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.”“Thanks,” she said.“Don’t worry about me—I’ll be fine.”Sometimes, I told her, I didn’t make it home till late.But then I added—I don’t know why—that I’d try to be back in time to have dinner with her.I took my usual route to the office, crosstown on 14th Street, past the Salvation Army, past the storefronts crammed with communion dresses and transistor radios.In Union Square it was business as usual.Two cops outside the Mays department store were busting a guy with big hair in a dashiki printed with peace symbols.Across the way from there, a dozen Hare Krishnas were beating the shit out of their tambourines.Under the trees near the Lafayette statue, a kid in a stroller was pointing a toy pistol at dog walkers and other passers-by.I think it was a toy.Not far away, an elderly black man in shoes made from old tires was screaming “Don’t you ‘brother’ me, man—I ain’t your brother,” to no one in particular.I picked up coffee and an egg-and-bacon sandwich from the coffee shop on the corner of 16th Street and made my way to the Heartland Credit Union Building.Freddie the doorman told me that the office that had once belonged to my friend Olga the Swedish masseuse had finally been rented—to a discount dentist.All the place needed was another discount dentist.I made my way up to my office and ate my sandwich.Then I lit a joint, cracking the window open to let out the smoke just in case a client popped in, not that I had any reason to suppose one would.I sat there for a while and savored the joint and bullied some thoughts that couldn’t fight back.Who was Sandy Smollett? Put another way: which was the real Sandy Smollett, and what the hell was she doing in my apartment? Come to think of it: which was the real Sandy Smollett and what the hell was she doing in my head? Who would want to hurt a girl like that, and why? Why had Yari told me she was forbidden fruit? I could come up with any number of plausible answers to all of those questions, and none of them was very helpful.After a few minutes of this, I decided I’d better check my messages.There was just one, from an attorney named J.H.Lucking, asking me to give him a tinkle.To tell the truth, it wasn’t from J.H.himself, but from an assistant of some kind with a voice that suggested her hobby was chewing barbed wire.I called the number she had left and she picked up.She told me that Mr.Lucking would like to meet with me as soon as was convenient.I asked if she meant convenient for me or convenient for him? She gave me an address on East 73rd Street and told me to be there at one thirty precisely.I asked what this was about.She told me Mr.Lucking would instruct me when I got there.I’m all for instruction if the price is right, so a little after one I took a Lexington Avenue train uptown and made my way to the address I’d been given.It was a handsome Empire-style row house and the entire building appeared to be occupied by the law firm of Lucking, Thorpe, & Lucking.I should have worn my clean shirt.Watched by a closed-circuit TV camera, I rang the bell and somebody buzzed me in.I found myself in a spacious, circular lobby at the foot of an imposing spiral staircase.After a few seconds, an efficient-looking woman in a black pantsuit trotted into view.“Mr.Novalis?”The charmer I had spoken to on the phone.She told me that Mr.Lucking was waiting for me in the conference room, one flight up and straight ahead.Evidently she had tipped off her boss to my arrival since J.H.was there waiting for me when I reached the landing.He was one of those tall, tanned attorneys who look as if they earned their law degree by ship-to-shore cablegram while crewing on large sailboats in the Caribbean.Perfectly groomed, he had the kind of dirty-blond hair that has the texture of steel wool, and he was dressed for litigation in a serious gray-flannel suit that said, “You can keep those pinched-in-at-the-waist pin-stripe limey fag numbers, and those shiny wop butt freezers—I’m proud to have an American flag stuck up my ass and you’d better not forget it.”He crushed my hand and led the way into the conference room, which filled the entire frontage of the second floor.Three large windows looked out at the consulate of some newly minted country.It boasted a flag that resembled the Paramount Pictures logo.The conference table was as large and as shiny as one of those portable dance floors they roll out on lawns for weddings in Fairfield County.J.H
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