Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you’re on Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

O-boy, o-boy—go-ing to nail me, one, of those lit-tle is-land love-lies, spend, the rest … of my life, eat-ing pa-pay-as, fra-grant as the cunt, of young paradise—

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rózsavölgyi, who is still strapped in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with helmet, goggles that reflect too much light, oxygen mask—a face of metal, leather, isinglass. But now the pilot is raising the goggles, slowly, and whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don’t you know me? Don’t you really know me?

Rózsavölgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shivering, blinded now in the overhead lights. Fräulein Müller-Hochleben is crawling around and around in the same circle, faster and faster, nearly a blur, croaking hysterically. Both have reached the exact level Roger’s subtle psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to. Quietly but firmly: “Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?”

“Mossmoon’s office,” they reply, in unison.

Mossmoon’s office is a roller-skate ride away from Whitehall, and guarded by room after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a frock of a radically different color from the others (and this goes on for a while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with, if that many can be so “radically different,” you know, like that—oh, colors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few), and whom Roger romances, bribes, threatens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches his way through till finally “Mossmoon,” pounding on this gigantic oak door, carved like the stone doorways of certain temples, “Pointsman, the jig’s up! In the name of whatever marginal decency enables you to get through the day without being shot dead by the odd armed stranger, open this door.” This is quite a long speech, and the door actually opens halfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He’s looking into a room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and-water, a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it’s Roger’s entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished table, over the polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet down the waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debonair (well, snotty) smile on his face. “Mossmoon, I’m on to you.” Has he actually come inside, in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia, the incense and the thighbone scepter?

“That’s not Mossmoon,” Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he speaks, “Mexico do come down off the table won’t you… gentlemen, one of my old PISCES colleagues, brilliant but rather unstable, as you may’ve noted—oh, Mexico, really—”

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know, in any world that really touches, at too many points, the one they’re accustomed to… and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by, across ten-guinea cravats, creative-looking little beards, up into a liver-spotted nostril, across a pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starched fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Iron Crosses, V.C.s, retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins, half-exposed service revolvers, and even a sawed-off shotgun under the shoulder there… .