“Just you and me, podner?” sez Bodine. “Ain’t that kind of cutting it a little close?”

“Listen,” Roger chuckling unhealthily at what’s also just occurred to him, “we can’t even bring those big rubber cocks along. Tonite, we’re going to have to use our wits!”

“Tell you what, I’ll just send a motorcycle out to Putzi’s, round us up a goon squad, and—”

“You know what? You’ve lost your sense of adventure. Yeh. You didn’t use to be like this, you know.”

“Look old buddy,” pronouncing it in Navy Dialect: buddih, “c’mon, buddih. Putcherself in my shoes.”

“I might, if they weren’t… that… shade of yellow—”

“Just a humble guy,” the swarthy doughboy of the deep scratching in his groin after an elusive crab with a horn finger, rippling the ballooning pleats and fabric of his trousers, “just a freckleface kid from Albert Lea, Minnesota, down there on Route 69 where the speed limit’s lickety-split all night long, just tryin’ t’ make it in the Zone here, kind of a freckleface kid used a safety pin through a cork for a catwhisker and stayed up listened to the voices coast to coast before I was 10 and none of them ever recommended gettin’ into any of them gang wars, buddih. Be glad you’re still so fuckin’ naïve, Rog, wait’ll you see your first European-gangster hit, they like to use 3 rounds: head, stomach, and heart. You dig that stomach? Over here stomach’s no second-class organ, podner ’n’ that’s a good autumn kind of thought to keep in mind.”

“Bodine, didn’t you desert? That’s a death-sentence, isn’t it?”

“Shit, I can square that. But I’m only a cog. Don’t go thinking I know everything. All I know is my trade. I can show you how to wash coke and assay it, I can feel a gem and tell you from the temperature if it’s a fake—the fake won’t suck as much heat from your body, ‘glass is a reluctant vampire,’ ancient dealers’ saying, a-and I can spot funny-money easy as E on an eye chart, I got one of the best visual memories in the Zone—” So, Roger drags him off, monologuing, in his zoot suit, to the Krupp wingding.