Though he was hale, if not hearty, at sixty-two, his friends were dropping like flies. First to go had been O’Shea who had found the strains of a divorce to be unbearable and waded into a pond in Patchogue, never again to surface. Next came Taggert, a trumpet player who had been hospitalized with frail lungs, then quickly released when he set a record for blowing up pulmonary balloons. Yet soon after, he expired all the same – in a commercial hotel, surrounded by weeping jazz musicians. No sooner had Dugan recovered from this loss than he received word that Lieberman, his long-time editor, had keeled over at his desk, as if he had grown weary of reading introspective first novels. Lieberman had been Dugan’s age, almost to the day, and had appeared to be strong as an ox. Brilliant at shoring up defective manuscripts, he had imposed a clever structure on Dugan’s complex study of nineteenth-century Balkan cabals. The loss was a grievous one to Dugan who could not help but think – it’s getting closer.
