Many of them had an arm or leg in a cast, and the ones with bottles mustered sullenly in doorways, never breaking their empties, leaving them behind as they themselves moved north to forage, or simply disappeared. Two feeble men wrestled quietly, humming wordless curses at each other, and an old woman limped into view, bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the penciled light of long retreat from Moscow. I opened the window and touched the brittle crust of snow settled on the ledge. The fire engine went speeding down Broadway, pure sound now, shrill wind, a voice from the evilest dreams.

A boy named Hanes, the fairest of Globke's assistants, came to see me one afternoon. He brought mail, newspapers, contracts and some cash.

"You were seen in a drive-in restaurant in Ocala, Florida," he said.

Hanes was barely twenty, poetically delicate in appearance, and it was hard to imagine him at work in the Transparanoia offices, a place where squat men, out-sweating the effects of air conditioning, were willing to hack off slabs of their own body fat to sell by the pound over transatlantic phone hookups.

"You were also seen at the airport in Benton Harbor, Michigan. According to the thing in the paper, the person who saw you walked up to you and said: 'Hey, Bucky, where you going?' And you said back: 'To get some Chinese food.' Then a two-engine plane rolled up and you got aboard."

Hanes sat on the edge of the unmade bed. His eyes never left me. I remembered a night on the West Coast some months before. The country's blood was up, this or that atrocity, home or abroad, and even before we hit the stage the whole place was shaking. We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a night of above-average fury. In our own special context we challenged the authenticity of the crowd's passion and wrath, dipping our bodies in coquettish blue light, merely teasing our instruments for the first hour or so.