“Not yet.”

“Well, I’m an artist. The dime’s my widow’s mite. Take it in good grace or in the future I’ll reduce my contribution to a penny.”

“Oh, you can’t do that, Mr. Turnquist,” the attendant said archly. “It would throw our whole budget out of whack.”

“You know me, eh?”

“Everybody knows you, Mr. Turnquist.” A heavy sigh. “Everybody.”

He took Turnquist’s dime and gave him a little yellow lapel pin for it. Turnquist faced us as he fastened the pin to the breast pocket of his thrift shop suit jacket. It was a sort of gray, and came reasonably close to matching his thrift shop trousers. He smiled, showing misaligned tobacco-stained teeth. He had a beard, a ragged goatee a little redder than his rusty brown hair and a little more infiltrated with gray, and the rest of his face was two or three days away from a shave.

“Little tin gods on wheels,” he advised us. “That’s all these people are. Don’t take any crap from them. If Art can be intimidated, it ain’t Art.”

He moved on and I laid a five-dollar bill on the counter and accepted two lapel pins in return. “An artist,” the attendant said meaningfully. He tapped another sign, which announced that children under the age of sixteen were not admitted, whether or not accompanied by an adult. “We ought to amend our policy,” he said. “No children, no dogs, and no artists.”

I’d awakened before Carolyn and went directly to a liquor store on West Seventy-second, where I bought a replacement bottle of Canadian Club. I took it home and knocked on Mrs. Seidel’s door, and when my knock went unanswered I let myself in and cracked the seal on the bottle, poured an ounce or so down the sink drain, capped the bottle and put it back where I’d found its fellow the night before.