“Maybe I could just go in there and ask around.”

The officer took the cigarette from his mouth and pointed with it. “Listen, you know what I want you to do? At noon tomorrow, there’s a bus goes to Naples. You get on that bus and go home, hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Festival is situated cater-cornered at the end of Gasparilla Street, across the street from the Tin Pot Arms. The pilings that support the building are partly in the water, in the Gulf of Mexico. On its board-and-batten exterior has been painted a myriad of colored bubbles on a field of green, so that the place has the look of an enormous earthbound balloon. Lettering on some of the larger bubbles enumerate its wares: FUN, BEER, DANCING, GIRLS, CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT, FOOD.

Clinton did not hesitate outside the place. He pushed the door forward and walked right in.

The Festival is one huge room. An elongated horseshoe-shaped bar occupies the center of it, and inside this horseshoe is a long spot-lighted ramp. These spotlights seem to be the only source of light in the place, so that its periphery, where the tables are located, appears at first to be in total darkness.

At the bar, a scuffle was taking place that engaged the attention of the bartender and the bouncer. Clinton’s entrance was therefore unnoticed by these people. He went directly to one of the tables that lined the walls and sat there in the dark. There were no other customers at the tables, but more than half of the bar stools were occupied. A large cluster of sailors on one side of the horseshoe bar looked across the ramp at a cluster of girls who sat opposite them. Other girls moved about desultorily among solitary male customers. Clinton watched several of these brief dumb shows of conversation but he did not wonder at what was being said because his attention was somewhat divided. A naked woman was making her way down the center of the ramp, unable to keep time with the jukebox music that accompanied her, but shaking various parts of her body in an awkward, lumbering rhythm of its own. Aside from Clinton himself, the only person in the room who paid any attention to the dancing woman was a lone sailor who looked upon her with the cold indifference of a butcher appraising a side of beef. Meanwhile, the bouncer, a wiry cat-like little man, was helping a big drunk with the problem of getting into his shoes.

All this activity in the Festival Night Club took place on a kind of screen projection of Clinton’s deepest concern: Berry-berry and his whereabouts. In his mind, when he saw this picture of Berry-berry, he could see only the back of his head, and it kept moving farther and farther away. This caused in him a painful anxiety that was centered in his chest. If a doctor had asked him to describe the feeling, he might have said it was like a wound caused by a poisoned arrowhead under his heart, and it caused his nerves to tingle in a hurtful way.