“Sure.”

He nodded gravely. He gestured toward my right with a stubby thumb. There were about twenty tables over that way, half of them occupied, and there was an empty bandstand.

“Nice little spot I got here, ain’t it? Brings in a good living, sends the kids to college — all strictly on the up and up, you know?”

I smiled pleasantly.

“No headaches at all. No high-priced entertainment — just a little dance music — steady clientele. So what happens? I get one of these uptown agents dropping in, hocking me, I should have these readings. Me, I donno from nothing — poetry’s out of my line — but be tells me out on the Coast they’re buying it like maybe it’s Equanil. Culture, he tells me.’ Three hundred bucks and I can own a poet for the weekend. A beard the guys got. Big son of a bitch, too, looks like he could wrestle Antonio Rocca better than writing poems. You follow me?”

“Peter J. Peters,” I said.

“Yeah.” He grunted. “So last Friday it goes on. I even bring my wife in, she goes for that sort of thing. First show at eleven, and by nine you can’t get a seat in the joint. Three, maybe four times as many customers as I ever had at one time before.”

“This is bad?”

He set the cigar down carefully on the edge of a glass tray. “Beer,” he said. “They wanted beer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One,” he said. “One to a customer. Sometimes one to a table.” His nostrils quivered slightly. “This is the part where I tend to get upset. You’ll watch me, huh?”

I put my hand on his arm reassuringly.

“Six, maybe seven at a table usually holds four, see? So a waiter goes over. Maybe one guy orders. The other six don’t want nothing. Or maybe they say not yet. The waiter goes back, the six still don’t want. And the first guy doesn’t reorder, he’s still nursing the first one. You ever see a guy nurse one beer for three hours? Regular customers I got can’t get in, and six fully grown people are watching one guy nurse one beer for three hours. Characters talking all kinds of big words when what it adds up to, they can’t hold a job. Intellectuals. There’s even a table I got to replace, they carved things in. ‘Middle class morality is primeval.’ You want to tell me what the hell that means? A hundred and fifty people, and you know what I take in? I got more in the register since six o’clock tonight. Beatniks. The same slobs been hanging around the Village twenty years, this year they got a name. One more goddam poet or Beatnik son of a bitch sticks his nose in that door, I’m gonna—”

I squeezed his wrist. He stopped. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks.”

“You tell it with admirable restraint.”

“It’s a week, it gets easier. What’s your interest anyhow? You look like a man works for a living.”

“One of them owes me money.”

“The Russians should owe it to you, better. God almighty.”

I put some cash on the bar. He pushed it back toward me.

“You’ll remember it, you could come back,” he said. “A customer wears a tie, a customer’s got socks under his shoes — I’m just starting to see he’s worth being nice to.”

He was lost in thought when I went out of there. There was a cast of stolid, painful determination over his face. Like the look of a man learning to live with disgrace in the family.

CHAPTER 11

I tried Fern Hoerner from a booth in a drugstore. I might as well have tried Eisenhower when he was caught up in crisis on the back nine at Burning Tree.

The Chevy was in a lot around the corner. I left it there, walked a block east to Washington Square, then cut through the park toward Thompson Street. It’s still a nice park, one of the last in New York you can pass after dark without having a homicidal sixteen-year-old step on your spine. I didn’t even mind the prim queens in tight jeans mincing along the pathways, although I was happier with the Italians on the tenement stairs on Thompson. Old women in black with seamed faces, and old men who had hopefully named their sons after Garibaldi or Marco Polo or Boccaccio and were content with a cop or two in the family. I went up a flight of chipped slate steps into a building that only a successful bombing could have improved, climbed two more sagging flights inside, then knocked on a door I had knocked on once or twice before.

After a minute the door opened an inch. A pouchy-faced woman with red eyes and hair like an abandoned floor mop gave me the best she would ever have to offer: “Yeah?”

“Oh, I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs. Henshaw. Nice of you to ask. Is Hiram at home, by chance?”

“Job?”

“Not work, no. I’m just that old sleuth, remember?”

“Agh—”

She jerked the door inward as graciously as an animal hater letting the cat in, then clomped off on a pair of wooden shower mules, trailing gin fumes and the hem of a ratty housecoat. “Hiram!” she bellowed. She slammed another door against loud television noise and disappeared.

The man I wanted came out after a minute, pulling on a jacket the color of cranberry sauce. I supposed it went well enough with his maroon and gray checked pants. He smiled at me from behind a pair of glasses as thick as hockey pucks.

“Well, man,” he said, “good to see, good to see. Fearless Fannin, the ideal of all us red-blooded American youth. Welcome to the humble pad, like.”

He was a jazz musician in his forties, roughly the size of a sparrow with stunted growth and about as nearsighted as a bat at noon. He’d gone through Dixieland and Bop and, when he could get work, into a sort of reactionary’s Progressive, and he’d spent more man-hours in Greenwich Village saloons than any relic since Maxwell Bodenheim. He was too old to be a Beatnik, and even the language he spoke was dead at least a dozen years, but he resurrected it with a flavor I liked, mostly unconscious. If Audrey Grant lived in the vicinity he would not only know her address, but also her mascara shade, her garter-belt size, and where she bought her Stopette.

“I thought you’d be out soothing the savage breast,” I told him.

“Oh, man, don’t bring up the subject, huh? That sax of mine is practically atrophied from lack of use. Last I looked there was rust on the reed. I haven’t seen a taxable dollar since Morgenthau stopped signing them.”

He gripped my hand, then went across to a piano bench against a smeared wall. There wasn’t any piano, but that would not mean anything in there. Everything else in the room had come in on the tide after the Lusitania went down.

I’ve got a small fin not going anywhere, Hiram. A girl named—”

“Man, man!” He gestured excitedly, putting a finger to his lips. He cocked an ear toward the back of the apartment. “Like, shhh—”

I grinned, waiting. Finally he nodded. “Pianissimo on the do-re-me, huh? That witch could hear a dime drop in a deep well. A fin for a chick named—?”

“Audrey Grant. You know where she sleeps?”

He chuckled. “You phrase that question ambiguously. If you mean whereabouts does the damsel have a pad she can call her own, sure. If you want to know where she is prone to rest her bones of an evening, I trust you’ve got an hour or two.”

“Easy mark?”

“Every doll to her own debauch. Leave us just say she is wont to wander.”

“What’s the mailing address?”

“East Tenth.” He gave me a number. “This an event sinister, Harry? I would sleep poorly if I thought I was fingering a frail.”

“Nothing important, Hiram. Just family business.”

“Tame, tame. You anxious to make contact pronto?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

“Well, there’s this brawl. A cat named Don McGruder just sold a slim volume of verse and is howling. Audrey Grant swings with that crowd, so McGruder’s is where you’d latch on.”

“A guy need an invitation?”

“To a pad in Crazytown? Man, you just sort of go, you know? But if you’re shy, I could clutch your clammy little hand. For, say, another thin fin?”