After the Pflaumbaum fire, lines of power among Bland and his German colleagues had to be renegotiated. It dragged on for a few years. Bland found himself in Depression St. Louis, talking with one Alfonso Tracy, Princeton ’06, St. Louis Country Club, moving into petrochemicals in a big way, Mrs. Tracy dithering in and out of the house with yardage and armloads of flowers, preparing for the annual Veiled Prophet Ball, Tracy himself preoccupied with the appearance of some individuals down from Chicago in flashy pinstripe suits, two-tone shoes and snap-brim fedoras, all talking in accents staccato as a Thompson.

“Oh, do I need a good electronics man,” Tracy moaned. “What do you do with these wops? The whole shipment was bad, and now they won’t take it back. If I step out of line, they’ll murder me. They’ll rape Mabel, they’ll go back to Princeton some dark night a-and castrate my kid! You know what I think it is, Lyle? A plot!”

Vendettas, jeweled gauntlets, subtle poisons come infiltrating this well-mannered parlor with the picture of Herbert Hoover on the piano, the pinks in the Nieman-Marcus bowl, the Bauhaus-style furniture like alabaster slabs of a model city (you expect little HO trains to come whirring out from under the davenport, cans ’n’ reefers on and on across the carpet’s ash-colored lowland…). Alfonso Tracy’s long face, creased either side of the nose and on around the mustache line, dragged down by worries, thirty years without a genuine smile (“Even Laurel & Hardy doesn’t work for me any more!”), morose with fright in his easy chair. How could Lyle Bland not be touched?

“Got just the fella,” sez he, touching Tracy’s arm, compassionate. Always good to have an engineer on tap. This one did some just top-notch electronic-surveillance designs once for the then-fledgling FBI, on a contract the Bland Institute landed a few years ago and subbed part of out to Siemens over there in Germany. “Have him in tomorrow on the Silver Streak. No problem, Al.”

“Come on out and have a look,” sighs Tracy. They hop in the Packard and drive out to the green little river town of Mouthorgan, Missouri, which is a railroad station, a tanning factory, a few frame houses, and dominating the area a gigantic Masonic hall, not a window on the whole massive monolith.

After a lot of rigmarole at the door, Bland is finally allowed in and led through velvet poolrooms, elaborate polished-wood gambling setups, chrome bars, soft bedrooms, on to a large warehouse section in back, which is crammed ten high with more pinball machines than Bland’s ever seen in one place in his life, Oh Boys, Grand Slams, World Serieses, Lucky Lindies as far as the eye can reach.

“And every one is fucked up,” sez melancholy Tracy. “Look at this.” It’s a Folies-Bergères: four-color lovelies doing the cancan all over it, zeros happening to coincide with eyes, nipples, and cunts, one of your racy-type games here, a little hostile toward the ladies but all in fun! “You got a nickel?” Chungg, boing there goes the ball just missing a high-scoring hole, hmm looks like a permanent warp there ahnnnggghk knocks a flasher worth 1000 but only 50 lights up on the board—“You see?” Tracy screams as the ball heads like a rock for the bottom, outside chance get it with a flipper zong flipper flips the other fucking way, and the board lights up TILT.