"Four months."

"But that doesn't mean anything," Raphael said. "I mean, Uncle Otto gets all the money. Don't you know the deal?"

"Tell us the deal, Raphael," suggested the sharp-nosed one.

"Uncle Otto is old," Raphael explained. "I mean really, really old. He had to get to Florida before it was too late, but nobody wanted to buy the bar because the neighborhood changed."

"Wait," said the big man, holding up his pinger hand. "You're gonna talk for a week, we need a place to sit down. You got a living room?"

"This is my living room," Raphael told him.

They all swiveled their heads around to study his living room, and he supposed it did look different from most living rooms. Most living rooms had chairs and sofas and things, but he had only this one chair that he was sitting in, that he could swing around to watch the television over there, if he wanted to watch television. Otherwise, the room was mostly electronic equipment on tables, and lots of open storage cabinets around the walls, so that what it mostly looked like was a recording studio. Which, in addition to being his living room, it was.

The gloomy one now said, "We don't have to sit. You say nobody wanted to buy the bar."

"It's too down-something," Raphael said. "The lawyer told me. Market!"

"So," the gloomy one prompted, "the uncle sold it to you.

"Well, I signed for it — the family made me do that — but I pay him a mortgage, which is just about everything the place makes, so I basically ignore it."

The sharp-nosed one said, "Who are those guys in there, running it? Not Rollo, the new ones. Friends of yours?"

"Maybe friends of Mikey's," Raphael said. "I don't know, I only ever saw the place just that one time."

"Maybe," the gloomy one said, "it would help if we knew who this Mikey was."

"I met him when I was on probation," Raphael explained. "He was on probation, too."

The big pinger man said, "What were you on probation for?" as though he couldn't believe it.

"Well, downloading," Raphael said, and gestured at his equipment.

They frowned at him. They were all very blank. Raphael saw the pinger finger twitch, and hurriedly said, "Taking music off the Web. You know, sharing files. Some big German record company came after me, me and a bunch of other people, even some kids, and said we were doing felonies."

The sharp-nosed one said, "You were on probation because you were listening to music? This is a crime?"

"They said so," Raphael said, "so I guess it is."

The gloomy one said, "Was Mikey downloading music, too?"

"No, I don't know what he did," Raphael admitted. "I think maybe he knows some real criminals."

"You mean," the edgy, carrot-haired man said, "people even more dangerous than music bandits."

"Uh huh. I know his father has a bunch of restaurants and bars in New Jersey and Long Island," Raphael explained, "so when my family made me take over the bar so Uncle Otto could go to Florida and die in the warm instead of up here in the cold, I told Mikey about it, and he said he'd take care of everything, he could use the practice for when someday he'd go into his father's business. So I signed a paper that says he's running it, and now I don't have to worry about anything any more."

They all sighed, all four of them. The big man turned to the others and said, "You know what I want to say to this nephew?"

"You want to say good-bye," the gloomy one suggested.

"I do." The big man nodded at Raphael. "Good-bye," he said, and they all left.

Gee, Raphael thought, I wonder what that was all about. I hope Mikey isn't making trouble up there in the city.

Well, what did it matter? The important thing was "Phaze," the piece he was constructing here. This was where he made his money, not some bar, now that he understood you could charge for music on the Net. Put it out there, avant garde fusion, let them sample, but before they download they have to pay, all major credit cards accepted. He had more customers in Japan and Norway than in the United States, but all currencies are good on the Net.

The O.J. Bar Grill. Who cared? That was so yesterday, back when people used to leave their houses.

19

"HOW CAN YOU KNOW nothing?" Tiny demanded, spread over much of the backseat of the Cadillac Conquistadore Kelp had borrowed for this journey to the Middle Earth section of Queens. "That guy didn't know nothing. I never seen anybody know such a total goddamn nothing."

Kelp, in the remaining portion of the seat beside Tiny, sounded a bit strangled as he said, "He was different, I'll give him that."

Stan, at the wheel of this monster machine, frowned out at the low buildings and broken sidewalks and stunted trees of this landscape he maneuvered through, which looked as though it had never received good nutrition in its formative years, and said, "What gets me about him is, he don't react. Four guys walk into his house, Tiny bings him on the head, what does he do? Does he yell, does he call the cops, does he make a run for it, does he tough it out, does he beg for mercy, does he say, 'No, you want Medrick the Meshugah next door'? No. He does nothing."

"He does nothing," Tiny agreed. "And he knows nothing."

They were all silent as they considered Raphael Medrick, who continued to recede uselessly behind them in his rickety little hovel beside the bay. It was probably the first time an automobile of this magnificence had ever driven down that dead-end street — dead-end in more ways than one — but what a waste of time.

It was a nice car, though. Kelp had picked it out, in the staff parking area of an East Side hospital — a very big vehicle to accommodate Tiny, MD plates to accord with Kelp's belief that doctors, living as they did on the cusp between pleasure and pain, could be relied on in their choice of transportation, and a green the color of money for that homey look.

"What I think it is," the diminished Kelp said after a couple of silent blocks, "I think he's one of those artists."

The others considered that idea. With a glance at the rearview mirror, Stan said, "One of what artists?"

"You know," Kelp said, "the artistic kind of artists, unworldly, all he knows is his art."

Stan said, "I thought they wore berets."

"Maybe not in the summer," Kelp suggested.

Tiny said, "I didn't see any pictures."

"I think," Kelp said, "he was doing music art in there. In the earphones and stuff."

"Oh, that crap," Stan said. "Every once in a while, I get in a car, it's tuned to a station like that, I gotta pull over, switch it around. You can't drive to that stuff, believe me."

Until this point, Dortmunder, in the front passenger seat, had been silent, brooding out at the undernourished neighborhood, but now he said, "I'm thinking about the O.J. He's gonna be no help on the O.J."

"None," Kelp agreed.

Tiny said, "Now more than ever, Dortmunder, the O.J. is history."

"Don't say that," Dortmunder asked.

"Raphael Medrick is not gonna be of any use," Tiny told him, "and Mikey and his friends are not gonna change their minds for nostalgia."

"This Mikey," Kelp said, "he's the son of a mob guy, which is even worse than a mob guy. He came up soft, and he thinks he's hard."

"So it's over," Tiny said.

Dortmunder, frowning mightily at the windshield, said, "I don't want it to be over."

Kelp, as he made minor adjustments in his body in a vain attempt to become comfortable back there with Tiny, said, "Then you know what you have to do, John."

Silence.

"John? You wanna give up the O.J.?"

"No."

"Then you know what you gotta do."

More silence. Finally, Dortmunder sighed and nodded at the outside world and said, "I think it looks a lot like this."