'Ah, schlemiel,' he whispered into the phosphorescence. Accident prone, schlimazzel. The gun would blow up in his hands. The alligator's heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage; in this unholy light. 'Can I let you just go?' Bung the foreman knew he was after a sure thing. It was down on the clipboard. And then he saw the alligator couldn't go any further. Had settled down on its haunches to wait, knowing damn well it was going to be blasted.
In Independence Hall in Philly, when the floor was rebuilt, they left part of the original, a foot square, to show the tourists. 'Maybe,' the guide would tell you, 'Benjamin Franklin stood right there, or even George Washington.' Profane on an eighth-grade class trip had been suitably impressed. He got that feeling now. Here in this room an old man had killed and boiled a catechumen, had committed sodomy with a rat, had discussed a rodent nunhood with V., a future saint - depending which story you listened to.
'I'm sorry,' he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemiel's stock line. He raised the repeater to his shoulder, flicked off the safety. 'Sorry,' he said again. Father Fairing talked to rats. Profane talked to alligators. He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still. Blood began to seep out amoeba-like to form shifting patterns with the weak glow of the water. Abruptly, the flashlight went out.
II
Gouverneur ('Roony') Winsome sat on his grotesque espresso machine, smoking string and casting baleful looks at the girl in the next room. The apartment, perched high over Riverside Drive, ran to something like thirteen rooms, all decorated in Early Homosexual and arranged to present what the writers of the last century liked to call 'vistas' when the connecting doors were open, as they were now.
Mafia his wife was in on the bed playing with Fang the cat. At the moment she was naked and dangling an inflatable brassiere before the frustrated claws of Fang who was Siamese, gray and neurotic. 'Bouncy, bouncy,' she was saying. 'Is the dweat big kitties angwy cause he tart play wif the bwa? EEEE, he so cute and ickle.'
Oh, man, thought Winsome, an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert.
The string was from Bloomingdale's, fine quality: procured by Charisma several months before on one of his sporadic work binges; he'd been a shipping clerk that time. Winsome made a mental note to see the pusher from Lord and Taylor's, a frail girl who hoped someday to sell pocketbooks in the accessories department. The stuff was highly valued by string smokers, on the same level as Chivas Regal Scotch or black Panamanian marijuana.
Roony was an executive for Outlandish Records (Volkswagens in Hi-Fi, The Leavenworth Glee Club Sings Old Favorites) and spent most of his time out prowling for new curiosities. He had once, for example, smuggled a tape recorder, disguised as a Kotex dispenser, into the ladies' room at Penn Station; could be seen, microphone in hand, lurking in false beard and levis in the Washington Square fountain, being thrown out of a whorehouse on 125th Street, sneaking along the bullpen at Yankee Stadium on opening day. Roony was everywhere and irrepressible. His closest scrape had come the morning two CIA agents, armed to the teeth, came storming into the office to destroy Winsome's great and secret dream: the version to end all versions of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. What he planned to use for bells, brass band or orchestra God and Winsome only knew; these were of no concern to the CIA. It was the cannon shots they had come to find out about. It seemed Winsome had been putting out feelers among higher-echelon personnel in the Strategic Air Command.
'Why,' said the CIA man in the gray suit.
'Why not,' said Winsome.
'Why,' said the CIA man in the blue suit.
Winsome told them.
'My God,' they said, blanching in unison.
'It would have to be the one dropped on Moscow, naturally,' Roony said. 'We want historical accuracy.'
The cat let loose a nerve-jangling scream. Charisma came crawling in from one of the adjoining rooms, covered by a great green Hudson's Bay blanket. 'Morning,' Charisma said, his voice muffled by the blanket.
'No,' said Winsome. 'You guessed wrong again. It is midnight and Mafia my wife is playing with the cat. Go in and see. I'm thinking of selling tickets.'
'Where is Fu,' from under the blanket.
'Out rollicking,' said Winsome, 'downtown.'
'Roon' the girl squealed, 'come in and look at him.' The cat was lying on its back with all four paws up in the air and a death grin on its face.
Winsome made no comment. The green mound in the middle of the room moved past the espresso machine; entered Mafia's room. Going past the bed it stopped briefly, a hand reached out and patted Mafia on the thigh, then it moved on again in the direction of the bathroom.
The Eskimos, Winsome reflected, consider it good hostmanship to offer a guest your wife for the night, along with food and lodging. I wonder if old Charisma is getting any there off of Mafia.
'Mukluk,' he said aloud. He reckoned it was an Eskimo word. If it wasn't, too bad: he didn't know any others. Nobody heard him anyway.
The cat came flying through the air, into the espresso machine roam. His wife was putting on a peignoir, kimono, housecoat, or negligee. He didn't know the difference, though periodically Mafia tried to explain to him. All Winsome knew was it was something you had to take off her. 'I am going to work for a while,' she said.
His wife was an authoress. Her novels - three to date - ran a thousand pages each and, like sanitary napkins, had gathered in an immense and faithful sisterhood of consumers. There'd even evolved somehow a kind of sodality or fan club that sat around, read from her books and discussed her Theory.
If the two of them ever did get around to making a final split, it would be that Theory there that would do it. Unfortunately, Mafia believed in it as fervently as any of her followers. It wasn't much of a Theory, more wishful thinking on Mafia's part than anything else. There being but the single proposition: the world can only be rescued from certain decay through Heroic Love.
In practice, Heroic Love meant screwing five or six times a night, every night, with a great many athletic, half-
