The Essential Ellison Part 116

Fine. Then: my paper was scheduled for the second day of the Conference, I wanted a few days to see the sights, and when SAS put that Boeing 767 down at Arlanda International, my sponsor, John-Henri Holmberg, was waiting with his new wife, Evastina, and John-Henri' s son, Alex. And they' d brought along a Dr. Richard Fuchs, a very strange little man who writes incredibly obscure books on bizarre illnesses that no one, apparently, either buys or reads. It was quite warm; John-Henri' s shirt was open and he carried his jacket; Evastina kept daubing at her moist upper lip; and Alex, who' s too old for them now, he was wearing short pants; it was quite warm. Fuchs wore gloves. Milky-white latex gloves, the kind you' d put on to examine specimens. But he was effusive in his greetings. Said he wanted me to see a monograph he' d translated into English on some quisquous aspect of Swedish mythology. Why an, wherefore this odd little man should be such a slavish devotee of my work, the semiotics of mythology, by an obscure Professor of Cla.s.sics from the English Department of the University of North Carolina, is somethin' I was unable to discover. But since it was he- of everyone I met over theah- was the cause of everything that happened to me... I do suspect his bein' there at the airport was considerable more than merest happenstance. I' m get tin' ahead of myself. Patience, Henry.

They took me to the Royal Viking Hotel, and I unpacked and showered and napped for about an hour. But I was still restless; I was aching for sleep, but I couldn' t falloff. My legs kept twitching. I couldn' t stop worrying about my paper. Two days, I was supposed to deliver it to a major international conference on the latest academic rigors, an' you know I' ve never been comfortable with all this " deconstructionist" criticism. So I was dog-tired, but instead of taking a Q-Vel for the leg cramps and catching up on some sleep, I fiddled with the ma.n.u.script. Even wound up putting a new sub-t.i.tle on it: Post-Structuralist Hermeneutics of the Theseus-Minotaur Iconography. I could barely get my tongue around all that. Imagine what I' d' ve done somebody asked me what the h.e.l.l it meant. But I knew it' d look impressive in The Journal.

So by the time they came to get me for the opening day' s dinner reception, I was pretty well goggle-eyed. Maybe that' s why I didn' t think what was happening was all that distressin' . What Shakespeare called " how strange or odd." I had fourteen and a half hours on the flight back to mull it, an' I can tell you now that it was indeed, oh my yes, it was indeed distressin' , strange, and odd.

Now take it easy! I' ll skip all the local color, what it' s like ridin' over cobblestone streets, and the hoe-ren-duss cost of livin' in Sweden- y' know how much it costs for a roll of Scotch Tape? About seven dollars, that' s what it costs, can you believe it- and I' ll cut right to the reception, and meeting Agnes. And Fuchs. And the sepulcher on Osterlanggatan. And the flame feather I brought home from Stockholm instead of the most beautiful woman who ever walked the face of the earth.

We were sitting around at this big table at the reception, with a cla.s.sical pianist named Baekkelund playing all sorts of twentieth-century Swedish compositions- Blomdahl, Carlid, Back, Lidholm, that whole " Monday Group" - and Fuchs was sitting next to me, looking at me as if I might start blowing bubbles at any moment, and I thanked him again for runnin' to get me a champagne refill, 'bout the third or fourth time he' d done it, like as if he wanted to come into my employ as a manservant, and he smiled at me with a little face full of nasty brown teeth, and he said, " I notice it is that you concern over my wearing of gloves."

I hadn' t realized I' d been oglin' his li' l rubber mittens, but I was just bubbly-happy enough to smart him, 'stead of just answering polite. I said, " Well, Dr. Foowks, it has attended my attention that the warm factor in this jammed ballroom is very possibly running toward ninety or so, and the rest of us are, how do they say it in Yiddish, we are all schvitzin' like sows, whilst you are covered fingertip to neck-bone. Why do you think that is so, suh?"

John-Henri looked uncomfortable. It was just the three of us had come to the reception- Evastina was home with the new baby, Fnork, who had reached the infant stage of catching and eating flies- and though there were others who' d come to sit at that big round table, it was more a matter of expediency in a jammed room with limited seating, than it was a desire to mingle with the three of us. (It had seemed to me, without too close an examination of the subject, that though a few people knew John-Henri, and greeted him saucily, not only did no one speak to Dr. Fuchs, but there were several who seemed to veer clear when they espied him.) Dr. Fuchs grew tolerably serious, and soft spoke, an' he replied to what instantly became obvious to me had been an incredibly stupid, rude, and champagne-besotted remark: " I live with a bodily condition known as hyperhidrosis, Professor Stapylton. Abnormally excessive sweating. As you have said it, schvitzing. I perspire from hands, feet, my underarms. I must wear knitted shirts to absorb the moisture. Underarm dress shields, of a woman' s kind. I carry pocket towels, in the ungood event I must actually shake hands flesh on flesh with someone. Should I remove my latexwear, and place my palm upon this tablecloth, the material would be soaked in a widened pool in moments." He gave me a pathetic little smile that was meant to be courageous, and he concluded, " I see revulsion in people' s faces, Professor. So I wear the gloves, is it not?"

I felt like thirty-one kinds of a blatherin' d.a.m.nfool, an' I suppose it was because I had no way of extricatin' my size 11M Florsheim from my mouth, that I was so susceptible when Fuchs humiliated me even more by introducin' me to this utter vision of a woman who came blowin' by the table.

Without even a hesitation on his part, springs right off this " I make people sick 'cause I' m soakin' wet all the time," right into, " Oh, Agnes! Come, my dear, come meet the famous American scholar and authority of mythic matters, Professor Gordon Stapylton of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a most brilliant colleague of our friend John-Henri."

We took one look at each other, and I knew what it was to endure hyperhidrosis. Every pore in my body turned Niagara. Even half stupored on good French champagne, I was sober enough to know I had, at last, finally, unbelievably, met the most beautiful woman in the world, the one woman I would marry and, failing that liaison, would never be able to settle for anyone else.

Her hair was the color of the embers when the fire has died down and the companions have snuggled into their sleeping bags and you cannot fall asleep and lie there looking into that moving breathing sussurating crimson at the bottom of the campfire. Her eyes were almond-shaped, and tilted, and green. Not murky, dirty green, but the shade of excellent Chinese jade pieces, Shang dynasty, Chou dynasty. Describing more, I' d sound even more the idiot than I do right now. I tried to tell y' all what she was like, when I called the next morning, remember? When I said I was bringing home the woman I loved, her name was Agnes? Well, I was tipsy with her then...and I' m tipsy allover again now, just describin' her. But the important part of all this, is that we took one look t' each other, an' we couldn' t keep our hands off!

Fuchs was tryin' to tell me that Agnes Wahlstrom was, herself, a noted scholar, a student of mythology, and curator of the Magasinet for sallsamma vasen, some kind of a museum, but I wasn' t much listening by that time. We were swimming in each other' s eyes; and the next thing I knew, I' d gotten up and taken her hand- which had a wonderful strong independent kind of a grip- and we were outside the two-hundred-year-old building with the reception up those marble staircases; and we were in a narrow service alley that ran back from the cobblestoned street into darkness alongside the hulking ugliness of the a.s.sembly hall; and I barely had an instant to speak her name before she bore me back against the alley wall, her lips on mine.

She fumbled her dress up around her hips, and undid my belt, almost batting away my hands as I tried to undress her. And there, in that alley, Henry, there in the darkness I found what I' d never been able to locate in nearly forty years of believing it existed: I found utter and total pa.s.sion, I-don' t-give-a-d.a.m.n l.u.s.t, a joining and thrashing that must have made steam come off us, like a pair of rutting weasels. Look, I' m sorry to be embarra.s.sin' you, Henry, my old friend, but under this pleasant, gregarious, b.u.t.toned-down academic pose, I have been nothin' but a lonely sonofab.i.t.c.h all my life. You know how it was between my parents, an' you know how few relationships I' ve had with women who counted. So, now, you have got to understan' that I was crazy with her, drunk with her, inside her and steam comin' off us. Migawd, Henry, I think we banged against that alley wall for an hour, maybe more. I have no idea why some Swedish cop didn' t hear us growlin' and pantin' and yellin' moremoremore, and come in there an' arrest us. Oh, jeezus, lemme catch mah breath. Lawd, Henry, you are the color of Chairman Mao' s Little Book! We never got back to the reception the Conference was hostin' .

We spent the night at the Royal Viking, arid the next morning she was as beautiful as the night before, except the sun loved touchin' her, Henry; and we ate breakfast in the room, and her eyes were that green, and made love again for another hour or so. But then she said she had to go home and change because she had to be at the Museum, she was late already, but she' d find me at the Conference in the afternoon and we' d, well, we' d be together.

Can you understand what that word meant to me? We' d be together. That was when I called you and told you I' d be bringin' back the greatest mythic treasure ever. I had to share it with someone, Henry. That was four days ago, before the street signs changed.

John-Henri is a decent man, and an absolutely great friend, so his chiding me on my behavior was maximum softly-spoke; but I was given to understand that walkin' off like Night of the Livin' Dumbbells with some gorgeous museum curator, right in the middle of where I was supposed to be, was unacceptable. He also confided that he' d been stuck with Dr. Fuchs all night, nearly, and he was not overwhelmin' ly thrilled by that, either. Turned out he was less acquainted with the man in the moist mittens than I' d thought. Out of nowhere, a few weeks before I was scheduled to fly in, he suddenly showed up, ingratiating, charming, knowledgeable about John-Henri' s background, very complimentary, workin' ever so hard to become Evastina' s and John-Henri' s best new buddy-chum. Just so, just that way, out of nowhere, he suddenly appeared in the antechamber of the Conference Hall, right in the middle of John-Henri' s polite, with-clenched-teeth admonition that I not pull a repeat of the previous evening' s gaucherie.

Fuchs kept smilin' at me with that scupperful of brown bicuspids, just smarmily inquiring had I had a pleasant evening, but not get tin' any closer to questions I' d' ve had to tell him were none of his d.a.m.ned business.

But I couldn' t get rid of him. He dogged my every step.

And I attended the sections I' d wanted to drop in on, and my mind wasn' t focused for a second on such arcane trivia. All I could think of was sliding my hands up between Agnes' s legs.

Finally, about three in the afternoon, she arrived. Looking absolutely wonderful, wearing a summery dress and sandals, in defiance of the chill that was in the air. She found me at the rear of the auditorium, slid in beside me, and whispered, " I have nothing on under this."

We left not more than three heartbeats later.

All right, Henry, I' ll skip all that. But now pay close attention. Five or six hours later, she seemed distracted, an' I suggested we go get some dinner. I was goin' to pop the question. Oh, yes, Henry, I see that expression. But the only reason you got it on you, is that you know somethin' was amiss. But if you didn't know that, then you wouldn' t think I was bein' precipitous, you' d agree that once having been in the embrace of such a woman, a man would be a giant fool to let her slip away. So just pretend you' re as innocent as I was, at that moment, and go along with me on this.

She said no, she wasn' t hungry, she' d had a big salad before she came to fetch me at the Conference, but would I be interested in seeing the Museum. Where she was curator. I said that would be charming. Or somesuch pseudo phrase so she wouldn' t suspect all I could think about was makin' love to her endlessly. As if she weren' t smart enough to know all that; and she laughed, and I looked sheepish, and she kissed me, and we went to get the car in the hotel structure, and we drove out, about nine or so.

It was a chilly night, and very dark. And she drove to the oldest section of Stockholm, blocky ribbed-stone buildings leaning over the narrow, winding streets, fog or mist trailing through the canyons, silvery and forlorn. It was, well, not to make a cliche of it...it was melancholy. Somehow sad and winsome at the same time. But I was on a cloud. I had found the grail, the crown, the scepter, the very incarnation of True Love. And I would, very soon now, pop the question.

She parked on a side street, cobbled and lit fitfully by old electric brazier lamps, and suggested we should walk, it was invigorating. I worried about her in that thin dress. She said, " I am a st.u.r.dy Scandinavian woman, dear Gordon. Please." And the please was neither cajoling nor requesting. It was " give me a break, I can outwalk you any day, son." And so we strode off down the street.

We turned a number of times, this side-street, that little alley, pausing every once in a while to grope each other, usually on my pretext that certain parts of her body needed to be warmed against the st.u.r.dy Scandinavian chill. And finally, we turned onto an absolutely shadow-gorged street down which I could not see a solitary thing. I glanced up at the street sign, and it read: Cyklopavenyn. Cyclops Avenue.

Now isn' t that a remarkable, I thought.

She took me by the hand, and led me into the deep shadow pool of the narrow, claustrophobic, fog-drenched Cyclops Avenue. We walked in silence, just the sound of our hollow footsteps repeating our progress.

" Agnes," I said, " where the h.e.l.l are we going? I thought you wanted me to see- "

Invisible beside me, but her flesh warm as a beacon, she said, " Yes, Magasinet for sallsamma vasen."

I asked her if we were nearly there, and she said, with a small laugh, " I told you to tinkle before we left." But she didn' t say " tinkle." She used the Swedish equivalent, which I won' t go into here, Henry, because I can see that you think I' m leading this story toward her giving me a vampire bite, or trying to steal my soul and sell it to flying saucer people...well, it wasn' t anything sick or demented, absolutely no blood at all, and as you can see I' m sit tin' right here in front' cher face, holdin' up my gla.s.s for a splash more of Mr. Jack Daniels.

Thank' ya. So we keep walkin' , and I ask her to translate for me what Magasinet Etcetera Et-cet-era means, and she said, it' s hard to translate into English. But she tried, and she said Museum wasn' t quite the right word, more rightly something not quite like Sepulcher. I said that gave me chills, and she laughed and said I could call it The Gatherum of Extraordinary Existences- as we reached a brooding shadowy shape darker than the darkness filling Cyclops Avenue, a shape that rose above us like an escarpment of black rock, something hewn from obsidian, and she took a key from a pocket of the thin summery dress, and inserted it in the lock, and turned the key- or you could call it The Repository of Unimaginable Creatures- and she pushed open a door that was three times our height, and I' m six one, and Agnes is just under six feet- or the Cyklopstra.s.se Keep of Rare and Extinct Beasts- and as the door opened we were washed by pure golden light so intense I shielded my eyes. where the door had snugged against the jamb and lintel so tightly there had been no leakage of illumination, now there was an enormous rectangle three times our height of blazing burning light. I could see nothing, not a smidge, but that light. And Agnes took me by the elbow, and walked me into the light, and I was inside the most breathtaking repository of treasures I' d ever seen.

Greater than the Prado, more magnificent than the Louvre, dwarfing the Victoria and Albert, more puissant than the Hermitage, enfeebling the image of Rotterdam' s Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, it rose above us till the arching ceilings faded into misty oblivion. I could see room after room after channel after salon after gallery stretching away in a hundred different directions from the central atrium where we stood, mah mouth open and my wits havin' fled.

Because the Museum that my Agnes tended, the Sepulcher that my Agnes oversaw, the Gallery my Agnes captained...it was filled with the dead and mounted bodies of every creature I' d read about in the tomes of universal mythology.

In niches and on pedestals, in crystal cases and suspended by invisible wires from the invisible ceilings, ranked in shallow conversation-pit-like depressions in the floor and mounted to the walls, in showcases and freestanding in the pa.s.sageways: The Kurma tortoise that supported Mt. Mandara on its back during the churning of the ocean by the Devas and Asuras. A matched set of unicorns, male and female, one with silver horn, the other with golden spike. The bone-eater from the Ani papyrus. Behemoth and Leviathan. Hanuman the five-headed of the Kalighat. A Griffin. And a Gryphon. Hippogryph and Hippocamp. The Kinnara bird of Indian mythology, and the thousand-headed snake Kalinaga. Jinn and Harpy and Hydra; yeti and centaur and minotaur; the holy feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and a winged horse and a Ryu dragon. Hundreds and thousands of beasts of all worlds and all nations, of all beliefs and all ages, of all peoples and of all dreams and nightmares. There, in the stunning Sepulcher on the Verg Cyklop, was ama.s.sed and arrayed and ranked all the impossible creatures that had never made it onto Noah' s leaky tub. I wandered gallery to gallery, astounded, impossible sights choking my throat and making me weep with amazement that it was all, all, all of it absolutely true. There was even a Boogeyman and his mate. They looked as if they had lived their lives under beds and in dark closets.

" But how...?" I could barely find words, at long last.

" They are here, a.s.sembled all. And I am the one who caught them. "

Of all I had seen, of all she might say, that was the most astonishin' . She had brought these beasts to heel. I could not believe it. But no, she insisted, she trekked out, and she stalked them, and she caught them, and killed them, and brought them back here for display. " For whom?" I asked. " Who comes to this place?" And she smiled the sweetest smile, but did not reply. Who, I wondered, a.s.saying the size of the rooms, the height of the ceilings, who did the tour of this repository of miracles?

Hours later, she took me away, and we went back to the Royal Viking, and I was too aswirl in magic and impossibilities to drench mahself in her scented skin. I could not fathom or contain what I had seen. Her naked body was muscular but more feminine than Aphrodite and Helen of Troy and the Eternal Nymph all combined. She was gorgeous, but she was the hunter of them all. Of course she had had a strong grip. From holding machete, and crossbow, and Sharps rifle, and bolas, and gas-gun. She told me of the hunts, the kills, the scent of the track, the pursuits in far lands: Petra and Angkor, Teotihuacan and Tibet, Djinnistan and Meszria, Skull Island and Malta and Knossos.

And then she said to me, " I am very much drawn to you, Gordon, but I know you' re going to ask me to come away with you, to live in America and be your wife. And I truly, deeply, am mad about even the thought of making love to you endlessly...but..."

The next day, I went looking for Cyclops Avenue. I have a skunk-sniffin' dog' s sense of direction, you know that, Henry; and I actual found the street again. I recognized all the twisty turns we' d made, even lookin' different in the daylight. But I got there. And, of course, the street signs had changed. Cyclops Avenue was now osterldaggatan. The Museum was not there. Oh, it likely was there, but I didn' t have either the proper guide or a key taken from the pocket of a summery dress to help me find it. So I went away, and I came back here, and that' s my story. Except for a couple of loose ends...

One: what of the peculiar Dr. Fuchs? Well, Agnes never said it in so many words, but I got the impression that she had taken pity on the poor little man, that he had been someone who had loved her and followed her, and whose existence meant nothing without her in it, and so she had allowed him to a.s.sist her. She said he was her " spotter." I didn' t ask what that meant, nor what it was he spotted. (Before I left Stockholm, John-Henri called to say goodbye, and he told me he had found a pair of gloves, apparently the property of Fuchs, half-filled with foul-smelling water or sweat or some fishy liquid, but that Dr. Fuchs, himself, had vanished, leaving an enormous hotel bill for John-Henri and the Conference to pay.) And two: I' ll bet you haven' t forgotten, have you?

That' s right, Henry, the feather.

I plucked it from the flank of an enormous roc that she had stalked and bagged and killed and stuffed. It hung from the ceiling in the Museum of Unimaginable Creatures, hung low enough so I could pluck one memento. I think, I guess, I well I suppose I knew somewhere in my head or my heart, certainly not in my pants, that I was never going to get this prize, this treasure, this woman of all women. And so, in some part of my sense, I stole a token to keep my memory warm. It' s all I have, one flame-red feather from the flank of the roc that tried to carry off Sinbad the Sailor.

And do you know why she renounced me, gave me a pa.s.s, shined me on, old Henry? I guess I begged a little, told her how good we were together and, yes, she admitted, that was so; but it was never gonna work. Because, Henry, she said...

I was too easy a catch. I didn' t nearly put up the fight it would take to keep her hunter' s interest pinned.

What' s that? Do I think I' ll ever see her again?

Henry, I see her all the time. This world of you and the University and houses and streets and mailboxes and a drink in my hand...it' s all like a transparent membrane on which a movie pictchuh is bein' cast. And behind it, I see her. My Agnes, so fabulous. She' s in a rough-bark coracle, with a canvas sail ripped by terrible winds caused by the beating of a devil roc' s great feathered wings, as its spiked tail thrashes the emerald water into tidal spires. She holds a scimitar, and her jade-green eyes are wild; and I know the flame-feathered monster that seeks to devour her, capsize her, drag her down and feast on her delicious flesh- I know that poor dumb ravening behemoth hasn' t got the chance of a s...o...b..ll in a cyclotron. In her path, in the fury of her flesh, no poor dumb beast has a chance. Not even- pardon the pun- the Roc of Agnes.

Do I see her? Oh my, yes. I see her clearly, Henry. I may never see my world clearly again after walking the halls and galleries of the Cyclops Avenue Museum...but I' ll always see her.

For a poor dumb beast, that vision and a G.o.ddam red feather is almost enough to get by on. Wouldja kindly, that Jack Daniels beside you. And then maybe I will go upstairs and try to catch a little sleep. Thank ya kindly, Henry.

Author's Note: I have always written my stories on Olympia office standard or portable typewriters. Bob Bloch also wrote on Olympias. When Bob died, he pa.s.sed on to me two of his machines. This story was written on one of those typewriters, completed on 5 July 1995. The work goes on.

Objects Of Desire In The Mirror Are Closer

Than They Appear We found the poor old guy lying in garbage and quite a lot of his own blood in the alley next to the Midnight Mission. His shoes had been stolen- no way of knowing if he' d been wearing socks- and whatever had been in the empty, dirty paper bag he was clutching. But his fingernails were immaculate, and he had no beard stubble. Maybe sixty, maybe older. No way of telling at a cold appraisal.

There were three young women down on their knees, weeping and flailing toward the darkening sky. It was going to rain, a brick-mean rain. Bag ladies in an alley like that, yeah, no big surprise...but these weren' t gap-toothed old scraggy harridans. I recognized two of them from commercials; I think the precise term is supermodel. Their voices outshone the traffic hissing past the alley mouth. They were obviously very broken up at the demise of this old b.u.m.

We strung the yellow tape; and we started a.s.sembling whatever was going to pa.s.s for witnesses; and then, without any further notice, the sky ruptured and in an instant we were all drenched. The old man' s blood sluiced away in seconds, and the alley was that slick, pretty, shiny black again. So much for ambient clues.

We moved inside.

The smell of Lysol and sour mash was charming. I remember once, when I was a little kid, I shinnied up an old maple tree and found a bird nest that had recently been occupied by, I don' t know, maybe robins, maybe crows, or something, and it had a smell that was both nasty and disturbing. The inside of the room they let us use for our interrogation smelled not much the same, but it had the same two qualities: nasty, and unsettling.

" Lieutenant," one of the uniforms said, behind me; and I turned and answered, " Yeah?" Not the way I usually speak, but this was about as weird a venue, as troubling a set of circ.u.mstances as any I' d handled since I' d been promoted to Homicide. " Uh, excuse me, Lieutenant, but what do you want us to do with these three ladies?"

I looked over at them, huddling near the door, and for a moment I hated them. They were taller than I, they were prettier than I, they were certainly wealthier than I, they had no hips and their a.s.ses were smaller than mine, and they dressed a lot better. I won' t compare cup size: at least I had them beat in that capacity.

" Keep them from talking to each other, but be easy with 'em. I think they' re famous, and we' ve got enough problems in the Department this week." I was talking, of course, about the serial hooker-slayer who had been leaving bits of unrecognizable meat allover town for the preceding six months. Then I went to work. Bird nest smell. Not nice.

The first half dozen were either too wetbrain or demented even to grasp what I was asking them. Clearly, none of them had been out in that alley. But someone had been; the old man probably didn' t cut his own throat. I' d say definitely, not even possibly.

The first bit of remark that bore any relation to a lead was the ramble of a guy in his thirties, broke-down like the rest of them, but apparently not as long in the life as his peers. He had been an aeros.p.a.ce worker, laid off at Boeing a few years earlier in one of the periodic " downsizing" ploys.

His name was Richard. He mumbled his last name and I wrote it on my pad, but I paid less attention than I might' ve, had he been a real suspect, when he said, " Wull, I seen the green light."

" Green light?"

" Richard. Muh name' s Richard."

" Yeah, I got that part. You said 'a green light." '

" Uh-huh. It was a light, out there, with him, y' know the dead guy?"

I said, yeah, I know the dead guy. " And there was this light. And it was green."

"Uh-huh."

I contemplated a career in orthodonture, as I was already pulling teeth. " Well, look, Richard, you can be of great help to us in solving this murder, if you could just tell me exactly what you saw. Out there. In the alley. The green light. Okay?"

He nodded, the poor sonofab.i.t.c.h; and I confess, I felt my heart go out to him. He actually was doing the best he could, and I didn' t want to push him any more fiercely than common decency would permit. It is probably toasty warm inclinations of a similar sort that will forever block me from becoming one of the Bosses. Oh, well, Lieutenant is a perfectly decent rank to die with.

" I wuz, er, uh..." I read embarra.s.sment.

" Go ahead, Richard, just tell me. Don' t be embarra.s.sed."

" Wull, I wuz takin' a leak out back, Around the corner in the alley, but back around the corner, y' know? Back behind where the dumpsters are. An' I wasn' t watchin' nothin' else but my own business, an' I heard these girls singing and laughin' , and I wuz 'fraid they might come over 'round the back corner an' see me wit' my di...with my pants unzipped... "

" The green light, Richard? Remember: the green light?"

" Uh-huh, I wuz get tin' to that. I zipped up so fast I kinda wet myself, an' I turned around to the back over there, an' all of a sudden there was this green light, big green light, an' I heard the girls screamin' and there was some kind a music, I guess it wuz, an' then allmigawd it was really loud, the girls' screamin' , an' I ducked outta there, and went around the dumpsters onna other side, and went over to the fence an' crawled over and come back to the Mission, b' cuz I din' t want to get involved, cuz..."

He stopped talking. I had dropped my pencil. I bent to pick it up where it had rolled, next to his right foot, I saw his shoes. When I straightened, I looked him in the eye and said, " But you went out there afterward, didn' t you, Richard?"

"Nuh-uh!" He shook his head violently, but I was looking him right in the eye, " Before the police came, you went out again, didn' t you, Richard?"

His lower lip started to tremble, I felt sorry as h.e.l.l for the poor slob. He was somebody' s son, somebody' s brother, maybe even somebody' s husband, once upon a layoff; and he was soaked to the skin with cheap wine; and he was scared.

" C' mon, Richard...I know you went back, so you might as well tell me what else you remember,"

He murmured something so softly, and with such embarra.s.sment, that I had to ask him gently to repeat: " I found the big knife."

" And you took it?"

"Yes'm,"

" When you took his shoes,"

"Yes'm,"

" And anything else?"

" No' mum. I' m sorry."

" That' s all right, Richard, Now I want you to go and get me the big knife, and bring it right straight back to this room, and give it to me, I' ll have one of the officers go with you,"

"Yes'm,"

I called for Napoli, and told him to take Richard out to the common room, to retrieve" the big knife." As they started for the door of the smelly little room, Richard turned back to me and started to say, " You gonna take..."

And I stopped him. " No, Richard, no I' m not going to take back those nice shiny new shoes. They look very comfortable, and they' re yours. In exchange for the big knife."

He smiled weakly, like a child who knows he' s done wrong, is truly abject about it but is grateful for being let off with just a reprimand.

When he came back, Napoli was carrying" the big knife." I' d expected a grav-knife or a b.u.t.terfly, something street standard. This was a rusty machete. A big, wide-bladed, cut-down-the-sugar-cane machete. The blood that was dried on the blade, all the way up to the handle, was- for certain- some of the same that had been, until recently, billeted in the carotid artery of that old man.

I took the machete gingerly. Napoli had tied a string around the base of the haft to preserve Richard' s- and any others' - prints. I lowered the killing weapon to the table using only the string noose. Then I went back to questioning Richard.

He' d thought he could sell it for some sneaky pete. That' s all there was to it. The shoes, because he needed them; and the knife, because it had been left lying there next to the body.

He tried to tell me the story a dozen different ways, but it was always the same. Taking a leak, seeing the green light running away, coming back and taking the old man' s shoes (and socks, as it turned out), swiping the machete while the three women bawled and screamed.

And he went on. For some long while. I gave him a five dollar bill and told him to get a good dinner over at The Pantry. I' m not ready for this line of work. It' s only eleven years; I' m not ready.

Days or weeks or millennia later or maybe it only seemed as quick as that I was back at the Precinct. I turned the big knife over to Forensics. My feet hurt and there was a patina of Post-Its allover my desk...and faxes...and memos enough to choke a c.o.ke machine. But the only urgent one was from the M.E. So I handed all the others off to Napoli, and told him to get them squared away, while I went downtown and had a chat with dear Old Doc Death, our coroner. The Boss saw me heading out and he put those two fingers in his mouth and whistled me to a halt and yelled across the squadroom, " Have you eaten?"

" Since what time?" I answered." Since ever. Go get some dinner."" I got to go downtown to see Dear Old Doc Death."" Jacobs," he said, without room for argument" do as I tell you." I said, yessir, and I went to The Pantry and had a T-bone. Richard of the green light was there, having a meal. He looked happy in his new shoes. I felt a lot better about the universe after that. In your heart of hearts, you think a Richard kind of rummy is going to stoke up on some sweet lucy or a tankard of muscatel and so you just don' t dip into the wallet for somebody like that. But every once in a sometime they fool you. This Richard was eating well, so I told the guy behind the cash register not to take his money, that I was paying for it, and Richard could maybe have a second meal, or buy a hat, or get a life. It was easier, after that, to go downtown.