Nowhere Read Free

extraction; he comes to the big city; he meets a kindly female impressionist; he—
    At this point my telephone rang, somewhere beneath the tangle of bedclothes on the studio couch. If the truth be known, I was relieved, though (presumably to impress myself, in the absence of any other human beings) I slammed down my Bic Banana, cursed, and assumed an expression of creativity annoyingly interrupted. But not being sufficiently prosperous to impose this upon the world, I answered genially.
    A bass and I should say utterly humorless voice told me: “Joo batter get out from zis house, my fran’, or be destroyed.”
    I confess I was distracted by the accent, which seemed to have elements of many languages not closely related to one another. I decided it was a hoax: such things are commonplace in my profession. Many wags enjoy pulling the leg of a private investigator. Call it thrill-seeking, but there are people who apparently get pleasure from calling a total stranger and, in a ridiculously incredible falsetto, making him an indecent proposal. Usually I drop the handpiece in silence, but on this evening I was piqued.
    “Drop dead, you jerk,” I growled, borrowing the taxi-driver’s idiom, which is useful when one is feeling as verbally uninspired as I was at that moment.
    “Is nawt time for little games, fallow, I assure you. Bums are there!”
    I sniffed. “If you are serious, my friend, then I must assure you that the bums in this neighborhood wouldn’t, couldn’t , destroy anybody. They are far too feeble.” Still, I didn’t much like the news that some of them had again bedded down inside the front door: that entryway stank enough as it was.
    “Dun’t talk like a prrrick,” said the voice, with lip-trilled, not uvular, r . “I can tell you zis: bums will go off in tan minutes. You must live or die.” Or perhaps it was “leave or die.” Either way, it was at this point that I first began to grasp what he was trying to tell me. Though funnily enough I was still slow to reach worry.
    “Ah,” I said patiently, “you mean ‘bombs,’ don’t you? Things that blow up? Uh-huh. Say, would you be offended if I asked—” I was interested in identifying his native tongue, but since this sort of inquiry might offend, I decided to add some soft soap: “Not that I’m suggesting you don’t speak English well.”
    “You crazy fokker!” he shouted. “Get your ahss from out that house or lose it! Now don’t talk no more, just ron.” He added what seemed a total irrelevancy: “Sebastiani Liberation Front.” And hung up abruptly.
    Trends come and go in all eras, but I should say that only in ours do they get successively more vile: in recent years it had become fashionable to detonate explosives in public places in the name of some usually unrecognizable cause. Frankly, I think the urge to destroy comes first, and then he who has it looks for a slogan to mouth while blowing up people and things, with the idea that his mayhem thereby becomes perfectly reasonable.
    At the moment I did not require a precise identification of the caller’s group: I had wasted too much time already. I dropped the phone and, I think, was out the door before I heard it hit the desk. I took the stairs in two bounds and was in the street on the third.
    A short, redhaired daughter of joy, a regular on the beat, was just sauntering past the building. “Hi, Rus!” said she. (I sometimes exchanged a bit of chaff with these ladies.) “You don’t look like you got it on straight, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
    It is with some pride that I can report my unthinking response as gallant: I swept this (fortunately little) tart up off her feet and, carrying her in the crook of my arm, like an outsized loaf of bread, I gained most of the block to the south before the explosion came, destroying not only my building but also the restaurant next door and the liquor shop across the street, along with its companions, the Asiatic spice shop and