"Seen Hanes lately?" I said.

"Hanes is back at work. Hanes? He's back at work. Why do you ask, Bucky?"

"No reason."

"We power our way up the charts," Globke said. "We reach the break-even point. We determine our allocations. We gross and outgross. We work out test cities versus chart cities. We refill the record racks. We confer with our senior people. We climb and-grab. We yell over the telephone. We sell and outsell. We display perpetual bad taste."

"The epics teach us that all work is equal to all other work," Michelle said. "Once we have freed ourselves of fear and desire, no act we perform is more important than the act that precedes it or the act that follows. Non-attachment is the path to beyond-reality. Beyond-reality is where our true nature indwells. The body is an illusion. The epics teach us that men cannot leap across time to the eye of the absolute. Men must proceed in stages across many boundaries. Free of fear and desire, we find our true nature. Good. Goodness. God. Godhead. Evil is nothing more than attachment. Evil is attachment."

"Evil is movement toward void," I said.

"One and the same," she said.

Before they departed she came to my chair and put her lips to my left temple. She had the kind of face that allows love or pain to rise immediately to the surface, unshrouded face usually belonging to older women, those who've forgotten what must be shielded and what disclosed. What now she revealed was not a longing for me but rather a need for what she took to be my suffering. In her eyes and warm lips was the wish to be burdened, to take whatever I could not bear. Globke waited at the door, oddly deferential to the moment's solemnity. He held the empty champagne bottle under his arm, a souvenir (he'd said) of the day of my second birth.

That evening I sat by the window, imagining tiny men in black booties scampering out of the firehouse, the house itself on fire, flames leaping and smoke pouring, the little men skipping about in glee, men in booties and stunted red helmets, men with bushy eyebrows, tiny men all in a circle holding hands.

25

In abundant sunlight a man carried paintings from a battered panel truck into the loft building across the street from me. He took canvas after canvas, about a dozen, gray every one with a white line down the middle. I turned back to Bohack, who occupied the center of the room, nodding into his Chinese beard, one foot up on a chair, the rest of him collapsing toward that point of support. He wasn't happy with me. His body showed it, swollen with exhaustion. He knew I was no longer content to remain in this room, leading his band of janissaries progressively inward, conceding motion to each hour that passed. His large open face seemed to beam his disappointment across the room. We were ten minutes into our second silence. Bohack took out a handkerchief and delivered mucoidal noises into it. He remained in his standing crouch, right foot set on the edge of the chair, elbow resting on right knee, his diffuse beard concealed by the handkerchief. He wasn't at all happy with me. I had betrayed our convergent destinies, reading the leer in the silvery eye of the first child to beckon.

"I wondered if you'd get here in time," I said. "I'm due to leave in a matter of hours. They're sending a car for me."

"If you knew I was coming over, why didn't you leave ahead of schedule? Why didn't Bucky Wunderlick get out when he had the chance?"

"Dumb question," I said.

"I guess it is. Heck, I'm stupid sometimes. You half want this confrontation. You half want to go to Essex Street with me."

"Who cut Azarian's throat? Did his people do that?"

"Longboy."

"What for?"

"Longboy's our throat man. When he was a medic in the Airborne he performed many a tracheotomy out in the field. Man with broken jaw, blocked air passage, choking to death in the drop zone. Longboy would trake him right there. He traked maybe ten people all told. He got to know the throat. He's developed a feel for it. So we sent Longboy after Azarian's throat. We had a lot of trouble locating Azarian. We knew he was after the product but we couldn't get him located right."

"He was just bidding," I said. "He never had his hands on it. There was no point in killing him."

"We killed him because we found him," Bohack said. "It was a heck of a job. We put a lot of time and effort into it. After all that time and effort, we obviously had to kill him. If we didn't kill him, it would have been a total waste, all that time and effort. We knew he was in California, in L.A., most likely in Watts. Finally we got street name and house number. That's when we sent out Longboy. He's our throat man."

"Dr. Pepper told you I was leaving. Is that right?"

"Right, Pepper told us. Pepper wanted me to arrange a get-together with Rex, Brandy, King, Bruno and the others. He knew about Happy Valley's interest in your retirement and he wanted to use the dog-boys to keep you permanently in this room. He was scared half to death of even approaching the dog-boys but he thought you'd cut him out of any chance at the product and this was his way of getting revenge. I was surprised, tell you the truth. I didn't think Pepper was that vindictive. He came on like a spiteful kid who wakes up one morning and finds he has two poison fangs and it's just a question of who gets the first nip. But I could tell he expected heap big trouble if he got anywhere near the dog-boys. Fear and trembling. It might have been halfway funny to see Pepper with those lunatics but I finally told him it wasn't necessary. I told him we didn't need the dog-boys. Don't you want to know why? You're just standing there without any look on your face. Isn't Bucky interested? Doesn't he care about these things?"

"He cares deeply."

"The dog-boys aren't an independent pack. I control them. I run them back and forth. They're not a separate faction. They're just a lunatic fringe that we use for our own purposes. They're completely subordinate. There's only one Happy Valley Farm Commune. The dog-boys are the lunatic fringe. We use them to sow fear and confusion. People think Happy Valley's weak and disorganized when it's just the opposite. A nice touch, what do you think? Broadcasting dissension, what do you think? Not bad, right? Sowing fear. Sowing confusion. What's your opinion?"

"I need time to think about it."

"I gave them the names," he said. "Bruno, Rex, Corky and so on. What do you think? Nice touch, don't you think? Sense of humor. You need that."

"How heavy are you?"

"I go two forty-five. Is that too heavy? I've got a big frame. With a big frame you need considerable poundage. My face is a round-type face but the rest of me is packed pretty solid."

"Are your parents big people?" I said.

"They're both normal size except my mother has the biggest thumbs I've ever seen in my Me."

"Any brothers or sisters?"

"Only child."

"Where do you buy your clothes?"

"Orchard Street."

"Do you pay your rent with cash, check or money order?"

"Right now we owe four months."

"What are your plans for me?"

"It's a nice day," he said. "Let's go up to the roof."

We strolled among chimneys of various shapes and materials, crumbling brickwork, heavy metal painted black, aluminum peanut-whistles. The tar was hard. To north and south, towers grew out of crooked rooftops in the foreground. Bohack rested against the ledge, eyes closed and face thrust upward, although the sun was at his back. It was one of those electrically blue days when every tall building set against the sky seems to drip silver. Bohack was looking at me now. His arms were folded. He wore crushed dented clothing that made him appear to ripple upward, a fountain of automobile parts and bland expressions.