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some news?”
    Greta had come to the hall door and was listening.
    “No, I’m sorry I haven’t. But I’d like to see you. If I may. The point is—I happen to know the men are very busy at the precinct house just now. There’ve been a lot of house robberies, whereas—I have the night patrol post starting tomorrow. I think it’s a good idea to look in the neighborhood.”
    “Yes.” Ed was disappointed at the absence of news, but grateful for this interest in his problem.
    “Could I come to see you tomorrow morning?” the young voice asked on a more definite note.
    “Yes, of course. You’ve got the address?”
    “Oh, yes. I took it down. Tomorrow morning around eleven?”
    “Very good.”
    “Who was that?” Greta asked.
    “A policeman from the station house where I went today. He wants to come to see us tomorrow morning at eleven.”
    “He’s got some news?”
    “No, he said he hadn’t. Sounds as if he’s coming on his own.” Ed shrugged. “But it’s something. At least they’re making an effort.”

4
    Patrolman Clarence Pope Duhamell was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Cornell University where he had majored in psychology, though with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with it when he left university. Military service had followed, and he had sat for two years in four camps in the United States as a Placement Counselor for draftees. Then honorably discharged, and having escaped Vietnam much to the relief of his parents, Clarence had taken a job in the personnel department of a large New York bank which had some eighty branches throughout the city. Clarence after six months had found the work surprisingly dull. The Preferential Hiring Law of the Human Rights Commission forced him to recommend people of “minority races” whatever their lack of qualifications, and he and the higher-up hiring officers had been blamed when accounts later got fouled up in the bank. It was good for a laugh, perhaps, and Clarence could still remember Bernie Alpert in the office saying: “Don’t take it so personally , Clare, you’re just out of the army and you’re just obeying orders, no?” Thus the bank personnel job had been not only unsatisfying to Clarence, but it had seemed an impasse: he was not even permitted to choose the best, the right person, and that was presumably what he had been trained to do. Casting about with a completely open mind—Clarence tried to keep an open mind about everything—he had read about police recruitment. Into the office at the Merchant and Bankers Trust Company’s personnel headquarters itself, in fact, had come some brochures in regard to joining the police force, which might have been dropped there by some hand of Providence, Clarence had felt, for bewildered people like himself. The variety of police work, the benefits, the pensions, the challenges had been set forth in a most attractive way. These brochures emphasized the service a young man could render his city and mankind, and stated that a policeman today was in a unique position to make contact with his fellow men, and to steer wavering individuals and families back into a happier path. To Clarence Duhamell had come the realization that a policeman need not be a dim-wit flatfoot, or a Mafia member, but might be a college graduate like himself, a man who knew his Krafft-Ebing and Freud as well as his Dostoyevsky and Proust. So Clarence had joined up with New York’s finest.
    Clarence had been brought up in Astoria, Long Island, where his parents still lived. On his mother’s side, Clarence was Anglo-Irish, and on his father’s remotely French and the rest German-English. After a year with the New York Police, Clarence was reasonably satisfied. He had been disillusioned in some ways: there had been enough contact with individuals (delinquents or criminals of whatever age), and a stretch with a downtown East Side precinct house had brought such violent incidents that Clarence (with a walkie-talkie) had had