“
Suddenly—so suddenly it scared him—there was light ahead, around a corner. Not the light of a rainy evening in the city, but paler, less certain. They rounded the corner. He noticed the flashlight bulb starting to flicker; lost the alligator momentarily. Then turned the corner and found a wide space like the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light coming off walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct. “Wha,” he said out loud. Backwash from the river? Sea water shines in the dark sometimes; in the wake of a ship you see the same uncomfortable radiance. But not here. The alligator had turned to face him. It was a clear, easy shot. He waited. He was waiting for something to happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and superstitious. Surely the alligator would receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be resurrected, the sexy V. tempt him away from murder. He felt about to levitate and at a loss to say where, really, he was. In a bonecellar, a sepulchre. “Ah, schlemihl,” he whispered into the phosphorescence. Accident prone, schlimazzel. The gun would blow up in his hands. The alligator’s heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage, in this unholy light. “Can I let you just go?” Bung the foreman knew he was after a sure thing. It was down on the clipboard. And then he saw the alligator couldn’t go any further. Had settled down on its haunches to wait, knowing damn well it was going to be blasted. In Independence Hall in Philly, when the floor was rebuilt, they left part of the original, a foot square, to show the tourists. “Maybe,” the guide would tell you, “Benjamin Franklin stood right there, or even George Washington.” Profane on an eighth-grade class trip had been suitably impressed. He got that feeling now. Here in this room an old man had killed and boiled a catechumen, had committed sodomy with a rat, had discussed a rodent nunhood with V., a future saint—depending which story you listened to. “I’m sorry,” he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemihl’s stock line. He raised the repeater to his shoulder, flicked off the safety. “Sorry,” he said again. Father Fairing talked to rats. Profane talked to alligators. He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still. Blood began to seep out amoebalike to form shifting patterns with the weak glow of the water. Abruptly, the flashlight went out.
”
”