"Your husband was a systems engineer-correct?"

"You're not one of the policemen I talked to after it happened."

"No," he said.

"Who are you?"

Clipped to his belt holster was a device called a fieldstrength meter. He took it out, raised the small antenna attached to it, and then tuned the meter to sweep the frequency band. Checking the needle he probed the north side of the room. From the bookcase he took a 1961 World Almanac. Embedded in the narrow space between the spine and the binding was a small audio device. Selvy disengaged the single transistor in the oscillator circuit. He looked at Klara Ludecke. She didn't know whether to be surprised or angry.

He took out his wallet and showed her a set of credentials linking him to something called U.S. Strike Force, Internal Projects.

"Special investigative unit."

"What is special about me?"

"Your husband didn't die under what I'd call normal circumstances, Mrs. Ludecke."

"When is murder normal?"

"Beyond the fact that he was murdered, there were unusual details."

"Abnormal, perhaps you would prefer to say."

"Words."

"Abnormal," she insisted.

"Yes, why not?"

"Anyone would agree. A grotesque death. And it's interesting that you haven't spoken a word about the people who killed him. Circumstances so abnormal that this small detail is completely overlooked."

"No, wrong."

"Perhaps this aspect of the crime isn't part of your special investigation. You're not interested? It's too routine for specialists. You're bored with that question?"

"I'd like to discuss the matter of acquaintances."

"Would you really?"

"Your husband's work took him to Washington on occasion.'

"This is correct. Washington and the surrounding area."

" Washington in particular."

"I wouldn't say that, no."

"According to the original police inquiry-"

"The police," she said. "The police know nothing. Sex crime, that's all they know. It's the people in the special investigation who know what's important and what isn't. They know where to look. How deep, how shallow. The police. They photograph the body. They make chalk marks on the floor. They check their files on deviates and the killers of deviates. That satisfies them. They have such experience in these areas. Who am I to complain?"

Klara Ludecke raised her eyes to an angle level with his.

"How special can this investigation be if you haven't even asked about Radial Matrix?" she said.

Selvy picked up a plastic disk from the coffee table in front of him, a scenic paperweight, three-dimensional vista of rolling hills, and studied it a moment. He watched the woman rise from the chair and walk through the dark parlor and along the equally dark hallway, where she opened the front door and held it, not taking her eyes off the opposite wall as he walked past her into the sun.

Later that same day he rode an escalator down to the Capitol subway with Lloyd Percival.

"You're due at Lightborne's when?"

"Tomorrow night," Selvy said. "Auction."

"What, more Guatemalan stuff?"

"Apparently."

"We see nothing but stiff pricks lately. What I wouldn't give for a single mushy prick. Might be a whole new approach. Jesus Christmas, what happened to the esthetic element? Tell Lightborne. The subtlety, the complexity, the simple charm. All he seems to show us are junkyard pieces."

"He knows, Senator."

"Just heard from some friends in Amsterdam. Someone's come up with a plaster-and-polystyrene copy of a Bernini I've always admired."

"_Saint Teresa in Ecstasy_."

"Right, some young Dutch sculptor."

"Lightborne's got a vicar he did."

"What kind of vicar?"

"A vicar with a stiff prick, Senator."

"Why did I ask?"

"Anyway."

"Anyway what this Dutch fella's done is to lift the folds of Saint Teresa's habit way up around her thighs and to place her knees well apart without changing the original position of the feet. Hell, it was already there. All he's done is highlight it. Her ecstasy always was sexual."

They were the last two people to step onto the small electric conveyance and it started immediately.

"Bernini might not agree."

"Don't quibble, Glen."

"Not to mention Saint Teresa."

"Are you a prude?"

"Possibly."

"Interesting fella. You're an interesting fella."

"What about the angel?"

"He's changed the configuration of the arrowhead but only slightly."

"To make it more phallic."

"Marginally so," Percival said.

"The sacred and profane."

"Special form of eroticism, isn't it? Always been attracted to it myself. It pleases the Lord that only a few of us have the wherewithal to pursue such attractions."

They got off the subway and took an elevator to the third floor of the Dirksen Building.

"Magazine wants to make me look human."

"Which?"

"_Running Dog_."

"Stay away," Selvy said. "It's not my department of course."

"Why?"

"They'll burn you."

"How do you know?"

"They're after controversy. They're dying and need a fix. Even if they do the piece they promise, you'll be hemmed in by autopsy reports, photos of entry and exit wounds, who killed Brown, who killed Smith, who killed Jones. They deal in fantasy."

They walked down a corridor toward the Senator's office.

"It's not your department of course."

"Absolutely not," Selvy said.

"Your duties are strictly administrative."

"Their editor's unstable. Grace Delaney. A lush. Used to spend all her time raising bail for well-hung Panthers."

Lightborne leaned forward to grimace, inches from the mirror, checking his teeth for traces of the grilled cheese sandwich he'd had for dinner. He turned on the cold water, wet his index finger and then ran it several times across his clenched teeth.

He cleared a space in the gallery and set out folding chairs and a bench, deciding finally not to bother hauling the armchair out here. He went around turning on lights. In his jacket pocket he found a slightly bent Tareyton King and he blew on it several times to remove microscopic lint and then began searching for a match, the cigarette held between thumb and middle finger, an idiosyncrasy he'd copied from a titled Englishman he'd once done business with. With no matches to be had, he finally turned on the hotplate and was waiting for it to warm when the first of the bidders arrived.

Eventually eleven people sat in the gallery as Lightborne made final adjustments. Glen Selvy carried a chair out of the living area and sat against a wall, slightly apart from the others. Lightborne showed a carved wood fertility figure. Noted its characteristics and advised as to period, precise handiwork involved, where found and how. A well-tanned man named Wetzel was the sole bidder.

A copper statuette with a lesbian theme also went without competitive bidding. Wetzel captured a bronze satyr-once owned by Fulgencio Batista, Lightborne said-after an encouraging flurry of bids against three other people.

Lightborne pushed a trunk on rollers into the auction area. He undid the belts, used an enormous key to open the trunk and then, with the help of a couple of men sitting up front, removed a three-foot-high volcanic stone phallus that pointed upward from a base of a pair of testicles larger than bowling balls.

The piece was variously chipped, pockmarked and discolored. It had character. Lightborne invited the bidders to take a closer look, and most did. Then he delivered a brief interpretation of the piece and opened the bidding.

Wetzel said, "That thing is about as pre-Columbian as an Oldenburg clothespin."

"Who said pre-Columbian? I said it was dug out of a tomb in the jungle. Who specified a date?"