V. (21 page)

The Outlandish office was in the Grand Central area, seventeen floors up. He sat in an anteroom full of tropical hothouse growths while the wind streamed bleak and heatsucking past the windows. The receptionist gave him an application to fill out. He didn't see Fina.

As he handed the completed form to the girl at the desk, a messenger came through: a Negro wearing an old suede jacket. He dropped a stack of interoffice mail envelopes on the desk and for a second his eyes and Profane's met.

Maybe Profane had seen him under the street or at one of the shapeups. But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it was as if this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching, that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind.

He listened to the wind. The messenger left. "Mr. Winsome will see you in a moment," said the receptionist. Profane wandered over to the window and looked down at 42nd Street. It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him. Maybe it was doing nothing after all to conceal this curious depression which showed up in no stock market or year-end report. "Hey, where are you going," said the receptionist. "Changed my mind," Profane told her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and in the street he looked for the messenger, but couldn't find him. He unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza's suit and shuffled along 42nd Street, head down, straight into the wind.

Friday at the shapeup Zeitsuss, almost crying, gave them the word. From now on, only two days a week operation, only five teams for some mopping up out in Brooklyn. On the way home that evening Profane, Angel and Geronimo stopped off at a neighborhood bar on Broadway.

They stayed till near 9:30 or 10, when a few of the girls wandered in. This was on Broadway in the 80's, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken heart for every light on it. Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it.

The first wave of girls came in to get change for the evening's clients. They weren't pretty and the bartender always had a word for them. Some would be back in again near closing time to have a nightcap, whether there'd been any business or not. If they did have a customer along - usually one of the small gangsters around the neighborhood - the bartender would be as attentive and cordial as if they were young lovers, which in a way they were. And if a girl came in without having found any business all night the bartender would give her coffee with a big shot of brandy and say something about how it was raining or too cold, and not much good, he supposed, for customers. She'd usually have a last try at whoever was in the place.

Profane, Angel and Geronimo left after talking with the girls and having a few rounds at the bowling machine. Coming out they met Mrs. Mendoza.

"You seen your sister?" she asked Angel. "She was going to come help me shop right after work. She never did anything like this before, Angelito, I'm worried."

Kook came running up. "Dolores says she's out with the Playboys but she doesn't know where. Fina just called up and Dolores says she sounded funny." Mrs. Mendoza grabbed him by the head and asked where from this phone call, and Kook said he'd told her already, nobody knew. Profane looked toward Angel and caught Angel looking at him. When Mrs. Mendoza was gone, Angel said, "I don't like to think about it, my own sister, but if one of those little pingas tries anything, man . . ."

Profane didn't say he'd been thinking the same thing. Angel was upset enough already. But he knew Profane was thinking about a gang bang too. They both knew Fina. "We ought to find her," he said.

"They're all over the city," Geronimo said. "I know a couple of their hangouts." They decided to start at the Mott Street clubhouse. Till midnight they took subways all over the city, finding only empty clubhouses or locked doors. But as they were wandering along Amsterdam in the 60's, they heard noise around the corner.

"Jesus Christ," Geronimo said. A full-scale rumble was on. A few guns in evidence but mostly knives, lengths of pipe, garrison belts. The three skirted along the side of the street where cars were parked, and found somebody in a tweed suit hiding behind a new Lincoln and fiddling with the controls of a tape recorder. A sound man was up in a nearby tree, dangling microphones. The night had become cold and windy.

"Howdy," said the tweed suit. "My name is Winsome."

"My sister's boss," Angel whispered. Profane heard a scream up the street which might have been Fina. He started running. There was shooting and a lot of yelling. Five Bop Kings came running out of an alley ten feet ahead, into the street, Angel and Geronimo were right behind Profane. Somebody had parked a car in the middle of the street with WLIB on the radio, turned up to top volume. Close at hand they heard a belt whiz through the air and a scream of pain: but a big tree's black shadow hid whatever was happening.

They cased the street for a clubhouse. Soon they found PB and an arrow chalked on the sidewalk, the arrow pointing in toward a brownstone. They ran up the steps and saw PB chalked on the door. The door wouldn't open. Angel kicked at it a couple of times and the lock broke. Behind them the street was chaos. A few bodies lay prostrate near the sidewalk. Angel ran down the hall, Profane and Geronimo behind him. Police sirens from uptown and crosstown started to converge on the rumble.

Angel opened a door at the end of the hall and for half a second Profane saw Fina through it lying on an old army cot, naked, hair in disarray, smiling. Her eyes had become hollowed as Lucille's, that night on the pool table. Angel turned and showed all his teeth. "Don't come in," he said, "wait." The door closed behind him and soon they heard him hitting her.

Angel might have been satisfied only with her life, Profane didn't know how deep the code ran. He couldn't go in and stop it; didn't know if he wanted to. The police sirens had grown to a crescendo and suddenly cut off. Rumble was over. More than that, he suspected, was over. He said good night to Geronimo and left the brownstone, didn't turn his head to see what was happening behind him in the street.

He wouldn't go back to Mendozas', he figured. There was no more work under the street. What peace there had been was over. He had to came back to the surface, the dream-street. Soon he found a subway station, twenty minutes later he was downtown looking for a cheap mattress.

chapter seven

She hangs on the western wall

Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S., browsed among treasures in his Park Avenue office/residence. Mounted on black velvet in a locked mahogany case, showpiece of the office, was a set of false dentures, each tooth a different precious metal. The upper right canine was pure titanium and for Eigenvalue the focal point of the set. He had seen the original sponge at a foundry near Colorado Springs a year ago, having flown there in the private plane of one Clayton ("Bloody") Chiclitz. Chiclitz of Yoyodyne, one of the biggest defense contractors on the east coast, with subsidiaries all over the country. He and Eigenvalue were part of the same Circle. That was what the enthusiast, Stencil, said. And believed.

For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of Eisenhower's first term, fluttering bravely in history's gay turbulence, signaling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy. Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist.

It appeared actually to have been little more than a change in nomenclature. Appointments became sessions, profound statements about oneself came to be prefaced by "My dentist says . . ." Psychodontia, like its predecessors, developed a jargon: you called neurosis "malocclusion," oral, anal and genital stages "deciduous dentition," id "pulp" and superego "enamel."

The pulp is soft and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamel, mostly calcium, is inanimate. These were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing it; protecting and sheltering.

Eigenvalue, enchanted by the titanium's dull spark, brooded on Stencil's fantasy (thinking of it with conscious effort as a distal amalgam: an alloy of the illusory flow and gleam of mercury with the pure truth of gold or silver, filling a breach in the protective enamel, far from the root).

Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason, Eigenvalue reflected. But even if there are several per tooth, there's no conscious organization there against the life of the pulp, no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go about grouping the world's random caries into cabals.

Intercom blinked gently. "Mr. Stencil," it said. So. What pretext this time. He'd spent three appointments getting his teeth cleaned. Gracious and flowing, Dr. Eigenvalue entered the private waiting room. Stencil rose to meet him, stammering. "Toothache?" the doctor suggested, solicitous.

"Nothing wrong with the teeth," Stencil got out. "You must talk. You must both drop pretense."

From behind his desk, in the office, Eigenvalue said, "You're a bad detective and a worse spy."

"It isn't espionage," Stencil protested, "but the Situation is intolerable." A term he'd learned from his father. "They're abandoning the Alligator Patrol. Slowly, so as not to attract attention."

"You think you've frightened them?"

"Please." The man was ashen. He produced a pipe and pouch and set about scattering tobacco on the wall-to-wall carpeting.

"You presented the Alligator Patrol to me," said Eigenvalue, "in a humorous light. An interesting conversation piece, while my hygienist was in your mouth. Were you waiting for her hands to tremble? For me to go all pale? Had it been myself and a drill, such a guilt reaction might have been very, very uncomfortable." Stencil had filled the pipe and was lighting it. "You've conceived somewhere the notion that I am intimate with the details of a conspiracy. In a world such as you inhabit, Mr. Stencil, any cluster of phenomena can be a conspiracy. So no doubt your suspicion is correct. But why consult me? Why not the Encyclopaedia Britannica? It knows more than I about any phenomena you should ever have interest in. Unless, of course, you're curious about dentistry." How weak he looked, sitting there. How old was he - fifty-five - and he looked seventy. Whereas Eigenvalue at roughly the same age looked thirty-five. Young as he felt. "Which field?" he asked playfully. "Peridontia, oral surgery, orthodontia? Prosthetics?"

"Suppose it was prosthetics," taking Eigenvalue by surprise. Stencil was building a protective curtain of aromatic pipe smoke, to be inscrutable behind. But his voice had somehow regained a measure of self-possession.

"Come," said Eigenvalue. They entered a rear office, where the museum was. Here were a pair of forceps once handled by Fauchard; a first edition of The Surgeon Dentist, Paris, 1728; a chair sat in by patients of Chapin Aaron Harris; a brick from one of the first buildings of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. Eigenvalue led Stencil to the mahogany case.

"Whose," said Stencil, looking at the dentures.

"Like Cinderella's prince," Eigenvalue smiled, "I'm still looking for the jaw to fit these."

"And Stencil, possibly. It would be something she'd wear."

"I made them," said Eigenvalue. "Anybody you'd be looking for would never have seen them. Only you, I and a few other privileged have seen them."

"How does Stencil know."

"That I'm telling the truth? Tut, Mr. Stencil."

The false teeth in the case smiled too, twinkling as if in reproach.

Back in the office, Eigenvalue, to see what he could see, inquired: "Who then is V.?"

But the conversational tone didn't take Stencil aback, he didn't look surprised that the dentist knew of his obsession. "Psychodontia has its secrets and so does Stencil," Stencil answered. "But most important, so does V. She's yielded him only the poor skeleton of a dossier. Most of what he has is inference. He doesn't know who she is, nor what she is. He's trying to find out. As a legacy from his father."

The afternoon curled outside, with only a little wind to stir it. Stencil's words seemed to fall insubstantial inside a cube no wider than Eigenvalue's desk. The dentist kept quiet as Stencil told how his father had come to hear of the girl V. When he'd finished, Eigenvalue said, "You followed up, of course. On-the-spot investigation."

"Yes. But found out hardly more than Stencil has told you." Which was the case. Florence only a few summers ago had seemed crowded with the same tourists as at the turn of the century. But V., whoever she was, might have been swallowed in the airy Renaissance spaces of that city, assumed into the fabric of any of a thousand Great Paintings, for all Stencil was able to determine. He had discovered, however, what was pertinent to his purpose: that she'd been connected, though perhaps only tangentially, with one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War. V. and a conspiracy. Its particular shape governed only by the surface accidents of history at the time.

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.