Raymond said, “The more I see you, the more I think it’s a good skinny you are.”

“What do we do now? I mean, about Raf,” I asked.

“Oh, there’s still some brick walls we can beat our heads against,” said Raymond.

Before he left, he said, “ ‘How is the gold become dim,’ Lamentations: four, one.”

He said tomorrow I should try an address near Viet Nam Plaza, close to the downtown. “No, wait on that until I can take you,” he said. “Or pack a rod, I most strongly advise.”

And on, “ ‘I am the man that hath known affliction. . . . It was I whom he led . . . where no light is,’ Lamentations: three, verse—don’t remember.” He left.

The Firecat had cream-colored seats, a radio-cassette and c.d. deck, smoked windows, burglar alarms, willful air conditioning.

But I was late getting started, having put off awakening till noon and then spent an hour with the street map just trying to figure a route to Viet Nam Plaza.

As I drove along the South Loop now in dusk’s glow, the banking sun and rising moon were comically big, vermilion.

I exited where my map was marked with Lumolighter; piloted down a ramp, passed the Phan Dai Butcher Shop, and entered a hopeless ghetto.

The downtown buildings—banks and towers from before the crash—with their height and cool angles and slick panes, loomed close but unreal as Oz beside these junkyard streets.

Like a little bit of Saigon, this village was—Hau Dac Ti Place: bombed-out restaurants, shelled shops. The houses were lean-tos, and there wasn’t one lawn.

My fingernail creased the street map balanced on my thigh. I needed to find Astro Ave.

The address Raymond had given me was for a converted filling station: a windowless building with CATFISH DEN painted along its forehead. Another sign read, BILLIARDS, WINE SET UPS, AIR COOLED! Razzle-dazzle lights spangled on a third sign out in the gravel parking lot. Most of the letters were bashed out on that sign. I couldn’t guess what it said—L T QU STL Y HA.

The temperature was a hundred and seven. The air smelled of crude oil. It felt wet but there would be no rain, not here or anywhere else according to the headline of the Chronicle.

Actually, the address was for the place upstairs, which was a natural-wood box on stilts. The area beneath the box was filled with candy-colored car seats, parts of cars, two refrigerators, a Danish Modern couch.

The only way up was an unrailed flight of steps. But up there, life! In three windows buzzed noisy fans.

The woman who answered my knock said, “You’re from Raymond?”

“I’m Paige. Mrs. Deveaux.”

“Right, then I’m Jewels,” the woman said. She was light-skinned, green-eyed, blonde, with the face shape and features of a Scandinavian. She wore a flowered kimono.