Humboldt's Gift

It so happened that I, Charlie Citrine, a lanky bald person with kinky back hair, ambled into a sort of eminence while my friend Von Humboldt Fleisher dropped dead. He, the poet, died in a dismal hotel. I, a different sort of writer, remained to mourn him in prosperity. I couldn't help it, I had made money, too. Ah, money, the money! Humboldt thought I had a lot. He said I was a millionaire. He didn't say, he accused me of making millions.

And money wasn't what I had in mind. What I really wanted was to do something good. Besides, how much is a lot? In Chicago in the rackety Twenties, kids used to go treasure hunting in the March thaw. Along the curbs you sometimes found Indianhead pennies, buffalo nickels and other high valuables. And just this spring I found myself, almost an elderly fellow, treading the curbs, staring just as keenly into the slush. Because I needed some luck. Then I realized with a shock of despair--what is a dime? And even if I were to find a dollar--what's a dollar?

But Humboldt would tell people, "Citrine? He's loaded. There's money in his kind of writing." Many reports were brought to me of all the damaging and mordant things he said. By this time--speak of writing!--there were stunning, pitiful, awful messages scribbled over Humboldt's wide, pale face. A poet obsessed by money; that, in part, was what Humboldt had become. He envied, hated and admired me for having made it. Well, he exaggerated, and he didn't live to see the witty, cranky Mammon take it all back. He died five years ago. Those five years have had the weight of 50.

In his day, Von Humboldt Fleisher was famous. That day was long ago and brief. A kid from West End Avenue in New York, he published at the age of 22 a book called Harlequin Ballads. You would have thought that a young man who had educated himself in the public schools, on the steps of the 42nd Street library (an intellectual forum) and at CCNY would be clumsy, that he would fumble, that his syntax would be coarse. Not at all. His Modernist avant-garde poems were musical, pure, piercing, radiant, witty, humane and highly Platonic (desiring passionately to return to an original perfection). The words were impeccable. This poetry was the work of an angel.

I was then 19 and I used to play rotation pool in the Rathskeller at Madison, Wisconsin. Someone had left Humboldt's book lying on the felt-covered massive green salb under the warm light, and I pinched it. Instead of taking it to lost and found, I went out to the terrace and began to read. I read all afternoon and I stayed up all night, much moved. These poems also were treasure reclaimed from the gutter. The sublime and vulgar American mixture. Antichrist was supposed to come from the slums. All the genteel people were worried. But here instead, to surprise everyone, came a Humboldt. Perhaps he was not wholly American. In his elegance, he was slightly foreign. I was a bit foreign myself. All the closer to me, therefore, all the truer. He was willing to speak openly of deep emotions in a way that Anglo-Saxons would call Oriental--all the better. I said in my thankful heart, "This guy is it!" At dawn I took of my clothes and jumped into Lake Mendota in my underpants. So early in the morning, I didn't think anyone would be watching, but an old woman ran out onto the pier threatening to report this obscenity to the police. I waded out dazed, and that afternoon in my suffocating attic on Langdon Street, I wrote Humboldt a letter.

Nineteen thirty-eight was his big year. Conrad Aiken praised him, T. S. Eliot noticed the ballads favorably (this was intoxicating; Humboldt worshiped Eliot).

Even that unappeasable purist Yvor Winters had a good word to say for them. Humboldt was made. First of all, he conquered Greenwich Village. The best doors in the Village opened to him. Behind those doors Russian literature and Marxist politics were discussed. New York was a very Russian city in the Thirties. It was a case, as Lionel Abel correctly said, of a great metropolis wishing with all its heart to belong to another country. Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism preoccupied thousands of people, Humboldt among them. He knew a lot about Bolshevism, the Smolny Institute, the Shakhty Engineers, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Civil War. He had been much affected by Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution and by Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx. We all knew those books. You couldn't be taken seriously in York if you didn't know them. Some of us were on fairly quiet terms with this information, but it was not in Humboldt to know anything quietly. He was a great talker--not garrulous but an extraordinary conversationalist. In fact, the Mozart of conversation. He was taken up by Harvard, Yale and Princeton, by scholars, editors and critics. He knew Max Eastman and Edmund Wilson, Calverton, Hook, the Partisan Review. He was invited to Kenyon by John Crowe Ransom, who said that he was a marvelous young genius. Twenty-two years old a poet and a critic, very handsome, he was taken seriously in the literary world, and he was also courted and flattered and pursued by women. When we met, he quoted Lenin to me, "Es schwindelt!" Lenin had said in 1917, when he saw that the Bolsheviks had captured the Russian government: He was giddy with power, with triumph. Humboldt later added that his own Manic fantasies had been realized in Success, for he often described himself as a Manic-Depressive. To Succeed you needed Manic energy, but you paid the Depressive price. Humboldt had been warned against Fame and, like any well-read person, he knew what a lot of trouble Beauty was. He was in a dangerous position, he said. When he talked like this, his face and Danger glowed like twin globes at each other.

Humboldt had answered my Madison letter and in 1939 I had gone to New York to see him. He received me cordially in his room on Bedford Street and opened a bottle of gin, which we drank neat. Then he began, delightfully, to talk and he never stopped. His theme for the day was Success and, as we crossed the Hudson on the Christopher Street Ferry to have lunch in Hoboken, he lectured me endlessly about it. He covered the problem under numerous headings--Calvinism, Grace, Depravity: the stewardship of John D. Rockefeller, who insisted that his money had come straight from God. Next Humboldt spoke about the meaning of eminence in an age of social revolution. Masses, melting pots, seething populations, technical transformations. What was social station in a country like the U.S., anyway? Besides, Henry Adams had said that mechanical progress would break our necks in a few decades. There was a tremendous lot of embroidery in these monologs of Humboldt's. He reasoned, he illustrated, cited, adduced, he crooned, he barked, he laughed, he was somber.

Humboldt, that grand, erratic, handsome person, with his wide blond face, rounded at the temples, that charming, fluent, learned, deeply worried man to whom I was so passionately attached, lived out the theme of Success. Naturally, he died a Failure. That's all that can result from the capitalization of certain nouns. Humboldt, in my opinion, had far too many capitals--Poetry, Beauty, Wasteland, Politics, Unconscious. And I must not forget Manic and Depressive. "Lincoln was our great Manic-Depressive," he said. After the war, Humboldt added Winston Churchill to the list. "Churchill was a classic case of Manic-Depression. What's wonderful about Manic-Depressives, Charlie, is that they have the power to make entire nations act out their condition. Emerging from gloom they're irresistible. They make Wars and Revolutions. They capture History. They force mankind to enter into their cycles."

Poor Humboldt didn't impose his cycles on mankind very effectively. Other Manics with more energy, more lust, stronger demons beat him out. One morning he woke up to find himself, like young Byron, famous; 30 years later, the fame was gone and he died in a flophouse near Times Square. Just a little earlier, in June of that year, I'd had a glimpse of him across 46th Street. He didn't see me and, because we hadn't spoken in 12 years, I didn't approach.

I was appalled. He had become gross, he had gone all gray. His face was gray and mad. He had the grimness of death all over him. He stood at the curb eating pretzel sticks out of a bag, grinding them in his teeth hungrily. Hidden, still, bitter, very bitter, I watched him for a while and then I took off.

This gray, gross, weak Minotaur with bloodshot eyes, Humboldt, six months before his death had moved into the Ilscombe Hotel, not far from the Belasco Theater. At the Belasco a dozen years ago, my play Von Trenck, ran for eight months. Then I was a Success. Humboldt made a scene on the sidewalk opening night. He came from the Village with a group of eggers-on, his cheering section from the White Horse on Hudson Street. I knew some of those miserable bastards. He had then just been released from Bellevue. Of course, he was crackers. And suffering. He carried a picket sign. He (continued on page 112) Humboldts Gift (continued from page 88) was silently frantic, red-eyed. On one side this picket sign read the author of this play is a Fink. On the other side it was Citrine is a Betrayer. This was reported in the Times. "Poet and Rooters picket playwright."

But now on the night of his death, Humboldt had been sitting on his bed in his stifling room, drinking raw gin, reading Yeats and Hegel and, in addition to these visionary authors, the Daily News and the Post, keeping up with Leonard Lyons and the Midnight Earl, the National League, Used Car Prices, Banking News. As long as he had fingers, they would creep toward the world's pulse. Then at about three a.m. (insomnia, he often used to say, is common with Manic-Depressives), he decided to take his garbage down. He was in the elevator with the pail when his heart attack began. When the pain struck, he pressed all the buttons, apparently, including the alarm button. Bells rang, the door opened and he stumbled into a corridor. There he fell, spilling cans, rinds, crusts and fighting for breath. He ripped off his shirt. He was removed in a police ambulance and was dead on arrival at the hospital.

• • •

At the time of which I speak--or didn't I speak of a time?--I started out one morning to see Murra, my accountant, and I found that my Mercedes-Benz had been attacked in the night. Not just scratched or dented by a careless driver. Somebody had pounded it all over, I assume with baseball bats, and this expensive car, no longer new but worth $14,000 three years ago, had been mauled with a ferocity difficult to grasp--to grasp, I mean, in an aesthetic sense, for these Mercedes coupes are beautiful, the silver-gray ones in particular.

My elegant car, the shimmering silver motor tureen that I had had no business to buy--a tense, tall, mustached person like me, hardly stable enough to drive this treasure, much less own title to it. I nearly broke down--appalled, almost swooning. Because everything!--the delicate roof with its sliding panel, the fenders, hood, trunk, doors, locks, lights--had been beaten and clubbed. The windows were shatterproof, so they held up, but they looked spat on all over. They were covered with white fracture blooms, they had a kind of crystalline internal hemorrhage. I felt like a man covered with tropical rash and out of his head with the itch thrust under a scalding shower. Someone had done to my car as I had heard rats did in warehouses, running wild, racing through by the thousands and tearing open sacks of flour for the hell of it. I felt a similar rip at my heart, and as if my blood were pouring out. The machine belonged to a time when my income was in excess of $100,000.

First of all, how could such a thing happen on the street? How could anyone get away with such a clatter in the middle of the night? It must have sounded like rivet guns. The car was parked around the corner from my high-rise, in a sort of lane. But wouldn't the doorman have heard the racket?

I knew perfectly well who was responsible for this assault. I had been warned any number of times that something was going to happen. But I must be the original Hear No Evil, the second monkey. Late at night the phone often rang and when I picked up the receiver, my caller was already yelling, "Citrine! You! Citrine!"

"Yes? Yes? What?"

"You know what, you son of a bitch. Look what you're doing to me. Pay me."

"Doing to you?"

"To me! You fucking-A right. The check you stopped was to me, wasn't it? Make good, Charlie. Make that lousy check good. I warn you. Don't force me to do something."

"I was fast asleep. I'm trying to wake up, Mr.----"

"No names. Get smart for once in your life. Jesus, is it ever time. No-no, no names! All we're going to talk about is a stopped check. Four hundred and fifty bucks. That's the only subject."

These gangster threats in the night, against me--me! Of all people! A peculiar soul and, in my own mind, almost comically innocent--made me laugh. Some people are provoked by the way I laugh. I should have checked myself. "Christ," he said, "you sound like the alarm going off in one of those jewelry stores that sell to the niggers on State Street. Man, you may be in Who's Who, but that's not a normal way to laugh. Listen, Citrine, you lost this dough to me in a poker game, and you'll say that you were drunk, but that's a lot of crap. I took your check, I don't give a shit about the lousy money, but I won't hold still for a slap in the face."

"You know why I stopped payment. You and your buddy were cheating."

"Could you prove that?"

"The host saw. He says you cheated. George swears that you were flashing cards to each other."

"So why didn't he speak up, that dumb prick! Why didn't he stop the game?"

"He may have been scared to."

"Who, that health fiend, with all that color in his face? For Christ's sake, he looks like an apple, with all that jogging five miles a day and the vitamins he takes, but he has no guts. If we cheated, he should have thrown us out."

"Well," I said, "it wasn't a good evening. I was high, though you don't seem to believe it. Nobody was very rational. Everybody was out of character. I think we should just forget it."

"What? I have to hear from my bank about your stop order, which is like a kick in the ass, and then drop it? You think I'm a punk? I'm sorry now we got into all that talk about education, I mentioned that I went to that cow college outside Moline. I saw the look on your face when I told the name of my Catholic college."

"What's college got to do with it?"

"Don't you understand what you're doing to me? You've written all that stuff. You're supposed to be famous. But you dumb asshole, don't you understand?"

"You wake me at two in the morning and ask me to understand. Can't we meet in the daytime, when my head is clear?"

"No more talk, day or night. Make good that check or I lower the boom on you. When I say boom, I mean boom."

I received several such calls, always in the small hours, from Rinaldo Cantabile. In this respect he resembled the late Von Humboldt Fleisher. Humboldt had often used the dramatic properties of night to bully and harass people. Now, I had several times discussed this Cantabile matter with George Swiebel, at whose kitchen table we had played poker. It was George who prevented me from paying the debt. He had ordered me to stop my check. George was an old friend, a businessman, who knew or said he knew the ways of the underworld. For many years he had wised me up. He had told me about whores and brothels, the track, machine politics, the racket unions and the Syndicate. He was, so to speak, my expert, my authority, and his reputation was at stake. George and I had sat next to each other in the fifth grade at the Chopin Grammar School near Western Avenue. Dear old school days. For 45 years we had been friends. So what George told me carried weight. "You don't pay him," he said. He then repeated in a loud shout, "Don't pay, Charlie! Those punks were cheating, cheating, cheating; I never saw anything more raw."

"But, George, Cantabile wants to know why you didn't call him on it right away. Honestly, I think he has a point."

"He's got nothing. He's nobody. I shouldn't have let him into my game. If he'd lost three bucks, we'd be chasing him still. Also, half the time he's spaced out on drugs. You were in no condition to notice, Charlie, but Cantabile was talking a mile a minute about literature, psychology, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and you"--George laughed with his spacious, breathy laugh--"talked about everything I'd warned you not to. For instance, my past, my family, your divorce, my divorce. You mentioned a lot about yourself and your ideas--ideas nobody understood one milligram of. Also about how we got taken in Africa on that beryllium-mine investment."

"Well, I must have been exceptionally (continued on page 196) Humboldt's Gift (continued from page 112) stupid, even for me. But now he threatens me in the night and I think I'd better pay this gangster."

"No pay!" shouted George. "The Cantabiles got thrown out of the rackets in the Thirties. He's just a bigmouthed kid with a dago mustache. He's seen The Godfather or something. Forget it!" And so I had submitted to George's judgment.

• • •

Something had to be done about my Mercedes. I fetched the doorman, Roland. He's a skinny, elderly, unshaven black man. The slack electric-blue uniform that he shared with the other doormen hangs about him. We had always had an agreeable kidding relationship. Both of us believed in cheerful greetings. He had already seen this disaster. He hadn't rung my bell but had let me discover the ruined car for myself. Tenants on their way to work had seen it, too. They knew, of course, to whom it belonged. Roland said, "This is a real bitch, Mist' Citrine." He wears thick glasses, and when I approach him, he often gives a snort of laughter. He thinks me an old roué, because women so often drive up, buzz me on the house phone, make inquiries, leave notes for me. "Somebody really has it in for you to mess up this beautiful car. I didn't come on till seven o'clock."

"One or two people couldn't have done this." I said. "It must have been a whole gang, with clubs, bats, hammers, monkey wrenches, swarming out and clobbering. Like a speeded-up anvil chorus. They could have done the job in ninety seconds. A terrific racket, but short enough so that people would start up from sleep and then turn over. They'd just as lief not look, anyway. Nobody wants trouble. If I hear shots at night, I always say it's backfire from a car."

Roland's face was strongly puckered about the mouth. His glance hinted that a vengeful husband had done this to me.

"Flag those useless fellows in the squad car when they pass, will you, Roland, please? Have them take a look and ring my bell. They'll probably give me a parking ticket...." I tipped Roland a dollar. To bind his good will, after such malevolence.

When I entered my apartment, the phone was ringing. It was Cantabile. "Have you seen your car, smartass?" he asked. "What you finally forced me to do?"

"Senseless!" I said. "Mad! Vandalism!"

"You drove me to it." He accused me loudly, but his voice shook.

"I made you hammer my car?"

"Ten times you were warned. I have emotions, too. You wouldn't believe how I feel this minute." I tried to speak, but he shouted me down. "Last night was step one. Now if you don't pay ... next is you know what."

"No, no, let's stop all this. I only want to settle."

"No settle. Pay. You make the check good. The full amount. And cash. I'm not fucking around anymore. I'll call you later. We'll make a date."

"When?"

"Never mind when. You stick by the phone till I call."

Next instant I heard a dial-tone--that interminable universal miaow. Desperate to tell someone, to consult, I dialed George Swiebel. Sharon, his secretary, said he was out on a job. He's in the construction business.

Now, what was I to do to compose myself? To regain calm, I did the one yoga thing I know. I removed my shoes and took everything out of my pockets. Then I stood on my head.

My loveliest of machines had been destroyed in the street, its silver skin pitted, its headlights crushed, its doors unopenable. The Mercedes shop steward would tell me in his German accent that all parts had to be imported from Europe.

And I, clutching my bald head in both hands, fingers interlocked in a gesture of despair, legs in the air, tufts of side hair sticking out, the green Persian carpet flowing under me. I was heart-injured that material possessions could mean so much!

I would never--repeat, never!--get a penny from the insurance company on such a queer claim. They had yards of small print and a thousand ways to weasel out. American corporations were boss before, but in the Nixon Administration they were drunk with immunity. The good old bourgeois decencies, even as window dressing, were gone.

It was from George Swiebel that I learned to stand on my head. My friend George is a large, wide-built man, a thick-muscled, ruddy man. He's not exactly a physical culturist, but he is devoted to the body, and I always turn to him for health advice. George has his own system and, as a rule, he cures himself.

So, when I told him about my arthritic neck, he prescribed standing on my head. Though I threw up my palms and shrieked with laughter at this recommendation (looking like one of Goya's frog caricatures--a visión burlesca--the one with the huge padlock on his parts), I practiced against the wall, I learned the trick and I was cured of my neck pains. Next, when I had a stricture, I asked George what to do. He said, "It's our age. It's the prostate gland. It's happened to me, too--you start, then you stop, then you trickle again? And it burns a bit? And you feel humiliated?"

"All correct."

"The remedy is, as you stand on your head, to tighten your buttocks. Just suck in the buttocks, as if you were trying to bring the cheeks together."

Now standing on my head actually relieved me. I breathed again. But I saw, when I was upside down, two large circles in front of me, very bright. These occasionally appeared during this exercise. I figured they were produced by pressure on the cornea. Such, at least, was my explanation. The weight on my skull buckled the cornea and produced an illusion of big diaphanous rings, like seeing eternity. Which, believe me, I was entirely ready for. I had a view of the bookcase behind me, and when my head was readjusted with more weight shifted to my forearms, the beautiful rings swam away, ideas of mortality vanished with them, and in reverse I saw rows and rows of my own books, some hack work, some sincere, biographies in many languages, a few copies of my big failure, The Sense of Being in Americans, and many editions of my play Von Trenck. The fortune I was alleged by Humboldt to have made was earned mainly by Trenck. I didn't add the money up while it was coming in. I was more moved to do the addition when it was ebbing. For me it had been a lot to manage. I had bungled the job, despite my keen interest (which I had tried to dissemble, concealing it even from myself, wanting terribly to be highminded). Immediately, the dough came between Humboldt and me. He claimed that I owed him a large amount, and he put through a check for 3000 bucks. The bank paid and I didn't contest the matter, although I owed him nothing. He was very litigious, Humboldt was.

Moreover, I was crippled by guilt. I wasn't absolutely sure that I had done right by Humboldt, and I had a feeling that my gains were ill-gotten. The play that brought me such wealth was not the play I had written. I had only provided a bolt of material from which the director had cut, shaped, basted and sewn his own Trenk. Broadway, after all, does adjoin the Garment District.

The cops leaned long and violently on my bell. I let them in and they began to write up their report. These heavy men were amused by this unusual case--a Mercedes crushed in the street. They entered smelling rather stale. Sitting in a squad car seemed to give them an assy sort of odor. Their hardware clinked and their wide hips were bulky with blanks. "Somebody really has it in for you," one huge black cop said. He was hinting at underworld complications. Perhaps I owed money to a juice man. Possibly I was in the rackets myself. But enough is enough; I had made my mistake and I wasn't going to name any names.

"I don't know anything," I said. I believe the police approved of my reserve.

"I never saw such a car massacre," said the first cop. "It's a real sin."

His buddy said, "Jesus, if I didn't have a garage I wouldn't own but a piece of (continued on page 250) Humboldt's Gift (continued from page 196) junk, only." He spoke on behalf of good judgment, and it made him pious. Then he saw the framed medal in green plush on the wall and he said, "Is that from the war? Were you in Korea?"

"No," I said, "it's from the French government. The Legion of Honor. Chevalier. I'm a knight."

"I didn't know an American was allowed to be," he said.

Von Humboldt Fleisher had sent me an unsigned postcard on that occasion.

"Shoveleer! Your name is now lesion."

The hand was shaky, but it was Humboldt's, no other. He had been on a Finnegans Wake kick for 20 years. Whenever I was similarly honored, he sent me a message. "Now you are one of Pulitzer's pullets, Lucky P. R. Always in a muddle." In the old days, we had had theoretical discussions about the deformation of language, a further extension of the artificial derangement of the senses. All of which came from the necessity to reclaim consciousness from received ideas. It was Blake and Vision against Locke and the tabula rasa. Did you, beholding the sun, see a pale blot in the sky, or did you see a heavenly host and hear it singing "Holy, holy, holy"? Art must redeem us from the cartoon world of positivist abstractions.

The state of mind Humboldt had created for himself had little to do with Art and Redemption. He became convinced that the main ingredient of my Success had been "stolen" from him. He didn't claim that he had written Von Trenck. What he said was that I couldn't have done it without him. It followed that he should have been an honored first-nighter in a tuxedo escorting a starlet and later, like a fair-haired bison, he should have been one of the guests at Sardi's, upstairs, waiting for the reviews. Instead, he behaved like a lunatic outside the Belasco, picketing me, applauded by his own cheering section, his cronies from the White Horse. The police offered to run him in, but I cried out in a frenzy, "Don't you touch him!" It was not one of my happiest evenings in New York.

Soon after, he drew that check for $3000 on my account. He had smashed up his Buick. I understand that he bought himself an Oldsmobile with my money.

I had heard, too, that he was living with a gorgeous black girl who studied the French horn at Juilliard, but I knew that this was not possible when I had my last sight of him on 46th Street. He couldn't have been living with a pretty girl, he was too destroyed for that. His color was dead. His face was a sort of East River gray and he was floundering in a large gray suit. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and spun its tent. His eyes were red. He stood eating pretzel sticks at the curb, his lunch. Hiding behind the cars across the street, I wore English shoes, custom-made by Poulsen and Skone. My underpants were combed Sea Island cotton, seven bucks a pair. I was in this period of my life dressed like Sugar Ray Robinson. Not that I had the fighter's spirit. Oh, no, I wasn't arrayed to fight but to be overcome. Seeing Humboldt, I was overcome by horror, compassion, ideas of Fate and other humanistic lah-de-dah. And I beat it. I went around the corner on long trembling legs, jaws and teeth shut hard and my very mustache stinging me. I said to myself, "Humboldt, goodbye! I'll see you in the next world."

And a few weeks later, he dropped dead at the Ilscombe Hotel.

On that same day, I went from breakfast at the Plaza, the Edwardian Room, to La Guardia. On the 727, I opened the Times and turned to the obituaries. There I saw his handsome, ruined face in black and gray. I went into the can and wept, while lights flashed return to your seat.

In his youth, he had had it all. The Goddess was with him. He was handsome, wise, angelic--he was a genius. His poems were musical, his ideas were daring, he was an original conversationalist, and women were mad for him. at a party I once heard a lady say. "Do you know what I think you're like, Humboldt? To me you're like a person from a painting." Well, he was destroyed. For a long time after his death, what I felt was that there were left in the world only certain gross comical disheartening persons in custom-made shoes or suits with psychedelic lining. And that these, or people like them, promoters, hard-nosed men, moral defectives, powerful dimwits--these owned the stock portfolios, the corporations, the reputations, these sailed the Aegean on yachts with gold faucets. These brutes had power and governed the nations.

• • •

I sat rubbing my mustache, staring at the walls, waiting for that telephone call.

And actually, this Rinaldo Cantabile didn't make me wait too long. I didn't know whether he was a real hoodlum or only an aspirant, but he was as subject as anyone else to the daily rhythms of the metropolis, the click that starts the traffic rushing at sunrise, the five-o'clock buzzing that rumbles it back from industries and offices. This great unaware beast is covered by a scale of minutes. Lunchtime is lunchtime. Rinaldo phoned me at half past 11. He probably had another date to keep. He said, "All right, you dumb prick, we're going to meet. Bring cash. And that's all you bring. Don't make any bad moves."

"I wouldn't know what or how," I said.

"You come alone."

"What else, it never even occurred to me----"

"Well, it better not occur. And bring new bills. You go to the bank and get new money. I don't want any grease or snot on those dollars. Get nine bills of fifty. New. And be glad if I don't make you eat the fucking check that bounced."

What a fascist! But maybe he was only priming himself, keeping up the savagery level. I had a hunch that it might be so. I said, in appeasement and abasement, "Any way you want it." My sole object now (through docility) was to put an end to our relations. "Where do you want me?" I said.

"On Division Street, the Russian Bath," he said.

"That old joint! For the love of God!"

"You be in front of it at one forty-five, and wait. Alone," he said.

I answered, "Right." But he hadn't waited for agreement. Again I heard the dial tone. I identified this interminable sound with the anxiety level of the disengaged soul.

I tried again to get hold of George Swiebel to warn him away from the Bath. Apparently, I had mentioned during the fatal poker game that it amused George to join his father now and again in the old steam room on Division near what used to be Robey Street. There could be no other reason Cantabile had picked that place for our rendezvous. The Russian Bath on Division Street is as old as old Mr. Swiebel, who is now in his 80s, and perhaps older. In childhood I went there with my own father and the place was as dank and rotten then as it is now, but always very agreeable as well. The steam was comforting and golden, it rotted the wooden posts until they resembled beaver fur, it softened the planks. Old Mr. Swiebel steamed himself there daily. I told George's secretary, Sharon, "No Russian steam today. This is Charlie Citrine. It's important, Sharon, you hear?"

George had said of his receptionist, "She digs emergencies." This was understandable. Sharon, a low-built, plain woman, had had her throat cut last year. Without warning, unprovoked, a fellow off the street stepped into the office one day with a razor and swept it over her throat. He went out again and was never seen. "The blood," said George, "fell like a curtain." With wonderful presence of mind, he knotted a towel on her neck and rushed her to the hospital. She now sits behind a glass panel.

I was afraid that Cantabile, having warmed up on my Mercedes, would want to go on to George. George Swiebel is generous, a good soul, a bright man, in his own way. George had organized that poker game for my pleasure and instruction. He said I was alone too much and out of things. He wanted to show me "real people," the masses. But his guests knew why they were invited and felt that they were on exhibit. The categories are grasped nowadays by those who belong to them. Thus, George's poker pals, aware that they were on display, enriched the evening with their own irony. It was all perfectly clear to them. They saw the Cantabiles for what they were. Emil, a smalltime hoodlum, was born to throw rocks through windows and to twist arms. His cousin Rinaldo, with his black mustache and elegant clothing, talked big, bluffed madly, read books but pretended to be a cast-iron lowbrow. About me the guests obviously knew that I was some kind of mental fellow whose name they could find in a reference book at the public library, and that I was there to relish their peculiarities. I proved to be by far the most peculiar.

I am a bad poker player. Besides, I was distracted by the people George had brought together: one undertaker, one junior statistician from the branch of the State University, one hillbilly from George's sales force, a fellow in the tuxedo-rental business, and Rinaldo and Emil, who had pushed their way in uninvited. My legs jittering under the table, I was smiling as the cards flipped toward me.

We sat with whiskey, poker chips and cigars in this South Chicago kitchen, amid the dark breathings of steel mills and refineries, under webs of power lines. Driving over the Skyway, I often note odd natural survivals in this scene of heavy industry. Carp and catfish still live in the benzine-smelling ponds nearby. Black women angle for them with dough bait. Woodchucks survive among the dumps. Redwing blackbirds with their shoulder tabs fly like uniformed ushers. Daisies and violets persist.

It's true I dropped about 600 bucks altogether, counting the check to Cantabile, but I am so used to having money taken from me that I didn't really mind. I had great pleasure that evening. I drank, I relaxed and I laughed a good deal. I was told later, however, that I alone failed to understand what was going on. The others saw how the Cantabile cousins were cheating, flashing cards and finagling with the deck.

• • •

In the Capone era, the Cantabiles had been bad eggs. At that time, for one reason and another, the whole world had identified Chicago with blood, there were the stockyards and there were the rackets. In this myth of blood, the Cantabiles had stood in the middle rank. They were quite well known. They worked for the Mob, they beat people and shot them, they drove whiskey trucks. Unfortunately for the family, there was a weak-minded uncle who joined the police force. This police Cantabile, one evening when he was off duty, got drunk in a bar. Two playful punks took away his pistols and had fun with him. At gunpoint, they made him crawl on his belly, eat sawdust, they kicked his ass while he lay on the floor moaning with humiliation and rage. When they had had enough, they ran away, full of glee, throwing the guns down. This was their mistake. He recovered his pistols, pursued them and killed them both in the street. For this he got a life sentence. It was a hard blow for the family. After this disgrace, the Cantabiles were dropped by the underworld. They had always been average minor racketeers. Now, because of old Ralph "Moochy" Cantabile, no one would take them seriously. Therefore, Rinaldo Cantabile could not afford to be brushed off by a person like me who lost to him at cards and then stopped his check. Perhaps George was right and Rinaldo, or Ronald, was of no consequence as a hoodlum. But he had done a terrible thing to my Mercedes. Whether his rage was natural or contrived, no one could say. He was apparently one of those proud, sensitive fellows who are a cause of so much trouble in human life through being passionate about internal matters of very slight interest to any other sensible person.

I got moving. I went out to my dented car, which, in maintenance costs alone, ran me $1500 per annum. Encountering bad air, which often comes in garbage gusts across the corner of the lake from the greatest steel-and-oil complex in the world--a brown air, more gas than air--I put up the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the stereo. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas, dark December, and the cultural FM stations were performing sacred music--oratorios by Monteverdi and Palestrina and Handel. Christ Lag in Todes Banden, arranged by Greenberg, with Cohen on the viola da gamba. I drove off, barely able to see through the windshield.

I hadn't yet decided in what order to do things. Maybe it would be best to take my car to the Clark Street garage and then take a taxi to the bank.

• • •

A little later, with the new $50 bills in my wallet, I was riding westward in a taxi. All I could see of the driver was a steel-wool Afro and atop that a cap. The back of the cab was dusty with cigarette ash and smelled like a tavern.

This is my old neighborhood, a district of small brick buildings painted by their Polish owners, with their strong property sense, mainly in Christmas red. The grass plots are fenced with black-iron pipe. There must be Baltic towns that look like this, Gdynia, for instance. But the Illinois prairie erupts in vacant lots and occasionally the wind drives tumbleweed down the streets.

In the old days, the days of coalmen and icemen, broken hot-water boilers were cut in half with acetylene torches, and these long troughs were used as planters on the grass plots of the brick bungalows coated in blaring red. The troughs were often painted silver in the spring; they had double rows of silver rivets and in their black soil geraniums grew. Big Polish women in ribboned dust caps beat the carpets, shook out mops and hosed the flowers.

As there was still time for it, I told the cabby to go farther, so that I could look at old landmarks. I had to speak to him through the perforations of the bulletproof screen. We went another mile west. The old landmarks had been demolished! I felt like a captive flamingo in the back seat, trying to look through the windows at the mangroves of his youth. With the pulsatory agitation of a bird, I saw that Lovi's old restaurant had been swept away, plus Ben's Pool Hall, and the old carbarn and Gratch's Funeral Parlor, from which both my parents had been buried. Eternity had allowed no picturesque interval. The ruins of time had been bulldozed and scraped away. Steel beams were rising in the air. It was the famous acceleration, the obliteration of familiar and sentimental attachments of which Americans are so bitterly proud. Polish kielbasa no longer hung in butchers' windows. The sausages in the carniceria were Caribbean, purple and wrinkled. The old signs were gone. The new ones said Hoy. Mudanzas. Iglesia. This was now a Puerto Rican neighborhood. There was more rubble in the street than formerly, a great deal of crushed plaster and broken glass. But the low limestone Russian Bath building (it was also a lodginghouse or proletarian hotel) still stood. The second floor used to be for bachelors or widowers who drove milk wagons or worked on the car line, aged working stiffs, lone Ukrainian grandfathers.

Ah, yes, I knew the place from boyhood. My father used to bring me. He had great faith in steam and in being lathered with oak leaves. These steam bathers don't look at all like the lean, elderly downtown people. They are cast in an antique form. Here you see men with swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk, thick pillar legs with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks and drink schnapps. You see hard, stout, old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. An atmosphere of conscious obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature. And down in the superheated cellar, all of these Slavonic cave men and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. While in the locker room upstairs little dudes and grinning broads leap up and down on the television screen and make smart talk. And Mickey, who keeps the food concession, fries skirt steaks and potato pancakes and, with enormous knives, chops cabbages for cole slaw and quarters grapefruits for the old men who mount in bed sheets from the blasting heat. The steam below rises from a pile of white-hot boulders on which Franush, the attendant, sloshes cold water. To keep his brains from baking, he wears a rimless wet felt hat. Like a red salamander, Franush creeps up with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring, he backs away, groping for the bucket. Then he flings the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.

Loyal to this place, Father Myron Swiebel came every day with his own herring, raw onions, buttered pumpernickel and bourbon whiskey. Though he had no driver's license, he drove his own Plymouth. On both eyes he had cataracts. But he could see well enough straight ahead. It was the side vision that was poor. Owing to this, he did great damage to other cars in the parking lot. But I was anxious about George. I didn't want Cantabile to run into him here.

I asked Mickey, who was searing fatty steaks and frying onions, "Has George come in today?"

A man of peace built like a bouncer, with huge bare arms and an apron tied very high under his muscles, Mickey has a twisted lip. During the Depression, he had to sleep in the parks and from the cold ground he got a partial paralysis of the cheek. It made him seem to scoff or jeer. This was a misleading impression, for he was a gentle, earnest person.

"The old man is here," he said. "George came on Sunday but not today."

I hurried out past the cashier's cage with its little steel boxes where patrons left their valuables. I passed the squirming barber pole, and when I got to the sidewalk, which was as dense as the galaxy with stars of broken glass, a white Thunderbird pulled up in front of the Puerto Rican sausage shop across the street and Ronald Cantabile got out. He sprang out, I should say. I saw that he was in a terrific state. Dressed in a brown raglan coat with a matching hat and wearing brown-kid boots, he was tall and good-looking. His dark and dense mustache was as fine as mink. But through this crackling elegance of dress there was a current, a desperate sweep, so that the man came out, so to speak, raging from the neck up. Clear across Division Street, I could see how red he was. He had worked himself up to intimidate me, I thought. But also, he was making unusual steps. His feet behaved strangely. Cars came between us just then, so that he could not cross over. Beneath them I could see his trotting movements. At the first break in the traffic, Cantabile opened his raglan coat to let me see that he was wearing a magnificent belt. But surely it wasn't a belt that he wanted to display. Just beside the buckle, something was sticking out. He clapped his hand to it. He wanted me to see that he was carrying a gun. More cars came and Cantabile was jumping up and down. Under the utmost strain, he called out to me when the automobiles had passed, "You alone?"

"Alone. I'm alone."

He drew himself up toward the shoulder with peculiar twisting intensity. "You got anybody hiding?"

"No. Just me. Nobody."

He opened the Thunderbird and brought up two baseball bats from the floor. A bat in each hand, he started toward me. A van came between us. Now I could see nothing but his feet moving rapidly in the high boots. I thought, he sees I've come to pay. Why should he clobber me? He's got to know that I wouldn't pull anything. Should I run?

As the last of a string of cars passed, Cantabile took a long stride with both bats, as if to rush upon me without a pause. But I yelled, "For Christ's sake, Cantabile!"

He paused and I held up open hands. Then he flung one of the bats back into the Thunderbird and started for me with the other.

"I brought the money," I said. "You don't have to beat my brains out."

"You got a gun?"

"I've got nothing."

"You come here," he said.

I went willingly to the middle of the street. He made me stop. "Stay right there," he said. I was in the center of heavy traffic, cars honking and the provoked drivers rolling down their windows. He tossed the second bat back into the T-bird. Then he strode up and took hold of me roughly. He treated me as if I deserved the extreme penalty. I held out the money, I offered it to him on the spot. But he refused to look at it. He pushed me with what I thought a Sicilian sort of fury toward the stairs of the Bath and past the squirming barbershop cylinders of red, white and blue. We hurried in, past the cashier's cage and along the dirty corridor.

"Go on, go on," said Cantabile.

"Where do you want to go?"

"To the can. Where is it?"

"Don't you want the dough?"

"I said the can! The can!"

I then understood, his bowels were acting up, he had been caught short, he had to go to the toilet, and I was to go with him. He wouldn't allow me to wait in the street. "OK," I said, "just take it easy and I'll lead you." He followed me through the locker room. The John entrance was doorless. Only the individual stalls have doors. I motioned him forward and was about to seat myself on one of the locker room benches, but he gave me a hard push on the shoulder and drove me forward. These toilets are the Bath at its worst. The radiators put up a stunning dry heat. The tiles are never washed, never disinfected. The hot dry urine smell rushes to your eyes like onion fumes.

"Jesus!" said Cantabile. He kicked open a stall, still keeping me in front of him. He said, "You go in first."

"The both of us?" I said.

"Hurry up."

"There's space only for one."

He tugged out his gun and shook the butt at me. "You want this in your teeth?" The black fur of his mustache spread as the lip of his distorted face stretched. His brows were joined above the nose like the hilt of a large dagger. "In the corner, you!" He slammed the door and, panting, took off his things. He thrust the raglan and the matching hat into my arms, although there was a hook. There was even a piece of hardware I had never before noticed. Attached to the door was a brass fitting, a groove labeled cigar, a touch of old-fashioned class. He was seated now with the gun held in both palms, his hands between his knees, his eyes first closing, then greatly dilating.

In a situation like this, I can always switch out and think about the human condition. Of course, he wanted to humiliate me. Because I was a chevalier of the légion d'honneur? Not that he actually knew of this. But he was aware that I was, as they would say in Chicago, a brain, a man of culture or intellectual attainments. Was this why I had to listen to his rumbling and slopping and smell his stink? Perhaps fantasies of savagery and monstrosity, of beating my brains out, had loosened his bowels. Humankind is full of nervous invention of this type, and I started to think (to distract myself) of all the volumes of ape behavior I had read in my time, of Kohler and Yerkes and Zuckerman and Schaller on gorillas, and of the rich repertory of sensitivities in the anthropoid branch. It was even possible that I was a more limited person than a fellow like Cantabile, in spite of my concentration on intellectual achievement. For it would never have occurred to me to inflict anger on anyone by such means. This might have been a sign that his vital imagination was naturally more prodigal and fertile. In this way, thinking improving thoughts, I waited with good poise while he crouched there with his hardened dagger brows. He was a handsome, slender man whose hair had a natural curl. It was cropped so close that you could see the roots of his curls and the contraction of his scalp in this moment of stress. He wanted to inflict a punishment on me, but the result was only to make us more intimate.

He stood and then wiped, and then pulled his shirttails straight, belting his pants with the large oval buckle and sticking back the gun (I hoped the safety catch was on). As I say, when he pulled his shirttails straight and buckled his stylish belt on the hip-huggers, thrusting the gun in, flushing the toilet with his pointed kid boot--too fastidious to touch the lever with his hand--he said, "Christ, if I catch the crabs here!" As if that would be my fault, too. I saw that he was a violent, reckless blamer. He said, "You don't know how I hated to sit here. These old guys must piss on the seats." This, too, he held against me and entered on the debit side. Then he said, "Who owns this joint?"

Now, this fascinating question had never occurred to me. The Bath was so ancient, it was like the Pyramids of Egypt, the gardens of Assurbanipal. "I've never heard of an owner," I said. "For all I know, it's some old people out in British Columbia."

"You're too fucking smart. I only asked for information. I'll find out." He washed his hands without soap, because none was provided, and then refused the roller towel. I admit that it had a kind of repulsive originality in its cake of filth. Full of the nastiness of the place, he asked, "Is this what they call a Bath?"

We went together to the lunch counter and there Cantabile dried his hands with paper napkins, which he pulled angrily from the dispenser, crumpled and dropped on the floor. He asked Mickey, "Why don't you have soap and towels in your can? Why don't you wash the goddamn place out? There's no disinfectant in there."

"No? Don't you put moth balls in there anymore, Joe? We got some Lysol left?" Joe, black and silent, leaned on the shoeshine chair, with its brass pedestals and upside-down bronze legs with feet. Aged and wordless, he seemed to wish to remind us all of some remote, grand considerations--possibly Honor, maybe Reason, perhaps Destiny.

"You guys are gonna buy supplies from me," said Cantabile. "Disinfectant, liquid soap, paper, everything. I got a shop on Clybourn Avenue." He took out a long ostrichskin wallet and threw a business card onto the counter.

Mickey took up the card with deference. His huge fingers were covered with black knife marks. "I'm not the boss, I just have the restaurant concession. But I'll pass the word on to management downtown."

"Mickey, who owns the Bath?" I asked. But he simply raised his eyebrows and looked blank. It would be curious, I thought, if it should turn out to belong to the Syndicate.

"Is George Swiebel here?" Cantabile asked. Mickey shook his head. "Well, he's a dumb shit. Tell him I said so."

We went out into the street. The sky had suddenly cleared. I couldn't decide if gloomy weather wasn't more suitable to these surroundings. The air was cold; the light was neat and sharp, the shadows thrown from blackened buildings made patterns on the ground.

"Well, let me give you this money. I brought the clean bills. That ought to wrap up the whole thing, Mr. Cantabile," I said.

"What--just like that? You think it's that easy?" said Rinaldo.

"Well, I'm very sorry. It shouldn't have happened. I really regret it."

"Do you take your friend George's word for everything? Why, he's an asshole. Why didn't he catch Emil and me in the act? No, he has you stop the check, and then you and he and that undertaker, the tuxedo man and all those other dummies spread around the gossip that Ronald Cantabile is a punk. Man! You could never get away with that. Don't you realize?"

"Yes, now I realize."

"I was watching you at the game, and I didn't dig you. When are you going to do something--and know what you're doing?" These words he spaced, he accented, he vehemently uttered into my face. He snatched away his coat, which I was still holding, the rich brown raglan with its large buttons--such buttons as Circe might have had in her sewing box. Very beautiful, really, rather Oriental-treasure buttons. The last garment I had seen resembling this one was worn by the late Colonel McCormick. I was then about 12 years old. His limousine had stopped in front of the Tribune Tower (I was there to obtain a free map of Chicagoland, as the colonel had renamed it). Two gunmen of small stature came out of the limousine first, each with two pistols, and crouched and circled on the pavement, defending all approaches. Then, in this four-gun setting, the colonel stepped out in just such a tobaccocolored coat as Cantabile's, and a pinch hat with gleaming harsh fuzz which would have given you nettle rash just to look at.

"You think I don't know what I'm doing?"

"No, you don't. You couldn't find your ass with both hands."

He made me get into his showy auto. It had red-leather bucket seats and an immense instrument panel. He took off at top speed from a standstill, like an adolescent drag racer, the tires wildly squealing.

In the car, I got a slightly different impression of him. Seen in profile, his nose ended in a sort of white bulb, which was darkly lined. His eyes were bigger than they should be, artificially dilated, perhaps. His mouth was wide, with an emotional underlip that seemed to evidence a childish struggle to appear full-grown. The look in his dark eyes also hinted that he aspired to be something he'd never attained and that this was a violent grief for him. I suspected that he didn't know what ideal it was he tried for. Only the grief was real.

We were speeding eastward. "Didn't I hear that you fought in Vietnam?" I asked.

"I was in Vietnam," he said. "I got out of that smelly Catholic college and enlisted."

"Did you see some action?"

He laughed. "I started some action. I stole a complete tank truck of gasoline and sold it to some black-market guys. Then I got caught. But my folks made a deal. Senator Dirksen helped. I was only eight months in jail."

He wanted me to know that he was no Uncle Moochy Ralph but a true Twenties Cantabile, with a criminal pedigree. The toilet-disinfectant business on Clybourn was obviously one of his rackets. He probably had a currency exchange or two and maybe an exterminator business. But he was obviously in the minor leagues.

No, this restless, striving, smoky-souled Cantabile was on the outside trying to get in. He was the sort of small entrepreneur the sanitation department fishes out of sewers after three months of decomposition. Certain persons of this type were found in the trunks of automobiles parked at O'Hare. The weight at the back was balanced by a cinder block laid on the motor.

Deliberately, at the next corner, Rinaldo ran a red light. He rode the bumper of a car ahead and he made other motorists chicken out. He was elegant, flashy. The seats of the T-bird were specially upholstered in soft crimson blood-splash leather. He wore gloves sold to horsemen by Abercrombie & Fitch. At the expressway, he gunned up the slope, running into merging traffic. The cars behind braked noisily. His radio played rock music. And I recognized Cantabile's scent. It was Canoe.

• • •

Rinaldo took me first to the Playboy Club. The Bunny at the door knew him and the checkroom Bunny was all smiles. He threw his coat down on the counter; I handed mine over carefully.

We stepped into the semidarkness, the opulence, onto the thick carpet of the bar, where bottles shone and sensual female forms went back and forth in an amber light.

Cantabile said, "We're going to see some people. When I give the high sign, you pay me the money and apologize." I realized that I was going to make amends in public, at least in a small way. Had a Cantabile family council ordered Rinaldo to do this--to repair the damage to their good bad name?

We were standing before a table.

"Bill, I'd like to introduce Charlie Citrine."

"Mike, this is Ronald."

The rest was, "Sit down, what'll you drink?"

Bill was unknown to me, but Mike was Mike Schneiderman, the gossip columnist. He was large, heavy, strong, tanned, sullen, stupid, fatigued, his hair razor styled, his cuff buttons nearly of a size with his sleepy eyes. His necktie was a big clumsy flap of silk brocade. He was sitting with his old fashioned and his cigar. His occupation was sedentary. He sat with people in bars and restaurants. He was clumsy by nature, smooth by practice. At certain moments he looked blank and almost ill. He knew me at once and said, "Hello, Charlie." Then he said to Bill, "Charlie's a famous person. He lives in Chicago incognito."

I was beginning to appreciate what Rinaldo had done. He had gone to a lot of trouble to set this up. Many strings had had to be pulled, many phone calls made, one could be sure of that. This Bill, a connection of his, perhaps owed the Cantabiles a favor and had agreed to produce Mike the columnist. I thought Bill had the Cosa Nostra look. Very clean-shaven, his powerful yet vulnerable nose curved deeply toward the nostrils. I thought it the kind of nose that would bleed easily. In a different context, I would have guessed him to have started out in life as a violinist, to have become disgusted with the bow and strings and to have gone into the liquor business. He had been well sunned in Acapulco. Mike was sleepy and haughty. Bill, doing Rinaldo a small favor, seemed contemptuous. Too bad. In a way, my sympathy at this moment was with Rinaldo, who had gone to great trouble to organize what should have been a beautiful encounter worthy of the Italian Renaissance. Mike's column was full of jet-set expressions and illiteracies. The names of the happy few appeared in bold type. He was used, of course, to people trying to crash his column. The Bunny took our drink order. Up to the neck, she was ravishing. Above, all was business anxiety. The wrinkle between her eyes had more force than the soft crease of her breasts could overcome.

Where the Club is, this lake-shore strip of the city is stupendous--skyscrapers of every form, and the shining road beside the shining golden-white vacancy of Lake Michigan. Man had overcome the emptiness of this land. But the emptiness had given him a few good licks in return. Here we were amidst the flatteries of wealth and power with pretty maidens and booze and tailored suits, and the men wearing jewels and using scent. Mike Schneiderman the columnist was waiting, most skeptically, for an interesting offering. I drank down my double Scotch eagerly and, being a quick expander, started to laugh. No one joined me. Ugly Bill said, "What's funny?"

I said, "Only that I learned to swim near this place at Oak Street before all these glamorous buildings went up. I used to come on the streetcar. It went no farther than Wells. I had a greasy bag of sandwiches. My mother bought me a girl's bathing suit at a sale and I was mortified by the little skirt with its rainbow border. Now I'm here drinking whisky."

Cantabile gave me a shove under the table with his whole foot, probably leaving a dusty print on my trousers. His frown spread upward into his scalp, rippling under the close-cut curls, while his nose became as white as candle wax.

I said, "By the way, Ronald ..." and I took out the bills. "I owe you money."

"What money?"

"The money I lost to you at that poker game. It was some time back. I guess you forgot about it. Four hundred and fifty bucks."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Rinaldo Cantabile. "What game?"

"It seems to have slipped your mind. We were playing at George Swiebel's apartment."

"Since when do you book guys play poker?" said Mike Schneiderman.

"Why? We have our human side. Poker has always been played at the White House. Perfectly respectable. President Harding played. Also during the New Deal. Morgenthau, Roosevelt, and so on."

"You sound like a West Side Chicago boy," said Bill.

"Humboldt Park," I said.

"Well, put away your dough, Charlie," said Cantabile. "This is drink time. No business. Pay me later."

"Why not now, while I think of it and as long as I have the bills out? You know, the whole thing slipped my mind, and last night I woke up with a start, thinking, 'I forgot to pay Rinaldo his dough.' Christ, I could have blown my brains out."

Cantabile said violently, "OK, OK, Charlie!" He snatched the money from me and crammed it without counting into the breast pocket of his jacket. He gave me a look of high irritation, a flaming look. Nor could I imagine why. What I did know was that Mike Schneiderman had power to put you in the paper and if you were in the paper, you hadn't lived in vain. Death's hold over you was in part canceled. You were not just a two-legged creature sneaking about for a brief hour, sullying eternity with nasty doings and thoughts. You were....

"What'cha doing these days, Charlie?" said Mike Schneiderman. "Another play, maybe? A movie? You know," he said to Bill, "Charlie's a real famous guy. They made a terrific flick out of his Broadway hit. He's written a whole lot of stuff."

"I had my moment of glory on Broadway," I said. "I could never repeat it, so why try?"

But Cantabile, like a cat glaring through a window, said, "We've got to go." I followed him and in the lobby he said, "What the fuck is the matter with you?"

"I can't think what I did wrong."

"You said you wanted to blow your brains out. You must know damn well, you creep, that Mike Schneiderman's brother blew his brains out two months ago. You read about it in the paper, how he gave counterfeit bonds for collateral and got caught."

"Oh, that Schneiderman! The fellow who printed up his own certificates, the forger?"

"You knew it, don't pretend," said Cantabile. "You did it on purpose to louse me up."

"I swear I didn't. 'Blowing my brains out'? That's a common expression. At worst, a Freudian slip. Absolutely unintentional."

"You always pretend you don't know what you did. I suppose you'll try to tell me that you didn't know Bill Lakin, the guy with the big nose. I suppose you'll say it's all news to you that he took the forged bonds as security and got indicted along with Schneiderman's brother."

"Is that true? Why should he be indicted just because brother Schneiderman put one over on him?"

"Bird brain, you don't understand what you read in the news. He bought Lekatride from Schneiderman for a buck a share when it was worth six. Haven't you heard of Kerner, either? These grand juries and trials? But you don't care about the things that other people knock themselves out over. You have contempt. You're arrogant, Citrine. You despise us."

"Who's us?"

"Us! People of the world ..." said Cantabile. He spoke wildly. It was no time for argument. I was to respect and to fear him. It would be provoking if he didn't think I feared him. I didn't think that he would shoot me. but a beating was surely possible, perhaps a broken leg. As we left the Playboy Club, he thrust the money again into my hand.

Our next stop was in the Hancock Building, somewhere on the 60th or 70th story. It looked like a private apartment, and yet it seemed also to be a place of business. It was furnished in decorator style, with plastic trick art objects hanging on the walls, geometrical forms of the trompe-l'oeil type that intrigue business people. They are peculiarly vulnerable to art racketeers. The gentleman who lived here was elderly, in a brown-hop-sack sports jacket with gold threads and a striped shirt on his undisciplined belly. White hair was slicked back upon his narrow head. The liver stains on his hands were quite large. Under the eyes and about the nose, he did not look altogether well. As he sat on the low sofa that, judging by the way it gave under him, was stuffed with down, his alligator loafers extended far into the ivory-shag carpet. The pressure of his belly brought out the shape of his phallus on his thigh. Long nose, gaping lip and wattles went with all this velvet, gold-threaded hopsack, brocade, satin, alligator and trompe-l'oeil objects. From the conversation, I gathered that his line was jewelry and that he dealt with the underworld. Perhaps he was also a fence--how would I know? Rinaldo Cantabile and his wife had an anniversary coming and he was shopping for a bracelet. A Japanese houseboy served drinks. I am not a great drinker, but today I understandably wanted whisky and I took a double shot of Black Label Scotch. From high up, I could contemplate the air of Chicago on this short December afternoon. A ragged western sun spread orange light over the dark shapes of the town, over the branches of the river and the black trusses of bridges. The lake, gilt, silver and amethyst, was ready for its winter cover of ice.

Meantime, the phone rang continually, and not a single call seemed local. They were all Las Vegas, L.A., Miami and New York. "Send your boy over to Tiffany and find out what they ask for this item," our host was saying. I then heard him speak of estate jewels and of an Indian Nizam who was trying to sell a whole lot of stuff in the U.S.A. and inviting bids.

At one interval, while Cantabile was fussing importantly over a tray of diamonds (nasty, that white stuff seemed to me), the old gentleman spoke to me. He said, "I know you from somewheres, don't I?"

"Yes," I said, "from the whirlpool at the Downtown Health Club."

Yes, I had met this old gentleman in the hot-chemicals bath, where people sat sweating, gossiping about sports, taxes, television programs, best sellers or chatting about Acapulco and the Cayman Islands. I didn't know but what this old man had one of those infamous cabanas near the swimming pool to which young chicks were invited for the siesta. There had been scandal and protest over this. What was done behind drawn drapes in the cabanas was no one's business, of course, but some of the old guys, demonstrative and exhibitionistic. had been seen fondling their little do'ls on the sun terrace, removing their false teeth in public to give the girls soul kisses. I myself had seen some of these spider-bellied old codgers on the sun deck taking the breasts of teenage hookers into their hands.

I was excited, I admit, by this apartment and its currents of criminality. I could feel the need to titter rising, mounting, always a sign that my weakness for the sensational, my American, Chicagoan (as well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and extremes was aroused. I knew that fancy thieving was a big thing in Chicago. If you knew one of these high-rise superrich Fagan types, you could order luxury goods. The actual shoplifting was done by addicts. They were compensated in heroin by the fences. As for the police, they were said to be paid off. They kept the merchants from making too much noise. Anyway, there was insurance. There was also the well-known "Shrinkage" or annual loss reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one's Chicago view of society. You couldn't really afford to be taken in naïveté.

Rinaldo was intrigued with a fine Accutron watch and Slipped it on. His old watch he tossed to the Japanese, who caught it. I thought the moment had come to recite my piece and I said, "Oh, by the way, Ronald, I owe you some dough from the other night."

"Where from?" said Cantabile.

"From the poker game at George Swiebel's. I guess it slipped your mind."

"Oh, I know that guy Swiebel with all the muscles," said the old gentleman. "But he's terrific company. And you know, he cooks a great boola-baize, I'll give him that."

"I inveigled Ronald and his cousin Emil into this game," I said. "It really was my fault. Anyhow, Ronald cleaned up on us. Ronald is one of the poker greats. I ended up about six hundred in the hole and he had to take my I.O.U. I've got the dough on me, Ronald, and I better give it to you while we both remember."

"OK." Again Cantabile, without looking, crumpled the notes into his jacket pocket. His performance was better than mine, though I was doing my very best. But then, he had the honor side of the deal, the affront. To be angry was his right and that was no small advantage.

When we were out of the building again, I said, "Wasn't that OK?"

"OK--yes! OK!" he said loud and bitter. Clearly, he wasn't ready to let me off. Not yet.

"I figure that old pelican will pass the word around that I paid you. Wasn't that the object?"

But Cantabile was still stoking his anger. "Christ!" he said. "I didn't like the way he was staring at me under those straight bodkin brows."

"Well, then, that does it. I can catch a cab."

He caught me by the sleeve. "You wait," he said. I didn't really know what to do. "Aren't you enjoying our afternoon?" said Cantabile, and grinned. Attempting to laugh this off, I failed. The globus hystericus interfered. My gullet felt sticky. "Get in, Charlie."

I sat in the crimson bucket seat, the supple fragrant leather again reminding me of blood. I fumbled for the seat belt--you never can find those cursed buckles.

"Don't fuck with the belt, we're not going that far."

Out of this information I drew what relief I could. We were on Michigan Avenue, heading south. We drew up beside a skyscraper under construction, a headless trunk swooping up, swarming with lights. Below the early darkness now closing with December speed over the glistening west, the sun like a bristling fox jumped down beneath the horizon. Nothing but a scarlet edge remained. I saw it between the el pillars. As the tremendous trusses of the unfinished skyscraper turned black, the hollow interior filled with thousands of electric points resembling champagne bubbles. The completed building would never be so beautiful as this. We got out, slamming the car doors, and I followed Cantabile over some plank bedding laid down for the trucks. He seemed to know his way around. Maybe he had clients among the hard-hats. If he was in the juice racket.

Anyway, Cantabile had brought his own hard hats. We put them on. Everything was prearranged. He said he was related by blood to some of the supervisory personnel. He mentioned also he did lots of business hereabouts. He said he had connections with the contractor and the architect. He told me things much faster than I could discount them. However, we rose in one of the big open elevators, up, up.

How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, appreciation, glee--yes, I appreciated his ingenuity. But it seemed to me that we were rising too high, going too far. Which button had he pressed? By daylight, I had often admired the mantis-like group of cranes tipped with orange paint. The tiny bulbs, which from a distance seemed so dense, were sparsely strung through. I don't know how far we actually went, but it was far enough. We had as much light about us as the time of day had left to give, steely and freezing, keen, with the wind ringing in the empty squares of wound-colored rust and beating the hanging canvases. On the east, violently rigid, was the water, icy, scratched, like a plateau of solid stone, and the other way was a tremendous effusion of low-lying color, the last glow, the contribution of industrial poisons to the beauty of the Chicago evening. We got out. About ten hard-hats who had been waiting crowded into the elevator at once and went down, leaving us no-where. Cantabile seemed to know where he was going, but I had no faith in him. He was capable of faking anything. I followed, I went slowly. He waited for me. There were a few windbreaks up here on the 50th or 60th floor, but the wind was storming them. My eyes ran. I held on to a pillar and he said, "Come on, Granny, come on, check stopper."

I said, "I have leather heels."

"You better not chicken out."

"No, this is it," I said.

But actually, we had come sufficiently far. "Now," he said, "I want to show you just how much your dough means to me. You see this?" He held up a $50 bill. He rested his back on a steel upright and, stripping off his fancy equestrian gloves, he began to fold the money. It was incomprehensible at first. Then I understood. He was making a child's paper glider of it. Hitching back his raglan sleeve, he sent the glider off with two fingers. I watched it speeding through the strung lights with the wind behind it out into the steely atmosphere, darker and darker below. On Michigan Avenue, they had already put up the Christmas ornaments, winding tiny bubbles of glass from tree to tree. They streamed down there like cells under a microscope.

He sailed off more of the 50s and they flew like finches, swallows, butterflies, all bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant. They brought crepuscular fortunes to people in the streets.

"The last two I'm going to keep," said Cantabile suddenly. "To blow them on drinks and dinner for us. Let's go."

If you didn't think of falling, the walk-way was more than adequate. I crept along, fighting paralysis of the calves and the thighs. My face was sweating faster than the wind could dry it as I took hold of the final pillar. Gladly, I fell into the seat of the Thunderbird when we got down. Cantabile removed his hard hat and mine, cocked the wheel and started the motor.

"Look," I said at the stoplight, my head hanging back over the top of the seat. "You've proved your point. You've made me atone for a whole day. I see the money was not the issue. Let's stuff the rest of it down a sewer, I want to go home."

"Shut up, Citrine." But there was a milder note in his voice and he drove in a more civilized way.

We went to Gene & Georgetti's, on Franklin, just off the spur of the elevated train. Parking among the other sinister luxury cars, we went into the drab old building. A crash of Muzak met us. The high and beautiful bar was crowded with drinkers, the gorgeous mirror jammed with bottles.

"A quiet table," Rinaldo told the waiter, "and don't put us by the men's room, Giulio."

"Upstairs, Mr. Cantabile?"

"Why not?" I said.

Cantabile stared, as if to say, "Who asked you?" But he said, "OK, upstairs."

We passed a fresco painted in various shades of tomato sauce and went up. Cantabile ordered. "Two bottles of Piper-Heidsieck," he said.

In the Capone days, hoodlums had mock battles with champagne at 22nd and Wabash, jigging the bottles up and down and shooting each other with corks and foaming wine. All in black tie, and like a fun massacre.

"Now I want to tell you something, and it's a new, different subject," said Rinaldo Cantabile. "I'm married, you know."

"Are you?"

"You bet I am and it would surprise you. She's a marvelous, beautiful, intelligent girl."

"A housewife?"

"Not my wife. You better know it, buddy. I wouldn't marry that kind of broad. My wife is working on her doctorate at Radcliffe, Harvard."

"No!"

"What do you mean, no?" said Cantabile. "And this is where you come in, Charlie. You know what her thesis subject is? She's writing about that poet who was your friend."

"You're kidding!."

"Von Humboldt Fleisher. You were talking about him at the poker game, and how much he meant to you."

"Was I? Somebody should have locked me up that night."

"For some magazine, you were going to write your recollections, all about Von Humboldt Fleisher. You were very emotional about that."

"I never, but never, speak of these things at all," I said. "My brain is softening. Chicago must be giving me arctic madness. I think I'd better get out of here. Was there more?"

"If you've got a secret left, I'd like to know what it is. The taxes, the lawsuits, the cunt you go with. But never mind all that. Listen to me, I'm very proud of my wife. She comes from a very good family. She's terrific. I want her to get that Ph.D., you understand? You're gonna give her information about this Fleisher man. Have you written anything about him?"

"I don't know what I've got. A mass of stuff, I haven't looked at it, it's chaotic. Give me a few minutes to think. Everything is much too strange. Es schwindelt."

"Your mistake, Citrine," said Rinaldo Cantabile, "is that you think you're the only person around with any brains. Now, read this." He handed me a typewritten letter, signed by his wife, Lucy Wilkins Cantabile. I read it. It was neat, polite, detailed and efficient, the letter of a model graduate student. She had prepared for me a long list of questions about Humboldt and his work.

"What does she want?" I said.

"Answers."

"Written answers?"

"I said answers."

"I won't do it," I said. "I'm not going to write a word. I never do anything like this. I always throw questionnaires away and I've practically stopped writing letters at all. Anyway, it's too much, I'm tired. My heart will break. I draw the line. Go to hell. Bump me off. Lots of absurdities I can take, like the ones you ran me through today, but there are things I don't do. Regardless of how the world is swollen out of shape, Cantabile. Take this letter back to your wife."

"You're not going to answer it?"

"No, I'm not."

"Would you talk to Lucy?"

"I might. I might not."

"You'll talk to her."

"I may agree to a short chat."

"With a tape recorder?"

"No. I don't like the way my voice comes out on tape."

"You don't have to listen. All right, don't get yourself into an uproar. Drink some champagne. Giulio, bring champagne glasses. Don't bring me that heavy junk. I want the lightweight with the long stems."

"Sure, Mr. Cantabile." Deferential smiling Giulio knew how to let Rinaldo look big.