It had begun some months before in Manhattan at the junction of three streams-a job, a girl, and a most noble lost cause. The job involved preparation of a thesis that would win Brian Cudahy a master’s degree in history from Columbia University. The girl was Kitty Bazerian, who rolls her belly in Chelsea nightclubs as Alexandra the Great. The noble lost cause, one of the noblest, one of the most utterly lost, was the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia.

I first saw Brian Cudahy on a Saturday morning. My mail had just arrived, and I was sitting in my living room sorting it. I receive a tremendous amount of mail. I’m on hundreds of mailing lists and I subscribe to a great many periodicals, and my mail carrier detests me. I live on 107th Street a few doors west of Broadway. My neighbors are transients and addicts and students and Orientals and actors and harlots, six classes of people who get little in the way of mail. Bills from Con Ed and the telephone company, slingers from the supermarkets, quarterly messages from their congressman, little else. I, on the other hand, burden my mailman with a sack of paper garbage every day.

My bell rang. I pressed a buzzer to admit my caller into the building. He climbed four flights of stairs and hesitated in the hallway. I waited, and he knocked, and I opened the door.