MASH 14 MASH goes to Moscow

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  “As a matter of fact, Kris, I’m with the individual to whom you refer at this very moment.”

  “Oh, George, tell me you haven’t gone over to the enemy!”

  “I am here under the flag of truce,” the senator said. “It is what is known as making a sacrifice for one’s beloved country.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “But couldn’t you have done it over the telephone?”

  “The question is moot,” the senator replied. “I am here. The next question is how can we get Boris to go to Moscow?”

  “If they’re not willing to give him Uncle Sergei’s theater back, I’m afraid he won’t go.”

  “You-know-who told me this is a matter of importance to the country, Kris. He has to go. It is our nonpartisan duty to get him there, theater or no theater.”

  “I see. Well, if you say so, George. There’s no way that I could make him go, even if I could—I’m really sick. Radar made some of his Mother O’Reilly’s Argentine chili last night, and that always knocks me out for a week or more. Have you thought of Archbishop Mulcahy?”

  “The archbishop refuses to go,” the senator replied.

  “Then that leaves you with only one choice,” Kris replied. “Hawkeye and Trapper John.”

  “I don’t believe I know the gentlemen to whom you refer.”

  “Boris generally calls Hawkeye the ‘Sainted Chancre Mechanic’ and Trapper John the ‘Pecker Checker.’ ”

  “Now that you mention it, I do recall hearing the names,” the senator said.

  “I’m sure that if they asked Boris, he’d go,” Kris said. “They saved his life in Korea.”

  “Well, we’ll get in touch with this.”

  “There’s only one small problem, George,” Kris said.

  “Which is?”

  “Neither Hawkeye nor Trapper John like You-know-who any better than we do. Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t mention his name. If you do, they’re liable to refuse.”

  “I understand perfectly, Kris, and thank you so much.”

  “Anytime, George,” Kris said. “And I won’t tell a soul, I promise, where you called from.”

  “Thank you, Kris,” the senator said. “There are those who wouldn’t understand.”

  He replaced the telephone in its cradle.

  “Presuming that you are capable of shelling boiled peanuts and eavesdropping simultaneously, sir,” the senator said, “a recapitulation of my conversation with Madame Korsky-Rimsakov O’Reilly would be redundant.”

  “What did he say?” Jim-Boy asked.

  “He said you heard it,” the Secretary of State replied.

  “What have we got on these two guys, Hawkeye and Trapper John?” Jim-Boy asked.

  “There is an extensive file on them in the Absolutely Top Secret Papers of the former Secretary of State, sir,” the Secretary of State said. “Unfortunately, it’s in Latin, and it will take some time to translate.”

  “Give them to me,” the senator said. “My Latin is fairly fluent. Not as fluent as my Russian and my Greek, but more fluent than, say, my Urdu and my Pakistani.”

  “Smart-ass,” the Admiral said under his breath.

  “Give him the file,” Jim-Boy ordered.

  “He doesn’t have a security clearance,” the Admiral protested.

  “He does now. Senator, you are herewith and hereafter declared a nonthreat to the security of the nation. You can read the file.”

  The Senator spent the next fifteen minutes reading the file, alternating wide grins and gasps of shock and surprise with little chuckles and an infrequent guffaw. Finally, he wiped the smile from his face and turned to Jim-Boy.

  “My first reaction, which you would think of as a gut-belly feeling, is to permit you to enlist the services of these two gentlemen in getting Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov to Moscow,” he said. “But I realize that emotion is partisan in nature, because if you did so, you would be back counting peanuts in about three weeks. Therefore, I offer this nonpartisan advice: Whatever you do, don’t send Drs. Pierce and McIntyre to Russia with Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov.”

  “I don’t have any choice in the matter,” Jim-Boy said. “Those are the last two names on the list.”

  “Don’t ever say that I didn’t warn you,” the senator said.

  “I have had three of my brilliant innovative ideas,” Jim-Boy said.

  “I was afraid of something like that,” the senator said.

  “The first thought is that I will personally talk to them ... little people like that, you know, when I talk to them ... and explain the situation. I feel sure that they will volunteer to come to the aid of their country in its hour of need. And if they don’t, of course, there’s always the IRS.”

  “Good thinking, sir,” the Admiral said.

  “My second brilliant innovative thought is the matter of an official escort for them. We can’t send you, Cy-Boy. We know what happens when you’re off alone with the Russians. Before I know it, you’ve agreed to give them General Motors. So you’re out. And the Admiral is out, too. They don’t like admirals. What we need is a high- ranking public official, say a senator—and not an ordinary run-of-the-mill senator, either, but a smart one—one who speaks Russian, for instance ...”

  “Not on your life,” Senator Kamikaze said. “There’s a limit to what even someone like me is willing to do in the way of sacrifices for his country.”

  “Of course, you don’t have to go,” Jim-Boy said. “I would understand completely. Just as I’m sure those right-wing lunatics who voted you into office would understand what you were doing here with me all afternoon and into the evening. Confessing the error of your ways and begging forgiveness.”

  “I did no such thing!” Senator Kamikaze said, righteously indignant.

  “I know that, Senator, and you know that, but people sometimes get the wrong idea. And you can just imagine what they’re going to think when I have you named an Honorary Democrat.”

  “You wouldn’t!” Senator Kamikaze said, horror in his voice.

  “I would, too, unless you agree to go to Moscow with this singer.”

  “Here I am, in office less than a year, and already I’m compromising my principles,” the senator said. “There must be a special virus in Washington.”

  “You do this for me, Senator, and I promise no one will ever know that you ever talked to me.”

  “I’ll have to have that in writing,” the senator replied.

  “Now that’s settled, we can turn to my third brilliant innovative idea of how a country should be run,” Jim- Boy said.

  “I’m all ears, sir,” the Admiral said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jim-Boy said. “But we weren’t talking about you.” He turned to the senator. “You’re not going alone, Senator. I mean with just these two doctors and this singer. If the Russians want culture, I’ll give them culture!”

  “What, exactly, do you have in mind, sir?” the Secretary of State asked.

  “It’s actually a ‘who’ I have in mind, Cy-Boy,” Jim- Boy said.

  “Who, exactly, do you have in mind, sir?”

  “Shur-lee Strydent!” Jim-Boy announced dramatically. “How does that grab you?”

  “You are, I am forced to conclude,” the senator said, “making reference to Shur-lee Strydent, the world’s ugliest movie star?”

  “Bite your tongue, Senator!” Jim-Boy snapped. “I’m willing to put up with a lot from you in the interest of world peace, but when you start casting aspersions against Shur-lee Strydent, you’re skiing on thin ice.”

  “That’s skating, I believe, sir,” the Admiral said.

  “Whatever,” Jim-Boy said. “If Shur-lee Strydent can pack movie theaters all across this country with her inimitable style of acting and singing, imagine what she can do in Red Square. It’ll make their May Day parade look like a convention of steamship salesmen.”

  Chapter Seven

  It is not true, as some suggest, that Shur-lee Strydent and her phenomenal success in the entert
ainment industry is just one of those weird things that happen from time to time in an industry which itself is more than a little weird.

  Miss Strydent is not, certainly, the ugliest performer ever to have attained fame or fortune. Neither is she possessed of the most blood-curdling singing voice ever to reach the public from the silver screen or over that electronic marvel known as the cathode ray, or boob, tube. And, without digging very far, it is easy to turn up dramatic actresses who are equally unconvincing (or in two cases, even less convincing) than the woman known to the world as “Shur-lee Strydent, Star of Stars.”

  But never before in the long and sordid history of the motion picture star system has there been incorporated in one female performer such an overwhelming lack of talent, such a forbidding anatomical physiognomy, and such an ability to drive strong men to drink by “singing.” Shur-lee Strydent was born Gertrude Rumplemayer to poor and, to tell the truth, grossly dishonest parents ten years before the date given in the The Official Biography of Shur-lee Strydent, Star of Stars. That is to say, she was born in 1937 (not 1947) in the borough of Richmond, of the City of New York, which is also known to the cognoscenti as Staten Island.

  By the time she was nine years old, Siegfried Rumplemayer, her father, had been cashiered from the New York City Sanitation Department after having been found guilty in a departmental trial of diverting departmental equipment (specifically, his garbage-can-on-wheels) to personal use.

  For more years than the Public Relations Division of the Department of Sanitation likes to recall, Siegfried Rumplemayer had used the proud white coat, garbage-can-on-wheels, and push broom of the Sanitation Department as nothing more than a cover for his true avocation —that of high-class dog-napper.

  One of the more interesting customs of the inhabitants of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York* is to possess dogs. The reason for this is probably because it is a pleasant feeling, indeed, to return to one’s apartment after a hard day out there in the jungle to find a furry friend blissfully wagging its tail at the sight of one.

  (* The Borough of Manhattan is the island which the Dutch bought from the Indians for $24. The other boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) are generally regarded as unimportant, especially by people who live in (or on) Manhattan.)

  The furry friends of Manhattan, however, like their counterparts in, say, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, require some things—like bushes, trees, grass, and fireplugs—which are in far shorter supply in Manhattan than they are in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. If every New Yorker possessed of a dog suddenly descended on the streets of Manhattan with said hound on a leash, a traffic jam of monumental proportions would occur.

  This situation gave birth to one of the more interesting occupations to be found in the Handbook of Occupations: Dog Walker. A dog walker, as the title suggests, is a person (frequently a highly perfumed gentleman of rather exquisite grace) who earns his living by collecting a dozen or so dogs and taking them all for a walk at once.

  It was in this that Siegfried Rumplemayer saw his chance to augment his income. He reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) that if people were willing to part with hard cash so that their furry friends could have access to the bushes, trees, and fire hydrants of Central Park, they certainly would be willing to part with even larger sums of cash should their furry friends become “lost.”

  In Siegfried’s defense, it must be reported that he had not, at first, included little Gertrude in his plans. For one thing, she was only four, and for another, truth to tell, he regarded his first (and only) born as a mean little kid who couldn’t be trusted as far as he could throw her. The very first thing that Little Gerty had done with her very first tooth was to bite her daddy on the nose, and things had gone down hill from there.

  But as the dog-napping plans were taking final form in Siegfried’s head, an incident involving their neighbor lady on Sunny Dale Avenue, Tottenville, Staten Island, occurred. The neighbor lady, whose name has unfortunately been lost to posterity, was a cat freak. She had cats of all sizes running wild around her property. One dark, dismal, rainy evening when Siegfried came home from pushing his garbage-can-on-wheels through Central Park, he was greeted by the neighbor lady (also known as the Cat Lady) who was in a state of high excitement and hysterical indignation.

  “I want to see you, Rumplemayer,” she screamed.

  “It’s Grass, Path, and Walkway Sanitary Technician Rumplemayer to you, Cat Lady,” Siegfried replied.

  “Do you know what your little monster has been up to, Rumplemayer?” Cat Lady screamed.

  “Which little monster do you mean, Cat Lady?”

  “Dirty Little Gerty is who I mean,” she shouted. “How many little monsters do you have, anyway?”

  “I’m a busy man, Cat Lady,” Siegfried had replied. “Get to the point.”

  “You know that pack of wild dogs that runs around the swamp?”

  “What about them?”

  “Your Dirty Little Gerty has been feeding my precious pussy cats to them, that’s what about them!”

  “I don’t quite follow you, Cat Lady,” Siegfried said.

  “I’ll explain it in simple terms,” she said. “That little monster of yours has been catching my precious pussy cats in a potato sack and then carrying them down to the swamp and letting them loose so those terrible dogs can chase them.”

  “Thank you for bringing the situation to my attention, Cat Lady,” Siegfried replied with dignity. “I’ll have a word with the little ... with Gertrude-Darling.”

  “You should take a horse-whip to her, that’s what you should do!”

  “Unfortunately, there are laws against that,” Siegfried said. “And Little Gerty knows all of them.”

  “She’s a vicious little monster, that’s what she is,” Cat Lady said.

  “She does favor her mother,” Siegfried said. “I’ll look into the matter.”

  By the time he had climbed the stairs to the third-floor rear apartment he thought of as his little place in the country, Siegfried had realized that one of his major dog-napping problems (how to get the mutts away from the pansies) had been solved.

  “Gerty-Baby,” he said, “how would Daddy’s little darling like to go to work with Daddy tomorrow?”

  “Not on your life,” Little Gerty replied, with the lisp that would one day become as world famous as Jimmy Carter’s choppers.

  “Daddy’s heard about the fun you’ve been having with Cat Lady’s kitty cats,” Siegfried said.

  “The old witch squealed on me, did she?” Little Gerty said, with a snarl. “I’ll push her wheelchair down the stairs for that!”

  ‘I’ve got a better idea than that,” Siegfried said, and he explained what he had in mind in some detail.

  “Daddy-Dear, that’s an absolutely rotten idea,” Little Gerty squealed gleefully. “I’ll do it!”

  The very next day, it being a Saturday, Little Gerty went with her daddy to work. The ticket taker on the Staten Island Ferry informed the pair of them that taking three cats in a burlap sack aboard an official ferryboat of the City of New York was a no-no. For a moment, Siegfried was stumped, but Little Gerty rose to the challenge.

  “One more word out of you, tomato nose,” she snarled, “and I’ll tell that fat cop over there that you offered me a Hershey Bar and a dime to play show-and-tell with you.”

  Little Gerty waited at the Fifth Avenue and Sixty-third Street entrance to Central Park until Siegfried, by then in uniform and pushing his garbage-can-on-wheels, showed up. Two of the three cats in the burlap sack were stashed in a closet of a Gentleman’s Rest Facility to which Siegfried had a key. Cradling the third tabby in her arms, Little Gerty skipped down the curving path ahead of her daddy until they came across what they were looking for: A ten-dog strong pack of furry friends, ranging in size from a Chihuahua to a St. Bernard, being taken on their morning constitutional by an exquisitely graceful young man in purple pedal-pushers and a yellow beret. They were on a collision course.


  “Get out of my way, you nasty sanitation person, you,” the young gentleman said. “Or I’ll sic my doggies on you!”

  “Oh,” Little Gerty yelped, throwing the cat at him. “I dropped my pussy cat!”

  The last seen of either the pussy cat, the exquisitely graceful young man, or the St. Bernard was as the latter chased the former through the rowboat concession on the shores of picturesque Central Park Lake. By that time, Siegfried and Little Gerty had the Chihuahua, a toy French poodle, and a sad-eyed beagle firmly stashed in the garbage-can-on-wheels and were heading out of the park.

  It had been Siegfried’s original intention simply to telephone the dog’s owner and announce that for a suitable reward the owner could have his furry friend back. But Little Gerty had showed such a natural inclination for the business that they improved on the basic plan.

  He rented a cheap basement room on the West Side and telephoned the furry friend’s owners to announce that his little girl had found their animal and that they could have it back simply by coming to pick it up. When the distraught dog owners arrived at the basement room, they found their furry friend snuggled up close to Little Gerty,* who had been equipped with both a set of dark glasses of the type worn by blind persons and a striped cane. There was also a pair of crutches leaning against the wall. Siegfried then cued his daughter.

  (* The means of getting the dog to snuggle up close and whimper had been Little Gerty’s contribution, and it had been simplicity itself. The dogs were fed, but instead of using water to make that Yummy-Yummy Gravy we see on TV, Rumplemayer pere et fille used bourbon whiskey. Since most pet owners are not at all familiar with the sound a hungover dog makes, the deception worked perfectly.)

  “Poor little blind daughter, your doggie-woggie’s real owner has come for it.”

  Little Gerty began with a whimper not much louder than the one the hungover hound was making, but soon worked herself into a mournful frenzy. The furry friend’s owners would then either come up with a reward four or five times as large as they had intended to bestow or would announce that they couldn’t possibly have the coldness of heart to separate their dog from the poor little blind girl on crutches. If this latter situation developed, Siegfried would say that what the child really needed was a seeing-eye dog, that they had been scraping their pennies together to buy her one and were only $124.80 short of the purchase price. Two out of three soft-hearted dog owners handed over the $124.80.