by Tom Robbins
“Airport,” said Switters.
“Where you fly today, sir?” asked the driver.
“Turkey.”
“Ah? Turkey. Long way. Vacation there?”
“Run arms there,” Switters replied matter-of-factly, wondering where that Joe had come from and what the hell Bobby had gotten him into.
part 3
Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there’s always a chance that a folly will.
—Erasmus
The land spread out before him like a pizza. Its topography was flat, its texture rough, its temperature hot, its hue reddish yellow, studded with pepperoni-colored rocks; and, at the moment, it glistened as if drizzled with olive oil. Water was absorbed slowly, very slowly, by the arid hardpan and tended to trickle toward any depression. Were the ground conscious, it would savor this unexpected rainwater, for it would see not another drop of moisture for a good seven months.
Behind him, where he’d separated from the band of Shammar Bedouins, the baked “cheese” bubbled up in low hills that grew progressively steeper until, farther west, they became a full-fledged mountain range with snowy peaks. Eastward, however, the “pizza” was unrelieved. This was the great Syrian desert that stretched into Iraq and Jordan and Israel and all the way across Arabia, and was the threshing floor upon which the human soul had been flailed free from the chaff of its long ripening, only to be ossified and shriveled by a degeneration into dogma of the very ideas that had nurtured it and winnowed it loose, in the endless granary of the desert, from its dark animal husk. Man’s physical self evolved in the sea, and to the rhythms of the oceans our salty blood and waves of breath still moved, but it was here on the burning sands of the Middle East, where Switters now paused to rest, that the spiritual self emerged. There had been nothing to distract it.
Switters was left almost giddy by the realization that not only was he alone, he was also unseen. By anyone or anything. In the Amazon forest, by way of contrast, one never made an undetected move, for no matter how deeply one penetrated, how far removed one was from one’s fellows and milieu, one was always of great interest to a hundred pairs of eyes: slitty eyes, bulbous eyes, multifaceted eyes, eyes bloodshot, chocolatey, or hollow; eyes that saw without being seen; a blinking, squinting, spying paradise of reincarnated Joes. Here in the desert, though, nothing watched but the gods. Small wonder that religion was born hereabouts or that, for better or worse, hereabouts it had thrived.
The coolness that had come with the rain was only a sweet memory now. Switters sweltered but didn’t sweat: perspiration evaporated before it could pump out of his pores. The air that he gasped, due to the exertion of wheeling his chair over stony, pitted, thorn-bushed terrain, was so light and dry that it made but the weakest impression on his respiratory system and failed to inflate his lungs, although it tingled inside him in a faintly delicious way. For all its unsubstantiality, the air seemed as alive as the earth seemed dead. Massaging his wrists, he squinted through nets of rising heat at the oasis, still more than a mile away, and could not help but think how vastly different these bare, harsh, god-connecting surroundings were from the scene off the coast of Turkey, where he had yachted and sipped Dom Pérignon only three weeks prior.
“Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.”
Switters had been expecting that declaration, had been nervously straining to hear it through a fog of jet lag and migraine and coffee-fueled Turk chatter all afternoon, but he hadn’t expected to hear it issued so abruptly, openly, and emphatically by a denim-clad black man striding toward him across lush oriental carpets and speaking English with a Swedish accent.
“Fuck Notre Dame,” Switters responded hopefully. Bobby hadn’t supplied him with a countersign. “Likewise the Los Angeles Lakers and the New—”
“Steady, man,” cautioned the contact. “You be speaking ill of the New York Yankees, you and me gonna have a problem. Ja, man, ya betcha.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.” With just a hint of fierceness in his grin, Switters had looked the man over. He was trim enough for someone of his age—late forties would be a good guess—but his shoulders were stooped, and his hands, from which long, sensitive fingers dangled like licorice whips, seemed uncallused and spongy. “However . . .”
“Ain’t no however to it. You got luggage upstairs? Good. Tell the bellman to bring it to the yacht basin. And follow me.” He paused. “I’d offer to push your chair, but if you can’t get out of this lobby on your own, you sure as hell not be getting out of where Mr. Poe be sending you.” For the first time, he smiled. “Go Yankees,” he said softly. “Go Knicks. And by the way, man, nice suit.”
The contact was Skeeter Washington, chief lieutenant to the legendary Audubon Poe and, in certain circles, a minor legend, himself. The son of a fairly well-known Harlem jazz couple (mother a singer, father played bass), Louis Mosquito Washington, about to be drafted, had enlisted in the army in 1969 after a recruiting sergeant assured him he’d be assigned to a military band. Instead, he’d been put in the infantry and shipped to Vietnam. He’d been wounded and upon recovery, ordered to return to battle once he’d enjoyed a week’s R and R in Tokyo. At that point he deserted, threw himself upon the mercy of a group of radical Japanese pacifists, and a month or so later turned up in Sweden, where he resided for a quarter century, earning a living and a reputation as a bebop pianist. A couple of years back, still smoldering with resentment over the horrors wrought in Southeast Asia by America’s savage wrong-headedness and his forced participation therein, he’d sought out Audubon Poe and volunteered his services—although neither Skeeter nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what Poe was up to, aside from providing the international news media with a steady source of information damaging to the “defense” industry and the CIA. It would have been unlikely, however, that the services of a jazz piano player would have been refused by a man born and reared in New Orleans.
“Uh, I should inform you,” Switters had said as they waited on the dock for the hotel porter to arrive with his bags, “that the company seems aware of this.”
“This?”
“My coming here. To meet with Poe.”
“Aw, doesn’t matter.”
“But isn’t there a price on his head?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Ol’ Poe, he put out the story himself years ago that he was on a CIA hit list. After that, the government didn’t dare to smack him. Not in no obvious, violent way, nohow. Could always try and slip him a heart attack pill or something, I guess. But Anna, she be sneaking and tasting his food before he eat a bite of it.”
“Who is Anna?”
“His fifteen-year-old daughter.”
Switters’s Adam’s apple flopped in his throat like an eel in a creel. Good God! he thought. Why didn’t Bobby warn me?
Antalya’s marina, one of the most beautiful on the Mediterranean, was built on the site of an ancient Roman harbor next to a restored Ottoman village. From its main dock, in the shadow of crumbling ruins, a motor launch had carried Washington and Switters out to a gleaming white ninety-foot yacht, The Banality of Evil, anchored about a half-mile offshore. The boat, flaring in the distance like a millionaire’s teeth, belonged to Sol Glissant, a Beirut-based French national who had made a chunk of his fortune rebuilding Lebanon’s swimming pools after the war and was known as the Pool Pasha of the Levant. For reasons of his own, Glissant had put The Banality of Evil at the disposal of Audubon Poe, who behaved as if it were his, which for all practical purposes it was.
Switters had been shown to a stateroom, given time to “freshen up” (code for perform maintenance), and then summoned on deck, where he was handed a champagne glass as large as a fishbowl by none other than Poe, himself. Like Washington, Poe was dressed all in denim, but his fine, sharp, birdlike features, his slicked-back silver hair, his effluvium of cologne that made Switters’s Jungle Desire, in comparison, smell as cheap as its name,
and the irony in his civil, confident quiver of a smile, produced an air of aristocracy that seemed to transform the egalitarian blue cotton into resort wear designed by a Riviera comte.
“So, you’re Switters,” Poe said, in an accent that managed to be both southern and refined. “The last I heard of you, you were hanging upside down over Baghdad.”
Sloshing his champagne, Switters demurred. “I believe you may have me confused with my friend Case. While I’ve passed many a merry hour in fair Iraq, my peripateticism there has been limited to its terrestrial surfaces.”
Poe regarded him curiously. “I see. Do please forgive my social blunder. But you are, are you not, the gentleman who knows how to refer to a lady’s treasure in seventy-five different languages?”
“Seventy-one.” Good God, he thought, is this to be my only claim to fame? The lone thing by which men remember me? My other achievements—academic, athletic, and political—eclipsed by this frothy exercise in linguistic trivia? They’ll probably engrave it on my tombstone, should I live long enough to get one.
“Myself, I dig the Swedish for it,” put in Skeeter Washington.
“Oh, yes,” said Switters. “Slida. One of my favorites. For its onomatopoeia.”
When Skeeter looked puzzled, Poe had said, “You must excuse Mr. Washington. He’s been a long time away from English. Why, I had to teach him to speak Ebonics, and as you may have noted, he’s not very fluent in it. Says things like ‘Ja, ya betcha, motherfucker.’ “ Laughing, he turned to his associate. “Skeet, onomatopoeia refers to a word that sounds like the thing it represents.”
“Slida,” said Switters, nodding. “And the Japanese for the organ in question is almost as onomatopoeic: chitsu.”
“Yeah, man, that ain’t bad, either.”
“Preferable, certainly, to the Japanese for the male equivalent: chimpo. Makes it sound like a trained monkey in a traveling circus.”
“Don’t know about yours,” said Skeeter, “but my dick behave like a trained monkey in a traveling circus most of the time.”
“Let’s change the subject, shall we, gentlemen?” said Poe. “Anna will be coming on deck momentarily with an hors d’oeuvre or two.”
The men hadn’t gotten down to business right away. In fact, nearly three days passed before Switters was taken belowdecks into the boat’s storeroom and shown the contraband that Poe and Washington were running. In the meantime, they sailed Turkey’s famed Turquoise Coast, slicing gracefully through waters the color of Suzy’s eyes, from whose pellucid depths fairyland rock formations and playful dolphins rose. They sipped Sol Glissant’s champagne, dined on fresh fish poached in grape leaves and served with capered sauces, and gazed at sunsets while Skeeter played on the salon piano, at Switters’s tipsy request, amazing bebop renditions of Broadway show tunes. Occasionally they talked shop, wondering among themselves, for example, at the arrogance and uncharacteristic stupidity of Israel’s Mossad in its recent bungled attempt to smack a revered Hammas leader inside Jordan.
“Goes to show you,” remarked Poe, “that cowboys are cowboys, whether Jewish or—”
“Goyboys,” suggested Switters.
“Cowgoys,” offered Washington.
“More champagne, Daddy?” asked young Anna.
Anna proved to be a slender sylph, with a galactically freckled, waiflike face, brown hair braided in pendulous pigtails, and breasts scarcely larger than her fists. She was innocently flirty, and Switters, when not drinking with the men, divided his time between going to absurd lengths to avoid ever being left alone with her and spying on her voraciously as she sunbathed, topless, on the afterdeck.
Because he was on water, Switters assumed that the prohibitive taboo was not in effect and that he was free to move about the yacht on foot. However, since he didn’t want to have to explain his situation to his hosts, he remained in the wheelchair. To honor the fates, he remained in the wheelchair even when no one was looking. He was heartened, nevertheless, for it occurred to him that should he fail to get the curse lifted, should worse come to worst, he possibly could spend the rest of his life aboard ship, be it a ship on the order of The Banality of Evil or one like Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters. The latter type, he had to admit, was much more feasible, although it provided scant more space for walking about than had his double bed in Seattle.
In any event, in the early afternoon of their third day at sea, Poe had called him to the railing and pointed a manicured nail at a hazy, macaroon-colored horizon. “Hatay,” he said. “On the Syrian border. A dismal, camel-gnawed area whose only distinction aside from it being the site of Alexander’s victory over the Persians is that it was upon its uninviting beach that Jonah was supposed to have been coughed up by the whale. Nothing symbolic is intended, I assure you, but I regret to report that it’s the very spot where we are coughing you up. Tonight.”
“Hatay? Turkey? What’s? . . .”
“How you get from Hatay into northern Iraq is your affair. Frankly, considering your physical liability, I have my doubts that you can manage it at all. People whom I trust, however, assure me you have excellent qualifications: the languages, the experience, the courage, the cunning. They couldn’t vouch, of course, for your desire.”
“Well, I’m plainly uninformed as to the nature of the mission, but I can tell you that I don’t go to dances to sit on the sidelines nibbling fruitcake. I’m here to take the prom queen home. Moreover, I happen to be embarrassingly bereft of hard currency, and Mr. Plastic is pretending he doesn’t know me. This gig has got to be preferable to selling used electrolysis equipment over the phone.”
Again, Poe studied him curiously. Then he said, “All right. Come with me.”
The silver-haired précieux (he could be foppish even in jeans) had unlocked the storeroom, shoved aside cases of champagne, crates of capers, and restaurant-sized jars of olives and pickled artichokes, to reveal a ton or more of . . . well, there were land-mine detectors and various devices for defusing or detonating mines, there were camouflage paints, gas masks, fire extinguishers, transmitters for jamming radio and radar signals, flares, bulletproof shields, water-purification kits, and a refrigerator stocked with serums for inoculation against anthrax, sarin, and other biological and chemical weapons.
“My goodness,” said Switters, looking over the supplies. “You’re a regular little elf.”
Poe winced. “I’ve been called worse. ‘Traitor,’ for example. By the President of the United States and the chairmen of the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress.”
“Not to mention Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and swarms of racketeering locusts in the pulpits and the press. Congratulations. One man’s treason is another man’s valor. At Berkeley, where I was in grad school at the time your book was published, you were celebrated and revered. As a matter of fact, though I have to admit I only read the reviews and not the tome itself, it was your book that inspired me to sign on with the company.”
If Poe had looked at him with curiosity before, those looks were nothing compared to the one he gave Switters now. “Pardon me? You joined the CIA because of a book that exposed it as an amoral, imperialist, bungling gang of money-wasters operating outside of and above the law?” He was starting to suspect that this man he’d been sent was crippled in mind as well as body.
“Why, yes. You made it irresistible. Because no other room in the burning house promised a more interesting view? Because every stand-up comic longs to play Hamlet? Because a big back has a big front? Because I believed my syrup of wahoo could sweeten its sulfur?” Switters shrugged. “It’s a trifle hard to explain.”
“Evidently.” Poe’s expression betrayed neither satisfaction nor confidence, and he enjoyed a long skeptical moment before shrugging, himself, and returning to the cache of—counteractives. “Those gas masks? There’re approximately two thousand of them. Not fractionally enough, but they’ll help. Your job is to get them to the Kurds near Dahuk.”
“Which Kurds? KDP or PUK?”
“Should such a choice become necessary, I’d favor PUK for the simple reason that the KDP is sponsored by the Iraqi government and therefore is in less danger of being gassed by it. Like all political parties everywhere, however, they’re both consumed with power and self-interest, so my preference is that you try to get the masks into the hands of those unarmed civilians whom both parties claim to represent.”
In a parodying, theatrical gesture, Switters pounded his right fist against his left breast and exclaimed, “So it shall be written, so it shall be done!”
They had an early supper on deck, a leisurely meal in which Switters was restricted to a single glass of champagne. This was due to the fact that he would be needing his wits about him, but also because the last time he’d had his fill of the bubbly, he’d gazed into Anna’s face and told her that her eyes were like a morning mist on the fur of a squirrel. Or something along those lines.
The sun was low but the air was still balmy, and the sea was the shade of blue that black could have been if it hadn’t stepped over the line. After plotting the mission as best they could—it was a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants operation—they entered into a conversation about jazz, cinema, and literature, a dialogue that hit a snag when Switters began expounding upon “the mythological and historical echoes” that resonated in the most overtly skimble-skamble phrases of Finnegans Wake. “Nigh him wigworms and nigh him tittlies and nigh him cheekadeekchimple,” for example.
After that, Audubon Poe talked of his boyhood among the gentry of New Orleans and how, to further his ambition to become a professional chess player, he had taught himself Russian at fourteen, thinking it might give him some advantage if ever pitted against the grand masters, who all seemed to hail from Mother Russia. At seventeen he became the youngest spy in the history of the CIA, which recruited him to dig for Cold War information at international chess tournaments, and although he blew his cover by having a love affair with the wife of one of the Soviet champions, he later became a full-time operations officer. In that capacity he served the company loyally for years, until he found himself gradually disillusioned and sickened by Vietnam, the secret war against Cuba, the gratuitous lying to the American public, the support of brutal dictatorships, the coziness with the Mafia, and, in general, the overly indulgent interpretation of the “such other functions and duties” clause in the agency’s charter. Poe didn’t blame company cowboys as much as he blamed the Presidents who used them, often illegally, as instruments of a foreign policy whose main objective was to enrich the defense industry and get them, the Presidents, reelected. Nevertheless, his exposé had badly dented the agency’s fenders—and forced him into a precarious exile.