Players

'Mystery of Stock Exchange Murder Unraveling Slowly.”

'So far I like it.”

'Gunman, obscure background, dum dum dum, carrying, get this, a bomb on his person, dum dum. Suspected terrorist network. Confusion over identity. Links being sought, dumdy dum. The guy refuses to talk, see a lawyer or leave his cell.”

'He had a bomb when on his person?”

'When he was caught. After he shot George. He was standing right over there. A miniature explosive package. I quote.”

'Nice.”

'Where are we, Lyle, as you put it so beautifully yourself?”

'We're inside.”

'Where do we want to be?”

'Inside.”

'Those both are right answers.”

'I prepared.”

'Wait and see how bad,' McKechnie said. 'That's all you can do. I'm getting ready to raise the barricades. There's a serious health problem in the family. There's my brother piling up gambling debts and making midnight phone calls complete with whispering and little sobs. Bookies, loan sharks, threats. Very educational. Interest compounded hourly. Then there's my oldest, who has a hearing problem to begin with and now out of nowhere who's found sitting on the floor in his room just staring at the wall. Twice last week. Has trouble moving his arms. Doesn't want to talk. He's too young to take drugs. It's not drugs. We had him to the doctor. They did these scans they do. Nothing definite. So now we're thinking of a shrink for kids. Did you ever feel you were in a vise? I walk around thinking what happened.”

'Let's try to have lunch next week.”

McKechnie reduced his cigarette butt to a speck of tobacco and a speck of paper. He dropped these on the floor. Then he jumped about a foot in the air, landing on the specks.

'Enjoy that?”

'Very advanced,' Lyle said.

'I used to be better. You should have seen me.”

'It's something you couldn't do in the outside world. They'd point and say ya ya.”

'Why don't we have lunch right now as a matter of fact? We'll go upstairs.”

'I don't eat up there anymore.”

'Why not?”

'I don't know, Frank.”

'There has to be a reason.”

'I suppose.”

'You don't know what it is.”

'I just haven't been up there in a while.”

'Lyle, I'm not exactly a promoter of tight-ass social customs. I don't have decanters full of sherry that I wheel out for my guests with their Bentleys parked outside. But there's nothing wrong with eating at the Exchange. It's halfway civilized and that's something.”

'It's inside.”

'It's inside, right. It's convenient, it's quick, it's good, it's nice and it's halfway fucking gracious, which is no small feat these days. So stop being stupid. You're talking like a jerk.”

'No pissa me off, Frank.”

Pammy had dinner with Ethan and Jack. They went to a place in SoHo. She was excited. Dinner out. Somewhere in her waking awareness there were glints of anticipation whenever Ethan and Jack walked into a room or when she picked up the ringing phone and it was one of them on the other end. Most people in her life were dispiriting presences. She looked forward to being with these two. If Ethan ever left his job, she'd sink into stupor and mutism.

The restaurant was full of hanging plants. A young woman arrived with the wine, telling them their food order would be delayed.

'There's a smoky fire in the basement right now. The kitchen staff is down there arguing over whether or not they want to pee on it. I opted out, unless they rig a swing, I told them. Distance is not my thing. There's Peter Hearn the conceptualist and his dog Alfalfa. I can never uncork without rupturing myself in the worst places, unless you don't consider sex important. Do you ever see how they uncork, with the knees? I'm sorry but I refuse to do that. It's degrading. I give a little bend, which is gruesome enough. More than that, forget about, you'll have to go somewhere else.”

They started on the wine. Smoke seeped into the main room but nobody left. There was no food being served. Everybody felt obliged to crack jokes and to drink a little faster than usual. A situation such as this could not be allowed to evolve without comic remarks and a trace of sophisticated hysteria. Ethan's mouth slid gradually into a secret grin. A woman at the other end of the room coughed and waved a handkerchief. Jack took the empty wine bottle to the waitress, who returned eventually with another, which Jack opened. Pammy wondered if her face was blotched. Wine did that. The man with the coughing woman ordered another round. Another man came out of the basement and began carrying plants out the front door. A two-inch needle, a sect ornament of some kind, was embedded in the flesh beneath his lower lip, pointing downward, its angle of entry about forty-five degrees. Jack hit the table and looked away, trying to suppress his laughter. The man left plants on the sidewalk and came back in for more. Wine squirted out of Jack's mouth. The room was filling with smoke. There was noise in the street, then wide beams of interweaving light. About ten firemen walked in. Pammy started to laugh, chewing at the air, her face blazing and clear, transcendently sane in this rose-stone glow. The firemen waddled around, bumping into each other. Ethan finished off another glass. The room seemed physically diminished by their entrance. They were outsized in helmets and boots, stepping heavily, lifting themselves like men on skis. Pammy couldn't stop laughing. The firemen cleared the place, slowly. Everybody was coughing, bottles and glasses in their hands. They trooped out, disappointed at the lack of applause.

It was dark. There were two hundred people in the streeet. Jack stepped onto the narrow platform at the back of one of the fire engines. He swung out from the vertical bar. The gaiety they'd brought into the street dissolved in minutes. Ethan and Pam started off down the block but Jack didn't want to get off the fire truck. He shouted commands and made wailing noises. Nobody paid much attention. The man with the needle beneath his lip came out with the last of the plants. Firemen dragged a hose around the corner. Ethan stood looking at Jack, a steadying distance in his gaze.

'I wonder what happened to the rain they predicted,' Pammy said.

Jack came along finally. They turned a corner and headed south, moving toward Canal Street and the possibility of a taxi. Standing outside the cast-iron buildings were large cardboard cylinders that contained industrial sweepings from the factory lofts. Jack charged one of them, shoulder-first, knocking it down. They followed along quietly as he ranged both sides of the street, crashing into containers. Just past Grand he hurdled an overturned container and veered neatly, forearm out front, body set low, to run into a metal garbage can. Pammy, eventually, noted that Ethan hadn't altered stride and she had to hurry to catch up with him. Jack was sitting in the gutter, holding his knee. The can was on its side, rolling only slightly back and forth, much of its contents still within, an indication of weight. To Pammy it made sense in a way. He'd always appeared to have reserves of uncommitted energy. A hitter of garbage cans. She watched him get to his feet, raggedly. Although there was no sign of an empty cab, Ethan leaned into the sparse traffic, arm high in the air.

'Does he do this often?”

'Tuesdays and Thursdays,' Ethan said. 'The rest of the week he speaks in tongues.”

Lyle sometimes carried yellow teleprinter slips with him for days. He saw in the numbers and stock symbols an artful reduction of the external world to printed output, the machine's coded model of exactitude. One second of study, a glance was all it took to return to him an impression of reality disconnected from the resonance of its own senses. Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was