"I know," Sammy said. "I have to finish Strange Frigate."

"No, Mr. Clay," Deasey said, awkwardly settling an arm over the shoulders of each of them and dragging them toward the door. "Tonight you are going to sail on it."

when Carl Ebling looked in the News the next morning, he was disappointed to find not the slightest mention of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, of the Aryan-American League, or of a fiendish (if for the time being sham) bomber who called himself-deriving the moniker from a shrouded villain who made scattered appearances in the pages of Radio Comics throughout the prewar years-the Saboteur. The last would have been pretty unlikely, since Ebling had, in his nervous haste to squirrel the device in the desk of his imagined nemesis Sam Clay, forgotten to leave the note that he had prepared specially and signed with his nom de guerre. When he checked all the other Saturday papers, once again he found not a word to connect him to anything that had gone on in the city the previous day. The whole matter had been hushed up.

The party thrown for Salvador Dali that last Friday of the New York World's Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons's column, a mention in Ed Sullivan's, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in "Talk of the Town" the following week. It was also described in one of Auden's letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene.

The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dali, that had been among the wonders of the Fair's Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dali's work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City.

"Those Olmec heads," Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. "That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he's hidden it in the basement of his house."

"You used them in The Pyramid of Skulls," Sammy said. "Those big heads. There was a secret compartment in the left ear."

"It's bad enough you read them," Deasey said. Sammy had prepared for the composition of his first work as Harvey Slayton by immersing himself deeply in Deasey's oeuvre. "I find it incredibly sad, Clay, that you also remember the titles." Actually, he looked, Joe thought, quite flattered. He probably had never expected, at this point in a career that he so publicly accounted a failure, to encounter a genuine admirer of his work. He seemed to have discovered in himself a tenderness- unsuspected by no one more than he-for both of the cousins, but particularly for Sammy, who still viewed, as a springboard to literary renown, work that Deasey had long since concluded was only "a long, spiraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom." He had shown some of his old poems to Sammy, and the yellowed manuscript of a serious novel that he had never completed. Joe suspected that Deasey had intended these revelations to be warnings to Sammy, but his cousin had chosen to interpret them as proof that success in the pulpwoods was not incompatible with talent, and that he ought not to abandon his own novelistic dreams. "Where was I?"

" Mexico City," Joe said. "Heads."

"Thank you." Deasey took a pull from his flask. He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly nearsighted. "Yes, the mysterious Olmecs." Deasey returned the magic lamp to his breast pocket. "And Mr. Longman Harkoo."

Harkoo, Deasey said, was a Village eccentric of long standing, connected to the founders of one of the posh Fifth Avenue department stores. He was a widower-twice over-who lived in a queer house with a daughter from his first marriage. In addition to looking after the day-to-day affairs of his gallery, orchestrating his disputes with fellow members of the American Communist Party, and pulling off his celebrated fetes, he was also, in idle moments, writing a largely unpunctuated novel, already more than a thousand pages long, which described, in cellular detail, the process of his own birth. He had taken his unlikely name in the summer of 1924, while sharing a house at La Baule with Andre Breton, when a pale, hugely endowed figure calling himself the Long Man of Harkoo recurred five nights running in his dreams.

"Right here," Deasey called out to the driver, and the cab came to a stop in front of a row of indistinct modern apartment blocks. "Pay the fare, will you, Clay? I'm a little short."

Sammy scowled at Joe, who considered that his cousin really ought to have expected this. Deasey was a classic cadger of a certain type, at once offhand and peremptory. But Joe had discovered that Sammy was, in his own way, a classic tightwad. The entire concept of taxicabs seemed to strike Sammy as recherche and decadent, on a par with the eating of songbirds. Joe took a dollar from his wallet and passed it to the driver.

"Keep the change," he said.

The Harkoo house lay entirely hidden from the avenue, "like an emblem (heavy-handed at that) of suppressed nasty urges," as Auden put it in his letter to Isherwood, at the heart of a city block the whole of which subsequently passed into the hands of New York University, was razed, and now forms the site of the massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology. The solid rampart of row houses and apartment blocks that enclosed the Harkoo house and its grounds on all four sides could be breached only by way of a narrow ruelle that slipped unnoticed between two buildings and penetrated, through a tunnel of ailanthus trees, to the dark, leafy yard within.

The house, when they reached it, was a vest-pocket Oriental fantasy, a miniature Topkapi, hardly bigger than a firehouse, squeezed onto its tiny site. It curled like a sleeping cat around a central tower topped witha dome that resembled, among other items, a knob of garlic. Through skillful use of forced perspective and manipulation of scale, the house managed to look much bigger than it really was. Its luxurious coat of Virginia creeper, the gloom of its courtyard, and the artless jumble of its gables and spires gave the place an antique air, but it had in fact been completed in September 1930, around the time that Al Smith was laying the cornerstone for the Empire State Building. Like that structure, it was a kind of dream habitation, having, like the Long Man of Harkoo himself, originally appeared to Longman Harkoo in his sleep, giving him the excuse he had long sought to pull down the dull old Greek Revival house that had been the country home of his mother's family since the founding of Greenwich Village. That house had itself replaced a much earlier structure, dating to the first years of British dominion, in which-or so Harkoo claimed-a Dutch-Jewish forebear of his had entertained the devil during his 1682 tour of the colonies.

Joe noticed that Sammy was hanging back a little, looking up at the miniature tower, absently massaging the top of his left thigh, his face solemn and nervous in the light of the torches that flanked the door. In his gleaming pinstriped suit, he reminded Joe of their character the Monitor, armored for battle against perfidious foes. Suddenly Joe felt apprehensive, too. It had not quite sunk in until now, with all the talk of bombs and woolens and radio programs, that they had come downtown with Deasey to attend a party.