As her two companions, one male and one female, stood at attention on either side of her glaring at me, Charm snapped, "I'm lucky to be here at all, what with you siccing the staties on me. They told me not to leave Massachusetts, as a matter of fact, but I talked to my dad's lawyer, Graham Witherspoon in Great Barrington, and he says nobody can connect me with any kidnapping, and I haven't been charged with anything, and those goons can ask me to do what they want me to do, but they can't tell me what to do."

"Uh-huh. But don't you want to be helpful, Charm? The cops just want to find the kidnappers and make sure Jay Plankton is freed before he is maimed any more than he already has been, or even killed."

"What do you mean, maimed?"

She evidently had not heard the news. So I explained about the tongue that had been dropped off earlier at the Post. "Or," I asked, "did you send the tongue, and this is another one of your bad-taste stunts in the name of the FFF?"

Charm made a face, and shot back, "Bad taste is only bad taste, so don't start in on that shit with me. Bad taste is in no way comparable to injury or murder. Name one major religion or secular philosophical or ethical construct where taste and morality intersect in any important way. You can't, can you?"

"Oh, Charm, Charm-I think you were not raised Presbyterian."

"No, but I've studied Calvinism, and I think I know the difference between predestination and simple, ephemeral notions of fashion and propriety." Charm's friends, her characteristic claque of two, gazed at her with awe.

"So, are you going in?" I asked, indicating the entrance to Sam Day's building.

"No, why should I go in there?"

"You don't know anyone who lives in here?"

"No, and anyhow we're not going in anywhere, we're going out."

Charm introduced me to her friends, Louis Murphy and Strawberry Swirl, who lived nearby, and said they were going over to North Sixth Street to the Pussy Pound.

Strawberry Swirl, it turned out, was female-lithe and catlike, with no hint of an out-of-control Sealtest-ice-cream habit, despite her name-but Louis was a hulking male and an unlikely habitue of the venue named. Although, I guessed, maybe selected male aficionados were let in too.

I was about to make careful inquiries about what an evening at the Pussy Pound might consist of, and to try to determine if, as it appeared, Charm's showing up on Lorimer Street was coincidental with Sam Day's living there. But before I could do either, Thad Diefendorfer came down the street with two other men.

"Don! Hey, it's you!" Thad recognized me but didn't seem to know Charm, Louis or Strawberry Swirl, and they showed no sign of recognizing Thad or the men on either side of him. "What are you doing out here?" Thad asked. He was holding a long-handled shovel with a sharp, narrow blade.

"I was hoping to talk to you," I said. "I was here earlier, but I guess you were out… what? Practicing a little urban agriculture?"

"Yes," Thad said, "we were over at the Bush wick Community Garden weeding the arugula and watering the tomatoes. The guys both work til ten o'clock, and anyway they like to garden when it's quiet and cool. Don, 1 want you to meet two friends. This is Daryl Kemmercr, an old friend from Ephrata, and Sam Day. I think I mentioned Sam, my main squeeze back in my FFF days. Now Sam and Daryl are together.

Amazing, isn't it? Or not so amazing, really, since Sam was always turned on by simple Amish boys, and there are only a certain number of us available outside of Lancaster County."

There were introductions all around, including Charm, Louis and Strawberry.

"Are you Charm from the cheese farm?" Day asked. He was tall and bearded and wore a sweaty T-shirt with a picture on it of what looked like a head of cabbage.

Kemmerer, similarly clad, was lankier, like Thad, with the same big ears that stuck out, chin whiskers, a formidable Adam's apple, and wavy locks that came down the back of his neck.

Charm said, "It looks like I'm famous-Charm from the cheese farm. Cheesy Charm.

Oh, right." She gave me the evil eye.

"Well, you sure did a good job of making the FFF look bad," Day said. "Aren't you the one who sent Plankton all the threats and that other weird stuff?"

"The FFF did an awful lot of really good work in its early days," Thad added. "It's really a shame, Charm, that your impression of the organization came strictly from Kurt Zinsser. Kurt was always prickly and a bit uppity, and he doesn't appear to have improved in either regard."

Charm chose not to reply to any of this. She just looked at Day and said, "I've heard of rice queens, and I've heard of dinge queens. And I've heard of snow queens for the dinge queens. But I've never before run into gay men who go for Amish guys. What do you call yourself, Sam, a clip-clop queen? Do you have to worry about getting into masochistic relationships where you start to feel buggy-whipped? Or is that what you're looking for?"

"No," Day said cheerfully. "The two Amish men in my life have been in no way abusive. They've been rational, sweet-natured, gentle and very comfortably masculine."

"Oh, swell, congratulations," Charm said. "And now you're having this rational, gentle, masculine, wild threesome. Can we all come up and watch?"

Kemmerer blushed, Day smiled, and Thad just shook his head. There was a part of me that wanted to compliment Charm on the first intriguing suggestion, however unrealistic it was, that I had ever heard her make. Instead, I said, "I was hoping you'd invite us along to go dancing, or whatever, at the Pussy Pound, Charm."

"Don't you wish," she said, then had to laugh, and the rest of us did, too.

Thad said to me, "How did you find me out here, anyway? Did I tell you where I was staying?"

"No," I said, "but why don't we go on inside, and all that will soon become clear."

"I hope you don't mind if we don't join you," Charm said. "Sitting around with four middle-aged male homosexuals is not my idea of Saturday night in New York."

We all made it clear that Charm, Louis and Strawberry Swirl would incur no social penalty by moving on, which they soon did.

"So," Thad said, "Charm and her gang are in the all-clear?"

"I'd say so, yes-that is, if they aren't out here conspiring with you three in the kidnappings of Moyle and Plankton."

"Conspiring with us?" Kemmerer said, looking bewildered.

"Where would anybody get that idea?" Day said.

Thad smiled wanly and said to me, "Lylc Marncr?"

I nodded. "He's inside, in Sam's apartment. I Ic's going to ask you a lot of stupid questions, which you're probably going to have to answer."

"Lyle Barner, the cop?" Day said, "lie's in my apartment?"

"The super let him in. Don't be too hard on the guy. Lyle made it look legal. Hard to resist, anyway."

I explained to the three of them that Barner had had Thad followed to Brooklyn from Albany, based on nothing more than Thad's FFF history and an irrational antipathy fed by baseless sexual jealousy. And that when Barner discovered that Sam Day, another old FFFer, was the listed tenant of the apartment Thad was visiting, this-plus some as yet unexplained peculiar language that one of the kidnappers used-was all Barner needed to send the kidnapping investigation wackily Thad's way.

"And then," I said, "when he heard you'd left the apartment with a shovel, it seemed to confirm Lyle's worst suspicions."