“Maoist?”

“Doubtful. Castroite?”

“Maybe. Reach the office yet?”

“No, something’s wonking up the circuits.”

“Jamming?”

“Maybe. Maoist?”

“Doubtful. Russkie?”

“Maybe…”

Kiley pulled and strained at the disc, trying to drag it out from under the great head. He was making some small headway when a photographer and three models and the director of fashion for a leading women’s magazine nudged him aside, and began posing the girls on the head of the dead beast.

“Look anguished, Maddie,” said the photographer, a slim and ascetic young man wearing an Australian digger hat in white velour. The model looked anguished. “No, no, more anguished. Cry for the entire world, sweetheart!” Maddie anguished harder. She cried. “Now tilt the pelvis just a tiddle forward, darling,” the photographer urged. “Let’s transmute that anguish into a starchy impudence at the really tasty things the season’s culottes have to say to the New Female!”

“Off duty,” said a cabbie, streaking down around a wing-tip and plunging up the Avenue.

Somewhere children were laughing and the wind was sweet with the scent of imminent Summer. But that was somewhere else.

“Jesus, I can’t stand the stink!” shouted a woman from the seventh floor window of an employment agency.

Seventeen sailors from a Japanese freighter, in New York on three-day leave, crouched near the juncture of wing and torso, and snapped pictures of the dead beast with Leicas, several murmuring words that sounded like, “Rodan.” No one paid them any heed.

Several handbills were hastily pasted onto the leathery hide, announcing the candidacy of Roger Scarpennetti for Borough President.

A vendor of socks (seconds) pitched his way from tail to beak, and made almost four dollars with his wares.