'Shush,' Profane said. Bung the foreman had carried a walkie-talkie before the FCC clamped down. Now he carried a clipboard and filed daily reports with Zeitsuss. He didn't talk much except to give orders. One phrase he used always: 'I'm the foreman.' Sometimes 'I'm Bung, the foreman.' Angel's theory was that he had to keep saying this, to remind himself.
Ahead of them the alligator lumbered, forlorn. It was moving slower, as if to let them catch up and end it. They arrived at the manhole. Angel climbed up the ladder and hammered with a short crowbar on the underside of the cover. Profane held the flashlight and kept an eye on the coco. There were scraping sounds from above, and the cover was suddenly jacked to one side. A crescent of pink neon sky appeared. Rain came down splashing into Angel's eyes. Bung the foreman's head appeared in the crescent.
'Chinga tu madre,' said Angel pleasantly.
'Report,' said Bung.
'He's moving off,' Profane called from below.
'We're after one now,' Angel said.
'You're drunk,' Bung said.
'No,' said Angel.
'Yes,' cried Bung, 'I'm the foreman.'
'Angel,' Profane said. 'Come on, we'll lose him.'
'I'm sober,' Angel said. It occurred to him how nice it might be to punch Bung in the mouth.
'I am going to write you up,' said Bung, 'I smell booze on your breath.'
Angel started climbing out of the manhole. 'I would like to discuss this with you.'
'What are you guys doing,' Profane said, 'playing potsy?'
'Carry on,' Bung called into the hole. 'I am detaining your partner for disciplinary action.' Angel, halfway out of the hole, sank his teeth into Bung's leg. Bung screamed. Profane saw Angel disappear, and the pink crescent replace him. Rain spattered down out of the sky and drooled along the old brick sides of the hole. Scuffling sounds were heard in the street.
'Now what the hell,' Profane said. He swung the flashlight beam down the tunnel, saw the tip of the alligator's tail sashaying around the next bend. He shrugged. 'Carry on, your ass,' he said.
He moved away from the manhole, carrying the gun safetied under one arm, the flashlight in the other hand. It was the first time he'd hunted solo. He wasn't scared. When it came to the kill there would be something to prop the flashlight against.
Nearly as he could figure, he was on the East Side, uptown somewhere. He was out of his territory - God, had he chased this alligator all the way crosstown? He rounded the bend, the light from the pink sky was lost: now there roved only a sluggish ellipse with him and the alligator at foci, and a slender axis of light linking them.
They angled to the left, half uptown. The water began to get a little deeper. They were entering Fairing's Parish, named after a priest who'd lived topside years ago. During the Depression of the '30's, in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, he had decided that the rats were going to take over, after New York died. Lasting eighteen hours a day, his beat had covered the breadlines and missions, where he gave comfort, stitched up raggedy souls. He foresaw nothing but a city of starved corpses, covering the sidewalks and the grass of the parks, lying belly up in the fountains, hanging wrynecked from the streetlamps. The city - maybe America, his horizons didn't extend that far - would belong to the rats before the year was out. This being the case, father Fairing thought it best for the rats to be given a head start - which meant conversion to the Roman Church. One night early in Roosevelt's first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship. The first thing he did – according to his journals (discovered months after he died) – was to put an eternal blessing and a few exorcisms on the water flowing through the sewers between Lexington and the East River, and between 86th and 79th Streets. This was the area which became Fairing's Parish. These benisons made sure of an adequate supply of holy water; also eliminated the trouble of individual baptisms, when he finally converted all the rats in the parish. Too, he expected other rats to hear what was going on under the upper East Side, and come likewise to be converted. Before long he would be spiritual leader of the inheritors of the earth. He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them.
Accordingly, he built himself a small shelter on one bank of the sewer. His cassock for a bed, his breviary for a pillow. Each morning he'd make a small fire from driftwood collected and set out to dry the night before. Nearby was a depression in the concrete which sat beneath a downspout, for rainwater. Here he drank and washed. After a breakfast of roast rat ('The livers,' he wrote, 'are particularly succulent') he set about his first task: learning to communicate with the rats. Presumably he succeeded. An entry for November 1934 says:
'Ignatius is proving a very difficult student indeed. He quarreled with me today over the nature of indulgences. Bartholomew and Teresa supported him. I read them from the catechism: 'The Church by means of indulgences remits the temporal punishment due to sin by applying to us from her spiritual treasury part of the infinite satisfaction of Jesus Christ and of the superabundant satisfaction of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the saints.'
'And what,' inquired Ignatius, 'is this superabundant satisfaction?'
Again I read: 'That which they gained during their lifetime but did not need, and which the Church applies to the fellow members of the communion of saints.'
'Aha,' crowed Ignatius, 'then I cannot see how this differs from Marxist communism, which you told us is Godless. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.' I tried to explain that there were different sorts of communism: that the early Church, indeed, was based on a common charity and sharing of goods. Bartholomew chimed in at this point with the observation that perhaps this doctrine of a spiritual treasury arose from the economic and social conditions of the Church in her infancy. Teresa promptly accused Bartholomew of holding Marxist views himself, as a terrible fight broke out, in which poor Teresa had an eye scratched from the socket. To spare her further pain, I put her to sleep and made a delicious meal from her remains, shortly after sext. I have discovered the tails, if boiled long enough, are quite agreeable.'
