“You were right. You are the man.”

“That’s nothing.” Errol Flynn frisks his mustache. “I saved a dame from an octopus not so long ago, how about that?”

“With one difference,” sez Blodgett Waxwing. “This really happened tonight. But that octopus didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know a lot. Not everything, but a few things you don’t. Listen Slothrop—you’ll be needing a friend, and sooner than you think. Don’t come here to the villa—it may be too hot by then—but if you can make it as far as Nice—” he hands over a business card, embossed with a chess knight and an address on Rue Rossini. “I’ll take the envelope back. Here’s your suit. Thanks, brother.” He’s gone. His talent is just to fade when he wants to. The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain’s there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutiérrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Gutiérrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge was allowing zoot-suiters to choose between jail and the Army. Gutiérrez joined up, was wounded on Saipan, developed gangrene, had to have his arm amputated, is home now, married to a girl who works in the kitchen at a taco place in San Gabriel, can’t find any work himself, drinks a lot during the day… . But his old zoot, and those of thousands of others busted that summer, hanging empty on the backs of all the Mexican L.A. doors, got bought up and have found their way over here, into the market, no harm turning a little profit, is there, they’d only have hung there in the fat smoke and the baby smell, in the rooms with shades pulled down against the white sun beating, day after day, on the dried palm trees and muddy culverts, inside these fly-ridden and empty rooms… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

Imipolex G has proved to be nothing more—or less—sinister than a new plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic polymer, developed in 1939, years before its time, by one L. Jamf for IG Farben. It is stable at high temperatures, like up to 900°C., it combines good strength with a low power-loss factor. Structurally, it’s a stiffened chain of aromatic rings, hexagons like the gold one that slides and taps above Hilary Bounce’s navel, alternating here and there with what are known as heterocyclic rings.