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place. You've said so yourself.”
    “It's a chrome cesspit,” Meehan said. That was another of the ten thousand rules: Write poetry, but not
down
.
    “Very good,” Benjamin said; an aesthete, with a good ear.
    “So,” Jeffords insisted, “given it's…what you said,
why
would you want to go back there?”
    “Because,” Meehan explained, “they know what they're doing.”
    That stopped them both for a few seconds, while they gave one another bleak looks; no more smiles out of the Halloween trunk. Then Jeffords sighed and said, “You don't think we know what we're doing.”
    “Right.”
    “May I ask why?”
    Meehan shrugged. “If you want to be insulted,” he said, “that's up to you.”
    “Fire away,” Jeffords said, but he looked a little pale.
    Meehan nodded at him. “When you first showed up, you claimed you were a lawyer, and you couldn't make that one fly for five seconds. Do you think I was the only one in that building made you for a ringer?”
    Stiffly, Jeffords said, “I wouldn't know.”
    “I would,” Meehan said. “Then the next thing, you take me out of the MCC like it's a treat or something, but nobody thought about the key for the shackles. Then—”
    Benjamin, taken aback, said, “Shackles?”
    “There was a mix-up about the key,” Jeffords mumbled. “We had to go back for it.”
    “I see.” Benjamin nodded at Meehan. “Go on,” he said.
    “The next thing that happens,” Meehan went on, “you got people on the plane that shouldn't be on the plane and shouldn't know there's anything funny going on, but they're on the plane because it's a contributor's plane, whatever that is, but whatever it is it means you don't control the situation. But if you're going to pull something with legal consequences, which is what you're talking about here, you've got to be able to control the situation.”
    Sounding frosty, Benjamin said, “I couldn't agree more, Mr. Meehan. Anything else?”
    “Yes,” Meehan said, marking that “Mr.” “We get to the gate to this place out there last night and the guard doesn't know we're coming, so once again a whole lot of people who aren't supposed to know I'm here
do
know, because they have to be alerted before we can get in. I won't even talk about how I never got dinner. All I'll say is, you people tell me you picked me in particular to go into this caper with you, whatever it is, and I'm supposed to feel all honored and plucked-from-the-crowd, but what I tell you is, I wouldn't pick you to go to the deli with. So just take me back to the MCC.”
    Jeffords shook his head. “I never expected anything like this for a second,” he said. He gazed at Meehan more in sorrow than in anger, a man whose pet dog won't do his great trick in front of company.
    Benjamin, frowning deeply, said, “They didn't give you dinner?”
    “There was fruit and stuff in the room,” Meehan assured him, because he didn't want to make a huge complaint about it. He wanted either for these people to come clean, or to take him back to the MCC, and probably both. Whatever they had in mind, it seemed to Meehan much better than even money that they'd get caught doing it. What good was freedom, if it came attached to disaster?
    “The interesting thing,” Benjamin said to Jeffords, breaking a silence with which Meehan had been very comfortable, “is that we now have what I would call a very clear demonstration that we were right in the first place.”
    “I suppose so,” Jeffords said, though he sounded gloomy about it.
    “Pat,” Benjamin said, “look on the bright side. You
did
pick the right man, and he has already proved that we do need such a person.”
    “Well,” Jeffords said, with a sigh, “I do look pretty clumsy there, don't I, seen in the clear light of day.”
    “Because
that's
not what you're good at, Pat,” Benjamin told him, back to being avuncular. “What
you're
good at is logistics, moving people and funds and transport in an open, clearcut, aboveboard