Odd Hours

summoned only by a Vegas headliner.
    The stairhead door had not been locked when I had been escorted to the basement; and it was not locked now. I stepped into the long back hallway on the main floor.
    Although I could not recall which door I’d been brought through from the alleyway, I thought it had been on the right. I opened the first that I came to, which was a storeroom. The second revealed a deserted office.
    Whether they were responding to the escalating tumult, which had been heard at the front of the building, or to a frantic cell-phone call from Hoss Shackett, two uniformed officers appeared at the far end of the corridor. I had never seen them before, but they knew at once that I did not belong here, most likely because I was scuttling and furtive and looked harried.
    One of them called out to me—Who was I, what was I doing here?—and I called back to them, “Just looking for the men’s room.”
    They didn’t buy that even as I was saying it. One of them drew his gun, and the other told me to stop where I was, to lie facedown, but Matt Damon would never lie down on a floor that looked like blue-Slurpee upchuck, or on any floor whatsoever, for that matter, just because some guy with a gun told him to do it.
    Fortunately, I did not have to improvise a deadly weapon out of my wristwatch or one of my shoes, because no sooner had the officer ordered me to lie down than the stairhead door behind me flew open. I did not have to turn and look to know that the wreckage from the interrogation room had spun out of the stairs like some motorized work of modern art by one of those sculptors who regularly conned museums into giving display space to the contents of a Dumpster.
    The officers’ attention having been diverted from me, I dared to move forward, staying close to the wall, seeking the next door.
    A new sound, a terrible ripping and slithering noise, grew in volume so rapidly that my curiosity got the best of me. I glanced back and saw that into the hallway had come Polterfrank.
    From his hands radiated pulses of power that stripped the blue linoleum tiles off the floor and whirled them into the air like a wind devil gathering drifts of autumn leaves to itself. The vinyl squares, in their wild waltz, whispered and clicked against one another.
    Because the officers paralyzed by this sight could not see Mr. Sinatra, they were merely startled and frightened by the spectacle before them. They were not propelled at once into a state of blind terror because they were not able to appreciate the phenomenon in its terrible fullness. Had they been able to see the singer in all his glorious wrath, they would have thrown down their weapons in surrender and fled to their mothers.
    Here he came, a punctured eardrum no longer an obstacle to his service to his country. He was feisty Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity, tough Tom Reynolds in Never So Few, courageous and determined Joseph Ryan in Von Ryan’s Express, and the righteous Sam Loggins in Kings Go Forth, but most of all he was Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra with a mad-on for the enemies of his country and the ignorant critics of his impeccable singing.
    Spinning metal furniture and parts of furniture seemed to remain the primary danger in the tornado, because the vinyl tiles appeared too flexible and too soft to inflict serious damage. On the other hand, they were stiffened by the mastic with which they had been glued to the floor; and when a critical velocity had been achieved, every edge of every thin tile might be stropped into a lacerating blade.
    Like a cresting wave, the floor peeled toward me, and from this tsunami of potentially lethal linoleum came an awful skirling like a thousand busy flensing knives scraping bone.
    Spooked, the cops bolted from the corridor, back the way they had come.
    The next door on the right led to the men’s restroom. The escalating tempest convinced me that I did not have time to explore farther.
    I stepped into the lavatory and backed away from the door, which closed between me and the haunt from Hoboken.
    As the tidal wave of churning vinyl and clanging metal scraped past the restroom door, the noise became so disturbing that I clapped my hands over my ears.
    Although Mr. Sinatra had been angry with me when I poked and prodded him toward an outburst, I trusted his intelligence to lead him to the realization that I had meant nothing I said and that I had acted out of desperation. Nevertheless, I was relieved when