Madame de Gaulle's Penis

by Herbie Brennan

  She materialised instantly. “But you haven’t had your coffee, Mr Sinclair. Isn’t that a shame.” Her eyes lit on the untouched tray. “And you’ve hardly touched your snack.” She turned to Bormann. “He eats like a bird, which is an example you might follow, Martin, so you lose a little weight. Look at Mr Sinclair have you ever seen such a figure of a man?”

  I left them to it. As I closed the door, I heard her ask, “Did you remember to take an advance, Martin? Even from a nice man like Mr Sinclair it’s important to take an advance. Everybody gotta eat.”

  Chapter Ten

  The first thing I did after the Washington plane touched down was to search out the Hertz desk to pick up the car I’d booked by phone. It wasn’t hard to find, but as I approached I was startled to discover the girl behind it was quite naked except for a cute little peaked cap with ‘HERTZ’ written round the brims That’s to say she really actually was naked: I wasn’t just imagining her so.

  At any other time, I’d probably have been quite taken by this example of American promotional zeal. Indeed, it was one thing about the States I’d been vaguely looking forward to, having read of topless waitresses in Los Angeles and nude weddings to publicise a hotel in New York. But just now, I was trying to keep my mind off sex since my mission to rid the world of de Gaulle had taken on a distinct sense of urgency.

  The problem, as I’d only just discovered from the papers, was that Mon General was on a five-day visit. He’d arrived the day I landed in Paris and what with travelling, losing luggage and hiring Martin Bormann, I’d already blown three and a half of those days. So I had to make the hit this afternoon, or at latest tomorrow, otherwise I’d have to chase after him on the next leg of what was looking like an unofficial world tour.

  Thus I had dozed on the flight to Washington, making strenuous efforts not to look at the air hostesses and mentally repeating nursery rhymes to stop myself fantasising about Beth. The latter was the main problem. Now that she’d vanished she was doubly desirable and the thought of what we might have done together was like a flagellant’s whip.

  The sheer effort involved had left me shaken and a little edgy - similar in many respects to the effects of jet lag - so that I would really have preferred to rent my car from a crabby old lady in a boiler suit than the naked twenty-two-year-old employed by Hertz.

  In fact, despite the phone booking, I more or less decided to give my business to Avis before I noticed that the Avis girl, stationed at the desk next door, was also nude. Presumably these two great companies had gone to war with all the weapons at their command. Although oddly enough, neither seemed to be doing more than an average volume of business, convincing proof, I thought, that American males must be at least partly constructed from plastic.

  Should I go National? The National desk was a little distance from the other two and consequently harder to find; and no solution to my problem when I did find it. The National girl was not naked. Which is to say not quite naked. She was wearing thigh-length boots and long black gloves. National, it seemed, was pitching for the kinky trade.

  So back I went to Hertz and there discovered something profoundly disturbing. The Hertz girl, whom I had examined naked only moments earlier, was now fully dressed in the neat Hertz company uniform. A sideways glance told me the Avis girl was also decently attired.

  “Excuse me,” I said, puzzled, “but did you have a special promotion running just now?”

  The Hertz girl smiled at me brightly but blankly. “Promotion, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you know... “ In the face of her blankness, I was suddenly embarrassed.

  “Oh,” she said suddenly, “you mean our special businessman’s discount!”

  I didn’t, but I let it go. When she investigated, she found I didn’t qualify for it anyway. After we’d gone through the formalities and I’d collected my keys along with directions to the car itself, I slipped next door to the Avis stand.

  “I don’t want to rent anything,” I told the Avis girl.

  “That’s quite all right, sir,” she said; and waited.

  She looked a bit more friendly than the Hertz girl so I asked, all in a rush, “Were you working in the nude a few minutes age? As a publicity stunt?”

  For a moment I thought she might call the police and put paid to all my scheme for de Gaulle, but they she grinned abruptly. “I’m afraid we don’t try all that harder, sir.”

  Which only left National. Sure enough, when I got there, the National girl was wearing a uniform which did not include either gloves or thigh length boots. Unwilling to risk trouble by asking her directly, I approached a fat man sitting on a suitcase. There was a hula dancer painted on his tie, so I imagined he must be fairly liberated.

  “May I ask you a question, sir?” I inquired in my best Irish accent.

  He glanced at me without expression. “Sure, Father - go ahead.”

  (I realise now I have neglected to mention that I was travelling in the guise of a Roman Catholic priest - one of the many disguises I planned to adopt in Washington to aid me in the murder of de Gaulle. It may have lost me the businessman’s discount, but on reflection, it probably stopped the Avis girl calling a cop.)

  “The young lady at the National Rent-a-Car desk - was she working in... ah... costume a moment ago?”

  “Didn’t notice,” he admitted.

  “Were you looking at her?”

  “Yea, I was looking at her some. No sin in that, is there?” He frowned suddenly and repeated, “Is there?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

  “Had on the same as she has now,” he told me.

  The car I rented was small by American standards and gigantic by European. It was also packed with interesting refinements like a cassette player and electrically operated windows. But as I drove into the city, I played with none of them. There was only one rational explanation for my recent experience: I had hallucinated.

  Van Rindt had once defined hallucination as ‘the externalisation of unconscious contents’, psychiatric jargon for the fact that you suddenly see something outside your head that actually only exists inside it. In other words, my obsession had grown too great for my mind to hold it, so that now, instead of simply imagining naked women, I was imagining I actually saw them. I was disturb rather than deeply worried. Van Rindt had quoted Jung as saying hallucinations are far more common than most people think. The thing is, you only notice if they’re unusual or bizarre. If you hallucinate an ashtray on a table, the chances are you never find out you were hallucinating. Your hallucination is just part of the furniture.

  But what disturbed me was the utter reality of the experience. There was nothing misty, ghost-like or nebulous about the rent-a-car girls. They looked exactly as three naked girls should look. The one from National even had an appendectomy scar on her abdomen.

  How far would this go, I wondered. Would I end up seeing naked women everywhere? The prospect had some appeal, but there was no doubt it would distract me from my Purpose. Furthermore, what would happen if I had the luck to stumble on a woman who was genuinely naked? A girl changing on the beach, for example, or the honorary secretary of a nudist colony? Would I see her as a skeleton? Or would the whole process go into reverse so that I perceived her fully dressed? Questions of this type were no less worrying for being insoluble.

  If there was one comforting aspect to the whole thing, it was the realisation that, however powerful these hallucinations became, they would surely vanish for good once I had regulated my sex life to less frustrating levels. In psychological terms, the hallucinations were not a new development, merely an extension of an existing condition. A superior sort of fantasising, if you like.

  I forced the problem from my mind and drove onwards. Americans may recognise essential differences between New York and Washington, but I could not. Tall buildings, heavy tr
affic, far too many people seemed sufficient to describe them both. Although Washington has a noticeable preponderance of very neat, well-built young men in conservative suits and short haircuts, presumably employees of the various Government departments and the C.I.A.

  I found a motel and checked in under the name of Father Ignatius O’Rourke, S.J. In the chalet, I drew the curtains and checked over my armaments, practising the movements necessary to put together and demolish my rifle. Then I crept up on a standard lamp and strangled it with my garrotte. There seemed no doubt at all I had the touch for murder. It occurred to me I did not know if the guns would actually fire. The thought expanded instantly into a nagging worry. I’d bought them both from a very shady character in London’s East End (following the police sergeant’s advice that this was the place to find real villains) and it was entirely possible that he had dishonestly sold me duds. I thought about it and decided a test was necessary.

  Since I was understandably wary of carrying the rifle outside, I loaded the Luger. A quick inspection showed me the lot was empty, so I went outside and shot an ornamental tree, then dropped the pistol into one pocket and took a missal from another, pretending to study it deeply. A young woman emerged from a nearby chalet, a puzzled expression on her face. To my relief I saw she was fully dressed in sweater and jeans.

  “Say, Father, did you hear somebody shooting just then?”

  I smiled at her benignly. “A car backfiring, my child.” Then, as a realisation struck me, my smile died. I recalled my earlier train of thought as I’d tried to analyse my hallucinations involving the rent-a-car girls. I had wondered then what might happen if I met a genuinely naked woman. The only two options seemed to be that she would appear as some sort of X-ray, or, in some sort of reverse hallucination, appear fully dressed. Did the fact that this young woman appeared fully dressed mean she was actually naked? Normally I wouldn’t have worried. When I wasn’t hallucinating I saw women fully dressed all the time. This was why, if they were pretty, I had to make the mental effort of imagining them stripped. But this girl, who wasn’t exactly pretty, but was no dog either, had rushed from a motel chalet in response to a gunshot. In such a situation and in such an emergency, she might well have forgotten to put on her clothes, having just emerged, for example, from the shower. I squinted at her in an attempt to detect dampness, then cunningly put the whole thing to the test by remarking, “Nice sweater.”

  “Yeah,” she said and went back inside without another word.

  I did likewise. Trying out the rifle would have to wait, although I was less worried about it now than I had been. If the Luger worked, chances were the rifle would work too. Besides - I glanced at the standard lamp - there was a good chance I would not need either.

  I sat down on the bed to review my plans.

  They were based on a fairly simple premise. All I had to do was gain access to the Oval Office of the White House. The following afternoon, according to the Washington Post, de Gaulle and his good lady would attend a Presentation of Certificates to a small group of charitable workers who had lost relatives in France during the war. It was to be a simple, moving ceremony, a description I took to mean that apart from the principals, very few other people would be present. But few or not, one of them would be me.

  Once within the privacy of the Oval Office, I planned to play the actual assassination by ear, although I had tentatively decided to shoot de Gaulle and garrotte his wife. Afterwards, escape would be no great problem since I would have President Johnson as my hostage. Once clear, I could ditch him to walk home, change my identity again and proceed back to New York where, hopefully, Bormann would have Van Rindt set up for me. If the plan appears naive to your sophisticated eye, I have to remind you for the umpteenth time that this was 1969. The world was innocent then, comparatively speaking. Hannibal Lector had not been invented. John F. Kennedy who, we now know, bonked every girl in sight, was still remembered as a clean-cut, moral, all-American college kid who somehow occupied the White House. Security had tightened since they shot him, but it wasn’t the paranoid science-fiction nightmare it is today. I reckoned that a combination of surprise, cunning and good old British deering-do would let me get away with it. James Bond seemed to manage quite well on the formula and you should remember that while From Russia With Love was on the screens of London in 1965, Bond was still best known from the books, which were a lot less high tech and tricky than the movies.

  The thought of Bormann prompted me to place a call to New York. When he came on the line I said, “John Sinclair here. Any news for me?”

  “Why are you talking with an Irish accent?” Bormann asked.

  I realised I had sunk too deeply into my role of Ignatius O’Rourke. “I’m not,” I said, reverting to my normal tones. “It must be a bad line.”

  “Yea,” he said, “you’re clearer now. Listen, I think I’ve tracked down your shrink.”

  “Van Rindt?”

  “There’s a Dr Nicholaas Van Rindt staying at the Hilton.”

  “Are you sure it’s the right one?” I asked cautiously. I was aware that after assassinating de Gaulle and holding the American President hostage, my time in the country would have to be severely limited. I had no intention of wasting any of it on a wild goose chase.

  “Can’t be many of them with a name like that. But don’t worry - I plan to check him out thoroughly.”

  “You’ve done very well, Mr Bormann,” I said gratefully.

  “So my mother keeps telling me.”

  “Any leads on Miss Philippe?”

  “I’m still working on it,” Bormann said shortly.

  I hung up in a state of high elation. Everything was moving forward smoothly as, somehow, I had known it would.

  Chapter Eleven

  The following morning, early, I went off to assault a nun.

  This was not, as you can imagine, a random impulse, but part of my master plan to reach de Gaulle later in the day. One of the charitable workers scheduled to meet the President was, according to the paper, Sister Marie Therese, Mother Superior of the Third Washington Order of the Sisters of Mercy. Since the faces of nuns are not particularly well-known outside the cloister, and the habit they wear voluminous enough to cover a multitude of sins, it seemed to me logical that if I could put Sister Marie Therese quietly out of the way for a while, it would be no great trick to take her place.

  I approached the convent obliquely, to spy out the lay of the land. Like most such institutions, it nestled in its own extensive grounds, surrounded by a high stone wall. I noticed a sign which said:

  TRESPASSERS

  WILL BE PROSECUTED

  WITH THE UTMOST RIGOR

  OF THE LAW

  Signed: Sisters of Mercy

  Since I had no intention of trespassing, I ignored it. But I did examine the wall with care. I’d soon have to climb it (almost certainly in drag) and I wanted to be sure it was within my capabilities. In fact it looked fairly easy, as rough stone walls often are. Broken bottles had been mortared in to the top, but a couple of thicknesses of cloth - my jacket, for example - should prevent serious injury if thrown across them.

  A little easier in my mind, I climbed back into the car and drove boldly to the front gate. A thought struck me at the last possible second, so that I backed off and drove away. If I brought the car inside, I would have to drive it out through that gate again, otherwise I’d have nothing on hand for my getaway. But if I drove the car away, I’d have nowhere to hide the denuded remains of the Mother Superior. I planned, briefly, to lure her into the grounds, strip her of her habit, truss her like a chicken and bundle her into the boot of the car, which I would then park as unobtrusively as possible within the convent grounds and abandon.

  I doubted if her fellow nuns would miss the old bat for quite some time, they being trained to get on with things and mind their own business. Once she was
missed, I doubted if they would think of looking in the car boot. With a bit of luck, they might decide to check up on the car before tampering with it, in which case, Hertz would certainly tell them it was the temporary property of Father Ignatius O’Rourke, information that should send them into a dither for hours. By the time the confusion stopped, de Gaulle would be butcher’s meat.

  The drawback with this plan, I now realised, was that after I nicked over the wall wearing the abba of Sister Marie Therese, I would have to walk to the White House. The prospect held no appeal at all, especially since speed was obviously essential in getting away from the convent once the deed was done. I had a second car - and driver - laid on for the afternoon and for a moment I toyed with the idea of having it come down and wait for me. But I doubted if the driver would take well to a Mother Superior who appeared over the top of the wall of her own convent. There seemed only one other thing to do and I did it.

  I drove up to the gate again in my stolen Mercedes and honked the horn imperially. Since nuns rely on the Lord to protect them, I didn’t expect convent security to be up to much. I was right. The gatekeeper accepted me as Father Ignatius O’Rourke on no more than my say-so and the clerical collar. I told her I’d come on an urgent mission from the Cardinal and she waved me through without asking Cardinal who - which was just as well since I hadn’t the least idea who the Cardinal of Washington might be. The only nasty moment she gave me was when I first caught sight of her. She was a tiny nun, no more than five foot tall. It occurred to me then that if Sister Marie Therese was also tiny, her habit might not fit me. This may seem a fairly basic point in retrospect, but I can only say I hadn’t thought of it until then.