with the controls of a tape recorder. A sound man was up in a nearby tree, dangling microphones. The night had become cold and windy.
'Howdy,' said the tweed suit. 'My name is Winsome.'
'My sister's boss,' Angel whispered. Profane heard a scream up the street which might have been Fina. He started running. There was shooting and a lot of yelling. Five Bop Kings came running out of an alley ten feet ahead, into the street, Angel and Geronimo were right behind Profane. Somebody had parked a car in the middle of the street with WLIB on the radio, turned up to top volume. Close at hand they heard a belt whiz through the air and a scream of pain: but a big tree's black shadow hid whatever was happening.
They cased the street for a clubhouse. Soon they found PB and an arrow chalked on the sidewalk, the arrow pointing in toward a brownstone. They ran up the steps and saw PB chalked on the door. The door wouldn't open. Angel kicked at it a couple of times and the lock broke. Behind them the street was chaos. A few bodies lay prostrate near the sidewalk. Angel ran down the hall, Profane and Geronimo behind him. Police sirens from uptown and crosstown started to converge on the rumble.
Angel opened a door at the end of the hall and for half a second Profane saw Fina through it lying on an old army cot, naked, hair in disarray, smiling. Her eyes had become hollowed as Lucille's, that night on the pool table. Angel turned and showed all his teeth. 'Don't come in,' he said, 'wait.' The door closed behind him and soon they heard him hitting her.
Angel might have been satisfied only with her life, Profane didn't know how deep the code ran. He couldn't go in and stop it; didn't know if he wanted to. The police sirens had grown to a crescendo and suddenly cut off. Rumble was over. More than that, he suspected, was over. He said good night to Geronimo and left the brownstone, didn't turn his head to see what was happening behind him in the street.
He wouldn't go back to Mendozas', he figured. There was no more work under the street. What peace there had been was over. He had to come back to the surface, the dream-street. Soon he found a subway station, twenty minutes later he was downtown looking for a cheap mattress.
Chapter Seven
She hangs on the western wall
Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S., browsed among treasures in his Park Avenue office/residence. Mounted on black velvet in a locked mahogany case, showpiece of the office, was a set of false dentures, each tooth a different precious metal. The upper right canine was pure titanium and for Eigenvalue the focal point of the set. He had seen the original sponge at a foundry near Colorado Springs a year ago, having flown there in the private plane of one Clayton ('Bloody') Chiclitz. Chiclitz of Yoyodyne, one of the biggest defense contractors on the east coast, with subsidiaries all over the country. He and Eigenvalue were part of the same Circle. That was what the enthusiast, Stencil, said. And believed.
For those who keep an eye on such things, bright little flags had begun to appear toward the end of Eisenhower's first term, fluttering bravely in history's gay turbulence, signaling that a new and unlikely profession was gaining moral ascendancy. Back around the turn of the century, psychoanalysis had usurped from the priesthood the role of father-confessor. Now, it seemed, the analyst in his turn was about to be deposed by, of all people, the dentist.
It appeared actually to have been little more than a change in nomenclature. Appointments became sessions, profound statements about oneself, came to be prefaced by 'My dentist says . . .' Psychodontia, like its predecessors, developed a jargon: you called neurosis 'malocclusion,' oral, anal and genital stages 'deciduous dentition,' id 'pulp', and superego 'enamel.'
The pulp is soft, and laced with little blood vessels and nerves. The enamel, mostly calcium, is inanimate. These were the it and I psychodontia had to deal with. The hard, lifeless I covered up the warm, pulsing it; protecting and sheltering.
Eigenvalue, enchanted by the titanium's dull spark, brooded on Stencil's fantasy (thinking of it with conscious effort as a distal amalgam: an alloy of the illusory flow and gleam of mercury with the pure truth of gold or silver, filling a breach in the protective enamel, far from the root).
Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason, Eigenvalue reflected. But even if there are several per tooth, there's no conscious organization there against the life of the pulp, no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go about grouping the world's random caries into cabals.
Intercom blinked gently. 'Mr. Stencil,' it said. So. What pretext this time. He'd spent three appointments getting his teeth cleaned. Gracious and flowing, Dr. Eigenvalue entered the private waiting room. Stencil rose to meet him, stammering. 'Toothache?' the doctor suggested, solicitous.
'Nothing wrong with the teeth,' Stencil got out. 'You must talk. You must both drop pretense.'
From behind his desk, in the office, Eigenvalue said, 'You're a bad detective and a worse spy.'
'It isn't espionage,' Stencil protested, 'but the Situation is intolerable.' A term he'd learned from his father. 'They're abandoning the Alligator Patrol. Slowly, so as not to attract attention.'
'You think you've frightened them?'
'Please.' The man was ashen. He produced a pipe and pouch and set about scattering tobacco on the wall- to-wall carpeting.
'You presented the Alligator Patrol to me,' said Eigenvalue, 'in a humorous light. An interesting conversation piece, while my hygienist was in your mouth. Were you waiting for her hands to tremble? For me to go all pale? Had it been myself and a drill, such a guilt reaction might have been very, very uncomfortable.' Stencil had filled the pipe and was lighting it. 'You've conceived somewhere the notion that I am intimate with the details of a conspiracy. In a world such as you inhabit, Mr. Stencil, any cluster of phenomena can be a conspiracy. So no doubt your suspicion is correct. But why consult me? Why not the Encyclopaedia Britannica? It knows more than I about any phenomena you should ever have interest in. Unless, of course, you're curious about dentistry.' How weak he looked, sitting there. How old was he - fifty-five - and he looked seventy. Whereas Eigenvalue at roughly the same age looked thirty-five. Young as he felt. 'Which field?' he asked playfully. 'Peridontia, oral surgery, orthodontia? Prosthetics?'
'Suppose it was prosthetics,' taking Eigenvalue by surprise. Stencil was building a protective curtain of aromatic pipe smoke, to be inscrutable behind. But his voice had somehow regained a measure of self- possession.
'Come,' said Eigenvalue. They entered a rear office, where the museum was. Here were a pair of forceps once handled by Fauchard; a first edition of The Surgeon Dentist, Paris, 1728; a chair sat in by patients of Chapin Aaron Harris; a brick from one of the first buildings of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. Eigenvalue led Stencil to the mahogany case.
