“Pointsman,” the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship among purple clouds (very dense purple, as pile velvet that color) at nightfall when the sea-breeze promises a difficult landing, “I’ve saved you for last. But—goodness, I don’t seem to have any urine left, here. Not even a drop. I’m so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you understand? If it means giving my life,” the words have just come out, and maybe Roger’s exaggerating, but maybe not, “there will be nothing anywhere for you. What you get, I’ll take. If you go higher in this, I’ll come and get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest, with an understanding woman in a quiet room, I’ll be at the window. I’ll always be just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I’ll go in, and the room will be defiled for you, haunted, and you’ll have to find another. If you stay inside I’ll come in anyway—I’ll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You’ll have the last room, Pointsman, and you’ll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life.”

Pointsman won’t look at him. Won’t meet his eyes. That’s what Roger wanted. The security police show up as an anticlimax, although aficionados of the chase scene, those who cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase scene, chase scene, wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret there—these enthusiasts may find interest in the following:

Roger dives under the table to button his fly and the zealous flatties leap at each other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but Roger has gone scuttling down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped, Mom’s-argyle-socked sublevel of these conspirators above, a precarious passage, any one foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe him out—till he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the necktie or the cock, whichever it’s easiest to get a hold on, and drags the man down under the table.

“Right. Now, we’re going to get out of here, and you’re my hostage, get it?” He emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock, pulling him like a child’s sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door, past the modally unusual rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated-looking at least, sirens already wailing in the street MANIAC ASSAULTS OIL PARLEY Ousted After——ing on Conferees and he’s out of the elevator by now running down a back corridor to a central-heating complex zoom! over the heads of a couple of black custodians who are passing back and forth a cigarette rolled from some West African narcotic herb, stuffs his hostage into a gigantic furnace which is banked for the spring (too bad), and flees out the back way down an aisle of plane trees into a small park, over a fence, zippety zop, fastfoot Roger and the London cops.