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beans! I got up and slunk out into the street with glare wounds all over my face.
    For a while I just paced back and forth out in front. I hadn’t seen Baloqui in a sulk like this since I asked him for the answer to a puzzle that I’d read in the Book of Knowledge . “A brick weighs six pounds and half its own weight,” I quoted, “and so what is the weight of the brick?” “That’s a puzzle?” He’d scowled. “What does it weigh? It weighs nine pounds.” “No, twelve,” I told him, which might have been fine, but then I had to add, “I got it right away.” Well, we argued, and his bushy black eyebrows knitted together and at one point I thought he was going to deck me as his face was turning blue and he was shouting, “That’s ridiculous! Your stupid book lies! ” and then for days he would pretend not to see me or hear me until finally I retracted and said the Book of Knowledge answer had turned out to be a typo. I am not a hard man. So now I did a little thinking and decided that before messing up my friendship with the jerk, I should go to the Superior and fact-check Arrigo’s story, which I did. I paid my nickel admission, walked into the lobby and found out from an usher that the theater manager, the guy I wanted to talk to, wouldn’t be in until three, so while I waited with a nickel bag of popcorn in my lap I was able to watch a whole bunch of neat-o cartoons, and then a couple of cowboy chapters, one a Tom Mix and the other Buck Jones, in which hundreds of bullets were fired except no one ever seemed to get hit unless he was standing near Gabby Hayes, which of course made me wonder if Hayes was Italian and possibly related to the Pagliarellos. The first feature, in the meantime, was The Great Dictator , a Charlie Chaplin movie that had the packed crowd of us grammar school aesthetes constantly erupting in guffaws that were almost as loud as when someone in a movie went blind or was decapitated or had acid thrown in his face. Halfway through the Hitler-Mussolini barbershop scene, I checked the time on the Dick Tracy watch that I got for my birthday from Pop years before, and seeing it was ten minutes after three I got up and went out into the lobby, where I finally met up with the Superior’s manager, a tall, stocky guy named Mr. Heinz. He was old, maybe twenty, twenty-one, and chewing gum with his mouth a little open and his hands on his hips as he stood staring down at me with this spazzed-out look in his eyes like he wasn’t quite sure that he wanted to be conscious.
    “So what’s up, kid? You lookin’ for a job? I’m real busy.”
    Right away I understood that I was going to have to grovel, but having so recently seen Gunga Din telling Victor Mc Laglen, “Din only poor beasty, Sahib” in a moment of breathtaking cinematic cringing destined never to be equaled, or even approached, until the sun grew cold and, long before that, the last executive at any TV or cable station running ads about erectile dysfunction and the state of one’s colon at the family dinner hour, had been shot, disemboweled and given no rites, I knew exactly how to do it to perfection, which I’m sure Sister Joseph would have told me was just more evidence that “there are no coincidences with the Holy Ghost.” And so after an “I know this sounds nutsy” preamble, along with a rich and heavy dose of “sirs,” I repeated what Baloqui had said about Jane while at the same time telling Heinz that she was my sister who’d “been missing for days” and that any little clue “could be helpful to the police.”
    “The police? I haven’t heard of any police coming by.”
    “Levitation’s not a crime,” I said.
    “Probably not.”
    “But did it actually happen? Did you see it yourself, sir?”
    He said, “No, kid. I didn’t. And except for one person seems like no one that I talked to about it did either. She was back of this crowd at the candy counter. But one of the ushers sure saw it.”
    “He did?