The Bone Deal and Chase at Fangoso Lagoons

The Bone Deal and Chase at Fangoso Lagoons is the episode in which Oedipa Maas and Metzger encounter Manny Di Presso, a lawyer caught between his client Tony Jaguar and the estate of Pierce Inverarity. What begins as a day at Inverarity’s lakeside development becomes a dispute over human remains: bones recovered from a World War II battlefield were sold, resold, and partly put to commercial use, while Jaguar alleges that Inverarity never paid him. Di Presso’s flight across the water leaves the others stranded, but the episode’s lasting disturbance lies in the history beneath the chase: the anonymous deaths at Lago di Pietà and the chain of transactions that made their remains merchandise.

The Outing and the Unexpected Encounter

While waiting for ancillary letters authorizing representatives in Arizona, Texas, New York, and Florida, where Inverarity had developed real estate, and in Delaware, where he had been incorporated, Oedipa and Metzger spent a day at Fangoso Lagoons, one of Inverarity’s last major projects. The Paranoids—Miles, Dean, Serge, and Leonard—followed in a convertible with their girlfriends. Their journey across the hills of San Narciso was marked by near collisions: Serge, driving with his hair in his eyes, was persuaded to give the wheel to one of the girls. The party pressed toward the coast but stopped short of the sea, whose presence the narration sets against the built landscape of housing developments, roads, and other incursions.

At the pier, the Paranoids began trying to start someone’s outboard after proposing to take a boat. A tarp-covered figure rose from another boat and called for help in a voice Metzger recognized from the film Baby Igor. The man was Di Presso. The sudden appearance turns the outing into a meeting between two people whose stories already overlap: Di Presso says he once acted as Metzger in a television pilot, while Metzger’s work for Inverarity gives him a connection to the estate at the center of Di Presso’s dispute.

The Claim and the Bones

Di Presso explains that he is a lawyer again and that the pilot will not be bought unless Metzger does something spectacular enough to attract public attention. The spectacle he brings is a claim by Tony Jaguar, his client and a major figure in Cosa Nostra. Jaguar alleges that Inverarity failed to pay for a supply of bones. The dispute concerns Beaconsfield’s bone-charcoal filter process: Oedipa recalls the connection between the company and bone charcoal, and Di Presso says that some of the bones are now underwater at Fangoso Lagoons, where they decorate the bottom for scuba divers.

Di Presso denies that the bones came from freeway construction or a bribe. Some were used in the research-and-development phase of the filter program in the early 1950s, before the company turned to other materials; Jaguar, he says, claimed to have harvested them all from Lago di Pietà. The remains’ passage through commerce is already disquieting: bones recovered from a mass burial site have become both industrial input and underwater decoration, and the question of payment attaches to their buyers and sellers without restoring the identities of the dead.

The history Di Presso recounts begins in 1943, during the advance on Rome. A small company of American troops was cut off on the narrow shore of Lago di Pietà, near the Tyrrhenian coast between Naples and Rome. German troops fired down from the cliffs. The lake was too cold to cross safely, there were no trees for rafts, and air support did not arrive; the isolated soldiers made raids and searched for escape routes, but the patrols that returned found none. The men eventually died without leaving a trace or a word. German enlisted men put the bodies, along with weapons and other unusable materiel, into the lake, where they sank and remained until the early 1950s.

Jaguar, who had been a corporal in an Italian unit attached to the German force at Lago di Pietà, knew what lay at the bottom. He and colleagues attempted to salvage it and recovered bones. Di Presso presents Jaguar’s decision to sell them as a product of uncertain calculations: the growing number of American tourists, the market for objects associated with the dead, and the possibility that attention might be drawn to American soldiers whose bodies had never been found. Jaguar sold his harvest through contacts in Cosa Nostra. An import-export firm bought the bones and sold them to a fertilizer enterprise; after that enterprise shifted to menhaden, it transferred several tons to a holding company, which kept them in a warehouse outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, for perhaps a year before Beaconsfield became interested.

The Pursuit and Its Abandonment

The confrontation becomes immediate when Di Presso spots another runabout approaching, with two figures in gray suits crouched behind its windshield. Looking back across the lake, he calls for help, says he is running, and asks Metzger not to bully the approaching man because he is his client. He then disappears down the ladder. His appeal leaves the party with no clear account of who is pursuing whom or what the figures intend, but his hurried departure makes the business dispute feel like a physical threat rather than merely a claim about an unpaid transaction.

Oedipa realizes that Metzger has taken the boat and that the rest of them are marooned. They remain at Fangoso Lagoons until after sunset. The Paranoids and their girlfriends finally attract the attention of the Fangoso Lagoons Security Force by using the glowing ends of their cigarettes to spell alternating S’s and O’s. The makeshift signal answers the day’s failed arrangements with a visible call for rescue: while Di Presso has vanished into his pursuit, the stranded group must make itself legible to the guards.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The enforced wait is filled with songs by the Paranoids, marijuana, and fragments of the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy, retold through eight memories that become progressively harder to follow. The group’s confused, smoke-clouded account prompts Oedipa to decide the next day that she will see the play itself, and she persuades a reluctant Metzger to go with her. The episode therefore connects the bone dispute to the investigation that follows not through a tidy explanation but through an interruption: the stranded afternoon gives way to an account of a play whose history will become another route into the novel’s mystery.

The scene’s grotesque comedy does not cancel its history. The party’s diversion at an extravagant real-estate project rests on the forgotten deaths of soldiers whose bodies were never recovered; their remains move from battlefield disposal to salvage, storage, industrial research, and the bottom of a recreational lagoon. At the same time, the narrative does not settle the dispute: Jaguar’s allegation is reported by Di Presso, while Metzger doubts that Inverarity would have failed to pay unless a bribe were involved. The bones make the past materially present, but the competing accounts leave responsibility—and even the exact transaction—uncertain.