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  “But do you know the weirdest thing of all?” X asked. “That is going to someone very high, after great pains to win the opportunity of an interview, and giving him in absolute secrecy the information that you have risked your life to obtain. Then to see the oculum vitreum, the glassy eye — ”

  “You translate loosely.”

  “Thank you. To see that look in the eye of the great one, and to know in a sudden flash that he also is one of them. Then you hear one more nail tapped into your coffin.

  “You think that I am a funny little man who likes to play Cloak and Dagger? I am that funny little man, but it is not all play. I have the blade of one of those daggers in my left shoulder, and it aches on rainy nights. I have a pellet that comes up like a lump in the muscles at the side of my neck, and I have the nervous habit of fingering it. I was once trussed and weighted and dropped from a garbage scow, and were I less than the Great X-Capo I would not be here to entertain you with the account.

  “I am not a phoney when I think that I am followed. More often than not I am followed. And when I die it will be suddenly. I have no habitation or name, and there will be no papers on my body. I will not even be allowed the last grand moment nor the Galgensprach. The spot will be X indeed.”

  X cleaned himself up a little and then he talked some more.

  “Very good men and very evil men have a presence. It is like an aura around them and they cannot be assailed. That is why very evil men often pass for very good men. It is the little men like myself who lack the presence who are open to assault. I am an alley rat. I have traveled a long distance by various devices and I have not, erubesco id dicere, changed my socks for four days. Some of the things that I know are so astonishing that I cannot write them till after I am dead.

  “But, Doofey, do you know the most courageous thing in the world to do?”

  “Not for sure, X, what is it?”

  “To flog a dead horse. Brave men blanch at the task and the staunch grow pale. That phrase is the most cutting weapon that we ever have to face. When we pursuer the Conspiracy out beyond the foamy shallows to where it is swift and deep and deadly, then they say that we are flogging a dead horse. The remark sears. The Devil invented the phrase.”

  “He's an apt phrase-maker. I'm a student of his style,” Duffey said.

  They talked of diabolism. X was sure that he had talked with the Devil.

  “He did not tell me that he was, but he implied as much. He came to my room late at night and talked without prelude. I do not know that he came through the closed door, but I did not hear it open or close and it was a creaky door. He was there till morning.

  “He left me frustrated, for he said that nobody would ever believe the things that he told me, and nobody ever has. We went over much of the material that I had collected. He would sometimes correct me on individuals. ‘No, he is not one of ours,’ he would say, ‘I wish he were, I wish he were.’ In some cases this left me in confusion for these were men that I seemed to have on sure information. And remembering that he is the Father of Lies, I am still confused.

  “He also claimed a number of men that I had no reason to suspect and of who I still do not have independent information. I have never repeated any of this, lest he be lying and I should harm innocent men. He told me that he did physically sit in on some of the high councils and that his person is known to all the inner conspirators.”

  “Does he know how it will all turn out?”

  “No. He doesn't know the future in any continuity. That isn't given to him. He knows it only in isolated interludes, but these are enough to curl the hair of a listener. He has a lot going in his favor. But he is a well-informed person. His knowledge is encyclopedic.”

  “Couldn't it have been a hoax? One of the Party boys out to scare you? I have known of instances of humor even in them.”

  “It could have been. I have hoped that it was so. Knowing my credulity, it is possible that they have done this: it is comforting to believe so. But he had a scope and aspect that was unnatural. If he was not the Devil, then he had a lot of the Devil in him.

  “In another sense, and in another life, I did know the Devil himself. And he was otherwise. I missed his burial, but I did dig him up one night.”

  X stayed with them for several days. They became fond of him. In some ways he was child-like. He had a wife in Milano but he had not seen her for years. He told them about it.

  “First I left and said I would be back in a week. I was in danger. Then affairs intervened, and it was three weeks before I could return.

  “She is a dear woman, but she has the gift of irony. She was sure to remark how long the week had been. I decided to wait several days to see if I could think of a good answer. Then fate intervened again and I had to leave the country.

  “The next time that I was in town I discovered that I would be acutely embarrassed to see her. I was overwhelmed with nervousness and apprehension.

  “It had been like this when we were younger. It took great courage to speak to her, and when I said ‘hello’ I shook like an aspen. I mean, of course, the populus tremuloides of my own land, not the populus grandidentata which my comparison has probably evoked in your minds. For, while the American and European aspen are related and both quake, yet they do not quake in the same manner, nor are their leaves even joined in like fashion. However, I shook, I trembled.

  “It was a miracle that I ever got up the courage to marry her, but I now discovered that it was not an enduring miracle. In the years that we were married I had gotten over a small part of my bashfulness with her. But now it was all back and more than I would be able to stand. How in the world could I face that beautiful woman again? What can one say to an ironic wife after long absence? I had been younger the first time and had the courage of youth. I have it no longer.

  “I fear that I can never face her again. I love her, but the well of courage has run dry. And yet I hear from friends that she is waiting faithfully and wonders why I do not come home.”

  When X left them it was in the hours after midnight. Perhaps it was three AM, when one, having slept, should be most alert. But they were not, and they did not hear him go. He took his black box, now filled with sandwiches and clean socks, and left.

  Nor did they ever hear of him for many months.

  Then they received an envelope with a newspaper clipping. The date and the city were cut off. It told of an unidentified man of slight build who had been slain. There was an old knife blade in his shoulder and a pellet lodged in the muscles of his neck. And he had no known identity.

  The clipping was passed around with some sorrow. But Dotty laughed.

  “We thought you liked him as well as the rest of us did,” Duffey said. “He was a good little man. Do not be callous about this.”

  “Now this is only an antic,” said Dotty. “He is no more dead than the rest of us are. He is having fun. How can you people investigate international conspiracies when you can't even see through a little joke?”

  “It is hardly a joke,” said Duffey. “He told me himself that he dagger blade in his shoulder, and that — ”

  “Of course he did. He told us all. Now you just hold that clipping to your nose. What does it smell like?”

  “Why, a little like an oriental gum,” said Stein, testing it. “What would you say, Duffey?”

  A familiar odor surely. Possibly guaiacum, or it could be clibanum, or even sandarse. What do you think Gabby?”

  “Euryops speciossissimus probably. I'm not sure.”

  “Oh stop sniffling,” Dotty scolded. “It's a rosin, and you know it. And who do we know who always had his pockets full of rosin? And what kind of press printed that clipping?”

  “The fonts are old and bad,” Stein hazarded. “I would say a very old, even obsolete press. There are marks of time here that can never be repaired.”

  “Exactly, the Pelican Press. He printed it here, and dubbed in the reverse before he left. Then he sent it here to entertain us.”
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  Of course that wasn't the end of X. He used to come back to them every year or two, but sheepishly on first return.

  10.

  Several years went by. Dotty put her foot down. “Playing cops and robbers we do not have time for. We are running a little magazine in the Quarter of New Orleans with the simple aim of restoring the world. That is all we can do. The other things we cannot do. If we restore the world, then the other things will already be done.

  “We will have no more cryptic extracts from the classified files. We will not look for taints on anyone just because he happens to be a snake or a devil. We will not mistake the mask for the face. This red caricature is not the face of the thing; it is only one of its masks, not the most important one, not the most dangerous one.

  “We will work for the Church in the dismembered World, and we will restore the World. That is the way it will be.”

  She had the backing of Henry in this but they didn't know it. Though when Dotty made up her mind she didn't need the backing of anyone.

  Some time after that, Stein and Duffey and Gabby started a sheet called the Investigator. Though it was done at the Pelican Press, it was disassociated from the Bark. The three men had all established sufficient outside incomes. This helped to make the Investigator independent.

  Henry was still in the Seminary and there would be several more years for him. In restoring the World, he could aid only indirectly till his time should come.

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer had left her father's trucking firm and had come to New Orleans to work with Dotty. It was mostly the ladies who ran the Bark after that. Some of them are still running it today. And quite soon an element of spice was added to counter the atmosphere of dangerous sweetness and ease Dotty's mind.

  Duffey had again a secondhand bookstore to go with his other activities, and, as necessary in the Quarter, an art shop and an antique shop. He kept his beard white and bright, and added an artist's tie and a beret for the trade. He marketed much of the works of both the Studios and the Pirates’ Alley painters. And he wrote eruditely for both the Investigator and the Bark.

  The file on the Infiltrates was kept in his heavy walk-in safe, along with some really valuable works of art (including authentic Van Ghis) and a heavy store of cash, for he also ran a hock shop. He came now to his beginning, not to his end. “Man was meant to be humble,” he'd say, “but man was not meant to be ordinary. My God, let me not die an ordinary man such as go down into the pit!”

  Look out! Here comes the spice.

  The Bark was joined by Margaret Stone from Chicago. Duffey had known her; and she was kindred of Stein. She had been in the Party, and now she had joined the Church, a move possible for her (as it was not for Stein) for intricate ethnic reasons (they had only half the same genes). Margaret was small and intense, with a large voice only saved from stridency by a certain music in it. She was Italian and Jewish, with possibly a little of the Preadamite in her. She would have been beautiful in repose, but no one had ever seen her so.

  Complacence was no part of her, and that dangerous smell of sugar had disappeared from the air. “It is written that if they will not believe Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe one risen from the dead,” she said ringingly. “My God, my God, they have got to believe the One risen from the dead.”

  She preached in the street with a fervor that startled the rest of them.

  “Why should I not affirm the doctrine of the Real Presence on Dauphin Street at midnight?” she'd challenge. “There are people on Dauphin Street at midnight to whom it has never been preached. That is the only home of those nocturnals; and if they do not hear it then and there they will never hear it.

  “This is not easy for me. It was not easy on Pentecost Morning. You people have forgotten. It came to you two thousand years ago and now you haven't the urgency. But Pentecost came to me one year ago on Pentecost Sunday and I am in a hurry. Doesn't it frighten you that He said He would vomit the lukewarm out of His mouth?

  “Don't you ever get the feeling that this night one more must be found? Imagine the panic of the Patriarch when he could not find Seventy. And the figure was reduced and he still could not find them. This night perhaps something will happen to the world unless one more can be found. He will destroy it if it falls short by even one. I fancy that thousands of times it has just got by, and many times it has just got by by one. And what if I alone can find that one tonight, and the world will stop if I don't?”

  “And who was saving the world before you came along, Margaret?” Dotty asked her.

  “Others who knew the urgency. Maybe one of them was worn out and not allowed to die till I came to replace him.”

  “You mustn't let this become a fetish,” Dotty said. “The Lord doesn't work by deadlines.”

  “He says that He does. He ought to know. Maybe you were the one needed on your day. Oh my God, what a thought? What if someone hadn't gone to work on you before? What if you had refused it?”

  11.

  Finnegan nearly always got to town once a year. Dotty appreciated this and knew that it was hard for him to do so. Ulysses can only with the greatest effort keep yearly appointments. He always looked as though he had traveled hard and rough to get there, and yet he appeared well when he was clean and rested. At the time of his third or fourth visitation he told them a little about his trip around the world, but he would not tell them all. “I did go around in a way,” he said. “At least it's possible. The trip disintegrated halfway around.”

  “Oh, then you're still over there?”

  “No, I'm back here now. But the way I came back is obscure. I was working below decks in the engine room. Times I was not working I amused myself with a bottle and an amazing library of old comic magazines.

  “I'm always hesitant to confess that I don't know where I am. When they made me get off the boat and take my pay we were in San Francisco, although I'd expected an Atlantic port.

  “What if Magellan were so careless and didn't know if he'd gone around or not?” Dotty asked.

  “His position was different. He was in command. I was not.”

  Yes, Finnegan was different. They tended to forget just how different he was when he was gone, and those who had not known him before hardly knew how to take him. Margaret Stone said she already knew him, though. They never did say where.

  Finnegan wrote several letters during one visitation, one to Show Boat in St. Louis:

  ‘It is with mixed emotions that I learn I have a God-child in absentia. I hope he is a dago. I will not be God-father to an Irishman. I love them, but to be morally responsible for one is more than flesh and blood can stand. Tell Marie that, for as long as she lives, I will have for her only hatred mixed with a certain affection, for she has had two. One is vouched for by the Merry Monk and the other by your own unoutstanding husband. I was promised the first. This was long ago, but I will not be forgotten.

  ‘Dotty is a mess. Dotty says ‘Don't write that’, but I will write it; the world should know. And whatever Dotty writes in the margins of this after I have finished it, do not believe her. I am sitting on Dotty's knees as I write, and I wish they were yours.

  ‘Yes, I know that was a real diamond I sent you. No, I didn't steal it. I am a diamond merchant. I give them to all my girls. Don't tell Dotty how big it is. Hers is no bigger than a pigeon's egg.

  ‘I love you, Teresa, my odd little sister, in the way we have agreed. The rest of the people in St. Louis I love only in the conventional manner which, while it is capable of shaking mountains and outlasting the stars, still is not quire the same thing. Isn't it too bad that you and I are the only ones who understand this?’

  Finnegan also wrote a long letter to Casey in Chicago. Nobody else knew what to write to Casey anymore. They didn't know what to say to him.

  And Finnegan answered the letters of Hans. Hans had allowed himself to be trapped: he had not intended to be trapped. He had wished to satisfy the demands of the world by making all the money necessary
in three or five years; and then he intended to devote himself to other things. If there is one thing that is very hard to do it is to quit making money. He was grown around and almost covered by the vines that he couldn't hack away. He had made money. He had been astonishingly successful. But he couldn't turn loose of the business. All his gain was in heavy equipment and developing property and futuristic paper.

  Marie did not know that he was bothered or that he wanted anything more than this. She wouldn't have understood Hans sometimes envied Finnegan.

  12.

  Dotty wrote a friendly letter to Marie in St. Louis:

  ‘Who the hell is Sally and why am I afflicted? Every time you get pregnant you have another brainstorm, but this one is the limit. This wild-eyed little bushwhacker said that you sent her a thousand dollars to come to America on. But granting that, why is she with us and not with you?

  ‘Dammit Marie, she talks worse than you do and she doesn't look much better. She's a crow. Why don't you contribute to the Childrens’ Gin Fund if you have to throw your money away? I gave Mary Margaret Stone a hammer and a rock and a rope and told her to knock Sally in the head and drown her in the river. But she brought her back tonight and said that she couldn't do it. I shouldn't have sent a girl to do a woman's job.

  ‘But what will I do with Salvation Sally? ‘I'm the one you're looking for,” she says. ‘That little Wop-Jew girl is the only one you have who knows how to street-preach, and you think you don't need me?’

  ‘We were getting on so well, but then we're not supposed to get on well. You are a filthy Irishman, Marie, and you have played a filthy Irish trick on me. Stein is tuning that guitar of hers but I doubt if anything will ever take the twang out of it. Stein knew her in Australia too. What the hell went on down there?