Penguin books

"I don't know what time it is," Säure Bummer gazing around. "Weren't we supposed to be at the Chicago Bar? Or was that last night?"

"I forget," Trudi giggles.

"Listen, Kerl, I really have to talk to that American."

"Dear Emil," Trudi whispers, "don't worry. He'll be at the Chicago."

They decide on an intricate system of disguise. Säure gives Slothrop his jacket. Trudi wears the green cape. Magda puts on Slothrop's boots, and he goes in his socks, carrying her own tiny shoes in his pockets. They spend some time gathering plausible items, kindling and greens, to fill the helmet with, and Säure carries that. Magda and Trudi help stuff Slothrop into the buckskin pants, both girls down on pretty knees, hands caressing his legs and ass. Like the ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral, there is none in these trousers here, and Slothrop's hardon, enlarging, aches like thunder.

"Fine for you folks." The girls are laughing. Grandiose Slothrop limps along after everybody, a network of clear interweaving ripples now like rain all through his vision, hands turning to stone, out of the Tiergarten, past shellstruck lime and chestnut trees, into the streets, or what is serving for them. Patrols of all nations keep coming by, and this mindless quartet have to hit the dirt often, trying not to laugh too much. Slothrop's sox are sodden with dew. Tanks manoeuvre in the street, chewing parallel ridges of asphalt and stonedust. Trolls and dryads play in the open spaces. They were blasted back in May out of bridges, out of trees into liberation, and are now long citified. "Oh, that drip," say the subdeb trolls about those who are not as hep, "he just isn't out-of-the-tree about anything.'" Mutilated statues lie under mineral sedation: frock-coated marble torsos of bureaucrats fallen pale in the gutters. Yes, hmm, here we are in the heart of downtown Berlin, really, uh, a little, Jesus Christ what's that—

"Better watch it," advises Säure, "it's kind of rubbery through here."

"What is that?"

Well, what it is—is? what's "is"?—is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taking a shit, right in the street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by—"Hey!" Slothrop wants to shout, "hey lookit that giant ape! or whatever it is. You guys? Hey . . ." But he doesn't, luckily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed in May.

Berlin proves to be full of these tricks. There's a big chromo of Stalin that Slothrop could swear is a girl he used to date at Harvard, the mustache and hair only incidental as makeup, damn if that isn't what's her name . . . but before he can quite hear the gibbering score of little voices—hurry, hurry, get it in place, he's almost around the corner—here, laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves of bread dough left to rise under clean white cloths—boy, is everybody hungry: the same thought hits them all at once, wow! Raw dough! loaves of bread for that monster back there . . . oh, no that's right, that was a building, the Reichstag, so these aren't bread ... by now it's clear that they're human bodies, dug from beneath today's rubble, each inside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an optical mistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we'll be feeding on by Xmas?

What the notorious Femina is to cigarette-jobbing circles in Berlin, the Chicago is to dopers. But while dealing at the Femina usually gets under way around noon, the Chicago here only starts jiving after the 10:00 curfew. Slothrop, Säure, Trudi and Magda come in a back entrance, out of a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only here and there, like the open country. Inside, M.O.s and corpsmen run hither and thither clutching bottles of fluffy white crystalline substances, small pink pills, clear ampoules the size of pureys. Occupation and Reichsmarks ruffle and flap across the room. Some dealers are all chemical enthusiasm, others all business. Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate the walls. Lights and arguing are kept low, should the military police happen by.

On a wire-backed chair, blunt hair hands picking quietly at a gui-

tar, sits an American sailor with an orangutan look to him. In 3/4 time and shit-kicking style, he is singing:

the doper's dream

Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in

To a bubblin' hookah so high,

When all of a sudden some Arab jinni

Jump up just a-winkin' his eye.

"I'm here to obey all your wishes," he told me,

As for words I was trying to grope.

"Good buddy," I cried, "you could surely oblige me

By turnin' me on to some dope!"

With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,

And we flew down the sky in a flash,

And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me

Was a whole solid mountain of hash!

All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,

Whur the Romilar River flowed by,

To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,

So pretty that I wanted to cry.

All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,

Morning glories woven into their hair,

Bringin'great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,

All their dope they were eager to share.

Well we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',

In the flowering Panama Red,

Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,

And those brownies so kind to your head.

Now I could've passed that good time forever,

And I really was fixing to stay,

But you know that

jinni turned out, t'be a narco man, And he busted me right whur I lay. And he took me back, to this cold, cold world, 'N' now m' prison's whurever I be ... And I dream of the days back in Doperland And I wonder, will I ever go free?

The singer is Seaman Bodine, of the U.S. destroyer John E. Badass, and he's the contact Säure is here to see. The Badass is docked in Cux-haven and Bodine is semi-AWOL, having hit Berlin night before last

for the first time since the early weeks of American occupation. "Things are so tight, man," he's groaning, "Potsdam, I couldn't believe it over there. Remember how the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin, íiir coats, everything in the world. Nobody gave a shit, right? You ought to see it now. Russian security all over the place. Big mean customers. You couldn't get near it."

"Isn't there supposed to be something going on over there?" sez Slothrop. He's heard scuttlebutt. "A conference or some shit?"

"They're deciding how to cut up Germany," sez Säure. "All the Powers. They should call in the Germans, Kerl, we've been doing that for centuries."

"You couldn't get a gnat in there now, man," Seaman Bodine shaking his head, dexterously rolling a reefer one-handed on a cigarette paper he has first torn, with straightfaced bravura, in half.

"Ah," smiles Säure, flinging an arm over Slothrop, "but what if Rocketman can?"

Bodine looks over, skeptical. "That's Rocketman?"

"More or less," sez Slothrop, "but I'm not sure I want to go into that Potsdam, right now. ..."

"If you only knew!" cries Bodine. "Listen, Ace, right this minute, hardly 15 miles away, there is six kilos! of pure, top-grade Nepalese hashish! Scored it from my buddy in the CBI, government seals 'n' everything, buried it myself back in May, so safe nobody'll ever find it without a map. All you got to do is fly over there or whatever it is you do, just go in and get it."

"That's all."

"A kilo for you," offers Säure.

"They can cremate it with me. All those Russians can stand around the furnace and get loaded."

"Perhaps," the most decadent young woman Slothrop has ever seen in his life, wearing fluorescent indigo eye-shadow and a black leather snood, comes slithering past, "the pretty American is not a devotee of the Green Hershey Bar, mm? ha-ha-ha. ..."

"A million marks," Säure sighs.

"Where are you going to get—"

Holding up an elfin finger, leaning close, "I print it."

Sure enough, he does. They all troop out of the Chicago, half a mile down through rubble piles, over pathways twisting invisible in the dark to all but Säure, down at last into a houseless cellar with filing cabinets, a bed, an oil-lamp, a printing-press. Magda cuddles close to

Slothrop, her hands dancing over his erection. Trudi has formed an inexplicable attachment to Bodine. Säure begins to crank his clattering wheel, and sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder, thousands on thousands. "All authentic plates and paper, too. The only detail missing is a slight ripple along the margins. There was a special stamp-press nobody managed to loot."

"Uh," Slothrop sez.

"Aw, come on," sez Bodine. "Rocketman, jeepers. You don't want to do nothing no more."

They help jog and square the sheets while Säure chops them up with a long glittering cutter blade. Holding out a fat roll of 100s, "You could be back tomorrow. No job is too tough for Rocketman."

A day or two later, it will occur to Slothrop that what he should have said at that point was, "But I wasn't Rocketman, until just a couple hours ago." But right now he is beguiled at the prospect of 2.2 pounds of hashish and a million nearly-real marks. Nothing to walk away from, or fly or whatever it is, right? So he takes a couple thousand in front and spends the rest of the night with round and moaning Magda on Säure's bed, while Trudi and Bodine lark in the bathtub, and Säure slips back on some other mission, out into the three-o'clock waste that presses, oceanic, against their buoyed inner space. . . .

DDDDDDD

Säure to and fro, bloodshot and nagging, with a wreathing pot of tea. Slothrop's alone in bed. The Rocketman costume waits on a table, along with Seaman Bodine's treasure map—oh. Oh, boy. Is Slothrop really going to have to go through with this?

Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning. Trucks and jeeps sputter in the distances. Slothrop sits drinking tea and trying to scrape dried sperm off of his trousers while Säure explains the layout. The package is stashed under an ornamental bush outside a villa at 2 Kaiserstrasse, in Neubabelsberg, the old movie capital of Germany. That's across the Havel from Potsdam. It seems prudent to stay off the Avus Autobahn. "Try to get past the checkpoint just after Zehlendorf instead. Come up on Neubabelsberg by canal."

"How come?"

"No civilians allowed on VIP Road—here, this one, that runs on across the river to Potsdam."

"Come on. I'll need a boat, then." :•.

"Ha! You expect improvisation from a German? No, no, that's— that's Rocketman's problem!ha-ha!"

"Unnhh." Seems the villa fronts on the Griebnitz See. "Why don't I hit it from that side?"

"You'll have to go under a couple of bridges first, if you do. Heavily guarded. Plunging fire. Maybe—maybe even mortars. It gets very narrow opposite Potsdam. You won't have a chance." Oh, German humor's a fine way to start the morning. Säure hands Slothrop an AGO card, a trip ticket, and a pass printed in English and Russian. "The man who forged these has been in and out of Potsdam on them a dozen times since the Conference began. That's how much faith he has in them. The bilingual pass is special, just for the Conference. But you mustn't spend time gawking like a tourist, asking celebrities for autographs—"

"Well say look Emil, if you've got one of these and they're so good, why don't you go?"

"It's not my specialty. I stick to dealing. Just an old bottle of acid— and even that's make-believe. Buccaneering is for Rocketmen."

"Bodine, then."

"He's already on his way back to Cuxhaven. Won't he be upset, when he comes back next week, only to find that Rocketman, of all people, has shown the white feather."

"Oh." Shit. Slothrop stares awhile at that map, then tries to memorize it. He puts on his boots, groaning. He bundles his helmet in that cape, and the two, Conner and connee, set out through the American sector.

Mare's-tails are out seething across the blue sky, but down here the Berliner Luft hangs still, with the odor of death inescapable. Thousands of corpses fallen back in the spring still lie underneath these mountains of debris, yellow mountains, red and yellow and pale.

Where's the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels and that National Geographic? Parabolas weren't all that New German Architecture went in for—there were the spaces—the necropolism of blank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human harvests rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or health, then there may have been, even here, some continuity of sacrament, through the terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric capital before the destruction—

the fallow and long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete . . . except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms open to the sky, wall-less rooms pitched out over the sea of ruins in prows, in crow's-nests. . . . Old men with their tins searching the ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. Advertisements for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, once classified, folded bürgerlich inside newspapers to be read at one's ease in the lacquered and graceful parlors are now stuck with Hitler-head stamps of blue, orange, and yellow, out in the wind, when the wind comes, stuck to trees, door-frames, planking, pieces of wall—white and fading scraps, writing spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unseen, thousands unread or blown away. At the Wìnterhilfe one-course Sundays you sat outside at long tables under the swastika-draped winter trees, but outside has been brought inside and that kind of Sunday lasts all week long. Winter is coming again. All Berlin spends the daylight trying to make believe it isn't. Scarred trees are back in leaf, baby birds hatched and learning to fly, but winter's here behind the look of summer—Earth has turned over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed. . . .

Like the walls of the Chicago Bar brought outside, giant photographs are posted out in the Friedrichstrasse—faces higher than a man. Slothrop recognizes Churchill and Stalin all right, but isn't sure about the other one. "Emil, who's that guy in the glasses?"

"The American president. Mister Truman."

"Quit fooling. Truman is vice-president. Roosevelt is president."

Säure raises an eyebrow. "Roosevelt died back in the spring. Just before the surrender."

They get tangled in a bread queue. Women in worn plush coats, little kids holding on to frayed hems, men in caps and dark double-breasted suits, unshaven old faces, foreheads white as a nurse's leg. . . . Somebody tries to grab Slothrop's cape, and there's brief tugging match.

"I'm sorry," Säure offers, when they're clear again.

"Why didn't anybody tell me?" Slothrop was going into high school when FDR was starting out in the White House. Broderick

Slothrop professed to hate the man, but young Tyrone thought he was brave, with that polio and all. Liked his voice on the radio. Almost saw him once too, in Pittsfield, but Lloyd Nipple, the fattest kid in Minge-borough, was standing in the way, and all Slothrop got to see was a couple wheels and the feet of some guys in suits on a running-board. Hoover he'd heard of, dimly—something to do with shack towns or vacuum cleaners—but Roosevelt was his president, the only one he'd known. It seemed he'd just keep getting elected, term after term, forever. But somebody had decided to change that. So he was put to sleep, Slothrop's president, quiet and neat, while the kid who once imaged his face on Lloyd's t-shirted shoulderblades was jiving on the Riviera, or in Switzerland someplace, only half aware of being extinguished himself. . . .

"They said it was a stroke," Säure sez. His voice is arriving from some quite peculiar direction, let us say from directly underneath, as the wide necropolis begins now to draw inward, to neck down and stretch out into a Corridor, one known to Slothrop though not by name, a deformation of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a hereditary disease. A band of doctors in white masks that cover everything but eyes, bleak and grown-up eyes, move in step down the passage toward where Roosevelt is lying. They carry shiny black kits. Metal rings inside the black leather, rings as if to speak, as if a ventriloquist were playing a trick, help-let-me-out-of-here. . . . Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed beautifully the sense of Death's wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a being They would dismantle. . . .

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can't be real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly detailed—They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant atomizer. . . .

(By Säure's black-market watch, it's nearly noon. From 11 to 12 in the morning is the Evil Hour, when the white woman with the ring of keys comes out of her mountain and may appear to you. Be careful,

then. If you can't free her from a spell she never specifies, you'll be punished. She is the beautiful maiden offering the Wonderflower, and the ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that dream and said nothing. The Hour is hers.)

Black P-38s fly racketing in formation, in moving openwork against the pale sky. Slothrop and Säure find a cafe on the sidewalk, drink watered pink wine, eat bread and some cheese. That crafty old doper breaks out a "stick" of "tea" and they sit in the sun handing it back and forth, offering the waiter a hit, who can tell? that's how you have to smoke armies too, these days. Jeeps, personnel carriers, and bicycles go streaming by. Girls in fresh summer frocks, orange and green as fruit ices, drift in to sit at tables, smiling, smiling, checking the area continuously for early business.

Somehow Säure has got Slothrop to talking about the Rocket. Not at all Säure's specialty, of course, though he's been keeping an ear tuned. If it's wanted, then it has a price. "I could never see the fascination. We kept hearing so much about it on the radio. It was our Captain Midnight Show. But we grew disillusioned. Wanting to believe, but nothing we saw giving us that much faith. Less and less toward the end. All I know is it brought disaster down on the cocaine market, Kerl."

"How's that?"

"Something in that rocket needed potassium permanganate, right?"

"Turbopump."

"Well, without that Purpurstoff you can't deal cocaine honestly. Forget honesty, there just wasn't any reality. Last winter you couldn't find a cc of permanganate in the whole fucking Reich, Kerl. Oh you should've seen the burning that was going on. Friends, understand. But what friend hasn't wanted to—in terms you can recognize—push a pie in your face? eh?"

"Thank you." Wait a minute. Is he talking about us? Is he getting ready to—

"So," having continued, "there crept over Berlin a gigantic Laurel and Hardy film, silent, silent . . . because of the permanganate shortage. I don't know what other economies may have been affected by the A4. This was not just pie-throwing, not just anarchy on a market, this was chemical irresponsibility! Clay, talcum, cement, even, it got this perverse, flour! Powdered milk, diverted from the stomachs of little sucklings! Look-alikes that were worth even more than cocaine—but the idea was that someone should get a sudden noseful of milk, haha-

hahah!" breaking up here for a minute, "and that was worth the loss! Without the permanganate there was no way to tell anything for sure. A little novocain to numb the tongue, something bitter for the taste, and you could be making enormous profits off of sodium bicarbonate. Permanganate is the touchstone. Under a microscope, you drop some on the substance in question, which dissolves—then you watch how it comes out of solution, how it recrystallizes: the cocaine will appear first, at the edges, then the vegetable cut, the procaine, the lactose at other well-known positions—a purple target, with the outer ring worth the most, and the bull's-eye worth nothing. An anti-target. Certainly not the A4's idea of one, eh, Rocketman. That machinery of yours was not exactly the doper's friend. What do you want it for? Will your country use it against Russia?"

"I don't want it. What do you mean, 'my country'?"

"I'm sorry. I only meant that it looks like the Russians want it badly enough. I've had connections all over the city taken away. Interrogated. None of them know any more about rockets than I do. But Tchitcherine thinks we do."

"Oboy. Him again?"

"Yes he's in Potsdam right now. Supposed to be. Set up a headquarters in one of the old film studios."

"Swell news, Emil. With my luck ..."

"You don't look too good, Rocketman."

"Think that's horrible? Try this!" and Slothrop proceeds to ask if Säure has heard anything about the Schwarzgerät.

Säure does not exactly scream Aiyee! and run off down the street or

anything, but squeeeak goes a certain valve all right, and something is routed another way. "I'll tell you what," nodding and shifting in his seat, "you talk to der Springer. Ja, you two would get on fine. I am only a retired cat burglar, looking to spend my last several decades as the Sublime Rossini did his: comfortable. Just don't mention me at all, O.K., Joe?"

"Well, who is that der Springer, and where do I find him, Emil?"

"He is the knight who leaps perpetually—"

"Wow."

"—across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is. Just as Rocketman flies over obstacles today." He laughs nastily. "A fine pair. How do I know where he is? He could be anyplace. He is everywhere."

"Zorro? The Green Hornet?"

"Last I heard, a week or two ago, he was up north on the Hanseatic run. You will meet. Don't worry." Abruptly Säure stands up to go,

shaking hands, slipping Rocketman another reefer for later, or for luck. "I have medical officers to see. The happiness of a thousand customers is on your shoulders, young man. Meet me at my place. Cluck."