Such amenities, confirming what had heretofore been mere wicked suspicions, instantly brought the yokels back for more. More, MORE; and, for the moment, left the competition nowhere. Fred might even have dispensed with the jumbo beret, the black tinted-lens horn rims, and the chestnut-colored beaver, which served him in lieu of neon signs and barkers; only he was stubborn.

And to be brutally honest (dealing as we are with clinical detail), Fred had to wear the beret, shades and foliage. He was not called Red Fred for naught. His name still appeared with inglorious regularity on subversive lists circulated by private, alphabetized agencies; and he thought it best to await the Revolution incognito.

It was, perhaps, because the assassins had hyped up his almost moribund business that Red Fred thought with mild kindnesses (when he thought of them at all) of Big Patsy and his two side-boys, whose names at this stage of narration are unnecessary. One can well imagine Red Fred’s dismay, then, at the appearance, the following Tuesday, of Gook, the blind beggar (whose bobby was serving alternate Thursday nights as a Civil Defense sky watcher), who informed him that Big Patsy was indeed anxious to see the tour guide posthaste. This, to make clear Red Fred’s attitude was (in the fullest Hitchcockian sense of the cliché), for the birds.

Gook made it abundantly evident, however, that if Red Fred did not bust his tuchus getting down to the empty loft building, on the corner of Bleecker and Bank streets, it might well fall on him the next time he went by. And that Big Patsy would be most reluctantly compelled to come and get him.

There was even some mention of sulphuric acid.