J. Morgan Cunningham

Comfort Station

He was doing exactly what Vivian had told him — thinking of what it would be like living with a wife who had only one leg.

ARTHUR HAILEY,

The Final Diagnosis

Persons this book are about

FRED DINGBAT — omnibus operative, proud of his position in intraurban transit. Too proud?

MO MOWGLI — custodian of the Comfort Station. What was there about his past that haunted him?

ARBOGAST SMITH — plainclothes patrolman. In responsibility he found anodyne — and the testing of his strength.

HERBERT Q. LUMINOUS — bookkeeper on the run. What happened to him was almost a cliché.

CAROLINA WEISS — onetime Russian countess now A & E mechanic. In the arms of another man she sought forgetfulness.

GENERAL RAMON SAN MARTINEZ TORTILLA — deposed dictator. What was it he wanted to get off his chest?

FINGERS FOGELHEIMER — mobster. Out of the thrilling days of yesteryear, he returns for vengeance.

LANCE CAVENDISH — Black. With him and thirty-five cents you can take the subway.

6:00 A.M

Rain.

Rain poured down like water out of the cloud-covered sky, which was above the city. Every intricate individual drop of the hydrous stuff, composed of two parts hydrogen for every lonely solitary part oxygen, fell on the already-drenched city like a cloudburst.

It was a cloudburst.

The rain fell everywhere on the city, on rich and on poor, on young and on old, on happy and on unhappy — but not on people inside their houses. If the roofs were okay. The rain fell on a tramp steamer of Liberian registry, Serbo-Croat captain and Siamese crew being loaded with rocking chairs for Terra del Fuego, girlie calendars on a consignment to Ulan Bator, and cartons of Smucker’s strawberry preserves bound for the Cape of Good Hope, at Pier 46, downtown. The rain fell on the Daily News trucks, gaily green, tootling their wares hither and yon throughout the great city, bringing the daily news to the citizens of Metropolis: New York. And throwing the bundles in puddles outside the candy stores, they should be more careful.

This was the third day of rain, drenching the already-drenched city. Odd items flowed in the gutters: Popsicle wrappers, good for stockings if you send them in with a quarter; tickets to hit shows; suicide notes; a bottle with a message inside, dated June 7, 1884; a one-inch-long spaceship from the planet Gu which had inadvertently crash-landed at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and West 49th Street and was now being inexorably swept toward its inexorable doom of both itself and its entire microscopic crew; and here and there the three-sixteenths-inch-long roach of a marijuana reefer, dropped by some doomed ten-year-old staggering through the rain in search of cheap kicks. Oh, the stories those gutters could have told — fiction, perhaps, but a scant raindrop (or could it be a teardrop?) from reality — if only there had been someone, some artisan, some born storyteller, to crawl through them and pick up the nuggets within.

But there was no such. There was only the early-morning workers, out with their lunch buckets at six in the morning on the third day of rain, drenching the already-drenched city, walking through the raindrops with their coat collars turned up against the rain, going to work.

The rain fell on the workers, bound for work. And it fell on the evening before’s revelers, homeward bound after a full evening of reveling, dancing up the center stripe of Fifth Avenue in top hat and tails, kissing one another’s wives in the Plaza Fountain, having a pickle at the Gaiety Delicatessen on West 47th Street off Times Square — and assuring one another they were having fun. And it fell on the cop on the beat, the burglar on the roof, the ambulance rushing across Queens with an emergency appendectomy in the back, the homosexuals cowering under trees in all the city’s parks but one ...

And the rain fell on the buildings. It fell on the new Madison Square Garden, the cupcake-shaped Hall of Culture where last night was seen Poundage, the new rock ’n’ roll sensation, and where tonight world-famed Evangelist Billy Cracker would appear, before a somewhat older group. And it fell on the Brooklyn Bridge, Mecca of so many would-be suicides. And it fell on the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which was nice. And it fell on Grand Army Plaza, with its green statues of the Civil War boys in blue. And it fell on the Bryant Park Comfort Station, crossroads of a million private lives.

The Bryant Park Comfort Station, situated on the south side of West 42nd Street midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, stands on land once completely under water, back before the turn of the century when this was the Croton Reservoir. But progress must come, even to reservoirs, and in the first decade of this, our fast-paced twentieth century, busy workmen from all over the civilized world and beyond gathered together, filled with high purpose, to empty the Croton Reservoir and erect on the site of its former standing the new central branch of the New York Public Library, and the leafy landscape called Bryant Park, and last but not least the Bryant Park Comfort Station.

The Bryant Park Comfort Station, a low granite structure of Greek Revival design, was designed by the New York architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings, who threw in plans for the library as well. Approximately twenty feet square, the building is dominated by a large opaque oval window on its north face, facing West 42nd Street, and by a large rectangular door on the west face, surmounted by the stirring inscription MEN. A stone filigree makes a tasty design about the upper walls, alternating ivy garlands with cow skulls, evocative of Death Valley: terribly meaningful in the architects’ overall planned impact of visual and tensile impact.

Constructed as a part of the ninth contract let on the Public Library/Bryant Park construction, a contract that included as well the treatment of the main building’s south court, a second comfort station elsewhere on the grounds for females, the approaches to the main building, and the sculpture on the Fifth Avenue front, the contract was awarded to Norcross Brothers Company on November 5, 1908, they just happening to have been the low bid again. The drawings and specifications had actually been turned over to the Park Department in September of 1907, the previous year prior, but it takes a while in our fast-paced modern world to get major projects like the construction of a comfort station actually under way.

In any event, the Bryant Park Comfort Station was completed in early 1911 and continues to stand to this very day, a mute but not inglorious tribute to the Messrs. Carrère and Hastings, and to the low-bidding Norcross Brothers as well. A fine bunch of men all. And a fine Comfort Station.

It’s funny, thought Fred Dingbat. But it wasn’t funny, not really, not ever. And especially not when it was raining. And especially not when it was raining on the Bryant Park Comfort Station, which Fred could see outside his rain-streaked bus windshield, ahead of him on the right, gray and somehow grim, almost menacing, in the early-morning semidarkness and with all the rain drenching an already-drenched city.

It always reminded him of Korea. But then again, what didn’t? A picnic in the park, an evening in front of the television set, a Mets home game, even the Bryant Park Comfort Station, it could all bring it back, those frozen moments in Korea, when ...

But no. He wasn’t going to dwell on that anymore; that was all done and finished and over and behind him and through and kaput and forgotten and terminated and fini and settled and no longer current now. Now was this bus, the 42nd Street Crosstown, a GM Citycruiser, dark green and light green outside, with light green seats inside all in a row, fluorescent lights warming and comforting him in the rearview mirror as he drove the breadth of the city, from Pier 82 at Twelfth Avenue all the way across 42nd Street to United Nations Headquarters at the avenue called First. A microcosm of America; nay, of the world. Beginning at the Hudson River piers, where the ships from all nations put in to give and to receive, the air alive with a polyglot of tongues and languages, the shouting of stevedores, the guttural imprecations of snared smugglers, the weeping of tiny lost Chinese waifs about to fall off the end of a pier; all there, all vibrant and alive, telling of lands far off across the ocean waves. And across the street, the Sheraton Motor Inn, a modern hostelry of cultured rooms, efficient service, and seething undercover goings-on.

And then the first block, from Twelfth Avenue to Eleventh Avenue, with its truck docks and warehouses, redolent with the spices of the Indies, the Volkswagens of Europe, the dried fish of Ultima Thule. And the second block, Eleventh Avenue to Tenth Avenue, bracketed by the TraveLodge, where the same rinky-dink is going on as back at the Sheraton Motor Inn.

Then the first half-block, Tenth Avenue to Dyer Avenue, the latter being the Lincoln Tunnel exit, bringing into the city the rich, faintly foreign life-stream of Hudson and Bergen counties, culminating in the huge white-faced parking garage with its mouth open like the open maw of a whale, waiting to swallow all the Jersey Jonahs. But even before that — oh, lest we forget — the West Side Airlines Terminal, first step on the anxiety-ridden voyage to Newark Airport, that complex organism spread out like a gigantic complex watch ticking away across the Hudson River.

And now the pace quickens. Dyer Avenue to Ninth Avenue, and three theaters all in a row: Mermaid, Midway, and Maidman (the way men like ’em). Ninth Avenue to Eighth Avenue, the McGraw-Hill Building — a book publisher, standing for book publishers everywhere in this giant Gotham, keepers of the flame, promulgators of culture to the masses. Eighth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, where Broadway angles in from the main theater district to form Times Square, not very far from the building where the Times is housed; along here, the movie palaces, the all-night grind houses where broken men, haunted by their past, can spend a few pitiful hours in Sneaky Pete and celluloid forgetfulness in dreams dreamed by other dreamers. New York, New York, is sure some town.

Times Square to Sixth Avenue: girlie-magazine stores, movie theaters, and upstairs in the grimy offices the import-export men with the code books hidden in the chandelier, the “model” agencies, the check-cashing services where a million life stories a day are told across a grubby wooden counter in wrinkled dollar bills.

But now the block that Fred Dingbat loved the most — remember Fred? — that between Sixth and Fifth Avenues. On the left, until it went bust, Stern’s mighty department store, conservatory of the myriad artifacts of our busy time. And on the right, the main branch of the New York Public Library, and Bryant Park, and ... the Bryant Park Comfort Station. For here was man in sum and essence, in his every facet. On the left, in the store that was and the stores that still struggle on, man the Builder, man the Acquisitor. On the right, in the Public Library, the treasure-house of thought, of philosophy, and of story (never denigrate it), was man the Divine, reaching out for knowledge and truth and wisdom and understanding and meaning and that Divine spark which gives to man his touch of the Divine. And in Bryant Park, man the Agrarian, man the Cultivator. And in the Comfort Station, the admission that man is still human, still man the Animal.

In the center of the center of the center of the world, man was still not entirely his own noble creation.

From here, the blocks accelerated. Madison, Park, Lexington, Third — nobody seems to know what happened to Fourth — and before Second Avenue was reached, the captains of industry had been tolled in their upthrust quarries. The Lincoln Building, the Chanin Building, the Socony Mobil Building, the Chrysler Building and Chrysler Building East, the Lorillard Building, and the Daily News Building. And in its midst, Grand Central Station, crossroads of a million private lives, tangential thread of so many tangled tales it would take one hell of a tale untangler to untangle them all. Or even half. And beside it, the Commodore Hotel, with even more carryings-on, as well as the Dartmouth College Club.

And then, finally, the final block to the United Nations Building, haven of peace, where men of a hundred nationalities walk the corridors, worrying about their private problems.

But is this all? It is not. On the return trip, /• backwards.

And every time, every successful journey from East River to Hudson River, or from Hudson River to East River, there at the center of it all was the Bryant Park Comfort Station, a present comfort in time of need. Men only, like McSorley’s.

Fred grinned at the Comfort Station through the rain drenching an already-drenched city, and told himself it was all right. He would think of Korea no more today. Or so he thought.

7:00 A.M

Mo Mowgli was late again.

Why was it, he thought, standing there in the rain pouring down on him from the sky, which was above the city, that he couldn’t seem to get to work on time anymore? Was it that he had lost that finely honed sense of purpose, almost of passion, which had ever inspired him to do his duty at whatever the task life had put before him? Was that it? Was it?

It was true his dreams of responsibility had not come true, regardless of the many correspondence courses he had taken. He had learned to be a detective through the mails, and still possessed the handcuffs, though he couldn’t seem to find the key anymore. He had studied hotel management by mail, had boned up in the same postal manner on air traffic controlling, library science, brain surgery, interior decoration, and post office operations. In the privacy of his own home he still occasionally walked around with his earphones on, the last legacy of his radio broadcaster course, now and again tripping over the trailing wire and catapulting into some portion of his meager furnishings. But with all of that preparation, all of that theoretical expertise, and with a soul more than willing to face the constant piling-up of crises and emergencies he knew faced those in positions of responsibility — who had troubles enough at home — where had life chosen to place him in the greater scheme of things?

He was the custodian of the Bryant Park Comfort Station.

Ah, well, he thought, as he hunched his shoulders against the rain drenching an already-drenched city, here too there was executive responsibility of a sort. For wasn’t the Bryant Park Comfort Station the very center of Manhattan, the crossroads of a million private lives, most of them troubled? It was.

So why couldn’t he get to work on time? It was a problem.

Looking now to his left along West 42nd Street, Mo saw at last the Crosstown bus coming his way. He would be no more than five or ten minutes late today: not good, but better than his recent average.

Perhaps if he lived closer to midtown it would be easier to get to work on time, but somehow Mo couldn’t bring himself to move out of the little apartment uptown, the meagerly furnished three rooms in which he lived alone, except for his correspondence courses and a cat called Bitsy, who occasionally came in from her usual haunt on the fire escape to eat roaches and condescend to join Mo in a saucer of milk. So it was that every morning he took a bus down Ninth Avenue to West 42nd Street, where he transferred to the Crosstown bus for the straight run to the Comfort Station. Usually arriving late.

It didn’t always matter if he was late. Most of the time there was no one around at seven in the morning anyway, no one to care if the Comfort Station was open or closed. But every once in a while Mo would alight late from the Crosstown bus to find some poor wayfarer hopping up and down on the sidewalk out front, his agony mirrored in his expression, which was agonized. At those moments of emergency and crisis, Mo always acted with instinctive speed and precision, unlocking the door, switching on the lights, assuring himself there was sufficient paper in the stalls, and at the same time feeling deep inside the gnawing knowledge of his own failure, his own inattention. He should have been here on time; it was his fault and no one else’s that the poor wayfarer had been reduced to hopping up and down on the sidewalk for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or even twenty minutes. At such times, Mo promised himself never to be late again, but his resolution never seemed to last very long: the next day, or the day after that, he would be late again.

As he was this morning. It was already past seven, and he was still at Ninth Avenue, blocks from his assigned post. But here, in any event, was the bus. It pulled to a stop, the bifurcated door opened, and Mo stepped aboard, grateful to be out of the pouring rain, drenching an already-drenched city.

“Hello, Mo.” It was Fred Dingbat, a driver Mo knew well.

“Hello, Fred,” Mo riposted, dropping a token into the box. Looking down the long length of the interior of the bus, Mo saw that there were no other passengers, a not infrequent occurrence at this hour of a Tuesday morning — or even a Wednesday morning, actually — particularly when it was raining, which it was doing now.

Mo sat in the first seat on the right side, where he faced the driver and could talk to him even while the vehicle was in motion. Against the rules, of course, but the bus company generally blinked at such bending of the regulations. Bus drivers were human, as the company understood, and liked to have some company while driving the bus. A little harmless fraternization with the passengers was considered all right, so long as it didn’t become too blatant or interfere with the driver’s performance of his function. He was, after all (the driver), in command of two point four tons of green machinery, rolling through the mighty city, surrounded by cars, cabs, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mounted policemen, wheelchairs, and the Cattleman Restaurant’s stagecoach: he had to be cool and calm at all times, in control of both himself and the juggernaut he was driving.

As though divining Mo’s thoughts, Fred commented, “The drive for more flexible bus routes is among the more significant advances in the theory of omnibus operation in the megalopolis patterns of latter twentieth century life.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” Mo countered. “The overlapping radii of responsibility in, say, your field and mine is going to prove increasingly important in the years to come, a fact the general public is still very much not aware of.”

Fred chuckled appreciatively. “You’re so right,” he urged. “But try to get the politicians to see it that way.”

“Well, they have problems of their own,” Mo designated, and once again the old suspicion reared its ugly head. Was that why he hadn’t found responsibility in life? Was that why the Bryant Park Comfort Station was, thus far, the apex of his career?

The fact of the matter was, Mo Mowgli had no problems at home. He wasn’t married, which meant he couldn’t commit adultery, nor could his wife. Nor could he have generation-gap problems with his children. Beyond all this, he wasn’t haunted by anything from his past, not even in the war. Any war.

It seemed so unfair. Just because he didn’t have personal problems at home, just because he wasn’t haunted by a grim reminder from his past, was that reason enough to keep him forever on the fringes of executive responsibility? He was willing, God knew, he wanted to do a good job.

Mo subsided into a morose silence. Fred, understanding something of the situation, returned his attention to the task of driving the big green bus and allowed Mo his moment of introspection. It must be a terrible thing, Fred thought, to be haunted by the lack of a past.

His bald pate covered by a bushy mass of brown hair, Mo Mowgli was perfectly ordinary looking in every way.

8:00 A.M

The unobtrusive black automobile which rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the Bryant Park Comfort Station at four minutes to eight on that unobtrusive Tuesday morning — the rain continuing to drench an already-drenched city — was an unobtrusive black Checker Marathon, the car for unobtrusive people. Manufactured with painstaking care by the artisans of Kalamazoo, Michigan, this particular unobtrusive black Checker Marathon — like so many others of its kind — had a one-hundred-twenty-inch wheelbase, an overall length of one hundred ninety-nine inches, and a width (at its widest width) of seventy-six inches. Powered by a powerful two-hundred-thirty-six-cubic-inch Perkins diesel engine, the noise of the motor while idling was not as unobtrusive as it might have been, but the savings in fuel could be counted in pennies. And however unobtrusive its black coloration, modest grille, and seemly quartet of headlights, the Marathon of which we speak stood a proud five feet three inches high, towering over all those pinched-down creatures from Detroit, and towering as well over most people’s girl friends.

Of the two individuals inside this particular Checker Marathon, the one sitting at the steering wheel, his hands on the wheel and his feet on the pedals jutting out of the floor, could most properly be termed the driver. He it was who had operated the nearly two ton vehicle in its travels through the now heavily trafficked city streets to this spot directly in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station, and it was undoubtedly the strain of commanding all this fine-honed machinery in such difficult conditions — lots of traffic, lots of rain — which had given him the morose and irritable expression which his countenance now demonstrated to whosoever might cop a glom through the windshield-wiper-wiped windshield, if anyone cared to. But what would be the explanation for the similar expression of unhappy gloom now to be seen upon the countenance of the other occupant of the vehicle already described, properly called the passenger?

For that — the explanation /• — one would have to search more deeply than minor current annoyances like rain or traffic; one would have to search — in fact — into the mentality and past of the individual concerned, by name Arbogast Smith, thirty-two years of age, a uniformed policeman by trade, currently on special plainclothes detail to Bryant Park Comfort Station, in Manhattan.

At this moment — in fact — Arbogast Smith himself, seated in the front seat of the powerful though unobtrusive black Checker Marathon beside the driver, was reflecting on his own past, the curious turns and twists of which had landed him here at this most unusual spot in space and time. It was not peculiar for Arbogast Smith to go into periods of introspection concerning his own history; he did it whenever nothing much was happening. In one way, however, his periods of introspection did set him apart from much of humanity: he did not do his flashbacks in the pluperfect tense. Most introspections, in this grammatical day and age, occur in what is called the past perfect or pluperfect tense — that is, he had been, he had gone, he had went — but Arbogast Smith got along without a lot of extra “hads,” throwing one in every now and then for seasoning but generally permitting his past to remain as simple as his present.

What Arbogast Smith was reflecting on was the three generations of cops he had come from and the pressure on him to live up to them in their field. This reflection was all worked out in neat paragraphs in Arbogast Smith’s mind, even including a fully fleshed scene — dialogue and all — at a kitchen table, the whole reflection being long enough to run, if printed in a book, a good solid nine pages. He had, however, barely gotten into the first paragraph of the reminiscence (“It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...”) when he was recalled to the present by the urgent honking of a bus horn directly behind the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon in which he was seated.

“Darn!” Arbogast said, with his usual forcefulness. “I hate to keep being recalled to the present like that.”

“It’s no fun for the rest of us either,” responded the driver, whose name I have in my voluminous research somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I’ll look again later.

“Gosh, you’re morose and irritable today,” Arbogast said, his usual modest and amiable demeanor returning to him with the speed of light (one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second).

“Ah, go fumigate yourself,” retorted the driver. “And get out of the car.”

“Listen,” said Arbogast, his tone now demonstrating that no more nonsense was to be taken, “I understand you have personal problems, as haven’t we all, but we are both cops together, both ultimately concerned with the greater good above minor personal contretemps, both working together—”

The driver reached across Arbogast, opened the passenger-side door, lifted his knee, pressed the sole of his black Thom McAn shoe against Arbogast’s hip, and kicked him into the gutter, where he landed, all unnoticing, on a suicide note.

Before Arbogast could counter with a stinging denunciation of violence in interpersonal affairs, the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon had growled away in the rain, becoming instantly invisible in the stream of traffic.

Arbogast sat there, on the suicide note, and watched the traffic go by in the rain. It was funny, he reflected, how things happened in this old world. It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...

He was recalled to the present by the honking of the selfsame bus horn that had rousted him the last time. Looking up, his annoyance now reaching the point of spilling over, he saw directly to his left the right double headlight of a 42nd Street Crosstown bus. Looking up, he saw the windshield, with the big wipers going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And through the windshield he saw the angry face of Fred Dingbat.

See how the threads are beginning to cross?

Of course, Arbogast didn’t yet know it was Fred Dingbat he was seeing up there through the windshield, but he was about to find out. Getting to his feet, both angered and saddened by the necessity of what he was now going to have to do, Arbogast went around to the side of the bus and knocked forcefully on the door. “Open up,” he said. “Police.”

Fred Dingbat opened the door. “Don’t you know you were obstructing me?” he demanded. “I have miles to go before I sleep. I have—”

“Don’t you know—?”

“Just a minute, will you?” Fred insisted peevishly. “I’m not done. I have miles to go before I sleep.”

“You already said that,” Arbogast pointed out.

“I have to say it twice,” Fred explained.

“Oh. Well, in any event, I am a police officer of the law, and here is my rain-soaked badge. See?”

“It’s rusting.”

“Being a cop isn’t all apples and kickbacks, you know. In any event, in blowing your horn in the New York City limits you have violated Municipal Ordinance 147, Part C, Subparagraph 12a. Now I don’t know how often your business brings you into New York City, but around here—”

“I’m here all the time! I drive this bus!”

“Around here,” Arbogast persisted, knowing how the public in general tried to avoid hearing the truth about these situations, “we have a municipal ordinance against blowing horns. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of these by-the-book boys, but if we don’t follow the letter of the law, how do you suppose we’ll ever manage to follow its spirit?”

“I never thought of that,” Fred admitted.

Arbogast nodded. “Most members of the general public never do,” he said. “So I’m afraid I’m just going to have to give you a summons.”

“Well,” Fred said, “if you have to, I guess you have to.”

“I have to.” Arbogast took his rain-soaked summons book from his pocket. “What’s your occupation?” he asked.

“I drive this bus!”

“I see.” Arbogast wrote out the summons, gave it to Fred, and stepped out again onto the rain-soaked curb. Looking back, he gave Fred a stern look and said, “Don’t let me see you around here anymore.” And then he turned toward the Bryant Park Comfort Station. The bus drove away. The rain rained.

9:00 A.M

The man who stepped down from Fred Dingbat’s bus in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past nine that Tuesday morning, turning his coat collar up against the rain drenching an already-drenched city, his other hand clutched tightly around the handle of the black satchel in his other hand, was late for work. Seven minutes late, in fact. Unlike Mo Mowgli, however, who had also been late for work this morning, this man was going to be a lot later before he was done, because this man was not going to work.

His name was Herbert Q. Luminous, and his history was almost a cliché of what can happen to a mild-mannered bookkeeper who meets a young blonde woman in a bar and finds in her companionship the kind of self-fulfillment and excitement that had never been his at home with his aging mother or at the office with his aging NCR computer or even down in the cellar of his house on Long Island with his aging issues of CPA Journal and the model train set which was his pride and also his joy.

And now, he reflected bitterly as he stepped down to the sidewalk from the bus, he would never see that model train set again. No, nor the carefully retained issues of CPA Journal, nor his aging mother, nor the NCR computer at the office. They were all in the past now, and it was time to forget the past and start to think about the future.

It was almost a cliché the way it had happened. At forty-two years of age, Herbert Q. Luminous had taken it for granted his chances for romance and adventure had passed him by, and if truth be told he didn’t really mind all that much. He liked his life, or at least he thought he did, with its regular hours, aging along with everything else that surrounded him.

Until the night, last winter, of the big snowstorm. Herbert was driving home (his reminiscences, like Arbogast Smith’s, tended to do without the pluperfect) from the Long Island Railroad station and his car got stuck in a snowdrift. Seeing red lights not far away, he fought his way through the snow and discovered a bar, and in it — her.

She said her name was Floozey. She was young and blonde and desirable, and he found himself buying her drinks, telling her his life story (it didn’t take long), and trying to impress her with his ability at shuffleboard bowling. It was almost a cliché, but it seemed to him he knew from the instant he had seen her that they were going to be very important to one another.

After that first meeting, there had been others. He went to her apartment in the city. He went again. He went some more. He had gone again and again.

And she was expensive. She liked the finer things in life: nightclubs, dancing, expensive restaurants. And gifts: perfumes, clothing, false eyelashes. Whatever she wanted, Herbert got it for her, because she was what he wanted. It was almost a cliché, really, his falling for her like that. But he did.

She went through his savings fast, and when he had no more money he was afraid to tell her. He knew it was almost a cliché to think a thing like this, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid that if she knew he had no more money she would leave him. And he couldn’t stand that, to lose her.

That was when the embezzling started. Herbert was a good bookkeeper; he knew how to manipulate figures without leaving any trace of his handiwork. And his embezzling was modest, never very much at one time, only enough to cover the checks he wrote for the things Floozey wanted.

The general public, of course, is unaware of just how common this sort of thing is in the world we live in. It’s almost a cliché to say so, but white-collar crime like that perpetrated by Herbert Q. Luminous costs the taxpayer every bit as much as the much more publicized and dramatic sort of crime performed by the Mafia, or what is known as grimy-collar crime. The white-collar criminal, more often than not, doesn’t even belong to the Mafia, as, for instance, Herbert Q. Luminous didn’t belong to the Mafia.

And there are other differences.

Law enforcement officials and others struggle daily with the effort to get across to the general public the dangers of white-collar crime, the soaring costs, the difficulty of apprehending the perpetrator — you can’t arrest a person just because they dress nice — but on the other hand, what if everybody who wanted to get something across to the general public did get it across? What then, eh? Never thought of that, did you?

It’s almost a cliché to say so, but very few people have.

Herbert’s embezzling followed the usual pattern, as did his relationship with Floozey. But the time came when his nervousness, his apprehension about his apprehension by the forces of the law, had grown in him to the point where he couldn’t keep silent any longer, and he finally confessed to Floozey the truth about his taking funds from his employer, imploring her not to think the less of him for his crimes, as he had done them for her.

Far from condemning him, Floozey congratulated him, and demonstrated her new respect for him in most convincing fashion. It’s almost a cliché of that sort of relationship: once Floozey saw that Herbert too was less than lily-white, her behavior toward him, particularly in the area of erotic relationship which had played such an important part in their affair, developed into a new phase which Herbert found highly gratifying, not to say exhausting.

However, his depredations upon his employer did bother his conscience, and he told Floozey it was now time for them both to scrimp and save so he could begin to return the money. But she, she said, had a better idea.

It’s almost a cliché of course, but her better idea was to place wagers on horse races. “We’ll win a bundle,” she promised Herbert. “Then we’ll pay off your bosses and hit out for Acapulco, whadaya say?”

And so Herbert was sucked deeper into the maelstrom, and in less than a lustrum he was not only much deeper into his boss’s pocket, but he was also deeply in debt to a certain bookmaker known as One-Eye Fishface.

Troubles, as the old cliché would have it, tend to come in bunches. And so they did for Herbert. On the very same day — yesterday it was, to be exact — that he received word at the office that a special audit was going to be made of the books, some glimmering of his malefactions having finally been noticed (though of course no one yet suspected good old Herbert Q. Luminous), on that very same day One-Eye Fishface phoned him at the office and gave him forty-eight hours to pay off the twenty grand he owed. Or else.

Herbert at once phoned Floozey. “The jig’s up!” she cried, when he explained the situation. Then, “I tell you whatcha do,” she went on. “You don’t come to see me tonight, too dangerous, One-Eye will be watching us both to make sure we don’t take a powder outa town.”

“How can One-Eye watch us both?”

“Never mind. He can. Here’s what you do. Today, before you leave the office, you hit your boss for every dime you can wangle. You got me?”

“What good will that do?” Herbert protested. “I’ll pay off One-Eye, but the firm will surely have me arrested.”

“You don’t pay off nobody,” Floozey told him, with the quaintness of language that he found so endearing. “You get cash, in a satchel, all you can get. You take it home with you tonight. You take it to the office with you tomorrow. But you don’t go to the office.”

“I don’t?”

“You don’t. You make sure you aren’t followed, and if you ain’t, what you do is, you go to the men’s room behind the public library on Forty-second Street. You know the place I mean?”

“I think I do, yes.”

“You go there tomorrow morning, and you wait till I get word to you.”

“Then what?” he asked.

“Then the two of us hit out for Acapulco,” she told him.

“Floozey,” he said, emotion welling up within him, “I know it’s a cliché thing to say, but I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, in her modest way, and hung up.

So here he was. In the satchel he was clutching tightly in his other hand was thirty-seven thousand nine hundred forty-two dollars and twenty-five cents, the absolute maximum amount he could embezzle in one day from his employer.

And in front of him, gray and grim in the pouring rain drenching an already-drenched city, was the Bryant Park Comfort Station.

“It’s almost a cliché to think it,” Herbert muttered to himself. “But here I am, a man on the run.”

He walked slowly into the Comfort Station.

10:00 A.M

Carolina weiss, onetime russian countess now A & E mechanic, boarded the 42nd Street Crosstown bus, westbound, at Second Avenue, the southern threshold of the fashionable Upper East Side, where every terrace is haunted by reminders of the past. Nervously she extended a one-dollar bill toward the driver, who by sheerest coincidence just happened to be Fred Dingbat, who not very long before had turned the face of his giant GM city bus from eastward to westward, and who, having left the mighty United Nations Building, where men from one hundred twenty-six nations pace the corridors and worry about their own personal problems, had set out upon the crosstown trek across mighty 42nd Street, where (/• backwards from 6:00 A.M. chapter).

Fred gazed upon the bill which had just been extended toward his right ear by Carolina Weiss, onetime Russian countess now A & E mechanic. Six and one-eighth inches long by two and five-eighths inches wide, the bill in question was a medium green in color on the back and a much darker green on the face. The face, dominated by the face of George Washington, also contained across the top the legend FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE, and beneath that THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. With a numeral “1” in each corner, the bill was clearly a one-dollar bill, or in common parlance a “single.” Beneath the wording THE UNITED appeared the warning “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” and beneath the word AMERICA appeared, in bright green, the serial number: D70570627C. The serial number also appeared on the lower left, along with an indecipherable signature, that of the Treasurer of the United States. On the lower right was the information “Series 1963 A” and the perfectly legible signature “Henry H. Fowler,” that being the name of the far-seeing then-Secretary of the Treasury. The numeral “4” appeared for no apparent reason four times on the face of the bill, possibly a further hint that Paul McCartney of the Beatles died in 1966 and was quietly replaced by the winner of a look-alike contest.

Fortunately, Fred Dingbat didn’t see the back of the bill, which is much more complicated even than the front and would take much longer to describe. But if he had ...

No. Carolina Weiss, nervously, extended the bill face-side facing Fred’s face only.

To which Fred replied, “Lady, we don’t give change, lady. Don’t you read the outside of the bus?”

Disconcerted, but nevertheless pleased that the driver had somehow been aware of her former noble status — else why call her “lady”? — Carolina said, in pretty confusion, “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t usually travel by this means of conveyance.”

“If you people are going to go on slumming expeditions,” Fred announced savagely, “you’re going to have to expect to take the rough with the smooth. Now, I have a schedule to maintain — are you coming along on this voyage into the unknown or aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes!” Carolina cried. “I must! I must!”

“Well, I don’t give change. You need coins or token.”

“You see,” Carolina explained, “for the first seven years of my marriage, I thought everything was—”

“If you don’t mind, lady,” Fred declaimed imperviously, “I’d appreciate it if you’d limit your reminiscences to internal monologue. You’re not supposed to talk to the driver while the vehicle is in motion, and as of now this vehicle is in motion.” Then he winked and said, “I won this bus in a crap game with Vincent Impelliteri, far-seeing then-Mayor of this mighty metropolis. Interested?”

“You can keep your reminiscences buttoned up too, young man,” Carolina replied, with the kind of haughty grandeur that goes a long way toward explaining the Russian Revolution.

Annoyed, Fred operated the mighty omnibus in a forward manner in a way so abrupt as to cause Carolina to lose her balance and totter backwards three tottering steps into a green plastic seat, which fortunately happened at the time to be unoccupied. Sitting there, shaken by her experience, Carolina paused a moment to catch her breath and reorganize her shattered thoughts.

“You haven’t paid your fare yet,” Fred reminded her, not unkindly, having now regretted the impetuosity which had produced his impetuous behavior of a moment before.

“Just a minute,” Carolina said. She was still clutching the handle of the valpack containing all of that portion of her worldly goods which she had chosen to take with her on this Grand Adventure, this break with the past, the endless round of misunderstandings, jealousy, petty bickering, which her marriage had at last come down to. If only ...

No. This was no time for reminiscence, not even in the form of internal monologue. This was a time for action.

Opening the valpack and spreading it out along the central aisle of the bus was a matter of a few seconds’ furious activity. Then, shielding her actions from the gaze of curious passengers all about her, Carolina knelt upon the opened valpack and delved into the pocket containing all the money she possessed in the world: two hundred sixty-two thousand eighty dollars, plus her childhood piggybank. Not much, but it would have to be enough, enough for the fresh start with Roland.

It was to the piggybank that Carolina instinctively turned now, in her moment of need. The piggybank was the last reminder of Imperial Russia, the Russia of her childhood: happy days on the Volga, etc. Holding the artifact in her two hands as she knelt there on the spread-eagle valpack in the bus aisle, Carolina thought back to those halcyon years, and a trace of a tear appeared in the corner of one eye. The right one. Speak, Memory! Carolina thought, and clutched the piggybank — named Rosebud, because of its curly tail — to her bosom.

The bus, meantime, had stopped at Third Avenue, where several passengers disembarked and several soon-to-be passengers stepped aboard. It was necessary for all of them to walk the length of the open valpack, and one of the new arrivals commented to his friend, an internationally famous plastic surgeon, “I see they’re finally carpeting the buses.”

“Lumpy, though,” commented the friend.

“What can you expect from a fusion administration?” riposted the first, and both fell to irrepressible giggling.

Carolina, recalled to the present by the people walking on her valpack — and on her ankles, if the truth be known — returned from her reverie and briskly shook some change out of the piggybank, then reverently replaced the latter in its valpack pocket, briskly zippered the valpack shut again, briskly got to her feet, and marched briskly to Fred Dingbat’s side, where she asked, “How much to the Bryant Park Comfort Station?”

Fred gazed upon her. “That’s for men only,” he informed her.

“Let me worry about that, Yarmulka,” she said, employing a Russian term of contemptuous endearment usually reserved for pet mice. “Just tell me how much.” She jingled coins in her hand. “I can pay,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

11:00 A.M

Through a window high in the United Nations Building overlooking the throbbing megalopolitan core of the Bos-Wash megalopolis complex, General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, right-wing dictator of the tiny South American nation of Guacamole, watched the traffic far below on East 42nd Street, and most particularly the impressive length of the gleaming top of the 42nd Street Crosstown bus. How many of the riders of that bus, he wondered, really understood the changes that were to be brought into their lives by the new megalopolitan construct in city planning and most particularly in the area of high-speed interurban and intraurban mass transit? Very few, he supposed. Although city planners and other concerned individuals in municipal and state and federal governments were undertaking at this very moment a massive effort to educate the general public, the man in the street by and large remained blissfully unaware of the incredible complexity of the changes being wrought with incredible speed in his everyday life by the steady swift advance of incredible technology.

If these seem like unusual reflections for the dictator of an obscure South American nation to be reflecting, let it be pointed out at once that General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, a gross little man with a pencil moustache and an arrogant demeanor, was on the threshold of being the former dictator of Guacamole, that obscure South American nation, partly as a result of the yearning of Guacamolians everywhere to be free, but also as a result of a minor error on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States’ super-hush-hush espionage organization, little known outside the innermost circles of deeply disturbed Washington, which had for the last three years been supplying arms, funds, and mimeograph paper to the insurgents in Guacamole instead of to the Federales Government.

General Tortilla had learned of the upcoming palace revolt just barely in time to make quick arrangements to get out of the country, first converting all his assets within Guacamole into cash, buying diamonds with the cash, and traveling to New York with the diamonds cleverly concealed as decorations spread out on the chest of his red and gold and blue and green and yellow uniform. Most of the money he had bled from his native land over the years now resided, of course, in numbered Swiss bank accounts, but the diamonds swathing his chest accounted for upwards of half a million dollars in addition to the unnumbered millions in the numbered accounts.

He had gotten out of the country by arranging an urgent meeting here at the United Nations Building in New York City, crossroads of a million private lives. The meeting, of course, would not take place. But the revolutionaries back home didn’t know that. They were still there, in green and lovely Guacamole, waiting for him to return so they could lop off his head with their machismos.

New York was to be his new home, at least temporarily, so naturally he was concerning himself now with local problems, of which the knotty one of mass transportation was naturally at the forefront of his mind. So much depends on the quick delivery of people and goods from one spot to another within the growing complexity of the new megalopolis concept. The Boston-Washington complex — familiarly known as Bos-Wash to the city planners struggling to keep up with the dizzy pace of modern technology — was in the forefront of that urban battlefield.

A sound recalled General Tortilla to the present. Turning, he saw entering the room, pistols drawn, three men he knew to be a part of the conspiracy against him, three men he had thought to be safely in South America!

“So,” the three said, as one man. “You thought you would escape the justice of an aroused people, General Tortilla.”

“You got me wrong,” General Tortilla protested, and abruptly flung himself through the connecting door to the next office. Locking the connecting door behind him, he headed for the hallway, pausing only to grab up a black London Fog raincoat hanging on an old friend of his, a research biochemist, standing in the corner. Not only would the raincoat conceal the diamonds winking and sparkling on his chest, there was the further consideration that it was, in fact, raining out, and the raincoat — if the London Fog people could be counted on — would go far toward keeping him dry, should his travels take him outside.

As he was convinced they would. Already a hammering had started at the door he had just locked, and which he had no intention of unlocking and opening. Instead, he hurried to the other door, which led to the hall, and then down the hall to the elevators.

He was just boarding an elevator when he saw the three maddened pursuers in maddened pursuit. They would, he knew, be following him on the very next elevator. Given the Bos-Wash response generally to the mass transit problems within its borders, he doubted that next elevator would be very long in coming.

At ground level, he raced through the opulent surroundings, described in detail in a pamphlet that can be ordered direct from the United Nations, U.N. Plaza, New York, N.Y. Outside into the rain drenching an already-drenched city he raced, looking frantically about for some means of escape.

What was that ahead of him?

The 42nd Street Crosstown bus.

General Tortilla started to run.

12:00 NOON

Everybody went to lunch.

1:00 P.M

Mo Mowgli sat at the tiny desk in his tiny office just off the main operating area of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, crossroads of a million private lives, and counted paper towels. The detail work in this job was a hundred times more than any layman would ever understand.

Actually, Mo’s “office” was the area designated on all official whiteprints as the “storage closet,” but several months ago Mo had attached a two-by-four to the rear wall of the closet to serve as a desk, and it was here, ever since, that he had made all his executive decisions.

It sometimes seemed to Mo that middle management didn’t fully comprehend the problems of the men in the field. Otherwise, surely they would have given him some enclosed area of his own here at the Comfort Station, and not expect him to merely stand around out in the operating area all the time, leaning against the wall.

For, consider: Not only was Mo more productive when he had an executive area of his own, not only were his decisions more certain, more rapid, and more likely to be accurate, but inside the storage closet here he could avoid those embarrassing incidents with individuals who come to the Comfort Station to meet new friends and who frequently mistook the motivation in Mo’s seemingly aimless hanging around. Mo had been invited to join many festive occasions as a result of this mis-apprehension, and had found the social whirl around him, while not exactly tempting, nevertheless disruptive of orderly executive thought. He was better off, he decided, in the closet.

The sort of swinging, amoral social activity which centered on the men’s room behind the main branch of the New York Public Library, also known as the Bryant Park Comfort Station, was in no essential way different from the kind of swinging, amoral social activity centering on other kinds of watering spots throughout the city: singles bars, for instance. The only essential difference was that in the Comfort Station virtually all the participants were men.

There were good reasons for this. Airline stewardesses in New York City tend to cluster in apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on and around West End Avenue, three and four girls sharing each apartment, the apartments familiarly known to those in the know as Airline Stewardesses’ Apartments. Secretaries, on the other hand, who tend to live in Queens and Brooklyn and other places outside the city, do their metropolitan carousing in the aforementioned singles bars, on and around Third Avenue in the Upper East Side. Which, as is obvious after only a cursory glance at a city map, leaves the center of the island — 42nd Street — to men.

Now, quickly scanning his wrist chronometer, which announced to him a time of seven minutes past the hour of one post meridiem, Mo Mowgli decided the moment had arrived for another of his periodic checks throughout the entire operational area. First carefully putting everything on his desk in order, as was his invariable habit, he got to his feet, left his office, and proceeded across the main floor in the direction of the stalls.

Stalls 1, 2, and 5, Mo saw, were at the moment employed in their primary function. Entering the unoccupied stalls, one after another down the straight rank along one wall, he checked swiftly for a sufficiency of paper, for a maintenance of sanitary standards, and for a continued proper functioning of all equipment. Finding all in order, he turned to the stand-up equipment on the opposite wall, familiarly known to the crew at Plumbing Supplies as “urinals.” These, too, passed muster, Mo was pleased to see, their silent white porcelain perfection a mute testimony to his continued dedication to the task life had given him in lieu of the responsibility he craved.

Three of the “urinals” were in use at the moment, and Mo was about to turn away and return to his office when it struck him that one of those three men looked vaguely familiar. Doctor Greenbaum? No, but nevertheless familiar. Where had he seen that neck, those slightly hunched shoulders, those slightly parted feet, that neat haircut before?

Here! Right here! Mo snapped his fingers in surprise when he realized that the customer currently paying attendance on “Urinal” Number 4 was the exact same customer who had been paying attendance on “Urinal” Number 4 two hours ago, when Mo had made his last check of the operational area.

The poor man must have kidney troubles, Mo thought, and was about to turn away and retire to his office when a sudden suspicion entered his mind with the weight of intuitive truth. Was this customer present again or was he present yet? In other words, had he been standing there at “Urinal” Number 4, unmoving, for the last two hours?

It seemed impossible, and yet ... Somehow, Mo suspected there was more to this situation than met the eye.

Still, he did not respond with any overt action. Years of dealing with the public had taught Mo to be cautious and circumspect in all dealings with the public until such time as he had all the facts at his command and was prepared to act with the assurance that he was definitely making the right move. Any other course, as he well knew from his years of dealing with the public, would be folly. Therefore, he moved with caution and circumspection in dealing with this representative of the public, so as not to be guilty of folly.

He pretended to use “Urinal” Number 3.

A glance to the right was sufficient to demonstrate that the individual under scrutiny was not actually employing “Urinal” Number 4, but was merely standing in front of it, just as Mo himself was not actually employing “Urinal” Number 3, but was merely standing in front of it.

Another glance to the right was sufficient to demonstrate to Mo that the individual under scrutiny had a vague, faraway, glazed look in his eyes, and that his lips appeared to be moving slightly, as though he were whispering to himself. Mo cocked an ear, but could hear nothing.

Was the individual under scrutiny perhaps suffering from some sort of illness? Should a medical specialist be summoned at once from the contemplation of the shambles he had made of his own life to give succor and assistance to the individual under scrutiny? Or was he perhaps, this individual under this scrutiny, a nut: the sort of unfortunate who sits beside you on the bus, starts twitching his lower jaw, and commences a long, belligerent, one-sided conversation with Harold Stassen?

Tentatively, Mo reached out his right hand and, with the thumb and first two fingers, tapped the individual under scrutiny tentatively on the forearm, while at the same time with his mouth Mo said: “Excuse me.”

The glaze over the individual under scrutiny’s eyes crumbled to confusion, and he babbled, “It was a long time ago that I remembered my mother got the phone call—”

Mo, quickly retracting the hand touching the individual under scrutiny, said, “What?”

The individual under scrutiny blinked. “What did you say?”

“I said excuse me.”

The individual under scrutiny looked hopeful. “Are you trying to pick me up?”

“Oh,” Mo said, in some personal distaste, stepping backwards with alacrity from “Urinal” Number 3. “You’re one of those,” he said.

“I am if you are,” the individual under scrutiny said. “On the other hand, I’m not if you’re not.”

“I’m not,” Mo said.

“Too bad,” said the individual under scrutiny. “It might have made a nice change of pace.”

Mo, not at all easy in his mind, retired to his office and said no more.

2:00 P.M

It had been a long hard day for Fred Dingbat, but he didn’t really mind: that was a part of the price one paid — and willingly, gladly — for the right to be at the center of things, here at the heart of the civilized world, operating the flagship of the metropolitan transit system, the mighty 42nd Street Crosstown bus. He had seen much these last eight hours, Fred had, much that he would remember and reflect on for long in the hours and days ahead, but for now his responsibility was nearing its end. Three minutes to two, he was told by his wristwatch: he was making his last westbound run, and would soon be relieved by the two-to-ten man, Seward Looby, a friend of Fred’s for years, ever since that time in Korea when ...

But no. That was in the past, let the past bury the past, there was to be no more thinking of the past from now on.

Nearing the Twelfth Avenue terminus of his route, Fred peered through the forty-four-inch-by-ninety-inch windshield of his omnibus and saw waiting on the sidewalk there the familiar figure in bus-driver gray, his cap at a jaunty angle, a pipe clenched at a jaunty angle in his teeth, his head cocked at a jaunty angle as he waited for the bus to arrive.

But wait just a minute! A pipe clenched at a jaunty angle in his teeth? But Seward Looby didn’t smoke! That figure waiting there, so familiar, dressed in the familiar bus-driver gray, cap at a jaunty angle, head cocked at a jaunty angle, could not be — because of the pipe clenched at a jaunty angle in his teeth — Seward Looby after all, but must be someone else.

A forebodal feeling fell flat on Fred.

And now, the distance rapidly closing between the large bus and the waiting individual, Fred could see that in truth it was not Seward Looby but was the man known to both Fred and Seward Looby — and so many others — as Supervisor Cracky. What was Supervisor Cracky doing here, instead of Su? Fred’s forebode increased.

The bus reached the intersection and pulled to a stop at the curb. Fred opened the doors and the last passengers — a wino trying to forget and an angry couple from Fair Haven, Vermont, off to the auto pound to reclaim their towed-away Studebaker — stepped down to the sidewalk and left Fred without a thought. Such is the general public.

Supervisor Cracky swung aboard with the litheness that belied his age. Few, looking at him, realized that Supervisor Cracky was one hundred seventy-four years old. At times, when Fred realized just how much past Supervisor Cracky must be oppressed by, he shook his head in wonder that the Grand Old Man, as the guys at the bus garage appelled him, managed to go on at all, much less to be the unending source of inspiration and encouragement that he was to all the men beneath him in the chain of command.

Looking at Supervisor Cracky now, Fred saw that beneath the jaunty exterior of the other’s façade Supervisor Cracky was in fact troubled. Perhaps very troubled. Fred’s forebode fleshed out to an apprehense. “What is it, chief?” he asked, his voice husky with emotion.

“I’m afraid there’s trouble, Fred,” Supervisor Cracky said, his voice husky with emotion. “Do you think you can carry on for a while?”

His voice husky with emotion, Fred said, “Is it — Su?”

“Su’s oldest,” began Supervisor Cracky, his voice husky with emotion. “Matilda. You know her, don’t you?”

Fred could only nod. He remembered Matilda: a cheerful, radiant child he was wont to dandle on his knee. At the memory, his knee once again seemed to feel the tender weight of her, dandling there.

“She’s come down with bubonic plague,” Supervisor Cracky said, his voice husky with emotion. “The whole neighborhood in Corona’s been cordoned off. You can understand the potentiality of plague in a high-density-population area like New York City, of course.”

Fred could only nod. The general public probably wouldn’t be able to understand, but he did.

“The police have the whole area closed off,” Supervisor Cracky said, his voice husky with emotion. “They’re washing everybody’s mouth out with soap, but God alone knows how long it will take.”

Fred could only nod.

“It’s all complicated by the fact that a kidnapped sex-symbol movie queen is known to be somewhere in the area,” Supervisor Cracky went on, his voice husky with emotion, “with her kidnappers. Also, a pitiful young escaped mental patient has vowed to fling himself from the roof of every Cape Cod in Queens and thus slowly beat himself to death, and he too is alleged to be in the same area.”

Fred could only nod.

His voice husky with emotion, Supervisor Cracky said, “On the other hand, because of flashflooding in Fort Tryon Park, a hell of a leak in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and an anti-bus-exhaust demonstration by well-meaning if misguided individuals in the Washington Park area — the bus routes were determined before most of the demonstrators moved into those apartments, but try to be logical with the general public — the fact is, I have no substitute bus driver to take our friend Looby’s place. Fred? Do you think you can carry on alone?”

Fred could only nod.

3:00 P.M

It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...

“Excuse me, fella. Do you mind?”

Recalled to the present by these words, Arbogast Smith blinked rapidly and looked about to see a truculent man with wet hands standing in front of him. An attempted pickup? His blood stirring at the thought of a little action after all — why else be recalled to the present? — Arbogast feigned a limp-wristed manner and said, “Did you want me?”

“I want you,” said the truculent man, “to move the hell over so I can get at the paper towels.”

“Oh! I am sorry!”

“Faggot,” muttered the truculent man, as Arbogast stepped to one side. He muttered and mumbled to himself while drying his hands, then rounded on Arbogast again to declare, “Why don’t you faggots go back to Russia?”

Arbogast considered showing his badge and explaining to the truculent man what he really was and why he was really here, but of course that was known as “blowing one’s cover,” which might simply confirm the truculent man in his misunderstanding. Arbogast decided to say nothing, to swallow his pride for the good of the job he was here to do. Or would that also be misconstruable by the truculent man?

Hands at last dry, the truculent man made his departure, in the process stepping quite severely on Arbogast’s left foot. It had been done deliberately, of course, there was no question about that in Arbogast’s mind. But try to prove it in a court of law. What the general public — and the Supreme Court — failed to understand was the actual real-life problem of the actual real-life cop on the beat. (Another unfortunate phrase under the circumstances, that one.)

Oh, well. The truculent man was now gone, and a sort of waiting-for-Godot silence had returned to the Bryant Park Comfort Station, the unlikely setting for Arbogast Smith’s attempt to make a name for himself in the ranks of New York’s finest.

He briefly reconsidered the janitor, the fellow who spent most of his time in the closet and who had made some sort of oddball overture a couple of hours ago. Put the nab on him after all? It wasn’t as though the janitor — custodian, they liked to be called, as he remembered — didn’t have a legitimate right to be here. But on the other hand, think of the psychological implications: why would a man choose a job in a place like this?

Arbogast cleared his throat with a sudden uneasiness, remembering that he too had opted for a job that had led him here.

All right, he’d leave the custodian alone for now. But if nothing else came up in the course of the day, it might not be a bad idea to put the nab on the custodian just to show the people downtown — at headquarters — that he, Arbogast Smith, was actually doing something around here.

In the meantime, he took a little walk around the area, counting shoes. There were still no more than two to be seen under the door of any stall. Unfortunate.

But the regulars were still here. He remembered them well, having observed each of them as he had entered his stall, keeping a mental file of their appearance in case he should ever need to know what any of them looked like. It was a cop kind of thing to do.

In Stall Number 1 was a nervous, middle-aged, balding sort of fellow with a satchel, an accountant type. He’d been in there since around nine o’clock this morning.

In Stall Number 2 was some kind of long-haired hippie with a valpack. He’d been there since around ten.

And in Stall Number 5 was a stocky foreign-looking fellow with a pencil moustache, who’d showed up a little before lunch.

It was awful to have bowel problems. Arbogast knew; they ran in his family. He shook his head with sympathy for the three sufferers in the stalls.

But each of the three was still alone, and therefore not Arbogast Smith’s official concern. Turning away, he ambled slowly toward the sinks, his mind turning to thoughts of the long trail that had led him, from his mother’s knee, to this very spot.

It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...

4:00 P.M

Lance Cavendish strode westward on 42nd Street, eyes flashing in his dark-hued face as he surveyed the scene. Rain rained, drenching the already-drenched city, but Lance was well protected within his Bill Blass raincoat and his Italia boots. His Afro hairdo, sculptured in the shape of a flamingo standing on one foot, was tucked away protectively under his Christian Dior hat, and his sensitive hands were protected by buff gloves from Countess Mara.

Like most Americans of African descent, Lance Cavendish was a Renaissance man, whose cool humor and good competence were a legend where’er he would wander. Having finished the architectural plans for the new Black Studies Center at Yeshiva University earlier than anticipated, Lance had taken time out from his busy schedule to present to the New York Public Library the original manuscript sheet music of his “Separate But Equal Cantata,” a defense of community control of neighborhood schools from which the pupils have been bussed, and was now on his way to the West Side Airlines Terminal, whence he would delimousine and deplane for Washington, D.C., to return to his seat in Congress, where he had a vital speech to deliver on offshore fishing rights before hastening off yet once more; he was to open in Las Vegas’ Sahara Hotel in just three days and was still to decide whether to appear as a singer or a comedian.

Now, striding westward on 42nd Street, humming his cantata while mentally composing a sonnet to the memory of Leadbelly, Lance Cavendish observed the rain splashing onto the sidewalk, running waterily in the gutter, spattering on the passing traffic, dribbling down the front of his own raincoat, and an expression of inner unease touched his handsome brown face. Looking about, he spied ahead through the splashing rain the stony contours of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, and his level amused eyes lit up in an expression of anticipatory relief. His stride increased in length, and purposefulness, and his eyes fairly sparkled.

But then, as the Comfort Station came closer, the expression in Lance Cavendish’s clear-seeing eyes grew more doubtful. Can it be? those piercing eyes seemed to say.

Lance Cavendish came to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the building. His keen vision observed the oval window in the street side wall, observed the entrance over on the right, even observed the statue up in Bryant Park behind the Comfort Station: a green-garbed green man in a frock coat, leaning on a book on a pedestal, holding what appears to be a bag of peanuts in his hands.

(Had Lance Cavendish looked carefully at the north face of this statue’s base, he would have seen the following inscription:

ERECTED BY

VOLUNTARY SUBSCRIPTION

UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

OF THE

STATE OF NEW YORK

1885

And had he, further, looked carefully at the inscription on the south face of the base, Lance Cavendish would have discovered that the person represented hereon was none other than the far-seeing William Earl Dodge, beloved of millions. Lance Cavendish didn’t look, however; he was otherwise engaged.)

After having fully observed the street side of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, Lance Cavendish strode to the park entrance just to the right of the Comfort Station and slowly but stridingly made a complete circuit of the building, going all the way around it and then coming all the way back around again in the opposite direction, until once more he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the cold gray building.

There was no entrance for him.

Lance Cavendish shuffled away.

5:00 P.M

The hours crawled by for Carolina Weiss, former Russian countess now A & E mechanic, every hour seeming to last sixty minutes. Sitting in Stall Number 2 at the Bryant Park Comfort Station, crossroads of a million private lives, she wiled away the wily hours by alternating reflections on the events which had led her here to this place at this time with speculations on what had become of Roland, who was to meet her here at this place at this time, but who had not as yet put in an appearance: the whole leavened with a soupçon of general philosophic commentary on the overall subject of relations, both marital and extra.

Who was it who said the bourgeoisie, having solved all the real problems of human life, had to invent adultery to keep from dying of boredom? Well, no matter: it doesn’t sound like someone we’d care to invite to the house anyway, so who cares what his name is? (The driver’s name! Arbogast Smith’s driver, from 8:00 A.M. Elwood Tripe, that was it! Elwood Tripe. All facts eventually rise, like corpses, to the surface.)

When Carolina Weiss began to reflect back upon her past, it was perfectly true that she had a past well worth reflecting back on. Born to an aristocratic Russian family still living in their beloved mother country years after the Communist overlords had begun to lord it over their unhappy nation, Carolina and her parents and brothers and sisters had managed for years to hide their nobility by overeating. It was Carolina who, at the age of nine, inadvertently gave the game away. Her class taking a compulsory tour of a nationalized mattress factory, Carolina had slipped and fallen from a catwalk, falling a scant two feet and landing on a pile of twenty superthick mattresses. No one thought anything of the incident, except that Carolina complained bitterly that something sharp had dug into her hip when she’d landed on the top mattress. The factory foreman announced this to be impossible, and patted the mattress all over to demonstrate that there was nothing sharp or hard within it. Nevertheless, the child continued to weep and to complain, and her teacher noticed a large bruise beginning to form on the youngster’s hip. The foreman, puzzled, had the top mattress taken apart by factory employees: it contained no foreign matter. Very well, he would have the second mattress taken apart, and then the third, and then the fourth ...

On the floor, beneath the twentieth mattress, there was found a single pea.

No one said anything at the time, but Carolina noted the glances she received the rest of that schoolday, and fortunately had the presence of mind to report the incident to her parents that evening.

Her father turned white — not that he’d ever really been red. Putting down his dinner shovel, “We are undone,” he said. And, “We must flee.”

Suiting action to words, the family fled that very night to Paris, where all became cab drivers, until the onslaught of the Nazi hordes forced them once more to flee, this time across the mighty Atlantic Ocean to the New World, where the family members split up, each finding his own niche in the Land of Opportunity. Carolina’s father became a famed Hollywood director, the man who did the gypsy number in the middle of every Abbott and Costello movie, until the castanets drove him insane and one memorable day he flung himself and his Stutz Bearcat into the sea off Big Sur.

Carolina’s mother became an internationally known Washington hostess and also had a nice line of frozen cookies. Her older brother went into psychiatry and was never seen again, the younger brother opened a factory which supplies pencils to William F. Buckley, and the family prefers not to discuss Carolina’s sisters. As to Carolina herself, she became an aircraft and engine mechanic out at Kennedy International Airport, crossroads of a million private lives, most of them at the same time.

And she married. Oh, it seemed like a good idea at the time, when big, bluff, handsome Derek Weiss came into her life. Looking at him across the table in the candle-lit restaurant, she thought, He’s a man. He’s all man. Perfectly true, and she was a woman. And so they got married.

Perhaps it would have been all right if they’d had children. Perhaps it would have been all right if they’d had more in common. But there she was in her Eastern Air Lines coveralls out to Kennedy Airport, and where was Derek? Derek, a high-powered attorney, was usually down in Washington arguing cases before the Supreme Court, crossroads of a million private lives.

But it might still have been all right if big, bluff, handsome Roland Redwing hadn’t come into her life. Looking at him across the table in the candle-lit restaurant, she thought, He’s a man. He’s all man. True again, and she was still a woman. And so they went to a lot of motels, crossroads of a million private lives.

What she didn’t know, of course — and it’s a violation of point-of-view to tell this but what the hell — what she didn’t know was that Roland Redwing was a confirmed bigamist, a man who traveled from city to city, from state to state, taking lonely wealthy women away from their husbands, marrying them, and leaving them sadder, wiser, and much, much poorer. Under a wide variety of aliases, Roland Redwing was wanted in every state in the Union and several European nations as well. Roland Redwing really was the crossroads of a million private lives.

And Roland Redwing, at this very moment, was in custody out in Merrick, Long Island, having been spotted by an alert rookie cop who’d recognized him from his wanted poster at the station. (Actually, the alert rookie cop had thought he was arresting Milton “Mad Dog” Mendelsohn, who did bear a superficial resemblance to Roland Redwing — they both had receding foreheads — and by the time Roland realized the mistake he’d already given up and confessed all.)

None of this, howsomever, did Carolina know, and so she continued to sit in the cramped stall with her valpack and wait for Roland, believing he would get here at any moment and the two of them would flee together forever to the sunlit Caribbean with all of Derek’s money, which was in the valpack.

Entering the men-only Comfort Station had not been at all difficult, as Roland had promised. Disguising her femininity by wearing a set of love beads around her neck, Carolina had simply worn her own clothing and hair, and had entered with no questions asked, and none answered. And now here she was.

And where, she wondered, was Roland?

6:15 P.M

Fingers Fogelheimer looked at his watch: it was five minutes to six. Taking advantage of the rush-hour confusion all around him, Fingers hurried across the sidewalk, carrying his attaché case, and ducked into the Bryant Park Comfort Station. Had he been seen by any of the boys? He didn’t think so.

In the attaché case, filling it so the sides of the case bulged like the body of a hippopotamus, was a manuscript. Fingers Fogelheimer had written it, evenings and weekends over the last three years, whenever he had a moment or two away from his regular job, which was one-of-the-boys in the Flatbush-Canarsie mob. Now the manuscript was done, a publisher was eagerly waiting to publish it, a paperback house was eagerly waiting to reprint it, and a motion-picture company was eagerly waiting to make a movie reminiscent of it. And they would all pay, pay through the nose. Fingers Fogelheimer had finally hit it big.

If he wasn’t caught first by the boys.

Eustace “Fingers” Fogelheimer had grown up with your usual disadvantaged background leading so often to crime, as it had done in this particular instance as well. That his father was a drunk was Fingers’ first clue to his probable future, and his mother’s improbable sweetness, endless patience, and voluminous bromides served as a strong confirmation. Still, Fingers hoped he might yet be the exception that proved the rule — as his mother might have put it — until that fateful day when’ he’d come home to discover his brother had become a priest. From that moment, Fingers Fogelheimer knew his doom was sealed: the very next day, he went and joined the Flatbush-Canarsie mob.

Through the years, being one of the boys had been a generally okay way to make a living, and if it hadn’t been for this manuscript now bursting the bonds of this attaché case, no doubt Fingers would have gone on with the mob right up till retirement. Unfortunately, however, Fingers tended to be a brooder, and one of the things he tended to brood about was the bad press that organized crime kept getting from the newspapers.

“If the general public understood the situation,” he used to brood, “they wouldn’t bad-mouth us like this all the time.” But of course the general public didn’t really understand the situation, and how could they? Who had ever explained to the general public just what the situation was?

Then one day, Fingers thought: “Why not me?”

Why not indeed? Pursuing the thought, Fingers realized he could write a book, a big fat book that would explain the situation to the general public. But how to get the general public to read this big fat book? That was the problem. The general public usually tended to shy away from big fat books that explained the situation. Any situation.

Then one day, Fingers had an inspiration: “I’ll make believe it’s a novel!”

And thus it came about. The novel, titled Underworld, ran seven million words and completely explained the situation. And never stopped pretending it was a novel.

What Fingers did was, he took all the different kinds of problems and crises that could possibly arise in the different facets of the mob’s operation, and he pretended that all of these crises had occurred at the exact same time, over the same three-day period. Watching the different facets of the mob react to all of these crisis situations, the book demonstrated just how the mob was organized and what its operations were like.

As to the characters in the book, Fingers decided to give them all problems at home, very middle-class middle-aged problems so that the middle-class middle-aged people who would read the book would be able to identify with the characters, which saved a lot of trouble in developing characterization. Switching back and forth from character to character, and within each character’s section switching back and forth between the mob crisis and the personal problem, Fingers gradually developed a panorama of the modern world a hundred miles wide and a silly millimeter deep.

Unfortunately, just as he was about to deliver the final draft of the manuscript, some of the mob bigwigs found out about the book — publishers and mob bigwigs play bridge together all the time, that’s how they found out — and got it into their heads it was an exposé. Fingers tried to explain it wasn’t an exposé, it was simply a matter of trying to demonstrate to the general public some of the problems and difficulties being faced by their men in organized crime, but the mob bigwigs couldn’t see it that way, and Fingers had just narrowly escaped with his life and his manuscript.

And now he was on the run. If he could get to his publisher’s office, he knew he’d be safe. In the meantime, he had taken cover here in the Bryant Park Comfort Station, where he would lie low for an hour or two until the boys drifted away to look for him in some other part of the city.

Looking around, Fingers saw nothing very interesting. Through a door, he could see one bozo sitting on a chair in a closet, counting paper towels. Another bozo was standing at the sinks, his hands in warm water, his expression glazed as he mumbled at his reflection in the mirror.

What about the stalls? He could see feet under the doors of numbers 1, 2, and 5. Down at the far end was Number 8: he went down there, toting the attaché case, and locked himself inside.

7:00 p.m

An overview of the Bryant Park Comfort Station would be a difficult thing to achieve, though one might climb one of the none-too-sturdy-looking trees in Bryant Park. But still, there would be the roof in the way. And today, with the third day of rain drenching an already-drenched city, the people inside could be grateful for that roof, you may be sure of that.

But let us, in imagination, strip away that roof and view the Bryant Park Comfort Station from above, seeing all the actors in today’s drama at once, each in his or her specified place in the scheme of things, in the construction of a tapestry the complexity of which probably isn’t at all appreciated or understood by the general public.

Well. Be that as it may. Looking down at this point from on high, we see below us the magnificent central office of the New York Public Library, with its stone lions out front. And behind: Bryant Park, extending from the rear door of the library westward to Sixth Avenue, and from the south side of West 42nd Street southward to West 40th Street. (There is no West 41st Street here, though there is elsewhere in Manhattan, which really gets the out-of-towners. Such fun!)

However. Narrowing the range of our bird’s-eye view, we see, along the northern perimeter of Bryant Park, just off the West 42nd Street sidewalk, the small square stone building we have come to know and love during these many months together, the Bryant Park Comfort Station. Without its roof. Or that is to say, with an invisible roof, so the people inside don’t get rained on.

Ah, the people inside. Gazing down through the invisible roof, we see Mo Mowgli hard at work in the storage closet, back bowed with responsibility. Out in the main operations area, Arbogast Smith has switched his station back to the “urinals” again and is standing there with his forehead pressed against the cool tile as he mumbles to himself. In Stall Number 1, clutching his satchel to his chest and wondering when on earth Floozey is going to arrive, is the absconding bookkeeper, Herbert Q. Luminous. Unknown to him, in the very next stall, the one numbered 2, clutching her valpack to her chest and wondering when on earth Roland is going to arrive, is Carolina Weiss, former Russian countess now A & E mechanic, who has no idea of the existence of Herbert Q. Luminous one scant partition away. Stalls 3 and 4 do not concern us, but in Stall Number 5, clutching his diamond-studded chest to his chest and wondering when it will be safe to amscray out of here, sits onetime dictator now amateur transit specialist General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, knowing nothing of the occupants of stalls 1 and 2. (And what is that he is writing on the stall walls, over and over, his expression wistful and sad? GUACAMOLE.) Tippy-toeing past stalls 6 and 7, we come to Stall 8, where, clutching his attach case to his chest and knowing nothing of any of the other dramas being played out in this small building today, Fingers Fogelheimer waits for the protective blanket of darkness to blanket him protectively so he can make his life-and-death dash for his publisher’s office over on Third Avenue.

But what is this? The scene shifts to the street outside the Comfort Station: the Crosstown bus has once more safely threaded the perils of Metropolis and is coming to a safe and sane stop at the curb. Fred Dingbat, still filling in for the absent Seward Looby, has completed his thirteenth consecutive hour at the controls of the mighty GM Citycruiser, and is ready to go on as long as the emergency requires him to stay in the driver’s seat. Pride and training tell, as they always do.

But what is this? Off Fred Dingbat’s bus, this trip, and into the rain which is pelting down onto the city from the sky, which is above the city, drenching an already-drenched city, step four swarthy men in London Fog raincoats. All have pencil moustaches. They stand on the soaked sidewalk as Fred Dingbat steers the mighty omnibus back into the swirl of evening traffic. Rain dribbles down the backs of their necks.

But what is this? A shadowy figure separates itself from the shadowy figures of trees in Bryant Park. A swarthy man in a London Fog raincoat with a pencil moustache, he hurries quickly to the little group of swarthy men in London Fog raincoats with pencil moustaches, and the five converse together in rapid undertones. In Spanish.

But what is this? The five figures turn as one man. They move as one man to the entrance to the Bryant Park Comfort Station. They enter as one man. Then they become five men again, separating, spreading out in all directions through the room like a group of men spreading out through a room.

One of them bumps inadvertently into Arbogast Smith, whom he had taken to be a phantasmagoria. “It was a long time ago that I remembered my mother got the phone call ...” Arbogast began, but the man cut him off with a guttural “Por favor, gringo.”

Within Stall Number 5, General Tortilla, half-dozing, came suddenly alert at the sound of his native tongue. Bending way down, a tough thing for a little fat guy like that to do, he peered under the bottom of the door. “Madre Dios!” he exclaimed under his breath when he saw the five swarthy men in London Fog raincoats with pencil moustaches who had spread out in all directions through the room.

Sitting up again, General Tortilla pondered his future, which was beginning to look shorter than his past, and much less imponderable. What to do?

Well, the first thing to do was get rid of the diamonds. They would definitely prove he’d intended to run away. Without them, he just might be able to talk his way out of all this.

To think was to act. General Tortilla at once ripped all the diamonds out of all the decorations spread all over his chest, and when he was done he had a thick fistful of diamonds. But what to do with them? Swallow them? No: it would take too long, and might be dangerous to the digestive tract.

Hide them, then. Looking this way and that in the narrow stall, General Tortilla discovered that at just about head height in the wall behind him one tile was loose. Swiftly removing it, he discovered behind it an open space just large enough for the diamonds. Swiftly placing the diamonds in the open space, he swiftly returned the tile to its original position and swiftly assured himself the tampering did not show. Perhaps, he promised himself, someday he would be able to return for those diamonds.

But what is this? Unknown to General Tortilla, he has placed the diamonds on a two-by-four cross-stud which slants down just slightly to the left. The diamonds having been jiggled when the general replaced the tile, they now begin to roll along the two-by-four, one at a time and then two and three and four, until all are rolling slowly down the slight incline of the two-by-four, only to be stopped by a pair of heavy nails incompletely driven through the piece of wood, so that a portion of each nail still jutted above the ligneous surface, just far enough to stop the motion of the diamonds.

But what is this? Within Stall Number 2, Carolina Weiss cocks her head. What sound is that she hears? A faint tock-tock-ing, like a one-handed clock, the noise coming from behind her. Turning her head, she noticed a loose tile, which she curiously removed.

“Well, well,” Carolina murmured to herself. “Shiny mothballs!” Having a moth problem with her valpack, Carolina promptly removed the diamonds from the space behind the loose tile and stuffed them into the valpack.

Meanwhile, the five swarthy men in London Fog raincoats with pencil moustaches have closed in on Stall Number 5, behind the door of which General Tortilla crouches, sweating behind his pencil moustache, waiting for the inevitable discovery.

The door is flung open! “Just finishing!” the General cries gaily, emerging. “It’s all yours!” He makes for the exit.

As one man, the five leap forward and knock General Tortilla flat.

From his closet, Mo Mowgli comes promptly forward, prepared to deal with this emergency just as efficiently as any man with agonizing problems at home to distract him.

From the urinals, Arbogast Smith approaches, not sure that felonious assault lies within his jurisdiction on this assignment, but feeling anyway that he should make his presence felt. Show the flag, as it were.

“It is not to be alarmed,” the five swarthy men say as one man. “Our companion has fallen. Is that not so, General?”

“Yes, of course,” General Tortilla cries, as the five swarthy men, moving as one man, help him to his feet. “Everything is all right,” he assures Mo Mowgli and Arbogast Smith, a false smile beneath his pencil moustache, but his eyes glazed with fear.

“I want to know what’s going on,” Arbogast Smith insists. “I am a police officer.”

“You are?” Mo Mowgli is astonished. “I thought you were a nut!”

“But we too are police officers,” the five swarthy men say, as one man. “We are in this country to observe norteamericano crime prevention methods.”

“If you’re police officers,” Arbogast Smith says, “let’s see your badges.”

“Badges?” echoed the leader. “We don’t got no badges. We don’t need no stinking badges!”

“Oh,” said Arbogast Smith. “I didn’t realize that.”

“You betcha,” the leader says. Moving as one man, they depart the premises, taking General Tortilla with them.

“As to you,” Arbogast Smith says to Mo Mowgli, “I expect you to maintain security as to my true identity.”

“I don’t plan to talk about you at all,” Mo assured him. “Count on it.”

8:00 P.M

1

The three men who entered the Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past eight that windy, cold, rainy night brought with them somehow a windy, cold, rainy aura of menace. Perhaps it was their cold unblinking eyes, perhaps the way their shoulders were set within their raincoats, perhaps the hands they kept in their coat pockets. Whatever it was, it hung around them like dark music, an aura of danger, of ... death.

One of the three was old, heavy, bald-headed, with the faint touch of an aristocratic sneer about his lips. A second was tall, elegant, with the wittily insouciant manner often attributed to Satan. And the third, a pugnacious stocky individual with thick curly black hair, had the style and expression of a fairly good club welterweight.

They strolled across the tile floor to Mo Mowgli’s office and stood looking in at him until, feeling perhaps the cold penetration of their eyes upon the back of his head, he turned and said, “Yes, gentlemen? What can I do for you?”

“I,” said the tall elegant one, “would like a copy of Swann’s Way.”

“That wouldn’t be here,” said Mo. “You want the library, around the corner.”

“In that case,” said the stocky one, “give us a copy of A Farewell to Arms.”

“That would be in the library, too,” Mo said. “Just around the corner.”

“Then,” said the bald-headed one, “you will give us Boris Godunov in a recent translation.”

“You’d have to go to the library for that,” Mo said. “You go out and around the corner.”

The stocky one said, “Everything we want’s in the library, is that it?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Mo.

“That’s a cute system you got,” the stocky one said. He seemed both violently amused and in some remote way angry.

“That’s all right, Norman,” the elegant one said. “He can’t help it, he just works here.” Looking at Mo he said, “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” Mo said. Something was wrong here. He knew something was wrong here. But he didn’t know what it was.

“Sure, Gore,” said the stocky one. “It don’t matter to you that everything we want he don’t have. What do you say, V?”

The bald-headed one said, to Mo, “I want you to be certain it is a recent translation of Boris Godunov. The older translations are not good enough.”

“But I don’t have any of that,” Mo said. “It’s all around to the library, that’s where you want to go.”

“Tell us,” said the stocky one, “what time does the Greek come in?”

“No, no,” said the bald-headed one. “You’re thinking of something else.”

Arbogast Smith, having heard the last question and thinking that perhaps at last something was about to happen over which he had jurisdiction, came over at that juncture to say, “What’s this about Greeks?”

The elegant one took a pearl-handled pistol from his coat pocket and pointed it at Arbogast Smith. “You’ll go into the closet with your friend there.”

“Say,” said Arbogast Smith. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“We don’t want to know,” Mo said quickly. “It’s something that happened somewhere else, maybe a long time ago. We got nothing to do with it.”

“Now you’re being smart,” the stocky one said, and took from his coat pocket a Smith & Wesson Police Special.38 caliber revolver. “Real smart,” he said.

The bald-headed one, taking from his pocket a nine-millimeter Luger, said, “You will both enter the closet. You will entertain one another with conundrums for seventeen minutes, a number I assure you has no particular significance, and then you may, if you wish, contact the authorities.”

Arbogast Smith and Mo Mowgli entered the closet. The stocky one shut the door. “Now what?” he said.

The bald-headed one bent over and peered at the shoes to be seen under the doors of stalls 1, 2, and 8. He pointed the Luger at Stall 8, saying, “Patent leather. That will be our man, I wager.”

The three walked down to Stall Number 8. The stocky one pushed open the door. “You’re right. There he is.”

Within, Fingers Fogelheimer stood cowering against the back wall. “Don’t!” he cried, clutching the attaché case containing his manuscript to his chest. “I tried to explain to the mob, I tried—”

“We are not from the mob, as you phrase it,” the bald-headed one said coldly.

Fingers Fogelheimer blinked. “You’re not?”

“We are from Literature,” the elegant one said.

The three guns roared.

2

When the guns roared, Herbert Q. Luminous heard a scream from the next stall, and at first he didn’t stop to realize that the scream had come from the throat of a woman.

He had been deep in despairing doubt, wondering what on earth was keeping Floozey from keeping their appointment and joining him here so the two of them could hit out for Acapulco and the good life together. Of course, he had no way of knowing that Floozey, who also bore a passing resemblance to Milton “Mad Dog” Mendelsohn, had also passed through Merrick, Long Island, this morning, and was now, as a result, in the cell next to Roland Redwing, her fingerprints having been established as belonging to Ruth Helen Deutscher, wanted for the mass murder of twenty-seven Doberman pinschers in Plattsburgh, New York, on January 17, 1946. (It was in all the true detective magazines.)

However, when the scream from next door was repeated, Herbert did at last come awake to the fact that it was a female screaming, and he wondered: Floozey? In the next stall?

Leaping to his feet, he rushed out of the stall only to see Carolina Weiss rushing out of the stall next door. Not Floozey after all, but someone else, a woman he’d never seen before. “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“I’ve been so terrified,” Carolina said. She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. “Sitting in there all day, and then those shots—”

“Say,” Herbert said. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know anymore!” Carolina wailed. “I came here this morning, and ...” And she found herself telling this calm-eyed stranger everything that had happened to her, from the day she fell on the mattresses up to this very moment.

What was there about self-revelation that was so contagious? Herbert found that he too wanted to Tell All, to get this secret life off his chest at last, and as soon as Carolina was done with her story he rapidly sketched in his.

Carolina, watching him as she listened, thought, He’s a man. He’s all man. And when Herbert was done talking she said, “Your friend hasn’t showed up. My friend hasn’t showed up. But here I am with all this money in my valpack.”

“And here I am,” Herbert said, “with all this money in my satchel.”

“Plus,” Carolina said, “I’ve got some oddball mothballs I’ll show you later.”

“You know what we could do,” Herbert said.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly.

“Yes,” he said breathlessly.

“Acapulco,” she said breathlessly.

“You bet your bird,” he said breathlessly.

In the meantime, Arbogast Smith and Mo Mowgli had rushed from the storage closet to survey the carnage in Stall Number 8. Paper was everywhere. “It’s been written on,” Mo said, “but I think we could still use it here. Waste not, want not.”

Arbogast Smith turned to the couple just leaving, carrying a valpack and a satchel. “You two better stick around to be witnesses,” he said.

“We don’t have time to be witnesses!” cried Herbert. “We’re about to become participants!” And they raced off heedlessly into the rain drenching an already-drenched city.

9:00 P.M

Fred Dingbat was tired. It had been a long day, one hell of a long day, ever since six o’clock this morning, threading this mighty Crosstown bus through the ever-changing maze of the city. And the rain had poured down out of the sky, which was above, drenching an already-drenched city. And a million life stories had played out another portion of their tales all around him, in the seething metropolis: New York.

But now it was nearing its close, the long day, one of the longest days of Fred Dingbat’s life. Supervisor Cracky had been by a little while ago to promise him this was the last circuit he would have to make, that at Twelfth Avenue his replacement was awaiting him at last. And Fred could go home, back to the wife and children, back to all his own private personal problems, back to the memory of those frozen moments in Korea, when ...

But no. He wasn’t going to think about that anymore. Not ever.

The Bryant Park Comfort Station. Looking out the rain-flecked windshield of his behemoth of the buslines, Fred saw that the Comfort Station was closed for the night. Mo Mowgli was standing there at the bus stop, in the rain, waiting.

Fred stopped. The bus door opened. Mo plodded aboard. “Evening, Fred.”

“Evening, Mo.”

Mo sat down in his usual seat. “I’m tired,” he admitted.

“Heard you had some excitement today,” Fred commented.

“A day like any other day,” Mo said wearily. “And I was there.”

They rode in companionable silence, these two, both vital parts in the mighty machine that makes up western civilization, both humble in their station and yet proud of their purpose in the greater scheme of things.

At Ninth Avenue, Mo left the bus, stepping down into the rain drenching an already-drenched city.

“Night, Mo,” Fred said.

“Night, Fred,” Mo said.

Fred drove on. There were no passengers in the bus, except for one gent sleeping toward the rear. He’d been there for quite a while, sleeping, and Fred hadn’t wanted to disturb him. A stocky swarthy man in a London Fog raincoat with a pencil moustache, he was one of half a dozen similar men who had come aboard as one man a couple of hours ago, whence all but this one had since departed.

A heavy sleeper, thought Fred. Funny how the stopping and starting of the bus didn’t wake him. Well, Fred would wake him at the end of this run, the last run of the day, when he got to Twelfth Avenue.

Fred looked out the rain-swept windshield of the mighty omnibus. Far ahead he could see his replacement standing on the sidewalk, waiting for him. Fred looked up. The rain was stopping, at long last.

It would be a nice day, tomorrow.

Content

J. Morgan Cunningham
Comfort Station

Persons this book are about

6:00 A.M

7:00 A.M

8:00 A.M

9:00 A.M

10:00 A.M

11:00 A.M

12:00 NOON

1:00 P.M

2:00 P.M

3:00 P.M

4:00 P.M

5:00 P.M

6:15 P.M

7:00 p.m

8:00 P.M

1

2

9:00 P.M