeks at the outside.”

“Three weeks!”

“We have a whole series of big presentations coming up. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

“I can’t wait three weeks, Bernard! Now look, you’ve let a few minor problems—hell, they’re not even problems. I’ve covered every one of those eventualities twenty goddamned times! You’ve got to do it now! Three weeks won’t help a thing!”

On Wall Street, salesmen didn’t say got to, either.

A pause. Then the doughnut’s soft patient voice from Paris, by satellite: “Sherman. Please. For 300 million bonds nobody’s got to do anything on hot flashes.”

“Of course not, of course not. It’s just that I know I’ve explained…I know I’ve…I know…”

He knew he had to talk himself down from this giddy urgent plateau as quickly as possible, become the smooth calm figure from the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce that the Trader T doughnut had always known, a figure of confidence and unshakable puissance, but…it was bound to be his car. No way out of it! Mercedes, RF, a white man and woman!

The fire raged inside his skull. The black man stropped away on his shoe. The sounds of the bond trading room closed in on him like the roar of beasts:

“He’s seeing them at six! Your offering is five!”

“Bid out! The Feds are doing reverses!”

“Feds buying all coupons! Market subject!”

“Holy fucking shit! I want out!”

 

All was confusion in Part 62, Judge Jerome Meldnick presiding. From behind the clerk’s table, Kramer gazed upon Meldnick’s bewilderment with amused contempt. Up on the bench, Meldnick’s large pale head resembled a Gouda cheese. It was bent over next to that of his law secretary, Jonathan Steadman. Insofar as the judgeship of Jerome Meldnick had any usable legal background, it was lodged in the skull of Steadman. Meldnick had been executive secretary of the teachers’ union, one of the largest and most solidly Democratic unions in the state, when the governor appointed him as a judge in the criminal division of the State Supreme Court in recognition of his jurisprudential potential and his decades of dog’s work for the party. He had not practiced law since the days when he ran errands, shortly after passing the bar, for his uncle, who was a lawyer who handled wills and real-estate contracts and sold title insurance out of a two-story taxpayer on Queens Boulevard.

Irving Bietelberg, the lawyer for a felon named Willie Francisco, was on tiptoes on the other side of the bench, peering over and trying to get a word in. The defendant himself, Francisco, fat, twenty-two, wearing a wispy mustache and a red-and-white-striped sport shirt, was on his feet yelling at Bietelberg: “Yo! Hey! Yo!” Three court officers were positioned to the sides and rear of Willie, in case he got too excited. They would have been happy to blow his head off, since he had killed a cop without batting an eye. The cop had apprehended him when he came running out of an optician’s with a pair of Porsche sunglasses in his hand. Porsche sunglasses were much admired in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, because they cost $250 a pair and had the name Porsche etched in white on the upper rim of the left lens. Willie had gone into the optician’s with a forged Medicaid prescription for glasses and announced he wanted the Porsches. The clerk said he couldn’t have them, because Medicaid wouldn’t reimburse the store for glasses that cost that much. So Willie grabbed the Porsches and ran out and shot the cop.

It was a true piece a shit, this case, and an open-and-shut piece a shit, and Jimmy Caughey hadn’t even had to breathe hard to win it. But then this weird thing had happened. The jury had gone out yesterday afternoon and after six hours had returned without reaching a verdict. This morning Meldnick was plowing through his calendar session when the jury sent in word they had reached a verdict. They came filing in, and the verdict was guilty. Bietelberg, just doing the usual, asked that the jury be polled. “Guilty,” “Guilty,” “Guilty,” said one and all until the clerk got to an obese old white man, Lester McGuigan, who also said “Guilty” but then looked into the Porscheless eyes of Willie Francisco and said: “I don’t feel absolutely right about it, but I guess I have to cast a vote, and that’s the way I cast it.”

Willie Francisco jumped up and yelled “Mistrial!” even before Bietelberg could yell it—and after that all was confusion. Meldnick wrapped his forearms around his head and summoned Steadman, and that was where things stood. Jimmy Caughey couldn’t believe it. Bronx juries were notoriously unpredictable, but Caughey had figured McGuigan was one of his solid rocks. Not only was he white, he was Irish, a lifetime Bronx Irishman who would certainly know that anyone named Jimmy Caughey was a worthy young Irishman himself. But McGuigan had turned out to be an old man with time on his hands who thought too much and waxed too philosophical about things, even the likes of Willie Francisco.

Kramer was amused by Meldnick’s confusion but not Jimmy Caughey’s. For Jimmy he had only commiseration. Kramer was in Part 62 with a similar piece a shit and had similar ridiculous catastrophes to fear. Kramer was on hand to hear a motion for an evidentiary hearing from the lawyer, Gerard Scalio, in the case of Jorge and Juan Terzio, two brothers who were “a couple of real dummies.” They had tried to hold up a Korean grocery store on Fordham Road but couldn’t figure out which buttons to hit on the cash register and settled for pulling two rings off the fingers of a female customer. This so angers another customer, Charlie Esposito, that he runs after them, catches up with Jorge, tackles him, pins him to the ground, and says to him, “You know something? You’re a couple of real dummies.” Jorge reaches inside his shirt, pulls out his gun, and shoots him right in the face, killing him.

A true piece a shit.

As the shitstorm grew louder and Jimmy Caughey rolled his eyes in ever more hopeless arcs, Kramer thought of a brighter future. Tonight he would meet her at last…the Girl with Brown Lipstick.

Muldowny’s, that restaurant on the East Side, Third Avenue at Seventy-eighth Street…exposed brick walls, blond wood, brass, etched glass, hanging plants…aspiring actresses who waited on tables…celebrities…but informal and not very expensive, or that’s what he heard…the electric burble of young people in Manhattan leading…the Life…a table for two…He’s looking into the incomparable face of Miss Shelly Thomas…

A small timid voice told him he shouldn’t do it, or not yet. The case was over, so far as the trial went, and Herbert 92X had been duly convicted, and the jury had been dismissed. So what was the harm in his meeting a juror and asking her about the nature of the deliberations in this case? Nothing…except that the sentence had not been handed down yet, so that technically the case was not over. The prudent thing would be to wait. But in the meantime Miss Shelly Thomas might…decompress…come down from her crime high…no longer be enthralled by the magic of the fearless young assistant district attorney with the golden tongue and the powerful sternocleidomastoid muscles…

A strong manly voice asked him if he was going to play it safe and small-time the rest of his life. He squared his shoulders. He would keep the date. Damned right! The excitement in her voice! It was almost as if she had been expecting him to call. She was there in that glass-brick and white-pipe-railing MTV office at Prischker & Bolka, in the heart of the Life, still pulsing to the rogue beat of life in the raw in the Bronx, still thrilling to the strength of those who were manly enough to deal with the predators…He could see her, he could see her…He closed his eyes tightly…Her thick brown hair, her alabaster face, her lipstick…

“Hey, Kramer!” He opened his eyes. It was the clerk. “You got a phone call.”

He picked up the telephone, which was on the clerk’s desk. Up on the bench, Meldnick, in thick Gouda consternation, was still huddled with Steadman. Willie Francisco was still yelling, “Yo! Hey! Yo!”

“Kramer,” said Kramer.

“Larry, this is Bernie. Have you seen The City Light today?”

“No.”

“There’s a big article on page 3 about this Henry Lamb case. Claims the cops are dragging their feet. Claims we are, too. Says you told this Mrs. Lamb the information she gave you was useless. It’s a big article.”

“What!”

“Don’t mention you by name. Just says ‘the man from the District Attorney’s Office.’ ”

“That’s absolute total bullshit, Bernie! I told her the fucking opposite! I said it was a good lead she gave us! It was just that it wasn’t enough to build a case out of.”

“Well, Weiss is going bananas. He’s ricocheting off the walls. Milt Lubell’s coming down here every three minutes. What are you doing right now?”

“I’m waiting for an evidentiary hearing in this Terzio brothers case, the two dummies. The Lamb case! Jesus Christ. Milt said the other day there was some guy, some fucking Englishman, calling up from The City Light—but Jesus Christ, this is outrageous. This case is fucking fulla holes. I hope you realize that, Bernie.”

“Yeah, well, listen, get a postponement on the two dummies and come on down here.”

“I can’t. For a change, Meldnick is up on the bench holding his head. Some juror just recanted his guilty vote in the Willie Francisco case. Jimmy’s up here with smoke coming out of his ears. Nothing’s gonna happen here until Meldnick can find someone to tell him what to do.”

“Francisco? Oh, f’r Chrissake. Who’s the clerk there, Eisenberg?”

“Yeah.”

“Lemme talk to him.”

“Hey, Phil,” said Kramer. “Bernie Fitzgibbon wants to talk to you.”

While Bernie Fitzgibbon talked to Phil Eisenberg on the telephone, Kramer went around the other side of the clerk’s table to gather up his papers on the Terzio brothers. He couldn’t believe it. The poor widow Lamb, the woman even Martin and Goldberg had such pity for—she turns out to be a snake! Where was a newspaper? He was dying to get his hands on it. He found himself near the court stenographer, or court reporter, as the breed was actually called, the tall Irishman, Sullivan. Sullivan had stood up from his stenotype machine, just below the brow of the judge’s bench, and was stretching. Sullivan was a good-looking, thatchy-haired man in his early forties, famous, or notorious, on Gibraltar for his dapper dress. At the moment he was wearing a tweed jacket that was so soft and luxurious, so full of heather glints from the Highlands, Kramer knew he couldn’t have afforded it in a million years. From behind Kramer came an old courthouse regular named Joe Hyman, the supervisor of court reporters. He walked up to Sullivan and said, “There’s a murder coming into this part. It’ll go daily. How about it?”

Sullivan said, “What? C’mon, Joe. I just got through a murder. Whadda I want wit’ another murder? I’ll have to wagon-train. I got theater tickets. Cost me thirty-five dollars apiece.”

Hyman said, “Awright, awright. What about the rape? There’s a rape that’s gotta be covered.”

“Well, shit, Joe,” said Sullivan, “a rape—that’s a wagon-train, too. Why me? Why do I always have to be the one? Sheila Polsky hasn’t stayed with a jury for months. What about her?”

“She has a bad back. She can’t sit that long.”

“A bad back?” said Sullivan. “She’s twenty-eight years old, f’r Chrissake. She’s a goldbrick. That’s all ’at’sa matter wit’ her.”

“All the same—”

“Look, we gotta have a meeting. I’m tired of always being the one. We gotta talk about the assignments. We gotta confront the goof-offs.”

“Awright,” said Hyman. “I’ll tell you what. You take the rape and I’ll put you in a half-a-day calendar part next week. Okay?”

“I don’t know,” said Sullivan. He wrapped his eyebrows around his nose, as if facing one of the agonizing decisions of a lifetime. “You think there’ll be daily copy on the rape?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Daily copy. Now Kramer knew why he resented Sullivan and his fancy clothes. After fourteen years as a court reporter, Sullivan had achieved the civil-service ceiling of $51,000 a year—$14,500 more than Kramer made—and that was just the base. On top of that, the court reporters sold the transcripts page by page, at a minimum of $4.50 a page. “Daily copy” meant that each defense lawyer and the assistant D.A., plus the court, meaning the judge, wanted transcripts of each day’s proceedings, a rush order that entitled Sullivan to a premium of $6 or more. If there were “multiple defendants”—and in rape cases there often were—it might go up to $14 or $15 a page. The word was that last year, in a murder trial involving a gang of Albanian drug dealers, Sullivan and another reporter had split $30,000 for two and a half weeks’ work. It was nothing for these characters to make $75,000 a year, $10,000 more than the judge and twice as much as himself. A court reporter! An automaton at the stenotype machine! He who can’t even open his mouth in a courtroom except to ask the judge to have someone repeat a word or a sentence!

And here was himself, Larry Kramer, a graduate of Columbia Law, an assistant D.A.—wondering if he was really going to be able to afford to take a girl with brown lipstick to a restaurant on the Upper East Side!

“Hey, Kramer.” It was Eisenberg, the clerk, lifting the telephone toward him.

“Yeah, Bernie?”

“I straightened it out with Eisenberg, Larry. He’s gonna put the Terzio brothers at the bottom of the calendar. Come on down here. We gotta get something going on this fucking Lamb case.”

 

“The way the Yanks build their council flats, the lifts stop only on every other floor,” said Fallow, “and they smell like piss. The lifts, I mean. As soon as one enters—great fluffy fumes of human piss.”

“Why every other floor?” asked Sir Gerald Steiner, devouring this tale of the lower depths. His managing editor, Brian Highridge, stood beside him, similarly rapt. In the corner of the cubicle Fallow’s dirty raincoat still hung on the plastic coatrack, and the canteen of vodka was still cached in the slash pocket. But he had the attention, praise, and exhilaration to deal with this morning’s hangover.

“To save money in the construction, I should imagine,” he said. “Or to remind the poor devils they’re on the dole. It’s all well and good for the ones who have flats on the floor where the lift stops, but the other half have to take it to the floor above and walk down. In a council flat in the Bronx it seems that’s a hazardous arrangement. The boy’s mother, this Mrs. Lamb, told me she lost half her furniture when she moved in.” The recollection brought a smile to Fallow’s lips, the sort of wry smile that says that this is a sad story and yet one has to admit it’s funny. “She brought the furniture up on the lift to the floor above their flat. They had to carry each piece down the stairs, and each time they returned to the floor above, something would be missing. It’s a custom! When new people move into an off-floor, the natives nip their belongings from beside the lift!”

The Dead Mouse and Highridge tried to choke back their laughter, since after all it was a lot of unfortunate poor people they were talking about. The Dead Mouse sat down on the edge of Fallow’s desk, which indicated that he was pleased enough with all this to settle in for a moment. Fallow’s soul expanded. What he saw before him was no longer…the Dead Mouse…but Sir Gerald Steiner, the enlightened baron of British publishing who had summoned him to the New World.

“Apparently it’s worth your life just to go down the stairs at all,” he continued. “Mrs. Lamb told me I shouldn’t use them under any circumstances.”

“Why not?” asked Steiner.

“It seems the staircases are the back streets of the council flats, so to speak. The flats are stacked up in these great towers, you see, and the towers are set this way and that”—he motioned with his hands to indicate the irregular arrangement—“in what are intended to be parks. Of course not a blade of grass survives, but in any case there are no streets or alleys or byways or pubs or whatever between the buildings, just these open blasted heaths. There’s no place for the natives to sin. So they use the landings of the stairways. They do…everything…on the landings of the stairways.”

The wide eyes of Sir Gerald and his managing editor were too much for Fallow. They sent a surge of poetic license up his brain stem.

“I must confess, I couldn’t resist a look. So I decided to retrace the route Mrs. Lamb and her son had taken when they first moved into the Edgar Allan Poe Towers.”

In fact, after the warning, Fallow hadn’t dared go near the stairway. But now lies, graphic lies, bubbled up into his brain at an intoxicating rate. In his intrepid trip down the stairs he encountered every sort of vice: fornication, crack smoking, heroin injection, dice games and three-card monte, and more fornication.

Steiner and Highridge stared, agape and bug-eyed.

“Are you serious?” said Highridge. “What did they do when they saw you?”

“Nothing but slog away. In their sublime state, what was a mere passing journalist?”

“It’s bloody Hogarth,” said Steiner. “Gin Lane. Except that it’s vertical.”

Fallow and Highridge both laughed with enthusiastic appreciation of this comparison.

“The Vertical Gin Lane,” said Highridge. “You know, Jerry, that wouldn’t make a bad two-part series. Life-in-a-subsidized-slum sort of thing.”

“Hogarth Up and Down,” said Steiner, wallowing a bit in his new role as phrasemaker. “Or will the Americans have the faintest familiarity with Hogarth and Gin Lane?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s any great problem,” said Highridge. “You remember our story on the Bluebeard of Howard Beach. I’m sure they didn’t have a ghost of an idea who Bluebeard was, but it can be explained in a paragraph, and then they’re pleased about what they’ve just learned. And Peter here can be our Hogarth.”

Fallow felt a slight stirring of alarm.

“On second thought,” said Steiner, “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

Fallow felt greatly relieved.

“Why not, Jerry?” asked Highridge. “I think you’ve really hit on something.”

“Oh, I think it’s intrinsically an important story. But, you know, they’re very sensitive about this sort of thing. If we did a story about life in the white council flats, that would be all right, but I don’t think there are any white council flats in New York. This is a very delicate area and one that’s causing me some concern just now. We’re already getting some rumblings from these organizations, accusing The City Light of being anti-minority, to use their term. Now, it’s all right to be a white newspaper—what could be more pure white than the Times?—but it’s quite another thing to pick up that reputation. That makes a great many influential people uneasy, including, I might say, advertisers. I received a dreadful letter the other day from some outfit calling itself the Third World Anti-Defamation League.” He dragged out the term Anti-Defamation as if it were the most ludicrous concoction imaginable. “What was that all about, Brian?”

“The Laughing Vandals,” said Highridge. “We had a picture on page one last week of three black boys in a police station, laughing. They’d been arrested for destroying the physical-therapy facilities in a school for handicapped children. Sprayed petrol and lit matches. Lovely fellows. The police said they were laughing about it after they brought them in, and so I sent one of our photographers, Silverstein—he’s an American—brazen little man—to go get a picture of them laughing.” He shrugged, as if it had been a routine journalistic decision.

“The police were very cooperative. They brought them out of the lockup, out by the front desk, so our man could get a picture of them laughing, but when they saw Silverstein with his camera, they wouldn’t laugh. So Silverstein told them a smutty joke. A smutty joke!” Highridge began laughing before he could finish. “It was about a Jewish woman who goes on a safari to Africa, and she’s kidnapped by a gorilla, and he takes her up in a tree and rapes her, and he keeps her there for a month, raping her day and night, and finally she escapes, and she makes her way back to the United States, and she’s relating all this to another woman, her best friend, and she breaks into tears. And the friend says, ‘There, there, there, you’re all right now.’ And the woman says, ‘That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know how I feel. He doesn’t write…he doesn’t call…’ And the three boys start laughing, probably out of embarrassment at this terrible joke, and Silverstein takes their picture, and we ran it. ‘The Laughing Vandals.’ ”

Steiner exploded. “Oh, that’s rich! I shouldn’t laugh. Oh my God! What did you say the chap’s name was? Silverstein?”

“Silverstein,” said Highridge. “You can’t miss him. Always goes about with cuts on his face. He puts scraps of toilet paper on the cuts to stop the bleeding. Always has toilet paper stuck to his face.”

“Cuts? What sort of cuts?”

“From a razor. Seems his father left him his straight razor when he died. He insists on using it. Can’t get the hang of it. Cuts himself to pieces every day. Fortunately, he can take pictures.”

Steiner was breathless with mirth. “The Yanks! Dear God, I love them! Tells them a joke. Dear God, dear God…I do like a fellow with sand. Make a note of this, Brian. Give him a rise in pay. Twenty-five dollars a week. But for God’s sake, don’t tell him or anyone else what for. Tells them a joke! Raped by a gorilla!”

Steiner’s love of yellow journalism, his awe of the “sand” that gave journalists the courage to try such stunts, was so genuine, Fallow and Highridge couldn’t help but laugh along with him. Steiner’s little face was far from that of a Dead Mouse at this moment. The outrageous zest of this American photographer, Silverstein, lent him life, even radiance.

“All the same,” said Steiner, sobering up, “we’ve got this problem.”

“I think we were perfectly justified,” said Highridge. “The police assured us they had been laughing about it. It was their lawyer, one of these Legal Aid people, I think they call them, who made a fuss, and he probably got hold of this Anti-Defamation whatever-it-is.”

“The facts aren’t what matters, unfortunately,” Steiner said. “We have to alter some perceptions, and I think this hit-and-run case is a good place to start. Let’s see what we can do for this family, these poor Lamb people. They already seem to have some support. This man Bacon.”

“The poor Lambs,” said Brian Highridge. “Yes.” Steiner looked puzzled; his turn of phrase had been inadvertent.

“Now, let me ask you, Peter,” said Steiner, “does the mother, this Mrs. Lamb, strike you as a credible person?”

“Oh yes,” said Fallow. “She makes a good appearance, she’s well-spoken, very sincere. She has a job, she seems very neat in her habits—I mean, these council flats are squalid little places, but hers is very orderly…pictures on the walls…sofa-with-end-tables sort of thing…even a little-table-inside-the-front-door sort of thing.”

“And the boy—he’s not going to blow up in our faces, is he? I believe he’s some sort of honor student?”

“By the standards of his school. I’m not sure how he would fare at Holland Park Comprehensive.” Fallow smiled. This was a school in London. “He’s never been in trouble with the police. That’s so unusual in these council flats, they talk about it as if one’s bound to be impressed by this remarkable fact.”

“What do the neighbors say about him?”

“Oh…that he’s a pleasant…well-behaved sort of boy,” said Fallow. In fact, Fallow had gone straight to Annie Lamb’s apartment with Albert Vogel and one of Reverend Bacon’s people, a tall man with a gold ring in one ear, and had interviewed Annie Lamb and departed. But by now his status as an intrepid explorer of the lower depths, Bronx version, was so exalted in the eyes of his noble employer, he didn’t care to back off just yet.

“Very well,” said Steiner. “What do we have as a follow-up?”

“Reverend Bacon—that’s what everybody calls him, Reverend Bacon—Reverend Bacon is organizing a large demonstration for tomorrow. It’s to protest—”

Just then Fallow’s telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“Ayyyy, Pete!” It was the unmistakable voice of Albert Vogel. “Things are poppin’. Some kid just called Bacon, some kid down at the Motor Vehicle Bureau.” Fallow began making notes. “This kid, he read your story, and he took it upon himself to get on the computer down there, and he claims he’s got it narrowed down to 124 cars.”

“A hundred and twenty-four? Can the police handle that?”

“Nothing to it—if they want to. They can check ’em out in a few days, if they want to put the men on it.”

“Who is this…fellow?” Fallow detested the American habit of using the word kid, which properly referred only to goats, to mean “young person.”

“Just some kid who works there, some kid who figures the Lambs are getting the usual raw deal. I told you that’s what I like about Bacon. He galvanizes people who want to challenge the power structure.”

“How do I get in touch with this…fellow?”

Vogel gave him all the details, then said: “Now, Pete, listen to me a second. Bacon just read your story and he liked it very much. Every newspaper and TV station in town has been calling him, but he’s saving this Motor Vehicle Bureau angle for you. It’s yours, exclusive. Okay? But you gotta push it. You gotta run with the goddamned ball. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand.”

After he hung up, Fallow smiled at Steiner and Highridge, who were all eyes, nodded knowingly, and said: “Yesssss…I think we’re rolling. That was a tipster at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, where they keep records of all the license plates.”

 

It was just the way he had dreamed it would be. It was precisely that way, it made him want to hold his breath for fear something would break the spell. She was looking into his eyes from just a tiny table’s width away. She was absorbed in his words, drawn into his magnetic field, so far into it that he had the urge to slide his hands across the table and slip his fingertips under hers—already!—just twenty minutes after he’s met her—such electricity! But he mustn’t rush it, mustn’t destroy the exquisite poise of this moment.

In the background were the exposed brick, the mellow highlights of the brass, the pubby carved cataracts of the etched glass, the aerobic voices of the young and swell. In the foreground, her great mane of dark hair, the Berkshire autumn glow of her cheeks—in point of fact, he realized, even in the midst of the magic, the autumnal glow was probably makeup. Certainly the mauve-and-purple rainbows on her upper eyelids and occipital orbits were makeup—but such was the nature of contemporary perfection. From her lips, swollen with desire, glistening with brown lipstick, came the words:

“But you were so close to him and practically yelling at him, and he was giving you such murderous looks—I mean, weren’t you afraid he was just going to jump up and—I don’t know—I mean, he did not look like a nice person!”

“Ayyyyyyyyy,” said Kramer, dismissing mortal danger with a shrug of his shoulders and a distention of his mighty sternocleidomastoid muscles. “These characters are 90 percent show, although it’s a good idea to keep your eye out for the other 10 percent. Hah hah, yes. The main thing was, somehow I had to bring out Herbert’s violent side, so everybody could see it. His lawyer, Al Teskowitz—well, I don’t have to tell you, he’s not the greatest orator in the world, but that don’t—doesn’t”—it was time to shift gears in the third person singular—”necessarily make any difference in a criminal trial. Criminal law is a thing unto itself, because the stakes are not money but human life and human freedom, and I tell you, that sets off a lot of crazy emotions. Teskowitz, believe it or not, can be a genius at messing up the minds—manipulating a jury. He looks so woebegone himself—and it’s calculated—oh, sure. He knows how to work up pity for a client. Half of it is—what’s the term?—body language, I guess you’d call it. Maybe just ham acting is what it is, but he knows how to do that one thing very well, and I couldn’t let this idea that Herbert is a nice family man—a family man!—just hang there in the air like some kind of pretty balloon, you know. So what I figured was—”

The words were just gushing out, in torrents, all the marvelous things about his bravery and talent for the fray that he had no one to tell about. He couldn’t go on like this to Jimmy Caughey or Ray Andriutti or, any longer, to his wife, whose threshold for crime highs was by now a stone wall. But Miss Shelly Thomas—I must keep you high! She drank it all in. Those eyes! Those glistening brown lips! Her thirst for his words was bottomless, which was a good thing, because she wasn’t drinking anything but designer water. Kramer had a glass of house white wine and was trying to keep from gulping it, because he could already tell this place was not as inexpensive as he had thought. Christ! His goddamned mind was double-tracking a mile a minute! It was like a two-track tape. On one track he was gushing out this speech about how he handled the trial—

“—out of the corner of my eye I could see he was about to snap. The string was pulled tight! I didn’t even know if I’d make it to the end of my summation, but I was willing—”

—and on the second track he was thinking about her, the bill (and they hadn’t even ordered dinner yet), and where he could possibly take her (if!), and the crowd here at Muldowny’s. Jesus! Wasn’t that John Rector, the anchorman of Channel 9 news, over there at that table up near the front, by the exposed-brick wall? But no! He wouldn’t point that out. Only space for one celebrity here—himself—victor over the violent Herbert 92X and the clever Al Teskowitz. A young crowd, a swell-looking crowd in here—the place was packed—perfect—couldn’t be better. Shelly Thomas had turned out to be Greek. Bit of a disappointment. He had wanted—didn’t know what. Thomas was her stepfather’s name; he manufactured plastic containers in Long Island City. Her own father was named Choudras. She lived in Riverdale with her stepfather and her mother, worked for Prischker & Bolka, couldn’t afford an apartment in Manhattan, wanted one badly—no longer could you find “some little place in Manhattan” (didn’t have to tell him)—

“—thing is, juries in the Bronx are very unpredictable. I could tell you what happened to one of the fellows in my office in court this morning!—but you probably noticed what I’m talking about. I mean, you get people who come into the jury box with their minds—how should I say it?—set in a certain way. There’s a lot of Us versus Them, Them being the police and prosecutors—but you probably picked up some of that.”

“No, actually I didn’t. Everybody was very sensible, and they seemed to want to do the right thing. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised.”

Does she think I’m prejudiced? “No, I don’t mean—there are plenty of good people in the Bronx, it’s just that some people have a chip on their shoulder, and some very weird things happen.” Let’s move off this terrain. “As long as we’re being candid, do you mind if I tell you something? I was worried about you as a juror.”

“Me!” She smiled and seemed to blush clear through the makeup glow, tickled pink to have been a factor in strategic thinking in Supreme Court, the Bronx.

“Yes! It’s the truth! You see, in a criminal trial you learn to look at things from a different perspective. It may be a warped perspective, but it’s the nature of the beast. In a case like this one—you’re—well, you added up as too bright, too well educated, too removed from the world of a character like Herbert 92X, and therefore—and this is the irony of it—too capable of understanding his problems, and like the French say, ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’ ”

“Well, actually—”

“I’m not saying that’s fair or accurate, but that’s the way you learn to look at things in these cases. Not you—but someone like you—can be too sensitive.”

“But you didn’t challenge me. Is that the term?”

“Yeah. No, I didn’t. Well, for one thing, I don’t think it’s right to challenge a juror just because he’s—she’s intelligent and well educated. I mean, I’m sure you noticed there was nobody else from Riverdale on your jury. There wasn’t even anybody else from Riverdale on your panel during the voir dire. Everybody is always moaning over the fact that we don’t get more educated jurors in the Bronx, and then when we get one—well, it’s almost like wasting a resource or something to challenge one just because you think she might be sensitive. Besides…” Did he dare try it? He dared. “…I just…to be honest about it…I just wanted you on that jury.”

He looked as deeply into those big mauve-rainbow eyes as he could and put as honest and open a look on his face as he knew how and lifted his chin, so she could see the fullness of his sternocleidomastoids.

She lowered her eyes and blushed clear through autumn in the Berkshires again. Then she raised her eyes and looked deeply into his.

“I did sort of notice you looking at me a lot.”

Me ’n’ every other regular in the courtroom!—but it wouldn’t do to let her know about that.

“You did? I was hoping it wasn’t that obvious! God, I hope other people didn’t notice it.”

“Hah hah! I think they did. You know the lady who was sitting next to me, the black lady? She was a very nice person. She works for a gynecologist, and she’s very sweet, very intelligent. I asked her for her telephone number, and I told her I’d call her. Anyway, you want to know what she said to me?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘I think that district attorney kind of likes you, Shelly.’ She called me Shelly. We hit it off very well. ‘He can’t take his eyes off you.’ ”

“She said that?” He broke into a smile.

“Yes!”

“Did she resent it? I mean, oh my God. I didn’t think it was that obvious!”

“No, she thought it was cute. Women like things like that.”

“It was that obvious, hunh?”

“It was to her!”

Kramer shook his head, as if in embarrassment, all the while pouring his eyes into hers, and she was pouring hers right back into his. They had already jumped over the moat, and rather effortlessly, too. He knew—he knew!—he could slide his hands across the table and take her fingertips in his, and she would let him, and it would all happen without their eyes leaving one another’s, but he held back. It was too perfect and going too well to take the slightest risk.

He kept shaking his head and smiling…ever more significantly…In fact, he was embarrassed, although not over the fact that others had noticed how possessed with her he had been in the courtroom. Where to go—that was what he was embarrassed about. She didn’t have an apartment, and of course there was no way in God’s world he could take her to his ant colony. A hotel?—far too gross, and besides, how the hell could he afford it? Even a second-rate hotel was almost a hundred dollars a room. God only knew what this meal was going to cost. The menu had an artless hand-lettered look that set off an alarm in Kramer’s central nervous system: money. Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.

Just then the waitress returned. “Have you had a chance to decide?”

She was a perfect confection, too. Young, blond, curly-haired, brilliant blue eyes, the perfect aspiring-actress type, with dimples and a smile that said: “Well! I can see that you two have decided something!” Or did it say, “I’m young, pretty, and charming, and I expect a big tip when you pay your big bill”?

Kramer looked into her twinkling face, and then he looked into Miss Shelly Thomas’s. He was consumed by feelings of lust and poverty.

“Well, Shelly,” he said, “you know what you’d like?”

It was the first time he had called her by her first name.

 

Sherman sat on the edge of one of the bentwood chairs. He was leaning forward with his hands clasped between his knees and his head down. The noxious, incriminating copy of The City Light lay on top of the oak pedestal table like something radioactive. Maria sat in the other chair, more composed but not exactly her old insouciant self, either.

“I knew it,” said Sherman, without looking at her, “I knew it at the time. We should have reported it immediately. I can’t believe I’m—I can’t believe we’re in this situation.”

“Well, it’s too late now, Sherman. That’s spilt milk.”

He sat up straight and looked at her. “Maybe it’s not too late. What you say is, you say you didn’t know until you read this newspaper that you’d hit anyone.”

“Oh, sure,” said Maria. “Then how do I say it happened, this thing I didn’t even know happened in the first place?”

“Just…tell what actually happened.”

“That’ll sound wonderful. Two boys stopped us and tried to rob us, but you threw a tire at one of them, and I drove outta there like a…a…hot-rodder, but I didn’t know I hit anybody.”

“Well, that’s exactly what happened, Maria.”

“And who’s gonna believe it? You read that story. They’re calling that boy some kinda honor student, some kinda saint. They don’t say anything about the other one. They don’t even say anything about a ramp. They’re talking about a little saint who went to get food for his family.”

The terrible possibility flared up once more. What if the two boys were only trying to help?

There sat Maria in a turtleneck jersey that brought out her perfect breasts even at this moment. She wore a short checked skirt, and her glistening legs were crossed, and one of her pair of pumps dangled off the tip of her foot.

Beyond her was the make-do bed, and above the bed there was now a second small oil painting, of a nude woman holding a small animal. The brushwork was so atrociously crude, he couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was. It could be a rat as easily as a dog. His misery made his eye hang on it for a moment.

“You noticed it,” said Maria, attempting a smile. “You’re getting better. Filippo gave it to me.”

“Terrific.” The question of why some greaseball artist might feel so generous toward Maria no longer interested Sherman in the slightest. The world had shrunk. “So what do you think we ought to do?”

“I think we ought to take ten deep breaths and relax. That’s what I think.”

“And then what?”

“And then maybe nothing.” ’N thin mibby nuthun. “Sherman, if we tell ’em the truth, they’re gonna kill us. You understand that? They’re gonna cut us up in little pieces. Right now they don’t know whose car it was, they don’t know who was driving, they don’t have any witnesses, and the boy himself is in a coma and it doesn’t look like he’s…he’s ever gonna come to.”

`You`` were driving, thought Sherman. Don’t forget that part. It reassured him to hear her say it. Then a jolt of fear: suppose she denied it and said he was driving? But the other boy knew, wherever he might be.

All he said, however, was: “What about the other boy? Suppose he shows up.”

“If he was gonna show up, he woulda showed up by now. He’s not gonna show up, because he’s a criminal.”

Sherman leaned forward and put his head down again. He found himself staring at the shiny tops of his New & Lingwood half-brogues. The colossal vanity of his bench-made English shoes sickened him. What availeth a man…He couldn’t remember the quotation. He could see the pitiful brown moon on the crown of Felix’s skull…Knoxville…Why hadn’t he moved to Knoxville long ago?…a simple Georgian house with a screen porch at one end…

“I don’t know, Maria,” he said, without looking up. “I don’t think we can outguess them. I think maybe we ought to get in touch with a lawyer”—two lawyers, said a small voice in the back of his skull, since I don’t know this woman and we may not be on the same side forever—“and…come forward with what we know.”

“And stick our heads in the tiger’s mouth is what you mean.” ’N stick uh bids in thuh tiguh’s mouth. Maria’s Southernism was beginning to get on Sherman’s nerves. “I’m the one who was driving the car, Sherman, and so I think it’s up to me to decide.”

I’m the one who was driving the car! She had said it herself. His spirits lifted a bit. “I’m not trying to talk you into anything,” he said. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

Maria’s expression grew softer. She smiled at him in a warm, almost motherly fashion. “Sherman, let me tell you something. There’s two kinds a jungles. Wall Street is a jungle. You’ve heard that, haven’t you? You know how to handle yourself in that jungle.” The Southern breeze was blowing past his ears—but it was true, wasn’t it? His spirits rose a bit more. “And then there’s the other jungle. That’s the one we got lost in the other night, in the Bronx. And you fought, Sherman! You were wonderful!” He had to resist congratulating himself with a smile. “But you don’t live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what’s in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side. You don’t know what that’s like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren’t any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family’s. Well, I didn’t grow up that way. We were always staggering back and forth across the line, like a buncha drunks, and so I know and it doesn’t frighten me. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everybody’s an animal—the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody.”

She continued to smile warmly at him, like a mother who has let a child in on a great truth. He wondered if she really knew what she was talking about or whether she was just indulging in a little sentimental reverse snobbery.

“So what are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m saying I think you ought to trust my instincts.”

Just then there was a knock on the door.

“Who’s that?” said Sherman, going on red alert.

“Don’t worry,” said Maria. “It’s Germaine. I told her you’d be here.” She got up to go to the door.

“You didn’t tell her what happened…”

“Of course not.”

She opened the door. But it wasn’t Germaine. It was a gigantic man in an outlandish black outfit. He came walking in as if he owned the place, took a quick look around the room, at Sherman, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and then at Maria.

“You Germaine Boll”—he was gasping for breath, apparently because he had just walked up the stairs—“or Bowl?”

Maria was speechless. So was Sherman. The giant was young, white, with a big crinkly black beard, a huge apoplectic-red face glistening with perspiration, a black homburg with an absolutely flat brim, a too-small black homburg perched way up on his huge head like a toy, a rumpled white shirt buttoned at the throat, but no tie, and a shiny black double-breasted suit with the right side of the jacket overlapping the left, the way a woman’s jacket is usually made. A Hasidic Jew. Sherman had often seen Hasidic Jews in the Diamond District, which was on Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, but he had never seen one so enormous. He was probably six feet five, well over 250 pounds, grossly fat but powerfully built, bulging out of his liverish skin like a length of bratwurst. He took off his homburg. His hair was pasted down on his skull with perspiration. He hit the side of his great head with the heel of his hand, as if he were tamping it back into shape. Then he put his hat back on his head. It was perched up so high, it looked as if it might fall off at any moment. Perspiration rolled down the giant’s forehead.

“Germaine Boll? Bowl? Bull?”

“No, I’m not,” said Maria. She had recovered. She was testy, already on the attack. “She’s not here. What do you want?”

“You live here?” For such a big man, he had an oddly high-pitched voice.

“Miss Boll isn’t here now,” said Maria, ignoring the question.

“You live here or she live here?”

“Look, we’re kinda busy.” Exaggerated patience. “Why don’t you try later?” Challengingly: “How’d you get in this building?”

The giant reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and pulled out an enormous ring of keys. There appeared to be scores of them. He ran a great fat forefinger around the ruff of keys and stopped at one of them and delicately lifted it with his forefinger and thumb.

“With this. Winter Real Estate.” Wid dis. Wint-tuh Reelastate. He had a slightly Yiddish accent.

“Well, you’ll have to come back later and talk to Miss Boll.”

The giant didn’t budge. He looked around the apartment again. “You don’t live here?”

“Now, listen—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. We gonna paint in here.” With that the giant stretched both his arms out, like wings, as if he were about to do a swan dive, and walked over to a wall and faced it. Then he pressed his left hand against the wall and sidled over and lifted his left hand and pressed his right hand down on that spot and shuffled over to his left until he was spread out in the swan-dive position again.

Maria looked at Sherman. He knew he was going to have to do something, but he couldn’t imagine what. He walked over to the giant. In as frosty and commanding a tone as he could create, just as the Lion of Dunning Sponget would have done it, he said: “Just a minute. What are you doing?”

“Measuring,” said the giant, still doing his swan-dive shuffle around the wall. “Got to paint in here.”

“Well, I’m very sorry, but we don’t have time for that now. You’ll have to make your arrangements some other time.”

The enormous young man turned around slowly and put his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, so that he looked puffed up to about five hundred pounds. On his face was the look of someone forced to deal with a pest. Sherman had the sinking feeling that this monster was used to such confrontations and, in fact, relished them. But the male battle was now on.

“You live here?” asked the giant.

“I said we don’t have time for this,” said Sherman, trying to maintain the Lion’s tone of cool command. “Now, be a good fellow and leave and come back and do your painting some other time.”

“You live here?”

“In point of fact, I don’t live here, but I’m a guest here, and I don’t—”

“You don’t live here and she don’t live here. What you doing here?”

“That’s not your concern!” said Sherman, unable to control his anger but feeling more helpless by the second. He pointed toward the door. “Now, be a good fellow and leave!”

“You don’t belong here. Okay? We got a real problem.” We gottuh reel problem. “We gottuh wrong people living in this building. This a rent-control building, and the people, they turn around”—tuhn arount—“and they rent the apartments to other people for a thousand, two thousand dollars a month. The rent in this apartment here, it’s only $331 a month. See? Germaine Boll—but we never see huh here. How much you pay huh?”

Such insolence! The male battle! What could he do? In most situations Sherman felt like a big man, physically. Next to this outlandish creature…He couldn’t possibly touch him. He couldn’t intimidate him. The Lion’s cool commands had no effect. And beneath it all the very foundations were rotten. He was at a complete moral disadvantage. He didn’t belong here—and he had everything in the world to hide. And what if this incredible monster was not actually from the Winter Real Estate Company? Suppose—

Fortunately Maria intervened. “It so happens Miss Boll’s gonna be here very shortly. In the meantime—”

“Okay! Good! I wait fuh huh.”

The giant began walking across the room like a rocking druid. He stopped at the oak pedestal table, and with glorious casualness, he lowered his tremendous heft into one of the bentwood chairs.

“All right!” said Maria. “That’s about enough!”

The giant’s response to that was to fold his arms and close his eyes and lean back, as if to settle in for the duration. In that instant Sherman realized he would truly have to do something, no matter what, or else be stripped of all manhood. The male battle! He started to step forward.

Craaaacccckkkk! All at once the monster was on the floor, on his back, and the stiff brim of his homburg was cartwheeling crazily along the rug. One leg of the chair was cracked almost in two, near the seat, with the light wood underneath the exterior stain showing. The chair had collapsed under his weight.

Maria was screaming. “Now look what you’ve done, you peckerwood! You brood sow! You tub a lard!”

With much huffing and puffing, the giant righted himself and began hoisting himself to his feet. His insolent pose was shattered. He was red in the face, and the perspiration was pouring down again. He leaned over to pick up his hat and almost lost his balance.

Maria continued on the attack. She pointed at the remains of the chair. “I hope you realize you’re gonna have to pay for that!”

“Whaddaya whaddaya,” said the giant. “It don’t belong to you!” But he was retreating. Maria’s reproaches and his own embarrassment were too much for him.

“That’s gonna cost you five hundred dollars and a—and a lawsuit!” said Maria. “That’s breaking and entering and entering and breaking!”

The giant paused by the door and glowered, but it was all too much for him. He went rocking out the door in great disarray.

As soon as she heard him clumping down the stairs, Maria closed the door and locked it. She turned around and looked at Sherman and gave a great whoop of laughter.

“Did…you…see…him…on…the…floor!” She was laughing so hard, she could scarcely get the words out.

Sherman stared at her. It was true—she was right. They were different animals. Maria had the stomach for…for whatever was happening to them. She fought—with relish! Life was a fight on the line she was talking about—and so what? He wanted to laugh. He wanted to share her animal joy in the ludicrous scene they had just witnessed. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even manage a smile. He felt as if the very insulation of his position in the world was unraveling. These…unbelievable people…could now walk into his life.

“Craaaaassssssh!” said Maria, weeping with laughter. “Oh God, I wish I had a videotape a that!” Then she caught the look on Sherman’s face. “What’s the matter?”

“What do you think that was all about?”

“What do you mean, ‘all about’?”

“What do you think he was doing here?”

“The landlord sent him. You remember that letter I showed you.”

“But isn’t it kind of odd that—”

“Germaine pays only $331 a month, and I pay her $750. It’s rent-controlled. They’d love to get her out of here.”

“It doesn’t strike you as odd that they’d decide to barge in here—right now?”

“Right now?”

“Well, maybe I’m crazy, but today—after this thing is in the paper?”

“In the paper?” Then it dawned on her what he was saying, and she broke into a smile. “Sherman, you are crazy. You’re paranoid. You know that?”

“Maybe I am. It just seems like a very odd coincidence.”

“Who do you think sent him in here, if the landlord didn’t? The police?”

“Well…” Realizing it did sound rather paranoid, he smiled faintly.

“The police are gonna send a colossal great Hasidic piece-a-blubber moron lunatic to spy on you?”

Sherman hung his mighty Yale chin down over his collarbone. “You’re right.”

Maria walked over and lifted his chin with her forefinger and looked into his eyes and smiled the most loving smile he had ever seen.

“Sherman.” Shuhmun. “The entire world isn’t standing still thinking about you. The entire world isn’t out to get you. Only I am.”

She took his face in both hands and kissed him. They ended up on the bed, but this time it took some doing on his part. It wasn’t the same when you were scared half to death.