Fleetwood's heart sank; he'd said the wrong thing, and the first crack out of the box, too. Obviously, he had blundered somehow into a strange land where people spoke in prepared dialogues, and the moment he'd opened his mouth he'd gone up in his lines. There was a proper response to the question, "what do you want?" but "bourbon and water" was not it. He glanced around nervously as two young women arrived at the magazine racks behind him and simultaneously picked up copies of the _New York Toast_. Neither returned his glance or even gave the slightest indication that they were aware of his existence, much less his dilemma. He looked back at the girl who had now begun to eye him rather curiously. Plainly she was waiting for him to get on with it; he had to try again, no matter how much he might disappoint both of them. "Scotch and soda?" he offered timorously. "Gosh," the girl said, "where do you think you are?" "I don't know," Fleetwood said and attempted what he hoped was the sort of glance that pleads understanding. "I mean to say...." "Are you being funny about a cup of coffee, or do you really think you're in a bar somewhere?" "Coffee?" Fleetwood said. He seized upon the word as a drowning man might snatch at a drifting life preserver. Besides, it dinged a small bell of recognition somewhere in the back of his mind. "Yes," he murmured, "coffee, please." "Okay, then," the girl said, and left. Fleetwood reflected on this exchange in a thickening mood of perturbation. Retracing, haltingly, its tangled bypaths, it seemed to lack in retrospect those bright glimmerings of reason that one looks for in a friendly conversation. The end result appeared to be that he was merely about to receive coffee, which his confused faculties identified only as something murky and brown, of undetermined usefulness. He had hoped for more. As he thought on it, however, voices reached to his inner ear. The girls at the magazine racks had tuned up conversationally. Chit-chat was their medium, of the sort that, for all its lack of substance, takes on a certain penetration after a time. In the end, Fleetwood found himself slipping, no matter how unwillingly, into the role of the eavesdropper. As it was, though, he couldn't have selected a more illuminating moment in which to fall from grace. "I've been following him for years," one of the girls said as Fleetwood dialed in full strength. "I watch for him every time he comes out." "Fleetwood Cassidy?" the second girl responded. "Oh, sure. I'm always watching for him." * * * * *