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of the action.…”
    “Hold that thought,” I said. “Who’s the center of the machine? That’s what we need.”
    Harold and Marvel looked at each other, and Marvel pursed her lips, then turned back to me. “I’d say the center of the machine is Dessusdelit, the mayor; Archie Ballem, the city attorney;Arnie St. Thomas, the councilman; and Duane Hill, the dogcatcher. Dodge and Rebeck have their own constituencies, but they’re mostly along for the ride. They don’t make any decisions. And there are a lot of smaller fish. The city clerk helps Dessusdelit run things, and then there are the department heads, individual cops, and so on.”
    “Does the machine run everything in town? Is there anybody high up we can talk to?”
    Marvel was already shaking her head. “Not everybody is on the take, but everybody important is getting something, somewhere. You couldn’t make a move here without the machine finding out.”
    “So it’s Dessusdelit and Ballem and St. Thomas and Hill?”
    “Yes.”
    “Power or money? Are they getting rich?”
    “Sure,” Harold said. “They try not to let it show too often, but every once in a while you see it. With Chenille and Ballem, anyway; Hill, you don’t see it so much. But I’d bet every one of them is a multimillionaire, the money they’ve taken out of this town.”
    I made a note. I made several notes.
    T HE DOG BLOOD SALES were only the most bizarre item on a laundry list of corrupt deals and straight-out rip-offs. Crooked public works employeessold tires, gasoline, car parts, even grass seed and fertilizer. The council routinely got kickbacks on city purchases. There was a regular business in false receipts, showing larger-than-actual city purchases of expendables.
    The city got suspiciously low rates of interest from the banks where they kept city cash; at the same time it paid suspiciously high interest rates on general obligation bonds issued to build a new sewer system.
    As she listed the payoffs, kickbacks, fraud, and outright thefts, Marvel paced the living room, excited. Finally she stopped, turned into the kitchen, and we could hear her banging through the cupboards. A minute later she stuck her head into the living room. “Who wants ice cream?” she asked.
    Five minutes later Harold sat behind a bowl of butter brickle ice cream and detailed how you could buy the municipal judge, how the cops took payoffs from the local bars, and how the chief wrote bid specs on new police cars to favor a particular car dealer. The cops stole from the parking meters, took bribes from drunk drivers, and accepted kickbacks from bail bondsmen for steering clients after arrests.
    “The fire department?” I prompted.
    “Now that’s different,” said Harold. “They’re separate from everything else, not on the takeanywhere. Except, like, they handle the dope traffic in town.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah. Ain’t that weird? All the cocaine that comes through Longstreet, all the good stuff, comes through fire. They split up the profit right there in the station house.”
    “Jesus Christ,” said John. “I didn’t even know they had that shit out here.”
    “I don’t know how it got started,” Harold said, “but that’s what they do. They’re good firemen, though.”
    “Yeah,” said Marvel. “For one thing, they’re awake all the time.”
    “Tell me one really big thing. Something that’s going on right now,” I said.
    Marvel had picked up a pencil, a yellow one, and pressed the eraser against her lips. John was staring at her fixedly, as if he were about to jump on her, and Harold kept glancing at John.
    “The sewers,” Harold prompted after a moment.
    “Yeah…” Marvel rubbed her forehead, thinking, trying to get a grip on a complicated subject. “Two years ago the federal government took the city to court for polluting the river. Sometimes our sewage was a little too raw. So we had to get new sewers and a new sewage plant.
    “The city got some grants and passed