Mr. Clyde and the cauldron bubbled and boiled. If Reilly tried to show up at Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, again, he would really get it in the throat with the fork. But there were those smocks and that pirate gear. Reilly must have smuggled the pirate gimmicks out of the garage the afternoon before. He would have to contact the big ape after all, if only to tell him not to come around. You really couldn’t expect to get your uniforms back from an animal like Reilly.

Mr. Clyde telephoned the number on Constantinople Street several times and got no answer. Maybe they had put him away somewhere. The big ape’s mother must be dead drunk on the floor somewhere. Christ only knew what she was like. It must be quite a family.

Dr. Talc had been having a miserable week. Somehow the students had found one of those threats that that psychotic graduate student had flooded him with a few years before. How it got into their hands he didn’t know. The results were already awful. An underground of rumors about the note was slowly spreading; he was becoming the butt of the campus. At a cocktail party one of his colleagues had finally explained to him the reason for the laughter and whispering that were disrupting his previously respectful classes.

That business in the note about “misleading and perverting the young” had been badly misunderstood and misinterpreted. He wondered if he might have to explain to the administration eventually. And that phrase “underdeveloped testicles.” Dr. Talc cringed. Bringing the whole matter into the open might be the best plan, but that would mean trying to find that former student, who was the sort who would deny all responsibility anyway. Perhaps he should simply try to describe what Mr. Reilly had been like. Dr. Talc saw again Mr. Reilly with his massive muffler and that awful girl anarchist with the valise who traveled around with Mr. Reilly and littered the campus with leaflets. Fortunately she hadn’t stayed at the college too long, although that Reilly seemed as if he were planning to make himself a fixture on the campus like the palm trees and the benches.

Dr. Talc had had them both in separate classes one grim semester, during which they had disrupted his lectures with strange noises and impertinent, venomous questions that no one, aside from God, could possibly have answered. He shuddered. In spite of everything, he must reach Reilly and extract an explanation and confession. One look at Mr. Reilly and the students would understand that the note was the meaningless fantasy of a sick mind. He could even let the administration look at Mr. Reilly. The solution was, after all, really a physical one: producing Mr. Reilly in the abundant flesh.

Dr. Talc sipped the vodka and V-8 juice that he always had after a night of heavy social drinking and looked at his newspaper. At least the people in the Quarter were having rowdy fun. He sipped his drink and remembered the incident of Mr. Reilly’s dumping all of those examination papers on the heads of that freshman demonstration beneath the windows of the faculty office building. The administration would remember it, too. He smiled complacently and looked at the paper again. The three photographs were hilarious. Common, bawdy people—at a distance—had always amused him. He read the article and choked, spitting liquid onto his smoking jacket.

How had Reilly ever sunk so low? He had been eccentric as a student, but now… How much worse the rumors would be if it were discovered that the note had been written by a hot dog vendor. Reilly was the sort who would come to the campus with his wagon and try to sell hot dogs right before the Social Studies Building. He would deliberately turn the affair into a three-ring circus. It would be a disgraceful farce in which he, Talc, would become the clown.

Dr. Talc put down his paper and his glass and covered his face with his hands. He would have to live with that note. He would deny everything.

Miss Annie looked at her morning newspaper and turned red. She had been wondering why it was so quiet over at the Reilly household this morning. Well, this was the last straw. Now the neighborhood was getting a bad name. She couldn’t take it anymore. Those people had to move. She’d get the neighbors to sign a petition.

Patrolman Mancuso looked at the newspaper again. Then he held it to his chest and the flashbulb popped. He had brought his own Brownie Holiday camera to the precinct and asked the sergeant to photograph him against certain official backdrops: the sergeant’s desk, the steps of the precinct, a squad car, a traffic patrolwoman whose specialty was school zone speeders.

When there was only one exposure left, Patrolman Mancuso decided to combine two of the props for a dramatic finale. While the traffic patrolwoman, pretending to be Lana Lee, climbed into the rear of the squad car grimacing and shaking a vengeful fist, Patrolman Mancuso faced the camera with his newspaper and frowned sternly.

“Okay, Angelo, is that all?” the patrolwoman asked, eager to get to a nearby school before the morning speed zone hours ended.

“Thank you very much, Gladys,” Patrolman Mancuso said. “My kids wanted to get some more pictures to show to they little friends.”

“Well, sure,” Gladys called, hurrying out of the precinct yard, her shoulder bag bursting with black speeding tickets. “I guess they got a right to be proud of they poppa. I’m glad I could help you out, honey. Anytime you want to take you some more pictures, just gimme the word.”

The sergeant tossed the last flashbulb into a trash can and clamped his hand on Patrolman Mancuso’s vertical shoulder.

“Single-handed you break up the city’s most active high school pornography racket.” He slapped his hand on the incline of Patrolman Mancuso’s shoulder blade. “Mancuso, of all people, brings in a woman even our best plainclothesmen couldn’t fool. Mancuso, I find out, has been working on this case on the q.t. Mancuso can identify one of her agents. Who’s the person really been going out on his own all the time looking for characters like those three girls and trying to bring them in? Mancuso, that’s who.”

Patrolman Mancuso’s olive skin flushed slightly, except in limited areas scratched by the Peace Party auxiliary. There it was simply red.

“Just luck,” Patrolman Mancuso offered, clearing his throat of some invisible phlegm. “Somebody gimme a lead to the place. Then that Burma Jones told me to look in that cabinet under the bar.”

“You staged a one-man raid, Angelo.”

Angelo? He turned a spectrum of shades between orange and violet.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you was to get a promotion for this,” the sergeant said. “You been a patrolman a pretty long time. And just a couple days ago I was thinking you was a horse’s ass. How’s about that? What do you say to that, Mancuso?”

Patrolman Mancuso cleared his throat very violently.

“Can I have my camera back?” he asked almost incoherently when his larynx was at last clear.

Santa Battaglia held the newspaper up to her mother’s picture and said, “How you like that, babe? How you like the way your grandson Angelo made good? You like that, darling?” She pointed to another photograph. “How you like poor Irene’s crazy boy laying there in the gutter like a washed-up whale? Ain’t that sad? That girl’s gotta get that boy put away this time. You think any man’s gonna marry Irene with that big bum laying around the house? Of course not.”

Santa snatched at her mother’s picture and gave it a moist smack. “Take it easy, babe. I’m praying for you.”

Claude Robichaux looked at the newspaper with a heavy heart as he rode the streetcar to the hospital. How could that big boy disgrace a fine, sweet woman like Irene? Already she was pale and tired from worrying about her son. Santa was right: that son of Irene’s had to be treated before he brought any more disgrace to his wonderful mother.