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“The average physician,” she said, “couldn’t find his own behind with both hands.”

“That’s not quite true—” said George.

“Doctors make me sick,” she said. And now she turned really nasty, now that she had George relaxed for a full blast of malevolence. “But college kids make me sicker,” she said. “Get out of here,” she said. “You’re the most boring goon I ever met!” She made a limp, disgusted motion with her hand. “Beat it, Rollo,” she said. “Tell teacher I’m the way I am because I like the way I am. Maybe they’ll make you a professor of people like me.”

Out in the anteroom of the jail, a little, dark, vicious young man came up to George. He looked at George as though he wanted to kill him. He had a voice like a grackle. He was Bernard Gratz, the lady’s husband.

“You been in there with Gloria St. Pierre?” said Gratz.

“That’s right,” said George politely.

“Where you from?” he said. “What you want with her?” he said. “Who ast you to come?” he said.

George had a letter of introduction from the professor who was giving the course in criminology. He handed it to Gratz.

Gratz wadded it up and handed it back. “That don’t cut no ice with me,” he said. “She ain’t supposed to talk to nobody but her lawyer or me. She knows that.”

“It was purely voluntary on her part,” said George. “Nobody made her talk to me.”

Gratz took hold of George’s notebook. “Come on—lemme see,” he said. “What you got in the book?”

George pulled the book away. It not only had his notes on Gloria in it. It contained notes for all of his courses.

Gratz made another grab for the notebook, got it. He tore out all the pages, threw them up in the air.

George did a very un-Christian thing. He knocked the little man cold—laid him right out.

He revived Gratz enough to get Gratz’s promise that he was going to kill George slowly. And then George gathered up his papers and went home.

Two weeks went by without much of anything’s happening. George wasn’t worried about being killed. He didn’t think Gratz had any way of finding him in his room over the garage of the dean of the Divinity School. George had trouble believing that the adventure in the jail had even happened.

There was a picture in the paper one day, showing Gloria St. Pierre leaving the jail with Gratz. George didn’t believe either one was real.

And then, one night, he was reading The Encyclopedia of Criminology. He was looking for clues that would help him to understand the life Gloria St. Pierre had chosen to lead. The Encyclopedia, all-inclusive as it tried to be, said not one word about why such a beautiful, intelligent girl should have thrown her life away on such ugly, greedy, cruel men.

There was a knock on the door.

George opened the door, found two unfamiliar young men standing outside. One of them said George’s name politely, read it and his address from a piece of paper torn from a pack of cigarettes. It was the piece of paper on which Gloria St. Pierre had started to write George’s biography, The Thrilling Life Story of Mr. Z.

George recognized it a split second before the two men started beating the stuffing out of him. They called him “Professor” every time they hit him. They didn’t seem mad at all.

But they knew their business. George went to the hospital with four broken ribs, two broken ankles, a split ear, a closed eye, and a headful of orioles.

* * *

The next morning, George sat in his hospital bed and tried to write his parents a letter. “Dear Mother and Father:” he wrote, “I’m in the hospital, but you mustn’t worry.”

He was wondering what to say beyond that, when a platinum blonde with eyelashes like buggy whips came in. She carried a potted plant and a copy of True Detective.

She smelled like a gangster funeral.

She was Gloria St. Pierre, but George had no way of recognizing her. Bernard Baruch could have hidden behind a disguise like that. She came bearing gifts all right, but no pity seemed to go with them. George’s wounds interested her, but the interest was clinical.