V. (55 page)

"Stencil," Profane announced, "you are juiced."

True. Autumn, coming on, was cold enough to've sobered Profane. But Stencil appeared drunk on something else.

V. in Spain, V. on Crete: V. crippled in Corfu, a partisan in Asia Minor. Giving tango lessons in Rotterdam she had commanded the rain to stop; it had. Dressed in tights adorned with two Chinese dragons she handed swords, balloons and colored handkerchiefs to Ugo Medichevole, a minor magician, for one lustless summer in the Roman Campagna. And, learning quickly, found time to perform a certain magic of her own; for one morning Medichevole was found out in a field, discussing the shadows of clouds with a sheep. His hair had become white, his mental age roughly five. V. had fled.

It went on like this, all the way up into the 70's, this progress-of-four; Stencil caught up in a compulsive yarning, the others listening with interest. It wasn't that Third Avenue was any kind of drunk's confessional. Did Stencil like his father suffer some private leeriness about Valletta - foresee some submersion, against his will, in a history too old for him, or at least of a different order from what he'd known? Probably not; only that he was on the verge of a major farewell. If it hadn't been Profane and the two bums it would have been somebody: cop, barkeep, girl. Stencil that way had left pieces of himself - and V. - all over the western world.

V. by this time was a remarkably scattered concept.

"Stencil's going to Malta like a nervous groom to matrimony. It is a marriage of convenience, arranged by Fortune, father and mother to everyone. Perhaps Fortune even cares about the success of these things: wants one to look after it in its old age." Which struck Profane as outright foolish. Somehow they had wandered over by Park Avenue. The two bums, sensing unfamiliar territory, veered away toward the west and the Park. Toward what assignation? Stencil said: "Should one bring a peace-offering?"

"Wha. Box of candy, flowers, ha, ha."

"Stencil knows just the thing," said Stencil. They were before Eigenvalue's office building. Intention or accident?

"Stay here in the street," Stencil said. "He won't be but a minute." And vanished into the lobby of the building. Simultaneously a prowl car appeared a few blocks uptown, turned and headed downtown on Park Avenue. Profane started walking. Car passed him and didn't stop. Profane got to the corner and turned west. By the time he'd walked all around the block, Stencil was at a top floor window, yelling down.

"Come on up. You have to help."

"I have to - You are out of your head."

Impatient: "Come up. Before the police get back."

Profane stood outside for a minute, counting floors. Nine. Shrugged, went inside the lobby and took the self-service elevator up.

"Can you pick a lock," Stencil asked. Profane laughed.

"Fine. You will have to go in a window, then."

Stencil rummaged in the broom closet and came up with a length of line.

"Me," said Profane. They started up to the roof.

"This is important." Stencil was pleading. "Suppose you were enemies with someone. But had to see him, her. Wouldn't you try to make it as painless as you could?"

They reached a point on the roof directly above Eigenvalue's office.

Profane looked down into the street. "You," with exaggerated gestures, "are going to put me, over that wall, with no fire escape there, to open, that window, right?" Stencil nodded. So. Back to the boatswain's chair for Profane. Though this time no Pig to save, no good will to cash in on. There'd be no reward from Stencil because there's no honor among second- (or ninth-) story men. Because Stencil was more a bum than he.

They looped the line round Profane's middle. He being so shapeless, it was difficult to locate any center of gravity. Stencil gave the line a few turns round a TV antenna. Profane climbed over the edge and they began to lower away.

"How is it," Stencil said after a while.

"Except for those three cops down there, who are looking at me sort of fishy -"

The line jerked.

"Ha, ha," said Profane. "Made you look." Not that his mood tonight was suicidal. But with the inanimate line, antenna, building and street nine floors below, what common sense could he have?

The center of gravity calculation, it turned out, was way off. As Profane inched down toward Eigenvalue's window, his body's attitude slowly tilted from nearly vertical to face down and parallel with the street. Hanging thus in the air, it occurred to him to practice an Australian crawl.

"Dear God," muttered Stencil. He tugged at the line, impatient. Soon Profane, a dim figure looking like a quadruply-amputated octopus, stopped flailing around. Then he hung still in the air, pondering.

"Hey," he called after a while.

Stencil said what.

"Pull me back up. Hurry." Wheezing, feeling his middle age acutely, Stencil began hauling in line. It took him ten minutes. Profane appeared and hung his nose over the edge of the roof.

"What's wrong."

"You forgot to tell me what it was I was supposed to do when I got in the window." Stencil only looked at him. "Oh. Oh you mean I open the door for you -"

"- and you lock it when you go out," they recited together.

Profane flipped a salute. "Carry on." Stencil began lowering again. Down at the window, Profane called up:

"Stencil, hey. The window won't open."

Stencil took a few half-hitches round the antenna.

"Break it," he gritted. All at once another police car, sirens screaming, lights flashing round and round, came tearing down Park. Stencil ducked behind the roof's low wall. The car kept going. Stencil waited till it was way downtown, out of earshot. And a minute or so more. Then arose cautiously and looked after Profane.

Profane was horizontal again. He'd covered his head with his suede jacket and showed no signs of moving.

"What are you doing," said Stencil.

"Hiding," said Profane. "How about a little torque." Stencil turned the rope: Profane's head slowly began to rotate away from the building. When he came around to where he was facing straight out, like a gargoyle, Profane kicked in the window, a crash horrible and deafening in that night.

"Now the other way."

He got the window open, climbed inside and unlocked for Stencil. Wasting no time, Stencil proceeded through a train of rooms to the museum, forced open the case, slipped that set of false teeth wrought from all precious metals into a coat pocket. From another room he heard more glass breaking.

"What the hell."

Profane looked around. "One pane broken is crude," he explained, "because that looks like a burglary. So I am breaking a few more, is all, so it won't be too suspicious."

Back on the street, scot-free, they followed the bums' way into Central Park. It was two in the morning.

In the wilds of that skinny rectangle they found a rock near a stream. Stencil sat down and produced the teeth.

"The booty," he announced.

"It's yours. What do I need with more teeth." Especially these, more dead than the half-alive hardware in his mouth now.

"Decent of you, Profane. Helping Stencil like that."

"Yeah," Profane agreed.

Part of a moon was out. The teeth, lying on the sloping rock, beamed at their reflection in the water.

All manner of life moved in the dying shrubbery around them.

"Is your name Neil?" inquired a male voice.

"Yes."

"I saw your note. In the men's room of the Port Authority terminal, third stall in the . . ."

Oho, thought Profane. That had cop written all over it.

"With the picture of your sexual organ. Actual size."

"There is one thing," said Neil, "that I like better than having homosexual intercourse. And that is knocking the shit out of a wise cop."

There was then a soft clobbering sound followed by the plainclothesman's crash into the underbrush.

"What day is it," somebody asked. "Say, what day is it?"

Out there something had happened, probably atmospheric. But the moon shone brighter. The number of objects and shadows in the park seemed to multiply: warm white, warm black.

A band of juvenile delinquents marched by, singing.

"Look at the moon," one of them called.

A used contraceptive came floating along the stream. A girl, built like a garbage-truck driver and holding in one hand a sodden brassiere which trailed behind her, trudged after the rubber, head down.

Somewhere else a traveling clock chimed seven. "It is Tuesday," said an old man's voice, half-asleep. It was Saturday.

But about the night-park, near-deserted and cold, was somehow a sense of population and warmth, and high noon. The stream made a curious half cracking, half ringing sound: like the glass of a chandelier, in a wintry drawing room when all the heat is turned off suddenly and forever. The moon shivered, impossibly bright.

"How quiet," said Stencil.

"Quiet. It's like the shuttle at 5 p.m."

"No. Nothing at all is happening in here."

"So what year is it."

"It is 1913," said Stencil.

"Why not," said Profane.

chapter fourteen

V. in love

I

The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 minutes. To Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock - who had forgotten everything - the hands might have stood anywhere. She hurried through the station behind an Algerian-looking facteur who carried her one embroidered bag lightly on his shoulder, who smiled and joked with customs officials being driven slowly to frenzy by a beseeching mob of English tourists.

By the cover of Le Soleil, the Orleanist morning paper, it was 24 July 1913. Louis Philippe Robert, due d'Orleans, was the current Pretender. Certain quarters of Paris raved under the heat of Sirius, were touched by its halo of plague, which is nine light-years from rim to center. Among the upper rooms of a new middle-class home in the 17th arrondissement Black Mass was held every Sunday.

Melanie l'Heuremaudit was driven away down the rue La Fayette in a noisy auto-taxi. She sat in the exact center of the seat, while behind her the three massive arcades and seven allegorical statues of the Gare slowly receded into a lowering, pre-autumn sky. Her eyes were dead, her nose French: the strength there and about the chin and lips made her resemble the classical rendering of Liberty. In all, the face was quite beautiful except for the eyes, which were the color of freezing rain. Melanie was fifteen.

Had fled from school in Belgium as soon as she received the letter from her mother, with 1500 francs and the announcement that her support would continue, though all Papa's possessions had been attached by the court. The mother had gone off to tour Austria-Hungary. She did not expect to see Melanie in the foreseeable future.

Melanie's head ached, but she didn't care. Or did but not where she was, here present as a face and a ballerina's figure on the bouncing back seat of a taxi. The driver's neck was soft, white: wisps of white hair straggled from under the blue stocking cap. On reaching the intersection with the Boulevard Haussmann, the car turned right up rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. To her left rose the dome of the Opera, and tiny Apollo, with his golden lyre . . .

"Papa!" she screamed.

The driver winced, tapped the brake reflexively. "I am not your father," he muttered.

Up into the heights of Montmartre, aimed for the most diseased part of the sky. Would it rain? The clouds hung like leprous tissue. Under that light the color of her hair reduced to neutral browns, buffs. Let down the hair reached halfway over her buttocks. But she wore it high with two large curls covering her ears, tickling the sides of her neck.

Papa had a strong bald skull and a brave mustache. Evenings she would come softly into the room, the mysterious place walled in silk where he and her mother slept. And while Madeleine combed the hair of Maman in the other room, Melanie lay on the wide bed beside him, while he touched her in many places, and she squirmed and fought not to make a sound. It was their game. One night there had been heat lightning outside, and a small night bird had lit on the windowsill and watched them. How long ago it seemed! Late summer, like today.

This had been at Serre Chaude, their estate in Normandy, once the ancestral home of a family whose blood had long since turned to a pale ichor and vaporized away into the frosty skies over Amiens. The house, which dated from the reign of Henri IV, was large but unimpressive, like most architecture of the period. She had always wanted to slide down the great mansard roof: begin at the top and skid down the first gentle slope. Her skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe matte against a wilderness of chimneys, under the Norman sunlight. High over the elms and the hidden carp pods, up where Maman could only be a tiny blotch under a parasol, gazing at her. She imagined the sensation often: the feeling of roof-tiles rapidly sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump, the wind trapped under her blouse teasing the new breasts. And then the break: where the lower, steeper slope of the roof began, the point of no return, where the friction against her body would lessen and she would accelerate, flip over to twist the skirt - perhaps rip it off, be done with it, see it flutter away, like a dark kite! - to let the dovetailed tiles tense her nipple-points to an angry red, see a pigeon clinging to the eaves just before flight, taste the long hair caught against her teeth and tongue, cry out . . .

The taxi stopped in front of a cabaret in the rue Germaine Pilon, near Boulevard Clichy. Melanie paid the fare and was handed her bag from the top of the cab. She felt something which might be the beginning of the rain against her cheek. The cab drove away, she stood before Le Nerf in an empty street, the flowered bag without gaiety under the clouds.

"You believed us after all." M. Itague stood, half-stooping, holding the handle of the traveling bag. "Come, fetiche, inside. There's news."

On the small stage, which faced a dining room filled only with stacked tables and chairs, and lit by uncertain August daylight, came the confrontation with Satin.