The Fool's Run

work. I can’t do it cold anymore.”
    A customer walked past the booth toward the rest rooms in the back, and we both shut up until we heard the door close behind him.
    “I’ve got a project,” I said. “I haven’t decided to do it, but I might be looking for help.”
    “Me?”
    “I’ve got no one else who could do it.”
    “Jeez, Kidd. What are you into?”
    “It’s weird, but there’s a big payroll. I get a million and change. You get half a million. There’s another guy I’ll talk to, he’ll take a quarter. I pick up all expenses. It’s illegal, but it’s not stealing. Nobody gets hurt. And I’ll cover you. When the guy pays me, I pay you. You might have to meet them, but they won’t know where you come from or who you are.”
    She lifted her Perrier bottle toward the light and inspected the bubbles that streamed up through it, thinking it over. “That’s an awful lot of money, Kidd,” she said finally. “It couldn’t be as clean as you say.”
    “I believe it will be. Like I said, it’s weird.”
    “What do you need me for?”
    “I’ll want to get into some houses. General backup. Driving cars. Carrying stuff around. Maybe some computer stuff—I’d show you how. You’d have time to think about it. A week, anyway.”
    “Why don’t you do it yourself? You’ve gone into some places.”
    “Never residences. I’ve always been set up from inside. I don’t know the first thing about breaking into private homes.”
    She considered it for a full minute, and sighed. “I don’t think I can take another four years,” she said finally. “Okay. Tell me about it.”

    WE SPENT THE night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning I flew to Chicago and caught a noon flight to Washington. On the way, I rolled out the tarot cards. The Fool showed again. That’s cool, I thought, that’s okay.
    I was at Washington National by three o’clock and took a cab down to a shabby, secondhand business district, a place called the Sugar Exchange. Judging from the lobby, the last white powder exchanged in the place hadn’t been sugar. Dace Greeley was locking his third-floor office when I came up the stairs.
    “Hey, Kidd,” he said. He brought up the shaky remnant of a once-great smile. He had always been thin, even delicate, but now he was gaunt. In his twenties, he’d had an odd effect on young women: they wanted to take care of him. And those who were most likely to be burning their bras in the morning were most likely to be taking care of Dace in the evenings. It wasn’t that he was hustling all the time. He’d go to a party, sit on a couch. Twenty minutes later the most interesting women in the place were hustling him. One told me it was his eyes, big dark pools under an unruly shock of black hair. His eyes were still dark, but now, against his starved face, they looked almost lemurlike. His hair had thinned and was shot through with streaks of gray.
    The last time I heard about him, a mutual friend said he was spending his days in out-of-the-way bars.
    “Why don’t you buy me a drink?” I suggested as we shook hands.
    “Sure. If you want to crawl through a dive. I’ve got about four dollars on me. On the other hand, you could buy me a drink and we could go someplace decent.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I’m buying.”
    We skipped the aging elevator and took the stairs down.
    “You’re looking good,” he said. “Still training? Shotokan?”
    “Yeah. How about you?”
    “Shit, do I look like it?”
    “Hey, you look like you’re doing okay.”
    He grabbed my coat sleeve on the bottom landing before we went into the lobby.
    “Kidd, my boy, we have had some interesting times together, so don’t bullshit me. I look like a wreck. I can’t get a reasonable job. My wife dumped me and moved to L.A., and I don’t blame her. Let’s go have a couple of drinks, but no bullshit.” He was pleading.
    “All right. But I need to know something right now. How bad is the booze? You a drunk, or what?”
    Dace laughed, a high-pitched whinny that wasn’t quite a giggle. “Jesus, if I was only a drunk, I’d be okay. But if I take a fourth drink, I puke all over myself. Can’t keep it down. The doctor says it’s an allergy. Says I’m lucky.”
    “Okay. So let’s go have two or three.”
    Dace worked at the Post back in the Watergate days, when everybody there was young and hot and tough. He was an investigator specializing in the Pentagon. He had a nose for dirt. He did one story after