The girl on the sidewalk twitched. "It doesn't have any beat." It was a song of the Great Depression. They were singing it in 1932, the year Profane was born. He didn't know where he'd heard it. If it had a beat it was the beat of beans thumping into an old bucket someplace down in Jersey. Some WPA pick against the pavement, some bum-laden freight car on a downgrade hitting the gaps between the rails every 39 feet. She'd have been born in 1942. Wars don't have my beat. They're all noise.

Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood: Non dimenticar, the t'i'ho voluto tanto bene, Ho saputo amar; non dimenticar . . .

And the cold street seemed all at once to've bloomed into singing. He wanted to take the girl by the fingers, lead her to someplace out of the wind, anyplace warm, pivot her back on those poor ballbearing heels and show her his name was Sfacim after all. It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion. "I'm Lucille," the girl said to Profane. The other two introduced themselves, Lucille came back up the stoop to sit next to Profane, Geronimo went off for more beer. Angel continued to sing. "What do you guys do," Lucille said.

I tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought. He scratched his armpit. "Kill alligators," he said.

"Wha."

He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn't born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper of Mulberry Street.

Geronimo came back with beer. They sat and drank beer and watched people and told sewer stories: Every once in a while the girls would want to sing. Soon enough they became kittenish. Lucille jumped up and pranced away. "Catch me," she said.

"Oh God," said Profane.

"You have to chase her," said one of her friends. Angel and Geronimo were laughing.

"I have to wha," said Profane. The other two girls, annoyed that Angel and Geronimo were laughing, arose and went running off after Lucille.

"Chase them?" Geronimo said.

Angel belched. "Sweat out some of this beer." They got off the stoop unsteadily and fell, side by side, into a little jog-trot. "Where'd they go," Profane said.

"Over there." It seemed after a while they were knocking people over. Somebody swung a punch at Geronimo and missed. They dived under an empty stand, single file, and found themselves out on the sidewalk. The girls were loping along, up ahead. Geronimo was breathing hard. They followed the girls, who cut off on a side street. By the time they got around the corner there wasn't girl one to be seen. There followed a confused quarter-hour of wandering along the streets bordering Mulberry, looking under parked cars, behind telephone poles, in back of stoops.

"Nobody here," said Angel.

There was music on Mott Street. Coming out of a basement. They investigated. A sign outside said SOCIAL CLUB. BEER. DANCING. They went down, opened a door and there sure enough was a small beer bar set up in one corner, a jukebox in another and fifteen or twenty curious-looking juvenile delinquents. The boys wore Ivy League suits, the girls wore cocktail dresses. There was rock 'n' roll on the jukebox. The greasy heads and cantilever brassieres were still there, but the atmosphere was refined, like a country club dance.

The three of them just stood. Profane saw Lucille after a while bopping in the middle of the floor with somebody who looked like a chairman of the board of some delinquent's corporation. Over his shoulder she stuck out her tongue at Profane, who looked away. "I don't like it," he heard somebody say, "fuzzwise. Why don't we send it through Central Park and see if anybody rapes it."

He happened to glance off to the left. There was a coat room. Hanging on a row of hooks, neat and uniform, padded shoulders falling symmetrical either side of the hooks, were two dozen black velvet jackets with red lettering on the back. Ding dang, thought Profane: Playboy country.

Angel and Geronimo had been looking the same way. "Do you think we should maybe," Angel wondered. Lucille was beckoning to Profane from a doorway across the dance floor.

"Wait a minute," he said. He weaved between the couples on the floor. Nobody noticed him.

"What took you so long?" She had him by the hand. It was dark in the room. He walked into a pool table. "Here," she whispered. She was lying spread on the green felt. Comer pockets, side pockets, and Lucille. "There are some funny things I could say," he began.

"They've all been said," she whispered. In the dim light from the doorway, her fringed eyes seemed part of the felt. It was as if he were looking through her face to the surface of the table. Skirt raised, mouth open, teeth all white, sharp, ready to sink into whatever soft part of him got that close, oh she would surely haunt him. He unzipped his fly and started to climb up on the pool table.

There was a sudden scream from the next room, somebody knocked over the jukebox, the lights went out. "Wha," she said sitting up.

"Rumble?" Profane said. She came flying off the table, knocked him over. He lay on the floor, his head against a cue rack. Her sudden movement dislodged an avalanche of pool balls on his stomach. "Dear God," he said, covering his head. Her high heels tapped away, fading with distance, over the empty dance floor. He opened his eyes. A pool ball lay even with his eyes. All he could see was a white circle, and this black 8 inside it. He started to laugh. Outside somewhere he thought he heard Angel yelling for help. Profane creaked to his feet, zipped his fly up again, blundered out through the darkness. He got out to the street after tripping over two folding chairs and the cord to the jukebox.

Crouched behind the brownstone balusters of the front stoop he saw a great mob of Playboys milling around in the street. Girls were sitting on the stoop and lining the sidewalk, cheering. In the middle of the street Lucille's late partner the board chairman was going round and round with a huge Negro in a jacket that read BOP KINGS. A few other Bop Kings were mixing it up with the Playboys at the fringes of the crowd. Jurisdictional dispute, Profane figured. He couldn't see either Angel or Geronimo. "Somebody is going to get burned," said a girl who sat almost directly above him on the steps.

Like tinsel suddenly tossed on a Christmas tree, the merry twinkling of switchblades, tire irons and filed-down garrison belt buckles appeared among the crowd in the street. The girls on the stoop drew breath in concert through bared teeth. They watched eagerly; as if each had kicked in on a pool for who'd draw first blood.

It never happened, whatever they were waiting for: not tonight. Out of nowhere Fina, St. Fina of the Playboys, came walking her sexy walk, in among fangs, talons, tusks. The air turned summer-mild, a boys' choir on a brilliant mauve cloud came floating over from the direction of Canal Street singing O Salutaris Hostia; the board chairman and the Bop King clasped arms in token of friendship as their followers stacked arms and embraced; and Fina was borne up by a swarm of pneumatically fat, darling cherubs, to hover over the sudden peace she'd created, beaming, serene.

Profane gaped, snuffled, and slunk away. For the next week or so he pondered on Fina and the Playboys and presently began to worry in earnest. There was nothing so special about the gang, punks are punks. He was sure any love between her and the Playboys was for the moment Christian, unworldly and proper. But how long was that going to go on? How long could Fina herself hold out? The minute her horny boys caught a glimpse of the wanton behind the saint, the black lace slip beneath the surplice, Fina could find herself on the receiving end of a gang bang, having in a way asked for it. She was overdue now.

One evening he came into the bathroom, mattress slung over his back. He'd been watching an ancient Tom Mix movie on television. Fina was lying in the bathtub, seductive. No water, no clothes - just Fina.

"Now look," he said.

"Benny, I'm cherry. I want it to be you." She said it defiantly. For a minute it seemed plausible. After all, if it wasn't him it might be that whole godforsaken wolf pack. He glanced at himself in the mirror. Fat. Pig-pouches around the eyes. Why did she want it to be him?

"Why me," he said. "You save it for the guy you marry."

"Who wants to get married," she said.

"Look, what is Sister Maria Annunziata going to think. Here you been doing all these nice things for me, for those unfortunate delinquents down the street. You want to get that all scratched off the books?" Who'd have thought Profane would ever be arguing like this? Her eyes burned, she twisted slow and sexy, all those tawny surfaces quivering like quicksand.

"No," said Profane. "Now hop out of there, I want to go to sleep. And don't go yelling rape to your brother. He believes in his sister shouldn't do any jazzing around but he knows you better."

She climbed out of the bathtub and put a robe around her. "I'm sorry," she said. He threw the mattress in the tub, threw himself on top of it and lit a cigarette. She turned off the light and shut the door behind her.

II.

Profane's worries about Fina turned real and ugly, soon enough. Spring came: quiet, unspectacular and after many false starts: hailstorms and high winds dovetailed with days of unwintry peace. The alligators living in the sewers had dwindled to a handful. Zeitsuss found himself with more hunters than he needed, so Profane, Angel and Geronimo started working part-time.

More and more Profane was coming to feel a stranger to the world downstairs. It had probably happened as imperceptibly as the fall-off in the alligator population; but somehow it began to look like he was losing contact with a circle of friends. What am I, he yelled at himself, a St. Francis for alligators? I don't talk to them, I don't even like them. I shoot them.

Your ass, answered his devil's advocate. How many times have they come waddling up to you out of the darkness, like friends, looking for you. Did it ever occur to you they want to be shot?

He thought back to the one he'd chased solo almost to the East River, through Fairing's Parish. It had lagged, let him catch up. Had been looking for it. It occurred to him that somewhere - when he was drunk, too horny to think straight, tired - he'd signed a contract above the paw-prints of what were now alligator ghosts. Almost as if there had been this agreement, a covenant, Profane giving death, the alligators giving him employment: tit for tat. He needed them and if they needed him at all it was because in some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they'd been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin, and all the junk of the world's Macy's. And the soul's passage down the toilet and into the underworld was only a temporary peace-in-tension, borrowed time till they would have to return to being falsely animated kids' toys. Of course they wouldn't like it. Would want to go back to what they'd been; and the most perfect shape of that was dead - what else? - to be gnawed into exquisite rococo by rat-artisans, eroded to an antique bone-finish by the holy water of the Parish, tinted to phosphorescence by whatever had made that one alligator's sepulchre so bright that night.

When he went down for his now four hours a day he talked to them sometimes. It annoyed his partners. He had a close call one night when a gator turned and attacked. The tail caught the flashlight man a glancing blow off his left leg. Profane yelled at him to get out of the way and pumped all five rounds in a cascade of re-echoing blasts, square in the alligator's teeth. "It's all right," his partner said. "I can walk on it." Profane wasn't listening. He was standing by the headless corpse, watching a steady stream of sewage wash its life blood out to one of the rivers - he'd lost sense of direction. "Baby," he told the corpse, "you didn't play it right. You don't fight back. That's not in the contract." Bung the foreman lectured him once or twice about this talking to alligators, how it set a bad example for the Patrol. Profane said sure, OK, and remembered after that to say what he was coming to believe he had to say under his breath.

Finally, one night in mid-April, he admitted to himself what he'd been trying for a week not to think about: that he and the Patrol as functioning units of the Sewer Department had about had it.

Fina had been aware that there weren't many alligators left and the three of them would soon be jobless. She came upon Profane one evening by the TV set. He was watching a rerun of The Great Train Robbery.

"Benito," she said, "you ought to start looking around for another job."

Profane agreed. She told him her boss, Winsome of Outlandish Records, was looking for a clerk and she could get him an interview.

"Me," Profane said, "I'm not a clerk. I'm not smart enough and I don't go for that inside work too much." She told him people stupider than he worked as clerks. She said he'd have a chance to move up, make something of himself.

A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you "make" out of one? What can one "make" out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he'd reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism. "I will give it a try," he told her, "and thanks." She was grace-happy - here he had kicked her out of the bathtub and now she was turning the other cheek. He began to get lewd thoughts.

Next day she called up. Angel and Geronimo were on day shift, Profane was off till Friday. He lay on the floor playing pinochle with Kook, who was on the hook from school.

"Find a suit," she said. "One o'clock is your interview."

"Wha," said Profane. He'd grown fatter after these weeks of Mrs. Mendoza's cooking. Angel's suit didn't fit him any more. "Borrow one of my father's," she said, and hung up.

Old Mendoza didn't mind. The biggest suit in the closet was a George Raft model, circa mid-'30's, double-breasted, dark blue serge, padded shoulders. He put it on and borrowed a pair of shoes from Angel. On the way downtown on the subway he decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in. Because he felt now as if he were living in some private depression days: the suit, the job with the city that would not exist after two weeks more at the most. All around him were people in new suits, millions of inanimate objects being produced brand-new every week, new cars in the streets, houses going up by the thousands all over the suburbs he had left months ago. Where was the depression? In the sphere of Benny Profane's guts and in the sphere of his skull, concealed optimistically by a tight blue serge coat and a schlemihl's hopeful face.

The Outlandish office was in the Grand Central area, seventeen floors up. He sat in an anteroom full of tropical hothouse growths while the wind streamed bleak and heatsucking past the windows. The receptionist gave him an application to fill out. He didn't see Fina.

As he handed the completed form to the girl at the desk, a messenger came through: a Negro wearing an old suede jacket. He dropped a stack of interoffice mail envelopes on the desk and for a second his eyes and Profane's met.

Maybe Profane had seen him under the street or at one of the shapeups. But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it was as if this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching, that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind.

He listened to the wind. The messenger left. "Mr. Winsome will see you in a moment," said the receptionist. Profane wandered over to the window and looked down at 42nd Street. It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him. Maybe it was doing nothing after all to conceal this curious depression which showed up in no stock market or year-end report. "Hey, where are you going," said the receptionist. "Changed my mind," Profane told her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and in the street he looked for the messenger, but couldn't find him. He unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza's suit and shuffled along 42nd Street, head down, straight into the wind.

Friday at the shapeup Zeitsuss, almost crying, gave them the word. From now on, only two days a week operation, only five teams for some mopping up out in Brooklyn. On the way home that evening Profane, Angel and Geronimo stopped off at a neighborhood bar on Broadway.

They stayed till near 9:30 or 10, when a few of the girls wandered in. This was on Broadway in the 80's, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken heart for every light on it. Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it.

The first wave of girls came in to get change for the evening's clients. They weren't pretty and the bartender always had a word for them. Some would be back in again near closing time to have a nightcap, whether there'd been any business or not. If they did have a customer along - usually one of the small gangsters around the neighborhood - the bartender would be as attentive and cordial as if they were young lovers, which in a way they were. And if a girl came in without having found any business all night the bartender would give her coffee with a big shot of brandy and say something about how it was raining or too cold, and not much good, he supposed, for customers. She'd usually have a last try at whoever was in the place.

Profane, Angel and Geronimo left after talking with the girls and having a few rounds at the bowling machine. Coming out they met Mrs. Mendoza.

"You seen your sister?" she asked Angel. "She was going to come help me shop right after work. She never did anything like this before, Angelito, I'm worried."

Kook came running up. "Dolores says she's out with the Playboys but she doesn't know where. Fina just called up and Dolores says she sounded funny." Mrs. Mendoza grabbed him by the head and asked where from this phone call, and Kook said he'd told her already, nobody knew. Profane looked toward Angel and caught Angel looking at him. When Mrs. Mendoza was gone, Angel said, "I don't like to think about it, my own sister, but if one of those little pingas tries anything, man . . ."

Profane didn't say he'd been thinking the same thing. Angel was upset enough already. But he knew Profane was thinking about a gang bang too. They both knew Fina. "We ought to find her," he said.

"They're all over the city," Geronimo said. "I know a couple of their hangouts." They decided to start at the Mott Street clubhouse. Till midnight they took subways all over the city, finding only empty clubhouses or locked doors. But as they were wandering along Amsterdam in the 60's, they heard noise around the corner.

"Jesus Christ," Geronimo said. A full-scale rumble was on. A few guns in evidence but mostly knives, lengths of pipe, garrison belts. The three skirted along the side of the street where cars were parked, and found somebody in a tweed suit hiding behind a new Lincoln and fiddling 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 came 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.

"Whose," said Stencil, looking at the dentures.

"Like Cinderella's prince," Eigenvalue smiled, "I'm still looking for the jaw to fit these."

"And Stencil, possibly. It would be something she'd wear."

"I made them," said Eigenvalue. "Anybody you'd be looking for would never have seen them. Only you, I and a few other privileged have seen them."

"How does Stencil know."

"That I'm telling the truth? Tut, Mr. Stencil."

The false teeth in the case smiled too, twinkling as if in reproach.

Back in the office, Eigenvalue, to see what he could see, inquired: "Who then is V.?"

But the conversational tone didn't take Stencil aback, he didn't look surprised that the dentist knew of his obsession. "Psychodontia has its secrets and so does Stencil," Stencil answered. "But most important, so does V. She's yielded him only the poor skeleton of a dossier. Most of what he has is inference. He doesn't know who she is, nor what she is. He's trying to find out. As a legacy from his father."

The afternoon curled outside, with only a little wind to stir it. Stencil's words seemed to fall insubstantial inside a cube no wider than Eigenvalue's desk. The dentist kept quiet as Stencil told how his father had come to hear of the girl V. When he'd finished, Eigenvalue said, "You followed up, of course. On-the-spot investigation."