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“Okay. I will.”

Humboldt put his hands on Sewell’s small yellow desk and thrust himself back in the chair so that the steel casters gave a wicked squeak. The ends of his hair were confused with cigarette smoke. His head was lowered. He was examining me as if he had just surfaced from many fathoms.

“Have you got a checking account, Charlie? Where do you keep your money?”

“What money?”

“Haven’t you got a checking account?”

“At Chase Manhattan. I’ve got about twelve bucks.”

“My bank is the Corn Exchange,” he said. “Now, where’s your checkbook?”

“In my trench coat.”

“Let’s see.”

I brought out the flapping green blanks, curling at the edges. “I see my balance is only eight,” I said.

Then Humboldt reaching into his plaid jacket brought out his own checkbook and undipped one of his many pens. He was bandoliered with fountain pens and ball-points.

“What are you doing, Humboldt?”

“I’m giving you carte blanche power to draw on my account. I’m signing a blank check in your name. And you make one out to me. No date, no amount, just ‘Pay to Von Humboldt Fleisher.’ Sit down, Charlie, and fill it out.”

“But what’s it about? I don’t like this. I have to understand what’s going on.”

“With eight bucks in the bank, what do you care?”

“It’s not the money. . . .”

He was very moved, and he said, “Exactly. It isn’t. That’s the whole point. If you’re ever up against it, fill in any amount you need and cash it. The same applies to me. We’ll take an oath as friends and brothers never to abuse this. To hold it for the worst emergency. When I said mutual aid you didn’t take me seriously. Well, now you see.” Then he leaned on the desk in all his heaviness and in a tiny script he filled in my name with trembling force.

My control wasn’t much better than his. My own arm seemed full of nerves and it jerked as I was signing. Then Humboldt, big delicate and stained, heaved himself up from his revolving chair and gave me the Corn Exchange check. “No, don’t just stick it in your pocket,” he said. “I want to see you put it away. It’s dangerous. I mean it’s valuable.”

We now shook hands—all four hands. Humboldt said, “This makes us blood-brothers. We’ve entered into a covenant. This is a covenant.”

A year later I had a Broadway hit and he filled in my blank check and cashed it. He said that I had betrayed him, that I, his blood-brother, had broken a sacred covenant, that I was conspiring with Kathleen, that I had set the cops on him, and that I had cheated him. They had lashed him in a strait jacket and locked him in Bellevue, and that was my doing, too. For this I had to be punished. He imposed a fine. He drew six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents from my account at Chase Manhattan.

As for the check he had given me, I put it in a drawer under some shirts. In a few weeks it disappeared and was never seen again.

fourteen

Here meditation began to get really tough. Why? Because of Humboldt’s invectives and denunciations which now came back to me, together with fierce distractions and pelting anxieties, as dense as flak. Why was I lying here? I had to get ready to fly to Milan. I was supposed to go with Renata to Italy. Christmas in Milan! And I had to attend a hearing in Judge Urbanovich’s chambers, conferring first with Forrest Tomchek, the lawyer who represented me in the action brought by Denise for every penny I owned. I needed also to discuss with Murra the CPA the government’s tax case against me. Also Pierre Thaxter was due from California to talk to me about The Ark—really, to show why he had been right to default on that loan for which I had put up collateral—and to bare his soul and in so doing bare my soul, too, for who was I to have a covered soul? There was even a question about the Mercedes, whether to sell it or pay for repairs. I was almost ready to abandon it for junk. As for Ronald Cantabile, claiming to represent the new spirit, I knew that I could expect to hear from him any minute.

Still, I was able to hold