V.V.(4) "under the rose" (23.24)

[David Morris]

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/rose.html

>From "Under The Rose" in Slow Learner:

"An alignment like this, he felt, could only have taken place in a Western 
World where spying was becoming less an individual than a group enterprise, 
where the events of 1848 and the activities of anarchists and radicals all 
over the Continent seemed to proclaim that history was being made no longer 
through the Virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends 
and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines. [...] 
For he and Moldweorp [who works nominally for the Germans], Porpentine knew, 
were cut from the same pattern: comrade Machiavellians, still playing the 
games of Renaissance Italian politics in a world that had outgrown them." 
(p.107)

"It was no longer single combat. Had it ever been? Lepsius, 
Bongo-Shaftsbury, all the others, had been more than merely tools or 
physical extensions of Moldweorp. They were all in it; all had a stake, 
acted as a unit. Under orders. Whose orders? Anything human? He doubted: 
like a bright hallucination against Cairo's night-sky he saw (it may have 
been only a line of clouds) a bell-shaped curve, remembered perhaps from 
some younger F.O. operative's mathematics text. Unlike Constantine on the 
verge of battle, he could not afford, this late, to be converted at any 
sign. Only curse himself, silent, for wanting so to believe in a fight 
according to the duello, even in this period of history. But they--no, 
it--had not been playing those rules. Only statistical odds. When had he 
stopped facing an adversary and taken on a Force, a Quantity?" (pp.134-35)

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