“That’s true,” she said, warming to him, wanting to agree with him.

Suddenly shy, he smiled hesitantly, half turning away from her, and said, “We’ve talked all this time, and we haven’t even been introduced. My name’s Wally Knurr.”

Why she said what she did Myrtle could never afterward understand. Maybe it was that the name had been so pervasively in her mind recently. Maybe it was because at long last she wanted there to be someone in the world who didn’t think of her as Myrtle Street of Myrtle Street. Maybe it was simply that this was the first time she’d introduced herself to someone new since she’d learned the true identity of her father. Whatever the reason, what Myrtle said, putting her hand out to be shaken by his soft pudgy fingers, was, “Hello. I’m Myrtle Jimson.”

He beamed happily at her. “Would you like to have lunch with me, Miss Jimson?” he asked.

TWENTY-SIX

The warlord’s daughter!

The purpose of the Princess is to be rescued.

Wally pushed back from the computer, his swivel chair rolling on the scratched floor. His hands trembled as he looked at the machine’s last response. Out of the program. Into real time, real consequence, real challenge. Real life.

Wally took a long slow deep breath. As much as was possible for him to do, he firmed his jaw. Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

TWENTY-SEVEN

At three in the morning, the only action on two-block-long Ganesvoort Street, in the middle of the wholesale meat section of Manhattan, south of Fourteenth Street in the far West Village, is Florent, a good twenty-four-hour-a-day French bistro operating in an old polished-chrome-and-long-counter former diner. The diner’s short end is toward the street, so the counter and tables run straight back under the vivid lights, with hard surfaces that bounce and echo the noise of cheerful conversation. While all around this one building the meat packers and wholesale butchers are closed and silent and dark, the bone trucks all empty and hosed down for the night, and the metal gates closed over the loading docks, the cars and limousines still wait clustered in front of the warm bright lights of the bistro, which seems at all times to be filled with animated talking laughing people who are just delighted to be awake now. Taxis come and go, and among them this evening was one cab containing Dortmunder and Kelp.

“You want the restaurant, right?” the cabby asked, looking at them in his mirror, because what else would they want on Ganesvoort Street at three in the morning?

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

The space in front of Florent was lined with stretch limos, some with their attendant drivers, some empty. The taxi stopped in the middle of the lumpy cobblestone street, and Dortmunder and Kelp paid and got out. They maneuvered between limos to the broken curb, moving toward the restaurant, as the cab jounced away to the corner. When it made its right, so did Dortmunder and Kelp, turning away from the inviting open entrance of the bistro and walking east instead, past all the dark and empty butcher businesses.

Kelp said, “Which one, do you know?”

Dortmunder shook his head. “All she said was, this block.”

“I see it,” Kelp said, looking forward. “Do you?”

“No,” Dortmunder said, frowning, squinting at the empty nighttime view, not liking it that Kelp had gotten the answer first, if in fact he had. “What do you think you see?”

“I think I see,” Kelp answered, “a truck over there on the other side, down a ways, with a guy sitting at the wheel.”

Then Dortmunder saw it, too. “That’s it, all right,” he agreed.

As they started across the street, Kelp said, “Maybe after we talk to Tiny we can go back to that place, grab something to eat. Looked nice in there.”

Dortmunder said, “Eat? Whadaya wanna eat at this hour for?”

“Ask the people in the restaurant,” Kelp suggested. “They’re eating.”

“Maybe they got a different body clock.”

“And maybe I got a different body clock,” Kelp said. “Don’t take things for granted, John.”

Dortmunder shook his head but was spared answering because they’d reached the truck, an anonymous high-sided aluminum box with a battered cab, on the door of which some previous company name had been sloppily obliterated with black spray paint. The driver was a twitchy skinny owlish man who hadn’t shaved for seventy-nine hours, which was not for him a record. He sat nervously, hunched over the wheel of his truck, its engine growling low, like something asleep deep in a cave. He stared straight forward, as though it was the law in this state to keep your eye on the road even when your vehicle was stationary.

Dortmunder approached the driver’s open window and said, “Whadaya say?”

Nothing. No answer. No response. The driver watched nothing move in front of his unmoving truck.

So Dortmunder decided to cut straight to the essence of the situation. “We wanna talk to Tiny,” he said.

The driver blinked, very slowly. His left hand trembled on the steering wheel, while his right hand moved out of sight.

“Wait a second,” Dortmunder said. “We’re friends of—”

The truck lunged forward, suddenly in gear. Dortmunder automatically flinched back as the dirty aluminum side of the truck swept past his nose, about a quarter of an inch away.

Kelp, behind Dortmunder a pace, cried out helpfully, “Hey! Dummy! Whadaya—!” But the truck was gone, rattling away down Ganesvoort Street, reeling past Florent, tumbling to the corner, swaying around to the right, and out of sight. “Well, now, what the hell was that for?” Kelp demanded.

“I think he was a little nervous,” Dortmunder said, and a voice behind them growled, “Where’s my truck?”

They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being. And, just to make the picture complete, this marvel carried over his shoulder half a cow; half a naked cow, without its fur or head.

“Tiny!” Dortmunder said inaccurately. “We’re looking for you!”

“I’m looking for my truck,” said Tiny, for that was indeed the name by which he was known. Tiny Bulcher, the blast furnace that walks like a man.

Dortmunder, a bit abashed, said, “Your driver, uh, Tiny, he’s a very nervous guy.”

Tiny frowned, which made his forehead like a children’s book drawing of the ocean. “You spooked him?”

Kelp said, “Tiny, he was spooked long before we got here. Years before. He never said a word to us.”

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp went on, “We just told him we’re your friends, we’re looking for you, and zip, he’s gone.”

Dortmunder said, “Tiny, I’m sorry if we made trouble.”

“You’re right to be,” Tiny told him. “You called my place, huh? Talked to Josie?”

“That’s right.”

“And she just told you I was down here, huh?”

“Sure.”

Tiny looked discontented with this idea. “Somebody calls that girl on the phone, says, ‘Where’s Tiny,’ and she says, ‘Oh, Tiny’s downtown committing a felony right now.’ ”

“She knows me, Tiny,” Dortmunder pointed out. “You and me met J. C. Taylor together, remember?”

Kelp added, “We been through the wars together, Tiny, us and J.C. Rescued the nun and everything.”

Tiny ignored Kelp, saying to Dortmunder, “Josie knows you, does she?” He was the only one in the known universe to call J. C. Taylor “Josie.” “On the phone, she knows you. Could be a cop calls, says, ‘Hello, J.C., this is John Dortmunder, your pal Tiny committing any felonies at this particular moment?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ says Josie.”