Eight of eight. The telephone rang. Enderby decided to give it the honour of full dentition, so he jammed in the encrusted lower denture. Try it out. Gum still sorish. But, of course, that was the hardened Gripdent or whatever it was. He had them all.
"Professor Enderby?"
"Speaking."
"You don't know me, but this is just to inform you that both my husband and I consider that your film is filth."
"It's not my film. I only wrote the-"
"You have a lot to answer for, my husband says. Don't you think there's enough juvenile crime in our streets without filth like yours abetting it?"
"But it's not filth and it's not my-"
"Obscene filth. Let me inform you that my husband is six feet three and broad in proportion-"
"Is he a red Indian?"
"That's just the sort of cheap insult I would expect from a man capable of-"
"If you're going to send him round here, with or without tomahawk-"
She had put down the receiver. What he had been going to say was that there was twenty-four-hour armed protection in the apartment lobby as well as many closed-circuit television screens. This, however, would not help him if the enemies were within the block itself. That he had enemies in the block he knew-a gat-toothed black writer and his wife; a single woman with dogs who had objected to his mentioning in his magazine article the abundance of cockroaches in this part of Manhattan, as though it were a shameful family secret; a couple of fattish electronic guitarists who had smelt his loathing as they had gone up together once in the elevator. And there might be also others affronted by the film just this moment referred to.