Penguin books

"Ssh." The dispenser's high forehead wrinkling in and out of oper-atical cross-furrows. Krypton goes back in among the shelves, and watches the lighted room through a bottle of paregoric till the opera's

over. Comes back in time to hear the pig asking, "Well where else would he head for?"

"I got it third-hand," Birdbury laying down the hypodermic he's been using as a baton. "Ask Krypton here, he gets around a bit."

"Greetings, gate," sez Albert, "let's inoculate."

"I hear Springer is supposed to be coming in tonight."

"First I've heard. But go on out to Putzi's, why don't you. That's where all that sort of thing goes on."

The pig looks up at a clock on the wall. "Got a funny schedule tonight, is all."

"Look here, Krypton, there's a bigwig from SPOG due in here any moment, so whatever it was, you know. . . ." They haggle over the three ounces of cocaine, the pig politely withdrawing to leaf through an old News of the World. Presently, taping the last of the crystal-stuffed bottles to his bare leg, Krypton invites everyone to the runcible spoon fight. "Bodine's holding some big money, folks in from all over the Zone—"

"Seaman Bodine?" inquires the amazed plush pig.

"The king of Cuxhaven, Porky."

"Well I ran him an errand once in Berlin. Tell him Rocketman sez howdy."

Krypton, bellbottom pulled up, opening one bottle just to see what he has, pauses, goggling. "You mean that hash?"

"Yup."

Krypton snuffs a big fingerful of the flaky white into nostrils right 'n' left. The world goes clarifying. Bitter snot begins to form in a stubborn fist at the back of his throat. Already the Potsdam Pickup is part of the folklore of the Zone. Would this pig here be trying to cash in on the glory of Rocketman (whose existence Krypton has never been that sure of)? Cocaine suspicions, cringing and mean as rats . . . shining bottles of a thousand colors, voices from the radio, the drape and hand of the pig's shag coat as Krypton reaches out to stroke . . . no, it's clear that the pig isn't looking for anything, isn't a cop, isn't dealing, or about to hustle anybody. . . . "Just wanted to see how it felt, you know," sez Krypton.

"Sure." Now the doorway is suddenly full of red hats, leather and brass. Krypton stands very still, the top to the open cocaine bottle in one hand.

"Slothrop?" sergeant in command comes edging into the room, hand resting on his sidearm. The pig looks over at Birdbury, who's shaking his head no, not me, as if he means it.

"Wasn't me, either," Krypton feels he ought to mention.

"Well somebody blew the whistle," the pig mutters, looking really hurt.

"Stand by," whispers Albert. To the MP: "Excuse me," moseying straight over to the wall switch, which he nicks off, Slothrop at once dashing through all the shouting past Birdbury's desk wham into a tall rack of medicines his straw stomach bounces him off of, but which then falls over on somebody else with a stupendous glass crash and scream—on down a pitchblack aisle, arms out to guide him, to the back exit, where he meets Krypton.

"Thanks."

"Quick."

Outside they cut eastward, toward the Elbe and the docks, pounding along, skidding in mudpuddles, stumbling over lorry-ruts, wind sweeping among the Quonsets to bat them in the face, cocaine falling in little white splashes from underneath Krypton's left bellbottom. Behind them the posse are hollering and shining flashlights, but don't seem to know where they've gone. Good. "Follow the yellow-brick road," hums Albert Krypton, on pitch, "follow the yellow-brick road," what's this, is he actually, yes he's skipping. , . .

Presently, out of breath, they arrive at the pier where the Badass and its division, four haze-gray piglets, are tied up, to find the runcible spoon fight just under way at the center of a weaving, cheering crowd of civilian and military drunks. Stringy Avery Purfle, sideburns slick as seal's fur in the pallid light, Adam's apple working in and out at a nervous four or five cycles a minute, shuffles around his opponent, the serene and oxlike St. John Bladdery, both with runcible spoons in the on-guard position, filed edges bright.

Krypton stashes Slothrop in a garbage bin and goes looking for Seaman Bodine. After a number of short, glittering feints, Purfle dodges in, quick as a fighting-cock. With a high slash that Bladdery tries to parry in third, Purfle rips through the Commando's blouse and draws blood. But when he goes to jump back, it seems thoughtful Bladdery has brought his combat boot down on the American's low dress shoe, nailing him where he stands.

Promotor Bodine and his two combatants are burning crystals of awareness in this poisoned gray gathering: a good half of the crowd are out in the foothills of unconsciousness, and the rest are not exactly sure what's going on. Some think that Purfle and Bladdery are really mad at each other. Others feel that it is meant to be comedy, and they will laugh at inappropriate moments. Now and then the odd beady

eyes will appear up in the night superstructures of the warships, staring, staring. . . .

Purfle and Bladdery have made simultaneous thrusts and are now corps a corps—with a scrape and clank the runcible spoons are locked, and elbows tense and set. The outcome rests with scrawny Purfle's gift for trickery, since Bladdery appears ready to hold the position all night.

"Rocketman's here," Krypton tugging at Bodine's damp wrinkled collar, "in a pig suit."

"Not now, man. You got the, ah—"

"But but the heat's after him, Bodine, where can we hide him?"

"Who cares, it's some asshole, is all. A fake. Rocketman wouldn't be here."

Purfle yanks his runcible-spoon hand back, leaning to the side, twisting his own weapon to keep its tines interlocked with those of Bladdery's, pulling the commando off-balance long enough to release his own foot, then deftly unlinking the spoons and dancing away. Bladdery recovers his footing and moves heavily in pursuit, probing in with a series of jabs then shifting the spoon to his other hand and surprising Purfle with a slash that grazes the sailor's neck, missing the jugular, but not by much. Blood drips into the white jumper, black under these arc-lights. Sweat and cold shadows lie darkly in the men's armpits. Purfle, made reckless by the pain, goes flying at Bladdery, a flurry of blind wild pokes and hackings, Bladdery hardly needing to move his feet, weaving from the knees up like a great assured pudding, finally able to grab Purfle's spoon hand at the wrist and twirl him about, like jitterbugging a girl, around in front of him, his own knife-edge now up and bisecting Purfle's Adam's apple, ready to slice in. He looks up, around, wheezing, sweaty, seeking some locus of power that will thumb-signal him what to do.

Nothing: only sleep, vomiting, shivering, a ghost and flowered odor of ethanol, solid Bodine counting his money. Nobody really watching. It then comes to Bladdery and Purfle at once, tuned to one another at the filed edge of this runcible spoon and the negligible effort it will take to fill their common world with death, that nobody said anything about a fight to the finish, right? that each will get part of the purse whoever wins, and so the sensible course is to break it up now, jointly to go hassle Bodine, and find some Band-Aids and iodine. And still they linger in their embrace, Death in all its potency humming them romantic tunes, chiding them for moderate little men . . . So far and no farther, is that it? You call that living?

An MP car, horn and siren and lights all going, approaches. Reluc-

tantly, Purfle and Bladdery do relax, and, sighing out of puffed cheeks, part. Bodine, ten feet away, tosses over the heads of the awakening crowd a fat packet of scrip which the Commando catches, riffle-splits, and gives half of to Purfle, who's already on route to the gangplank of his gray mother the John E. Badass, where the quarterdeck watch are looking more lively, and even a card game in the ship's laundry breaking up so everybody can go watch the big bust. Drunkards ashore begin to mill, sluggish and with no sense of direction. From beyond the pale of electric light comes a rush of girls, shivering, aroused, beruf-fled, to witch St. John Bladdery away under cover of pretty-pastel synthetics and amorous squeals. Bodine and Krypton, hipwriggling and cursing their way through the crowd, stumbling over wakers and sleepers, stop by the dumpster to collect Slothrop, who rises from a pile of eggshells, beer cans, horrible chicken parts in yellow gravy, coffee grounds and waste paper spilling or clattering off of him, raises his mask, and smiles howdy at Bodine.

"Rocketman, holy shit, it really is. What's happening, ol' buddy?"

"Been double-crossed, need a ride to Putzi's." Lorries have been showing up, into whose canvas shadows MPs are beginning to load everybody slower-moving than they are. Now two civilians, one with a beard, come charging down the pier, hollering, "A pig suit, a pig suit, there, look," and, "You—Slothrop—stay where you are."

Not about to, Slothrop with a great clank and crunch rolls out of the garbage and at a dead run follows Bodine and Krypton, chickenfat flowing away, eggshells flying off behind him. A Red Cross Club-mobile or canteen truck is parked down at the next nest of destroyers, its light spilling neatly square on the asphalt, a pretty girl with a Deanna Durbin hairdo framed inside against stacks of candy bars, cigarettes, chock-shaped sandwiches in waxed paper.

"Coffee, boys?" she smiles, "how about some sandwiches? We're sold out of everything tonight but ham," then seeing Slothrop, "oh, dear, I'm sorry. . . ."

"Keys to the truck," Bodine coming up with a Cagney sneer and nickel-plated handgun, "c'mon," cocking the hammer.

Tough frown, shoulderpadded shrug. "In the ignition, Jackson." Albert Krypton climbs in the back to keep her company while Slothrop and Bodine jump in front and get under way in a tight, screeching U-turn just as the two civilians come running up.

"Now who th' hell's zat," Slothrop looking back out the window at their shouting shapes diminishing, "did you check that one bird with the ace of spades on his cheek?"

Bodine swerves past the disturbance around the John E. Badass and gives everybody the obligatory finger. Slothrop slouches back in the seat, putting the pig mask up like a knight's beaver, reaching over to pry a pack of cigarettes out of Bodine's jumper pocket, lighting one up, weary, wishing he could just sleep. ... In back of him suddenly the Red Cross girl shrieks, "My God, what's that?"

"Look," Krypton patiently, "you get some on the end of your finger, right, then you close off one half of your nose, a-and—"

"It's cocaine!" the girl's voice rising to an alarming intensity, "is what it is! It's heroin! You're dope fiends! and you've kidnapped me! Oh, my God! This is a, don't you realize, it's a Red Cross Clubmobile! It's the property of the Red Cross! Oh, you can't do this! I'm with the Red Cross! Oh, help me, somebody! They're dope fiends! Oh, please! Help! Stop and let me out! Take the truck if you want, take everything in it, but oh please don't—"

"Steer a minute," Bodine turning around and pointing his shiny pistol at the girl.

"You can't shoot me," she screams, "you hoodlum, who do you think you are, hijacking Red Cross property! Why don't you just—go somewhere and—sniff your dope and—leave us alone!"

"Cunt," advises Seaman Bodine, in a calm and reasonable tone, "you are wrong. I can shoot you. Right? Now, you happen to be working for the same warm and wonderful organization that was charging fifteen cents for coffee and doughnuts, at the Battle of the fucking Bulge, if you really wanna get into who is stealing what from who."

"Whom," she replies in a much smaller voice, lower lip quivering kind of cute and bitchy it seems to Slothrop, checking it out in the rearview mirror as Bodine takes over the wheel again.

"Oho, what's this," Krypton watching her ass, "what have we here," shifting under its khaki skirt as she stands with long legs braced for their raiding creaking 60 or 70 miles an hour and Bodine's strange cornering techniques, which look to be some stylized form of suicide.

"What's your name?" Slothrop smiling, an avuncular pig.

"Shirley."

"Tyrone. Howdy."

"Tra-la-la," Krypton now looting the cash register, gobbling Her-shey bars and stuffing his socks with packs of smokes, "love in bloom." About then Bodine slams on the brakes and goes into a great skid, ass end of their truck slewing toward an icy-lit tableau of sentries in white-stenciled helmet liners, white belts, white holsters, a barricade

across the road, an officer running toward a jeep hunched up and hollering into a walkie-talkie.

"Roadblock? What the shit," Bodine grinding it into reverse, various goodies for the troops crashing off of their shelves as the truck lurches around. Shirley loses her footing and staggers forward, Krypton grabbing for her as Slothrop leans to take the handgun off the dashboard, finding her half-draped over the front seat when he gets back around to the window. "Where the fuck is low now? What is it, a Red Cross gearbox, you got to put a nickel in someplace to get it in gear, hey Shirley?"

"Oh, goodness," Shirley squirming over into the front between them, grabbing the shift, "like this, you drip." Gunshots behind them.

"Thank you," sez Bodine, and, leaving rubber in a pungent smoking shriek, they're off again.

"You're really hot, Rocketman, wow," Krypton lying in back offering ankle and taped cocaine bottle to Shirley with a smile.

"Do tell."

"No thanks," sez Shirley. "I'd really better not."

"C'mon . . . aw . . ."

"Were those snowdrops back there?" Slothrop squinting into the lampshine ahead, "GIs? What're GIs doing here in the British sector, do you know?"

"Maybe not," Bodine guesses, "maybe only Shore Patrol, c'mon, let's not get any more paranoid than we have to. . . ."

"Look, see, I'm doing (snuff) it and I'm not growing (snuff) fangs or anything. ..."

"Well, I just don't know," Shirley kneeling backwards, breasts propped on the back of the seat, one big smooth country-girl hand on Slothrop's shoulder for balance.

"Look," Bodine sez, "is it currency, or dope, or what? I just like to know what to expect, cause if the heat's on—"

"Only on me, far as I know. This is nothing to do with dealing, it's a whole different drill."

"She's the rose of no-man's laaaand," sings Albert Krypton, coaxing.

"Why you going to Putzi's?"

"Got to see that Springer."

"Didn't know he was coming in."

"Why does everybody keep saying that?"

"Rebebber, dow," Shirley talking with only one nostril here, "dot too buch, Albert, just a teensy bit."

"Just that nobody's seen him for a while."

"Be inhaling now, good, good, O.K., now. Umm, there's a little still, uh, kind of a booger that's blocking it... do it again, right. Now the other one."

"Albert, you said only one."

"Look, Rocky, if you do get busted—"

"Don't want to think."

"Jeepers," sez Shirley.

"You like that? Here, just do a little more."

"What'd you do?"

"Nothing. Wanted to talk to somebody at that SPOG. Find out what was happening. We were just supposed to talk, you know, off the record, tonight in the dispensary. Neutral ground. Instead The Man shows up. Now there are also these other two creeps in civvies."

"You a spy, or something?"

"Wish I was even that. Oh boy. I should've known better."

"Well it sounds pretty bad." And Seaman Bodine drives along not liking it much, brooding, growing sentimental. "Say," presently, "if they do, well, catch up with you, I could get in touch with your Mom, or something."

"My—" A sharp look. "No, no, no ..."

"Well, somebody."

"Can't think of a soul."

"Wow, Rocketman. ..."

Putzi's turns out to be a sprawling, half-fortified manor house dating from the last century, off the Dorum road and seaward down a sandy pair of wheel-tracks with reeds and tough dune grass growing in between, the house perched like a raft atop a giant comber of a sandhill that sweeps upward from a beach whose grade is so subtle that it becomes water only by surprise, tranquil, salt-pale, stretching miles into the North Sea like clouds, here and there more silver, long cell or skin shapes, tissue-thin, stilled under the moon, reaching out toward Helgoland.

The place never got requisitioned. Nobody has ever seen the owner, or even knows if "Putzi" is anybody real. Bodine drives the truck right on into what used to be the stable and they all get out, Shirley hoorahing in the moonlight, Krypton mumbling oboy, oboy through big mouthfuls of that frau bait. There is some password and security hassle at the door, on account of the pig getup, but Slothrop flashes his white plastic knight and that works. Inside they find a brightly lit and busy combination bar, opium den, cabaret, casino and

house of ill repute, all its rooms swarming with soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies and folks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising hell at a noise level the house's silent walls seal off completely from the outside. Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one's thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?

Springer is nowhere in sight, and from what Slothrop can gather from random questioning won't be by till later, if at all. Now this happens to be the very delivery date for that discharge they arranged sailing in with Frau Gnahb to Stralsund. And tonight, of all nights, after a week of not bothering him, the police decide to come after Slothrop. Oh yes, yes indeed NNNNNNNN Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop We Have Been Waiting For You. Of Course We Are Here. You Didn't Think We Had Just Faded Away, No, No Tyrone, We Must Hurt You Again If You Are Going To Be That Stupid, Hurt You Again And Again Yes Tyrone You Are So Hopeless So Stupid And Doomed. Are You Really Supposed To Find Anything? What If It Is Death Tyrone? What If We Don't Want You To Find Anything? If We Don't Want To Give You Your Discharge You'll Just Go On Like This Forever Won't You? Maybe We Want You Only To Keep On. You Don't Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes You Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can't. You Think You're Good But You're Really Shit And We All Know It. That Is In Your Dossier. (Laughter. Humming.)

Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his mask. "You look bad, Rocky. This is Solange. She's a masseuse." She is smiling, quizzical, a child brought to visit the weird pig in his cave.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Let me take you down to the baths," the woman's voice a soapy sponge already caressing at his troubles, "it's very quiet, restful. ..."

"I'll be around all night," Bodine sez. "I'll tell you if Springer shows."

"This is some kind of a plot, right?" Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.

"Everything is some kind of a plot, man," Bodine laughing.

"And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways," Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. Which is Slothrop's first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston's—and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he's headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom. He understands that he should not be so paranoid of either Bodine or Solange, but ride instead their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him. . . .

Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues to search for his customer, 2½ bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy against his bare stomach under his skivvy shirt. The Major isn't at any of the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor show wherein one Yolande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table to table picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the flame of some joker's Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt—nor is he drinking, nor, according to Monika, Putzi's genial, cigar-smoking, matelassé-suited madame, is he screwing. He hasn't even been by to hassle the piano player for "San Antonio Rose." It takes Bodine half an hour before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging doors of a pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkröte, known throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before which bemedaled and brevetted Krautkillers, as well as the baddest shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees from the grossest of Zonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken out, and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed an Iron Toad, faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintly smiling, a foot long at its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit-stained toilet and hooked up to the European Grid through a rheostat control rigged to deliver varying though not lethal surges of voltage and current. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat (some say it's the half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn't in fact hooked up to an automatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really—you can piss on the Toad without anything at all happening. But you just never know. Often enough to matter, the current will be there—piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your prototype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissing on some long-ago third rail and nil-

minated to charcoal, to epileptic night, his scream not even his own but the electricity's, the amps speaking through his already shattering vessel, shattered too soon for them even to begin to say it, voice their terrible release from silence, nobody listening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track, some old man unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under a million June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relaxing and tightening in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a cat screwing, a church bell in a high wind, a window being broken, no direction to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly by the old, the coal-gas and Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning. Or you can find him any night at Putzi's if you're man enough to go in piss on that Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is in a self-congratulating mood.

"Ugly 'sucker tried his best," wrapping an arm about Bodine's neck, "but got his warty ol' ass handed to him tonight, damn 'f he didn't."

"Got your 'snow,' Major Marvy. Half a bottle shy, sorry, it's the best I could do."

"That's all reet, sailor. I know so many nose habits between here 'n' Wiesbaden you'd need three ton 'n' that wouldn't last the 'suckers a day." He pays off Bodine, full price, overriding Bodine's offer to prorate for what's missing. "Call it a little lagniappe, goodbuddy, that's Duane Marvy's way o' doin' thangs. Damn that ol' toad's got my pecker to feelin' pretty good now. Damn 'f I wouldn't like to stick it inside one them little whores. Hey! Boats, where can I find me some pussy around here?"

The sailor shows him how to get downstairs to the whorehouse. They take you into a kind of private steam bath first, you can screw right there if you want, doesn't cost any extra. The madame—hey! ha, ha! looks like some kind of a dyke with that stogie in her face! raises an eyebrow at Marvy when he tells her he wants a nigger, but thinks she can get hold of one.

"It isn't the House of All Nations, but we do aim for variety," running the tortoise end of her cigar-holder down a call-sheet, "Sandra is engaged for the moment. An exhibition. In the meantime, here is our delightful Manuela, to keep you company."

Manuela is wearing only a high comb and black-lace mantilla, shadow-flowers falling to her hips, a professional smile for the fat American, who is already fumbling with uniform buttons.

"Hubba, hubba! Hey, she's pretty sunburned herself. Ain'tcha? You

got a leetle mulatto in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe es-pañol? You sabe fucky-fucky?"

"Si," deciding tonight to be from the Levante, "I am Spanish. I from Valencia."

"Va-len-cia-a-a," sings Major Many, to the well-known tune of the same name, "Señorita, fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala la-lit la-h laaa ..." dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave center of the waiting madame.

Manuela doesn't feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last cities to fall to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which knew him first, felt his cruelty two years before the civil war even began for the rest of Spain. She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn't her first, but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi's is mostly British. During the War—how many camps and cities since her capture in '38?—it was German. She missed the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north—missed the flowers, children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she's never been, Valencia, this evening's home. . . . Ya salimos de España. . . . Pa' luchar en otros frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela. . . .

She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the room could be any size, an entire city's breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.

"Aaahhh, hot damn," Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last. "Come on, everybody in the pool," a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela's ankle and tugging. Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his stomach a loud smack, to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds encompassing—anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace,

eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.

Well, that's all reet. He isn't fucking her eyes, is he? He'd rather not have to look at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, that sweet and nigger submissiveness. She'll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under the water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes . . . visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think—more occupied with thrust, impact, penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say he isn't enjoying himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn't find herself too, in some casual athletic way, liking the ride up and down the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though her mind is on a thousand other things now, a frock of Sandra's that she covets, words to various songs, an itch below her left shoul-derblade, a tall English soldier she saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown forearm, shirt rolled to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table. . . .

Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, silhouettes moving by, a gray cloudy evacuation. "What in thee hell," Major Marvy about to come, rising on his elbows distracted, squinting in several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.

"Raid," a voice going past. "MPs," shivers somebody else.

"Gaaahh!" screams Major Marvy, who has just recalled the presence of 2 1/2 ounces of cocaine in his uniform pockets. He rolls, walrus-heavy, Manuela sliding away and off his limpening nervous penis, hardly aroused but enough of a professional to feel the price includes a token puto and sinvergüenza now. Scrambling up out of the water, skidding on the tiles, Duane Marvy, bringing up the rear, emerges into an ice-cold changing-room to find the last of the bathers fled, the closets stone-empty except for one multicolored velvet something or other. "Hey where's my uniform!" stomping on the floor, fists at his sides, face very red. "Oh you motherless bastards," thereupon throwing several bottles and ashtrays, breaking two windows, attacking the wall with an ornate umbrella stand, feeling better for it in his mind. He hears combat boots crashing overhead and in rooms nearby, girls screaming, a phonograph record knocked screeching into silence.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume complete with mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an innocent funseeking pig. As humorless limey voices move closer through the rooms of Putzi's, he rips frantically at silk lining and straw padding to make room for his own fat. And, struggled at last inside, whew, zipped up, mask hiding face, safe, clownish-anonymous, pushes out through bead curtains, then upstairs to the bar, only to run spang into a full division of the red-hatted 'suckers coming his way, all in step, swear to God.

"Here's our elusive swine, gentlemen," pocked face, blunt and ragged mustache, pointing a pistol right at his head, others moving up quickly. A civilian comes pushing through, spade-shape blazing dark on his smooth cheek.

"Right. Dr. Muffage is outside with the ambulance, and we'd like two of your chaps for a moment, sergeant, till we're all secure."

"Certainly, sir." Wrists weak from steam and comfort gathered skillfully behind his back before he can even get mad enough to start yelling at them—cold steel, ratcheting like a phone number being dialed late at night, with no hope in hell of any answer ever. . . .

"Goddamn," he finally gets out, mask muffling his voice, giving it an echo that hurts his ears, "what'n thee hell's wrong with you, boy? Don't you know who I am?"

But oh-oh, waitaminute—if they've found the uniform, Marvy ID and cocaine in the same set of pockets, maybe it isn't such a hot idea to tell them his name just yet. ...

"Leftenant Slothrop, we presume. Come along, now."

He keeps silent. Slothrop, O.K., we'll just wait, see what the score is, square the dope thing later, play dumb, say it must've been planted. Maybe even find him a Jewish lawyer good enough to nail the 'suckers for false arrest.

He's escorted out the door and into the idling ambulance. The bearded driver gives him only a quick over-the-shoulder glance, then lets in the clutch. Before he can think to struggle, the other civilian and the MPs have quickly strapped Marvy at knees and chest to a stretcher.

A pause by an Army lorry to let the MPs off again. Then they continue on. Toward Cuxhaven. Marvy thinks. Nothing but night, moon-softened blackness out the window. Can't tell. . . .

"Sedation now?" Ace of Spades crouches beside him, shining a pocket flashlight over ampoules in his kit, rattling syringes and points.

"Mm. Yes, we're almost there."

"I don't see why they couldn't have given us hospital space for this."

The driver laughs. "Oh yes, I can just see that.'"

Filling the hypodermic slowly, "Well we are under orders ... I mean there's nothing—"

"Dear chap, it's not the most respectable operation."

"Hey," Major Marvy tries to raise his head. "Operation? What's this, boy?"

"Ssh," ripping away part of one pigsuit sleeve, baring Marvy's arm.

"I don't want no needle—" but it's already in the vein and discharging as the other man seeks to calm him. "I mean you really got the wrong fella, you know?"

"Of course, Leftenant."

"Hey, hey, hey. No. Not me, I'm a major." He should be more emphatic about this, more convincing. Maybe it's the 'sucking pig mask in the way. Only he can hear his voice, now given back entirely to himself, flatter, metallic . . . they can't hear him. "Major Duane Marvy." They don't believe him, don't believe his name. Not even his name. . . . Panic strikes him, deeper than the sedative has reached, and he begins to buck truly in terror against the straps, feeling small muscles along his chest stretch into useless twinges of pain, oh God, beginning to scream now with all his might, no words, only cries, as loud as the strap across his chest will let him.

"For pity's sake," the driver sighs. "Can't you shut him up, Spon-toon?"

Spontoon has already ripped the pig mask away, and replaces it now with one of gauze, which he holds on with one hand while dripping ether with the other—whenever the thrashing head comes within range. "Pointsman has taken leave of his senses," he feels obliged to say, irritated out of all patience, "if he calls this a 'calm imperturbable.' "

"All right, we're on the strand now. No one in sight." Muffage drives down toward the water, the sand just solid enough to hold the ambulance, everything very white in the small moon, which is at its zenith . . . perfect ice. ...

"Oh," Marvy moans. "Oh fuck. Oh no. Oh Jesus," the words in long drugged diminuendo, struggles against his bonds weakening as Muffage parks them at last, an olive-drab derelict tiny on this broad beach, the enormous slick stretching away moonward, to the threshold of the north wind.

"Plenty of time," Muffage looking at his watch. "We're catching the C-47 at one. They said they could hold up for a bit." Sighs of comfort before turning to their task.

"That man's connections," Spontoon shaking his head, removing the instruments from their disinfectant solution and laying them on a sterile cloth beside the stretcher. "My, my. Let's hope he never turns to a life of crime, eh?"

"Fuck," groans Major Marvy softly, "oh, fuck me, will you?"

Both men have scrubbed, and donned masks and rubber gloves. Muffage has switched on a dome light which stares down, a soft radiant eye. The two work quickly, in silence, two wartime pros used to field expediency, with only an occasional word from the patient, a whisper, a white pathetic grope in his ether-darkness after the receding point of light that's all he has left of himself.

It's a simple procedure. The crotch of the velvet costume is torn away. Muffage decides to dispense with shaving the scrotum. He douses it first with iodine, then squeezes in turn each testicle against the red-veined and hairy bag, makes the incision quickly and cleanly through skin and surrounding membranes, popping the testicle itself out through the wound and welling blood, pulling it out with the left hand till the cords hard and soft are strung visible under the light. As if they are musical strings he might, a trifle moon-mad, strum here on the empty beach into appropriate music, his hand hesitates: but then, reluctantly bowing to duty, he severs them at the proper distances from the slippery stone, each incision then being bathed in disinfectant, and the two neat slits, side by side, finally sutured up again. The testicles are plopped into a bottle of alcohol.

"Souvenirs for Pointsman," Muffage sighs, stripping off the surgical gloves. "Give that one another shot. It might be better if he sleeps through, and someone back in London explains this to him."

Muffage starts up the motor, backs in a half-circle and slowly heads back up toward the road, the vast sea lying still behind.

Back at Putzi's, Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwölfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees.

And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, Use, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for

from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy. . . .

Upstairs, one Möllner, valise full of his night's treasures—an American major's uniform and papers, and 2 1/2 ounces of cocaine—explains to the shaggy American sailor that Herr von Göll is a very busy man, attending to business in the north, as far as he knows, and has not commissioned him to bring to Cuxhaven any kind of papers, no military discharges, passports—nothing. He's sorry. Perhaps the sailor's friend is mistaken. Perhaps, again, it's only a temporary delay. One appreciates that forgeries take time.

Bodine watches him leave, unaware of what's inside that valise. Albert Krypton has drunken himself unconscious. Shirley comes wandering in, bright-eyed and restless, wearing a black garter belt and stockings. "Hmm," she sez, with a certain look.

"Hmm," sez Seaman Bodine.

"And anyway, it was only ten cents at the Battle of the Bulge."

D D D D D D D

So: he has traced Weissmann's battery from Holland, across the salt marshes and lupine and bones of cows, to find this. Lucky he's not superstitious. He'd be taking it for a prophetic vision. There is of course a perfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read Martin Fierro.

He watches from his temporary command post in a copse of junipers on a low hill. Through the binoculars he sees two men, one white, one black, holding guitars. Townspeople are gathered in a circle, but these Tchitcherine can crop out, leaving in his elliptical field a scene with the same structure as the male-female singing contest in the middle of a flat grassland in Central Asia well over a decade ago— a coming-together of opposites that signaled then his own approach to the Kirghiz Light. What does it signal this time?

Over his head, the sky is streaked and hard as marble. He knows. Weissmann installed the S-Gerät and fired the 00000 somewhere close by. Enzian can't be far behind. It will be here.

But he has to wait. Once that would have been unbearable. But since Major Marvy dropped out of sight, Tchitcherine has been a little more cautious. Marvy was a key man. There is a counterforce in the Zone. Who was the Soviet intelligence man who showed up just be-

fore the fiasco in the clearing? Who tipped the Schwarzkommando off to the raid? Who got rid of Many?

He's been trying hard not to believe too much in the Rocket-cartel. Since his illumination that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover, Tchitcherine has been watching for evidence. Gerhardt von Göll, with his corporate octopus wrapping every last negotiable item in the Zone, must be in it, consciously or otherwise. Tchitcherine last week was on the point of flying back to Moscow. He'd seen Mravenko, one of the VIAM people, briefly in Berlin. They met in the Tiergarten, two officers ostensibly strolling in the sun. Work crews shoveled cold patch into holes in the pavement, banging it flat with shovels. Bicycle riders ratcheted by, skeleton-functional as their machines. Small clusters of civilians and military were back under the trees, sitting on fallen trunks or lorry wheels, stirring through bags and valises, dealing. "You're in trouble," Mravenko said.

He'd been a remittance man too, back in the thirties, and the most maniacal, systemless chess player in Central Asia. His tastes ran low enough to include even blindfold chess, which Russian sensibilities find unutterably gross. Tchitcherine sat down at the board each time more upset than the last, trying to be amiable, to jolly the madman into some kind of rational play. Most often he'd lose. But it was either Mravenko or the Semirechie winter.

"Do you have any idea what's going on?"

Mravenko laughed. "Does anybody? Molotov isn't telling Vìshin-sky. But they know things about you. Remember the Kirghiz Light? Sure you do. Well, they found out about that. I didn't tell them, but they got to somebody."

"It's ancient history. Why bring it up now?"

"You're regarded as 'useful,' " Mravenko said.

They looked at each other, then, for a long time. It was a death sentence. Usefulness out here ends as quickly as a communique. Mravenko was afraid, and not entirely for Tchitcherine, either.

"What will you do, Mravenko?"

"Try not to be very useful. They're not perfect, though." Both men knew this was meant to be comfort, and isn't working too well. "They don't really know what makes you useful. They go on statistics. I don't think you were supposed to survive the War. When you did, they had to look at you more closely."

"Maybe I'll survive this, too." And that was when he got the idea of flying to Moscow. But just about then word came in that Weissmann's

battery couldn't be traced any further than the Heath. And the renewed hope of meeting Enzian stopped him from going—the seductive hope that's leading him further each day from any chance of continuing on past the other side of that meeting. He never supposed he would. The real question is: will they get him before he gets Enzian? All he needs is a little more time ... his only hope is if they're looking for Enzian too, or the S-Gerät, and using him the same way he thinks he's using Slothrop. . . .

The horizon is still clear: has been all day. Cypress-shaped junipers stand in the rust and hazy distances, still as monuments. The first purple flowers are showing on the heather. It is not the busy peace of late summer, but the peace of a burial ground. Among the prehistoric German tribes, that's what this country was: the territory of the dead.

A dozen nationalities, dressed as Argentine estancieros, crowd around the soup-kitchen commissary. El Nato is standing on the saddle of his horse, Gaucho style, looking off into the German pampas. Felipe is kneeling out in the sun, making his noontime devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja, on the eastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine legend from the last century, Maria Antonia Correa followed her lover into that arid land, carrying their newborn child. Herders found her a week later, dead. But the infant had survived, by nursing from her corpse. Rocks near the site of the miracle have since been the objects of yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out. "We're talking frames per century," Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, "per millennium!" Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters seldom do, that history as it's been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and air (who'll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross. . . .

Graciela Imago Portales, dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back from her forehead, wearing a long black riding skirt and black boots, sits shuming cards, stacking herself flushes, full houses, four of a kind, just for her own amusement. The supernumeraries have

brought next to nothing to play with. She knew it would come to this: she'd thought once that by using it only in games, money would lose its reality. Wither away. Has it, or is she playing a game with herself? It seems Beláustegui has been watching her more closely since they got here. She doesn't want to threaten his project. She's been to bed with the solemn engineer a few times (though at first, back in B.A., she'd have sworn to you she couldn't have drunk him even with a silver straw), and she knows he's a gambler too. A good pair, wired front-to-front: she picked it up the first time he touched her. The man knows his odds, the shapes of risk are intimate to him as loved bodies. Each moment has its value, its probable success against other moments in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can't afford to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what's present, dealt him by something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake everything on this anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he'll go on to something else. But he won't hold back. She's glad of that. He's a source of strength. She doesn't know, if the moment came, how strong she'd be. Often at night she'll break through a fine membrane of alcohol and optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use, unsupported, she could ever be.

The sets for the movie-to-be help some. The buildings are real, not a false front in sight. The boliche is stocked with real liquor, the pulpería with real food. The sheep, cattle, horses, and corrals are real. The huts are weatherproof and are being slept in. When von Göll leaves—if he ever comes—nothing will be struck. Any of the extras who want to stay are welcome. Many of them only want to rest up awhile for more DP trains, more fantasies of what home was like before the destruction, and some dream of getting somewhere. They'll move on. But will others come? And what will the military government think of a community like this in the middle of their garrison state?

It isn't the strangest village in the Zone. Squalidozzi has come in out of his wanderings with tales of Palestinian units strayed all the way from Italy, who've settled down farther east and started up Hasidic communes, on the pattern of a century and a half ago. There are onetime company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury, dedicated now to a single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in among the Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter. One village in Mecklenburg has been taken over by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds, each one conditioned to kill on sight any human except the one

who trained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost. The dogs have gone out in packs, ganged cows in the fields and brought the carcasses miles overland, back to the others. They've broken into supply depots Rin-Tin-Tin style and looted K-rations, frozen hamburger, cartons of candy bars. Bodies of neighboring villagers and eager sociologists litter all the approaches to the Hund-Stadt. Nobody can get near it. One expeditionary force came armed with rifles and grenades, but the dogs all scattered in the night, slender as wolves, and no one could bring himself to destroy the houses and shops. No one wanted to occupy the village, either. So they went away. And the dogs came back. If there are lines of power among themselves, loves, loyalties, jealousies, no one knows. Someday G-5 might send in troops. But the dogs may not know of this, may have no German anxieties about encirclement—may be living entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger. There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives—from hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill-the-stranger was born in them. If any have remembered the blows, the electric shocks, the rolled-up newspapers no one read, the boots and prods, their pain is knotted in now with the Stranger, the hated. If there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting out loud any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill that take them over, even the pensive heretics themselves, at any first scent of the Stranger. But in private they point to the remembered image of one human, who has visited only at intervals, but in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate—from whom came nourishment, kind scratches and strokings, games of fetch-the-stick. Where is he now? Why is he different for some and not for others?

There is a possibility, among the dogs, latent so far because it's never been seriously tested, of a crystallizing into sects, each around the image of its trainer. A feasibility study, in fact, is going on even now at staff level in G-5, to see whether original trainers might not be located, and this crystallizing begun. One sect might try to protect its trainer against attacks from others. Given the right combinations and an acceptable trainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselves off than to send in combat troops. The study has been contracted to, of all people, Mr. Pointsman, who is now restricted to one small office at Twelfth House, the rest of the space having been taken over by an agency studying options for nationalizing coal and steel—given him more out of sympathy than anything else. Since the castrating of Major Marvy, Pointsman has been officially in

disgrace. Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of British Plastics, drinking the knight's favorite, Quimporto—a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port—with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion. Ostensibly the meeting is to finalize plans for the Postwar Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat, a source of great corporate fun these days ("Imagine the look on some poor bastard's face when the whole sleeve simply falls out of the shoulder—" "O-or how about mixing in something that will actually dissolve in the rain?"). But Mossmoon really wants to discuss Pointsman: "What shall we do with Pointsman?"

"I found the most darling boots in Portobello Road," pipes Sir Marcus, whom it's always hard to get around to talking business. "They'll look stunning on you. Blood-red cordovan and halfway up your thighs. Your naked thighs."

"We'll give it a go," replies Clive, neutral as can be (though it's a thought, old Scorpia's been so damned bitchy lately). "I could use a spot of relaxation after trying to explain Pointsman away to the Higher Levels."

"Oh, the dog chap. I say, have you ever thought about a Saint Bernard? Big, shaggy darlings."

"On occasion," Clive keeps at it, "but mostly I think about Pointsman."

"Not your sort, darling. Not at all. And he is getting on, poor chap."

"Sir Marcus," last resort, usually the willowy knight demands to be called Angelique, and there seems no other way to get his attention, "if this show prangs, we're going to see a national crisis. I've got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night—"

"Mm, I'd like to jam your male box, Clivey—"

"—and 1922 Committee coming in the windows. Bracken and Beaverbrook go on, you know, it isn't as if the election put them out of a job or something—"

"Dear chap," smiling angelically, "there isn't going to be any crisis. Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out to destroy the blacks, and it's obvious now he won't do the job. What harm can he cause, roaming around Germany? For all we know he's taken ship for South America and all those adorable little mustachios. Let it be for a while. We've got the Army, when the time is right. Slothrop was a good try at a moderate solution, but in the end it's always the Army, isn't it?"

"How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?"

A long disagreeable giggle. "Clive, you're such a little boy. You don't know the Americans. I do. I deal with them. They'll want to see how we do with our lovely black animals—oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, they're just so big, so strong—before they try it on their own, ah, target groups. They may say a good many harsh things if we fail, but there'll be no sanctions."

"Are we going to fail?"

"We're all going to fail," Sir Marcus primping his curls, "but the Operation won't."

Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus's estate, "The Birches," the fore-play is a game about who has the real power, who's had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty "Angelique" are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain. . . .

It wasn't always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat. ... It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who'd volunteered were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. ...