ever bring to men a mockery of liberty, of dignity. But that cannot be. Or else I have lived . . .'
Signor Mantissa grasped his hand. 'Thank you,' he said.
The Gaucho shook his head. 'Per niente,' he muttered, then abruptly turned and made his way toward the riot in the square. Signor Mantissa watched him briefly. 'Come,' he said at last.
Evan looked over to where Victoria was standing enchanted. He seemed about to move, or call to her. Then he shrugged and turned away to follow the others. Perhaps he didn't want to disturb her.
Moffit, knocked sprawling by a not-so-rotten turnip, saw them. 'They're getting away,' he said. He got to his feet and began clawing his way through the rioters expecting to be shot at any minute. 'In the name of the Queen,' he cried. 'Halt.' Someone careened into him.
'I say,' said Moffit, 'it's Sidney.'
'I've been looking all over for you,' Stencil said.
'Not a mo too soon. They're getting away.'
'Forget it.'
'Down that alley. Hurry.' He tugged at Stencil's sleeve. 'Forget it, Moffit. It's off. The whole show.'
'Why?
'Don't ask why. It's over.'
'But.'
'There was just a communique from London. From the Chief. He knows more than I do. He called it off. How should I know? No one ever tells me anything.'
'Oh, my God.'
They edged into a doorway. Stencil pulled out his pipe and lit it. The sounds of firing rose in a crescendo which it seemed would never stop. 'Moffit,' Stencil said after a while, puffing meditatively, 'if there is ever a plot to assassinate the Foreign Minister, I pray I never get assigned to the job of preventing it. Conflict of interest, you know.'
They scurried down a narrow street to the Lungarno. There, after Cesare had removed two middle-aged ladies and a cab driver, they took possession of a fiacre and clattered off pell-mell for the Ponte San Trinita. The barge was waiting for them, dim amid the river's shadows. The captain jumped to the quay. 'Three of you,' he bellowed. 'Our bargain included only one.' Signor Mantissa flew into a rage, leaped from the carriage, picked up the captain bodily and before anyone had time to register amazement, flung him into the Arno. 'On board!' he cried. Evan and Godolphin jumped onto a cargo of crated Chianti flasks. Cesare moaned, thinking of how that trip would be.
'Can anyone pilot a barge,' Signor Mantissa wondered. 'It is like a man-o'-war,' Godolphin smiled, 'only smaller and no sails. Son, would you cast off.'
'Aye, aye, sir.' In a moment they were free of the quay. Soon the barge was drifting off into the current which flows strong and steady toward Pisa and the sea. 'Cesare,' they called, in what were already ghosts' voices, 'addio. A rivederla.'
Cesare waved. 'A rivederci.' Soon they had disappeared, dissolved in the darkness. Cesare put his hands in his pockets and started to stroll. He found a stone in the street and began to kick it aimlessly along the Lungarno. Soon, he thought, I will go and buy a liter fiasco of Chianti. As he passed the Palazzo Corsini, towering nebulous and fair above him, he thought: what an amusing world it still is, where things and people can be found in places where they do not belong. For example, out there on the river now with a thousand liters of wine are a man in love with Venus, and a sea captain, and his fat son. And back in the Uffizi . . . He roared aloud. In the room of Lorenzo Monaco, he remembered amazed, before Botticelli's Birth of Venus, still blooming purple and gay, there is a hollow Judas tree.
Chapter Eight
In which Rachel gets her yo-yo back, Roony sings a song, and Stencil calls on Bloody Chiclitz
I
Profane, sweating in April's heat, sat on a bench in the little park behind the Public Library, swatting at flies with rolled-up pages of the Times classified. From mental cross-plotting he'd decided where he sat now was the geographical center of the midtown employment agency belt.
A weird area it was. For a week now he'd sat patient in a dozen offices, filling out forms, having interviews and watching other people, especially girls. He had an interesting daydream all built up, which went: You're jobless, I'm jobless, here we both are out of work, let's screw. He was horny. What little money he'd saved from the sewer job had almost run out and here he was considering seduction. It kept the time moving right along.
So far no agency he'd been to had sent him anywhere for a job interview. He had to agree with them. To amuse himself he'd looked in Help Wanted under S. Nobody wanted a schlemiel. Laborers were for out of the city: Profane wanted to stay in Manhattan, he'd had enough of wandering out in the suburbs. He wanted a single point, a base of operations, someplace to screw in private. It was difficult when you brought a girl to a flophouse. A young kid with a beard and old dungarees had tried that a few nights ago down where Profane was staying. The audience, winos and bums, had decided to serenade them after a few minutes of just watching. 'Let me call you sweetheart,' they sang, all somehow on key. A few had fine voices, some sang harmony. It may have been like the bartender on upper Broadway who was nice to the girls and their customers. There is a way we behave around young people excited with each other, even if we haven't been getting any for a while and aren't likely to very soon. It is a little cynical, a little self-pitying, a little withdrawn; but at the same time a genuine desire to see young people get together. Though it springs from a self- centered concern, it is often as much as a young man like Profane ever does go out of himself and take an interest in human strangers. Which is better, one would suppose, than nothing at all.
Profane sighed. The eyes of New York women do not see the wandering bums or the boys with no place to go. Material wealth and getting laid strolled arm-in-arm the midway of Profane's mind. If he'd been the type who evolves theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses. All he believed at this point, on the bench behind the Library, was that anybody who worked for inanimate money so he could buy more inanimate objects was out of his head. Inanimate money was to get animate warmth, dead fingernails in the
