Inside he led me along a narrow hall to a large kitchen. A man and two young girls were painting the walls a gun-metal color, using pans and rollers. Bohack gave me a glass of water and told one of the girls to clean up the mess on the landing. I followed him through another room where two men with sledgehammers were knocking down a wall. They stood in sunny ruins, clothes and bodies chalked with plaster. The third and last room looked east. It was a small room, filled with plants, feverish in the heat of three floodlights. The lone window had no curtains or blinds. Steam came clouding out of an adjacent bathroom where hot water ran in the shower. Bohack placed me in an unpainted blocklike chair and then left the room.

Plants covered the floor around the perimeter of the room and were crowded together on shelves and grew in white plastic pots hung from the ceiling and in clay pots attached to the walls with metal clips. I noted many kinds, those huge and hooded and furled on long sticks, enclosing the springs of their own alertness, or drowsy and pouched, nocturnal orchids, vines and ivies, showering ferns, palms in their rectitude, or those murky and velvet, or redolent of the limpness of old summers, or pale as lizards. A small man entered the room. He said his name was Chess. He wore flannel trousers, glazed with age, and a matching vest over a striped shirt and tie. Vest lacked a button and the tie was not centered.

"Plants are scary things," he said.

He carried an old briefcase. His hair was blondish, combed sideways almost ear to ear. He closed the door behind him, wincing at the sound of the sledgehammers.

"It's like a prison here," he said. "I don't know why they stay. People leave and then come back. Some leave twice and come back twice. You watch, I say to myself. So-and-so will leave for good next time. But they're all right here. Just like I'm right here. I'm in this room same as you. I'll tell you something about Bohack. He's not smart and he's not stupid. He doesn't have any special magnetism. His ideas just miss being interesting ideas. For a long time I couldn't figure out what made him so indispensable. Why him? What's so special? I finally figured it out. It's because he's so big. He's the biggest one. People respond to his bigness."

"Where is he?" I said.

"He's making the four o'clock check. He checks the whole floor three times a day. Tells people what to do and how to do it. Somebody has to give orders and he's the biggest. Let me ask you something. That bridge out there. Is that the Brooklyn or the Williamsburg? I've never been able to muster enough courage to ask anyone. But I feel comfortable somehow with you. There's a chemistry with you. Let me rub away some of this steam on the window and you can get a better look."

"It's the Manhattan."

"Scary," he said. "I didn't know there was a bridge called the Manhattan Bridge. All this time not knowing. Oh that's so scary. What do you think of my plants? People are usually surprised by the plants. People forget we started out as an earth-family in a completely rural and rustic environment. Interdependence of man, plant and animal. That idea still has beauty for me. So what do you think of my plants? It's dry out today so I've got the hot shower going to get some humidity in here. Plants need that. Usually I just turn on the humidifier but Spot keeps peeing in it so I've had to put it away until Bohack gets him re-toilet-trained. That's the power of names. People act in response to their names. There's a tiny sector of the human brain where the naming mechanism is located. Spot pees in my humidifier and Rex plays with a little rubber Santa Claus that goes squeak-squeak a mile a minute. Dog behavior and dog play. But don't worry, this room is sacrosanct. We don't have to be concerned about anybody coming in here who isn't authorized to do so. The orchid is a cuntlike plant. Don't you think? Menacing in its beauty. Some plants just stand there. The orchid lures a person. It draws a person inward. This room is a good room for meditation and inward thinking. It's the most inward room we have. That's as good a reason as any as to why you're here."

The door opened and Longboy stood there, left hand in his back pocket, all his weight on one leg, the left, his body slack against the door frame. Chess raised his eyebrows and Longboy responded with a series of gestures too complex to unravel. Then he backed out of the room, pulling the door closed. Chess took some clippings out of his briefcase. The window was fogged to the point of total opaqueness. I felt a sickly light sweat all over my body.

"Where's Bohack?" I said. "Is the package with him? I know you've got the damn thing."

"Pepper told us you were going on tour. Hanes told us where the record plant is."

"Hanes also turned over the product. You wouldn't have guaranteed his safety without that."

"Hanes turned over the product and Pepper agreed to test it for a straight fee. Hell probably never get paid but I doubt if he cares. He was overjoyed at this late date merely to find out what's been in that package these many weeks that's reduced us all to such deviant behavior. That begonia needs cutting back. Funny I hadn't noticed earlier."

I picked up the plant he'd indicated and threw it against the wall, using a windmill motion. Chess looked briefly at the cracked clay, leaves still embedded in lumps of earth. Then he leaned over in his chair and spread the newspaper clippings on the floor between his feet.

"Everybody's searching, you know. Everybody's trying to make the journey. But they're going about it wrong. They're seeking the wrong kind of privacy, the old privacy, never again to be found. Now here's an item about a seventy-year-old man who's sailing from Cape Hatteras to England in a skiff that's only nine feet long. It says he plans to practice yoga at sea. This one is about a Bloom-ington housewife who's flying from Minnesota to Australia in a balloon. Evidently she has relatives in Australia. That's the ostensible reason for the journey. We both know the real reason. A group of Methodists from Pittsburgh are setting out next month for the Sinai Desert where they intend to pray and fast for forty days and nights. It says they're being urged by their bishop to take along some kind of rations besides water but it says the group thus far has resisted the idea. Woman, sixty-two, circles world in single-engine plane. Now here's a Norwegian man who sat for two hundred and two hours in a window box on his terrace, breaking the world record by thirty-some-odd hours. We both know he wasn't interested in records. A man in Missouri spent a hundred and sixty-one days in a deep cavern. Missouri abounds in caverns. He ate canned food, he drank water, he burned over nine hundred candles. He said it's the first time in his life he wasn't bored. Sensory overload. People are withdrawing from sensory overload. Technology. Whenever there's too much technology, people return to primitive feats. But we both know that true privacy is an inner state. A limited environment is important. Yes, yes. But you can't fly off in a balloon and expect to find the answer.

The will has to urge itself to this task. The mind has to level itself across a plane of solitude. We're painting this whole floor of the building a dark gray. Not the plant room. No, no. The plant room stays white. Everything else gets painted gray."

"I just had a thought."

"The concept of a captive lunatic fringe within an organization is mine alone, my concept alone, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Irrationality can be managed to great effect. There's power and intimidation behind every event the dog-boys are made to stage."

"Are you Dr. Pepper?" I said. "You're not, are you?"

"I'm Chess and these are my plants. Pepper is at least four inches taller than I am. You know that. Voice aside. Color of eyes aside. The man is four inches taller than I am. Pepper's feats in the realm of disguise are well known and well documented but the man can't hide four inches of muscle, bone and tissue. I'm Fred Chess, ordinary American. I used to be a theatrical producer. I went into photo offset work after that Nothing seemed to be panning out. Look, if I were Pepper, it would mean I knew all along what kind of drug was in the package. Any long-standing intimate connection between Pepper and Happy Valley would mean that I, as Pepper, had knowledge of the drug from the very beginning. You'd have to revise everything that's happened. It would mean that I managed not only Bohack but also Hanes and Watney. If I'm Pepper, it means everything's been a lie up to now. I managed the whole thing, it means. I guided the product from hand to hand. It was my circle, point by point, the product originating at Happy Valley and ending there. It would mean that you've been the victim of the paranoid man's ultimate fear. Everything that takes place is taking place solely to mislead you. Your reality is managed by others. Logic is inside out. Events are delusions. If I were Pepper, it would mean I knew the nature of the product, I had it delivered to you, I planned and followed its course, I fabricated a Toronto meeting between Hanes and Watney, I assigned the informer to Azarian, I planted Hanes in the subway, I had Watney leave the bubble gum cards, I had Bohack bring you over here – the straight line intersecting the circle. It would mean I managed Opel."