Underdogs
By Robert Ryan
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About this ebook
Seattle burned to the ground in 1889 and a new city was built on top of the old. A century later, the original Seattle remains: empty streets, crumbling sidewalks, and pitch-black passageways, twelve feet beneath the modern metropolis.
When a stickup goes horribly wrong, Hilton “Rabbit” Babcock and his eight-year-old hostage, Ali, tumble through the rotten floor of an abandoned warehouse and into the subterranean city. They are not alone. Strange, desperate characters lurk in the shadows of old Seattle, and they don’t take kindly to visitors. But with the cops and the ruthless drug queen he’s in debt to waiting aboveground, Rabbit has little choice but to plunge deeper into the dark, dragging Ali along with him. To bring her out, the Seattle PD turns to a Vietnam vet who spent his war years flushing the Viet Cong from their jungle tunnels. Is Lewis ready to face his demons and go underground again? Ali’s life might just depend on it.
Robert Ryan
Robert Ryan is an author, journalist and screenwriter who regularly contributes to GQ and the Sunday Times where he was Deputy Travel Editor for seven years. Ryan is currently working on his next novel and a variety of television projects. Find out more at RobTRyan.com and follow him on Twitter @robtryan.
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Underdogs - Robert Ryan
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.
—Luis Bunuel.
PROLOGUE
The Ben Moc (Big Mac) Woods, north of Cu Chi Town, Vietnam. 1969.
HE SENSED THE PATROL even before he heard them, picked up the vibrations of the Armoured Personnel Carrier that disgorged the soldiers onto his patch, heard the wind carry their nervous, jokey exchanges. Crouching in his pit, surrounded by fetid, crumbling earth and the severed stumps of tree roots, Tran Van Giang was attuned to the surrounding soil. His entire body, after thousands of hours’ moving through the blackness, had evolved, mole-like, into an organic receiver and amplifier of movement. From the heavy fall of enormous feet encased in GI boots to the softest multi-limbed scrapings of the giant centipedes that roamed the burrows, he perceived every intrusion into his world, above and below ground.
He tried not to think too much about the creatures that shared his crepuscular domain, about the mites that his wife had painfully picked out from his arms and legs with a heated needle just ten days before. Already, in the forty-eight hours since his return underground, he could feel new invaders slipping effortlessly under his skin, raising tiny tracks as they made their random progress around his limbs. His wife had been right: as far as the land was concerned, he must be like one of the mites, burrowing and digging and worming his way just below the surface. It wasn’t, she said, natural. It was no way to treat the country, the planet, living in it like some lurking parasite, when he should be in the sunlight, farming and raising cattle and children.
He felt the APC rumble off, probably to a prearranged pick-up point. There had been a time when helicopters would have provided aerial surveillance and back-up, but their losses to shoulder-launched rockets had proved too grievous even for the Yankees. The soldiers, meanwhile, would be sweeping forward, looking for his underground hiding place. Well, not his, but any evidence of tunnels like his in the vicinity. He was glad and grateful that he had carefully re-planted the lid of the trapdoor just before dawn, meticulously arranging fresh green shoots into random patterns, and dumping the old decaying camouflage branches many metres away. He had deliberately taken his time so as to linger long enough to feel the first rays of sunlight on his skin, the beams that brought the Americans out of their camps and into the countryside, where, if all went well, he would kill them.
Now he could hear the patrol coming, probably line abreast, each one swivelling his head, frantically scanning the ground for Charlie, gooks, slopes, zips, VCs, slants, and all the other terms they used to dehumanise the elusive enemy. The element of surprise to Tran’s assault was long gone: these days the GIs knew all about the pop-up soldiers and their trapdoors. Yet, despite that, every time they seemed genuinely shocked, like a little child with a spring-loaded toy, repeatedly wondering how it could possibly work, marvelling at how an entire army could operate underground almost without trace. And without cold drinks, too.
Tran played the old game, mentally gambling with himself as to just how many Americans there would be when he stood and lifted the lid. At stake, of course, was his life. If he misjudged this he, like too many of his comrades over the last five years, would be blown apart by M-16 fire before he had a chance to so much as aim. They would be taking him home in a couple of rice sacks if that happened. He realised he was holding his breath at the prospect of his wife explaining to their daughter, years in the future, how her father had died a hero. In a filthy hole in the ground. He must remember to breathe.
The air was the worst part of tunnel life. Going back to his village for a week’s precious leave for the first time in over a year made him realise that. Not that he was complaining. He was lucky to have had it at all—the cadre had been uncharacteristically generous; the Northerners never got to return; the Ho Chi Minh trail was one-way for them.
But coming up and walking and cooking and eating above ground, seeing colours and the sky and even, away from this bomb-blasted, chemically scoured zone, trees and birds, perhaps it had been a mistake. He was ashamed to admit to himself, so ashamed he felt like blurting it out at the next self-criticism session, that the very last night he had dared to dream of not coming back, of not lowering himself into the miles of tunnels once again for … for how long? They had been at war for twenty-five years or more. Japanese, French, ARVN, and then Americans. It could be another twenty-five years.
Except he knew, when he heard the GI crying in the night after a punji had passed clean through the man’s boot and out the top, that something had changed. When he had listened to the big black man wailing and sobbing like Tran’s three-month-old daughter, the daughter he got to see for seven short days before coming back to his underworld, he knew that what the cadres had been saying since the Tet Offensive was right—the spirit of these large, hairy foreigners was indeed running low. Perhaps they were all crying like that inside, crying for their daddy to pick them up and take them home. Tran Van Giang, and his companions who made up his fighting cell, they or their friends or their sons and daughters could last another quarter of a century, even breathing this disgusting air. At least, he liked to think so. The Americans must be tiring of losing their feet, their limbs, their lives for nothing at all. Tran should have killed the sobbing soldier that night. Instead, he slipped back into the forest. He couldn’t take the life of anything that had reminded him of his daughter. He sucked through his teeth once more.
At the core of that small packet of inhaled air was the scent of soil, the odour of the red clay, overlaid with a musty tang of ripe vegetation and the damp of mildew and fungal growths. But overriding all that were the corruptions added by human life under here—the sweat and shit, the smoke from the underground kitchens, the aroma of a hastily lit Compatriot cigarette, the nauseous stench of rotten rice. Added to this diabolical recipe was the acid sharpness of rat or bat droppings, and worst of all, the unmistakable odour of stale blood from discarded, decomposing bandages. The final ingredients of this olfactory soup issued from hastily buried limbs from even hastier amputations, and, ironically, the dead who had to be kept down here in makeshift graves, until they could be buried in less haste, with due ceremony.
As the casualties mounted, though, sometimes nobody was left who could remember where all the bodies were stored, so digging a new side tunnel occasionally unearthed forgotten heroes of the NLF or the People’s Army of North Vietnam. And even those they never found, Tran occasionally felt their ghosts move by him in the tunnel, the breath of their unhappy souls hot on his cheeks. He had built a shrine at home to the dead comrades, charging his wife to tend it well, in case, he too, joined the list. He let himself embrace the feeling he had for his wife, relished the bitter-sweet pain. He missed her.
A rustle made him jump. Someone was sweeping the undergrowth very near his trapdoor. For once there were no booby traps up there, no tripwires, no punji stakes, no exploding Coca-Cola cans or Zippos, no Bouncing Bettys to leap up to groin level and fill American manhood with ball-bearings and steel splinters, nothing to warn them and put them on their guard that there was someone like Tran lurking in the blackness.
For a minute or more he had been aware of the scraping of a human form through the earth below, but from the speed of the movements he knew this was no clumsy, frightened American. There was an earth fall below and behind him, and the softest of grunts, although down here it sounded louder than a water buffalo fart. Nguyen, his face lit by a tiny bamboo shoot/nut oil lamp, appeared at the main tunnel entrance, a metre below. Tran quickly put his finger to his lips, a move he knew was probably unnecessary in Nguyen’s case, but even the best of them made mistakes in their excitement. One word could float free of the earth and catch the ear of the Americans, particularly those who had started coming down after them. They, too, had begun to develop odd, inhuman instincts, although not as strong as the Vietnamese. They, after all, still went back to their luxurious bases at night, feeding, he had heard, on steaks almost bigger than Tran himself—perhaps that was where their distinctive greasy meat smell came from—and drinking beer and whisky and even washing in water that had been specially flown in for them, while Tran and the others choked on their cooking smoke or, if it was too dangerous to cook, feasted on what was left of their single rice-ball ration. The only advantage was that being below permanently kept the senses sharp.
Nguyen, who had been spying on the patrol from the far trapdoor, raised his fingers. Eight of them. He slashed the air. Walking in a straight line. He indicated with a pointed crooked finger. Just passing overhead. Tran acknowledged the information and Nguyen slipped away, taking his meagre light with him, leaving Tran back in the darkness. He didn’t want to be blinded when he went up: any second now he would flick on the lighter he had retrieved from a dead American and stare at the flame long enough to constrict his pupils a little. Too many times he had popped up and wasted valuable seconds blinking away the scalding tears from eyes unused to the harsh glare of natural light.
The sweeping sounds had stopped. He heard the soldiers shout to each other excitedly, and the thump of running boots. They were too near to have discovered the other trapdoor, and, even though he understood not a word of what they said, he quickly sensed the despondency and disappointment (or was it forced, phony bravado he detected?) as they unearthed nothing but a false alarm. The search resumed.
Soon, then. He checked the carbine by touch. By now Tran could do everything in the dark, anything he was capable of in the light, even fieldstrip this weapon. It wasn’t a proper carbine, of course, but one of the hundreds of copies turned out in the subterranean weaponries south of his position, in the Fil Hol garrison. A few metres down the main tunnel, resting in Tran’s alcove, was a far superior Chinese AK-47. But that had such a strong signature when fired, GIs instinctively flattened. The carbine sounded like the US weapon that was its distant ancestor, the one that had been captured, stripped and copied and cast from sand moulds in the underground forges, and he knew that for a few moments the soldiers would freeze and check to see what their friends were firing at. Those few moments were all he needed.
Now. He flicked the lighter on and watched the details of his burrow grow dim as the flame danced before him, painfully searing his retina.
Crouched on his narrow ledge, all he had to do was stand and the lid flipped open. The movements were smooth and well practised. Stand, shoulder weapon, fire. Ignore the sky and the surroundings—not that the chemicals and napalm had left much beauty here to distract him—ignore the half a dozen sweet, sweet breaths he would get of real air. Just drop the enemy and disappear.
There were eight all right, six facing forward and two behind. He was unlucky that day. One of the rear observers saw him immediately and almost got a warning shout out before Tran’s carbine bullet took him and spun him backwards. Neck wound. Probably be dead when the medevac helicopters got here. The next two he hit in the back before they had a chance to turn, one in the shoulder-blade, the other in the top of the leg, punching out an arc of shockingly red blood, which seemed to hang there in the early-morning air. An artery, he thought happily. That was a spray of death if ever he saw one. The first rattle of an M-16 sent leaves and twigs dancing to his left. He had allowed himself to be distracted after all. One more shot and back down.
Now, he thought, as the trapdoor slammed shut on the overworld, the game really begins.
PART ONE
AT 2.45 PM ON June 6, 1889 an overturned glue pot at a workshop on Madison Street began the great fire of Seattle, which destroyed most of the old downtown, an area of more than sixty blocks. When it came to rebuilding it was decided to raise the floor level one storey, to help eliminate the drainage and sewage problems the city faced, especially at high tide. Many of the shops remained open at below street level (accessed by ladders) until early this century, when the sealing in of the original first floor of the city was completed.
These days Seattle, Washington is a city of 516,259 people. It covers 84 square miles of land, 8 square miles of water. It is bounded on one side by Elliott Bay, the other by Lake Washington, with the smaller Lake Union to the North. It has 35 inches of rain per annum, thanks to being in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains to the west. The top five companies in town are Boeing, Costco, the Weyerhaeuser timber company, Microsoft and the truck producer Paccar. The city has 1,260 sworn police officers, including 42 lieutenants, 138 sergeants, 224 detectives and 834 officers. There are 648 civilians employed by the Police Department. Seattle has an average of 40 murders per year, 260 rapes, 1,025 armed robberies, 7,695 burglaries and 6,944 incidents of auto-theft. The most popular cars to steal are older Volkswagens and Hondas. The police receive 2,429 911 calls on an average day.
ONE
The Paul Allen Athletic Club, Seattle, Washington. October. Friday 7.10 pm. Now.
LEWIS HAD OFTEN COMPLAINED about the public address system. Why, in the midst of a game of racquetball, should he have to listen to the fact that a lost child was at the reception desk, that tickets for the Mariners or the Seahawks were on special at reception, that Microsoft was proud to sponsor this year’s Fringe Theater Festival?
Most of the time he managed to block it out, ignore the mundanities echoing around the court walls. Now he was two strides and a backhand away from victory when he heard the name. He had not been aware of the run-up to it, nor did the roar in his ears allow him to catch much of the second part of the sentence. All he really heard was ‘Mr Dodo’.
Then the court lights seemed to dim, and he had to clench hard—then harder—his anal sphincter and his buttocks to prevent him soiling the polished wooden floor. The pucker effect they used to call it—some weird muscle that contracted and tried to pull your asshole inside-out. For a second he thought he was going to faint, but then the lights came up again. His forehead prickled as if his body was pumping pure hydrochloric acid out of its pores.
‘Ha-ha’. While Lewis struggled to keep his bearings, Tenniel leapt in—or perhaps merely fell—scooped up the missed ball and hammered it against the wall with all the ferocity a fat cop can manage. They both watched it dribble feebly into the back corner. But it was Tenniel’s point. He beamed with the pleasure of a man who can tell his wife how well the new fitness regime was going.
Lewis lost that one and managed another perfunctory game, sweating a quantity of fluid completely out of proportion to his exertion, before accepting defeat. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Tenniel. ‘You’re playing like you need a crap or something.’
‘Sorry, John. You just outplayed me, I guess. Haven’t got the stamina.’ He managed a weak best-man-won smile.
Tenniel flashed his teeth back, ignoring for once the grating that he felt when Lewis’s prissy New England vowels strangled stamina into stemina. ‘Well, it had to happen sometime. You sure you’re OK?’
Lewis knew that Tenniel was waiting for something to take the edge off the victory, such as Lewis revealing he had a hernia operation three hours earlier and it had blunted his speed, but he didn’t have the heart. Or the excuse. He had been playing the cop for three, four months now, and the strain of trying to keep at least a pretence of equality in the scores was getting to him. But not tonight. ‘Absolutely fine.’
As they ambled back to the changing room, Tenniel puffing a happy wheeze from his overheated alveoli, Lewis thought about Mr Dodo. A coincidence? Maybe unlike the bird, the surname never died out. But something made him sure this was a message for him, something in the way his left hand suddenly ached for the first time in three, four years. Something in the pucker effect.
In the changing room he batted off Tenniel’s insistence on a drink. The cop had some time to kill before his shift, and was mildly pissed at Lewis: he wanted to celebrate the great victory over the fitter man (he would conveniently forget that Lewis was also a little older, shorter and that technically it had been a draw—to Tenniel this would go down as The Night Lewis Played As If He Needed A Crap). Lewis showered so fast it was a disgrace to the notion of personal hygiene and was out the door before Tenniel had squeezed into his bad suit. He just raised a hand as the policeman said with renewed enthusiasm: ‘Same time next week?’
In the entrance hall he leant over the reception desk. ‘Tammy, what was that message for—’ he cleared his throat, frightened it would come out as a squeak—‘Mr Dodo?’
‘Hold on, Mr Lewis.’ He noticed that Tammy used everybody else’s first name—it would no doubt be ‘Goodnight, John’ when the portly Tenniel swept by—but had trouble with his. Well, she wouldn’t be the first to be phased by a white man hurtling towards fifty called Carl Lewis. The other one had kind of cornered the market in the title. Which was a little unfair, because he had had it first.
‘It said: Mr Rivers will meet Mr Dodo in the parking lot.
We don’t have a Mr Dodo as a member, Mr Lewis, or one signed in as a guest, but the man insisted on the announcement.’
Lewis nodded. ‘Yeah, I …’ Unsure of how to explain his interest he blurted: ‘Can you book us the same time next week?’
Tammy looked puzzled. He and Tenniel had a rolling slot; there was no need to reconfirm. ‘Sure, Mr Lewis, it’s already down.’
Another rainshower had started, this one a welcome-to-the-weekend drizzle. Lewis stood framed in the doorway, unsure of whether to sprint to his car and get out of there and not look back, or wait for developments. But if Mr Rivers could track him down to his health club … He stepped out and scanned the scene around him. It would be dark soon. Floodlights already illuminated the great walls of the bulk of the stadium behind him, the workers now hammering day and night to get it completed before they moved into the penalty period. Well, at least they got the sports club opened. Ahead of him, over the roofs of the parked cars, was a second freshly minted complex, the Mariners’ new home, sitting smug and pretty, finished well ahead of schedule.
Headlights flashed from across the lot. A quick blink aimed at him, he had no doubt. Lewis took a deep breath and walked across, reluctantly passing his own car, onto the Mercury that had given him the come-on. The passenger door swung open, and he tossed his bag over the back and slid into the seat. The interior light stayed on long enough for him to get a good look at Mr Rivers, and analyse what a quarter of century down the line had done to him. He knew Rivera—his real name—was doing the same.
The light clicked off. Lewis could smell the driver, the scent of rain on a new woollen coat, an almost feline odour. But the cat in question was distinctly alley-bred.
‘Mr Dodo. Howyadoin’?’
He thought he detected sarcasm and superiority coexisting in the words, but Lewis took the hand anyway. It seemed churlish not to. Actually, what seemed entirely reasonable right now would be to grab this man by his throat, bang his head against the wheel a dozen times, put him in the trunk and dump him out near the Everett Field. That might just—just—convey how unwelcome he was.
Instead, all he said was: ‘Willie.’
‘You look good.’
‘You smell like shit. Where did you get that coat from?’
‘Still got the nose, huh? I been in town three days, I get wet every time I step onto a sidewalk, the coat hasn’t had a chance to dry out. I swear, it’s rotting on my back.’
‘It’s Seattle, Willie. Haven’t you heard the jokes? Haven’t you ever watched Frasier? A raincoat is what you need. Not a skunk-skin overcoat.’
There was an awkward pause. Willie started first. ‘Shall we …?’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Well … I saw one of your pictures in a magazine. Great shot up a mountain it was, real Ansel whatsit.’
‘Adams.’ This was not the time to tell him he despised Ansel Adams, and hated being compared to him.
‘Anyways, it had a list of contributors and these pictures and fuck me if I didn’t see right away it was my old friend …’ He swivelled to face him. ‘Carl Lewis. So I called your agent.’
‘And he said, hey, he plays racquetball every Friday with a cop called Tenniel at the Athletic Club. Yeah, very professional.’ Come to think of it, he realised, that did sound like the sort of thing his agent Michael would do—never let a client or a potential client slip away, nail them there and then.
‘No, well, not exactly. Look, it wasn’t hard, OK? I called your wife—’
‘She’s not my wife.’
‘Well she sounded like your wife. She wasn’t the maid, I figured that much. Anyway, I said I had special delivery UPS you had to sign for. She told me where you were. It’s not like you’ve got anything to hide, is it? It’s not racquetball with a big blonde, is it? No. Look, you wanna go for a drink? I checked a bar out while I was waiting. Just down the street.’
At that moment they both picked up the once-familiar whine of a starter motor pushing reluctant helicopter blades into making the first tentative swipes in the air. They listened as the pitch increased, and the turbine kicked in, and a deeper note, a whup, whup sound came into the mix as they fired up and the blades whisked and thickened the air beneath them. The fittings on the Mercury vibrated in sympathy, like teeth rattling in loose sockets, and the rear-view mirror started slowly to turn itself out of alignment.
From the roof of a former cold storage plant across the street on Occidental two mechanical locusts lifted into the air, illuminating the stadium complex parking lot with their nose lights. They wafted straight up to a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet, then assumed the familiar slightly nose-down forward motion. Lewis could just make out men in fatigues and caps through one open hatchway, clutching their weapons; he knew that the new rapid reaction force—they had some acronym he could never remember—for the entire greater Seattle area was billeted next to the new Seahawks’ football development. But what kind of incident needed two fully loaded slicks?
The Mercury rocked spasmodically as the double rotor wash hit them, and then the noise quickly diminished, fading to a low whistle as the pair turned east and disappeared behind the elevated concrete freeways of the I-5 interchange.
There was nothing to be said, but Willie said it anyway: ‘Takes you back, huh?’
Lewis thought they would be heading for the cavernous F X McRory’s, but Willie had the good sense to have picked out Chipper’s opposite the main gate of the near-complete Seahawks’ venue. It was reasonably full, although nothing like as if the Mariners had been playing ball down the road. The thirty-five TV screens were showing re-runs of the ’97 season, when the guys could do no wrong. Nothing had seemed to click once they moved into the new space across Brougham Way. This last season, just finishing, had sucked. Nice stadium, shame about the team everyone said. Their last motto: ‘You gotta love these guys’ seemed a little hollow right now. Sports fans don’t have to love anyone who isn’t winning.
Lewis led them upstairs, where the screens were playing to just half a dozen people, and slotted them into a table well away from the others.
Now he could see Willie Rivera properly. The years hadn’t been too bad to him. He was still small, wiry, although now with a little loose skin around his jowls and throat. Those bright-as-a-button eyes hadn’t clouded too much. His Puerto Rican skin was still unmarked and smooth for the most part, except for a small scar at the corner of his mouth, which looked to be of relatively recent vintage.
Yes, the bits were intact, but there was some odd translucence to him, as if he was somehow less substantial than when Lewis knew him as a buddy. Time was making the man transparent, ethereal. He wondered if he looked like that. Maybe they all looked like that. Christ, they were almost old men now. Soon they’d be dribbling in wheelchairs, trying to get someone to listen to their great adventure, like World War Two Marines.
‘You put on some bulk, man,’ Willie said, as if to quash the notion.
Lewis shrugged. He had gained some muscle—and fat—since he had been a skinny young man serving with Willie. He liked it that way.
‘How’s the hand?’ Lewis was suddenly aware he was fingering the scar on his palm, which was itching intensely. ‘Sorry about that. Did I ever say sorry?’
Lewis raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. No worries. Saved a life. A little scar was nothing. They ordered drinks, a seven and seven for Willie, an Amber Ale for Lewis. ‘Hungry?’ asked Lewis.
Willie wobbled his head in a so-so manner. ‘How’s the chili?’ The nod convinced him and he added a bowl of red to the order. Then they sparred for five minutes or so, until Willie found the perfect way to bring the subject up. The movies.
‘Yeah—and did you see Apocalypse Now? The Horror, the Horror? I mean, fuck, we seen a better quality of horror than that, didn’t we? And what about the Russian roulette in The Deerhunter? I never heard of anything like that.’
Lewis snorted. ‘What about opening a trapdoor to see if anyone is waiting on the other side to blow your head off?’
‘I guess. Yeah, maybe. I can see that.’
‘Willie. Why are we sitting in some asshole bar talking about Vietnam movies?’ What he really meant was: what the fuck are you doing here in my life, calling up my agent, my non-wife and ruining my fucking game of racquetball? He noticed that even his mental language was quickly slipping back to army doggerel—every sentence doubled in length because of the weight of profanities it supported, but, thanks to the limited choice available, the repetition lending it a staccato rhythm.
Willie leant forward. ‘Yeah, I was forgetting, Mr Dodo, huh? Straight to the point, eh?’
The stupid nickname made him flinch.
‘You OK?’
Lewis shook his head. ‘What have you been doing, Willie?’
‘After I got back? I joined a band.’ Ah, yes, Willie had been a trumpet player. ‘Still do it now and then. Weddings, dances. We got to play SOBs, once. You know it?’
‘Sons of Bitches? What’s that, a punk club?’
Willie laughed. ‘You know what it is. Sounds of Brazil. You been to New York yet? Well, we supported Gato Barbieri. You heard of him, at least?’
‘Last Tango in Paris?’
‘Right, yeah, Last Tango in Paris.’
‘So you make a living out of playing?’
‘A living? A living … no. Some money. I sold cars for my brother—he’s a timbales player, but he knows cars. The Mercury is one of his. I still do that, too. Let’s see, I got married.’ He grinned. ‘Three times now. I’ll get it right soon.’
‘And now you’re looking up your old buddies?’
‘Well, I tell you, Mr Do—’
‘Don’t call me that. Don’t.’
‘Sorry. Been a long time, and … the truth is, there ain’t many of us left. Out of the eight, there is me, you and the Bat. And I tell you, the Bat is bats these days.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘He lives with his mother in Queens. She says he just don’t go out any more.