As a matter of fact, it was that bad. When they left the parkway, they immediately found themselves in endless clogged traffic, windshield wipers slap-slapping in the headlight-lit darkness all around them, auto windows all steamed up, smeary child-faces peering out every side and back window, people honking furiously and pointlessly at one another, and the same people revving like mad and spinning their wheels when they found themselves on a bit of ice, instead of gently accelerating. And the huge sprawling parking lot of the Merrick Mall, when they reached it, was if possible even worse; in addition to at least as much stalled traffic, there were also millions of pedestrians slipping and sliding around, some of them pushing shopping carts full of Christmas packages and some of them pushing baby carriages full of Christmas packages and babies. "This is terrific," Dortmunder said. "Your nephew Victor is still the same giant brain he always was."

"The Dunkin' Donuts," Kelp said, peering through the windshield and pretending he hadn't heard Dortmunder's comment. "We're supposed to meet him at the Dunkin' Donuts."

The Merrick Mall, in the manner of most shopping centers, was designed like a barbell, with a branch of a major department store at one end, a branch of a major supermarket at the other end, and several zillion smaller stores in between. As Kelp inched along amid the shoppers, the familiar electric logos gleamed out at them from the darkness: Woolworth's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thom McAn, Rexall, Gino's, Waldenbooks, Baskin-Robbins, Western Auto, Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. Then the record stores, the shoe stores, the ladies' clothing stores, the Chinese restaurants. However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another.

"There it is," Kelp said, and there it was: Dunkin' Donuts, with its steamy window full of do(ugh)nuts. Kelp pootled around a while longer, found a parking place at the far end of a nearby row, and he and Dortmunder squelched through the slush and the hopeless vehicles to find Victor seated at a tiny formica table in the Dunkin' Donuts, actually dunking a do(ugh) nut into a cup of coffee.

Kelp's nephew Victor, a small neat dark-haired man who dressed as though he were applying for a job as a bank teller, was more than thirty years of age but looked barely out of his teens. His slenderness and boyishly unlined face helped to give that impression, confirmed by the eager anticipatory quality of his every expression. What he most looked like was a puppy seen through a pet-store window, except he didn't have a tail to wag.

"Mr. Dortmunder!" he said, hopping to his feet and sticking out the hand with the dunked do(ugh)nut in it. "Nice to see you again." Then be realized he was still holding the do(ugh)nut, chuckled sheepishly, stuck the whole thing out of sight in his mouth, wiped his hand on his trousers, stuck it out again, and said, "Muf nur muf."

"That goes for me, too," Dortmunder told him, and shook his sticky hand.

Victor gestured for them to sit at his table, while he hurriedly and noisily swallowed, then said, "Coffee? Donuts? Uncle?"

"Not for me," Dortmunder said. Neither he nor Kelp had taken the invitation to sit.

"Victor," Kelp said, "I think we'd just rather go see this fellow Porculey, okay?" Kelp tended to get a little nervous when in the presence simultaneously of Dortmunder and Victor.

"Oh, sure," Victor said. Standing beside the table, he gulped his coffee down, patted his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, "All set."

"Fine," Kelp said.

Victor led the way outside, and turned right, to walk along the semi-protected sidewalk. The few other pedestrians slogging past weren't even trying to look imbued with Christmas cheer. A roof extended over the walk, but a gusty cold breeze shot little clumps of wet snow in under it from time to time. Kelp, his uneasiness expressing itself in a fitful desire to keep some sort of conversation going, said, "Well, Victor. Still got your old Packard?"

"Oh, yes," Victor said, with his modest little chuckle. "It's a fine car. Ask the man who owns one."

"Do you want us to follow you, or should we all ride in the Packard?"

They were just passing one of the empty stores; black windows, a bit of trash in the doorway. "We're here," Victor said, and stopped.

This was so unexpected that Kelp and Dortmunder kept going, until they realized they'd left Victor behind. When they looked back, Victor was knocking on the glass door of the empty store.

Now what? The door was opening and light was spilling out into the snowy dark. A voice was speaking, Victor was grinning and replying, Victor was crossing the threshold, smiling and gesturing for Dortmunder and Kelp to follow. They did, and entered another world.

The stocky man who shut the door behind them remarked, genially, "Terrible out there tonight," but Dortmunder paid no attention, absorbing the interior of the store. In its most recent commercial manifestation it had apparently been a women's clothing boutique, the long narrow space separated into sections by platforms of various heights, all edged with elbow-high black wrought-iron railings, each platform covered in carpeting of another color, all shades of blue or gray. With the walls covered in burlap painted dark blue and the plate glass windows painted black, the final effect was somewhere between a garden and a garret, flooded in moonlight.

Probably when the platforms had borne racks of skirts and sweaters and jumpsuits the garden effect had been predominant, but now the feeling was much more of a garret, helped by the bits of clothing and old rags draped carelessly over most of the railings. The nearest couple of platforms featured ratty pieces of living-room furniture, while a platform toward the middle bore several plain wooden kitchen chairs and an old trencher table. Toward the rear were two easels, a high stool, and a library table covered with the impedimenta of painting: tubes of color, water glasses full of slender brushes, rags, palette knives. Unframed canvases were stacked in corners and hung on the walls. Above the easels, the standard shop ceiling gave way to a recess containing a domed skylight.

The store was warm after the snowy night outside, and despite its narrow length and endlessly shifting levels, it was somehow cozy. People lived here, you could see that, and had made a place of their own in what had once been a desert of impersonality.

People. Two of them, one a girl of about twenty curled up on the sofa, with an old plaid throw rug draped across her legs. She was slender, but with roundness and softness, like the world's tastiest peach, and her smile made her cheeks plump and delectable. Dortmunder could have gone on looking at her for thirty or forty years, but he forced himself to give some attention to the other person as well.

This was the man who had let them in. He was a roly-poly sloppy man of about fifty, wearing bedroom slippers, paint-stained dark corduroy trousers, a mostly-green plaid shirt and a dark green ratty cardigan sweater with leather elbow patches. He hadn't shaved today, and it was possible he hadn't shaved yesterday.

Victor was making the introductions, announcing each name as though that person were a particular discovery of Victor's own: "Griswold Porculey, I'd like you to meet my uncle, Andy Kelp, and his friend, Mister John Dortmunder."

"W'r'ya," Dortmunder said, shaking Porculey's extended hand.