But although I had such feelings and made such judgments, I couldn’t rid myself of the habit of watching for glimpses of higher capacities and incipient powerful forces in, say, the rich, stupid black eyes of Jay Wustrin’s mother, or in Bodo Heisinger’s second try – his marriage to the wife jailed for plotting to have him rubbed out, knocked off, shot dead.

I myself seem to be doing an idiotic thing in looking for signs of highest ability in human types evidently devoted to being barren.

Sometimes I wonder whether my mother, whom I have long suspected of being a hypochondriac, had done this to me by putting me into a Jewish orphanage, where I was taught (but at the time did not agree) that the Jews were a chosen people. This may be the nucleus of my belief that the powers of our human genius are present where one least expects them. Yes, even in what a friend of mine once described as ‘the moronic inferno.’

I don’t claim one single thing for this (personal) habit of examining features and behaviors. It’s all intuited. Not a thing is provable. And very possibly it is a carryover from some vestigial Jewish impulse, in some instances still strongly at work.

With my Chink or Jap looks, I am seldom taken for a Jew. I suppose there is some advantage in this. When you are identified as a Jew, you are fair game. The rules of behavior change, and you become in a sense expendable. Now, Adletsky, as one of the richest men in the world, didn’t need to care whether you esteemed him or not. He was openly Jewish, because it was altogether too clear. Besides, your opinion didn’t matter a damn to him. But the case of Bodo Heisinger was different. You couldn’t say whether or not Bodo was a Jew. Would a Jew divorce and then marry again a woman convicted of scheming to murder him? To do that put him far beyond any Jewish conception of the relations between men and women.

The old toy manufacturer needed to be where the action was, all the kinks and the scandals. He still drove his mental motorcycle and drove, as it were, at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon. He had knocked the hit man’s gun out of his hand. He had had him put away. And then he had had him released. When the kids’ demand was for ever more repulsive, menacing space-alien dolls, he anticipated the trend and led the industry in sales.

And, now, in came Madge. Amy remembered having met her once or twice when she was Jay’s client, fifteen years ago. She looked different – very attractive, Amy granted. She was slender, not too hippy. Prison must have kept her in condition. She had a good bust, an oval face, a well-shaped head. She was very fair, a golden babe whose hair was pinned tightly, almost to the point of strain, and braided at the back. Amy had seen her silk suit in an Escada window – five thousand bucks on her back, plus matching sapphires on the fingers and hanging from her ears. The few golden hairs that broke loose from control seemed independently strong. In the wilderness (Amy allowed herself a fun image), you could make a trout fly of such hairs and attach it to a bent pin. In jail for forty months, she had probably worn dungarees or smocks. But now there wasn’t a shadow of prison anywhere. Merely a change of scene and costume. She was very handsome, Amy thought. It was only the woman’s nose that was wrong – too full at the tip to be entirely feminine. All the more reason, therefore, to present the voluptuous bust in an Escada frame. She wore a silk blouse with ruffled cuffs. This Madge Heisinger was a real turn-on. Imagine what an effect she would have made lying nude, wearing nothing but the sapphires, drawing a man toward her with salty sweet-talk. Plus (let’s not omit it) the extra relish of a plotted murder.