The Fourth K

The Congress has a

Arthur Wix asked almost jubilantly, "The city of Dak is being bombed?"

"Yes," the Sultan said. "A barbaric act but a convincing one."

They were all looking at Yabril, who now had four armed men very closely surrounding him. Yabril said thoughtfully, "Finally I will see America, it has always been my dream." He looked at the Americans but spoke to the Sultan. "I think I would have been a great success in America."

"Without a doubt," the Sultan said. "Part of the demand is that I deliver you alive. I'm afraid I must give the necessary orders so that you do not harm yourself"

Yabril said, "America is a civilized country. I will go through a legal process that will be long and drawn out, since I will have the best lawyers. Why should I harm myself? It will be a new experience, and who knows what can happen? The world always changes. America is too civilized for torture, and besides I have endured torture under the Israelis, so nothing will surprise me." He smiled at Wix.

Wix said quietly, "As you once observed, the world changes. You haven't succeeded. You won't be such a hero."

Yabril laughed delightedly. His arms went up in an exuberant gesture. "I have succeeded," he almost shouted. "I've torn your world off its axis. Do you think your mealymouthed idealism will be listened to after your planes have destroyed the city of Dak? When will the world forget my name? And do you think I will step off the stage now when the best is yet to come?"

The Sultan clapped his hands and shouted an order to the soldiers. They grabbed Yabril and put handcuffs on his wrists and rope around his neck.

"Gently, gently," the Sultan said. When Yabril was secure he touched him gently on the forehead. He said, "I beg your forgiveness, I have no choice. I have oil to sell and a city to rebuild. I wish you well, old friend. Good luck in America."

Thursday Night

NewYork Cily

AS CONGRESS IMPEACHED President Francis Xavier Ke

City, a place that had once been the very heart of the greatest city in the world, where once The Great White Way, Broadway itself, ran down from Central Park to Times Square.

These people had varied interests. Horny suburban middle-class men haunted the adult pornographic bookshops. Cineastes surveyed miles of film of naked men and naked women indulging themselves in the most intimate sexual acts with varied animals in best-friend character roles. Teenaged gangs with lethal but legal screwdrivers in their pockets sallied forth as gallantly as the knights of old to slay the dragons of the well-to-do, and with the irrepressible high spirits of the young, to have some laughs. Pimps, prostitutes, muggers, murderers, set up shop after dark without having to pay overhead for the bright neon light of what was left of the Great White Way. Tourists came to see Times Square, where the ball fell on New Year's Eve and proclaimed the coming of another joyous New Year. On most of the buildings in the area and the slum streets leading into it were posters with a huge red heart and inside that red heart the inscription I 1OVE NEW YORK. Courtesy of Louis Inch.

On that Thursday near midnight, Blade Booker was hanging out in the Times Square Bar and Cinema Club looking for a client. Booker was a young black man noted for his ability to hustle. He could get you coke, he could get you H, he could get you a wide assortment of pills. He could also get you a gun but nothing big. Pistols, revolvers, little.22's, but after he got himself one he didn't really get into that anymore. He wasn't a pimp, but he was very good with the ladies. He could really talk to their shit, and he was a great listener. Many a night he spent with a girl and listened to her dreams. Even the lowest-down hooker who would do things with men that took his breath away had dreams to tell. Booker listened, he enjoyed listening, it made him feel good when ladies told him their dreams. He loved their shit. Oh, they would hit the numbers, their astrological chart showed that in the coming year a man would love them, they would have a baby, or have kids grow up to be doctors, lawyers, college professors, be on TV; their kids could sing or dance or act or do comedy as good as Richard Pryor, maybe even become another Eddie Murphy.

Blade Booker was waiting for the Swedish Cinema Palace to empty out after the completion of its X-rated film. Many of the cinema lovers would stop here for a drink and a hamburger and in hopes of seeing some pussy. They would straggle in singly, but you could spot them by the abstracted look in their eyes, as if they were pondering an insoluble scientific problem.

Also most of them had a melancholy look on their faces. They were lonely people.

There were hookers all over the place, but Booker had his very own placed in a strategic corner. Men at the bar could see her at a little table that her huge red purse almost covered. She was a blond girl from Duluth, Mi

Her name was Kimberly Ansley, and just six years ago she had chopped up her pimp with an ax while he was sleeping. Watch out for girls named Kimberly and Tiffany, Booker always said. She had been arrested and prosecuted, tried and convicted, but convicted only of manslaughter with the defense proving she had numerous bruises and had been "not responsible" because of her heroin habit. She had been sentenced to a correctional facility, cured, declared sane and released to the streets of New York. There she had taken up residence in the slums around

Greenwich Village, supplied with an apartment in one of the housing projects built by the city that even the poor were fleeing.

Blade Booker and Kimberly were partners. He was half pimp, half roller; he took pride in that distinction. Kimberly would pick up a cineaste in the Times Square Bar, and then lead her customer to a tenement hallway near Ninth Avenue for quick sexual acts. Then Blade would step from the shadows and clunk the man on the head with a New York Police Department blackjack.

They would split the money in the man's wallet, but Blade got the credit cards and jewelry. Not out of greed but because he didn't trust Kimberly's judgment.

The beauty of this was that the man was usually an errant husband reluctant to report the incident to the police and have to answer questions about just what he was doing in a dark hall on Ninth Avenue when his wife was waiting for him in Merrick, Long Island, or Trenton, New Jersey. For safety's sake, both Blade and Kim would simply avoid the Times Square Bar for a week. And Ninth Avenue. They would move to Second Avenue. In a city like New York that was like going to another black hole in the galaxy. That was why Blade Booker loved New York. He was invisible, like The Shadow, The Man with a Thousand Faces. And he was like those insects and birds he saw on the TV public broadcasting cha

In short, unlike most citizens, Blade Booker felt safe in New York.