Who saves him (or interferes with his orgasm)? Why, Jeremy himself. Old Beaver shows up and waves off the heat, who go surly, fangflashing back to masturbating into Crime Does Not Pay Comics, gazing dreamy at guardroom pinups of J. Edgar Hoover or whatever it was they were up to, and the romantic triangle are suddenly all to have lunch together at the Club. Lunch together? Is this Noel Coward or some shit? Jessica at the last minute is overcome by some fictitious female syndrome which both men guess to be morning-sickness, Roger figuring she’ll do the most spiteful thing she can think of, Jeremy seeing it as a cute little private yoo-hoo for 2-hoo. So that leaves the fellas alone, to talk briskly about Operation Backfire, which is the British program to assemble some A4s and fire them out into the North Sea. What else are they going to talk about?

“Why?” Roger keeps asking, trying to piss Jeremy off. “Why do you want to put them together and fire them?”

“We’ve captured them, haven’t we? What does one do with a rocket?”

“But why?”

“Why? Damn it, to see, obviously. Jessica tells me you’re—ah—a math chap?”

“Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-sigma, equals one over the square root of two pi, times e to the minus s squared over two little-sigma squared.”

“Good Lord.” Laughing, hastily checking out the room.

“It is an old saying among my people.”

Jeremy knows how to handle this. Roger is invited to dinner in the evening, an intimate informal party at the home of Stefan Utgarthaloki, an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in Cuxhaven. “You’re welcome to bring a guest, of course,” gnaws the eager Beaver, “there’re a lot of snazzy NAAFIs about, it wouldn’t be too difficult for you to—”

“Informal means lounge suit, eh?” interrupts Roger. Too bad, he hasn’t got one. The prospects of being nabbed tonight are good. A party that includes (a) an Operation Backfire figure, (b) a Krupp executive, must necessarily then include (c) at least one ear to the corporate grapevine that’s heard of the Urinating Incident in Clive Mossmoon’s office. If Roger only knew what Beaver and his friends really have in mind!

He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought him from the Panama Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions—the pointed lapels have to be reinforced with coat-hanger stays because they extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit—underneath his purple-on-purple satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing his waist in to a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression of the jacket, which then falls to Bodine’s knees quintuple-vented in yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back up over his ass. The pants are belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten inches, so he has to use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The whole suit is blue, not suit-blue, no—really BLUE: paint-blue. It is immediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings it haunts the peripheral vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial. A subversive garment, all right.