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Bruce Lee.”
    That stopped Benchpress for a second. He hadn’t considered the possibility of this goofball having a gun.
    “Are you?” he asked, studying the contours of Neal’s jacket.
    “Naaah.”
    But you’re not sure, Benchpress, are you? Neal thought. That’s okay. That’s just fine.
    “Do we have a deal?” Neal asked.
    “I think we can work something out,” Benchpress said. He reached out slowly and took the bill from the coin slot. Then he fixed Neal with a hard-guy stare and started to back away.
    Neal counted to twenty, slowly and loudly, and then started to give Benchpress directions. The game went on about a minute before Neal saw him reach under the rock and come up with the other half of the bill.
    “Okay?” Neal shouted.
    “Wait a minute! I’m checking the serial numbers!”
    Smart guy, thought Neal. Next time I come back, he’ll have an office job.
    “Okay!” hollered Benchpress. “Now what?”
    “I don’t know! I’ve never done this before! You have any ideas?”
    “Why don’t I just walk away?”
    “How do I know you won’t be waiting for me at the bottom?”
    “You have an ugly and suspicious mind!”
    “Tell me about it!”
    Neal was debating with himself whether to trust him, when Benchpress yelled, “Do you have a dime?”
    What the hell?
    “Yeah!”
    “Okay! I’ll go to Pier Thirty-nine! You wait fifteen minutes and then put the dime in the binoculars. Look down to Pier Thirty-nine and I’ll be standing there waving at you.”
    Interesting concept, Neal thought. He shouted, “Right! That gives you a good ten minutes to sneak up the other side and then kick my head into the Bay!”
    “You don’t trust me?”
    No, Neal thought, but I don’t have a choice, do I? Unless I want to stand on this hill for a few days.
    “You can’t walk to Pier Thirty-nine in fifteen minutes!” Neal shouted.
    “I’m going to take a cab, asshole!”
    There was always that.
    “Okay, okay. Just get going!”
    “It’s been nice chasing you!”
    “Nice being chased!”
    Neal watched as Benchpress disappeared beneath the trees. He checked his watch. It was ten-forty-five, but felt to him like it should be a lot later. He spent the time catching his breath, slowing his heartbeat, and enjoying the view. He waited twelve minutes and then put his dime in the binoculars and focused in on the pier. Benchpress must have found himself a hell of a cabbie, because it was not quite eleven when Neal saw him standing on the pier, looking up toward Telegraph Hill, smiling and waving.
    I love a man who takes an honest bribe, Neal thought.
    Neal took his time getting down Telegraph Hill. He strolled down Greenwich Street onto Columbus Avenue, stopped to admire the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul’s terra-cotta towers, and took a seat on a bench in Columbus Square. He shared the bench with two old men who were chatting amiably in Italian. The seat gave him a nice view of the park, where he saw young mothers pushing baby carriages, older Chinese people doing t‘ai chi, and still older Italian women, dressed in black, tossing bread crumbs to pigeons. He liked what he saw, but he liked what he didn’t see even better: no Benchpress, no small groups of Benchpress’s friends and associates searching for a young white guy in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. Trust is one thing, he thought, stupidity is another.
    He gave it five minutes on the bench before moving on down Columbus toward the corner of Broadway. Bypassing a half-dozen Italian cafés, bakeries, and espresso bars—there would be time for those later—he headed straight for the City Lights Bookstore.
    Neal had known about the City Lights Bookstore long before he had ever visited it. What Shakespeare and Company was to the Lost Generation, City Lights was to the Beat Generation. It was a literary candle in the window that showed the way back from Kesey to Kerouac, and in a sense back to Smollett and Johnson and old Lazarillo des Tormes.
    Mostly