"We'll wait here for a second," he said, craning his head around toward me, so that I caught a full whiskey blast. "I want you to stick with me for a while, okay, Bechstein, please?" He was opposed on principle, I knew, to the word "please." "Just be my rabbit foot."
The police car passed, a bit slowly, but passed, and the shadows of the cops within it seemed serene and unpursu-ing. I exhaled.
"Okay," I said, free from doubt for the first time in four days. I clutched his shoulder as kindly as a shoulder may be clutched. "I will. What's with the doll?"
He shook it.
"I see," I said. Actually, I would have loved to see. Stolen jewels. Who is not stirred by these two words?
"Just a minute," he said, sliding off the bike. He started toward the Cloud Factory with the doll.
I watched him disappear down the hill. It had never occurred to me that my success at remaining aloof from the business of my family all that time might be the fruit of my father's will as much as my own. I'd always thought I disappointed him by my shame, my lack of interest, my adolescent scorn. And then I thought: Wait a minute, am I going to get arrested? Hold everything.
"What'd you do with it?" I said, when Cleveland strolled easily back, patting the pockets of his too-small jacket. "Did anyone see you?"
"No evidence on me n-now," he said, sounding frazzled, a bit winded. "No one saw. May the Cloud Factory bless and k-keep my little baby. Now listen. Here's what we're going to do. I've got to run over to Ward Street to gather up my mentor. I'll get his truck-he has a beautiful truck- and we'll be back for you."
"Why do I have to wait here?"
He grabbed my elbow with one hand, my upper arm with the other, and lifted me into the air, about four inches off the saddle. It hurt.
"Off," he said, dragging me brusquely onto my feet. To an observer it would have looked as though he were about to beat me up. "You're staying here because you're going to be very busy while I'm gone." He reached into his trousers pocket and drew out a half-dozen quarters. "Here," he said. "Start calling all the magic names you know. All the wise guys. Your Uncle Lenny, whoever. Ask them-with all the filial humility you're so good at-to lay off. As a favor to you."
"I don't know any wise guys, Cleveland. I can't call Uncle Lenny."
He climbed onto the BMW, pulled on his helmet. His voice came distant and nasal through the lowered visor, as though he were talking to me from inside a bottle.
"Sure you can," he said. "Call your dad, if you have to." He jumped down hard on the starter, and his drunken foot slipped, pounded on the ground. "Jesus. Call collect."
"This is not a good scheme, Cleveland. This is a bad scheme. You can't even start your motorcycle. " I saw that I was trying to welsh on my promise to help him, so I grinned. "You're impaired."
He jumped again, and the bike began its controlled explosions.
"I'm huge," he said, poking his finger into my chest. "I'll be back in ten minutes."
Kneading the damp pieces of metal in my hand, I watched him pass again through the shadows between streetlights, shrinking as he went. I wished, with sharp, strange regret, that I had kissed his cheek.
I stood with a quarter half-slid into the coin slot, my thoughts a jumble of preambles and strategies, having decided firmly but in some bewilderment that I could not call Uncle Lenny. It would have to be my father. I say bewilderment because I still did not really believe that the premature arrival of the police had anything to do with my father, and so I couldn't quite see why I should call him, except that I'd told Cleveland I would. It was intolerable enough to have to alarm my father for a good reason, but for more of Cleveland 's nonsense! I pinched the quarter, full of dread, wondering whether I shouldn't just call to say hello. I read fifteen times an obscene graffito on the aluminum corner of the phone booth.
"Collect call to Joseph Bechstein from Art, " I said, and in a minute I heard my father saying that he would not accept the charges. In the second before my heart sank, I felt how odd it was to hear his high, clipped familiar voice and not be able to speak to him, as though the operator had raised an unhearing ghost or oracle; this woman held the switches and wire that connected us. My father would hang up, and then I would, and she would be left wherever it is that operators are.
"Dad!" I said. "Please talk to me!"
I heard the sudden silence as the woman broke the connection; then, as she blandly suggested that I dial direct, I heard the sirens growing in the distance. I dropped the receiver with a loud clunk and ran back toward the parking lot. For a few seconds I saw his motorcycle, very far away, before it disappeared from view. He must have flown past the wrong street corner, past two cops in a car with a description and an APB. One, then two, three squad cars went red and glittering after him. For the next few minutes I jogged helplessly back and forth, hopped into the air, climbed the steps of the museum, trying to catch a glimpse, aware of nothing around me but ceaseless demonstrations of the Doppler effect. I knew so little what to do that it actually occurred to me to call the police.
"Help, oh, help," I whispered.
Then I saw Cleveland emerge from a street over behind the library, the street I had walked in my efforts to avoid Phlox, and simultaneously heard the drone and terrible flutter of hundreds of beating dove wings. The helicopter swung low and hung, it swept its single straight beam across Cleveland, and its metal voice issued an incomprehensible command. Cleveland hesitated a moment, probably from the shock of suddenly finding an uproar of wind and brilliance above his spinning head, then shot toward me, toward the Cloud Factory, as the police cars appeared behind him. The helicopter jerked upward, then dropped down again onto Cleveland. He reached the curb not twenty yards from me, let his bike fall, with its rear wheel still whirling, and ran toward the Cloud Factory, pursued by the light from above. I ran after him.
"Get back!" said the helicopter. "Keep away!" Cleveland scrambled up over the chain-link fence, tottering at the top, and then I lost sight of him. The police pulled up, left their cars, and came jingling and rattling toward me. One of them detached himself from the group and, with a shove and a hammerlock, took me into custody. I could not say that I had nothing to do with this. We watched, I and my cop. The searchlight caught Cleveland on an iron ladder, drunk and terrified and climbing very badly, a flash of white-pink under his arm. I cried out. Down, I thought, down, go down. But he continued his upward climb, running wildly along each catwalk to the next ladder, encased every step of the way in the solid tube of light, until he reached a ladder fastened to the side of the building itself, a series of bars like staples punched into the brick.
"Go down!" I said.
"He can't hear you," said the cop. "Shut up."
Cleveland 's pursuers were already scaling the building around him, from all sides, when he attained the summit of the Cloud Factory. I saw him, legs apart, in the shadow of the magic valve, one waving hand extended toward the oncoming helicopter to shield his face from its light, the other clutching the naked doll. In that one long second before he lost his footing and fell head over heels over head, the spotlight hit him strangely, and he threw a brief, enormous shadow against the perfect clouds, and the hair seemed to billow out from the shadow's head like a black banner. For one second Cleveland stood higher than the helicopter that tormented him; he loomed over the building, over me, and over the city of secret citizens and homes beneath his feet, and the five-foot shadow of the doll kicked and screamed.