"I hear the meter running," said Henry.

From the corners of my eyes, I saw him walking away, then stop and throw his hand up.

Shrank flinched. So did I. Henry's cane sailed through the air to land with a sharp clatter on the planks.

"You might need that," said Henry.

Shrank and I stood staring at the weapon on the pier.

The sound of the taxi driving off jerked me forward. I grabbed the cane and held it to my chest, as if it might really work against knives or guns.

Shrank looked at the vanishing lights of the taxi, far off.

"What in hell was that all about?" he said.

Behind him, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spengler and Kafka all leaned on their mad elbows, sank in their dusts, and whispered, yes, what was that all about?

"Wait'll I get my shoes." He vanished.

"Don't get anything else," I cried.

That made him laugh a choking laugh.

"What would I get?" he called, unseen, rummaging around. In the door he showed me a shoe in each hand. "No guns. No knives." He shoved them on, but didn't lace them.

I couldn't believe what happened next. The clouds, over Venice, decided to pull back, revealing a full moon.

Both of us looked up at it, trying to decide if it was bad or good, and for which of us?

Shrank's gaze wandered to the shoreline and along the pier.

"He wept like anything to see such quantities of sand," he said. Then hearing himself he snorted softly. "Come oysters, said the carpenter, and took them close in hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the golden strand."

He began to walk. I stayed. "Aren't you going to lock your door?"

Shrank gave the merest nodding glance over his shoulder at the books clustered like vultures with their black feathers and dusty golden stares, waiting on shelves for the touch that gave life. In invisible choirs, they sang forth wild tunes I should have heard long days ago. My eye ran and reran the stacks.

My God, why hadn't I truly seen?

That dreadful escarpment inhabited by dooms, that lineup of failures, that literary Apocalypse of wars, squalors, diseases, pestilences, depressions, that downfall of nightmares, that pit of deliriums and mazes from which mad mice and insane rats never found light or made exit. That police lineup of degenerates and epileptics dancing the rims of shelved library cliffs with teams replacing teams of nausea and revulsion waiting in the higher darkness.

Single authors, single books, fine. A Poe here or a Sade there is a spice. But this was no library, it was an abattoir, a dungeon, a tower where ten dozen men in iron masks were penned, silently raving, forever.

Why hadn't I seriously seen and known?

Because Rumpelstiltskin was in charge.

Staring at Shrank even now I thought, at any moment he'll grab his foot and rip himself straight up in half and fall in two pieces!

He was hilarious.

Which made him all the more terrible.

"Those books," said Shrank at last, breaking the spell, not looking at them, staring up at the moon, "they don't care for me. Why should I care for them?"

"But..."

"Besides," said Shrank, "would anyone really want to steal Decline of the Wat?"

"I thought you loved your collection!"

"Loved?" He blinked once. "My God, don't you see? I hate everything. Name it, there's nothing in the world I like."

He strode off in the direction Henry had taken with his taxicab.

"Now," he said, "coming or not?" "Coming," I said.

Is that a weapon?"

We walked slowly, feeling each other out. I was amazed to find Henry's cane in my hands.

"No, an antenna, I think," I said.

"Of a very large insect?"

"A very blind one."

"Can he find his way without it, and where's he going this time of night?"

"Running errands. Back immediately," I lied.

Shrank was a lie detector. He almost writhed with delight at my voice. He quickened his pace, then stopped to examine me.

"I take it he steers by his nose. I heard what you asked and what he answered back."

"Armpits?" I said.

Shrank shriveled inside his old clothes. His eyes darted first to his left, then to his right underarm and down along a vast history of stains and time's discolorings.

"Armpits," I said again.

It was a bullet in the heart.

Shrank staggered, then firmed himself.

"Why and where are we walking?" he gasped. I could sense the rabbit palpitation under his greasy tie.

"I thought you were leading the way. I only know one thing." I moved, this time half a step ahead of him. "Blind Henry was searching for some unwashed shirts, dirty underclothes, bad breath. He found and named them for me."

I did not repeat the dread epithet. But Shrank, with each word, was diminished.

"Why would a blind man want me?" said Shrank at last.

I didn't want to give it all away at once. I had to test and try. "Because of Janus, the Green Envy Weekly," I said. "I've seen copies in your place, through your window."

That was pure lie, but it struck midriff.

"Yes, yes," said Shrank. "But a blind man, and you...?"

"Because." I took a deep breath and let it out. "You're Mr. Fixit."

Shrank shut his eyes, spun his thoughts, chose a reaction. Laughed.

"Fixit? Fixit! Ridiculous! Why would you think?"

"Because." I walked on, making him dog-trot to follow. I talked to the mist which gathered ahead. "Henry smelled someone crossing the street, many nights ago. The same smell was in his tenement hall, and here now tonight. And the smell is you."

The rabbit palpitation shook the little man again, but he knew he was still clear. Nothing was proven!

"Why," he gasped, "would I prowl some downtown lousy tenement I wouldn't dream to live in, why?"

"Because," I said, "you were looking for Lonelies. And damn fool stupid dumb me, blinder than Henry, helped you find them. Fannie was right. Constance was right! I was the death goat after all. Christ, I was Typhoid Mary. I carried the disease, you, everywhere. Or at least you followed. To find Lonelies." A drumbeat of breath. "Lonelies."

Almost as I said it, both Shrank and I were seized with what were almost paroxysms. I had spoken a truth that was like a furnace lid thrown back so the heat scorched out to sear my face, my tongue, my heart, my soul. And Shrank? I was describing his unguessed life, his need; all yet to be revealed and admitted, but I knew I had at last yanked the asbestos up and the fire was in the open.

"What was that word?" asked Shrank, some ten yards off and motionless as a statue.

"Lonelies. You said the word. You described them last month. Lonelies."

And it was true. A funeral march of souls went by in a breath, on soundless feet, in drifts of fog. Fannie and Sam and Jimmy and Cal and all the rest. I had never put a proper label on them. I had never seen the carry-over that tied them all and made them one.

"You're raving," said Shrank. "Guessing. Making up. Lying. None of this has to do with me."

But he was looking down at the way his coat was run up on his skinny wrists and the weathermarks of late-night sweats down his coat. His suit seemed to be diminishing even as I watched. He writhed in his own pale skin, underneath.

I decided to attack.

"Christ, you're rotting even as you stand there. You're an affront. You hate everything, all, anything in the world. You told me that just now. So you attack it with your dirt, your breath. Your underwear is your true flag, so you run it up a pole to ruin the wind. A. L. Shrank. Proprietor of the Apocalypse!"

He was smiling, he was overjoyed. I had complimented him with insults. I was paying attention. His ego roused. Without knowing it, I had made and baited a trap.

What now? I thought. What, what, for God's sake do I say now, now? How draw him out? How finish him?

But he was walking ahead again now, all inflated with insults, all magnificent with the medals of ruin and despair I had pinned to his greasy tie.

We walked. We walked. We walked.

My God, I thought, how long do we walk, how long do we talk, how long does this go on?

This is a movie, I thought, one of those unbelievable scenes that continue and continue when people explain and others talk back and people say again, It can't be.

It is.

He's not sure what I know and I'm not sure that I know, either, and both of us wonder if the other is armed.

"And both of us are cowards," said Shrank.

"And both are afraid to test the other."

The Carpenter went on. The Oyster followed.

We walked.

And it was not a scene from a good or bad film where people talked too much; it was a scene growing late at night and the moon vanishing to reappear as the fog thickened and I was having a dialogue with Hamlet's father's idiot psychiatrist's friend's ghost.

Shrank, I thought. What a name. Shrink from this, shrink from that, you wind up shrunk! How had it started? Out of college, on top of the world, hang a shingle; then the great earthquake of some year, did he recall? the year his legs and mind broke and there was the long slide without a toboggan, just on his skinny backside, and no women between him and the downfall pit to ease the concussion, lubricate the nightmare, stop his crying at midnight and hatred at dawn? And one morning, he got out of bed and found himself, where?

Venice, California, and the last gondola long since departed and the lights going out and the canals filling with oil and old circus wagons with only the tide roaring behind the bars. . . .

"I have a little list," I said.

"What?" said Shrank.

"The Mikado," I told him. "One song explains you. Your object all sublime, you will achieve in time. To make the punishment fit the crime. The Lonelies. All of them. You put them on your list, in the words of the song, they never will be missed. Their crime was giving up or never having tried. It was mediocrity or failure or lostness. And their punishment, my God, was you."

He was puffed now, with a peacock stride.

"Well?" he said, walking ahead. "Well?"

I loaded my tongue and took aim and fired a round.

"I imagine," I said, "that somewhere nearby is the decapitated head of Scott Joplin."

He could not help the impulse that moved his right hand to his greasy coat pocket. He pretended to pat it in place, found himself staring with pleasure at that hand, glanced away, and went on walking.

One shot, one hit. I glowed. Detective Lieutenant Crumley, I thought, wish you were here.

I fired a second round.

"Canaries for sale," I said in a tiny voice like the faded lead-pencil lettering on the cardboard in the old lady's window. "Hirohito ascends throne. Addis Ababa. Mussolini."

His left hand twitched with secret pride toward his left coat pocket.

Christ! I thought. He's carrying her old bottom-of-the-birdcage headlines with him!

Bull's-eye!

He strode. I followed.