Mr. X

accordion.

    In my progress upWord Street, I noticed four middle-aged ruffians skulking out ofPurse Lane. Three of the four carried baseball bats, and their glances up and down the street, their investigations through the open doors of taverns, declared them hounds sniffing for a coon. Mountry's rough, backwoods atmosphere enveloped them like a fog. All hills and vales strung together with muddy roads disfigured by shacks whose weedy front yards sprouted old cars, broken appliances, and now and then a few pigs, Mountry had provided an unending supply of brutal dumbbells back in my days of art and crime. I did not suppose it had changed much over the years. I wandered unseen toward the bully-boys, and the ripest of plums dropped straight into my astonished hand.

    The plum's descent began with the sight of Frenchy La Chapelle bopping on the balls of his feet as he kept a wary eye on the hound pack. Heknew about them; they made him nervous. Although alike in breaking every law they could at every opportunity, Frenchy and the Mountry boys were of different species and as instinctively natural enemies as the cobra and the mongoose. Their antithetical physical types increased the instinctive hostility, the Frenchys tending toward a rodentlike sleekness and the rednecks sharing an inclination to potato-sack bellies and beefsteak faces.

    I sauntered invisible alongside the bully-boys. Their commander muttered this heavenly imprecation: 'Dunstan's around somewhere. Check out the alleys and meet me back at theSpeedway.'

    My heart, that old warhorse, foamed at the bit.

    I hastened across the street and materialized beside Frenchy. In years past, I now and again had summoned him to my service, invariably with the sense of mysteriously accommodating myself within a range of visibilities rather than anything as decisive as making myself visible. As far as Frenchy is concerned, one minute I'm not there and the next minute I am, and the process dismays him far more than he wants to let on.

    When he became aware of my presence, he flinched, then twitched his narrow shoulders and pretended he was doing loosening-up exercises. People like Frenchy never loosen up, and their only exercise is running from the police. 'How come I never see you sneakin' up on me?'

    'You don't look in the right places,' I said.

    He gave a rim-shot laugh,rat! tat!, bounced up and down, and glanced across Word Street.

    'Do you know those hillbillies?'

    He shot me a wary look, then thrust his hands into the pockets of the leather jacket. 'Might have seen 'em in the Speedway.'

    I raised my head to expose, beneath the brim of my hat, my left eye.

    'One of 'em's called Joe Staggers,' he said. “I'm kind of busy right now.'

    'No, you're not,' I said. 'Two nights ago, you were busy behind Lanyard Street with Clyde Prentiss. Tonight you have nothing to do but listen to me.'

    Frenchy jittered himself back into a semblance of confidence. 'Clyde's only a friend of mine, all right?'

    'The old Grueber warehouse,' I said. 'Microwaves. How many did you get before Clyde's mishap, a dozen?'

    Frenchy breathed through his mouth while admiring the lighted upper windows of a tenement across the street. 'Around ten. I dumped 'em in the river.'

    He was telling me what he should have done. All twelve of the stolen microwaves were stacked against a wall of his tiny apartment.

    'Clyde Prentiss represents a threat to your freedom,' I said. “If he should happen to recover, he'll turn you in for a reduced sentence. Some would say Clyde should have done his friends the favor of dying.'

    Frenchy tried to look unconcerned. 'The poor guy could go at any moment. Bad heart. Fifty-fifty chance.'

    “I am going to improve those odds, Frenchy,' I said. He stopped twitching. 'After tonight, you won't have to worry about Prentiss. In return, you will perform a number of errands for me. You will be remunerated. This is your first installment.' A fifty-dollar bill passed from my hand into Frenchy's pallid hand, thence into a zippered pocket.

    He ventured a sidelong glance. 'Uh, are you saying . . .'

    'You know perfectly well what I'm saying. Who are thosemeat-heads after?' I wanted to learn how much he knew.

    'A guy named Dunstan took some bread off 'em in a card game. They're sore.'

    'Would you recognize Dunstan if you saw him?'

    'Yeah.'

    “I want you to work through the lanes. If you see Dunstan, tell him that someone wants to meet him in Veal Yard. Show him the way. If you run into Staggers or his pals, send them in the opposite direction.'

    He moved away, and I said, 'Unload those microwaves inChicago.'

    Frenchy took off as though jet-propelled. I slipped back acrossWord Street and into the nearest lane. My long-delayed encounter with Master Dunstan would not occur until the brat's birthday, but in the meantime it was my ironic duty to protect him from harm, I went gliding up Horsehair with every anticipation of spilling a quantity of Mountry blood.

    Though I could wish for half a dozen Horsehairs, one will do. Swelling and contracting in width, a back alley's back alley, it snakes back and forth through Hatchtown, and from within its walls the experienced listener can discern a great deal of what is going on around him. In high good humor, I awaited broadcasts from Mountry.

    Hatchtown residents stumbled home, lurched into taverns, wrangled, copulated. Children squalled, slept, squalled again. I was pretty sure I heard Piney Woods humming to himself as he shambled along Leather towardWord Street, but it may have been some other derelict old enough to remember 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo.' I ducked into Veal Yard, and the music for which I had been searching came to me from the direction of Pitch and Treacle.

    The music in question was theclick-slop, click-slop of cobblestones meeting steel-tipped boots with run-down heels, high-style footwear amongst Mountry's finest. I made my way into Wax. The yokel made pursuit all the easier by rapping his baseball bat against the bricks, producing a sharp, ringingtock! vivid as a flare. I was still unable to distinguish whether he was on Pitch or Treacle, but a little extra speed would bring me to the point where the two lanes flowed together into Lavender only seconds behind my quarry. Concentrating on theclick-slop, click-slop and the occasional, radarishtock!, I ignored the other sounds drifting from adjacent lanes. Then two different sets of footsteps snagged my attention.

    To those who can hear, footsteps are as good as fingerprints. Two men of approximately the same weight walking across wet ground in identical pairs of shoes leave virtually identical impressions, but the sounds they make will differ in a thousand ways. What made me attend to the pair of footsteps coming from Pitch or Treacle was their unreasonable similarity. (They were not identical. Even identical twins do not replicate each other's tread, they cannot.) One man, the first, moved in fearfully, with an irregularity that betrayed overindulgence in alcohol. The man behind him glided along in confident high spirits, not only unimpaired but as if the concept of impairments or obstacles did not exist for him—it was the walk of anunearthly being.

    I must allude now to a circumstance beyond the grasp of any mortal reader. In the stride of an unearthly being nothing even faintly like morality may be detected. A transcendent ruthlessness resounded from the tread of the second pair of footsteps drawing near the joining of Pitch and Treacle and their meeting with the more spacious Lavender.

    And yet! Although the first set of footfalls contained virtually no resonance of the so-to-speak angelic or unearthly, it uncannily resembled the second.

    It was like

    I felt as though

    I might have been standing before

    You Mighty Ones, in his present euphoria Your Servant can find no better description of the emotional state induced by this impossible resemblance than the adjective most beloved of the Providence Master,eldritch. I had heard the footsteps of my son. Aware that the redneck was in pursuit, he possessed the capacity to mislead him with the false signal of, I don't know what you call it, an auditory