“About two hours.”

“I gotta get uptown by three o’clock.”

“Well, you shall be a little late this afternoon,” Ignatius said angrily. “I am already lowering my standards by associating with you and fouling up my bun compartment. You should be glad that I haven’t turned you in. I have on the police force a brilliant friend, a sly undercover agent, Patrolman Mancuso. He is just looking for the sort of break a case like yours would offer. Fall to your knees and be grateful for my benevolence.”

Mancuso? Wasn’t that the name of the undercover agent who had stopped him in the rest room? George got very nervous.

“What does this undercover pal of yours look like?” George sneered in an attempt at bravery.

“He is small and elusive.” Ignatius’s voice was cunning. “He is given to many disguises. He is a veritable will-o’-the-wisp, scurrying here and there in his never-ending search for marauders. For a while he chose the covert of a bathroom but now is out on the streets where he remains at my beck and call every minute.”

George’s throat filled with something that choked him.

“This is a frame-up,” he swallowed.

“That’s enough from you, you guttersnipe. Encouraging the degeneration of some noble woman scholar,” Ignatius barked. “You should be kissing the hem of my uniform in gratitude for my not advising Sherlock Mancuso of your evil goods. Meet me before the RKO Orpheum in two hours!”

Ignatius billowed grandly off down Common Street. George put his two packages in the bun compartment and sat down on the curb. This was really luck meeting a pal of Mancuso’s. The big vendor really had him. He looked furiously at the wagon. Now he wasn’t only stuck with the packages. He was stuck with a big hot dog wagon.

Ignatius tossed money at the cashier and literally lunged into the Orpheum, waddling down the aisle toward the footlights. His timing had been perfect. The second feature was just beginning. The boy with the magnificent photographs was definitely a find. Ignatius wondered if he could blackmail him into watching the wagon every afternoon. The urchin had certainly responded to his mention of a friend on the police force.

Ignatius snorted at the movie credits. All of the people involved in the film were equally unacceptable. A set designer, in particular, had appalled him too many times in the past. The heroine was even more offensive than she had been in the circus musical. In this film she was a bright young secretary whom an aged man of the world was trying to seduce. He flew her in a private jet to Bermuda and installed her in a suite. On their first night together she broke out in a rash just as the libertine was opening her bedroom door.

“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”

“They sure got some funny people at matinees,” a lady with a shopping bag said to her companion. “Just take a look at him. He’s got on a earring.”

Then there was a soft-focus love scene, and Ignatius began to lose control. He could feel the hysteria overtaking him. He tried to be silent, but he found that he couldn’t.

“They’re photographing them through several thicknesses of cheesecloth,” he spluttered. “Oh, my God. Who can imagine how wrinkled and loathsome those two really are? I think I’m getting nauseated. Can’t someone in the projection booth turn off the electricity? Please!”

He rattled his cutlass loudly against the side of his seat. An old usherette came down the aisle and tried to grab the cutlass from him, but Ignatius wrestled with her, and she slid to the carpet. She got up and hobbled away.

The heroine, believing her honor to be in question, had a series of paranoid fantasies in which she was lying on a bed with her libertine. The bed was pulled through the streets and floated across a swimming pool at the resort hotel.

“Good grief. Is this smut supposed to be comedy?” Ignatius demanded in the darkness. “I have not laughed once. My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage. That woman must be lashed until she drops. She is undermining our civilization. She is a Chinese Communist agent sent over to destroy us. Please! Someone with some decency get to the fuse box. Hundreds of people in this theater are being demoralized. If we’re all lucky, the Orpheum may have forgotten to pay its electric bill.”

As the film ended Ignatius cried, “Under her All-American face she is really Tokyo Rose!”

He wanted to stay for another showing, but he remembered the waif. Ignatius didn’t want to ruin a good thing. He needed that boy. Weakly he climbed over the four empty popcorn boxes that had accumulated before his seat during the movie. He was completely enervated. His emotions were spent. Gasping, he staggered up the aisle and out onto the sunlit street. There, by the cab stand at the Roosevelt Hotel, George was keeping a surly watch over the wagon.

“Jesus,” he sneered. “I thought you was never coming outta there. What kinda appointment you had? You just went to see a movie.”

“Please,” Ignatius sighed. “I’ve just been through trauma. Run along. I’ll meet you at one sharp tomorrow at Canal and Royal.”

“Okay, prof.” George took his packages and started to slouch away. “Keep your mouth shut, huh?”

“We shall see,” Ignatius said sternly.

He ate a hot dog with trembling hands and peeked down into his pocket at the photograph. From above the woman’s figure looked even more matronly and reassuring. Some broken professor of Roman history? A ruined medievalist? If only she had shown her face. There was an air of solitude, of detachment, of solitary sensual and scholarly pleasure that appealed to him greatly. He looked at the scrap of wrapping paper, at the crude, tiny address. Bourbon Street. The undone woman was in the hands of commercial exploiters. What a challenging character for the Journal. That particular work, Ignatius thought, was rather lacking in the sensual department. It needed a good injection of lip-smacking innuendo. Perhaps the confessions of this woman would perk it up a bit.

Ignatius rolled down in to the Quarter and, for a wild and very fleeting moment, pondered an affair. How Myrna would gnaw at her espresso cup rim in envy. He would describe every lush moment with this scholarly woman. With her background and Boethian worldview, she would take a very stoic and fatalistic view of whatever sexual gaucheries and blunders he committed. She would be understanding. “Be kind,” Ignatius would sigh to her. Myrna probably attacked sex with the vehemence and seriousness that she brought to social protest. How anguished she would be when Ignatius described his tender pleasures.

“Do I dare?” Ignatius asked himself, bumping the wagon absentmindedly into a parked car. The handle sank into his stomach and he belched. He would not tell the woman how he came across her. First, he would discuss Boethius. She would be overwhelmed.

Ignatius found the address and said, “Oh, my God! The poor woman is in the hands of fiends.” He studied the façade of the Night of Joy and lumbered up to the poster in the glass case. He read:

ROBERTA E. LEE

presents

Harlett O’Hara

The Virgin-ny Belle

(and pet!)

Who was Harlett O’Hara? Even more important, what kind of pet? Ignatius was intrigued. Afraid of attracting the wrath of the Nazi proprietress, he sat down uncomfortably on the curb and decided to wait.

Lana Lee was watching Darlene and the bird. They were almost ready to open. Now if only Darlene could get that line straight. She wandered away from the stage, gave Jones some additional directions about cleaning under the stools, and went to look out of the porthole of glass in the padded door. She’d seen enough of the act for one afternoon. The act was really pretty good in its own way. George was really bringing in the money with the new merchandise. Things were looking good. Too, Jones seemed to be broken in at last.