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By Root 6134 0

in a bill-collecting agency in Plainfield. He had abandoned a wife and four children. They were now on welfare in the East. Coming to Chicago, Guido Stronson had opened a grand office on La Salle Street and produced glittering credentials, including a degree from the Harvard Business School. He said he had been conspicuously successful in Hartford as an insurance executive. His investment company soon had a very large clientele for hog bellies, cocoa, gold ore. He had bought a mansion on the North Shore and said he wanted to go in for fox hunting. Complaints lodged by clients had led to these federal investigations. The report concluded with the La Salle Street rumor that Stronson had many Mafia clients. He had apparently cost these clients several millions of dollars.

By tonight Greater Chicago would know these facts and tomorrow this office would be mobbed by cheated investors and Stronson would need police protection. But who would protect him the day after tomorrow from the Mafia? I studied the man’s photograph. Newspapers distort faces peculiarly—I knew that from personal experience, but this photograph, if it did Stronson justice in any degree, inspired no sympathy. Some faces gain by misrepresentation.

Now why had Cantabile brought me here? He promised me fast profits, but I knew something about modern life. I mean, I could read a little in the great mysterious book of urban America. I was too fastidious and skittish to study it closely—I had used the conditions of life to test my powers of immunity; the sovereign consciousness trained itself to avoid the phenomena and to be immune to their effects. Still, I did know, more or less, how swindlers like Stronson operated. They hid away a good share of their stolen dollars, they were sentenced to prison for eight or ten years, and when they got out, they retired quietly to the West Indies or the Azores. Maybe Cantabile was now trying to get his hands on some of the money Stronson had stashed—in Costa Rica, perhaps. Or maybe if he was losing twenty thousand dollars (some of it possibly Cantabile family money) he intended to make a big scene. He would want me to see such a scene. He liked me to be present. Because of me he had gotten into Mike Schneiderman’s column. He must have been thinking of something even more brilliant, more sensationally inventive. He needed me. And why was I so often involved in such things? Szathmar too did this to me; George Swiebel had staged a poker party in order to show me a thing or two; this afternoon even Judge Urbanovich had acted up in chambers for my sake. I must have been associated in Chicago with art and meaning, with certain upper values. Wasn’t I the author of Von Trenck (the movie), honored by the French government and the Zig-Zag Club? I still carried in my wallet a thin wrinkled length of silk ribbon for the buttonhole. And O! we poor souls, all of us so unstable, ignorant, perturbed, so unrested. Couldn’t even get a good night’s sleep. Failing in the night to make contact with the merciful, regenerative angels and archangels who were there to strengthen us with their warmth and their love and wisdom. Ah, poor hearts that we were, how badly we were all doing and how I longed to make changes or amends or corrections. Something!

Cantabile had shut himself up in conference with Mr. Stronson, and this Stronson, represented in the paper with a brutally thick face and hair done in pageboy style, was probably frantic. Maybe Cantabile was offering him deals—deals upon deals upon deals. Advice on how to come to terms with his furious Mafia customers.

Thaxter was lifting his legs to let the porter vacuum under them.

“I think we’d better go,” I said.

“Leave? Now?”

“I think we should get out of here.”

“Oh, come on, Charlie, don’t make me leave. I want to see what happens. There’ll never be another occasion like this. This man Cantabile is absolutely wild. He’s fascinating.”

“I wish you hadn’t rushed into his Thunderbird without asking me. So excited by gangland Chicago you just couldn’t wait. I suppose you expect to make use of