"They need room to run," Selvy said.

By midnight he was on Interstate 95 north of Philadelphia. In the back seat of his Toyota were some clothes and a couple of cartons packed with various possessions. He smoked and listened to the radio. Fixed limits and solid dark. After a while he turned off the radio and rolled down his window. The highway was almost empty but a roar filled the interior of the car, an air blast so integral to travel on major routes that he couldn't break it down to component sounds. So much his own car. So much the sparse additional traffic. So much the power of night.

Moll Robbins sat looking into the keys of her typewriter. On the wall to her left was a neon display, bluish white, a smoking gun. At her elbow, which rested on the table before her, was a glass of iced tea and half a cruller. The limp white page in the typewriter was blank.

When she got up and looked through the peephole to find it was Selvy who'd just knocked, she discovered she didn't fully welcome the visit. Something in her resisted his appearance just now. Bad timing, that was all, probably.

"What time is it?"

"I don't know," he said.

"I'm awake, oddly enough."

"I like your robe. It's not your kind of thing, though, is it?"

"The gunfighter. Sit down, I'll get you something. It's not a robe, it's a tea gown. I'm drinking tea."

"I'm drinking whisky," he said.

"What else? The gunfighter's special. NYPD's been looking for you, hill and dale, ever since you rode into the sunset. I get calls regularly. Precinct, homicide, missing persons."

"They know my name?"

"Nope."

"What'd you tell them?"

"You were a pickup. I picked you up. You were too cute to resist."

"Plausible," he said.

"Sure, good girl, except you're not Clark Gable and I'm not Jean Arthur. Any of it begin to make sense to you?"

"Afraid not."

"The police have some leads, apparently."

"Cops don't know shit. Forget cops."

She poured him a drink. He looked drawn and spare and a little dangerous, reminding Molt of the first time he'd turned up at her door. She left the bottle and sat across the room, studying him.

"Something new in here."

"What?" she said.

"Neon."

"Guess I couldn't resist. More flash. Transience and flash. Story of my life. I realize looking around this place that I don't have any furniture in the strict sense. I stack clothes in those modular boxes in the bedroom. I work at a folding table. I have a wall unit. It's just as well, isn't it? If you don't live in a house on your own piece of property, there's no point owning real things. If you're floating in the air, ten-twenty-thirty stories up, might as well live with play objects, shiny balls and ornaments."

"It's a gun. I didn't see at first from this angle. A sixshooter."

"I saw it the day after. Couldn't resist. Also the story of my life. Not being able to resist."

"Resist what?"

"Whatever I don't see clearly."

He gestured toward the typewriter.

"If I'm interrupting, say so."

"I wasn't getting anywhere."

"Where do you want to get?"

She leaned well forward, peering at him, her hands hanging down over her knees, almost as though she was getting ready to slip off the end of the ottoman, an impromptu comic bit.

"Who are you, Selvy?"

He sat back in his chair, an intentional countermotion, a withdrawal, and smiled in deep fatigue, self-deprecatingly. He appeared to be disassociating himself from whatever significance the question by its nature ascribed to him.

"Who is Earl Mudger?" she said.

"Don't know."

"Who is Lomax?"

"Lomax. Don't know."

"Of course I have my own versions of the answers to all these questions."

"I can't corroborate."

She reached over to the table for her iced tea. It was the middle of the night. She was remotely tired, knowing it wasn't the kind of weariness that leads to immediate sleep. The reverse probably. Getting to sleep would be labor, prolonged exertion. The ice in her glass had melted, making the tea flavorless.

"What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it's sexual. I want to know this. Is it homosexual?"

"You're way ahead of me," he said.

"Isn't that why the English are so good at espionage? Or why they seem so good at it, which comes to the same thing. Isn't it almost rooted in national character?"

"I didn't know the English controlled world rights."

"To what?"

"Being queer," he said.

"No, I'm saying the link is there. That's all. Tendency finds an outlet. I'm saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates. Although I don't mean to say it so Freudianly."

"I'm open to theorizing," he said. "What else do you have?"

"I have links inside links. This is the age of conspiracy."

"People have wondered."

"This is the age of connections, links, secret relationships."

"What would you think of this?"

"What?"

"If I told you this," he said.

"Tell me."

"_Running Dog_ is a propaganda mechanism."

"Who for? You're kidding."

"I don't know who for."

"That's bullshit, Selvy."

"You're right, I'm kidding."

"I don't like that smile."

"Just a little joke."

"Granted, it's a crappy magazine. Granted, we play to people's belief in just what I've been talking about. Worldwide conspiracies. Fantastic assassination schemes. But we are not anybody's mechanism."

"I'm not even smiling, look."

"I mean granted, we do things in the schlockiest way imaginable. You'd better be kidding."

"A kidder," he said. "I like to kid."

"Whose mechanism?"

"Can't you take a joke?" he said. "Don't you know when someone's joking?"

"Because it makes me think of how we named the goddamn magazine. Except we meant it ironically, of course. Using the Hanoi line then current. The familiar taunt."

"What taunt?"

"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."

"All comes back."

"Perfect name for a radical publication, considering the temper of the times. The name had impact then. It fairly sparkled with irony."

Moll this time slipped down the side of the ottoman to sit crosslegged on the floor.

"We almost named it _H. C. Porny_. H. C. Porny was a cartoon character we'd planned on using. He was supposed to represent the government. More precisely the government plus big business. Short, fat, leering old man. We'd hoped, see, to replace Uncle Sam as a national symbol."

"H.C. meaning Hard Core."

"Our cartoonist OD'd, unfortunately. OD meaning overdose. And that was the early end of H. C. Porny. Where were you then, Selvy?"

"Fasting."

"I'll bet you were. Praying and fasting. People had flag decals. Everybody had something. People had bumper stickers. AMERICA -LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. So this friend, it's clear as day, this well-meaning friend gave me a sticker of my very own, which I thought was so devilishly clever I immediately proceeded to affix it to the bumper of my little Swedish car. VIETNAM -LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. And don't two guys come staggering out of a bar on Eighty-sixth Street while I'm stopped for a light? And don't they see my sign and start pounding on my car until the whole thing gets out of hand and there's a mob of people and I end up with a broken ankle and my car half wrecked?"

"Passions quicken in wartime. We see this time and again."

"Sure, sex was in the parks and streets. What lovely urgent folly. But what were you doing, pal? We're waiting to hear."

"I was preparing for the desert."

"You were oiling your goddamn.38."

"That was my desert period."

"You were leaping through burning hoops for a better America."

She watched him close his eyes and go to sleep. It took only seconds. Pure of heart, she thought. She found some brandy in the cabinet and sat a while drinking, watching him sleep. The digital clock in the wall unit had stopped days earlier at 4:01. 4:01 sounded about right. She finished the brandy and got up off the floor, creaking a bit. Selvy's head was tilted left. She put her hand to his face: sleep and warmth. Then the other hand, framing him. He opened his eyes finally. She waited for him to adjust to his surroundings.