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primly clasped in her lap. He liked her the better for it.
    He sat quietly in his seat but paid little attention to the film after that. Who could say what that gigantic many-throated FUCK! meant? It was a word like any other, and he used it himself, although not often. It was neither ugly nor beautiful in itself, and its use was now so widespread that it had almost no meaning or so many different meanings that it was no longer valid linguistic coin. In the voices of the giant choir of the young in the film it had a primitive derision, it was a slogan, a weapon, a banner under which huge destructive battalions could march. He hoped that the fathers of the four students who had been shot at Kent State would never see Woodstock and know that a work of art that had been dedicated to their dead children contained a passage in which nearly half a million of their children’s contemporaries had mourned their death by shouting FUCK! in unison.
    The film had more than an hour yet to run when he left the theatre. The girl didn’t seem to notice that he was going.
    The sun was shining over the blue sea, and the flags of the nations represented in the festival snapped brightly at their poles on the theater’s façade. Even with the continuous traffic of cars along the waterfront and the passage of the crowds on the sidewalk and promenade, it was blessedly quiet. For this morning, at least, Cannes remembered that it was supposed to look like a Dufy.
    Craig went down to the beach and walked by the water’s edge, unaccompanied, a private man.
    He went up to his room to shave. In the mailbox there was the large manila envelope with his name scrawled on it in a slanting, bold woman’s hand and a letter postmarked San Francisco from his daughter Anne.
    He tossed the envelopes onto a table in the salon and went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. Then, his face pleasingly smarting from lotion, he went back into the salon and slit open Gail McKinnon’s envelope.
    There was a hand-written note on top of a pile of typed yellow pages.
    “Dear Mr. Craig,” he read, “I’m writing this late at night in my hotel room, wondering what’s wrong with me. All my life people have been glad to see me, but this afternoon and evening, every time I as much as looked in your direction, on the beach and at lunch, in the lobby of the Festival Hall, at the bar, at the party, you made me feel as though I were Hurricane Gail on her way to lay waste the city. In your career you must have given hundreds of interviews. To people who were a lot more stupid than I am, I bet, and quite a few who were downright hostile. Why not to me?
    “Well, if you won’t talk to me about yourself, there are a lot of people who will, and I haven’t been wasting my time. If I can’t get the man whole, I’ll get him refracted through a hundred different pairs of eyes. If he comes out not terribly happy about himself, that’s his fault and not mine.”
    He recognized the reporter’s usual gambit. If you won’t tell me the truth, I will get your enemy to tell me lies. It was probably taught in the first year at all schools of journalism.
    “Maybe,” he read, “I’ll do the piece in an entirely different way. Like a scientist observing the wild animal in his natural state. From afar, using stealth and a telescopic lens. The animal has a well-developed sense of territory, is wary of man, drinks strong waters, has an inefficient instinct for survival, mates often, with the most attractive females in the herd.”
    He chuckled. She would be difficult to defeat.
    “I lie in wait,” the note finished. “I do not despair. I enclose some more drivel on the subject, neatly typed. It is now four A.M ., and I will carry my pages through the dangerous dark streets of Gomorrah-by-the-sea to your hotel and cross your concierge’s palm with silver so that the first thing you will see when you wake in the morning is the name of Gail McKinnon.”
    He put the note down and,