V.

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."