At the street door, Sean — -whom Laszlo conveniently didn’t know — poked his head outside to reconnoiter, keeping his left hand and Laszlo’s verdant treasure safely out of sight.

“It’s cool,” he announced, and out we went, looking so exactly nonchalant and casual we were almost invisible to ourselves.

We got home five minutes after Mike, and Sean instantly abandoned himself to Sativa again while I tried to explain to the irate M. T. Bear why I hadn’t responded to his last radio signal, why it took us so long to get home, and why we found nothing more significant than the bulging paper bag. Mike liked his plots to work the way he meant them to.

“Apparently,” he said when he’d digested my report, “Laszlo missed his connection at Grand Central.”

“He wasn’t very happy,” I agreed.

“So you’ll have to start tailing him tomorrow.”

“Oh.” That again.

But the time had become five o’clock, and we felt justified in calling it a day. This left us gloriously free until the morning, because it was Monday night, the Village sabbath, and all the entertainment coffeehouses were closed, and nothing, praise God, was happening. We could all use a little nothing happening. So we settled down to sample Laszlo’s grass.

An hour or something later we all nobly admitted that just this once we had to admire Laszlo’s taste. We were all absurdly pacified.

“Man,” I drawled for all of us, “I’m stoned. All I want to do now is move as little as possible. Wow.”

“Oh yeah,” Sativa languidly remembered, “I forgot.”

“That’s cool,” Mike said. “What’d you forget?”

“She can’t recall,” Sean answered, but:

“Oh no,” she corrected. “Somebody called. While you were away. I’ll remember in a… oh yeah, Harriet called.”

The rest of us groaned. We dearly loved Harriet, but only in conservative doses and never on the phone. She could burn up an hour saying good morning.

“What,” I queried bravely, “did she want?”

“It’s her anniversary. She and Gary the Frog have been living together for seventeen and a half weeks Tonight. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Better him than me,” said Mike. “Better her than me, too, come to think of it.”

“Well, I think it’s sweet. And they’re having a party tonight to celebrate.”

“Forewarned,” I uttered, “is forestalled.”

“Right,” Sativa gleamed. “And we’re all going.”

That produced the finest stunned silence our pad had heard since Mike’s third-last mistress announced that she was pregnant. (It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant at all, and that Mike didn’t do it anyway, but for a while there our atmosphere was very oddly charged.)

I recovered first. “A,” I insisted, “I do not go to parties. Ever.”

“But…”

“B. If I did go to parties, I still wouldn’t go to parties where Gary the Frog and Harriet were likely to appear.”

“But, Chester…”

“C. I didn’t accept the invitation, wouldn’t’ve accepted the invitation, and didn’t authorize you — sweet little songbird though you may be — to accept it for me.”

“But I promised!”

“D. I’ve had a hard day and I want to rest.”

“You and Michael are the guests of honor.”

“E. What with one thing and another, I can barely move at best and have no eyes for that crosstown hike to Harriet’s seventh-story loft.”

“We can take a taxi.”

“And F, I do not go to parties. Ever.”

“You said that before.”

“It’s still true, and it goes for Mike and Sean, too. Right?”

“Right!”

“But I gave Harriet my word…”

“Sorry about that, love. You’re free to join the gruesome orgy if you wish, but the rest of us aren’t leaving this house, and that, my sweet, is where it’s at.”

It’s kind of refreshing, now and then, to exercise authority in your own home.

FROM THE very beginning, the party was as horrid as I knew beforehand it would have to be. The guests, more than a hundred, were just about evenly divided between people I didn’t want to see and people I didn’t want to see me. The loft was too hot, too narrow, too crowded, too dark, too smoky, and stank to high someplace of elderly cat box… There were, furthermore, two low-fi sets, one at each end of the loft, each blasting a different record I’d never have listened to otherwise, plus an atrocious and overstuffed rock-n-roll gang abusing megawatt amplifiers at about midway through the loft, plus everybody shouting to be heard above it all. Untold numbers of guests were extravagantly overdue for baths. Other hordes of guests were shakily holding foul-colored drinks ready to spill on the nearest available me. A few guests, most definitely the wrong ones, had already reached the disrobing stage, and some weren’t limiting their efforts to themselves.

And just in case we were somehow able to withstand all this, the creature that opened the door and let us in was Laszlo Scott.

“Well, well, well,” he ad-libbed, “Chester the Great and Michael the Cross-Eyed Bear. You might as well come in; it can’t make any difference now.”

We wedged our way in, escaping Laszlo in the crowd, and moved by a process much like osmosis through the steamy loft, hunting for Harriet so we could pay our counterfeit respects and split. Perfect and preferably strangers, most likely female, shrieked, “Darling!” brutally through my tender ears. Anybody stepped on my feet all the time. Something tried to remove my clothes, I hope. My well-known joi de vivre signaled TILT.

(Sativa — that unprintable lady Machiavelli — wasn’t with us, nor was Sean. They stayed home to take advantage of our absence, and I still don’t know how she engineered it. Under my breath, and sometimes above it, I invented gorgeous ancient curses for her head.)

We reached the back of the loft without encountering Harriet, which was odd, she being a lot too large to miss. We’d not found Gary either, but in that environment this single lonely blessing went unnoticed. We had, however, mysteriously acquired tall glasses full of a swampy bluish liquid that, remarkably, didn’t taste at all bad, considering. We emptied our glasses, tossed them out the nearest window, and started back toward the front of the loft.

Just as we were sneaking past that felonious rock pile again, it blew an untuned fanfare that plastered us against the wall. When this was over, silence or studio deafness fell upon the gladly smitten horde.

“Cats and chicks,” a regrettable voice boomed from the rock group’s biggest amplifier. That explained where Gary the Frog was lurking. “Cats,” it regibbered, “and chicks: welcome to our little party.”

“Yes,” came Harriet’s equally amplified baritone, “we’re so glad you could make it tonight,” which might mean a number of things but probably didn’t.

We were trapped, Mike and I, trapped and doomed. Even when no one was talking, the air pressure from that six-foot amplifier’s humming kept us pinned against the wall. We couldn’t get away, and the wall had splinters.

“Farewell, Michael,” I sighed at the top of my lungs. “I will sleep now.”

“Courage, mon brave,” he bellowed nobly. “We are not yet dead.”

“That’s half the problem,” I explained.

Then, “Cats and chicks,” the talking frog attacked again, “on account of this is our anniversity, me and Harriet’ve fixed up something superspecial for all our buddies here tonight. Right, Harry?”

“Right, Gary!”

“You bet. An’ here to tell you all about it is a local Village celebrity who needs no introduction, a cat who we all know an’ dig the most, a great artiste that his accomplishments are all the talk of MacDougal Street and environs, none other than your old buddy, Mis-ter Lasz-lo Scott!”

“Michael,” I said in what currently passed for a whisper.

“Yes?”

“I think I’ll start worrying now.”