"Are we on camera?" asked Metzger dryly.
"This is real," chattered Di Presso, "come on." The Paranoids cast off, backed the "Godzilla H" out from the pier, turned and with a concerted whoop took off like a bat out of hell, nearly sending Di Presso over the fantail. Oedipa, looking back, could see their pursuer had been joined by another man about the same build. Both wore gray suits. She couldn't see if they were holding anything like guns.
"I left my car on the other side of the lake," Di Presso said, "but I know he has somebody watching."
"Who does," Metzger asked.
"Anthony Giunghierrace," replied ominous Di Presso, "alias Tony Jaguar."
"Who?"
"Eh, sfacim'," shrugged Di Presso, and spat into their wake. The Paranoids were singing, to the tune of "AdesteFideles":
Hey, solid citizen, we just pinched your bo-oat,
Hey, solid citizen, we just pinched your boat… grabassing around, trying to push each other over the side. Oedipa cringed out of the way and watched Di Presso. If he had really played the part of Metzger in a TV pilot film as Metzger claimed, the casting had been typically Hollywood: they didn't look or act a bit alike.
"So," said Di Presso, "who's Tony Jaguar. Very big in Cosa Nostra, is who."
"You're an actor," said Metzger. "How are you in with them?"
"I'm a lawyer again," Di Presso said. "That pilot will never be bought, Metz, not unless you go out and do something really Darrowlike, spectacular. Arouse public interest, maybe with a sensational defense."
"Like what."
"Like win the litigation I'm bringing against the estate of Pierce Inverarity." Metzger, as much as cool Metzger could, goggled. Di Presso laughed and punched Metzger in the shoulder. "That's right, good buddy."
"Who wants what? You better talk to the other executor too." He introduced Oedipa, Di Presso tipping his shades politely. The air suddenly went cold, the sun was blotted out. The three looked up in alarm to see looming over them and about to collide the pale green social hall, its towering pointed windows, wrought-iron floral embellishments, solid silence, air somehow of waiting for them. Dean, the Paranoid at the helm, brought the boat around neatly to a small wooden dock, everybody got out, Di Presso heading nervously for an outside staircase. "I want to check on my car," he said. Oedipa and Metzger, carrying picnic stuff, followed up the stairs, along a balcony, out of the building's shadow, up a metal ladder finally to the roof. It was like walking on the head of a drum: they could hear their reverberations inside the hollow building beneath, and the delighted yelling of the Paranoids. Di Presso, Scuba suit glistening, scrambled up the side of a cupola. Oedipa spread a blanket and poured booze into cups made of white, crushed, plastic foam. "It's still there," said Di Presso, descending. "I ought to make a run for it."
"Who's your client?" asked Metzger, holding out a tequila sour.
"Fellow who's chasing me," allowed Di Presso, holding the cup between his teeth so it covered his nose and looking at them, arch.
"You ran from clients?" Oedipa asked. "You flee ambulances?"
"He's been trying to borrow money," Di Presso said, "since I told him I couldn't get an advance against any settlement in this suit."
"You're all ready to lose, then," she said.
"My heart isn't in it," Di Presso admitted, "and if.I can't even keep up payments on that XKE I bought while temporarily insane, how can I lend money?"
"Over 30 years," Metzger snorted, "that's temporary."
"I'm not so crazy I don't know trouble," Di Presso said, "and Tony J. is in it, friends. Gambling mostly, also talk he's been up to show cause to the local Table why he shouldn't be in for some discipline there. That kind of grief I do not need."
Oedipa glared. "You're a selfish schmuck."
"All the time Cosa Nostra is watching," soothed Metzger, "watching. It does not do to be seen helping those the organization does not want helped."
"I have relatives in Sicily," said Di Presso, in comic broken English. Paranoids and their chicks appeared against the bright sky, from behind turrets, gables, ventilating ducts, and moved in on the eggplant sandwiches in the basket. Metzger sat on the jug of booze so they couldn't get any. The wind had risen.
"Tell me about the lawsuit," Metzger said, trying with both hands to keep his hair in place.
"You've been into Inverarity's books," Di Presso said. "You know the Beaconsfield filter thing." Metzger made a noncommittal moue.
"Bone charcoal," Oedipa remembered.
"Yeah, well Tony Jaguar, my client, supplied some bones," said Di Presso, "he alleges. Inverarity never paid him. That's what it's about."
"Offhand," Metzger said, "it doesn't sound like Inverarity. He was scrupulous about payments like that. Unless it was a bribe. I only did his legal tax deductions, so I wouldn't have seen it if it was. What construction firm did your client work for?"
"Construction firm," squinted Di Presso.
Metzger looked around. The Paranoids and their chicks may have been out of earshot. "Human bones, right?" Di Presso nodded yes. "All right, that's how he got them. Different highway outfits in the area, ones Inverarity had bought into, they got the contracts. All drawn up in most kosher fashion, Manfred. If there was payola in there, I doubt it got written down."
"How," inquired Oedipa, "are road builders in any position to sell bones, pray?"
"Old cemeteries have to be ripped up," Metzger explained. "Lake in the path of the East San Narciso Freeway, it had no right to be there, so we just barrelled on through, no sweat."
"No bribes, no freeways," Di Presso shaking his head. "These bones came from Italy. A straight sale. Some of them," waving out at the lake, "are down there, to decorate the bottom for the Scuba nuts. That's what I've been doing today, examining the goods in dispute. Till Tony started chasing, anyway. The rest of the bones were used in the R&D phase of the filter program, back around the early '50's, way before cancer. Tony Jaguar says he harvested them all from the bottom of Lago di Pieta."
"My God," Metzger said, soon as this name registered. "GI's?"
"About a company," said Manny Di Presso. Lago di Pieta was near the Tyrrhenian coast, somewhere between Naples and Rome, and had been the scene of a now ignored (in 1943 tragic) battle of attrition in a minor pocket developed during the advance on Rome. For weeks, a handful of American troops, cut off and without communications, huddled on the narrow shore of the clear and tranquil lake while from the cliffs that tilted vertiginously over the beach Germans hit them day and night with plunging, enfilading fire. The water of the lake was too cold to swim: you died of exposure before you could reach any safe shore. There were no trees to build rafts with. No planes came over except an occasional Stuka with strafing in mind. It was remarkable that so few men held out so long. They dug in as far as the rocky beach would let them; they sent small raids up the cliffs that mostly never came back, but did succeed in taking out a machine-gun, once. Patrols looked for routes out, but those few that returned had found nothing. They did what they could to break out; failing, they clung to life as long as they could. But they died, every one, dumbly, without a trace or a word. One day the Germans came down from the cliffs, and their enlisted men put all the bodies that were on the beach into the lake, along with what weapons and other materiel were no longer of use to either side. Presently the bodies sank; and stayed where they were till the early '50'5, when Tony Jaguar, who'd been a corporal in an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago di Pieta and knew about what was at the bottom, decided along with some colleagues to see what he could salvage. All they managed to come up with was bones. Out of some murky train of reasoning, which may have included the observed fact that American tourists, beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything; and stories about Forest Lawn and the American cult of the dead; possibly some dim hope that Senator McCarthy, and others of his persuasion, in those days having achieved a certain ascendancy over the rich cretini from across the sea, would somehow refocus attention on the fallen of WW II, especially ones whose corpses had never been found; out of some such labyrinth of assumed motives, Tony Jaguar decided he could surely unload his harvest of bones on some American someplace, through his contacts in the "family," known these days as Cosa Nostra. He was right. An import-export firm bought the bones, sold them to a fertilizer enterprise, which may have used one or two femurs for laboratory tests but eventually decided to phase entirely into menhaden instead and transferred the remaining several tons to a holding company, which stored them in a warehouse outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for maybe a year before Bea-consfield got interested.