“Look.” Berry-berry turned back the cover. The centers of all the pages had been cut out, and the big directory was used as a hiding place for certain small treasures: several articles of jewelry, a bundle of twenty-dollar bills, and a revolver. “See? This is my freedom. I keep my freedom in here. And any time I want to, I put this stuff in my pocket, and take off like a big-assed bird. Go ahead, look it over, if you want to. I got a real sapphire in there, worth seven hundred and fifty.”

He removed a bottle of brandy from under the bed, and took a swallow from it. “Here, you want a drink.”

Clinton hesitated for a moment. “Yes, please.” He reached for the bottle. Berry-berry held it away from him.

“Look, if you don’t want a drink, you don’t have to take it just because . . .”

“But I do.”

“Okay.” He handed Clinton the bottle. Clinton took a drink from it.

“You know where I got that ring?” Berry-berry said. “A woman from Palm Beach gave it to me. She and her husband had this yacht—an eighty-footer worth I don’t know how much—they had it tied up in Key Bonita. She gave me that ring; no kidding. I may never sell it, either, I may just keep it.” He breathed on the ring and rubbed it against his sweat shirt. “See those cuff links? Those I bought. And that night, I wore them with a two-hundred-dollar black suit. Everybody else was in white and cream and beige. Not me. Black. Listen, I could’ve had any woman there. I mean any. You think that’s bragging?”

“No,” Clinton said, “but where?”

“At this party on the yacht. And you know why I got invited? Not because I own half the town or because I’m the mayor or some other hot-shot. Because I’m not. I’m nothing. But, Clint, I’ll tell you, I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something about me that a woman—well, they take risks, they lie, they’ll do anything—just to latch on to some of it, whatever it is, this thing I got. And it’s not that I’m hung like a horse or anything either. ‘Cause in that respect I’m just a normal healthy guy. —Anyway, here’s what happened. You won’t even believe it. I was standing in a bookshop. A bookshop, for godsake, just hanging around, and—you remember Madeline Carroll? Well, just like that, only black-haired, and she came walking into the place. Really bored, you know. So bored, oh, boy. And pretty soon we were having this conversation. Nothing; just, I need a book for a sick friend, and all that; just a conversation. And so she bought a book and started to walk out of the place. Then she stopped, you know, like she’d forgotten her change or something, and said: ‘By the way, have you got a white suit and a black tie?’ I looked her up and down and I said, ‘Why, have you got one you’ve outgrown?’ And then she told me to come to this party on the yacht. I said, ‘How do you know I’m not some dangerous maniac that goes around murdering beautiful women?’ And then she said, ‘Well, in that case I won’t need a sleeping pill tonight, will I?’ And she walked out and got in her car. So I walked out there, real slow, you know, not anxious or anything, and I said, ‘Look, are you serious? Because I may just show up on that yacht.’ She said, ‘You’d better!’ So I said, ‘I thought you had a husband.’ And you know what she said then?”