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superstitions. The story claimed he went out to Coney Island once a week whenever he was in town and had his palm read by a gypsy fortuneteller named Madame Zora.
    The last item was a squib in Walter Winchell’s column dated 11/20/42 announcing that Johnny Favorite was breaking off his two-year engagement to Margaret Krusemark, daughter of Ethan Krusemark, the shipping millionaire.
    I shuffled all of this stuff together, got a manila envelope out of the bottom drawer, and stuffed it inside. Then, on a hunch, I dug out the glossy of Favorite, and called the number in the Brill Building stamped on the back.
    “Warren Wagner Associates,” answered a perky female voice.
    I gave her my name and made an appointment to see Mr. Wagner at noon.
    “He has a luncheon engagement at twelve-thirty and can only give you a few minutes.”
    “I’ll take them,” I said.

EIGHT
    “When you’re not on Broadway, everything is Bridgeport.” This blue-ribbon wisecrack was made to George M. Cohan in 1915 by Arthur “Bugs” Baer, whose column in the Journal-American I read every day for years. It might have been true in 1915. I can’t say, not having been there. That was the era of Rector’s and Shanley’s and the New York Roof. The Broadway I knew was Bridgeport; a carnie street of shooting galleries and Howard Johnson’s; Pokerino parlors and hot dog stands. Two old dowagers, Times Tower and the Astor Hotel, were all that remained from the golden age “Bugs” Baer remembered.
    The Brill Building was on 49th and Broadway. Walking up from 43rd, I tried to remember how the Square looked the night I saw it for the first time. So much had changed. It was New Year’s Eve of ‘43. An entire year of my life had vanished. I was fresh out of an army hospital with a brand-new face and nothing but loose change in my pockets. Someone had lifted my wallet earlier in the evening, taking all I owned: driver’s license, discharge papers, dogtags, the works. Caught up in the vast crowd and surrounded by the electric pyrotechnics of the spectaculars, I felt my past sloughing away like a shed snakeskin. I had no identification, no money, no place to live, and knew only that I was heading downtown.
    It took an hour to move from in front of the Palace Theatre to the center of the Square, between the Astor and Bond Clothes, home of the “two-trouser suit.” I stood there at midnight and watched the golden ball drop on top of Times Tower, a landmark I didn’t reach for another hour. That was when I saw the lights in the Crossroads office and played a hunch which led me to Ernie Cavalero and a job I’ve never left.
    In those days, a pair of mammoth nude statues, male and female, bookended the block-long waterfall on the roof of Bond Clothes. Today, gigantic twin Pepsi bottles loomed in their place. I wondered if the plaster statues were still there, trapped inside the sheet-metal bottles like caterpillars slumbering within the confines of their chrysalides.
    Outside the Brill Building, a tramp in a tattered army greatcoat paced back and forth, muttering, “Scumbag, scumbag” to all who entered. I checked the directory at the end of the narrow T-shaped lobby and located Warren Wagner Associates, surrounded by dozens of song-pluggers, prizefight promoters, and fly-by-night music publishers. The creaking elevator took me to the eighth floor, and I prowled a dim hallway until I found the office. It was in a corner of the building, several rabbit-warren cubicles with interconnecting doors.
    The receptionist was knitting when I opened the door. “You Mr. Angel?” she asked, forming her words around a wad of gum.
    I said that I was and got a card out of my dummy wallet. It had my name on it but said I was a representative of the Occidental Life and Casualty Corp. A friend with a print shop in the Village made them up for me in a dozen professions. Everything from ambulance chaser to zoologist.
    The receptionist pincered the card between fingernails as