“If you mean work, man, I’m applying to the sanitation department Tuesday. Meet a cat. Don McGruder, Harry Fannin.”

He didn’t curtsey, which was a small boon. The hand fluttered hither and yon some more, then finally got down to where mine was.

“Delighted, Harry. You’re new blood. I simply adore new blood.”

“Like you could save it, Don,” Henshaw grunted. “Harry goes for dames. It’s kind of a fad.”

McGruder pouted. “A shame,” he said wistfully. I got my hand back, not without a caress. “You’re more than welcome anyway, dear,” he decided. “We try our best to get along with the minority groups. Have a ball, won’t you?” He tweaked Henshaw’s ear, gave me an exaggerated wink and flitted off, as harmless as a falling leaf.

“Poets,” Henshaw said. “I forgot to clue you about that.”

I shrugged. An extremely young girl with wild black hair and a shape like an ironing board was pouring herself a Canadian Club at the makeshift bar. Most of the rest of the stuff appeared to be unadvertised house brands, so I waited for the bottle. On the floor to my right a hulking Negro in a fluorescent white shirt was slumped against the wall with a set of bongo drums between his sprawled knees and a dreamy expression on his face. A girl in a dress that might have been cut from old gunny sacks was hunkering next to him.

Just beyond them a man in a leather jacket and knee-length laced boots was fishing around in an army knapsack. The knapsack seemed to be filled with equal quantities of canned goods and paperback books.

“—You have to read the Lankavatara Sutra” someone said loudly behind me. “It’s the only way to get in—”

“—James Jones?” someone else said. “James Jones! You can’t mean it?”

Ironing Board finished with the bottle and passed it to me. You could have buried bones in the dirt under her fingernails. “Is it true?” she said. “Are they really coming tonight?”

“Who?” I said.

“Corso and Ginsberg.”

“Who are Corso and Ginsberg?”

“Who are Corso and—” She gaped at me as if I’d just heaved a rock through a cathedral window. “Why, only the two greatest poets since, since—”

“The greatest ever?”

She went off shaking her head. “—Herman Wouk?” a voice said. “Herman Woukl You don’t really—” I poured a healthy belt of the Canadian. I expected I might need it.

Henshaw was filling a tumbler with red wine from a gallon jug. “You see the Grant girl?” I asked him.

He squinted, looking around. “Her roommate.” He gestured toward the far corner. “That chick I mentioned — Dana O’Dea.”

There was only one girl over that way. She had short, coal-black hair, and she was wearing a tight shoulderless sheath dress. In better light the dress might have been the color of a burning barn, but its color didn’t matter anymore than color matters on a Rolls Royce. At sixty miles an hour its loudest noise would have been from seams stretching in the appropriate places. I could understand why a painter would make use of her. She was as voluptuous as overripe fruit.

She looked drunk. She was doing a solo shuffle to the music, rocking a pair of hips like two cruisers in a heavy sea. A man coming out of one of the corridors snatched at the back of her dress as he passed. She let out a high-pitched squeal, scampering away.

“She’s worth looking at, isn’t she?” a husky voice said next to me then. It was a voice I knew, one that sounded like fog whispering. It didn’t really sound that way. That was just a metaphor my blurry little brain had come up with in a hectic moment between all those clients in the last three days.

“Hi,” she said. She was wearing tan slacks and a powder-blue blouse which was slashed deeply between her breasts. The blouse had a high collar up under that yellow hair, and the only make-up she had on was lipstick. There was a feint touch of the same shade on a pillow slip I hadn’t gotten around to changing.

“You’re that girl whose phone must be out of order.”

“Oh, Harry, you must think I’m dreadful, but that morning, I—” She glanced past me, but Henshaw was talking to someone. No one else was at the bar. “I was going to leave you a note, Harry, but there just didn’t seem to be anything to say that wouldn’t sound banal. I’m sorry—”

“No harm done.”

“I’ve been uptown almost every minute since. About the book. It’s been a good thing, actually. It’s kept my mind off Josie.”

“Sure.”

“Although I guess I have to admit it’s also kind of exciting. It looks as if there’s going to be a movie sale, a big one.”

I was glad she was going to have a movie sale. That would make her rich and famous. She would be able to afford an answering service to take her incoming messages, like when Sam Goldwyn called. There was still a square of adhesive on her wrist.

“We’re being awfully uncommunicative,” she said.

“I haven’t meant to be, Fern.”

“You did call, didn’t you?”

“Once or twice.”

“I’ll be less busy next week, Harry.”

“Sure.”

“Please? I haven’t meant to make it seem so casual. It wasn’t— well, they weren’t the most romantic circumstances—”

“That’s true.”

“What’s true?” somebody asked. A man Henshaw’s age with a beard like a devastated wheat field had come up in back of us. He was wearing a paint-stained sweatshirt and he had strong features behind the stubble, sharper than they had appeared in Grant’s clipping. An expensive unlit briar hung inverted in one corner of his small mouth, and he took it out to kiss Fern on the cheek.

“Ravishing,” he said.

“Hello, Ivan. Ivan Klobb, Harry Fannin.”

Klobb gave me a firm right hand. “Fannin? The chap who was with Fern on that unfortunate evening?”

“I’d hate to have it make me a celebrity.”

“You’re a private detective, the newspapers said.”

I nodded. He did also. I didn’t like him. There was something bland about his expression, almost vicious. After a moment he took Fern’s arm. “Indeed, yes. Well, look, you two, I hope you’ll pardon the intrusion, but if you’re not discussing something earth-shaking, I’d like to speak with you, Fern. A personal matter — five minutes, no more.” She glanced at me uncertainly. “I’ll bring you back, old girl, if it’s worrying you. You don’t mind, my good man, do you?”

I minded the phony English accent more than anything else, although I had decided what it was about him that grated. Without the beard he would have had a face just like those I remembered from old newsreels of Bund meetings in the days of Fritz Kuhn, when he himself would have been a susceptible twenty.

“You won’t be leaving, Harry?” Fern asked me.

“I’ll see you later.”

“Do, please.” Her hand touched my wrist. I watched them walk off toward one of the rear doors.

Henshaw had disappeared, I hoped in search of Audrey Grant. I took a drink of the whisky I had been carting around and made a face. Evidently McGruder had had some empty bottles stored away. What he had poured into the one with the Canadian Club label had not been Canadian. I turned back to the bar and added water to the glass.

“—James Gould Cozzens?” someone moaned. “James Gould Cozzens! You’re mad—”

A record ended with a screech and someone started to monkey with the machine. Near me the Negro tapped a brief staccato on the bongos in the break. Before I looked he was lolling back against the wall, as if it had all been reflex.

“Go ahead, Rosie, take off on it!” someone yelled.

The man made an indifferent gesture. “I thought maybe Donnie wanted to read us some bright new words now,” he muttered.

People turned toward Don McGruder, but he dismissed them with a flutter of that pale palm. “Later, dears, later. Play some of those old Bird Parkers like a sweet lad, why don’t you, Nicky?”

The boy at the phonograph began to dig through a stack of records. Behind me two others were raving.”—Hitch-hiked all the way? Well, man, I hope you read On the Road—”