V. (18 page)

The only grounds for divorce in New York state is adultery. Roony, dreaming mildly of beating Mafia to the punch, had begun to look with more than routine interest, at Paola Maijstral, Rachel's roommate. Pretty and sensitive; and unhappy, he'd heard, with her husband Pappy Hod, BM3, USN, from whom she was separated. But did that mean she'd think any better of Winsome?

Charisma was in the shower, splashing around. Was he wearing the green blanket in there? Winsome had the impression he lived in it.

"Hey," called Mafia from the writing desk. "How do you spell Prometheus, anybody." Winsome was about to say it started off like prophylactic when the phone rang. Winsome hopped down off the espresso machine and padded over to it. Let her publishers think she was illiterate.

"Roony, have you seen my roommate. The young one." He had not.

"Or Stencil."

"Stencil has not been here all week," Winsome said. "He is out tracking down leads, he says. All quite mysterious and Dashiell Hammettlike."

Rachel sounded upset: her breathing, something. "Would they be together?" Winsome spread his hands and shrugged, keeping the phone tucked between neck and shoulder. "Because she didn't come home last night."

"No telling what stencil is doing," said Winsome, "but I will ask Charisma."

Charisma was standing in the bathroom, wrapped in the blanket, observing his teeth in the mirror. "Eigenvalue," he mumbled. "I could do a better root canal job. What is my buddy Winsome paying you for, anyway."

"Where is Stencil," said Winsome.

"He sent a note yesterday, by a vagrant in an old campaign hat, circa 1898. Something about he would be the sewers, tracing down a lead, indefinitely."

"Don't slouch," Winsome's wife said as he chugged back to the phone emitting puffs of string smoke. "Stand up straight."

"Ei-gen-value!" moaned Charisma. The bathroom had s delayed echo.

"The what," Rachel said.

"None of us," Winsome told her, "have ever inquired into his business. If he wants to grouse around the sewer system, why let him. I doubt Paola is with him."

"Paola," Rachel said, "is a very sick girl." She hung up, angry but not at Winsome, and turned to see Either sneaky-Peteing out the door wearing Rachel's white leather raincoat.

"You could have asked me," Rachel said. The girl was always swiping things and then getting all kittenish when she was caught.

"Where are you going at this hour," Rachel wanted to know.

"Oh, out." Vaguely. If she had any guts, Rachel thought, she would say: who the hell are you, I have to account to you for where I go? And Rachel would answer: I am who you owe a thousand-odd bucks to, is who. And Esther get all hysterical and say: If that's the way it is, I'm leaving, I will go into prostitution or something and send you your money in the mail. And Rachel would watch her stomp out and then just as she was, at the door, deliver the exit line. You'll go broke, you'll have to pay them. Go and be damned. The door would slam, high heels clatter away down the hall, a hiss-thump of elevator doors and hoorah: no more Esther. And next day she would read in the paper where Esther Harvitz, 22, honors graduate of CCNY, had taken a Brody off some bridge, overpass or high building. And Rachel would be so shocked she wouldn't even be able to cry.

"Was that me?" out loud. Esther had left. "So," she continued in a Viennese dialect, "this is what we call repressed hostility. You secretly want to kill your roommate. Or something."

Somebody was banging on the door. She opened it to Fu and a Neanderthal wearing the uniform of a 3rd class boatswain's mate in the U. S. Navy.

"This is Pig Bodine," said Fu.

"Isn't it a small world," said Pig Bodine. "I'm looking for Pappy Hod's woman."

"So am I," said Rachel. "And what are you, playing Cupid for Pappy? Paola doesn't want to see him again."

Pig tossed his white hat at the desk lamp, scoring ringer. "Beer in the icebox?" said Fu, all smiles. Rachel was used to being barged in on at all hours by members of the Crew and their random acquaintances. "MYSAH," she said, which is Crew talk for Make Yourself At Home.

"Pappy is over in the Med," said Pig, lying on the couch. He was short enough so that his feet didn't hang over the edge. He let one thick furry arm fall to the floor with a dull thump, which Rachel suspected would have been more like a splat if there hadn't been a rug there. "We are on the same ship."

"How come then you aren't over in the Med, wherever that is," said Rachel. She knew he meant Mediterranean but felt hostile.

"I am AWOL," said Pig. He closed his eyes. Fu came back with beer. "Oh boy, oh boy, yeah," said Pig. "I smell Ballantine."

"Pig has this remarkably acute nose," Fu said, putting an opened quart of Ballantine into Pig's fist, which looked like a badger with pituitary trouble. "I have never known him to guess wrong."

"How did you two get together," Rachel asked, seating herself on the floor. Pig, eyes still closed, was slobbering beer. It ran out of the corners of his mouth, formed brief pools in the bushy caverns of his ears and soaked on into the sofa.

"If you had been down the Spoon at all you would know," Fu said. He referred to the Rusty Spoon, a bar on the western fringes of Greenwich Village where, legend has it, a noted and colorful poet of the '20's drank himself to death. Ever since then it has had kind of a rep among groups like The Whole Sick Crew. "Pig has made a big hit there."

"I'll bet Pig is the darling of the Rusty Spoon," said Rachel, "considering that sense of smell he has, and how he can tell what brand of beer it is, and all."

Pig removed the bottle from his mouth, where it had been somehow, miraculously, balanced. "Glug," he said. "Ahh."

Rachel smiled. "Perhaps your friend would like to hear some music," she said. She reached over and turned on the FM, full volume. She screwed the dial over to a hillbilly station. On came a heartbroken violin, guitar, banjo and vocalist:

Last night I went and raced with the Highway Patrol

But that Pontiac done had more guts than mine.

And so I wrapped my tail around a telephone pole

And now my baby she just sits a cryin'.

I'm up in heaven, darlin', now don't you cry;

Ain't no reason why you should be blue.

Just go on out and race a cop in Daddy's old Ford

And you can join me up in heaven, too.

Pig's right foot had begun to wobble, roughly in time with the music. Soon his stomach, where the beer bottle was now balanced, started to move up and down to the same rhythm. Fu watched Rachel, puzzled.

"There's nothing I love," said Pig and paused. Rachel did not doubt this. "Than good shitkicking music."

"Oh," she shouted; not wanting to get on the subject but too nosy, she was aware, to leave it: "I suppose you and Pappy Hod used to go out on liberty and have all sorts of fun kicking shit."

"We kicked a few jarheads," Fig 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 red, white and blue and one day his sweetheart Belinda Sue (to rhyme with blue) up and run off with an itinerant propeller salesman. Said for that lonely GI. Abruptly Pig swung his head toward Rachel, opened his eyes and said, "What you think of Sartre's thesis that we are all impersonating 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 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 80's. "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 bum who were only accidental 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 an 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: St 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 Generaux 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

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 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."