9

"You got an envelope around here?" "Try the drawer under the sink. There's Christmas cards and things in there," she said.

Meadows rooted around in the drawer until he came up with a blue-tinted envelope almost six inches square and he folded his yellow pages neatly and stuffed them into the envelope. It already had a stamp on it. Meadows knew Flossie was watching as he sealed the envelope and printed an address on it.

He walked to her side and casually dropped the envelope onto her big belly.

"If anything happens to me, I want you to promise that you'll see that gets delivered."

Flossie glanced down. The envelope was addressed to: "The President of the U.S., Washington, Personal and Confidential."

He expected her to be impressed. She looked at him and said "What's going to happen to you!"

"You never know," he said. He turned toward the door.

"Hey, you're serious, aren't you?" Flossie said.

He nodded without turning.

"You going to take care of yourself?"

"You know it," he said.

"I wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

"I know," Meadows said.

"Before you leave, would you get me the bottle of Fleischmann's under the sink?"

He handed her the bottle, let himself out through all the burglar barriers, and started downstairs. Inside the apartment, Flossie took a swig from the bottle of rye, looked at the envelope, smirked and tossed it toward the corner. It landed on a pile of clothes.

Meadows allowed himself the unaccustomed lux-

10

ury of a taxicab to get to the Lifeline Laboratory. It was in a brownstone building on East Eighty-first Street, a building distinguished from its neighbors only by the visible fact that it had a small identifying, plaque next to the front door, and the invisible fact that it alone, of all the buildings on the block, was not overrun with roaches, a condition New Yorkers accepted with their accustomed stolidity despite the fact that apartments on the street rented for $275 a room.