He gave me a garden room in the basement, there was a pad and pencil on the night table. I followed him back to the kitchen. He touched my arm and said Claire had not known Wheeler. I said, But you know him.
I only knew that you did — and that he was hired because of you. Monty betook himself then upstairs to what sounded like the third-floor (American). I wolfed an apricot yogurt and some tight-wrapped square slices of boiled ham. I heard voices above but it could have been the radio. But it could be TV, a sudden thought, for I’d come from a country where radio is still equal if not superior.
I did not go to bed.
I was within walking distance of Soho.
In the curtained living room on a desk I made out Jenny’s typing on the two pages I’d passed to Monty and Claire that rainy bluefish night. Because of the number of large and small paintings and photos fitted into every available foot of wall, I took the dark living room for granted.
However, at ten o’clock after a shower and a shave downstairs I was walking along Prince Street and was aware of something on those walls I ought to notice.
At Mercer I turned my attention south. But as I came abreast of the building where the man in glasses who had given me a cup of tea had his peculiarly genuine loft, I saw a phone far down the street and thought of the Xerox copies. If anyone had broken in while Lorna was asleep, there was no receipt to tell which Xerox shop had the copies of the film diary. It was difficult to phone transatlantic from a pay booth.
I pushed the button by the nameless name slot.
I passed through and upstairs as if someone was expected. I could not recall the trucks and their noise, and their mass tilted half on the sidewalk, but if Mercer Street had been as before full of trucks, I’d taken them for granted.
If I say so myself I had at this time begun to happen in another spirit. I reach as through a glove port into quiet for the words, no doubt some the wrong words, in order to say what was then hard to feel and is now hard to tell though if I had and have this sense that at that time I had begun to happen in a new spirit or stage, you at least who read this have me even if you cannot perhaps reach inside.
The young man in steel-rimmed glasses stepped back into his loft and I said I’d come back to hear about slit-scan screening. He moved toward the corner where the electric ring was, his hand stirred toward his kettle and electric ring six or eight feet to his left; the workbench was ten feet behind him to his right; the slit-scan track at the far end to my right and his left seemed altered, there was more equipment at the near end of the track, the camera end from which the camera would take off along the track toward the far end where the little screen was fixed through which the approaching camera received larger and larger and with infinitesimal displacement to one side or the other whatever tricks had been prepared behind the vertical slit in the screen.
And behind and above the screen and in front of a black curtain that I thought had not been there last week stood a tall black girl. She was under one of the spotlights down there in tight white trousers and a bralike white top, and a black wire trailed from her hand off toward the floor, and now a white foot was raised to a ledge or stand to one side of the little screen, and her dark elbow came down to poise on the raised white thigh, and her mouth beneath a colossal Beefeater’s pile of dense hair lowered toward the hand, and her eyes widened toward me in a huge soft sound around me that carried a meaning irrespective of the words addressed into what she had in her palm — which was a mike, call it a princess mike.
Her words I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU I LIKE YOU swept through my knees and under my feet and came around behind to hold me with some delicately smacking breaths of unvoiced laughter.
OK, June, said the man in glasses. I’ll be in touch, have a nice weekend.
June smiled into her hand and said seductively, Baby it’s only Monday.
She was enjoying playing with the public-address system.
June smiled into her hand. The man in glasses still watching me reached behind him below the poster that had NAND at the lower right and switched on an amplifier. June spoke again and her new voice made the loft vast and the interview ahead real.
He moved away toward her and I wandered to the bench and removed a pistol from behind a generator, and moved away from the bench.
When she passed me on the way out scuffing her white shoes and having acquired somehow on her languid route a white jacket with padded shoulders, she gave my arm a nice little grab and said she really, really did like me.
And when she was gone down the stairs outside I asked the man in glasses what he meant rifling my friend’s apartment right down to the kids’ toys and clothes, spreading crayons all over the place and mashing them into the carpet.
He moved to the electric ring and turned it on and asked with a little smile on his face like someone in the movies, what else he had done at my friend’s.
I said he had smashed a television set. He said he had not smashed any television set, and then I noticed that the two sets that had been facing each other a yard apart had been moved somewhere.
I moved closer and told him that his boss Phil Aut had had him do this, that he’d asked last time Who’s Phil Aut, but I knew he worked for Phil Aut, I knew he’d entered my friend’s flat first Thursday and encountered my friend’s wife, who let him in, and that some time Sunday between nine and four he’d got in again.
The man in glasses said he was making a cup of tea, OK? and I moved closer feeling like the game called grandmother’s footsteps we played at Jenny’s and Will’s birthday parties where you move up when the person who’s it isn’t looking and the person turns around to catch you moving.
My host let sugar out of a small square envelope like what you get in a restaurant, and he said he was drugging me.
He offered me the cup and I said I didn’t take sugar.
He handed me the other, I discovered a chair and set the cup down on it.
He said he’d been afraid of this, and when I said of what, he sipped his tea and lowered his cup just a bit from his lip and said quietly Oh please, man.
I said even more quietly that I didn’t know what Aut’s thing with Graf was, but getting into Gene Autry drag to impersonate Graf must have got him a bonus and if he thought I believed one guy went there Thursday and another guy Sunday he must be as dumb as he must have been mean to shake the pennies out of a recycled coffee tin’s slot when you could just take off the plastic top.
He finished his tea in a gulp, put his cup down by the ring, approached me and said he thought he knew what had happened—
I said there’d been a window cracked too.
Who’s Gene Autry? he said.
I had my eye on him. His patience seemed gratuitous. I felt again a solid value in this place of his work. It was as if his patience for which in flickering spasms of insight he could see utterly no reason nonetheless protected that work. Instead of two tellies facing, there was just one up on the bench beside a compact console which to judge from its wiring may have been a video synthesizer.
But now so quick it was like the glory of that black girl’s voice coming out of the woodwork, I had his pearl-buttoned denim shirt in one fist and had whacked the side of his head with the other hand which was open but hard so it was more like an unfeathered chop than a slap which it was not, and his glasses were on the deck and he was blinking deeply from his cheeks up. He hit me in the chest with the heel of his hand and I found I hadn’t let go of his shirt so he stuck to me when I staggered back. My raincoat was killing me. The best I could do was bring my free hand up in a fist and as he brought his arm on that side out for a hook my fist cut into his armpit and he gave a high-pitched grunt and his punch didn’t come fast and I blocked it with the elbow of the arm I’d uppercut him with and let go his shirt as he dropped to a knee. It was a fight I now sensed I had almost had in Corsica with Dagger. The armpit, as my Druid adviser must have said some time, is one of those openings dangerously near the real circuits of the body. And as my host dropped and my fist dropped, he couldn’t have said more persuasively than in half-nauseated pain he did say the word pennies—so it occurred to me that he had not been the Sunday one. He crawled away and reached for his glasses across a line of sunlight that had escaped through one corner of a window where the shade that had probably been drawn for something he had been doing with June hadn’t quite blocked it.