“No we can’t, Ed,” said Otto Rank. “Not this time. I’m surprised you don’t know that.” He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I think you do.” He lifted his finger in Ed’s face, pointed it like a gun. “Later,” he said.

“Fuck you, Rank,” Ed said.

He knew something was wrong when Rank only laughed and left.

“Shit, Ed,” Hanson said. He shrugged. Then he left too.

After he was sure they were gone, Ed went out to his car, a four-to-the-floor ’47 Dodge into which someone had shoehorned the 409 from a ’52 Caddy. He fired it up and sat in it for a moment listening to the four-barrel suck air. He looked at his hands.

“We can do it either way you fuckers,” he whispered. Then he dumped the clutch and drove downtown.

He had to find out what was going on. He knew a broad in the DA’s office called Robinson. He persuaded her to go to Sullivan’s diner with him and get lunch. She was a tall woman with a wide smile, good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours. Ed knew that he could find that out if he wanted to. He could find that out, but he was more interested in the Brady case, and what Rank and Hanson knew.

“Hey,” he said. “Rita.”

“Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,” said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. “Don’t put that sugar on me,” she sang.

Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan’s when he heard her say:

“Hey, Ed. You still fuck?”

He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan’s doorway. Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn’t, began to ask her what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.

“Jesus, Ed,” she said. “Look.”

He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.

4
Operations of the Heart

“But you never phone!” Anna Kearney said.

“I’m phoning now,” he explained, as if to a child.

“You never come and see me.”