"Wall-to-wall spooks," Boog said. "Only place in town where it’s safe to talk. See that Chinaman? Best spy in town."
"Who does he spy for?" I asked.
"The Israelis," Boog said. The line was moving virtually at a trot.
"Hello, Freddy," Boog said, when we got to the counter. "Hit us with a little of that goat."
"Booger-man," Freddy said, in an accent that might have been Princetonian. His eyes scanned me from head to foot, like a radar beam. Then he handed us our barbecue, which in fact was goat.
"Yeah, all these spooks eat goat," Boog said. "They get used to it while they're overseas in the Third World, performing covert acts."
"What's Freddy's last name?"
"Fu," Boog said.
"There was a woman at the auction named Mrs. Lump," I said. "Ever heard of her?"
"Bessie Lump," Boog said. "Sure. Only she ain't the one you're saving that icon for. Too old for you.
"These booths must have been meant for midgets to fuck in," he commented, trying to arrange a napkin so as to protect his orange tie. Then he nodded at the eagle-eyed Freddy Fu and a moment later a Pakistani teenager appeared with two bottles of Tasmanian beer.
"I allus drink Tasmanian beer when I eat goat," Boog explained.
"Bessie Lump is Cyrus Folmsbee's girl friend," he added, swabbing up a puddle of sauce with a bit of goat. "Cyrus happens to be the richest man between Upperville, Virginia, and Riyadh, Sau-ou-dee Arabia. His family started up the Smithsonian to begin with. The Folmsbees own just about everythang in America that's worth havin' except Winkler County."
"How can he own the Smithsonian?" I asked.
"Well, he don't, exactly," Boog said. "But ownership might just be a state of mind. I thank it's safe to say Cyrus has the mind of an owner. I thank he thanks his family just kind of lent it to the nation."
"What does Mrs. Lump have to do with it?" I asked.
The second I said it Boog kicked me in the shins. I looked up, he nodded at the carry-out line, and there was Bessie Lump herself, quietly waiting to get some barbecued goat.
Chapter XII
The sight of her almost caused me to drip barbecue sauce on my doeskin jacket. She was just a dumpy little woman in an old blue coat, but the fact that she had somehow turned up in a CL barbecue joint in Falls Church, Virginia, struck me as unnerving.
Boog immediately popped out of the booth and went over to talk to her. Bessie Lump didn't greet him warmly, but on the other hand she didn't seem to mind that he had come over to talk to her. She shuffled up the line and received a modest brown bag, presumably full of barbecued goat.
To my surprise, Boog brought her over and introduced us. "Isn't he tall?" she said, when I stood up. Her eyes were disconcertingly colorless, like Levis that have been washed too many times.
"She followed me," I said, when she was gone.
Boog just laughed. "She never follert you," he said. "Old Cyrus used to run the CIA, back when it was a respectable organization. He picked up a taste for goat, that's all."
"She doesn't seem very friendly," I said, not reassured.
"Well, the Folmsbees ain't exactly just folks," Boog said. "The Shiptons neither. Bessie's a Shipton."
"What's a Shipton?" I asked.
Boog looked amused. "Yore ignorance is so appalling I can't thank where to start," he said, between munchings. "Bessie married beneath her. Husband's name is Northrup
Lump. Of course, she would have had to marry beneath her, if she married at all, since the Shiptons got here back in the days of the primordial slime. The Shiptons even beat the Folmsbees, but the Folmsbees hung onto their money and the Shiptons didn't. The Shiptons was shabby genteel."
That I could follow. The shabby genteel are familiar ground to me. I had bought many a second-rate heirloom from meek, shabby genteel ladies in decorous apartments about the land. I could always get the heirlooms for reasonable prices, since the meek ladies could seldom bring themselves to discuss money at all. They would take whatever I offered, and in turn give me tea. If they had lives, it was not apparent.
"Anyway," Boog went on, "having married a Lump the only way Bessie could redeem herself was by shacking up with a Folmsbee. It's been going on for forty years."
"What happened to Mr. Lump?" I asked.
"Why nothin'," Boog said. "I thank he spends his time playin' checkers with the butler."
"It's hard to believe the Smithsonian is really for sale," I said.
"You got the Waxahachie outlook," Boog said. "Thank of it. Seventeen museums in the Smithsonian, not to mention all them warehouses they got strung around in places like Anacostia and Silver Spring. For fifty, sixty years we been sucking stuff out of every country in the world and cramming it into warehouses an' museums—seventy-eight million items, they say.
"Hail, we got more African masks than you could find in Africa, and more Persian doodads than the pore old Shah."
"But that stuff is worth billions and billions," I said. "Who's gonna buy it?"
"That's the fun part," Boog said. "Emergent nations is gonna buy it. What them pore bastards in the Third World don't realize yet is that we bought up most of their heritage years ago, before they even started thanking about emerging. We got it right here. Now, what's the first thang an emergent nation needs when it emerges?"
"Schools and hospitals?" I ventured. "Tractors. Freeways."
Boog shook his head. "What they need is fancy new museums, filt with the native crafts that are their heritage," he said. "Something to remind them of how it was before they shook off their colonial shackles."
"Oh," I said.
Boog grinned. "Cy's got a little brother named Peck, short for Peckham. The Folmsbees kind of look down on Peck because he actually went in business. What he does is build museums. Right this minute he's off building national museums in twenty or thirty little new countries. Naturally the countries ain't got nothing to put in the new museums, since we carted off all their goodies long ago."
"So we'll sell it all back to them," I said.
"Bingo," Boog said, with a grin.
Chapter XIII
"But they can't sell the stuff that's on view in the Smithsonian," I said. "Those are famous pieces. People would miss them."
Boog was silent, but he grinned at me in a way that suggested Waxahachie was my destiny.
"What if they was replaced by first-rate repros?" he said, finally. "How long do you reckon it'd take the public to notice?"
I was speechless. The notion that all the superb objects in seventeen museums were being quietly replaced with high-class forgeries was ... well, mind-boggling. It meant that somewhere in America an army of forgers was working away, making museum-quality forgeries of an almost infinite variety of objects.
"Hodges," Boog said, when I looked at him in bewilderment. "Hodges, South Carolina. That's where they're making the repros."
That made sense. The Carolinas are full of furniture factories, some of which turn out nothing but reproduction furniture. And, of course, forgery itself was hardly a new thing.
"But who gets the real pieces?" I asked. "They're world famous. If they start turning up in museums in Zaire or Bangladesh someone's gonna notice."
Boog dismissed this notion.
"The world ain't really filt with art historians," he said. "Most people ain't scouts. Half the people in museums all over the world are in a bad humor because they've been made to go against their wills. They ain't gonna give a shit if some statue that used to be in the National Gallery turns up in Islamabad."
"What does Mrs. Lump have to do with it?" I asked. "Is she a spy?"
"Ain't we all spies?" he asked, turning suddenly metaphysical. "The way I figger it, to spy is human."
Then he began to talk about Spinoza and Descartes and was still talking about them when I delivered him back to his muddy Lincoln, in front of the Bubble Bath.
"Spinoza was a great man," he said. "Greater than Sam Raybum or Fehx Frankfurter either."
Then he got in his Lincoln and roared oflf toward Washington.
I sat in my car for a few minutes, staring at the flaking purple front of the Bubble Bath and wondering what Spinoza would have thought about a Double Bubble Brunch.
Suddenly I felt very pressured, not from anything people were doing to me, but from things I was doing to myself.
To put it simply, I was in a phase of wanting too much. I wanted Cindy, but I also wanted Jean, I wanted Boss Miller, and I certainly would not have spurned Lolly and Janie Lee, whose very cheerfulness made them attractive. Of course I still wanted Coffee and Kate and Tanya Todd, and I had a strong fondness for Beth Gibbon—the flea-marketer's daughter, only a scant two hours away, in Augusta, West Virginia.
My capacity for wanting, which had always been great, seemed to have expanded dangerously since I arrived in Washington. I not only wanted several women now, I also wanted a great many things, and I wanted both the women and the things keenly. My ongoing fantasies about Boss Miller were as dark, intense, and adulterous as ever, but at the moment they were overlaid with half-innocent fantasies about Jean, and light cheerful fantasies about Lolly and Janie Lee, and somehow all these fantasies arrived at a time when, thanks to Cindy, I should have been feeling sexually content.
In short, I was just a stew of wants, none of them really significant, but none of them easily dismissible, either.
In such moods, I usually hit the road. If I'm in Maine I head for Oregon, if in Chicago or Detroit for Miami or New Orleans, trusting that the long roads and blue skies of America will restore me to lucidity and a simple sense of purpose: to find the best things to be found along the roads and beneath the skies.
And the last resort, always, when the buzz of wants becomes intolerable, is to head for Harbor City, California, and its great flea market, stuck there between L.A. and the ocean, the souk of souks, the ultimate American marketplace.
A trip to Harbor City, from anywhere in the eastern half of America, offered the best of both worlds: the ascetic loneliness of the long drive across gray plains and beige deserts, and then millions of goods one could fling oneself into in pure debauch, like Scrooge McDuck into his money bin.
It's not that I ever find much in Harbor City, perhaps the most intelligently scouted flea market in the world, with hustlers of every variety circling like pariah dogs, waiting for someone to give up and drop a price significantly.
What's important is that Harbor City is always there, a river of trash and treasure flowing unwearied through its stalls. If you want to buy a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox or sell a complete set of Little Orphan Annie Radio Club decoders —six in all—you can, almost any time you arrive.
To simple people, content with themselves, the need for such a place must seem degraded. But I love it, and anyway have never been content with myself.
I guess I buy and sell in hope of style—or maybe as a style of hope, and Harbor City is kind of the capital of my nation, where there are always others as restless as myself, who constantly buy and sell, too, for their own reasons.
Chapter XIV
I actually sat in front of the Bubble Bath for about ten minutes, in a fretful mood, trying to convince myself to be sensible and stop wanting so many women and so many things.
Wanting even one woman intensely was dangerous enough: Wanting several at the same time meant erecting a structure of need and desire which would eventually collapse like a South American bleacher, burying me in angry women.
But after ten minutes I hit the Capital Beltway, in a mood to ply the wistful Jean Arber with icons, or trunks, or whatever it might take.
Main drag Wheaton is so seedy it almost makes Arlington look classy.
Jean's shop was in a little decayed shopping center that looked like it had been built in Cleveland and then rolled end over end from there to Wheaton.
Put another way, it looked like it had been set down whole by some huge crane capable of lowering whole cinderblock shopping centers into place: only in the case of this shopping center the crane operator had nodded for a moment and dropped it into place from a height of about ten feet.
All the buildings in the shopping center were slightly cracked, and the asphalt parking lot had begun to roil and bubble. In fact the parking area looked a little like the surface of the moon, in which big chunks of dusty asphalt were interspersed with sizable craters.
I worked my way through the craters and parked right in front of Jean's shop, which was between an adult bookstore and a pet shop. The door of the adult bookstore was framed with multicolored lightbulbs, which when flashing might have been expected to attract adults, or at least teenagers.
The pet shop was even more depressing. Its window contained nothing but comatose hamsters and a cage full of hyperactive gerbils.
The cracks in the several buildings were large enough that small shrubs or spreading vines could have been planted in them, but instead of shrubs and vines most of them seemed to be full of empty red-and-white boxes, of the sort Colonel Sanders' fried chicken comes in.
The sources of all the red-and-white boxes was not far to seek. A fried chicken outlet was right across the street, sandwiched between a Long John Silver's and a spanking new Taco Belle. Even as I watched, a patron of Colonel Sanders casually tossed an empty fried chicken box out of his rusty station wagon.
I got out and looked in the window of Jean Arber's antique shop. The window had a modest wooden sign on it which said "Jean's Antiques." Inside I could see a number of trunks and what looked like some rather nice blue crockery, but I couldn't get in. The door was locked and a note stuck to it which read:
Dear Jimmy:
Gone to the babysitters. Back at 3:15. Did you really tell them you'd take them to Baskin-Robbins?
XXX Jean
Although the note was short and not intended for me, I was intrigued by it.
Particularly, I was intrigued by the three X's, just above the signature. Tanya Todd was always writing me notes and ending them with Xs and I could never quite puzzle out what the Xs were supposed to tell me. Were the Xs meant as a warning, or did they conceal an affection that the woman making the Xs didn't feel like being too specific about?
Since Jean's letter was addressed to the husband from whom she was not quite divorced, I suspected the latter. She might not be quite sure that she still loved him, so she hit him with a few Xs, to warn him to take things slow.
While I sat in the car, reflecting, one of the oldest Volvos I had ever seen drove up and parked beside me. It had once been dark blue but now it was just dark. I knew a good many Volvo collectors, mostly in California—they tend to be a finicky lot, but any one of them would have jumped at the chance to buy such an ancient specimen. It was much smaller than the Volvos of our day—in fact, it resembled those small vehicles, half pickup and half dogcart, that big city milkmen used to deliver milk in.
Instead of containing milk bottles, this Volvo contained a short energetic man in bib overalls. It didn't even contain him long, because he immediately got out and headed for Jean's antique shop. He was evidently so accustomed to marching right in that he didn't notice the note until he crashed into the door.
Once that happened he was forced to take cognizance of the note. He was rather likable looking, bushy-haired, bushy-bearded, blue-eyed, and puzzled. He squinted at the note for a moment and then went over and stood in front of the window of the pet shop, looking almost as morose as the hamsters. In fact, he looked not unlike a human hamster, except that his hair was longer.
I had a feeling he was Jimmy. So far he had not noticed me at all, which in itself says something about the state he was in. A pearl Cadillac can't be an everyday sight in such a shopping center.
I had been thinking of Jean's husband as a potential rival, but the more I studied Jimmy the less like a rival I felt. Who could take pride at beating a human hamster in a contest for the hamster's own wife? Jimmy looked like all he wanted to do was find some nice litter and curl up in it. He had little sp
rigs of straw in his hair, so perhaps he had already curled up in some.
Before I could reflect further on Jimmy or the Xs Jean's van drove up and parked on the other side of me. I looked around and saw two wonderful little faces peering at me out of the right window of the van. Those faces certainly didn't ignore white Cadillacs and cowboys. They were the faces of little girls, maybe about three and five years old, respectively. They looked as intelligent as racoons, and their faces were surrounded by great puffs of fleecy curls, as if both of them were wearing Harpo Marx wigs.
I smiled at them, an unexpected development that caused them to exchange quick glances. Like their mother, they wore puffy coats, only theirs were red instead of blue.
After a moment of shy hesitation they decided they were charmed by my smile and gave me two smiles in return.
In the few moments that it took me to establish contact with the girls, a marital or perhaps post-marital storm gathered and broke on the other side of Jean's van.
Jimmy stopped being a human hamster and became an outraged ex-husband. He immediately rushed around to Jean's side of the van, and as he did I rolled my window down a little, out of a shameless desire to eavesdrop.
Eavesdropping was no problem, since Jimmy's pent-up feelings burst out of him at the top of his voice. At the mere sound of his voice both little girls gritted their teeth, made faces, and put their fingers in their ears.
"Where did you go?" Jimmy yelled.
Whatever reply Jean made was totally inaudible.
"But I drove all the way!" Jimmy yelled. "I thought we were going to get burgers!"
At the mention of burgers the little girls whipped around. They still had their fingers in their ears, or at least in their curls, but the burger part got through. They immediately deserted me and began to pat their mother's back. It was obvious even to me, a neophyte with children, that so far as their father was concerned they were willing to let bygones be bygones if he was in the mood to provide burgers.
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