Imperfect Bite

By Timothy Foote

THE TOOTH MERCHANT

byC.L. SULZBERGER 275 pages. Quadrangle. $7.95.

Since World War II, New York Times Columnist C.L. Sulzberger has been prowling Europe's corridors of power, acquiring a broad acquaintance with Poo-Bahs, potentates, foreign ministers and heads of state. Presented in daily print, the fruits of his labors have customarily shown more care than flare, and a neutral observer might have assumed that if Sulzberger ever got round to a novel, it would be one of those ponderous constructions that bore the reader while portentously trading on the author's expertise.

Not so. In The Tooth Merchant, Sulzberger's knowledge is very much in evidence, but so is a distinct sense of humor. He presents a slippery, multilingual Armenian named Kevork Sasounian, who discovers the original dragon's teeth (sacksful of them), which have been lying in a cave in Asia Minor since Cadmus' and Jason's time. What to do? Why, sell them as potential shock troops to the highest bidder in the cold war world of the 1950s.

Sales trips follow, with Sasounian sowing sample teeth and producing angry instant hoplites, to the delight or dismay of the likes of Stalin and Beria, Ben-Gurion, Nasser, SHAPE Commander General Alfred Gruenther in Paris, and Dwight David Eisenhower, who watches the demonstration on a quiet corner of the White House lawn.

Exactly who buys the dragon's teeth or not, and why, should stay secret. It is fair to say, though, that Sulzberger offers a fine, new explanation for the moment and method of Joseph Stalin's demise. Another of his best moments is a debate between General Gruenther (a Catholic) and Sasounian about whether or not it would be murder to dump the dragon's teeth into the depths of the North Atlantic.

The author keeps these trips light and fantastic, poking fun at international spy novels as he goes, writing himself into the text (Sasounian gives C.L. Sulzberger $4,000 to try to smuggle his mistress from Istanbul to Paris), and sowing the story with enough hard words to keep most readers within busy reach of a good dictionary. (Samples: congener, metopic, eristic, flocculent, saporous.) Sulzberger's congeners will be pleased to find that The Tooth Merchant, though occasionally eristic, never stoops to flocculence.

--:Timothy Foote

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