“I’ve given this a lotta thought, Russ,” she said from the supine. “I think it’s the only thing will make a man of you.”
I remained obtuse. “Obviously the man is a charlatan. He has all the earmarks: arch idiom; strained and impertinent references to the higher culture; a pose as being, at once, all the kinds of degenerate I confessed to you, just now through the door, that I am not—”
I halted, carrying an imaginary pinch of snuff towards my nose. “But did he or did he not display those necessary evidences of deviation, identified by Sergeant Boris, an authority in this area, as symmetry and precision…?”
“Come awn,” Peggy complained, horse blinding herself with her hands. “I’ve got a Mama Celeste Deluxe pizza in the oven, and it’s done in twelve to fifteen minutes, depending on if you want the crust crisp or chewy.”
“Still,” I said, “I wonder whether I should cable Interpol’s office in Munchen? By no means have all the bizarreries of the past twenty-four hours been explained. Despite his motley, Boris was not playing a role in a motion picture—he seethed with envy at Zwingli’s new career as cinemactor. And those schoolgirls are obviously unregenerate miscreants. There was a dog answering the description of Ophelia. It might well be that Natalie’s masks are layered: first, Sapphic stewardess, then fake government operative—to further Polidor’s scheme against me—but finally, real Treasury agent in pursuit of an actual arch-criminal. The voice on the phone just now spoke suspiciously of currency, and made references as well to a commerce in what could include heroin on the one hand and the Sforza figurine on the other.”
When I removed my speculative fingers from the division between my nostrils I smelled singed mozzarella, tomato sauce, and oregano. I had fasted since devouring the second brownie a sun and moon ago.
I ravenously changed the subject: “The Deluxe, unless I miss my guess, has sausage and mushrooms and peppers and—”
“For crying out loud, Russ,” Peggy howled, exposing her eyes. “Here I am finally letting you have what you hired me for in the first place and have been trying to get ever since by hook or by crook. Come on and get it over with, because if we go to Bavaria there’s no sense in paying for two rooms.”
But for the horrible grimace with which she concluded this speech, she was more comely than I had ever seen her—as I now, tardily, realized.
I draw the curtain across the episode that followed—requiring neither the huzzahs nor the jeers of a bawdy audience—except, perhaps ungallantly, to lift the fringe and reveal the only absolute fact (as it was the most startling) yet established in the Villanova case: Peggy was not, as the pizza went to cinder, serving her novitiate in venery.
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Who is Teddy Villanova? Page 24