The Erection Set

He survived, all right. I wish I could confirm all those rumors that had been seeping out of Europe the past twenty years. But no matter what I heard, they didn’t jell with the Dogeron Kelly I knew. Nice guys just don’t change. And the rumors were all screwed up too. One told of a darkly lethal character who blew the whole postwar black market business to hell and gone when he creamed out the hard operators, using Stateside mob money to disrupt the economy. Nobody wanted to talk about what happened after that. Then there was the other “El Lobo” ... the Wolf ... who tangled with the international financiers and took them for all they were worth. The Dog and The Wolf. There was a sameness there. The difference was that Dog could hardly handle simple mathematics. He never could solve a navigatio n problem when he had to use a Weems Computer or triangulate a course. If he hadn’t had a pigeon’s instinctive memory for time, distance and direction, he couldn’t have hit the floor with his hat. But he had, and he was always on target and always back again, sometimes leading strays and once a squadron whose numbers failed them. When it came to finance, he couldn’t even make sense out of British money, far less a French franc. If it wasn’t the American dollar it was all play money. The only other rate of ex- . change he understood was cigarettes and candy bars.

Yet, there was that change. Those damn eyes of his. They watched everything. He moved funny too, always knowing who was behind him and on either side, an odd awareness of where everyone else was and, when they were out of position, he knew and was ready to pounce.

Two Dogs? Three? It was possible. He was here now and I’d see him again. Digging into the dark corners was my game and now I’d really get to the answers. I had to. I was curious: I hoped I’d like what I’d find.

I was afraid I wouldn’t.

V

I never could figure out why people didn’t like the rain. A dull day, a little wet and it was growl time. Women brooded in tight little apartments tying up the telephones; husbands fidgeted on barstools, dragging out lunch hours into early hangovers; the few on the streets fought for taxicabs whose drivers seemed to take a sadistic satisfaction out of their predicament. Hell, the rain was nice. It cleaned things out. A good rain in New York was the city’s only mouthwash and it gargled happily and rumbled with pleasure as the garbage got spewed out down the drain.

At Park Avenue I turned north and walked a dozen blocks to the old Tritchett Building, found Chet Linden’s office number on the directory and took the elevator up to the sixth floor. He grinned when I walked in, waved me toward a chair, finished his phone conversation and swung around toward me. “Having trouble adjusting, Dog?”

“Catching up fast. The town sure has changed.”

“Not for the better.”

“That’s for sure,” I said. “When did you get in?”

“A week ago today. I miss London already. Get your ten grand yet?”

I pulled out my last cigarette and lit it. “There’s a morals clause attached to it.”

A slow laugh spread across his face. “And you can’t beat the rap?”

“Hardly.”