On the second Wednesday in August following Angie the Rat’s handsome funeral (13 heart-broken mourners 13), Red Fred’s Village Voyages putted lackadaisically past the heat-prostrated eyeballs of one hundred and sixteen of New York’s Finest, beating its way uptown toward the East Side Airlines Terminal. Aboard were only Red Fred and three authentic, bohemian (what they used to call) beatniks.

The shades were by Ray-Ban, the slacks of Italian silk, the berets and bop-kick goatees courtesy of a four-year-old photo of Dizzy Gillespie in Down Beat and the open-toed thong sandals from Allan Bloch. They looked flea-ridden, esoteric and intense. One of them slept. One of them scratched. One of them sweated.

The “boys” were leaving the scene.

To split: to, like, make it. If you got eyes.

And other ethnic phrases of a similar nature.

The police re-marked the caravan sleepily. The intelligence that Fred had, on more than one occasion, denounced them as cossacks, kulaks, and cosmopolite hirelings of the infamous Joint Distribution Committee, had not yet reached them. True, from time to time, more as a conditioned reflex than anything else, they served him with a warrant for violating City Statute 1324 (entitled: An Ordinance Against Running Stagecoaches On Streets Not Illuminated With Gaslamps); and at Yuletide they put the arm on him for “charitable” contributions odd and sundry. But aside from that, he was seldom bothered by them.

As the snail undulated its way along MacDougal Street there came into sight at a point just abaft The Kettle of Fish a tall, gaunt, gold-encrusted police officer with a face like a horse who has not only just read Baudelaire for the first time but has scribbled How True! in the margin.

This was Captain Cozenage, whose record while in charge of the Homicide Squad was without parallel in the annals of crime: as a result of which he had been, in rapid succession, switched to the Loft Robberies, Pigeon Drop, Unlicensed Phrenologists, and Mopery Squads: and was now entrusted with a letter-of-marque to suppress steamboat gamblers on the East River.