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By Root 6088 0

highly amused by Cantabile’s determination to drive us into the Thunderbird, to cram us into the red leather upholstery of the throbbing open car. He made it seem like a kidnap. We were on the broad sidewalk in front of the Institute, and lovers of criminal legend could tell you that the celebrated Dion O’Banion used to drive his Bugatti at a hundred mph over the very spot where we were standing while pedestrians fled. I had in fact mentioned this to Thaxter. Wherever he went, Thaxter wished to experience the characteristic thing, the essence. Getting the essence of Chicago, he was delighted, he was grinning, and he said, “If we miss Bartelstein now we can stop in the morning en route to the airport.”

“Poll,” said Cantabile, “get behind the wheel. I see the squad car.” Buses were trying to squeeze past the parked Thunderbird. Traffic was tied up. The cops were already spinning their blue lights at Van Buren Street. Thaxter followed Polly to the car and I said to Cantabile, “Ronald, go away. Let me alone.”

He gave me a look of open and terrible disclosure. I saw a spirit striving with complications as dense as my own, in another, faraway division. “I didn’t want to spring this on you,” he said, “but you force me to twist your arm.” His fingers in the horseman’s gloves, skin-tight, took me by the sleeve. “Your lifelong friend Alec Szathmar is in hot trouble, or could be in hot trouble—that’s up to you.”

“Why? How come?”

“I’m telling you. There’s this pretty young woman—her husband is one of my people—and she’s a kleptomaniac. She was caught in Field’s pinching a cashmere cardigan. And Szathmar is her lawyer, dig? It was me that recommended Szathmar. He went to court and told the judge not to send her to jail, she needed psychiatric treatment and he’d see that she got it. So the court released her in his custody. Then Szathmar brought this chick straight to a motel and took her clothes off, but before he could screw her she escaped. She didn’t have more on than the strip of paper they stretch across the toilet seat when she streaked out. There are plenty of witnesses. Now this girl is straight. She doesn’t go for the motel bit. Her only bag is stealing. For your sake, I’m restraining the husband.”

“All I hear from you, Cantabile, is nonsense, more and more and more nonsense. Szathmar can act like a jerk, but he’s not a monster.”

“All right, I’ll unleash the husband. You think your buddy wouldn’t be disbarred? He would be—fucking-A-right.”

“You’ve hoked up all this for some goofy reason,” I said. “If you had anything on Szathmar you’d be blackmailing him right now.”

“So have it your way, don’t cooperate, I’ll slaughter and butcher the son of a bitch.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. You know what you are? You’re an isolationist, that’s what you really are. You don’t want to know what other people are into.”

Everyone is forever telling me what my faults are, while I stand with great hungry eyes, believing and resenting all. Without metaphysical stability a man like me is the Saint Sebastian of the critical. The odd thing is that I hold still for it. As now, clutched by the sleeve of my checked coat, with Cantabile steaming intrigues and judgments at me from the flues of his white nose. With me it’s not how all occasions do inform against me, but how I employ occasions to extract buried information. The latest information seemed to be that I was by inclination the sort of person who needed microcosmic-macrocosmic ideas, or the belief that everything that takes place in man has world significance. Such a belief warmed the environment for me, and brought out the sweet glossy leaves, the hanging oranges of the groves where the unpolluted self was virginal and gratefully communed with its Maker, and so on. It was possible that this was the only way for me to be my own true self. But in the actual moment we were on the wide freezing pavement, on Michigan Boulevard, the Art Institute behind us, and over against us all the colored lights of Christmas traffic and the white façades of Peoples Gas and other companies.