“We heard,” said Mr. Allingham. “We heard you talking to her owl.” He raised his glass and stared at it, standing sadly and savagely in the middle of the room like a man with oblivion in his hand. Then he made his choice, and drank.

“We’re going places,” he said. “We’re taking a taxi and Sam is going to pay for it. We’re going to the West End to look for Lucille.”

“I knew she was a kind of Holy Grail,” George Ring said when they were all in the darkness of the taxi rattling through the rain.

Samuel felt Mrs. Dacey’s hand on his knee.

“Four knights at arms, it’s terribly exciting. We’ll call at the Gayspot first, then the Cheerioh, then the Neptune.”

“Four lost souls.”

The hand ached on along the thigh, five dry fishes dying on a cloth.

“Marble Arch,” Mr. Allingham said. “This is where the fairies come out in the moon.”

And the hurrying crowd in the rain might have had no flesh or blood.

“Park Lane.”

The crowd slid past the bonnet and the windows, mixed their faces with no features and their liquid bodies under a sudden blaze, or vanished into the streaming light of a tall door that led into the bowels of rich night London where all the women wore pearls and pricked their arms with needles.

A car backfired.

“Hear the champagne corks?”

Mr. Allingham is listening to my head, Samuel thought as he drew away from the fingers in the corner.

“Piccadilly. Come on Allingham’s tour. That’s the Ritz. Stop for a kipper, Sam?”

The Ritz is closed forever. All the waiters would be bellowing behind their hands. Gustave, Gustave, cried a man in an opera hat, he is using the wrong fork. He is wearing a tie with elastic at the back. And a woman in evening dress cut so low he could see her navel with a diamond in it leaned over his table and pulled his bow tie out and let it fly back again to his throat.

“The filthy rich,” he said. My place is among the beggars and the outlaws. With power and violence Samuel Bennet destroys the whole artifice of society in his latest novel, In the Bowels.

“Piccadilly Circus. Center of the world. See the man picking his nose under the lamppost? That’s the Prime Minister.”

3

The Gayspot was like a coal cellar with a bar at one end, and several coalmen were dancing with their sacks. Samuel, at the door, swaying between Mrs. Dacey and George Ring, felt his thigh, still frightened. He did not dare look down at it in case even the outside of the trouserleg bore the inexcusable imprint of his terror in the taxi.

“It’s cosmopolitan,” George Ring whispered. “Look at the niggers.”