A two-legged native was approaching. Would he be friendly? Or would he attack the outlander?
The biped paused and looked at Archie. Archie paused and looked back. The night looked down on the age-old scene of primeval suspicion. Archie spoke first:
“I beg your pardon ? Can you tell me where six-twenty-one East Twenty-first would be?” he asked.
The native grunted and flapped his elbows as if getting up steam to flee this apparition dislodged by the night.
“You want Peter Cooper Village,” the native syllablized carefully. “This here is Stuyvesant Town. You have to go out and cross Twentieth Street. Peter Cooper’s on the other side.”
“Oh. How do I get out?"
“Just follow this path around the oval.”
“Thanks.” Archie started out on the path indicated by the native’s pointing finger.
Immediately the Stuyvesant native circled so that he was on the parallel path which formed the other side of the oval. Like two nervous animals backing off from a fight, he and Archie retreated from each other. The Neanderthal choreography continued until they were out of each other’s sight.
Again Archie wandered, this time seeking Twentieth Street, the Mecca of the trapped in Stuyvesant Town. But it eluded him. Each path he followed, each oval he circled, seemed only to lure him deeper into the crazy-quilt brick complex. Finally he spied another figure, a woman. Archie accosted her.
“I beg your pardon,” he started to say.
“AGGH! EE-EEK!” she screamed. “Help! Rape! Help!” She fled into the darkness, the gremlin of paranoia spawned by city living perched grinningly on her shoulder.
Archie trudged onward. Just when he was beginning to despair of ever finding his way back to civilization — relatively speaking, that is—he picked up the spoor of a Chevrolet’s exhaust fumes. Nose twitching, he mounted a bench and peered into the forest. On a trail off to the left he spied the GM behemoth and identified it by the tail fins over its blinking red eyes. Quick as a native runner, he dashed for the trail down which it was going and followed in its wake until it emerged on Twentieth Street.
With a sigh of relief, Archie crossed the street. A sign told him that now, at last, he stood on the fringes of Peter Cooper Village. It was something to know that at least he had found the right jungle. Cautiously, wishing he’d brought a machete, he hacked his way through the confusing landscaping toward one of the buildings. He read the number marking its entrance and deduced that the building he sought must lie somewhere to the Northwest of it. Having no compass, he peered skyward to take his bearings from two stars and resumed his trek.
A few moments later he was again lost. The malevolent red brick had blotted out the stars. The morass of Peter Cooper Village was no more distinguishable than Stuyvesant Town had been.
“Hold it right there!"
The voice came from the blackness of the bushes at Archie’s elbow. He froze in his sneakered tracks. An instant later the source of the voice confronted him.
He was a big man in the gray uniform of the private police who patrol Peter Cooper Village. His jacket was pushed back so that the holster attached to his belt was easily accessible. His forearm was forced to push against a rather large paunch so that his fingers could grip the butt of the gun in the holster. But his grip on it was firm as he again addressed Archie.
“What are you doing here?” the cop asked.
“Visiting a friend,” Archie replied.
“At this time of night?” The cop was openly skeptical.
“Yeah.” Archie didn’t know what else to say.
“You don’t live here,” the cop deduced with questionable brilliance. “I know every teenage punk in this section. You don't belong here. Now just what do you think you’re up to? ”
“I’m going to visit a friend. I told you.”
“What friend? What’s the address?”
Archie told him.
“Aha!” The cop crowed triumphantly. “Just as I thought. That’s on the other side of the project. You don’t belong here. People around here don’t get juvenile delinquents falling in on them in the middle of the night. Now you better be on your way. Go on! Get out of here before I run you in!”
“On what charge?” Archie asked.
“Trespassing. This is private property, you know. Also, loitering. Also suspicion of breaking and entering. And if you don’t move on, I'll think of a few more.”
“Okay. But which way do I move?”
“That way.” The cop pointed. “That’s Riley’s section that way. Let him handle you just so you stay off my beat. And spread the word to the other young punks. There ain’t gonna be no rumbles on my beat.”
“I’ll tell ’em it’s taboo turf,” Archie promised and set off in the direction the cop had indicated.
The theory used to be that if you had ten monkeys and chained them to ten typewriters for a thousand years, they would write every book in the British Museum. The idea was that sooner or later each book would be written by the chance striking of the typewriter keys. One author picked up this theory and wrote a variation on the theme. In his version, the very first day the ten monkeys turned out the opening chapters of The Canterbury Tales, Les Miserables, The Iliad, and seven other classics. It was by somewhat the same sort of defiance of the laws of chance that Archie now stumbled upon the building he was seeking.
He took the elevator up to the eighth floor and rang the doorbell of the Kupp apartment. The peephole in the door clicked open and Archie felt—rather than saw—the eye appraising him. A moment later the door itself swung open and Dixie Kupp greeted him.
She was a redhead, but not the red-headed Dixie he sought. Where the disappearing Dixie had been slender and chic, this one was more generously built -- voluptuous without being fat—and a bit disheveled. She was older than the original, perhaps thirty to the first one’s mid-twenties. Her face was lightly freckled in contrast to the peaches-and-cream complexion of the other Dixie. She was wearing a man’s bathrobe made of wool. There were no signs of anything underneath it.
“Come on in.” She stood aside so Archie could enter. When he had she closed the door and led the way into the living room. The furnishings were Macy’s rococo modern. The inevitable prints — two dancers by Degas and a Montmartre scene by Utrillo — hung over a pseudo-Swedish couch. “How come André gave you my number?” Dixe asked after they’d seated themselves.
“He thought you might be able to tell me where I might find a mutual friend,” Archie improvised. “A redhead like you, named Dixie like you. Sort of on the thin side -- fashion-model type.”
“I don’t know her." Dixie shrugged. “I can’t imagine why André thought I would.”
“How about a blonde named Helen—mid-twenties, very well built?”
“Not offhand. Why are you looking for them?”
“I have a message for them from Andre.”
“Oh.” Dixie looked at him suspiciously. “I’ll bet you don’t have a message for me, though, do you?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Don't be. André delivered m message to my husband himself—-and right on schedule.” She lapsed into a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile.
“You’ve seen André recently?”
“No. But my husband has. Just yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“You sound surprised,” Dixie observed.
“It’s just that I didn’t think André was contacting too many people on this trip,” Archie said carefully.