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He swallowed noisily, and bobbed his head.

“Now, Mouse, Eddie Kapp here killed my brother Bill.”

Kapp jumped up from the bed, howling. “What the goddamn hell are you talking about? For Christ’s sake, why would I do a stupid thing like that?”

“You wanted me with you, or you wouldn’t be leading the revolt. You were afraid, once I found out Will Kelly wasn’t my father, I’d stop, I’d lose heart and give the thing up. Same as if I found out he was still part of the mob, all this time. And then I wouldn’t stick with you for a second. So you murdered Bill. I was supposed to think Ganolese did that one, too, and you could offer the partnership. ‘We both want the same people, only for different reasons.’ That’s exactly what you said.”

He shook his head. “You got it wrong, Ray. I was with you from the time Bill went upstairs to the time we found him dead.”

“No. You were gone ten minutes, to the head. And nobody else could have gotten their hands on Bill’s gun. He would have put it on the dresser. Any stranger came in, the gun would have been in Bill’s hand. You could go in and talk to him, tell him you want to be friends, and walk around the room until you angle over to the dresser, and there you are.”

When he moved, it was dirty. He jumped for Mouse, trying to shove him into me. I ran back and to the side, jumping up onto the bed and down on the floor on the other side, turning to face the door. He had his hand on the key when I shot him. I emptied the Luger into him before he could hit the floor.

Mouse lay quivering on his stomach on the floor, arms over his head in stupid protectiveness. I wiped my prints from the Luger and dropped it on the floor and went around to poke Mouse in the side with my toe. I said, “Get up. I’m not finished talking to you.”

It took him a while to get his limbs working right. I waited till he was standing, then I said, “You wait till I leave here. You give me a good five minutes. Then you go back to the party and tell them what happened. And tell them why it happened. You got that?”

He nodded. There was white all around the pupils of his eyes.

“This was a blood matter,” I told him, “not a mob matter. Blood revenging blood. There’s no need for them to come after me, to avenge Eddie Kapp. I’m his son, and I say there’s no need for it. And I don’t remember a single name or a single face that I saw here today or at Lake George two weeks ago. You got that?”

He nodded again.

“Five minutes,” I said.

I went out to the hall. The party was raging to my left, too loud for them to have heard the shots in that closed and bulkily furnished bedroom. I walked down to the right. The big man with the broken nose was sitting in a fragile chair by the door. He said, “What they doing? Shooting guns off the terrace? They’ll get cops up here if they don’t look out.”

“I hope it’s over pretty soon,” I said. “I need my sleep.”

“You moving in?”

“Just going to get my luggage.”

“You won’t get much sleep here.” He laughed. “This’ll go on for a couple days yet.”

I left, and took the elevator down, and went out to the street.

I went into the first bar I came to on Lexington Avenue, but it was lunchtime and full of bland smooth people. I stayed only long enough for one shot of bar whiskey on the rocks and one long session emptying my stomach into the toilet in the men’s room. Then I headed west.

It was all bland and arid till Sixth Avenue. My stomach was empty, but from time to time I had to lean against light standards and wait through an attack of dry heaves. On Sixth Avenue I found a White Rose, where the drinks were ample and cheap.

I couldn’t stay in one place. I spent about an hour in that first place, and then moved downtown, stopping for a while in each bar I came to. At four in the morning, another guy and I were thrown out of a place somewhere downtown, and the other guy said he knew a great place to sleep out of the wind, behind a theater. We went there, and someone was sleeping there, with a half-full bottle of wine. We took it away from him and found another place, and went to sleep. But before we did, I tried to tell him all my troubles. I couldn’t enunciate very well, and he couldn’t concentrate at all, so he never found out that I was trying to tell him that I had killed my father.

In the morning, I woke up first, freezing cold and with a bitter grinding headache. I finished the wine and felt better, somewhat warmer, and the headache fuzzier.

From there, it all blended in together. I got in a couple of fights, and once I went to a place in New Jersey late at night where the bars opened at five. I threw up in the H & M tubes.

Until one morning I woke up in a great gray metal box. The sides of the box were all incredibly far away. The top of the box kept coming closer and then receding. Other human beings were in the metal box with me, making small and ghastly noises.

I don’t know how long I lay on the floor before I realized I was in a room and not a box, nor how much longer before I realized I was in a jail. In the drunk tank.

First time crept, and then it leaped up and flew a while on wide black wings. I tried to count to sixty, to get in my mind how long a minute should be, but when I started to count my brain scraped against the inside of my skull and I cried out because I thought I was going to die. A lot of people grumbled and shouted at me to be quiet. I rolled over on my stomach and pressed my forehead against the cold floor and waited.

It did finally lessen, and I could sit up. And then I could stand, and take stock of myself.

My shoes were gone. So was my wallet. So were my raincoat and my suitcoat and my tie. So were my watch and belt and high school ring. So was my glass eye.

I found an empty bit of wall to sit and lean against, and dozed and wept and by the time a jailer came and opened the clanging door and called my name, the worst was over. I was empty, in every way.

I followed him to a small narrow room with a wooden table and four wooden chairs. Johnson stood up from one of the chairs, and the jailer went away.

We looked at each other. Johnson said, “You get it all out of your system?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been looking for you. I thought you might wind up here. I’ve had a friend of mine here keeping an eye out for you.”

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“What date?”

“The twenty-fifth. Of October.”

One day less than two weeks. “It took me a while, didn’t it?”

“I guess you had a lot to get over.”

“I guess I did.”

“You feel strong enough to go for a walk?”

“Where to?”

“My place first. Get you cleaned up.”

“They stole my eye, Johnson.”

“We’ll get you another one.”

He shepherded me like a strayed child. He lived in a ratty apartment on West 46th Street, west of 9th Avenue. I told him the hotel and the name where he could find my suitcase. While he was gone, I showered and shaved. Looking at myself in the mirror, when I started to shave, I got a shock. My face was gaunt and filthy, hair and beard shaggy, the empty eye socket a grim dull red.

When Johnson came back, I was wearing his robe. He brought me an eye patch, till I could get another eye. I dressed out of the suitcase, and then he came over with a bottle of Gordon’s gin, only two or three shots gone from it. “Do you want some?”

I shook my head. “Not now. Try me in a couple of weeks. I’ll be ready for social drinking then.”

“It’s all over, then.”

“Yes, it really is.”

“All right. I’ve got something for you.” He returned the gin bottle to his dresser drawer, under the shirts, and came back with a small envelope. “Two hard types came to the office Friday before last. They said this was for you. If I ran across you anywhere, I should give it to you. I got the feeling I should make an effort to run across you.”

I took the envelope and ripped it open. Inside, there were five one hundred dollar bills. And a note: “No hard feelings, L.G.”

Johnson watched my face. “Well?”

“I don’t get it.” I showed it to him.

“You don’t know anybody named L.G.?”

Then I got it. Lake George. “I know now,” I said. “Never mind.”

“They’re telling you they won’t bother you, is that it?”

“Let’s flush that note down the toilet or something.”

“Shall I burn it, like Secret Agent X 7?”

“I think you ought to.”

He did. Watching it burn in the ashtray, he said, “Do you remember your talk with Winkler?”

“Who?”

“Detective Winkler, of New York’s finest.”

“I talked to him?”

“You wanted to confess to half the killings in the United States. A couple of racketeers named Ganolese and Kapp, and some old lawyer out on Long Island, and I don’t know who all.”

“I did?”

“Winkler says it was a real wild story, except you refused to give any names except of the people you killed.”

I looked around the room. “Then why am I here? Why didn’t he lock me up?”

“Officially, Ganolese and Kapp aren’t even missing. No bodies, no murder weapons, no witnesses. Officially, the lawyer died of a heart attack. It said so on the certificate. Winkler says I should tell you not to come bothering him with any more wild stories.” He grinned at me.

“They don’t care.”

“Not about people like Kapp and Ganolese. Not even a little bit.”

I stood up and walked around the room and stretched. This was the other side. I came through, and this was the other side.

Johnson emptied the ashtray. “One thing more,” he said. “I was looking for you anyway, even before those hard types showed up. Two days after you called me the last time a guy hired me to find you. Arnold Beeworthy, his name is. You mentioned me to him. He said you were supposed to call him back about six weeks ago.”

“I forgot about him.”

“Tomorrow, why don’t you take a run out there and say hello?”

“Okay.”

I slept on his sofa. In the morning, I spent two hours being fitted for a new eye. I paid for that out of the five hundred, and gave the rest to Johnson. He didn’t want to take it, but I told him he was being paid by the guys who beat him up.

In the afternoon, I took the subway out to Queens. Beeworthy grabbed me the minute he saw me and stuck me in front of the tape recorder. We stopped for dinner and went back at it and didn’t quit till midnight. I slept in the guest room. The next morning, he drove me into Manhattan to get my suitcase from Johnson. When we got back, Sara was listening to the tape and crying. Arnie told her to cut that out and make us some coffee.