“Yeah,” Sean whispered. “Man, how old is that chick?”

“What chick?” Mike derailed fairly easily and didn’t like it a bit.

“You know.” Long Texas smile. “Sa-TI-va,” very slowly.

“Oh wow. I don’t know. Twenty-five?”

“Yeah?” Sean’s face looked as dreamy as a custard pie in August.

“Now,” calmly, “about this Radio…”

“ On and on they went, while Laszlo stayed perversely home and I swallowed endless lousy egg creams. The plan was for Michael to follow Laszlo, when and if he left, keeping in touch with us by radio, thus leaving Sean and me free to ransack Laszlo’s pad with little chance of getting caught, an arrangement of which I basically approved. Sean, however, didn’t seem to have much of a gift for wrist radios.

“Blue button,” he said ruefully after a prolonged while; “green button” in bewilderment; “gray button! Hey, man, which is which?”

“What?” Mike looked grievously stricken. “What do you mean?”

“I mean which is which, man? I can’t tell them goddamn buttons apart.”

“What do you mean, you can’t tell them apart?” I’d seldom heard Mike sound so utterly offended.

“I think,” I drawled, interrupting my catalog of sorrows, “I think,” again, “Sean’s trying to tell you something.”

“So tell me, dammit.”

“It strikes me,” prolonging Michael’s agony, “that our young friend’s a trifle color blind. Right, Sean?”

“Yeah,” he confessed, embarrassed. “I got these goofy contact things I’m s’posed to wear, but I don’t like ’em.”

So I ended up wearing the radio, though Mike’s generally reluctant to entrust me with electronic gear, being of the odd opinion that every communications gadget I touch falls apart instantly, which has only happened a few times and was never quite my fault.

And still we waited, sipping flat egg creams, telling Sean imaginative tales about Sativa, drawing progressively unfriendly looks from the Puerto Rican counterman and his fat wife or whatever, and cursing Laszlo fluently. None of us was particularly happy, and the day showed signs of becoming interminable and drab.

Laszlo finally left home at half-past two. Mike gave him the traditional half block lead and then slipped out after him, first making sure my radio was on. He doubted I could safely turn it on myself. Fine roommate.

Half a tepid egg cream later my left wrist said, “KRD 429B, mobile unit one, to KRD 429B, mobile unit two. Come in mobile unit two.”

“That’s Michael,” I explained to Sean and the suddenly downright hostile counterman.

“KRD 429B, mobile unit two,” I told my left wrist as Sean and I scuttled out just before the counterman could scuttle us, “to KRD 429B, mobile unit one. Hello there. Do we really need this KRD garbage?”

“You have to,” Mike’s voice said tinnily. “The UNCC may be monitering.”

“Groovy. Considering what we’re up to, I don’t want to be that easy to identify. Are you there?”

My radio crackled thoughtfully for a bit, then, “Right.”

“Great. What’s happening?”

“He’s trying to flag a cab. No, he’s got one. It’s cool to begin the exercise, understand?”

“Robert.”

“Robert?”

“You know, Yes.”

“Roger!”

“I thought that was some kind of British vice.”

“I’ve got a cab. I’ll follow him. You get to work.”

“Roger?”

“Right. Keep in touch.”

Sean and I played truck dodge from one curb to the other, leaping about inconspicuously, and ended up in the aromatic downstairs hall of the hyper-substandard brick antiquity that Laszlo Scott infested. Sean wanted to read the archaic obscenities on the walls, but I hustled him along upstairs. My main ambition was to get this whole thing over with as quickly as possible.

Laszlo’s den, third grimy floor front, sported a shiny metal door with five count them five locks of elaborately different kinds. The homemade universal key Mike’d issued me opened all of them but one, which turned out to be neither locked nor working. I began to feel a treacherous sense of confidence rising within me.

I slowly pushed the door open. It didn’t creak. This bothered me. Laszlo’s door by rights should creak. I stood there wondering about that, and Sean pushed past me into the pad.

Nothing happened to Sean, so I shrugged and followed him in. “Hello there,” I told my wrist before I even bothered to look around. “Are you there?”

“What’s happening?”

“Contact, smooth and easy. Where are you?”

“Third and 28th Street headed north.”

“Groovy. Keep in touch.”

Then I looked around. It wasn’t exactly the kind of pad I’d expected Laszlo to have, but it was obviously Laszlo’s kind of pad. The internal walls had all been torn down, not quite neatly, making the pad one huge and thickly littered room, in the midst of which stood Sean looking shocked. I got the impression he wasn’t used to dirt.

The walls were whitewashed, mostly, and decorated with Laszloish slogans in gaudy colors, like: Art is Fredom; The Cretor is The Onley True God; The Futur Belongs too the Poet — the rest being unprintable, just as poorly spelled, and pretty dull.

The windows were covered over with colored tissue paper pasted directly on the panes — the standard poor man’s stained-glass effect — which was covered over in turn by a few years’ geological accumulation of good old city filth. The light that found its way through these barriers was dim and resigned, unable to give a damn, precisely what Laszlo’s litter needed. Complete darkness would’ve been even better, aesthetically, but might’ve had some practical drawbacks.

“Well, Sean, this is a New York poet’s pad. How do you like it?”

“You mean he lives here?”

“That’s what he calls it. There’s his bed.”

It was over in the farthest, darkest corner of the mess, a bare and superannuated mattress on the floor, torn and filthy with historic dirt, surrounded by discarded bottles, beer cans, chocolate milk cartons, creme-filled cupcake wrappers, sandwich bags, used tissues, mummified corned beef sandwiches, obsolete stockings, assorted dingy female undergarments, badly used torn comic books — the enduring moldy record of Laszlo’s Village life. The place smelled of mature cat box, too, though there seemed to be no cat.

Sean clearly didn’t believe a word of this. “You say this cat’s a Poet, man?”

“That’s the general idea, baby. A genuine twentieth-century bard.”

“Oh yeah?” Sean was learning fast.

“Hey!” my left wrist suddenly demanded. “What’s happening?”

“We’re inside,” I assured him, while Sean, tiptoeing fastidiously, touching whatever he thought he had to as little as possible and wiping his fingers nervously on his Levi’s afterwards, more or less began to search the pad. The litter was six inches thick on the average, deeper in drifts, and the task before us had a lean and hopeless look.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mike insisted.

“Talking to you,” I said reasonably enough. “What’s happening?”

“We’re in Grand Central. Subject’s waiting for someone under the clock. Looks worried.”

“Great. Keep up the good work, fellah.” Sean had found a chartreuse desk minus a drawer or two, and was cheerfully ransacking it, emptying it onto the floor, creating an additional mess Laszlo was unlikely to notice.

“Are you, ah, proceeding with the exercise?” Poor Mike.

“With great viguh, sir, in spite of all but insurmountable obstacles.”

“Results?”

“Ambiguous.”

“Oh? Well, ah, keep in touch.”

“Later,” That done, I joined the hunt.

Sean and I in record time formulated a neat set of ground rules for the search. Nothing on the floor, we agreed, was worth considering; anything carefully stashed anywhere was. That made our job 90 percent easier. Another rule prohibited putting things back where we found them, which would just be wasted time and needless charity. Working thus, we went through Laszlo’s midden with a gap-toothed rake.