The phone rang once and then twice, loud in the dark of the bedroom.  On the third ring, a hand emerged from within the pile of bedclothes and flailed at the bedside table until it found the base of the telephone.  Unappeased, the phone rang again.  The hand crept up and grabbed the receiver.  Both disappeared back under the blankets.

“H’llo?”  Suddenly realizing he couldn’t talk into the old-fashioned stick telephone’s earpiece, Daniel Bearach sat up in bed, yanked the chain of the table lamp to turn it on, and peered at his ticking alarm clock.  Then he scooped up the rest of the phone with his free hand and told it, “By God, this had better be good.  It’s three-thirty in the morning, and Danny Boy needs his beauty sleep.”

The earpiece squawked.  Dan held it away from him to regard it with disfavor before asking the mouthpiece, “No, who the hell are you?  Look, fella, if we’re playing guessing games here, I guess I’m going back to bed.”  There was more squawking.  “You have my raincoat.  You called me during this darkness of my soul to tell me you have found my missing raincoat.  That’s nice.  Goodbye.” 

He hadn't managed to hang up the earpiece before it made more noises.  “Gee, Sergeant, it’s sure great to know the cops are so attentive to these little difficulties of Manhattan’s citizenry.”  Dan rubbed the back of the hand holding the earpiece wearily across his forehead before he continued, “So, where did you find this fawn-colored classic of mine, complete with laundry receipt in otherwise empty pockets?  Given the drama of this set-up, my coat must have been next to the body of a murdered millionaire laid out on a Persian silk carpet inside a locked music room over on Fifth Avenue.” 

This time the squawking was sustained and had gained volume.  Dan’s posture went from slumped to stiff, but his voice had not changed when he said, “No, I wasn’t at the Club Marseilles at one o’clock a.m. on April the 17th, 1931, which we mere taxpayers would sloppily term tonight at one.  I sure as hell wasn’t headed for one of your paddy wagons parked outside of said club while clutched in the mitts of one of New York’s Finest, no thanks to you for asking.  Instead, I was over at an affair at Mrs. George van Reisler’s penthouse.  If I were you, I’d wait for ten o’clock a.m. on April the 17th, 1931, to confirm that Daniel Bearach was there with said hostess.  That decision is yours.  However, the rest of this night is mine, and I intend to use it for sleep.  You can deliver the coat back to the address on the receipt to be laundered again, considering where it’s been.  Goodbye.”  He hung up the earpiece and buried the entire telephone in the patchwork quilt that topped off his bedclothes as the phone began to ring again. 

“Coffee,” Dan told his small bedroom as he got up and started towards the kitchen.  When the knock on his apartment door came, he hesitated and then changed direction.

Dan opened his front door, stared silently at the tall red-head dressed in a wet and well-tailored suit in the corridor, and then told his visitor, “Coffee.”  Without closing the door, he turned around and once again headed for the kitchen of his apartment.  He didn’t bother to check and see if he was being followed.  He could hear both the sound of the door shutting and the faint squelching of footsteps on the carpet behind him just fine. 

When Dan flipped the switch, the kitchen light was so bright that he squinted as he opened the first cupboard.  Glasses, plates, and bowls - his telephone was ringing again.  Maybe the coffee was in the second cupboard.   Flour, sugar, baking soda - long, pale, damp fingers reached past him and closed the cupboard door.  Dan’s head pivoted to watch as the hand of the Lad of the Lake opened the fourth and last cupboard, reached in, and then pulled out and flourished Excalibur, the Holy Grail, the Golden Treasure of the Indies, a bag of ground Eight O’Clock coffee beans. 

“Eureka!  He has found you!”  Dan grabbed the coffee pot and ran the hot tap on the kitchen sink.

His guest had struck a kitchen match and lit a stove burner.  Good.  His guest’s thin lips had parted to ask, “Do you want me to answer the telephone?  It’s ringing again.”  Not so good.

Now that Dan was ladling coffee into the pot, he had some attention to spare for inessentials.  “Not unless you want to explain to the cops how you got away after they pinched you over at the Marseilles.”

Kevin Royce - who the hell else would it be at this hour in this state? - said wearily, “A double-sawbuck in the hand is worth two shoulders in their grip.  I’m sorry I left your coat behind with the nosies.”

Dan grunted before realizing that some additional comment would be expected of him.  “Don’t forget to ask next time, buddy, before you swipe my raincoat.  I had a wet trip home from the office.”  The smell of brewing coffee perked up his brain cells enough for him to realize he was addressing the wrong issue.  “What the hell were you doing over at a pansy club, anyhow?”

“I could claim that I don’t remember.  With my bum memory, you might even believe me.  In fact, my visit was the culmination of a vain quest to separate our best-selling author from his latest manuscript.”

“All right, what exactly was Jimmy Campbell doing over at a pansy club?  Showing some girlfriend the least appealing alternative to the limited charms of his presence?  And did you lay hands on his manuscript?  Frank is scheduled to put Zesty Adventures to bed tomorrow, and he’ll need that novella of Jimmy’s to do it.  The printers are waiting.”  Dan rubbed his hands up and down his stubbled cheeks, trying to stimulate both circulation and thoughts.  “Hold on a minute.”  Drastic measures were called for.  He went over to the kitchen sink, removed the plate that had held his supper, and turned on the cold water faucet.  Then he stuck his head under the water.

When he turned off the tap, he blinked as a towel flopped over his head.  Kevin’s voice was wry.  “Good God, dry yourself off before you catch an influenza and give it to me.  The last thing I want is to be sneezing in front row seats at some Broadway review.  Also, I believe your coffee has brewed.”

“So?  Somebody gave you hands.  Pour.”  Dan rubbed the towel briskly over his hair, and then held it out in one hand and glared at it.  “Hey, this is my dish towel.”  He tucked it back into the ring hanging below the sink.

“Really.  Here’s your coffee, three lumps, no milk.”

Dan sat down at the kitchen table, picked up his cup, took a swallow, and then conducted his first serious survey of his late-night visitor.  Kevin’s brown eyes were brooding over a second cup of Dan’s coffee as his long fingers tapped unconscious, untranslatable Morse code on the side of a borrowed cup.  Kevin owned a lot of good suits, so it couldn’t be the soaked grey merino wool that was ruining his mood.  He also seemed more rattled than a run-in with the cops over hooch would justify.  “You look like hell.”

“Really again.  I don’t know if you heard the news during your latest bi-monthly week of residence in Hartford, but the police have decided to renew the crack down on the Times Square pansy clubs.  That means they will be slipping the names of any patrons they arrest during their raids to reporters, and I don’t want any of those names to be ones associated with Bearach and Royce Publications.  Even in our backwater of the publishing industry there are limits.  We don’t need anything else dragging us down, what with this depression already hanging around the company’s neck like a rotten albatross.”

Dan felt his eyebrows knit.  The expression probably made his face look like Felix the Cat’s, if experience was any guide.  “You might want to call Morrie, then, and have him go over and bail out Jimmy.  I don’t know if Jimmy will want to call his own lawyer.”  Dan wondered if his eyes, when he lifted them to meet Kevin’s, were as troubled as he felt.

They must have been since Kevin seems to get what Dan was really asking without any more words.  “No.  I don’t think he would telephone the same man who double-checks contracts for his uncle’s meat packing plant about this.”  He puffed out a breath.  “Dan, I’m afraid Jimmy wasn’t there for the host’s horticultural wit.  Not that.  The other.  The—social opportunities, I think.  When I spotted him, Jimmy had some character practically wrapped around his neck.”  A thick silence fell.  The two men drank their coffee and stared in different directions, Kevin at the motionless blades of the ceiling fan, Dan at the new, marbleized Formica on the table top.  After a silence that lingered, Kevin said, his voice determinedly casual, “I’d better call Morrie before the minions of the law telephone you again.  If you don’t mind, I’ll also call Jill.  I was supposed to be dropping by her apartment this evening before I was so rudely detoured.”

Dan shrugged and jerked a thumb towards the phone.  Jill was Kevin’s former wife and Dan knew they still kept company when neither of them was busy elsewhere.  He slumped in his chair a bit more and finished his coffee, then went and poured the last cup from the pot before turning off the burner.  Kevin’s familiar baritone rose and fell in the bedroom.  Up and sharp for the lawyer, down and smooth for the doll, about what a guy would expect.

Poor Jimmy.  He knew he wasn’t supposed to sympathize with Jimmy, but he did.  A look to the fella like Charles Atlas, and he was still hanging around in the pansy clubs.  Dan unconsciously shook his head.  Not just perverted but stupid.  Even so—

Kevin came back into the kitchen.  “Morrie wasn’t full of good cheer, I must say.  Sometimes I wonder what we pay him that retainer for.”

“It sure can’t be for the charm of his company.”  Dan yawned, stretched.  “You’re still dripping.  Serve you right for forgetting my raincoat when you went on the lam.”

“Your talent for stating the obvious—”

“Makes me one hell of a publisher of popular fiction.  Bang, bang.”  Dan pointed his first two fingers at Kevin.  “Your suit is dead.  My third-best coat is in the hall closet, supposedly being saved for the next luckless, apple-selling character I spot who’s about my size.  Instead you can wear the rag home, and serve you right.”

“Wonderful.  I shall pillage my way through your wardrobe, leaving devastation in my wake.  Perhaps after that, you’ll buy a decent suit.”  Kevin went over, rummaged in the hall closet, pulled out the ancient chesterfield, and grimaced.  “No, your tastes are hopeless.  Good night, Corporal Punishment.”  He threw off a mock-salute, a stiff parody of the one they’d both learned in the army.

“ ‘Night, Sergeant Soaked.  Don’t jaywalk on your way home.  The cops might notice.”

After Kevin closed the front door behind him, Dan shook his head and went over to his living room windows.  Outside, it was still raining cats and dogs.  A few minutes later, Kevin came out the front doors of the apartment house, six floors below, and hailed a passing taxicab.  Good.  Dan closed his eyes wearily.  Maybe this particular coat would survive long enough to be returned to him.  He opened his eyes, but it was without seeing the scattered lights of the buildings stretched out in Manhattan’s Stonehenge of concrete, steel, and glass.  A long five minutes later, he stirred, shook his head, and returned to the bedroom.  The telephone kept its own council.

****

So, Dear Diary, you tell me what I should have told Dan.  “Well, my friend, there I was, out searching for some perverse and illicit companionship of my own, when I spied one of our authors about to follow a stranger’s back into the little gentlemen’s room.  So, rather than staying to salvage one of our best remaining sources of income, I panicked at the thought of meeting someone I knew from our offices in that particular bistro and fled right into the loving arms of the gendarmes, leaving behind your raincoat.”

Just writing the words makes me ill.  I can see the look Dan would get on his face if I actually told him, that same expression he wears after Harry Kennedale has dropped off another one of his torture-the-half-naked-doll covers for Zesty Detective.  Why is Dan so damnably clean-cut?  Even when we were on leave together in Paris after months in the trenches, he was clean-cut.  I’d pour a bottle of champagne down him, and he’d still be clean-cut, untouched.  That should be against all the laws of nature if not man.

However, he is right about Harry.  I certainly wouldn’t leave Jill alone with Harry in a bedroom, even if she is my ex and about three times tougher than I am.  Come to think on it, she wouldn’t leave me alone in a room with Harry, either, so we’re even.

I loathe lying to Dan.

I have to stop writing in you so late at night, Dear Diary, especially when I’ve had rotten gin and worse luck.  It only ends in tears and torn-out pages at the end of the entry.

All right, then.

(1)   Get a haircut.  Change the style.  I do hate this one and a trim might help confuse the minions of the law if they see me again.

(2)  Telephone Jill and thank her for covering for me once more.  I knew there was some reason I keep paying my alimony so promptly.  Ladle on extra cream.

(3)  Kevin, you are a b-word.  Shoot myself for continuing to use that sort of charm on a long-time friend in whom my interest is so very fraternal. 

(4)  Scratch (3).  Pulling the trigger would probably only result in a flesh wound.

(5)  Find something Frank can use to fill that hole in Zesty Adventures.  Dutch East Indies cannibals?  The tale about the airplane crashing at the base of Mount Erebus in Antarctica?  Army ants.

(6)   Remind Dan to telephone his sister up in the beautiful hick town of Hartford and have her check if his father’s dentures are still at the dentist.  I wonder, did the Elder Berach pick them up himself this time or is he flapping dignified gums at the Hartford Elks Club again?

(7)  Invite B. out to the opening night of the Review.  Ask him what is going on down at the clubs.  Maybe his patron will pull some strings for J.?

(8)  Try and get a few hours of sleep.  Ha, ha, ha.

(9)  Do what the list says and then dump these pages.

****

Dan hung up his office phone, got up from his desk, and went over to the right-hand window.  He grabbed both sides of its frame and pressed his face against the upper pane, closing his eyelids, letting the cool of the glass help him dry the leak that threatened his facade.  He wasn’t surprised to hear the creak, behind him and to his right, of the office’s other swivel chair.  Dan reminded himself, for the fiftieth time, that he had to oil the damn thing.  Kevin would never do it and risk ruining another suit.  If Dan concentrated on that, he wouldn’t have to think about—  He wasn’t surprised by the hand that gripped his shoulder.  Not really.

“Give me a minute to glue myself together here, buddy,” he said without turning around.

“All right.”

In the quiet that followed, he could hear the hum of a high rise building going about its business and the brisk tapping of their secretary’s typewriter from the outer office.  Mrs. Weeks’s noise reminded him to keep his own noise down as he swallowed hard, and then said, “That was Morrie.  Jimmy hung himself over at the Tombs before Morrie could bail him out.  Oh, and Morrie’s sorry that he was too slow.”

The hand on his shoulder tightened, but Kevin’s voice was even as he asked, “Hung himself or was hung?”

“Does it matter?  But, knowing Jimmy, probably hung himself.  You know the bum could never resist an overly dramatic gesture.”  Dan thought about suicide, about what it would take to do the job.  He arced his own neck back and opened his eyes.  The ceiling was about six feet above his head and could stand to be dusted.  There was a light fixture that would serve nicely. He flopped his head around experimentally.

“Now, don’t you start.  It’s bad enough when the hired help indulge in gothic revelry.”

“Tough guy.”

“I didn’t like Jimmy.  He took his writing too seriously for my taste.  And the way he’d play the big-time author in front of those young friends of his—”  During the pause, Dan could feel the hand on his shoulder tighten a little before Kevin said, “Not that any of that nonsense matters now.  Goddamn it.”

Dan turned around.  “I think we need a drink, old pal of mine.”  Kevin looked like someone had locked him in an icehouse to freeze. 

“Yes, I believe we do.”  Kevin went over to his desk.   Its mahogany surface, as was typical, was bare of all clutter except for a single, small square of paper that read, Zesty Westerns.  Kevin grimaced and pinned it to the cork board on the wall above his desk, in the column headed “At Printer.”  Then he opened the desk’s large bottom drawer.  From behind a file-case he fished out a bottle, its label printed in French, the wax seal atop the cork in the neck still intact.  He turned back to Dan.  “I was saving this for an improbable event such as one of our boys or girls getting a real book published.  Somehow this must count.”  He’d pulled out his multi-bladed silver pocket knife.  The blades included a corkscrew, of course.

“Yeah,” Dan said, “I never would have picked out Jimmy for lavender.”  That one word was as far as he could bring himself to go.  His stomach hurt.

“I might have,” Kevin succeeded in tugging out the cork. “He was much too fond of all those muscles of his.”  After eyeing the skewered cork, Kevin turned to consider the dusty water glasses on the middle shelf of the sideboard jammed into a corner of the office and then shrugged and drank from the mouth of the bottle.  He punctiliously wiped the mouth of the bottle clean with his handkerchief before rotating in his swivel chair and stretching out one long arm to pass the goods along to Dan at the window.

Dan took a cautious sip.  The hooch was brandy, the real item, several years old, judging from the way its golden-smooth fire ran down his throat.  He tilted the bottle back again.  “I guess so.  In any case, here’s to Jimmy, the poor, sorry son of a bitch.  Hell and damnation to the cops who arrested him.”  He took one last drink.  Without wiping the mouth of the bottle, he passed it back over to Kevin, who drank, in his turn, without comment.

Then Dan wandered the short distance over to his own desk . Every time Dan had to hunt for something, the contrast between the two desks struck him anew.  His was a scarred and battered walnut roll-top cluttered with correspondence jammed into pigeonholes, paste-ups of ads and illustrations, manuscripts with notes from their editors attached to them by paperclips, and a pile of magazines.  Dan shifted some of the month’s stack of Bearach and Royce’s pulp titles and then fished out an issue of Fantastic Wanderings.  Above the gaudy cover picture of a half-naked man with an implausible set of muscles clad in an incredibly short pair of fur trousers was the screamer, “Red Moons of Mayhem!  A new Kernak the Feral story by James V. Campbell!”  He would have picked a different font, Dan decided absently, but he didn’t make those choices these days.  “One of us better go talk to Peggy.  She kind of liked Jimmy and she’ll be blue.”

“Good luck for us they got along since she was his editor.”  Kevin looked at the bottle in his hand, shook his head, and jammed the cork back in.  “Bad luck for her now.”  He put the brandy away in his drawer.  “Let’s both go.  Then, I say we take off the rest of the afternoon.  Let’s go somewhere else before I ball up half the quarterly estimates on the new titles.”

True, in the last five minutes their office had gone from cozy to cramped.  “The pictures.  Let’s go to a talkie.  After we stop over at Morrie’s office and get the rest of the story from him.”  Dan considered the magazine cover in his hand.  He shook his head.  “It’s a hell of a set of last words.”  He estimated the distance to the trash can.

“What, making spotty kids and skinny clerks all over the country forget their family troubles and their threatened jobs for an hour or two?  There are worse lines to exit this big stage with, Corporal Cynical.”

“Yeah.”  Dan slowly smiled before he put the magazine back down on top of the pile.  “Remind me of that again if I forget, will you?”

“My pleasure.”  Kevin got up, pulled his own hat and raincoat off of the rack next to the door, and donned them.  Then he turned to Dan, who was signing one last business letter.  “All right, do you want your second-best raincoat or your third-best attempt at frightening strangers?”

“Just hand over my raincoat, smart-alec.”

When Dan opened the door to the rest of the suite of offices, the typewriters had fallen silent, and most of the company’s staff was huddled into little clusters, talking in low tones.  The news was already making the rounds.  Dan squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and tried to feel like an executive before he went out there.  Faced with that scene, all he really wanted to do was change his mind and huddle in this foxhole, barricaded behind a locked door with Kevin and the rest of the brandy.  So?  Life was tough some days.  At least he was still around to endure it.

****

Morrie really is a horse’s ass.  He gives a fellow an ongoing urge to briskly knee him in the groin.  It’s too damn bad he’s such a competent horse’s ass, a truly brilliant lawyer.  I believe him when he reported that his unofficial sources over at the jail said that J. did the job himself.  I even believe in his sources, since he already had a copy of the autopsy report the powers that be rushed through, when they realized J. was somebody mildly significant.  So now I grasp the what and how of J.’s suicide.  What I still don’t understand, given that I’ve had time to get past the shock and think matters over, is the why.

It’s not that I don’t comprehend J’s impulse.  Most members of this exclusive gentleman’s club have such urges every now and then.  But J’s record with the gendarmes was clean.  He’d had some girlfriends who could have spoken up for him.  This one time he might have ridden it out with nothing more to deal with than a fine to pay, numerous cold shoulders, and a lot of lying to do. 

A few bruises from the boys in blue, but no jailhouse rape.  In the end, all the physical culture seemingly did him some good.  How charming autopsy reports are with their “minimal loosening of anal musculature or other pathological signs of foreign or abnormal intrusion, no oral bruising,” blah, blah, blah, you can feel the pathologist’s disapproval of the possibilities rolling off of the typewritten page.  Which makes me wonder what the heck J. was doing at the Club Marseilles earlier in the evening, collecting hairpins?  He must not have met that tea-roomer until just before I spotted them.  No last mess of potage for which J. swapped the rest of his life.

Poor Peggy Lynn.  The news hit her hard enough that I had to close her office door so the rest of the staff wouldn’t get a free show.  She even dropped her glasses when she was digging around in her purse for a handkerchief.  Dan was good with her, loaning his own handkerchief and draping his arm around her shoulders, saying all the right words.  He usually is good with women, especially the smart ones like Peggy.  I wish he’d keep company with someone of her type rather than that mantrap he’s involved with up in Hartford.  None of your business, though, Mr. Royce. 

At least Dan glued Peggy back together fast enough that she and Frank managed to get Zesty Adventures put to bed.  They were a cute little duo of editors, two blond heads huddled close together over the layouts in the art room, twin sets of thick glasses, grave duet debates over the merits of hurricanes-and-heaving-bosoms versus army-ants-and-heaving-bosoms.  I bet you’d be too late to grab Peggy in any case, Danny boy, now that Frank’s finally noticing her.

Note to self:  Next time you go to a midday movie, bring along refreshments, rather than buying overpriced candy next door and then going for a drink afterwards.  That certainly resulted in a nasty end to the day.

****

Dan leaned over and muttered in his companion’s ear, keeping the volume down out of deference to the newsreel.  “So, Sergeant Casanova, did you get what you were after from the gal behind the candy counter?”

Kevin’s voice was even lower.  “Don’t be crude.” 

Dan hoisted his eyebrows before he grinned, invisible in the dark he knew.   So he nudged Kevin in the ribs with his elbow.  Kevin said, “Hush up, the next feature is starting.  I want to see this.” 

Right, a segment on surrey racing.  Kevin had always been fascinated by that, sure.  Dan snorted audibly. 

Kevin jabbed a thumb into Dan’s ribs.  “Fine, I got the telephone number for her boarding house.  Now be quiet.”

The talkies might be lowbrow, but what the heck.  So were the pulps, and that was the industry where they had both spent most of their lives.  Anyhow, Kevin liked skulking around in picture palaces during working hours as much as Dan did.  Along with speakeasies and ball games, the pictures were one of their three favorite ways to play hooky whenever they wanted to forget they were mature and mostly sober businessmen.  Certainly a talkie had been the best of the three choices for today.  Dan needed to relax into the plush, velvet embrace of his seat and let the blacks, whites, and grays of the artificial world on the screen surround him like an art-deco nightclub where his brain could dance off all its troubles.

Moving pictures had always soothed Dan.  He could still remember the crowd in that picture house in Paris, the one that had been converted from an ancient theatre burlesque to show flickers.  After he had settled back uncomfortably into the tiny wooden seat, his shoulder pressed tight against Kevin’s, he had passed the time before the four-reeler examining the naked Greek deities decorating the proscenium arch.  The chipped, plaster gods, yellowed by the same cigarette smoke that was lazily curling up into the projector’s beam of flickering light, had struck him as the essence of wartime France.  You weren’t supposed to smoke in the theater, but the place had reeked of gitanes and gauloises, unwashed cotton, and the garlic and sour bread smell of a crowd that wasn’t eating enough and was using too many cheap spices to try and compensate.

After the rooster on film had silently crowed, he and Kevin had spent the reels that followed swapping rude remarks back and forth about the valiant Napoleonic French troops.  Their nasal American voices, however low, had probably cut right through the cigarette smoke.  They’d attracted enough attention from the rest of the audience that their evening had ended outside the movie house in a fist-fight with a pair of poilu fresh from the trenches, followed by a wild, laughing retreat through an increasingly confusing neighborhood of slate-roofed houses and cobblestoned streets.  They never did find the girls they’d gone in search of that day, but the flickers, the company, and the crude, red wine served by the dive they’d ended up in had been an ample substitute.

Now it was someone else’s turn to be young and opinionated.  A couple of characters in the row behind them kept up a running commentary through the documentary and the Laurel and Hardy two-reeler.  They were satisfied with a single crack about the title of the cartoon, Bum Bandit, probably out of deference to Betty Boop, but started up again during the main feature, Men Without Women.  It was a submarine picture, the boat was trapped on the ocean floor, and the pair wasn’t impressed.  They managed to keep it down, though, until the first sailor died.  The boat’s captain took the death badly.  The older of the pair behind them took it badly, too, but for a whole different reason.  “Oo, now that’s real warlike, Captain.  What a fag.”

Kevin went stiff, but before Dan could react he’d turned and was saying, his voice low and deadly, “Be quiet, you sorry little punk.  How the hell would you know what’s war-like, anyhow?  If you’ve ever had a gun fired at you in your entire life, it was probably the cap gun your brother got for his fifth birthday.”

For a wonder, the punks did pipe down.  The folks seated around them, also fed up with the young pair’s wit, hissed and shushed while a bobbing flashlight warned of an approaching usher. But Kevin’s tone probably turned the trick.  Dan couldn’t blame him.  Given what had just happened to Jimmy, that crack was too much for a former doughboy to take.

After the pictures, without any discussion between them, they headed for Hank’s on 44th.  The speakeasy was too nice a place for a gin joint and too low for a nightclub, but past experience showed the steaks were good and the whiskey wasn’t excessively poisonous.  They climbed the narrow flight of stairs in the back of the cigar store, meeting with no more opposition than a grunt from George, the doorkeeper and waiter.  Hank himself, slowly polishing a glass behind the bar, greeted them by saying “So, how do ya like this weather?”  Without waiting for a response, he went to talk with the cook before mixing them a couple of cocktails.  The place was empty at this hour aside from a pair of producers over at a table in one corner, negotiating some complex deal under the cover of a discussion about farm prices, the commodities strikes, and next year’s political conventions.

The Old Fashions were strong and the steaks still sizzled when they came to the table.  Kevin took in a forkful or two of his before he said, “I admit I’m surprised to find I can eat after today.”

Dan waved his own just emptied fork, chewed and swallowed, and said, “Military discipline.  Steak’s easy after charley-horse stew or iron rations.  By the way, nice job with the temper there.”

Kevin flushed.

Dan quirked one corner of his mouth, and then asked, “You think I was kidding?  I wanted to punch that one fella, but you had a better idea.”

“Good that you didn’t.  He was bigger than both of us, and I don’t care how often you go sparring at that gymnasium or how much shoe leather you wear out.  You’re not a kid anymore.”

“Is this where I’m supposed to say I could handle him?  I know, I know, I’m not even a tough proposition these days, only one more vet who’s waiting for his bonus.”

They exchanged glances.  Several of the ragged men in the long line in front of the soup kitchen they had passed on the way over from the picture palace had been wearing veterans badges.  Some of them might even have earned the honor.  Kevin said, “Don’t forget your third-best coat at the office.  It’s supposed to get cold again tonight.”

“Yeah, someone will want the thing.”  Dan looked at the steak on his plate, squared his shoulders, picked up his fork, and stabbed at another piece.  So what if the starving people were now in Manhattan instead of China?  His mother’s old dinner-table saying still applied.

Kevin shook his head and then talked work.  It was a downhill race between their falling circulations and the dropping costs for paper and printing, they agreed.  But, at least for now, the business was still in the black, and that was a small miracle in itself.  “We can postpone dropping the author’s payment rate-per-word a while longer,” Kevin concluded and sighed.

“Three cheers for us,” Dan said.  “I felt rotten enough cutting wages in the office last fall.”

“We’ll all survive the skinnier paycheck.  You claim walking keeps you fit.  You didn’t really need a Packard rusting in that converted carriage house up in Hartford.”

“Yes, Sergeant.  And you’d already seen Gay Paree.”

Their eyes met for one of those shared glances that forced a man to look away even when he didn’t want to.  Still, it helped to know you had a pal who had seen you weren’t one of the Villains of Capitalism.  They switched over to discussing the prospects for the Yankees in the coming season.  Between the steaks and the Old Fashions, dinner was a good ending to a lousy day.  Too bad the evening had to be ruined.

They both spotted him as they came out of the back of the cigar store but it was too late to duck.  Handsome Harry Kennedale had wandered away from his easel in search of more of the Virginia gaspers he smoked and was smirking at something the young cigar store clerk was showing him.  He twisted his neck at the sound of the rear door opening, spotted Dan and Kevin, and turned the smirk in their direction.  “Gentlemen.”  Out of deference to Bearach and Royce’s checkbook, the smirk went greasy, but, in Dan’s opinion, it stayed offensive. 

“Harry,” Kevin said, his voice smooth and neutral.

“I heard about Jimmy.  Such a tragedy.”  Harry shook his head, still smirking, as the clerk briskly swept behind the counter whatever the two men had been huddling over.

Dan managed to suppress his snort.  To Harry, the name had been Mr. Campbell when Jimmy was alive.  Jimmy had a higher opinion of himself and his stories, and a lower opinion of Harry, than to permit Harry first-name terms.

“Although it was the best that he could do, all things considered.”  Harry nodded judiciously.  “Yes, all taken into consideration, far better hung up on a wall than stuffed and mounted.”  He chortled at his wit and nudged the grinning clerk who was now leaning across the counter, over an ad for chewing tobacco pasted onto the wooden top of the display case.

Kevin didn’t smile.  Dan asked, “Harry, is that cover painting for Zesty Horror done?

“Ah.  Yes it is.  I think you’ll be pleased, Dan, I do indeed.”  The smirk had turned dreamy.  “She’s a new model, and I captured something there.  Ronald will be delighted.”

Ronald Fallon was the firm’s art director and a great fan of Kennedale’s work, in one of the few lapses in taste Dan could hold against Ron.

Harry turned to Kevin.  “Oh, Kevin, you’ll be glad to know I went over to Chinatown and found a model for The Frightening Doctor Tzu.  A withered-up little Chink and a quite bloodcurdling one, especially with a branding iron in his hand.  Authentic ethnic features.”  For some reason Harry really worked hard for Kevin’s approval, and Kevin had a reputation as a stickler for accuracy, especially by the low standards of the pulps.  Even now, as an executive publisher, Kevin sometimes indulged himself in notes to writers and artists about eight-shot six-shooters and newly discovered South Seas islands graced by dusky-skinned, blue-eyed maidens.

Harry narrowed his eyes.  His smile was close to a leer.  “The girl has the right look for an English virgin, too.  An interesting face, very interesting.  I have her telephone number if you’d like to talk with her about more work.”

Dan glanced down so what he was feeling wouldn’t show on his face.  The Bull Durham ad below the clerk’s crossed arms was simply a black silhouette, against a red background, of a large and gifted specimen of genus Taurus with the terse copy, “Her Hero.”  That was the relationship between Harry and his models, and Dan had never figured out why.

“You might want to pass it along to Ron, just in case,” Kevin said, still giving the impression of being on the other end of a poor telephone connection from some place where it was starting to snow.  “Thank you for being so prompt on that cover.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry said. He added to the clerk, “My cigarettes?”

The kid sprang to obey.  Yeah, the way others reacted to Harry really was a mystery to Dan, but it wasn’t an enigma he wanted to linger and contemplate.  “Good evening, Harry.”

“Good evening, Daniel.”  The nod was everything it should be, the smile was friendly.  Dan was just glad to get the glass door of the tobacco shop between him and Kennedale.  However, he waited until they were well down the street and passing a subway entrance to say, “Jesus.  The perfect end to a wonderful day.”

“I’ll say.”  Kevin shook his head.  “Are you heading back to the office?  I’m off to find a fair, frail hand that can stroke coolly and consolingly across my forehead.”

“I won’t be at the office long.  I’m going back to my apartment to pack.”

“My God, you’re right.  It is Friday.  After this week, who’d believe it?”  Kevin shook his head and then stuck out his hand.  “Say hello to your father up in Hartford.”

Dan took it and shook.  “I will.  And you, buddy boy—” he freed his hand to poke Kevin in the chest, “spend the extra money and telephone me if you need to, for any reason at all. Okay?”

“Okay, Corporal.”  Kevin smiled, hesitated for a moment, and then walked off towards the nearest corner where he could catch a taxi.  On the way he paused to buy an apple he probably didn’t want and tip his homburg to the old lady who’d sold it to him.  Dan shook his head.  Some tough guy.  Resolutely, he turned and walked away, trying to remember what he’d promised to bring back for his sister from Manhattan.

****

Dan’s in Hartford on his usual every-other-week pilgrimage to the shrine of hometown and hearth.  I miss him.  No, not that way.  Don’t be crude, Dear Diary.  Even if he is my business partner and best friend, the man has a face about as handsome as the front of a flivver and eyes slightly bigger than headlights.  He really does.  So don’t start.

While Dan’s up in the wilds somewhere, sorting through his standard suitcase of manuscripts and sales figures and telephoning to bother the print plant, I’m supposed to be taking a break from paperwork and important executive decisions to review the latest month’s issues of our rags.  This particular one is another of Peggy’s babies, which means I won’t actually have to fix anything, but, on principle, we double-check all of our titles every now and then.  Besides, like Dan says, if we don’t read the stuff, we shouldn’t sell the stuff.

And what have we here?  Another happy tale by that Herndon kid for Wilderness Wanderings, about happy handsome adventurers exploring the world’s wild places in happy unison until one handsome, manly fella stubs his toe on a volcano and is rescued by the other handsome, manly fella, oh my dear chum, happily ever after, the end.  Will Herndon’s really not a bad writer for being so young, but I wonder if he has any idea how his stories read?  No, probably not.

Writing of which, J’s mother was in this morning to pick up his last check.  We had told her we would mail the money, but she didn’t wait.  I could tell she only wanted to see if we - if I - believed what the cops said about J.  I think I convinced her otherwise.  It was still nice of her to offer to send Dan that manuscript and tactful to suggest routing it around Peggy, who still sniffles over J. a little every now and then.  Maybe I can wedge the story into South Seas Wanderings and squeeze out another check for J.’s estate.  Ask Mrs. Weeks how we’re doing there.

I do miss Dan, though.  He always says I’m the one who’s good at the heart-on-sleeve baloney, but that’s not true.  In any case, it’s easier to pull off the touchy scenes with two.

My God.  Here’s Zesty Detective.  Shoot me, please, just not with a roscoe spearing the dark with fiery flashes, barking “Kachow!  Kachow!” as the bullets pummel my snow-white flesh, dimpling it with blossoms of vivid scarlet.

****

Without getting up, Dan pushed his chair back from his desk. He shoved his legs against the floor to roll the chair left towards the bookcase between his desk and the door.  Securing the dictionary, he propelled himself back past his desk, dropping the book off en route to the file cabinet next to the window.  After removing a file of correspondence, he was about to roll back to his desk when Kevin swiveled around in his own chair and shot out one long leg, just blocking the edge of the space Dan needed to roll through.

“Stop that,” Kevin said, his tone firm, “or I will be forced to beat you.”

“You and what Expeditionary Force?”  Dan asked reasonably.

“Me and Mrs. Jones the cleaning lady.  Do you remember what she had to say about the state of the finish on the floor in here?”

“Sure I do.  Raise the toll gate.”

Kevin lowered his leg, and Dan parked his chair back against his desk where it belonged.  Then he stretched out a hand to snag the ham and cheddar on rye off its paper wrappings, took a bite, and checked the Webster’s.  Nope, contact was still not a verb and, based on past correspondence, the usage wasn’t a typo, either.  He’d wanted to give Bergstrom, Hastings, and Brown the benefit of the doubt.

Kevin, who had returned to sorting through the afternoon mail Mrs. Weeks had just dropped off, stopped at a bulging manila envelope with “confidential” printed on it in large letters below the address.  “Jimmy’s last story is here.”  His sterling silver letter opener, a Christmas gift from Dan in 1928, flashed as he slit open the envelope.  “Funny, he wrapped it up.  Here you go, Corporal.”  He swiveled again to toss over to Dan the manuscript, tied up in brown paper and string.

“Thanks.  Good timing.  Right now, I’d rather deal with Jimmy’s purple pageantry above the frui - his elaborate descriptions than our lawyer’s idea of what serves for proper business English when submitting a bill.”

“Have fun, then.”

“I will.”  Dan took one last drag off his bottle of cream soda, pulled the string and paper off, and leafed through the pages of typewritten manuscript, trying to estimate how long the first editorial pass would take.  The stack was a much thicker than usual.  That was odd.  “Huh.”  He picked up some pages.

“What?”

Dan didn’t answer.  He was busy spreading out the sheets of thick drawing paper that had been folded over and shoved into the middle of the manuscript.  The pages were covered with panel sketches, the sort you did for the Sunday funnies.  There were maybe nine or ten of them.  Dan flattened the sheets out on his desk, looked, and felt his eyes widen.  “Jesus H. Christ!”

Kevin didn’t bother to ask again.  His chair creaked as he got up.  Dan was shuffling to the second page when he felt Kevin’s hand descend onto his shoulder as Kevin leaned past him to see.  He flinched.  It was Kevin’s turn not to notice as he asked, “Is that what I think it is?”

Dan cocked his head to look up into his friend’s eyes, inches from his own.  “It sure is, buddy.  These are the original drawings for a genuine bluey, an eight-pager, a Tijuana Bible.”

“Pornographic funnies.”  Kevin paused to think, and then asked, “What are layouts for pornographic funnies doing hidden in Jimmy’s manuscript?  He can’t be the author, not with his attitude toward blue.  I have a hard time even imagining him reading the stuff.”

“Look again.” 

Kevin did, leaning in so close this time that Dan could smell his cologne.  He didn’t push away.  At least Kevin blocked the view of what was on his desk.  Something in Dan cringed at the thought of those drawings out in plain sight.  He put the first page back on top of the pile.

Kevin’s voice was very quiet.  “Red Hammer of Rapine, starring – Kernak the Feral.  Oh my God.  Poor Jimmy.”

Like Balboa’s men, in that stupid poem Dan had had to memorize in Laneil B. Stanson Elementary School, he and Kevin gazed at each other in wild surmise.  Then their hands collided as they simultaneously reached for the pile of paper.  Kevin, by virtue of standing upright, won and flipped to the second page, and then the third.  They both paused.  “That girl Kernak’s giving it to seems familiar,” Kevin said.

Dan shrugged.  “You get around in Manhattan more than I do, buddy.”

“Not like that, I don’t.”  Dan flipped over another page, and then another.  Kevin continued, in the tones of one doing a poor job of convincing himself, “It could be a coincidence, that Jimmy found these.  They print this garbage about a lot of people’s sex-lives:  picture stars, sportsmen, not just cartoon characters.  I heard there’s one floating around featuring Warren G. Harding.”

“Now, there’s a surprise.  No, this isn’t a coincidence.  Think about it.  If it had been the actual dirty little rag of a mag you buy from some guy in a bulgy coat on a street corner, you might convince me.  But these are roughs.  The final product may not even have been printed yet.  Where the hell did Jimmy get this stuff?”

“And do you think there are more of them somewhere?”  Kevin asked slowly.  Dan shook his head in ignorance rather than denial.  Kevin added, “The drawing’s awfully good for this sort of trash.  Can you recognize the new young lady?  The features are distinct enough for a caricature.”

“No, although in that position she ain’t no lady, Kevin.”

“Dan.”  For Kevin, the delivery was repressive.  He reached over and flipped to the next sheet.  They both looked down.

Kevin made a choking noise.  Dan made a different noise, more like he’d been slapped, then closed his eyes, and waited for the world to end.  After a few seconds it didn’t, so he opened his eyes and glanced down again, hoping from some place far away that the paper would have dissolved.  It hadn’t.

Kernak the Barbarian had caught up with the evil sorcerer and his warrior henchman, who were thoroughly and obscenely occupied with each other when Kernak burst into the treasure room of the Ruby Tower of Foulness to slaughter them and rescue the princess.  The artwork was passable, just detailed enough that you could recognize the features of the villainous mage.  Was Kevin’s nose really that aquiline?  Guess it was.  And, as for the henchman - as Dan had long feared, he himself resembled Felix the Cat.  In some obscure way, the resemblance continued below the neck, well below the neck.  At least he wasn’t portrayed endowed with a cat’s pri - His own hand reached down and flipped to the seventh page.  Kernak, covered in blood, was freeing the captive princess in about the same way the Japs were threatening to free Manchuria.  One last page.  Kernak riding – in one sense of the word – off into the sunset.  Happily ever after.  The end.  Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

****

Now I know the rest of why Jimmy hung himself.  Jimmy took that fictional, over-muscled, he-man side of beef dead seriously.  He felt as strongly about Kernak as I feel about Dan.  Not that Dan is an over-muscled side of beef, just compactly muscular, very strong.  No wonder I was stuck as the sorcerer and he got to be the warrior.  Dan’s always had the looks of a fighter, dark, tight-coiled and whip-cord tough, the body beau—

No.  Not Dan.

No.

No.

If ever a man could hate, Anonymous Pornographic Artist, I hate you.  Die, you bastard, and rot in hell.

****

Dan propped his chin up on both hands and took a deep breath.  Okay, he’d established that the world was not conveniently coming to an end.  It figured.  Nothing ever arrived on time when you really needed it to.  “Kevin, get the brandy.”

Without a word, Kevin got the brandy.  This time he didn’t even bother with the corkscrew on the protruding cork.  He used his teeth.

“Jesus, buddy, I haven’t seen you do that trick in about thirteen years.”

“Lucky thirteen.”  The words had that distant tone, but as least he was talking.  Dan held out one hand for the bottle, swigged deep, and returned it.  Kevin sat, drinking small, measured sips, as if what was left of the brandy was a poison with a good bouquet.  Dan took the opportunity to scoop up all the pages except for the merely suggestive second, refold them, and lock them up in the safe hidden behind the corkboard above Kevin’s desk.  He could sense Kevin’s nearness as he leaned past him, and the sensation made his skin prickle.  Dan ignored the feeling.  He knew from experience that it would pass.

After he’d slammed the safe door shut, spun the dial, and fitted the panel of corkboard back into place over, Dan deliberately seated himself on the corner of Kevin’s desk.  With seemingly equal deliberation, Kevin leaned back in his swivel chair, which screeched of course, and said, “I bet Jimmy didn’t take this little literary jest well.”

“Yeah, and bet I know why he didn’t come to us for help.  Page six.”

“I bet you’re right.”  Kevin shook his head.  “Kernak the Feral.”  Suddenly, his lip twitched, and then both he and Dan were laughing.

After a minute or two, before the hysteria could become more than an underlying harmony in their laughter, they ran down.

“So,” Dan asked at last, “now what?”

“Now,” Kevin grimaced, “we attend our scheduled meeting with Ed Bradfield and his crew about printing costs.”

Dan spent the whole meeting nodding his head, looking non-committal, and not really hearing anything anyone was saying.  Kevin seemed to be spending the meeting coolly taking notes, but Dan recognized the leather-covered pocketbook  Kevin was writing in.  Kevin had carried that book, or its ancestor, for years.  It was some kind of personal journal in which Kevin would jot down ideas and memos to himself, ones that he would later tear out when whatever job he was writing about was done.  To see the pocketbook open for this long on company time was to know there was a crisis at hand.  With both of them distracted, Dan was thankful Mrs. Weeks was at the meeting.  At need, she could have run the meeting all by herself.  She could have run the company all by herself, too, if she had been willing to read Zesty Horror to do it.

He and Kevin wrapped up the meeting by shaking hands all around and refusing invitations out for dinner, drinks, and dolls on the town.  Instead, Dan ruthlessly sacrificed Fred, their chief accountant, on the Altar of Hospitality, and watched calmly as Fred was dragged off, bleating slightly, to lead a tour of nightclubs he’d never ventured into in his entire life.

“Mr.  Bearach, that was cruel.”  Mrs. Weeks was trying to appear shocked, but the corners of her ample lips were twitching.

“Nonsense.  He’ll come back tomorrow with his shield or on it.”  Even to his own ears, Dan sounded like he was doing a bad imitation of a college football coach.

Mrs. Weeks clucked her tongue, but the twitching had turned into dimples.  She tucked her notes up against her formidable, middle-aged bosom and said, “I’ll just type these minutes up and add them to the contractual file while you and Mr. Royce deal with your other little difficulty.”

Dan didn’t even think about denying they had some other little difficulty.  “I’m not sure how—”

“Mrs. Weeks, is Mr. Fallon in his office or over in the art studio?”  Kevin interrupted to ask.  Miracle of miracles, he had returned from exile in Siberia.  Sure, he was shredding the confetti that had once been pages of his pocketbook into even smaller confetti, but he was also showing all the signs of having an idea.  Ron Fallon, their art director - right.

“I’ll go get that, uh, document, to show Ron” he told Kevin.

“Let’s meet up here.”

As Dan was leaving to grab the second page of the bluey from his desk drawer, he heard Mrs. Weeks say serenely, “I don’t know, Mr. Royce, but, if you give me a moment, I’ll find out for you.”  That would be her answer if asked the meaning of life, Dan was willing to bet.  Someday he’d have to take the time to try the question on her and see.

The studio, when under the former tenant’s jurisdiction, had been the office of that company’s president.  When Dan and Kevin had moved their fledgling firm into the empty floor of the old building on Eighth Avenue, they had taken one long look at the huge corner room with its large, multiple windows on two walls, and its southern exposure, looked at each other, and promptly moved into a small office well down the hall that had belonged to a senior manager.  Natural light was precious and not, in their joint opinion, to be wasted as a perk.  Besides, the former president’s private washroom had proved invaluable when converted into a darkroom for the use of Bearach and Royce’s photographer.

Ron turned out to be in the studio, leaning on a drafting board and critiquing a sketch that had already been approved for layout.  “As gangsters go, he looks like he could maybe rob my granny.  I’d bet on the old gal, though—”  Catching sight of Dan and Kevin he straightened up and asked, “Hey?”  Ron’s informal manners and vocabulary were the last, fading remnants of his days in the Village.

Kevin said, “Ron, could we talk to you in your office for a few minutes?”  George, the lay-out man, looked alarmed and Kevin added, “No jobs involved, just censorship problems.”  George rolled his eyes and reached for a font bar.

“So, what’s going on?”  Ron said, leading the way into his small office, a room dominated by Ron’s drafting board, two well-cleaned windows, and what appeared to be a cubist rendition of Times Square on one wall.  “Is the problem those sons of bitches over at the Society for the Protection of Morals again?  I told them you couldn’t even see her nipple.  I’d made damn sure of that myself before the cover was photographed, let alone—”

“Calm down, calm down.”  Dan took gross advantage of seniority to sit at Ron’s stool and spread out the bluey page on his drafting board.  “We want you to examine this.”

Ron paused for a moment, leaned in, looked, and half-yelped, half-laughed, “Holy Cats!”  Then he looked again and sobered.  “Boy, if he wasn’t dead already this would just about kill Jimmy Campbell, the poor bastard.”

“Yeah, we’re not too thrilled ourselves, Ron.  Look, do you recognize the fist?”

Now that his professional expertise was involved, Ron leaned in and then gave Dan a glare.  Obediently, Dan moved out of the way so that Ron could sit down, pick up the drawing paper, and examine the style closely.  Ron’s face was shuttered and intent.  After a minute or so he sighed, put the sheet back down, and said, “Whoever it was is usually better than you’re seeing here.  It’s deliberately clumsy, like it was drawn in a hurry or sketched off-handed so he wouldn’t be too obvious.”  Dan remembered hearing that artists had a distinct, almost indefinable, individualism about their work that could be recognized immediately by other professionals who knew them well.  But Ron shook his head before adding, “I’m not sure.  He might not be a professional ink guy from the way he handles a pen and shading.  Maybe an engraver or a painter.”  He examined the page one more time.  “Hey, is there any more of this stuff?”

“I certainly hope not,” Kevin said, his voice cool.

“Too bad.  This is pretty classy of its type.”

Kevin’s eyes narrowed, but this time Dan interrupted with an idea.  “Ron, where does a fella get these things?”

“What?  Indoors, you mean?”  Ron glanced up from the bluey page, surprised.  “At a cigar store, of course.  They store them under the counter, but if you ask for some blue, they’ll figure out what you mean.  Not all of them, of course, but try the United Cigars over around Union Square, or Hank’s Best Cut below the speak on 44th, or over in the Garment district, the Tobacco Palace off 36th and—”

Dan’s eyes met Kevin’s.  Neither pair was amused.  “Thanks, Ron,” Dan said.

****

The brandy cork was a symptom.  I’m back in a soldier’s mentality.  When you’ve come to the worst place in the world, just keep going.  Don’t stop to consider, merely deal with the problem in front of your face.  That’s how you survive, and I am going to survive.

Coupling or no coupling, Dan’s still talking to me, which matters - maybe more than it should, but what the hey.  Why shouldn’t we be on speaking terms?  I’m still his red-blooded Don Juan of a friend, a real he-man for all I’m a Manhattan semi-socialite.  Who’s going to suspect me of knowing all sorts of interesting names and addresses?  Not my friends in the trade.  Not my employees.  Certainly not my partner.

Are these print-plant guys ever going to shut up?  Dan’s positively ill, if you know how to read him.  Poor Danny-boy.  I bet he never, ever, imagined himself in quite that position.  Lord knows, I’ve been careful not to.  And now it’s all ruined.

Maybe the worst part is that I want to go look at that damnable drawing again, yearn to take the page out and stare for a good, long time until it’s scorched onto my eyeballs, ache for that so much I have to stop thinking about it now or there’ll be yet another problem.

The risk.  Remember always the risk.  I should shred these pages here and now, but not during a business meeting. The scraps will have to go into more than one wastepaper basket.

I have an idea.  Ron will know.

Whatever else happens, I’m going to find the artist, see what he had to do with Jimmy’s death, deal with him.  I’ll make him sorry he ever saw the light of day.

****

When the bell over the doorway rang, the same weedy clerk was behind the counter of the cigar store.  The fella looked up, saw them, and his eyes widened just a little before he pasted the usual, non-committal, pleasant look onto his face.  “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

No one else was in the store.  They’d loitered on the corner like a pair of drugstore cowboys to be sure of that.  Kevin let Dan do the talking although they both knew how.  This would be easy, compared with forcing some massive, sullen farm boy in khaki to go over the top for the third or fourth time.  

Dan cleared his throat.  “I’d like some blue, please.  I’m especially interested in illustrated pulp fiction.”  The whole trick was not in what you said, but in how you said it.

The clerk’s eyes darted around, towards the front of the store and then towards the back stairs.  At the head of those stairs, in the speakeasy above, George kept his guardian watch against trouble.  Before the clerk could muster the nerve to holler, Kevin slapped the palm of his hand down on the countertop.  The two bits he was holding made quite the noise, and the clerk flinched before Kevin silently slid away his hand, revealing the money.

Dan continued, now propped against the counter, “I think you know exactly what artist I mean.  Yup.”  Abruptly he leaned forward, close to the clerk, who leaned back.  “So, how about it?”

The question hung in the balance for a moment until Kevin, still without a word or change of expression, added two more quarters. Then the clerk went underneath the counter like a rabbit into his hole.  Extended shuffling sounds emerged.  Dan and Kevin exchanged glances.  The noise was like the fella had a branch of the public library under there.  In about a minute, he reappeared and dropped three small booklets, pages of cheapest pulp fastened by a single staple, down on top of the Bull Durham ad.  The clerk’s hand darted out to scoop up the quarters, and he backed up against the floor-to-ceiling tobacco case behind him.  His tongue darted out to nervously lick his lips.  The gesture wasn’t appealing.

Assault of the Scarlet Sorceress, starring Kernak the Feral.

Dick Danger in Laying Down the Law.

Betty Boop’s Better Business Bureau.

Dan’s eyebrows darted down.  Richard Danger was also theirs – lucky Bearach and Royce, kachow, kachow – but Betty Boop sure wasn’t.  Kevin had picked up the Kernak eight-pager, so Dan took on Betty.  He’d always liked her, but after those eight pages he wasn’t sure he wanted to see her or Bimbo the dog again for a good, long while.  It was the same artist as on the sheets locked up in their office safe, though.

Kevin, who had finished with Kernak, took a deep breath and reached for Danger.  Dan spent the extra time eying the clerk with the same thoughtful attention he’d once devoted to a green buck private who he’d caught on inspection with a deck of cards stuffed where his gas-mask filter should have been.  Yup, he could still wilt an offender by eye.  Good to know.  His own boys and girls at the office were used enough to him that his glares had started to bounce.

“Same artist?”  he asked Kevin, not taking his eye off the clerk.  Dan wasn’t all that keen on the idea of George from upstairs getting involved in this little encounter.

Kevin, who’d quickly paged through Betty’s book, said, “Yes, and the same writer, too.  Probably a one-man show.”

Abruptly, Dan dropped both hands onto the counter top, leaned forward, and barked, “Him?”

The clerk’s chin bobbed up and down before he could stop it.  Then, getting a grip on himself, he weakly asked, “Who?”

Dan didn’t even bother.  He turned to Kevin and their eyes briefly met.  Then, without another word, they turned and left the shop, leaving behind the clerk to contemplate his betrayal of his notion of an idol.

Outside, the light had faded and streetlamps and neon were about to take over from the sun.  The cigar store was close enough to the entertainment district that the streets were busier than during the working day.  The day shift had given way to swing shift, the ranks of guys without lodgings were beginning their nighttime field march in search of someplace safe to sit and get warm, and the suburbs were out for fun.  Usually Dan would have had enough attention to spare to admire certain individuals among the well-coiffured theater-goers, the gowned ladies with hands resting on the arms of their gentleman escorts, out on their way for early suppers before their shows.  Not tonight, though.  It was a short walk to Harry Kennedale’s apartment, and Dan spent the interval trying to decide if he wanted to rein in what he sensed roiling off of Kevin or abet it.  He still hadn't decided when they got to the front stoop of the old brownstone.

They might or might not have gotten in through the locked front door, but they didn’t get a chance to find out.  The brunette exiting, head down and moving fast, almost knocked Dan off his feet.  He caught her arm, and Kevin grabbed the front door before it could swing shut.

“Careful, sister,” Dan growled, and then softened his tone when he got his first clear look at her face.  She was busy not crying and the effort had made her mad.  “Hold on.  Let’s take this inside and off the stoop.”

For a moment, she was going to tug her arm away from his grip, but she saw something in his expression and stopped.  Instead she said, “Why should I?”  Her accent was straight out of the tall corn.

“Because I think I know you.”  He did, too.  He’d last seen her tied to a rack, more defiant than alarmed, on the cover of last month’s Zesty Detective.  “And, if I’m right, I bet I know who put that look on your face.  We have business with him.”

“Risky business, I hope.”  She was still examining his face with intent blue eyes.  “Okay.  I guess this is my day to be the sucker.”  Dan let loose her arm and they went back into the brownstone, Kevin holding the door open and bowing them into the foyer.   Once indoors, she said, bluntly, “You don’t have to bother.  He isn’t up there in his apartment.  I bet he’s out on the town again.”

Instead of asking where Harry was, Dan asked, “What the heck did he do this time?  Anything you can share?”

Her lips gave away when she almost lost her composure, but she kept charge in the end.  “Nothing important, I suppose.  We were dating for a little while.  Just – you know, dating, nothing my mother would disapprove of.  I only mention the fact to explain why I was upset that Harry somehow failed to mention the impact my face splashed across a pulp cover would have.  The boss at the last job my typing service sent me out on had more hands than an octopus.  When I asked him where he got those berries, he laughed and said no girl who showed in print where I did had reason to complain.  He left bruises.  I chalked him up as merely nasty until a guy started in on me at the movies last night.  That one also seemed to think he knew me real well.”  Her chin went up.  “It sure wasn’t worth the three bucks Harry paid me to pose, putting up with the social results.”

All of a sudden, Dan knew why her face seemed so familiar.  His stomach twisted.

Kevin knew it, too.  “I’m afraid the responsibility was not Zesty Detective’s.”  He reached inside his overcoat to the breast pocket, and took out and unfolded the page of proofs.  “Do you know what this is?”

She took it from him, glanced down, spotted her own features on the half-clad girl on the page, and paled.  “No.”  Dan had to give her credit.  She examined the page carefully before she asked, “What is this, anyhow?”

They took turns, explaining it to her.  Blue wasn’t really something you wanted to explain to a girl from Iowa, or Nebraska, or some place like that, especially when she was involved.  The kid didn’t say a word as they went on.  She just got quieter and quieter.  By the time they were done, her shoulders had slumped.  For this one, no arm around her shoulders.  Instead, Dan offered her his flask.

She took it, opened the cap with a fumble that fell somewhere between ignorance and acquaintanceship, and had a small drink.  It made her cough, but she dabbed at the mouth of the flask with her sleeve before she screwed the top back on and passed it over.  Dan put it away.  She said, her voice dull, “I guess it’s the wide open prairies for me.  I’m done in this town if any guy I meet might have me down for Kernak’s love slave.”

Dan was trying to think how to tell her that he’d heard the blueys were showing up all over the country these days, when Kevin said, “Nonsense.”  His voice was brisk.  This time he reached for his trousers pocket and took out his wallet.  From it he selected a business card, and asked, “Dan, may I borrow your pen?”  Kevin hated carrying a fountain pen, in case it leaked on his shirt.  “The artwork in this tripe is passable, but not that good.”

As he wrote, Kevin continued, “Take my card over to this address on Fifth.  It’s a beauty salon.  Ask for Gerald and give him my name.  Tell him I thought you would look good,” Kevin paused to survey the girl critically, “as a blonde.”

The kid’s lips firmed in comprehension.  Her chin went up.

Kevin said, voice soft, “You should probably have them pluck your eyebrows, too.  A pity, they have a very nice shape.  The manicurist may be able to give you some tips on cosmetics to go along with your new hair color.”

He added a fin to the card.  Before her indignation could swim to the surface, he said, “Zesty Detective is one of our titles.  Western Wanderings is a tamer magazine, and an appearance on its cover will set apart the new you quite nicely.  The sessions in our studio in front of an easel will pay back the money.”

“Yeah, you’d be cute in a high-necked, pearl-snapped cowgirl’s shirt and a blue bandana,” Dan said.

He watched as she thought the matter over, but she was smart.  “All right.  I won’t say that you owe it to me, because you don’t, but it’s a deal I can live with.  It’s sure better than unexpected squids and octopi lurking beneath the surface every time I take a swim.”  After taking a deep breath, she opened the clasps on her handbag and tucked away Kevin’s card and the five dollar bill.  “Now, is there something I can do to help you?”  Her lips twisted sardonically, and she amended, “You wanted to know about – Mr. Kennedale?”

Dan smiled with appreciation before he asked, “Do you know where he might have gone out helling?”

“He likes the clubs down around Times Square.  You know,” her mouth twisted in disgust, “the sick ones.  He tried to get me to go to a place further downtown in the Village, one he called authentic, but I wouldn’t.  I didn’t want to run into any more of those women in tuxedos.”

“What was the name of the place?”  Kevin asked.

“The Chalet.  I won’t ask you why you’re asking because I hope I know the answer.”  The girl paused for a moment, and then said, gruffly, “Thank you.  I’ll ditch your card after I use it.  That was a good idea.”

Dan smiled at her.  “We don’t have your problem, so it’s easier to think straight.”  Jesus, the lies came easy now.

Her own smile in return was a little shy.  “Well, thanks anyhow.  I’m heading home to write down ten thousand times, Don’t be a chump.”

“Have some chop suey first,” Kevin advised, and swept the outside door open for her with the same flourish he would have used to open the door for his dinner date at her penthouse apartment at the evening’s end.

“Good night,” she said and marched out, shoulders back and chin held high.

After the door closed, Dan said, “I’ll race you for her.”

“Business before pleasure.  We need a taxi.”

****

I’m writing in a taxi now, in a taxi, because I need something to do with my hands.  That’s despair for you.  It’s hell on the standards, but I still refuse to wring my hands like some panty-waist ribbon clerk in a burlesque review.

How long before some writer or printer lays hands on that eight-page epic and the word gets around?

It will start with a silence, almost unnoticeable.  There’ll be fewer invitations to drinks, fewer cards to worry about responding to at Christmas.  No longer will I have to praise my host and hostesses’ genius children at parties.  They won’t allow me in the same room as their kids.  Hell, they won’t allow me in the same room as their parties.

After a while, it’ll get to the business.  For no apparent reason, the distribution amounts will drop off.  We won’t get that extra half-a-point offer on purchases.  The warning about the new city inspector will somehow fail to reach our firm.  This is going to hurt, hurt a lot given how lousy business is.  Our artistic buddy has taken a swipe not just at Dan and me, but at the forty-eight other folks who rely on our money to appease this cold and ravenous city. 

I imagine that we won’t have a lot of unexplained employee emigrations, given the economic situation, but there won’t be many friendly encounters in the corridors.  I can hardly wait for the first time I go into the men’s room and it empties out as if someone has called a fire drill.  The only thing worse will be the first time someone musters guts enough to ask me the question, and the relieved expression that will come over their face when I lie.

And all this when we’re innocent.  Well, I’m “innocent,” in this case.  Never, never with Dan.  And he is innocent of anything but bad luck with fiancées and contemplating – or committing, for all I know – adultery with that barracuda up in Connecticut.  I know he’s innocent of the rest of it.  I’ve never touched him.  I’ve never gone near him, never even seen him naked except for that time on leave in Paris when he proved that any hopes in that direction were mere nastiness on my part.  Even that proof was innocent, by the standards of degeneracy.  A busy night at the bordello, too much wine, not enough money, good friends, why not share the girl?  I still remember—

No.

What if those hicks in Hartford somehow find out?  What about Dan’s father?

Christ.  I’m going to kill Harry.  But not until after I get rid of these pages.

****

Dan left Kevin alone as his friend, hunched into the opposite corner of the back seat of the cab, scribbled into his notebook.  Dan was too busy trying not to punch their driver, a big fan of the Italian government’s way of doing business.  The urge gave him a good clue about how badly sprung his nerves were. 

When they got out of the taxi, they were in Washington Square, a couple of blocks north of their real destination.  Walking down MacDougal, Dan could feel the muscles between his shoulder blades twitch.  He wanted to crane his neck around to see if he spotted anyone he knew.  With an effort of will, he suppressed the urge.  Next to him, Kevin seemed unperturbed, but a muscle ticked just below his ear.

From the place’s looks, the Chalet wasn’t much more than a lower-end speakeasy stowed behind a small drugstore.  Kevin had a low-voiced conversation with the character at the door – Dan assumed that money changed hands – and they were admitted.  When they got inside, he squared his shoulders, checked around, and then headed for the bar.  The guy behind the battered mahogany, to Dan’s surprise, looked like an ex-prize fighter, complete with cauliflower ears and much-broken nose.

“What’ll it be, gents?”  He sounded like a boxer, too.  His words were gravel topped by broken china.

“Whiskey and water,” Dan said.  The drink was his tipple of choice at a new joint. He found it easier to recognize the more poisonous substitutes for alcohol without the juices and flavorings of a cocktail to cover them up.

Kevin nodded to make it two.  They both tried their drinks, which were lousy, and then turned to survey the crowd.  The crowd surveyed them right back.  The once-over wasn’t blatant, but they were the center of the room’s attention.  Maybe ten or fifteen guys, of light-loafered species ranging from wolves to wild violets, were seated at the bar or in the booths, talking and drinking.  But all of their gazes drifted, at least once, towards where Dan and Kevin stood.  Dan and Kevin were being evaluated like the green member of a veteran squad, although none of the doughboys had ever worn cravats.  Dan checked the room with more care.  He didn’t see Harry.

Harry saw them, though.  He came out of the men’s room saying, “Tompkins, I could do with another—”, caught sight of Dan and Kevin, and froze.

Dan hadn't known what they would do until they did it, but it was as if he and Kevin had practiced the routine for months.  They were up, off the barstools, and had each grabbed an arm before Harry had time to do more than half-turn to flee.

Dan grabbed the collar of Harry’s suit coat and yanked it hard, pulling the coat halfway down Harry’s back, effectively pinning his arms.  Kevin said harshly, “We figured it out, Harry.  You were the one at the Marseilles the night of the raid.  You were the one who took him there and left him there before he met his stranger, they arrested him, and he hung himself in that cell.”  Well, Harry had always wanted Kevin’s undivided attention.  He sure had it now.

Dan shifted and got Harry in an arm lock.  Over Harry’s shoulder, he checked the patrons to see if the crowd was going to be trouble.  Seemingly trouble had started – some of the patrons were half out of their seats – but something about Kevin’s words had frozen them into a tableau.  Harry made a choked noise, and the bartender tilted his thick neck, considering the three of them, before he gently, almost delicately, put down his crowbar on top of the bar.  As if that had been a signal, the other patrons settled back, silent but with eyes intent.  

Kevin continued, “I don’t know if Jimmy ever kissed a fella before you took him clubbing, and I don’t much care.  All I know is he loved that over-muscled pulp character he’d created, and you used Kernak for a cheap joke in a pornographic eight-pager.”  He stepped back, as if he couldn’t stand to be so close to Harry.  He probably couldn’t.  “So, tell me Harry.  What did you say to Jimmy, that night at the Club Marseilles, when he met you there to ask who raped his feral baby?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”  Harry’s words were bewildered but his eyes weren’t.

Kevin reached over and grabbed Harry’s face, palm pressed hard over his cheekbone, fingertips curled under his ear, thumb wrapped under his jaw.  He yanked Harry’s head to one side.  It was the proper grip to break a fella’s neck, if currently applied from the wrong angle.  Dan wondered if Harry recognized the grip.

Maybe he did.  Kevin continued, voice calm and thoughtful, leaving his hand where it was as Harry began to twist.  “Somebody told Jimmy about your second job drawing pornographic funnies.  My vote would be for Ron, who’s close enough to being your friend not to want you blacklisted from the pulps, but also close enough to honorable to know how hurt Jimmy would be when he found out what you’d done.  And Jimmy would have found out.  Just like we found out about that other little joke of yours, using us as models.”  Dan tightened his grip and Harry abruptly stilled.  “I’m betting you gave Ron those roughs and he passed them along to Jimmy.  Were you asking Ron for a critique?  Did you think he’d be as admiring of your dashing dissipation as your little clerk friend and your stupider models?”

Harry made a pained noise that seemed to tell Kevin something.  He let go and asked, still cold, still calm, “What did you say to Jimmy, Harry?”

“Only what was obvious to everyone who paid real attention to those stories of his.  I merely let him know why he loved his muscles, and his admiring little buddies, and his feral Kernak so very, very much.”

“Cripes.”  Dan couldn’t believe the heat in his own voice.  “He liked to look good.  He crushed on his friends some.  So what?  That doesn’t mean much.”

“So what?”  Harry laughed, but the sound wasn’t funny.  “All you had to do was put enough hooch into him, and then get him to where he could meet the real thing, to show Jimmy what Kernak actually meant to him.”

“And then you left him there alone, for the unthinking, the vicious, and the cops.”

“Why not?  I wasn’t the queer, after all.”

Kevin’s face had lost its cold, impassive glaze.  Now it was an advertisement for incredulity.  “You do that and claim you’re not—” He trailed off as if he couldn’t find the word.

There was a stir in the audience, almost silent until now. 

“Oh, not her,” a light, mocking tenor from a booth in the corner played the chorus-leader for this Greek drama.  “She’s with us but not of us, if you know what a girl means.  Miss Manly Q. Artist merely thinks of us as so many easy dates for those slow Friday nights.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dan said coldly, and tightened his arms until he felt one of Harry’s arms pull against its socket. “And you’re calling Jimmy queer?  You’re disgusting.”

Harry’s head went back, and he yanked hard against Dan’s grip.  “Screw you.  As if you have any right to sit in judgment on me.  One of my models is from Hartford, and she told me all about you.  Your  married ‘friend’ told her.  Little Dan would be good for more than an escort, Mrs. Smayle said, if you didn’t already belong to ‘Nance’ Goodich’s crowd, that sweet bunch of flowers.  You and Hugh Biddle.  You and Jeremy Pratt.  You and all the others.  Not exactly crushing on your friends, Danny boy.”

Dan let loose as if he’d been holding a cobra.  Kevin turned to give him a look.  Their eyes met.

Harry twisted away, shrugged his coat back up onto his shoulders, and said to Kevin, his voice half-malicious and half-pleading, “I only drew what Danny dreams about, a true man like you giving it to him as hard as he wants it.  He may act tough, but he’s really nothing but a fag.”

Kevin stepped forward, and with a blow that could have been preserved behind glass in the natural history museum as an exemplar of its breed, knocked Harry out cold.  Then he told the body sprawled out on the floor, his voice empty, “So am I, Harry.  So am I.”

When Dan had gone off to war, hoping to make his father proud, he hadn't known about that taciturn man’s own military service. He hadn't known then about that campaign in the Philippines, how the U.S. Army had raped, and burned, and killed a hundred thousand natives to grind the insurrection into dust. So he hadn't understood, when he finally returned from the trenches as his father’s true colleague at last, why he was greeted only with the words, “I didn’t want you to go through what I went through, just so you could learn what I know about the world.”  He hadn't understood the look of weary sorrow on his father’s face.  He’d learned since then.  Now he recognized and understood the same look on Kevin’s face.  He understood because he felt the look move across his own features as he stood, gazing at Kevin.

After a long moment, Kevin stared down at the floor and said, voice still flat, “Harry’s crumbling under the strain.  I guess he can’t live the life any more than Jimmy could.  Only, he found a different way to run.  We have met the enemy—”

“—and he is us.  Yeah, sure.  Let’s go.”

They turned, but were interrupted by a rumble from the bartender.

“I’m sorry,” Kevin said, “did we forget to pay for our drinks?”  The polite inquiry would have reassured Dan if the tone hadn’t been so dead.

“Nah.”  The bartender picked up the crowbar and hefted it thoughtfully.  “That’s a nice uppercut there.  Good follow-through across the body line.”

“Thank you.  My friend,” Kevin nodded at Dan, “got me started.  He boxes.”

The bartender gave Dan an assessing look and then nodded.  “The guy who owns this place?  He’s got a cousin with a printing plant in Brooklyn.”

Dan grimaced.  That explained how Harry had gotten sucked into the morass of the pornography business.  Blackmail, probably.

“These blueys, the artists earn three, maybe five bucks a page.  It’s a lot of money to pay, but it’s a lot of profit for the publisher, too, and good artists are hard to find.  Still, the owner don’t need no trouble.  I’ll talk to him.  Kernak, right?”

“Yeah.  Thanks,” Dan said, meaning it.  “We’ll go now.  Sorry to crash the party and then leave you stuck with our bad date.”

The bartender shrugged.  “Not for long.  Drag him out, ladies.”

There was no shortage of volunteers.

****

Irony.  Thirteen years of this ongoing joke, Dan and I both, neither of us knowing the other—  Oh, to hell with it.  I’m throwing this out the window.

****

“Jesus, buddy, what was that for?”  Dan asked, alarmed.  They’d wound up back in the office, the safest territory either of them could pick without actually discussing the matter.  Kevin had walked inside without a word, hung up his hat and coat, gone over to open the lower sash, returned to get his notebook, and thrown it out the window.

“I wrote in it because I didn’t have anyone to talk to who I trusted, who would understand.  Now I do.  I wish I didn’t, knowing from first-hand experience what it costs to be a homosexual.”

Dan shrugged from where he was sitting on his desk.  He would have liked to argue, but he couldn’t.  “It’s a hell of a life, Sergeant.”

“That it is, Corporal.  But we’re alive to live it.”

“Yup.”  Suddenly Dan laughed.  “Hey, according to the books written by the kind of highbrows who look down on the lowly pulps for their fantastic and improbable plots, this is when we follow your notebook out the window.”

“I’m a lot more interested in how we could be so stupid for so many years.  Hartford?  You managed to live the life on alternate half-weeks in Hartford?”

“It’s not Terra Haute, for Christ’s sake.  We know what goes where in Hartford, even if we don’t have any bars to sit around in and discuss the procedures.”

Kevin, who was sitting on the sill of the open window, suddenly folded his arms across his chest and grinned sardonically.

Heart lighter, Dan said, “And there are places to go.  You know, guys’ houses, parties, the Y. M.—”

“—C.A.” they finished together, and laughed. 

Kevin shook his head, still grinning. “You and that boxing of yours,” and then mock bobbed and weaved as Dan feinted heaving the stale remnants of his lunch-time sandwich at him.  Finally, Kevin yielded, throwing up his arms.  “Okay, okay.  I take it you’ve had some more-than-really-good friends.”

“So have you, from the sound of it.”  Dan neatly tossed the stale sandwich into the wastepaper basket.

“Yes, along with one very good friend indeed.”  Kevin’s face sobered, but to rueful, not to flat.  “I don’t want to screw that up, Danny-Boy.  Especially not now, with the bluey floating around out there.  There’s going to be a lot of pressure, a lot of eyes watching.”  He propped one arm against the window frame and turned to look out at the city.  It was a nice spring night, and you could hear the traffic, the horns and the motors, from the street below.  Kevin’s head swiveled like he was scouting for an approaching army.  He said, without turning, “Somehow my circumstances don’t seem fair.  The only other consolation this stupid situation offers, aside from the very great prize of never having to lie to you again, is the chance to get a genuine gaze at you without your clothes on.  And I don’t know if it’s a good idea to take that chance.”

“Hey, have some sympathy for me, here.  You’re the one with the looks.”

Kevin turned around, paused, and then said mildly, “You have the body.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the graceful one.”

“Hah.  This from a veritable paragon of masculinity.”

“Ooo, words straight out of last month’s issue of Zesty Hollywood.”  Dan wasn’t surprised to find Kevin standing next to his desk.  He got up, with a lack of haste that was almost luxurious, to reach out his hand, cup it around Kevin’s jaw, and lean in to taste the half-smiling lips with his own.

Not bad.

Who was he kidding?  Damn tasty.  He took inventory.  The salt-sweet of Kevin’s supple lips, the warmth of his strong hands, the deep rasp of his breathing, the softly chafing caress of lightly furred male skin, the wet, small noises of tongues meeting;  also, two wide-open windows and an unlocked office door, not to mention an efficient cleaning staff.

Dan pushed back and took a deep breath.  “Whoa.  Bad business etiquette.”

Kevin took a few seconds to find words again.  Then he cleared his throat.  “Obviously, we’re taking the chance at least once.  If only to confound curiosity, to keep us from building up ridiculous expectations.”  The corners of his lips quirked.

“But not at the office.”

“No.  Doors aren’t sound-proof, wood floors are hard on the knees, desk edges dig in.  And,” he added pointedly, “my chair creaks.  Loudly.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll oil the thing tomorrow.  You could do it yourself, you know.  Hand me my coat.”

When they left, they walked through the entire office suite on the way out.  He could only guess what Kevin was thinking, but Dan was bracing himself up for the battle he knew was coming.  Somehow, they would fight back.  Deviants they might be, but they were also damn good pulp publishers with a readership, authors and artists, and a staff to think about.  This latest scandal was just one more difficulty to struggle through.

He took his second inventory of the evening, this time of all the familiar places that he had helped create.  Mrs. Week’s small room, neat and complete with pet rubber tree.  Accounting, where Fred would sure need seltzer tomorrow.  Turn the desk light off in Peggy’s office.  Did you leave in a hurry for a hot date with Frank, kid?   A hat forgotten in the secretarial pool that belonged to, what was her name, Susan?  Yeah, Susan.  Ahead of him in the dim, Kevin moved with the smooth grace that Dan knew from experience he should ignore in public, especially from behind.  That small debit was entered under the business column of the inventory sheet, too. 

When they got to the art studio, Dan was surprised to see a light on.  Then, he was surprised at his surprise.  There was someone in there, hunched over one of the draftsmen’s boards.  The fella was Ron, of course.

Kevin cleared his throat.  Ron started, and moved his forehead off of the hand he had propped it on.  “Hey.”

Kevin said, “We found Harry.”

“Oh?”

“He was still alive when we left him.”

“Jeez.”  Ron visibly thought matters over.  “So, you were mad at him.  What was the problem?”

“You’re a good liar, Ron,” Dan said conversationally.

Ron turned entirely around on his stool to examine the two of them.  He’d picked his words by the time he opened his mouth again, Dan could tell.  “Yeah, you get a lot of practice in the Village.”  And then, after a pause, “I’m sorry.”  Another pause.  Ron shrugged.  “I should have known Jimmy couldn’t take what Harry could dish out.  That was my fault.  I got three or four pages into Harry’s little masterpiece and telephoned Jimmy.  Then, just like Jimmy asked me to, I sent the pages over to him by messenger.  Stupid.”

“Three or four pages?  Like I said, you’re a good liar, Ron.”

“All right, all right, I saw page six.  But some stuff is none of my business.  I learned that in the Village, too.”  Ron sighed.

Dan said, just to break the silence, “There’ll be a model coming over, that kid Harry used on Zesty Detectives last month.  She’ll have a new hairdo, so don’t mention it if you recognize her features.”  He raised his eyebrows significantly.  “Especially don’t mention pages two and three.”

“Oh, her.  She’s also in Dick Danger and the Doubtful Dame.  I won’t mention that, either.  She’s the other reason, besides the fact I didn’t think Jimmy and you guys would think his jokes were very funny, that I didn’t give Harry back his roughs to submit, that I sent them to Jimmy instead.  Harry said she was a prude, but I met her when she did that cover for us, and I thought she was nice.  I figured Harry could come up with something else for his publisher.”  Once again he paused.  “Do you think she likes Italian food?”

“Don’t ask me, ask her,” Dan said.  He was too busy hiding the relief washing over him to make his retort sting like it should have.  “So those roughs were his only copies of the artwork for that bluey, and you diverted them?  Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Sure, like I said, she looked nice.  Besides, Harry could have caused the firm trouble with the postal service.  I don’t want the firm hurt.  I want to keep this job.”  Ron looked at both of them, his face unusually diffident.  “That is, if I still have this job.”

“What do you think?”  Dan hesitated a moment and then added sharply “Goddamn it, would you try and consider all possible results before you act next time, though?”

Ron flushed and ducked his head, like a kid called out in front of the class.  Hopeless.  Artists.  Jesus.

Kevin said, his voice both sad and amused, “You will still have a job if we still have jobs.  But, even allowing for Bearach and Royce being run by pariahs during a depression, that will probably continue to be the case.”

“Pariahs?”  Ron blinked.  “Oh.  Yeah.  That.”

“Yes, that, Ron.”  Kevin was trying not to let the balance tip towards amused.  Trying, and failing.

“I don’t know, it seems like a waste of time to me.  Do you think she’d pose for that cover on South Seas Wanderings?  I’d do the painting myself.”

Dan snorted.  “If no clutching octopi arms are involved, yeah, I guess.  Good night, Ron.”

“Night.”  Ron turned back to the board and dreamily picked up a number three pencil. 

They exited the studio, said good evening to Mrs. Jones, who was rattling her buckets in reception, and left.  As they went down in the elevator toward the street, Kevin eyed the elevator attendant and said mildly, “Let’s grab some Chinese.”

“And take the food back to my place?  Okay.”  Dan decided this keep-it-clean-in-public stuff wasn’t too hard after all.  Except for the grin, of course.  He would have to work on his grin.

“So,” Dan asked, a half-hour later, “now that you can take a good, long stare with no one noticing and fewer clothes in the way, do you think I look like Felix the Cat?”

“Felix?”  Kevin’s eyebrows went up, and then he suddenly smiled. “You know what that name means, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“Felix means joy, Felix means luck.  So I guess you do look like Felix to me, Danny-boy.”

Dan wanted to respond with - not mush, but something.  Courtesy of Laneil B. Stanson Elementary School’s idea of how to teach poetry, he found words.  Just like at the fifth grade recital, he put his heels together, linked his hands behind his back, rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling, and recited the poem he’d memorized after drawing its title out of a hat:

“I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them?
Or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta
and in every city of these states inland and seaboard,
And in fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.”

 “Walt Whitman,” Dan added punctiliously.  Never, ever, deny the author his byline.

“Come over here and let’s discuss that,” Kevin suggested thoughtfully. 

****

All right, Diary Dear, I admit that I missed you.  Besides, Mrs. Weeks kept asking me where I’d lost you.  Now, more than ever, it will not pay to be careless.

(1)  Outer-space Wanderings?  Interstellar Wanderings?   I am not agreeing to Zesty Futures.  That sounds like buying medicinal alcohol on the Chicago commodity exchange.

(2)  Get Fred to double-check the quarterly figures to make sure, but the books look like we can leave the per-word rate about where it should be for now.

(3)  Since Jimmy’s mother agrees, talk to the Hollywood rep. about Kernak.  Although, if you ask me, by the time they get done with him out there, he’ll be Kernak the Not-Altogether-Housebroken.

(4)  Call G. and warn him they’re going to crack down on the drag balls this year.  Also, did he hear about what happened to that poor cuss S.?  Send along some cash to help with the medical expenses.

(5)  Get Dan to oil my chair again.  It’s driving me nuts.

(6)  Promise him a suitable reward.  Yes, that one.  Hmm!

(7)  Finish the list and then tear out these pages.