"Gosh," the girl said, "where do you think you are?"
"I don't know," Fleetwood said and attempted what he hoped was the sort of glance that pleads understanding. "I mean to say...."
"Are you being funny about a cup of coffee, or do you really think you're in a bar somewhere?"
"Coffee?" Fleetwood said. He seized upon the word as a drowning man might snatch at a drifting life preserver. Besides, it dinged a small bell of recognition somewhere in the back of his mind. "Yes," he murmured, "coffee, please."
"Okay, then," the girl said, and left.
Fleetwood reflected on this exchange in a thickening mood of perturbation. Retracing, haltingly, its tangled bypaths, it seemed to lack in retrospect those bright glimmerings of reason that one looks for in a friendly conversation. The end result appeared to be that he was merely about to receive coffee, which his confused faculties identified only as something murky and brown, of undetermined usefulness. He had hoped for more. As he thought on it, however, voices reached to his inner ear. The girls at the magazine racks had tuned up conversationally. Chit-chat was their medium, of the sort that, for all its lack of substance, takes on a certain penetration after a time. In the end, Fleetwood found himself slipping, no matter how unwillingly, into the role of the eavesdropper. As it was, though, he couldn't have selected a more illuminating moment in which to fall from grace.
"I've been following him for years," one of the girls said as Fleetwood dialed in full strength. "I watch for him every time he comes out."
"Fleetwood Cassidy?" the second girl responded. "Oh, sure. I'm always watching for him."
At this exchange, the back of Fleetwood's neck could not have bristled more smartly had someone begun currying operations with a pair of spiked boots. He straightened rigidly on his stool, twitched significantly about the ears and nose and, in short, affected all the most usual aspects of a beagle alerted to the first whiff of a super-scented fox. Coming as it did in the exact moment of his greatest befuddlement, this overheard snatch of conversation had a telling effect. All at once it posed questions, suggested half-answers and plunged him headlong into a whole new field of bewildering conjecture. It all came too suddenly, however, for him to know how to react to it. For a moment he simply froze to his stool and stared straight ahead like a hypnotized hen.