The address turned out to be in the neighborhood of the Mission, a venerable part of the city with fine old homes rising two and three stories among towering palms and cypress and sycamore. For a time Hook thought the directory had given a wrong address, for there was a 240 Mission Plaza and next a 242 but nothing in between except a driveway curving behind 240, which was a huge two-story Spanish-style home dark as a cemetery. Following the drive back around the house, Hook found the missing half—lights burning in an apartment above a large four-car garage that looked as if it had been a stable at one time. The light was dim—candlelight, it appeared—and shone through shades as colorful as stained-glass windows and covered with psychedelic designs. From inside came the sound of a wailing sitar. Hook climbed the stone stairway at the end of the structure and knocked on the door. After a moment, the music inside was turned down, and then he heard a toilet flushing, heard it from underneath, from the garage more than through the door of the apartment. Finally there was a voice, male, someone just on the other side of the door.

“Who is it?”

“My name is Hook. My son stayed here last week.”

There was no response for a time then, just the sound of voices inside, hurried, soft, much as it had been at Mrs. Rubin’s. Only here there was no window for the occupants to look out through; they would have to dare. And finally someone did. The door opened and a short thin young man wearing what looked like a Samurai warrior’s robe stepped into the opening. He had shoulder-length red hair and chalk-white skin that only reinforced Hook’s impression of him as someone in Japanese costume, a Kabuki player.

“Are you Isaac Huston?” Hook asked. “Icarus?”

The youth nodded uneasily. He looked both awed and frightened. “You’re Chris’s father?”

“Yes. He sent a letter from here.”

Icarus rolled his head theatrically. “Oh wow, man, what a thing that was to happen. I’m sure sorry for you. I still can’t believe it.”

“Could we talk?”

“What did you want to talk about?”

“A lot of things.”

The young man nodded a reluctant comprehension. “Oh. You want to come in, you mean. I’m having a few people in.”

“It’s up to you.”

Icarus shrugged his slender shoulders. “Well sure. Why not? Come on in.”

Following him, Hook stepped into the sort of room he had seen before only in magazines, a careful assemblage of the mod, the outrageous, and the simply unlivable. The wood floor was painted black, the walls red, the ceiling pink. There was a polka-dot mattress on the floor, an Eames chair, an old double car seat, a legless dining room table painted like a checkerboard, and a huge inflated clear plastic doughnut in which a young Negro male with a huge halo of Afro hair lolled sleepy-eyed. Overhead, a mobile made of mirrors of many colors and shapes turned slowly, catching the room’s candlelight and bounding it off the walls, which were covered with collages and protest posters and beautifully framed photographs of nude models, mostly male, the work of Icarus, Hook assumed. On the mattress a girl in a granny dress and rimless spectacles lay on her side, insouciantly studying Hook as she toyed with the shoulder-length tresses of a lean muscular young man sitting in front of her on the floor, with his head resting back against the swell of her hip. He was wearing an Indian headband, a threadbare serape, jeans and sandals, and he watched Hook with a look of weary contempt, as if the two of them were old enemies. As Icarus introduced Hook, not one of the three said a word.