I said, "That's not what you have in mind for me, I guess. My expertise is limited in security work, and I don't do it."

"Nah. It's your connections with these FFF guys we're interested in. It's this NYPD detective, Lyle Barner, who says he knew you when he was a cop in Albany. He says you tracked down a gay kid after his asshole parents put him in the bin, and it was the FFF that helped him escape."

"The chronology's a little off," I said. "But I did use the FFF to locate a young man named Billy Blount, who was wanted on a phony murder charge. This was twenty years ago, though, and I'd find it hard to believe that any of the FFF are still around.

They broke up as a group even before I met one of them in Denver, around seventy-nine. My guess is, the Forces of Free Faggotry gang that's giving Plankton a hard time is another outfit entirely. They probably heard about the old FFF and picked up on the name. I doubt that an old radical group's name can be copyrighted."

Jeris examined the smoldering cigar thoughtfully. The stench from the thing was awful. Cigars had once held a romance for me; they evoked happy childhood memories of trips from central New Jersey to Phillies or Yankees games on a Pennsylvania Railroad smoker with my dad and his cronies. But that was long ago, and now it was all I could do to keep from saying, "Jerry, since you're smoking that cigar, do you mind if I drop my pants, bend over, and light farts while we're chatting?"

Instead, I said, "Doesn't the NYPD have any leads at all? If the harassment has been going on steadily for weeks, they must have more to go on than anything I'm likely to come up with from my brief, now-stale contact with the FFF."

"Yeah, you'd think they'd be on top of it by now," Jeris said. "And Jay has plenty of fans in the department, so it isn't like they're blowing us off. But until today the FFF pretty much mailed in all the shit-and I do mean shit-so there wasn't any physical evidence that was traceable. I'd show you some of the disgusting doo-doo they sent Jay, but the cops have it all. Call Lyle Barner, and he'll give you the tour." "Well, I wouldn't mind catching up with Lyle." "The thing is, Don, while Jay is concerned, naturally, he is far from being intimidated. Which I'm sure you can appreciate from listening to his show. Or," Jeris said with a derisive snort, "are you the NPR type? The travails of poets in Egypt and all that elitist crap?"

"I've heard Plankton's show," I said, and glanced at the digital clock above Jeris's computer terminal. When was the next train back to Albany? Was it noon or one o'clock? Noon would be cutting it close, one o'clock no problem. Just pick up a deli sandwich, go back to "The Oblong Box"-Karla Jay? Robb Forman Dew?-and be back in Albany by mid-afternoon, never again to lay eyes on these people.

"I know you're gay," Jeris said next. "And I just want you to know, that's no problem for us." "Praise be."

"That on-air shit is just… Jay can't stand political correctness. You gotta admit, Don, that's fair enough."

I said, "What if I chased these new FFF guys down and then I decided to join them in making the J-Bird's life a living hell? Which, by the way, is how you described it on the phone yesterday."

"That's because of the threats, not the juvenile pranksterism. The note with the last mailing said things were gonna get worse. And today things did."

"But maybe these people-whoever they are-maybe they'll convince me that the J-Bird deserves all the grief he's getting from them. That he deserves that and worse.

That all the adolescent fag-baiting on the show encourages bullies and bashers, and it's not only dumb and tedious, but dangerous too. Maybe I'll find the FFF, and they'll recruit me, and I'll come after the J-Bird, and you'll rue the day you ever brought me into this. Then what?"

"Then," Jeris said, blowing a smoke ring, "I'd have to ask for our money back. What is your fee scale, anyway? Can we afford you? This isn't Albany, with all that lobbyist funny money sloshing around."

I told him what my normal fee was, mentally calculating an extra twenty-five percent and adding it in.

"That's outside our budget," Jeris said, and he suggested a figure twenty-five percent lower than what I'd told him. I shrugged, and he said, "We'll work something out."

"Jerry, you said on the phone yesterday that if I could locate the FFF people, you wouldn't necessarily want to prosecute them; you'd just want to talk to them. This makes me wonder. It reminds me of the Blount case twenty years ago, when the parents of Billy Blount hired me to bring their wanted-for-murder son back to Albany and turn him over, not to the police, but to them. As it happened, these people were as duplicitous as anybody I've ever done business with. They were the abysmal dregs."

"Nah, we'll play it straight with you," Jeris said, waving away doubt with his cigar.

"We don't want to chop these guys' balls off, we just want to work something out with them so they'll get off Jay's case. They want us to can Leo Moyle, and we're not gonna do that. But we can talk to them, I'm sure of it. Jay thinks it would be fun to put them on the air."

"Moyle is the resident gay-baiter?"

"Leo is kind of a loose cannon, yeah. But that's what's so great about him. He lends the show an element of danger. I don't go along with half of what he comes out with, and speaking candidly, neither does Jay. But you gotta have an un-PC presence on any show today, or your show is gonna be shit-canned faster than you can say Phil Donahue. Leo stays; that's a given. But can we talk to these FFFers, maybe give them their fifteen minutes, let them promote the glories of cocksucking or whatever? I think we can work it out. Anyway, let's track them down and see exactly what it is that we've got to work with here."

It all sounded unlikely to me-as unlikely as LBJ inviting the Chicago Seven in for bourbon and branch water and a tete-a-tete with Bob McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I said, "Doesn't Plankton put only people he likes on the show? People he basically agrees with, or at least gets along with? The show's not Crossfire or The McLaughlin Group. He's never been interested in a cross section of viewpoints before, as far as I'm aware."

"Not true," Jeris said, through an expanding toxic cloud. "Jay likes badass people if they're real, no matter where they're coming from politically or whatever. Especially if they're funny badass real. Funny and not phony are what Jay looks for and what our listeners tune in for. These FFFers are deeply sincere, apparently, and they're crude as shit, for chrissakes, so… no, there's no problem with them getting on the air.

We'd do a pre-interview, naturally, to make sure they can express themselves verbally as effectively as they send fecal matter through the US Postal Service."

"They sent actual shit? Not a joke-shop rendition?" "Some kind of animal turds,"

Jeris said, opening a folder next to his computer and handing me several sheets of paper. "NYPD has the stuff at a lab for analysis. Here's a list of what's come in to us so far, and photocopies of the notes that came with it."

The first page, a word-processor printout, contained a list of dates and notations for each date. For June 2, the notation was Asswipe for the homophobic asshole and, in paren-theses, Rover break-in. The other dates, beginning with June 9 and ending on July 7, were followed by these notations: brains for the brainless; charms for the charmless; douche for the douche bag; excrement for the execrable; fat for the fathead.