Swill's was crowded; Karl thought at first this was an after-work office crowd stopping in for a drink. The men and women who formed chic little cliques looked as if they bought their suits and briefcases from the same place. Swill's must have been one of the last places in the city that paid little attention to the city's edicts about smoking.

The suits Karl had noticed first. But most of the other customers in here looked as if they hadn't done an honest day's work in their lives. What was it these days that had so many unemployed, ones who were obviously fit to work? They were all f.u.c.ked-up, lazy kids expecting to be taken care of. Christ, he himself had worked his way, all of his way, through a small college in upstate New York, had come that close to graduating, then done a fine-tuned job on one of the college deans behind the Sigma Kappa fraternity house. It sure wasn't his fault if things had gotten out of hand. There was no way he could have known two of the dean's sycophants-the chair of the phys ed department and the dean of students-would be packing heat, for G.o.d's sakes. Of course the fraternity took it all as a reason to party. They were all drunk; that's what they did. Their parents paid for all of this and the kids got stoned and shot birds off telephone poles.

And because of the whole fracas, he himself had had to get out of town just a month before graduation. His cla.s.s in the contemporary novel hadn't finished, so he'd gotten an incomplete; well, that's the way it went. But he didn't flaunt his college education; that could be taken wrong by some people who might claim he was overeducated for this kind of work.

"Maybe," said Candy, "we should be going after this p.r.i.c.k." He flicked his thumbnail against the jacket photo of Paul Giverney.

It amused Karl that the present contract was put out on a writer, someone in the literary scene, something Karl thought he knew a little about. It was a milieu with which he wasn't totally unfamiliar. There'd been places like Swill's at college; he'd had many an argument about Hemingway standing at the bar in Loser's-Hemingway and Ayn Rand (talk about your butch writers!).

Karl had paired up with Candy for a host of reasons that went beyond Candy's wanting to operate independently of the Fabriconi family (for whom he'd worked for several years). He, too, didn't like being told to take out this guy or that guy, no questions asked or answered, just do it.

"s.h.i.t," Candy had said back then. "It's like the guy's already walking around dead meat and don't know it. I mean I'd know more about his stupid Irish setter than I would about Conrad Gravely."

Karl raised his eyebrows. "That was your hit?"

Candy nodded.

"That was cla.s.sy, that was an A job, man. You picked that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d off without so much as touching a hair on the guys with him. I always wondered who did that hit."

Modestly, Candy rocked his hand in a comme ci, comme ca gesture. "But then they find out the vic-Connie Gravely-wasn't the one turned on them after all. It was some other guy." Candy blew on his coffee. "What a b.u.mmer."

"Not your fault. You shouldn't take the heat for that. You were doing what you got paid to do, that's all."

"So when that happened, I walked into Gio's office (this was Giovanni Fabriconi) and told him I was finished, to get another b.u.t.ton man."

Karl laughed. "I bet he liked that."

"Oh, yeah, only not enough to let me live. More than one goon came after me."

"You reduced his staff considerably's what I'm thinking."

Candy snorted. "Considerably's right. Thing is, if they'd let me follow Gravely around for a few days-h.e.l.l, even twenty-four hours-I'd've known. I got this instinct, see."

And this instinct, see was the other reason Karl had teamed up with him: Candy had an uncanny ability to intuit whether the mark had done what he was accused of or, on a broader spectrum, whether he deserved to die, accusations aside.

"But these guys, the ones like Gio, all they see is getting theirs back. They ain't really too particular about the truth, you know?"

Karl knew. And it was the only time he'd ever heard anyone else voice his own concern. Once he had questioned the guilt of the guy he was supposed to relieve of his life, and said so, and got no thanks for his concern.

"f.u.c.k you care?" one of the other guys had said, in real nervous agitation, shoving the slide back on his own .9 mm.

Truth. That was a pretty heady word for a couple of hit men to be tossing around. So those were the reasons, aside from Karl's just plain liking Candy. Karl knew he was good at sizing up a man, but in a more superficial way, like fitting him for a suit. It could be all that education he'd had (whereas Candy hadn't made it past the first year of high school) that had muddied the waters of his perception. Too much Hemingway. Everybody was guilty to Hemingway.

Now in Swill's, Karl knew that Candy was only half serious about going after Giverney. They weren't interested in pro bono work. And, of course, they knew nothing about Paul Giverney other than his being a sensationally popular writer.

Karl answered, "Yeah, well, we don't know what Ned ever did to Giverney. Maybe he screwed around with his wife."

Candy turned to the back flap copy. "His wife's name is Molly."

"What? You think you'll find it in the bio? Her telling Giverney Ned Isaly tried to screw her?" Karl reached over and turned the book around. "I still think it's a s.h.i.tty jacket."

Candy's forehead creased in deep perplexity, as if being called upon to authenticate a painting at the Met. "You know, it kind of fits the book, though."

"How come? Is it gray and rainy and everybody's sunk in anomie?"

"In f.u.c.king what?"

"Anomie. I like that word."

"Ho, ho, well, f.u.c.k your college education. Remember, you never graduated, same as me." Candy s.n.a.t.c.hed back the book and pretended to read.

Karl could have pointed out where they never graduated from, but he didn't. "So what's it about?"

"I've only got around fifty pages read. It's way out weird. It sounds like science fiction."

"Philip K. d.i.c.k?" Karl asked. This was the one writer Candy knew about. For some reason he was crazy about Philip K. d.i.c.k.

"No, no, no. It ain't nothin' like his stuff. No, in Giverney's book it's like everything around this person, this woman, has sort of collapsed. Everything we see around her has changed."

"Anomie." Sunk in anomie. He should get a medal.

"Whatever. Near the beginning she goes into this drugstore-well, that's not the right word for it now because it's all changed. Now it's one of them old-fashioned pharmacies. She parks her car and when she gets out she sees the other cars in line are old models. So she's got this new Lexus and the others look like they're straight from the 1940s and '50s, like a two-toned Chevy Belair. When she goes inside what used to be this familiar drugstore-"

At this point a scrawny girl-or woman-holding two beer bottles by their necks paused at their table and looked at Candy's turned-around baseball cap and shades. "That is so yesterday." She walked on, swinging the beers.

Karl laughed. "Told you."

Candy looked back and forth from the girl to Karl. "If she only knew. Her life in her hands."

"Go on."

"Okay, so she goes in, into the pharmacy, and everything's changed. Instead of all gla.s.s shelves and chrome there's dark wood paneling and those colored bottles these pharmacies used to have along the rear counter, beakers, they're called. And this guy, the pharmacist, that's where it gets even more hairy. The guy is still the same one she knew, same name, same person except he's dressed different, you know, more old-timey. And he knows her, calls her by her name-it's Laura-asks about her kid. He's like nothing ever happened-"

"And it's not like Philip K. d.i.c.k?"

"No! I told you, it's not like him. It's more like-what's that guy, that program that used to have a lot of episodes about people turning up in the old hometown and finding it changed?"

"Rod Serling. Rod Serling-what was the name of the show . . . ? Never mind, go on."

"Then she goes to this boutique next door.

"In the windows were dresses on headless and armless mannequins, dresses that might have been stylish back in the thirties or forties. A pleated skirt, the polka-dot one with small capped sleeves-"

"Jesus," Karl said. "Is this supposed to be scary or is it set on Seventh Avenue?" Karl twirled his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "Though come to think of it, I guess Seventh Avenue is scary, I mean if you have to deliver s.h.i.t there."

"He's just setting the scene, Chrissakes. So she looks in and sees this woman, Miss Fleming, who owns the joint:"Miss Fleming looked as she always did. No, not quite. Her hair was done differently, in a coil at the nape of her neck-"

Karl slid down in his seat. "Come on, C, get to the scary part."

"Well, but this is scary, you think about it. To have everything changed just a little, just enough to make you think maybe it's her that's changed." Candy sat back, pleased with this a.n.a.lysis. "Okay, I'll leave out the beauty shop business-"

"Please do."

"She starts walking.

"Telling herself, Don't hurry, don't hurry. She forced herself to look at the houses she pa.s.sed, relieved they all looked familiar. Except this house, with its Moorish architecture, the recessed door under an arching stucco roof-"

"What in f.u.c.k's Moorish architecture? I have a hard enough time with modern and Victorian and that c.r.a.p."

The writer at the next table was looking their way. Karl was about to say something emphatic-like "f.u.c.k off!"-until he realized the fellow wasn't really looking at them but through them. He was in his own head. Karl liked that.

"Okay," said Candy, "I'll just capsize some of the description; suffice it to say, there's a little something wrong with each place she pa.s.ses. So she walks along"-in dread of her own house. Then she thought she knew what all of this was: a dream, one of those lucid dreams where one inhabits his own dream, knowing that he's dreaming-"

"Whoa! That went right past me. You know you're dreaming in your own dream?"

"Yeah."

Karl shifted the toothpick back. "It's a tautology."

"A what?"

"Tautology. A kind of contradicting yourself. Like that."

"Like what? Where're you going with this, K?"

Karl shrugged.

"Well, don't go there," said Candy. Then he laughed; this book was really getting to him. He looked over at the writer. "Look there, guy's still writing away. Only time he's stopped is to drink his beer."

"Maybe he's like that writer in that King story, the Jack Nicholson one. Remember when his wife finds a whole stack of pages beside his typewriter with only one thing typed on them, one line: 'All work and no play,' et cetera? Remember that?"

Candy nodded. Swill's was filling up even more. A little group with punk hair shades-electric blue, eggplant purple-were moving like a small squadron through the room. The girls seemed to be dressed in scarves, no hemlines or sleeves discernible, just a lot of material, bunched here and there or flowing behind. This squadron-three girls, two boys-sported enough body jewelry to open a branch of Robert Lee Morris. They stopped at the table where the writer sat. It was a table for four and the spokesman, a skinny guy with a rhinestone in his eyebrow and a fade haircut, was telling the writer to sit somewhere else because it was a table for four.

"f.u.c.k they think they are?" Candy was incensed.

There were five of them, so they still needed another chair and quickly homed in on the extra one at Candy and Karl's table. Candy immediately clamped his feet on the seat. Without a word, the skinny guy wrapped his hand around the third chair, the one that Candy had just stashed his feet on, and pulled. Candy's feet stopped him in midpull.

"We need this, man," said the skinny guy.

"Ever think of asking?"

The kid yanked and Candy's feet hit the floor. Candy stood up. He was a head shorter than the kid, but that made no difference to the armlock Candy got him in. And twisted. The kid yelped like a puppy. Candy repeated it: "I said, ever think of asking?"

The kid blurted out a "Please" tacked on to an apology.

Candy let him go. "Punk." He sat down again, scarcely noticing the attention he'd attracted.

Swill's was packed for this hour in the evening when Saul sat down at the table in the window. It pleased them that most of the other regulars had accepted that this window table was Ned's and Saul's. Most of them, but not all. Whenever he had the chance, b. w. brill would flop there, take out a roll of foolscap, a pen, and his pipe. He would be joined occasionally by Freida Jurkowski, another poet, and they would try to top each other with their most recent recitals. b. w. brill was all over the Village coffeehouses where he made as much impact as the background music.

There was a pecking order in here, but it had nothing to do with Ned or Saul; no one could come anywhere within pecking distance of them. But b.w. and Freida liked to make it appear they could because they'd been published. True. Only there were certain terms of publication that didn't impress even the unpublished (that is, nearly everyone in Swill's). Paperback original was one (although more publishers were turning to it) and especially paperback original romance. The only thing worse was vanity publishing, Vanguard Press, one of those the writer had to pay to get his stuff published. Insofar as anyone knew, none of the Swill's regulars had ever opted for it. Or if they had, certainly wouldn't want to admit it, which pretty much undercut the whole idea of (modestly) flashing your book around. Then there were the "little poetry" reviews that weren't of the Sewanee, Kenyon, Prairie Schooner caliber. The ones Freida could count as hers were chapbooks and ones with stapled pages. b.w. had published nothing since his book, five years ago, except a poem in a small review called Unguentine Press. UP had since folded, and b. w. brill had found no new home for his "verses," which is what he liked to call them, as if self-deprecation would summon up admiration in his listeners, which, of course, it didn't since everyone (except Freida and a couple of other poets) knew he was a horse's a.s.s whom it was impossible to deprecate too much.

Swill's clientele all gave the impression they weren't aware of anything but their own projects-novels, short stories, poetry, screen and TV treatments, or pilots for new sitcoms, written on spec. But they were aware, maddeningly and jealously, of success.

So when Ned and Saul walked in, Freida and b.w.-although they tried to make a leisurely job of leaving-made sure to vamoose. They could be ostracized. To be ostracized in Swill's was a novel experience since (as stated) no one wanted to be thought to care what the other guy was doing. The novelty arose from the low-key fashion in which the ostracizing was carried out. You could hardly put your finger on it; indeed you couldn't put your finger on it if you were not the object of it. There would be that ever so slight push or a back turning at the bar, that hard to be seen curl of the lip, that minutest raising of the eyebrow or flicker of the lid.

So Frieda and b.w. hopped it and Saul and Ned sat down.

Saul looked the room over and saw the same two men he'd seen in the park, now without the suits. The suits had been swapped for jeans and leather jackets. They were still carrying the books. While he was watching them, Ned came in.

Ned Isaly they recognized from both the photo in Michael's Restaurant and the dust jacket. He was at a table in the window now back-lit by the blue and green top of the Chrysler Building. He was sitting with the fellow Karl thought he remembered from the park. There was also a tall dark-haired girl standing by the table, looking as grim as a process server, the one who'd been putting the coins into the jukebox, playing that ear-splitting song again and again.

"Look at him," said Candy, nodding in the direction of a nearby table. "f.u.c.kin' everybody in here's writing a G.o.dd.a.m.ned book, it looks like." This one was a man probably in his early thirties seated with several notebooks spread out across the table, writing in one.

"Novelist wannabe?" said Karl. He lifted his shot of whiskey, said, "Cheers."

"Likewise," said Candy, lifting his beer, watching the moisture condense on the gla.s.s.

Karl said, "I wonder what it's like to write a book."

Candy was quiet for a moment, thinking this over. "Well, look, it can't be that hard if everybody in here's doing it. I mean the ones that aren't into art, you know, painting. Hard thing about writing a book is you'd have to think up something to write about. Enough it'd take up a whole book, couple hundred pages. That's a pretty tall order."

"Couple hundred? You must be joking. This"-he tapped Ned's book-"is three hundred eighty-four pages. And Giverney's must be over a hundred more. Nearly five hundred. That's a h.e.l.l of a lot of pages to fill."

"Well, yeah, if you're talkin' novels. These are novels. Made-up fiction."

"I know what fiction is, C. I'm talking nonfiction."

"If it's only facts you got to report, then that'd be a lot shorter. You wouldn't have to put in all this description and the, you know, insights. Still, it'd be hard, looking up all that s.h.i.t . . ." Candy took another pull at his beer. Then he leaned back, chair tilted, and watched the ceiling fans creaking circles.

"Even so, you'd still have to put in the small stuff," Karl said.

"What small stuff?"

"Like the fly up there," said Karl. "Two flies. You'd have to put them in."

"You wouldn't have to put the flies in."

"Yes, you would. It's how you describe something like this room so people would see it. They ain't gonna see it if you don't put in the flies. No way." Karl grabbed the Giverney book, leafed through it, scanned a page, and read:"It was an old-fashioned pharmacy, the sort she might have gone to as a kid and had a strawberry shake or chocolate soda or cherry phosphate. Before drugstores, big, impersonal, crowded with goods. The different gla.s.ses that lined the shelves behind the counter-ribbed gla.s.ses for shakes and sodas- "Or here:"The window was stuck; she could open it only a few inches. The air that entered was as warm as the air inside. It felt heavy, exhausted. She would have shut the window but thought, 'Why bother?' She thought, one enters and one leaves. Between these two events, nothing happens. Outside, in the still tree sat a bird, an ordinary wren or-"

Candy thought about these pa.s.sages. "I don't see any small stuff in it."

Karl said, "Well, what about the bird in the tree? Or the ribbed gla.s.ses and so forth?"

In his annoyance and impatience, Candy pushed back his chair. It collided with one behind him. A woman in big horn-rimmed gla.s.ses looked over her shoulder.

"Hey! Watch it!"

Candy had to smile. People just didn't know that a Watch it! to either of them could get you a choice site in a cemetery. Oh, well, when in Rome. He mumbled an apology, repositioned his chair. "All I'm saying is, who'd want to read about some dame going mano a mano with a f.u.c.king bird?"