V.

Patrolman Jones and Officer Ten Eyck, disdaining the elevator, marched in perfect unison up two flights of palatial stairway, down the hall toward Winsome's apartment. A few tabloid reporters who had taken the elevator intercepted them halfway there. Noise from Winsome's apartment could be heard down on Riverside Drive.

"Never know what Bellevue is going to turn up," said Jones.

He and his sidekick were faithful viewers of the TV program Dragnet. They'd cultivated deadpan expressions, unsyncopated speech rhythms, monotone voices. One was tall and skinny, the other was short and fat. They walked in step.

"Talked to a doctor there," said Ten Eyck. "Young fella named Gottschalk. Winsome had a lot to say."

"We'll see, Al."

Before the door, Jones and Ten Eyck waited politely for the one cameraman in the group to check his flash attachment. A girl was heard to shriek happily inside.

"Oboy, oboy," said a reporter.

The cops knocked. "Come in, come in," called many juiced voices.

"It's the police, ma'am."

"I hate fuzz," somebody snarled. Ten Eyck kicked in the door, which had been open. Bodies inside fell back to provide the cameraman a line-of-sight to Mafia, Charisma, Fu and friends, playing Musical Blankets. Zap, went the camera.

"Too bad," the photographer said, "we can't print that one. " Ten Eyck shouldered his way over to Mafia.

"All right, ma'am."

"Would you like to play," hysterical.

The cop smiled, tolerantly. "We've talked to your husband."

"We'd better go," said the other cop.

"Guess Al is right, ma'am." Flash attachment lit up the room from time to time, like a spell of heat lightning.

Ten Eyck flapped a warrant. "All you folks are under arrest," he said. To Jones: "Call the Lieutenant, Steve."

"What charge," people started yelling.

Ten Eyck's timing was good. He waited a few heartbeats. "Disturbing the peace will do," he said.

Maybe the only peace undisturbed that night was McClintic's and Paola's. The little Triumph forged along up the Hudson, their own wind was cool, taking away whatever of Nueva York had clogged ears, nostrils, mouths.

She talked to him straight and McClintic kept cool. While she told him about who she was, about Stencil and Fausto - even a homesick travelogue of Malta - there came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.

"Sure," he said later, as they headed into the Berkshires. "Paola, did you know I have been blowing a silly line all this time. Mister Flab the original, is me. Lazy and taking for granted some wonder drug someplace to cure that town, to cure me. Now there isn't and never will be. Nobody is going to step down from heaven and square away Roony and his woman, or Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia. There's no magic words. Not even I love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Khrushchev that? Ho-ho."

"Keep cool but care," he said. Somebody had run over a skunk a ways back. The smell had followed them for miles. "If my mother was alive I would have her make a sampler with that on it."

"You know, don't you," she began, "that I have to -"

"Go back home, sure. But the week's not over yet. Be easy, girl."

"I can't. Can I ever?"

"We'll stay away from musicians," was all he said. Did he know of anything she could be, ever?

"Flop, flip," he sang to the trees of Massachusetts. "Once I was hip . . ."

Chapter Thirteen

In which the yo-yo string is revealed as a state of mind

I

The passage to Malta took place in late September, over an Atlantic whose sky never showed a sun. The ship was Susanna Squaducci, which had figured once before in Profane's long-interrupted guardianship of Paola. He came back to the ship that morning in the fog knowing that Fortune's yo-yo had also returned to some reference-point, not unwilling, not anticipating, not anything; merely prepared to float, acquire a set and drift wherever Fortune willed. If Fortune could will.

A few of the Crew had come to give Profane, Paola and Stencil bon voyage; those who weren't in jail, out of the country or in the hospital. Rachel had stayed away. It was a weekday, she had a job. Profane supposed so.

He was here by accident. While weeks back, off on the fringes of the field-of-two Rachel and Profane had set up, Stencil roamed the city exerting "pull," seeing about tickets, passports, visas, inoculations for Paola and him, Profane felt that at last he'd come to dead center in Nueva York; had found his Girl, his vocation as watchman against the night and straight man for SHROUD, his home in a three-girl apartment with one gone to Cuba, one about to go to Malta, and one, his own, remaining.