Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

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I trust you’ve already established that there’s no check in this envelope. No matter how long this letter turns out to be, no matter how many sheets of paper wind up folded together and stuffed into this envelope, the first thing you’ll do is shake everything out looking for a check, and there won’t be one. So you’ve done that by now, and you said, “The dirty rat bastard said he’d send a check and there’s no check here and this better be good.”

I’ll make it as good as I can, Lisa.

But where to start? Why, at the beginning of this beautiful day, dear Lisa, when Laurence Clarke sprang out of bed with a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye and—

Oh, hell.

Rome must have fallen on just this sort of day. A bright sun shining, a ghost of a breeze toying with the garbage in the gutters and plucking the hems of the mini-skirts, even the air pollution in the acceptable range. I actually hummed on the way to the office. Hummed! And some of the people I passed in the streets were smiling. Genuine New Yorkers with discernible smiles on their faces. I know it sounds impossible, but they couldn’t all have been tourists. Some of them must have been natives, and here they were smiling at one another.

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