‘I see. . . . Oh well, never mind.’ (She’s brave, now.) ‘I’ll try you again, may I, in a few days?’

‘Of course.’ (Oh – why not be a little nicer, now she’s been put in her place?) ‘Or I’ll call you.’

(A pause.)

‘Well – goodbye, Geo.’

‘Goodbye, Charley.’

Twenty minutes later, Mrs Strunk, out on her porch watering the hibiscus bushes, watches him back his car out across the bridge. (It is sagging badly, nowadays. She hopes he will have it fixed; one of the children might get hurt.) As he makes the half-turn on to the street, she waves to him. He waves to her.

Poor man, she thinks, living there all alone. He has a kind face.

It is one of the marvels and blessings of the Los Angeles freeway system that you can now get from the beach to San Tomas State College in fifty minutes, give or take five, instead of the nearly two hours you would have spent, in the slow old days, crawling from stoplight to stoplight clear across the downtown area and out into the suburbs beyond.

George feels a kind of patriotism for the freeways. He is proud that they are so fast, that people get lost on them and even sometimes panic and have to bolt for safety down the nearest cutoff. George loves the freeways because he can still cope with them; because the fact that he can cope proves his claim to be a functioning member of society. He can still get by.

(Like everyone with an acute criminal complex, George is hyperconscious of all bylaws, city ordinances, rules and petty regulations. Think of how many Public Enemies have been caught just because they neglected to pay a parking ticket! Never once has he seen his passport stamped at a frontier, his driver’s licence accepted by a post office clerk as evidence of identity, without whispering gleefully to himself, idiots – fooled them again!)

He will fool them again this morning, in there, in the midst of the mad metropolitan chariot race – Ben Hur would certainly chicken out – jockeying from lane to lane with the best of them, never dropping below eighty in the fast left lane, never getting rattled when a crazy teenager hangs on to his tail or a woman (it all comes of letting them go first through doorways) cuts in sharply ahead of him.