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deserted him at last.
    A hit.
    He cleared his throat, leaned forward, and tipped a column of ash into the big glass tray, nodding, as if in approval of the perfect cylinder. “It’s a pity you haven’t a medical degree, Mr. Walker. I could use you on my staff.”
    “I can’t even fix a toaster.” I pretended to consult my notebook while he reassembled the elements of his professional imperturbability. If I rubbed it in now I’d lose him for good. It was enough to know that Catalin had felt sufficiently guilty over his fling with Vesta Mannering to confide it to his analyst half a year after the fact. That took him out of the casual philanderer category. I’d won myself a free game, and to hell with the angling metaphor. I was still seasick from the ferry.
    “I guess the bonus question is does a Walter Mitty have it in him to become a Don Quixote? Can a dreamer be a doer?”
    “Most definitely. That’s the whole point of giving in to a fixation.”
    I looked up from the notebook. “There’s a point?”
    “Of course. It’s always a matter of choice. On that one thing, Freud and I are in total accord. Nothing happens by accident.”
    He parked his cigar and braced his hands on his fat thighs, warming to the subject. He had stamped out his own brief flare of inferiority. In his case it would always be a temporary aberration.
    “If you dislike the suit of clothes you’re wearing strongly enough, eventually you will change suits. If you hate yourself—totally, violently, with the deep self-loathing of the true paranoid schizophrenic—you will become another person. Not just think. Become.”
    I was looking at my own double reflection on the surface of his glasses. It seemed to me one of the images was distorted. “We’re talking Jekyll and Hyde.”
    “Robert Louis Stevenson was a thinker ahead of his time. A psychosis, Mr. Walker, is like a drug. Indulge in it, and your personality changes. Your dress, bearing—even such benchmarks as the set of your features and the timbre of your voice—will be altered nearly beyond recognition. Any estimation you may have formed of Mr. Catalin’s abilities and temperament based on information supplied by his wife and friends is useless. He may be smarter, stronger, and more athletic than the person you were hired to find. He will almost certainly be more dangerous.”

Five
    I LEFT HIM, a pleasant-looking brown man in a green office, and stood on the front doorstep for a minute, replacing the nicotine in my system with the clear sharp sopping air off the lake and wondering what I was going to do with the next six hours and change. I wasn’t dressed for strolling on the beach and I didn’t care that much about seeing how fudge is made.
    “I guess Doc Ashraf didn’t find you batty enough to keep.”
    I turned my head. The flatbed wagon that had brought me there was drawn up down the block, the ponytailed driver in the Regency get-up lounging sideways on the seat with his stovepipe hat on the back of his head and one silver-buckled shoe propped up on the whipsocket. He was munching on a Clark bar.
    I said, “I guess that cargo’s still gathering barnacles on the dock.”
    “Zebra mussels, actually. They’re getting to be a bitch: choking out all the other marine life, snagging the inlets. We’ll get rid of them someday. Then flocks of giant boat-eating seagulls will fly up from Brazil or someplace like that and screw up the fishing. We go from crisis to crisis here. But at least we ain’t got Democrats. I’m on a sugar break. Want some?” He held up the remaining half of the candy bar.
    I shook my head, but the suggestion had started my stomach juices going. “Anyplace around here a fellow can get lunch without hocking an heirloom?”
    “I could eat too. Hop aboard.” He took his foot off the whipsocket.
    In a little while he trotted the horses up a hill and drew rein in front of a colonnaded porch the length of the Queen Mary. A double row of windows with