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Chapter One
April Fools
Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertise his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seeive him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so
"I', unscrupulous, highlyis that society cannot afford to lose me I'm an asset" Price calms down, continues to stare out the cab's dirty , probably at the word FEAR sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a McDonald's on Fourth and Seventh "I ives a shit about their work, everybody hates their job, I hate my job, you've told eles? Not an alternative I didn't transfer from UCLA to Stanford to put up with this I h money?" Like in a movie another bus appears, another poster for Les Miserables replaces the word - not the same bus because someone has written the word DYKE over Eponine's face Tim blurts out, "I have a co-op here I have a place in the Hamptons, for Christ sakes"
"Parents', guy It's the parents'"
"I' turn this up?" he snaps but distractedly at the driver, the Crystals still blaring from the radio
"It don't go up no higher," maybe the driver says
Tinores hi in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs Maybe the ODM III or ORC II dyna systems?" His voice softens here "Either one Hip my friend, very hip"
He takes off the expensive-looking Walk "I hate to coe, the disease, about how filthy this city really is and you know and I know that it is a sty " He continues talking as he opens his new Tuht at D F Sanders He places the Walkside a Panasonic wallet-size cordless portable folding Easa-phone (he used to own the NEC 9000 Porta portable) and pulls out today's newspaper "In one issue - in one issue - let's see here strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Coh the pages excitedly - "baseball players with AIDS, ots dropping like flies in the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera, kids who broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more Nazis and the joke is, the punch line is, it's all in this city - nowhere else, just here, it sucks, ait, ridlock, baby-sellers, black- collapses on baby, e collapses - " His voice stops, he takes in a breath and then quietly says, his eyes fixed on a beggar at the corner of Second and Fifth, "That's the twenty-fourth one I've seen today I've kept count" Then asks without looking over, "Why aren't you wearing the worsted navy blue blazer with the gray pants?" Price is wearing a six-button wool and silk suit by Erna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti Pan down to the Post There is atwo people who disappeared at a party aboard the yacht of a se the island A residue of spattered blood and three slasses are the only clues Foul play is suspected and police think that perhaps a rooves and indentations found on the deck No bodies have been found There are no suspects Price began his spiel today over lunch and then brought it up again during the squash gaone on, over three J&Bs and water, ly about the Fisher account that Paul Owen is handling Price will not shut up
"Diseases!" he exclaims, his face tense with pain "There's this theory out now that if you can catch the AIDS virus through having sex with so, whether it's a virus per se or not - Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, leukemia, anorexia, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, dyslexia, for Christ sakes - you can get dyslexia from puy- "