V.

"Well, I don't know where she is," Rachel yelled. "I wish I did," she said, quieter. For a minute or so they heard about a soldier who was overseas in Korea fighting for red, white and blue and one day his sweetheart Belinda Sue (to rhyme with blue) up and run off with an itinerant propeller salesman. Sad for that lonely GI. Abruptly Pig swung his head toward Rachel, opened his eyes and said, "What you think of Sartre's thesis that we are all impersonating identity?"

Which did not surprise her: after all he had been hanging around the Spoon. For the next hour they talked proper nouns. The hillbilly station continued full blast. Rachel opened a quart of beer for herself and things soon grew convivial. Fu even became gleeful enough to tell one of his bottomless repertoire of Chinese jokes, which went:

"The vagrant minstrel Ling, having insinuated himself into the confidence of a great and influential mandarin, made off one night with a thousand gold yuan and a priceless jade lion, a theft which so unhinged his former employer that in one night the old man's hair turned snow white, and to the end of his life he did little more than sit on the dusty floor of his chamber, plucking listlessly at a p'ip'a and chanting 'Was that not a curious minstrel?'"

At half past one the phone rang. It was Stencil.

"Stencil's just been shot at," he said.

Private eye, indeed. "Are you all right, where are you." He gave her the address, in the east 80's. "Sit down and wait, she said. "We'll come get you."

"He can't sit down, you know." He hung up.

"Come," she said, grabbing her coat. "Fun, excitement, thrills. Stencil has just been wounded, tracking down a lead."

Fu whistled, giggled. "Those leads are beginning to fight back."

Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop. At this hour, the only customers were two elderly ladies and a cop off duty. The woman behind the pastry counter was all tomato cheeks and smiles, looking like the type who gave extra portions to poor growing boys and mothered bums with free refills on coffee, though it was a neighborhood of rich kids and bums who were only accidental there and knew it and so "moved on" quickly.

Stencil was in an embarrassing and possibly dangerous position. A few pellets from the first shotgun blast (he'd dodged the second by an adroit flop in the sewage) had ricocheted into his left buttock. He wasn't especially anxious to sit down. He'd stowed the waterproof suit and mask near a walkway abutment an East River Drive; combed his hair and straightened his clothing by mercury light in a nearby rain-puddle. He wondered how presentable he looked. Not a good job, this policeman being here.

Stencil left the phone booth and edged his right buttock gingerly onto a stool at the counter, trying not to wince, hoping his middle-aged appearance would account for any creakiness he showed. He asked for a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and noticed that his hand wasn't shaking. The match flame burned pure, conical, unwavering: Stencil, you're a cool one, he told himself, but God: how did they get on to you?

That was the worst part of it. He and Zeitsuss had met only by accident. Stencil had been on the way over to Rachel's place. As he crossed Columbus Avenue he noticed a few ragged files of workmen lined up on the sidewalk opposite and being harangued by Zeitsuss. Any organized body fascinated him, especially irregulars. These looked like revolutionaries.

He crossed the street. The group broke up and wandered away. Zeitsuss stood watching them for a moment, then turned and caught sight of Stencil. The light in the east turned the lenses of Zeitsuss's glasses pale and blank. "You're late," Zeitsuss called. So he was, Stencil thought. Years. "See Bung the foreman, that fella there in the plaid shirt." Stencil realized then that he had a three-day stubble and had been sleeping in his clothes for the same length of time. Curious about anything even suggesting overthrow, he approached Zeitsuss, smiling his father's Foreign Service smile. "Not looking for employment," he said.

"You're a Limey," Zeitsuss said. "Last Limey we had wrestled his alligators to death. You boys are all right. Why don't you try it for a day."