TO ALEXANDRA

Without whose patience, faith, and inspired insights this book could not have been written

There were only three passengers on the last bus from downtown: a man, a woman, and a bum. The slim young man sat alone at the back of the bus because he had an instinctive mistrust of men in uniform, even bus drivers. Unable to sleep because of the heat and a relentless gnawing in the pit of his stomach, he had left the flophouse and deposited his bindle in a bus station locker so he could wander the streets unencumbered. The young woman sat close up behind the driver clutching her handbag to her lap, her knees pressed together and her gaze fixed on the nippled rubber floormat to avoid making eye contact with the old bum who sat across from her, smelling of piss and sweat and waking up with a moist snort each time the bus hit a pothole or lurched to miss one.

An oppressive heat wave had been sapping the city for over a week. Not until after midnight was it cool enough for people to go out and stroll the streets for a breath of air. In the stifling tenements that separated air-conditioned downtown from the breezy suburbs, kids were allowed to sleep out on fire escapes, sprawled on sofa cushions. On the brownstone stoops down below, women in loose cotton house dresses gossiped drowsily while men in damp undershirts sucked beers. At the beginning of the heat wave, people had complained about the weather to total strangers with a grumpy comradeship wrought of shared distress, like during wars or floods or hurricanes. But once the city's brick and steel had absorbed all the heat it could hold and began to exhale its stored-up warmth into the night, the public mood turned sullen and resentful.

The bus crawled through tenement streets that were strangely dark because people left the lights off to keep their apartments cooler, and many streetlights had been broken by bands of kids made miserable and mutinous by the heat. But the interior of the bus was brightly lit, and it made the young man uncomfortable to be moving through dark streets in a glass specimen case with everyone looking at him from out there in the dark. All the bus windows were open to combat the heat, but the breeze was so laden with soot that it was gritty between his teeth, so he reached up and snapped shut the window in front of his seat. An advertising placard in the arch of the roof assured him that he could improve his chances of success by 25%, 50%, 75%... Even More... by Building a Powerful Vocabulary the Amazing Word-Wizard Way! Money Back If Not Totally Delighted! Let Words Unlock Your Buried Inner Potential! My inner potential must be buried pretty goddamn deep, he thought. He'd been on the drift for two years now, ever since he'd brought his participation in the Korean Police Action to an informal end.

The girl at the front tugged the slack cord, and a deformed dingbrought the bus to a lurching stop. The young man slipped out through the back accordion doors as the girl thanked the driver and stepped down from the front of the bus. With a swirl of dust and litter, the bus drove off, carrying the snorting drunk into the night.

She walked towards the only unbroken streetlight on the block, tottering a little because she was unaccustomed to high heels. When her ankle buckled, she looked back at the sidewalk with an irritated, accusing frown, as though she had tripped over something. That was when she noticed him.

It occurred to the young man that she might think he was following her, and the last thing he wanted was to frighten her, so he put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle to show that he wasn't trying to sneak up on anybody or anything. It was the theme from The Third Man,a film he had seen six times in one day when he'd gone into a narrow, fleabag movie house one rainy afternoon to get some sleep but, fascinated, had stayed until the theater closed after midnight. He could recite the whole 'cuckoo clock' speech by heart, and in Welles's voice, too.

It was obvious from the rigidity of the girl's back as she increased her pace that his whistling wasn't putting her at ease. And why should it? he asked himself; she probably listened to the eerie tales of The Whistleron the radio. The boy got a real surprise when she reached the streetlight and turned on him. "You better not try anything!" Her voice was reedy with tension. "This is an Italian neighborhood!"

The boy held up his palms in surrender. "Whoa there, ma'am," he said in his moistly toothless Gabby Hayes's voice. "You ain't got no just cause to go chucking a whole passel of I-talians at me." But she didn't find that funny. The streetlight directly overhead turned her eyes into gashes of shadow beneath vivid brows; only the tips of her lashes shone, mascara'd with light. He smiled and said in his stammering Jimmy Stewart voice, "Look, I'm... I'm just terribly sorry if I frightened you, Miss. But I want you to know that I wasn't following you. Well, yes, yes, I wasfollowing you, I suppose. But not on purpose! I was just, sort of, well... walking along. Lost in daydreams. Just... just lost in daydreams, that's what I was. Look, why don't I just... just... turn around and go the other way? It's all the same to me, 'cause I'm not going anywhere special. I'm just... you know... sort of drifting along through life."

She still didn't smile, although it was a greatJimmy Stewart, if he did say so himself. She continued to stare at him, frightened, tense; so he made a comic little salute and walked up the street, away from her. Then he turned back. "Excuse me, my little chickadee, but you said something that tickled my cur-i-osity." He dragged out the syllables in the nasal, whining style of W. C. Fields. They were talking across a space of perhaps ten yards, but it was well after midnight and the background growl of downtown traffic was so distant that they could speak in normal tones. "Pray tell me, m'dear. Why did you warn me that this is an I-talian neighborhood. Just what has that-as the ancient philosophers are wont to wonder-got to do with anything?" W. C. Fields tapped the ashes from his imaginary cigar and waited politely for her answer.

She cleared her throat. "Italians aren't like most city people. They have family feelings. If a woman screams, they come running and beat up whoever's bothering her."

"I see," W. C. drawled. "A most laudable custom, I'm sure. But one that would be pretty hard on a fellow unjustly accused of being a mugger, like yours truly." She smiled at the W. C. Fields, so he kept it up. "You are, I take it, a woman of I-talian lineage?"

"No. I live here because it's safer. And cheap."

He chuckled. "You've told me more than you meant to," he said in his own voice... well, the made-up voice he used for everyday.

She frowned, and the steep-angled light filled her forehead wrinkles with shadow. "What do you mean?"

"You've told me that you live alone, and that you don't have much money. Now I wonder if you'd be kind enough to tell me one other thing?"

"What's that?" she asked suspiciously, but already the first spurt of adrenaline was draining away.

"Is there someplace around here where I could get a cup of coffee?"

"Well... there's a White Tower. Four blocks down and one over."

"Thanks." His eyes crinkled into a smile. "You know, this is a strange scene. I mean... really strange. Just picture it. Our heroine descends from a bus, right? She is followed by a young man, lost in vague daydreams. She suddenly turns on him and threatens to Italian him to death. Surprised, bewildered, dumbfounded, nonplussed, and just plain scared, he decides to flee. But curiosity (that notorious cat killer) obliges him to stop, and they chat, separated by yards of sidewalk that he hopes will make her feel safe. While they're talking, he notices how the overhead street lamp glows in her hair and drapes over her shoulders like a shawl of light. ...A shawl of light. But her eyes... her eyes are lost in shadow, so he can't tell what she's thinking, what she feels. The young hero asks directions to a coffee shop, which she obligingly gives him. Now comes the tricky bit of the scene. Does he dare to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him? They could sit in the Whitest of all possible Towers and while away a few hours of this stifling hot night, talking about... well, whatever they want to talk about. Life, for instance, or love, or maybe-I don't know-baseball? Finally the drifter summons the courage to ask her. She hesitates. (Well, come on! What young heroine wouldn't hesitate?) He smiles his most boyish smile. (I'm afraid this ismy most boyish smile.) Then the girl— Well, I'm not sure what our heroine would do. What do you think she would do?"