"Maybe it is the old FFF," Timmy said, "and they're going to put Leo in a mental institution-and try to turn the homophobe gay. Maybe do a poetic-justice job on him like the one in the Paul Haig case you worked on, where renegades from Vernon Crockwell's homosexual-cure psychotherapy group turned on the evil doctor and gave him a kind of dose of his own medicine."

I briefly thought that one over, too, and said, "Timothy, where are you dredging this wild stuff up from?"

"Experience, Donald. Yours, not mine, I should add."

"None of that is totally implausible. It's just that… a simpler set of circumstances is far likelier. You haven't seen the notes these neo-FFFers sent Plankton. They are not the work of sophisticated minds. These people are both crude and borderline loony. So far, I'd say a thoroughly non-byzantine scenario is unfolding. My guess is, word will come from the kidnappers making some weird demand in exchange for Moyle's release. Maybe a demand that Plankton apologize to the homosexuals of America on his show- and then serialize a radio dramatization of The Lord Won't Mind. Anyway, it probably won't be long before we know."

"I hope you're right, but the whole thing sounds to me fraught with more complex possibilities. Maybe it's all being staged by Plankton and his people. How about that? A publicity scam. Have Plankton's ratings been going down? Has he been losing advertisers?"

"Not that I know of. Anyway, that'd be illegal. Staging a kidnapping, especially, would not go down well with the Manhattan DA's office. These people blather about 'edge' and 'pushing the envelope' and radio that's 'dangerous.' But just below the surface they're some of the most clunkily reactionary people in the country. They're Babbitts whose most profound interest is in their own comfort. They would never do anything that risked a big fine-possibly necessitating selling off a chunk of their General Electric stock- or, God help them, the quirky uncertainties of prison life.

For all their bravado, the J-Bird and his gang are not really risk takers."

Timmy said, "Oh, I don't know. They've hired you. For them, that's taking a chance.

Of course, they may not know what they're in for."

"No, I've been up front with the J-Bird and his producer. They know I don't like them-even that I could turn on them."

"That's to their credit, then," Timmy said. "Unless, of course-and we're back to this-they brought you into this because they have something in mind that you're not aware of. Something… duplicitous."

"Timothy, you're making me a little nervous."

"Oh, Don, if I could only believe that," he said in his well-practiced way, "I'd be the happiest man in Albany."

I didn't laugh, just said, "Even beyond keeping me amused, you can be helpful in this."

"How?"

"Check my files on the Blount case and dig out the most recent address for Kurt Zinsser, the old FFF gay who harbored Billy Blount when he was on the run from his parents and the Albany cops. See if Blount himself is in the Albany area, and if you can't find him you might check those two women with the travel agency who were his buddies- Margarita something and Christine something. Christine was a fellow FFF rescuee. They may well have maintained contact with the old FFFers who, after all, saved their sanity and maybe their lives. They may know Thad Diefendorfer too-and he may know about them. I'll ask him. But anything you can do on that end to get the ball rolling, I'll be grateful for."

A little silence. He said, "You know, I'm at work."

"Sure, I know. But it's July. The entire legislature of the state of New York is in repose, on greens and fairways from Montauk to Jamestown. Who are you trying to kid, Callahan? And all of you legislative staffers in Albany are cranking up the air-conditioning, kicking back in your bosses' leather club chairs, and reading Madame Bovary aloud to one another. It's summer at the capitol. I've been around Albany as long as you have, and you can't fool me."

"You are largely mistaken, Donald," he said.

"Uh-huh."

"But when I get home from work at 5:18 P.M., I'll check your files, make some calls, and see what I can do."

"Thank you, Timothy."

"See you around eleven, then?"

"Unless I join the neo-FFF myself and blow up the J-Bird's radio transmitter, sure."

"You won't do that. You're no Babbitt, but you aren't quite as adventurous as you once were, either."

I chose to take a wait-and-see attitude as to whether I would regard Timmy's remark as a mere accurate analysis or as a challenge.

Chapter 7

Barner was at the radio station questioning Leo Moyle's would-be date, a telemarketing supervisor named Jan Hammond, and Diefendorfer and I were seated in a booth at an inadequately air-conditioned garment-district coffee shop, where Barner planned on meeting us for lunch-if he had time for lunch, which, he said, he rarely did. Diefendorfer was telling me how he had heard about the FFF in 1973 and joined up with the group after his seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Ronnie Busby, in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, had been locked away in a Philadelphia mental hospital by his parents.

"When word got around about Ronnie and me, I was treated shabbily enough,"

Diefendorfer said, "but at least I had my freedom. I had already planned on leaving the community, so the shunning was tolerable. My mother and father didn't shun me, hurt and baffled as they were, and only one of my three brothers turned his back whenever I entered a room. But Ronnie just disappeared one day, and it wasn't until a week later that his eleven-year-old sister Beth told me what his family had done with Ronnie."

"Were you both still in high school?" I asked.

"Ronnie was a senior. I was homeschooled. My family were all house Amish, the most conservative branch. Ronnie was going to go to Millersville State College the following fall, and I was going to live with him, work, get my GED, and then go to Millersville, too-even though I wasn't sure why, besides being with Ronnie, I wanted to go to college. I did have some vague idea that I wanted to be an agronomist maybe, or a jazz saxophonist. When I was eight or nine, I heard a John Coltrane piece coming from the radio in a parked car at the Ephrata Agway-it wasn't until years later that I understood who and what I had heard-and I thought, someday I want to be able to make that sound. That urge stayed with me right up until the sad day I discovered that I have no musical talent whatsoever."

"Thad, this all sounds pretty gutsy for the early seventies. Especially an Amish kid being out. It was tough enough back then for the Methodists and Congregationalists."

Diefendorfer considered this. "I guess it was, but at the time I didn't think of myself as brave. During the year Ronnie and I were together-most of which time I most definitely was not out with anybody-I was torn between euphoria and sheer terror.

When I was seventeen, a Dairy Queen went up near our farm, and my brother Emmanuel and I started hanging out there. That was pretty racy in itself for a Mennonite kid. It's where I met Ronnie when I was hanging around alone one Friday night having a shake. We kept looking at each other, and finally he came over and asked me if I was Amish-I had my farm clothes on-and he asked, were Amish people allowed to eat food made in a machine that ran on electricity?"

"That would have been my first question, too," I said.

"Well, the answer is no. But on an Amish sin scale of one to ten, ingesting a Dairy Queen product is probably only a one or two. The trouble was, however, that the more Ronnie and I talked, and the more that we looked at each other, the more I felt that a sin-scale ten was just around the corner for me."