“We kicked a few jarheads,” Pig bellowed over the music, “which is about the same thing. Where did you say Polly was?”
“I didn’t. Your interest in her is purely Platonic, is that it.”
“Wha,” said Pig.
“No screwing,” Fu explained.
“I wouldn’t do that to anybody but an officer,” Pig said. “I have a code. All I want to see her for is Pappy told me before they got under way I should look her up if I was ever in New York.”
“Well, I don’t know where she is,” Rachel yelled. “I wish I did,” she said, quieter. For a minute or so they heard about a soldier who was overseas in Korea fighting for the red, white and blue and one day his sweetheart Belinda Sue (to rhyme with blue) up and run off with an itinerant propeller salesman. Sad for that lonely GI. Abruptly Pig swung his head toward Rachel, opened his eyes and said, “What do you think of Sartre’s thesis that we are all impersonating an identity?”
Which did not surprise her: after all he had been hanging around the Spoon. For the next hour they talked proper nouns. The hillbilly station continued full blast. Rachel opened a quart of beer for herself and things soon grew convivial. Fu even became gleeful enough to tell one of a bottomless repertoire of Chinese jokes, which went:
“The vagrant minstrel Ling, having insinuated himself into the confidence of a great and influential mandarin, made off one night with a thousand gold yuan and a priceless jade lion, a theft which so unhinged his former employer that in one night the old man’s hair turned snow white, and to the end of his life he did little more than sit on the dusty floor of his chamber, plucking listlessly at a p’ip’a and chanting, ‘Was that not a curious minstrel?’ “
At half past one the phone rang. It was Stencil.
“Stencil’s just been shot at,” he said.
Private eye, indeed. “Are you all right, where are you.” He gave her the address, in the East Eighties. “Sit down and wait,” she said. “We’ll come get you.”
“He can’t sit down, you know.” He hung up.
“Come,” she said, grabbing her coat. “Fun, excitement, thrills. Stencil has just been wounded, tracking down a lead.”
Fu whistled, giggled. “Those leads are beginning to fight back.”
Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop. At this hour, the only customers were two elderly ladies and a cop off duty. The woman behind the pastry counter was all tomato cheeks and smiles, looking like the type who gave extra portions to poor growing boys and mothered bums with free refills on coffee, though it was a neighborhood of rich kids and bums who were only accidentally there and knew it and so “moved on” quickly.
Stencil was in an embarrassing and possibly dangerous position. A few pellets from the first shotgun blast (he’d dodged the second by an adroit flop in the sewage) had ricocheted into his left buttock. He wasn’t especially anxious to sit down. He’d stowed the waterproof suit and mask near a walkway abutment on East River Drive; combed his hair and straightened his clothing by mercury light in a nearby rain-puddle. He wondered how presentable he looked. Not a good job, this policeman being here.
Stencil left the phone booth and edged his right buttock gingerly onto a stool at the counter, trying not to wince, hoping his middle-aged appearance would account for any creakiness he showed. He asked for a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and noticed that his hand wasn’t shaking. The match flame burned pure, conical, unwavering. Stencil, you’re a cool one, he told himself, but God: how did they get on to you?
That was the worst part of it. He and Zeitsuss had met only by accident. Stencil had been on the way over to Rachel’s place. As he crossed Columbus Avenue he noticed a few ragged files of workmen lined up on the sidewalk opposite and being harangued by Zeitsuss. Any organized body fascinated him, especially irregulars. These looked like revolutionaries.
He crossed the street. The group broke up and wandered away. Zeitsuss stood watching them for a moment, then turned and caught sight of Stencil. The light in the east turned the lenses of Zeitsuss’s glasses pale and blank. “You’re late,” Zeitsuss called. So he was, Stencil thought. Years. “See Bung the foreman, that fella there in the plaid shirt.” Stencil realized then that he had a three-day stubble and had been sleeping in his clothes for the same length of time. Curious about anything even suggesting overthrow, he approached Zeitsuss, smiling his father’s Foreign Service smile. “Not looking for employment,” he said.
“You’re a Limey,” Zeitsuss said. “Last Limey we had wrestled his alligators to death. You boys are all right. Why don’t you try it for a day.”
Naturally Stencil asked try what, and so the contact was made. Soon they were back in the office Zeitsuss shared with some vaguely-defined estimates group, talking sewers. Somewhere in the Paris dossier, Stencil knew, was recorded an interview with one of the Collecteurs Généraux who worked the main sewer line which ran under Boulevard St. Michel. The fellow, old at the time of the interview but with an amazing memory, recalled seeing a woman who might have been V. on one of the semimonthly Wednesday tours shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. Having been lucky with sewers once, Stencil saw nothing wrong with trying again. They went out to lunch. In the early afternoon it rained, and the conversation got around to sewer stories. A few old-timers drifted in with their own memories. It was only a matter of an hour or so before Veronica was mentioned: a priest’s mistress who wanted to become a nun, referred to by her initial in the journal.
Persuasive and charming even in a wrinkled suit and nascent beard, trying not to betray any excitement, Stencil talked his way downstairs. But had found them waiting. And where to go from here? He’d seen all he wanted to see of Fairing’s Parish.
Two cups of coffee later the cop left and five minutes after that Rachel, Fu and Pig Bodine showed up. They piled into Fu’s Plymouth. Fu suggested they go to the Spoon. Pig was all for it. Rachel, bless her heart, didn’t make a scene or ask questions. They got off two blocks from her apartment. Fu peeled out down the Drive. It had started to rain again. All Rachel said on the way back was, “I’ll bet your ass is sore.” She said it through long eyelashes and a little-girl grin and for ten seconds or so Stencil felt like the alter kocker Rachel may have thought he was.
chapter six
In which Profane returns
to street
level
V
I
Women had always happened to Profane the schlemihl like accidents: broken shoelaces, dropped dishes, pins in new shirts. Fina was no exception. Profane had figured at first that he was only the disembodied object of a corporal work of mercy. That, in the company of innumerable small and wounded animals, bums on the street, near-dying and lost to God, he was only another means to grace or indulgence for Fina.
But as usual he was wrong. His first indication came with the cheerless celebration Angel and Geronimo staged following his first eight hours of alligator hunting. They had all been on a night shift, and got back to the Mendozas around 5:00 A.M. “Put on a suit,” said Angel.
“I don’t have a suit,” Profane said.
They gave him one of Angel’s. It was too small and he felt ridiculous. “All I want to do,” he said, “really, is sleep.”
“Sleep in the daytime,” Geronimo said, “ho-ho. You crazy, man. We are going out after some coño.”
Fina came in all warm and sleepy-eyed; heard they were holding a party, wanted to tag along. She worked 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. as a secretary but she had sick leave coming. Angel got all embarrassed. This sort of put his sister in the class of coño. Geronimo suggested calling up Dolores and Pilar, two girls they knew. Girls are different from coño. Angel brightened.
The six of them started at an after-hours club up near 125th Street, drinking Gallo wine with ice in it. A small group, vibes and rhyt
hm, played listlessly in one corner. These musicians had been to high school with Angel, Fina and Geronimo. During the breaks they came over and sat at the table. They were drunk and threw pieces of ice at each other. Everybody talked in Spanish and Profane responded in what Italo-American he’d heard around the house as a kid. There was about 10 percent communication but nobody cared: Profane was only guest of honor.
Soon Fina’s eyes changed from sleepy to shiny from wine, and she talked less and spent more of her time smiling at Profane. This made him uncomfortable. It turned out Delgado the vibes player was going to be married the next day and having second thoughts. A violent and pointless argument developed about marriage, pro and con. While everybody else was screaming, Fina leaned toward Profane till their foreheads touched and whispered, “Benito,” her breath light and acid with wine.
“Josephine,” he nodded, pleasant. He was getting a headache. She continued to lean against his head until the next set, when Geronimo grabbed her and they went off to dance. Dolores, fat and amiable, asked Profane to dance. “Non posso ballare,” he said. “No puedo bailar,” she corrected him and yanked him to his feet. The world became filled with the sounds of inanimate calluses slapping inanimate goatskin, felt hitting metal, sticks knocking together. Of course, he couldn’t dance. His shoes kept getting in the way. Dolores, halfway across the room, didn’t notice. Commotion broke out at the door and half a dozen teenagers wearing Playboy jackets invaded. The music bonged and clattered on. Profane kicked off his shoes—old black loafers of Geronimo’s—and concentrated on dancing in his socks. After a while Dolores was there again and five seconds later a spike heel came down square in the middle of his foot. He was too tired to yell. He limped off to a table in the corner, crawled under it and went to sleep. The next thing he knew there was sunlight in his eyes. They were carrying him down Amsterdam Avenue like pallbearers, all chanting, “Mierda. Mierda. Mierda . . .”
He lost count of all the bars they visited. He became drunk. His worst memory was of being alone with Fina somewhere in a telephone booth. They were discussing love. He couldn’t remember what he’d said. The only other thing he remembered between then and the time he woke up—in Union Square at sundown, blindfolded by a raging hangover and covered by a comforter of chilly pigeons who looked like vultures—was some sort of unpleasantness with the police after Angel and Geronimo had tried to smuggle parts of a toilet under their coats out of the men’s room in a bar on Second Avenue.
In the next few days Profane came to tally his time in reverse or schlemihl’s light: time on the job as escape, time exposed to any possibility of getting involved with Fina as assbreaking, wageless labor.
What had he said in that phone booth? The question met him at the end of every shift, day, night or swing, like an evil fog that hovered over whatever manhole he happened to climb out of. Nearly that whole day of slewfooting drunk under February’s sun was a blank. He was not about to ask Fina what had happened. There grew a mutual embarrassment between them, as if they’d been to bed after all.
“Benito,” she said one night, “how come we never talk.”
“Wha,” said Profane, who was watching a Randolph Scott movie on television. “Wha. I talk to you.”
“Sure. Nice dress. How about more coffee. I got me another cocodrilo today. You know what I mean.”
He knew what she meant. Now here was Randolph Scott: cool, imperturbable, keeping his trap shut and only talking when he had to—and then saying the right things and not running off haphazard and inefficient at the mouth—and here on the other side of the phosphor screen was Profane, who knew that one wrong word would put him closer than he cared to be to street level, and whose vocabulary it seemed was made up of nothing but wrong words.
“Why don’t we go to a movie or something,” she said.
“This here,” he answered, “is a good movie. Randolph Scott is this U.S. marshal and that sheriff, there he goes now, is getting paid off by the gang and all he does all day long is play fan-tan with a widow who lives up the hill.”
She withdrew after a while, sad and pouting.
Why? Why did she have to behave like he was a human being. Why couldn’t he be just an object of mercy. What did Fina have to go pushing it for? What did she want—which was a stupid question. She was a restless girl, this Josephine: warm and viscous-moving, ready to come in a flying machine or anyplace else.
But curious, he decided to ask Angel.
“How do I know,” Angel said. “It’s her business. She don’t like anybody in the office. They are all maricón, she says. Except for Mr. Winsome the boss, but he’s married so he’s out.”
“What does she want to be,” Profane said, “a career girl? What does your mother think?”
“My mother thinks everybody should get married: me, Fina, Geronimo. She’ll be after your ass soon. Fina doesn’t want anybody. You, Geronimo, the Playboys. She doesn’t want. Nobody knows what she wants.”
“Playboys,” Profane said. “Wha.”
It came out then that Fina was spiritual leader or Den Mother of this youth gang. She had learned in school about a saint, called Joan of Arc, who went around doing the same thing for armies who were more or less chicken and no good in a rumble. The Playboys, Angel felt, were pretty much the same way.
Profane knew better than to ask whether she was giving them sexual comfort too. He didn’t have to ask. He knew this was another work of mercy. The mother to the troops bit, he guessed—not knowing anything about women—was a harmless way to be what maybe every girl wants to be, a camp follower. With the advantage that here she was not a follower but a leader. How many in the Playboys? Nobody knew, Angel said. Maybe hundreds. They all were crazy for Fina, in a spiritual way. In return she had to put out nothing but charity and comfort, which she was only too glad to do, punchy with grace already.
The Playboys were a strangely exhausted group. Mercenaries, many of them lived in Fina’s neighborhood; but unlike other gangs they had no turf of their own. They were spread out all over the city; having no common geographical or cultural ground, they put their arsenal and street-fighting prowess at the disposal of any interested party who might be considering a rumble. The Youth Board had never taken a count on them: they were everywhere, but as Angel had mentioned, chicken. The main advantage in having them on your side was psychological. They cultivated a carefully sinister image: coal-black velvet jackets with the clan name discreetly lettered small and bloody on the back; faces pale and soulless as the other side of the night (and you felt that was where they lived: for they would appear suddenly across the street from you and keep pace for a while, and then vanish again as if back behind some invisible curtain); all of them affecting prowling walks, hungry eyes, feral mouths.
Profane didn’t meet them in any social way until the Feast of San’ Ercole dei Rinoceronti, which comes on the Ides of March, and is celebrated downtown in the neighborhood called Little Italy. High over all Mulberry Street that night soared arches of light bulbs, arranged in receding sets of whorls, each spanning the street, shining clear to the horizon because the air was so windless. Under the lights were jury-rigged stalls for penny-toss, bingo, pick up the plastic duck and win a prize. Every few steps were stands for zeppole, beer, sausage-pepper sandwiches. Behind it all was music from two bandstands, one at the downtown end of the street and one halfway along. Popular songs, operas. Not too loud in the cold night: as if confined only to the area below the lights. Chinese and Italian residents sat out on the stoops as if it were summer, watching the crowds, the lights, the smoke from the zeppole stands which rose lazy and unturbulent up toward the lights but disappeared before it reached them.
Profane, Angel and Geronimo were out prowling for coño. It was Thursday night, tomorrow—according to the nimble calculations of Geronimo—they were working not for Zeitsuss but for the U.S. Government, since Friday is one-fifth of the week and the gover
nment takes one-fifth of your check for withholding tax. The beauty of Geronimo’s scheme was that it didn’t have to be Friday but could be any day—or days—in the week depressing enough to make you feel it would be a breach of loyalty if the time were dedicated to good old Zeitsuss. Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn’t know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more into a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight. . . .
He wasn’t comfortable in this street. The people mobbing the pavement between the stalls seemed no more logical than the objects in his dream. “They don’t have faces,” he said to Angel.
“A lot of nice asses, though,” Angel said.
“Look, look,” said Geronimo. Three jailbait, all lipstick and shiny-machined breast- and buttock-surfaces, stood in front of the wheel of Fortune, twitching and hollow-eyed.
“Benito, you speak guinea. Go tell them how about a little.”
Behind them the band was playing Madama Butterfly. Nonprofessional, non-rehearsed.
“It isn’t like it was a foreign country,” Profane said.
“Geronimo is a tourist,” Angel said. “He wants to go down to San Juan and live in the Caribe Hilton and ride around the city looking at puertorriqueños.”
They’d been moseying slow, casing the jailbait at the wheel. Profane’s foot came down on an empty beer can. He started to roll. Angel and Geronimo, flanking him, caught him by the arms about halfway down. The girls had turned around and were giggling, the eyes mirthless, ringed in shadow.
Angel waved. “He goes weak in the knees,” Geronimo purred, “when he sees beautiful girls.”
The giggling got louder. Someplace else the American ensign and the geisha would be singing in Italian to the music behind them; and how was that for a tourist’s confusion of tongues? The girls moved away and the three fell into step beside them. They bought beer and took over an unoccupied stoop.
V. Page 15
