“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. Glück.”
So the Evil Hour has worked its sorcery. The wrong word was Schwarzgerät. Now the mountain has closed again thundering behind Slothrop, damn near like to crush his heel, and it might just be centuries before that White Woman appears again. Shit.
The name on the special pass is “Max Schlepzig.” Slothrop, feeling full of pep, decides to pose as a vaudeville entertainer. An illusionist. He has had a good apprenticeship with Katje, her damask tablecloth and magical body, a bed for her salon, a hundred soirées fantastiques. . . .
He’s through Zehlendorf by midafternoon, inside his Rocketman rig and ready to cross. The Russian sentries wait under a wood archway painted red, toting Suomis or Degtyarovs, oversize submachine guns with drum magazines. Here comes also a Stalin tank now, lumbering in low, soldier in earflapped helmet standing up in the 76 mm mount yelling into walkie-talkie . . . uh, well. . . . On the other side of the arch is a Russian jeep with a couple officers, one talking earnestly into the mike of his radio set, and the air between quickens with spoken Russian at the speed of light weaving a net to catch Slothrop. Who else? He sweeps his cape back with a wink, tips his helmet and smiles. In a conjuror’s flourish he’s out with card, ticket ’n’ bilingual pass, giving them some line about a command performance in that Potsdam.
One of the sentries takes the pass and nips into his kiosk to make a phone call. The others stand staring at Tchitcherine’s boots. No one speaks. The call is taking a while. Scarred leather, day-old beards, cheekbones in the sun. Slothrop’s trying to think of a few card tricks he can do, sort of break the ice, when the sentry sticks his head out. “Stiefeln, bitte.”
Boots? What would they want with—yaaahhh! Boots, indeed, yes. We know beyond peradventure who has to be on the other end, don’t we. Slothrop can hear all the man’s metal parts jingling with glee. In the smoky Berlin sky, somewhere to the left of the Funkturm in its steelwool distance, appears a full-page photo in Life magazine: it is of Slothrop, he is in full Rocketman attire, with what appears to be a long, stiff sausage of very large diameter being stuffed into his mouth, so forcibly that his eyes are slightly crossed, though the hand or agency actually holding the stupendous wiener is not visible in the photo. A SNAFU FOR ROCKETMAN, reads the caption—“Barely off the ground, the Zone’s newest celebrity ‘fucks up.’”
We-e-e-ll, Slothrop slides off the boots, the sentry takes them inside to the telephone—the others lean Slothrop up against the arch and shake him down, finding nothing but the reefer Säure gave him, which they expropriate. Slothrop waits in his socks, trying not to think ahead. Glancing around for cover, maybe. Nothing. Clear field of fire for 360 degrees. Smells of fresh asphalt patch and gun oil. The jeep, crystal verdigris, waiting: the road back to Berlin, for the moment, deserted. . . . Providence, hey Providence, what’d you do, step out for a beer or something?
Not at all. The boots reappear, smiling sentry right behind them. “Stimmt, Herr Schlepzig.” What does irony sound like in Russian? These birds are too inscrutable for Slothrop. Tchitcherine would’ve known enough not to arouse any suspicion by asking to see those boots. Nah, it couldn’t’ve been him on the phone. This was probably some routine search for that contraband, was all. Slothrop is being seized right now by what the Book of Changes calls Youthful Folly. He swirls his green cape a few more times, chisels a stubby Balkan army off of one of the tommyguns, and moseys away, southward. The officers’ jeep stays where it is. The tank has vanished.
Jubilee Jim, just a-peddlin’ through the country,
Winkin’ at the ladies from Stockbridge up to Lee—
Buy your gal a brooch for a fancy gown,
Buggy-whip rigs for just a dollar down,
Hey come along ev’rybody, headin’ for the Jubi-lee!
Two miles down the road, Slothrop hits that canal Säure mentioned: takes a footpath down under the bridge where it’s wet and cool for a minute. He sets off along the bank, looking for a boat to hijack. Girls in halters and shorts lie sunning, brown and gold, all along this dreaming grass slope. The clouded afternoon is mellowed to windsoftened edges, children kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds in a chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended storm of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With distance the light gathers a slow ecru haze, girls’ flesh no longer bleached by the zenith sun now in gentler light reawakening to warmer colors, faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments of skin cells saying touch . . . stay. . . . Slothrop walks on—past eyes opening, smiles breaking like kind dawns. What’s wrong with him? Stay, sure. But what keeps him passing by?
There are a few boats, moored to railings, but always somebody with an eye out. He finally comes on a narrow flat-bottomed little rig, oars in the locks and ready to go, nothing but a blanket upslope, a pair of high heels, man’s jacket, stand of trees nearby. So Slothrop climbs right in, and casts off. Have fun—a little nasty here—I can’t, but I can steal your boat! Ha!
He hauls till sundown, resting for long stretches, really out of condition, cape smothering him in a cone of sweat so bad he has to take it off finally. Ducks drift at a wary distance, water dripping off of bright orange beaks. Surface of the canal ripples with evening wind, sunset in his eyes streaking the water red and gold: royal colors. Wrecks poke up out of the water, red lead and rust ripening in this light, bashed gray hullplates, flaking rivets, unlaid cable pointing hysterical strands to all points of the compass, vibrating below any hearing in the breeze. Empty barges drift by, loose and forlorn. A stork flies over, going home, below him suddenly the pallid arch of the Avus overpass ahead. Any farther and Slothrop’s back in the American sector. He angles across the canal, debarking on the opposite bank, and heads south, trying to skirt the Soviet control point the map puts someplace to his right. Massive movement in the dusk: Russian guardsmen, green-capped elite, marching and riding, pokerfaced, in trucks, on horseback. You can feel the impedance in the fading day, the crowding, jittering wire loops, Potsdam warning stay away . . . stay away. . . . T
he closer it comes, the denser the field around that cloaked international gathering across the Havel. Bodine’s right: a gnat can’t get in. Slothrop knows it, but just keeps on skulking along, seeking less sensitive axes of suspicion, running zigzags, aimed innocuously south.
Invisible. It becomes easier to believe in the longer he can keep going. Sometime back on Midsummer Eve, between midnight and one, fern seed fell in his shoes. He is the invisible youth, the armored changeling. Providence’s little pal. Their preoccupation is with forms of danger the War has taught them—phantoms they may be doomed now, some of them, to carry for the rest of their lives. Fine for Slothrop, though—it’s a set of threats he doesn’t belong to. They are still back in geographical space, drawing deadlines and authorizing personnel, and the only beings who can violate their space are safely caught and paralyzed in comic books. They think. They don’t know about Rocketman here. They keep passing him and he remains alone, blotted to evening by velvet and buckskin—if they do see him his image is shunted immediately out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in exile with other critters of the night. . . .
Presently he cuts right again, toward the sunset. There’s still that big superhighway to get across. Some Germans haven’t been able to get home for 10, 20 years because they were caught on the wrong side of some Autobahn when it went through. Nervous and leadfooted now, Slothrop comes creeping up to the Avus embankment, listening to traffic vacuuming by above. Each driver thinks he’s in control of his vehicle, each thinks he has a separate destination, but Slothrop knows better. The drivers are out tonight because They need them where they are, forming a deadly barrier. Amateur Fritz von Opels all over the place here, promising a lively sprint for Slothrop—snarling inward toward that famous S-curve where maniacs in white helmets and dark goggles once witched their wind-faired machinery around the banked brick in shrieking drifts (admiring eyes of colonels in dress uniforms, colonel’s ladies in Garbo fedoras, all safe up in their white towers yet belonging to the day’s adventure, each waiting for his own surfacing of the same mother-violence underneath . . .).
Slothrop frees his arms from the cape, lets a lean gray Porsche whir by, then charges out, the red of its taillights flashing along his downstream leg, headlights of a fast-coming Army truck now hitting the upstream one and touching the grotto of one eyeball to blue jigsaw. He swings sideways as he runs, screaming, “Hauptstufe!” which is the Rocketman war-cry, raises both arms and the sea-green fan of the cape’s silk lining, hears brakes go on, keeps running, hits the center mall in a roll, scampering into the bushes as the truck skids past and stops. Voices for a while. Gives Slothrop a chance to catch his breath and get the cape unwound from around his neck. The truck finally starts off again. The southbound half of the Avus is slower tonight, and he can jog across easy, down the bank and uphill again into trees. Hey! Leaps broad highways in a single bound!
Well, Bodine, your map is perfect here, except for one trivial detail you sort of, uh, forgot to mention, wonder why that was. . . . It turns out something like 150 houses in Neubabelsberg have been commandeered and sealed off as a compound for the Allied delegates to the Potsdam Conference, and Jolly Jack Tar has stashed that dope right in the middle of it. Barbed wire, searchlights, sirens, security who’ve forgotten how to smile. Thank goodness, which is to say Säure Bummer, for this special pass here. Stenciled signs with arrows read ADMIRALTY, F.O., STATE DEPARTMENT, CHIEFS OF STAFF. . . . The whole joint is lit up like a Hollywood premiere. Great coming and going of civilians in suits, gowns, tuxedos, getting in and out of BMW limousines with flags of all nations next to the windscreens. Mimeographed handouts clog the stones and gutters. Inside the sentry boxes are piles of confiscated cameras.
They must deal here with a strange collection of those showbiz types. Nobody seems too upset at the helmet, cape, or mask. There are ambiguous shrugging phone calls and the odd feeble question, but they do let Max Schlepzig pass. A gang of American newspapermen comes through in a charabanc, clutching on to bottles of liberated Moselle, and they offer him a lift part way. Soon they have fallen to arguing about which celebrity he is. Some think he is Don Ameche, others Oliver Hardy. Celebrity? what is this? “Come on,” sez Slothrop, “you just don’t know me in this getup. I’m that Errol Flynn.” Not everybody believes him, but he manages to hand out a few autographs anyhow. When they part company, the newshounds are discussing the candidates for Miss Rheingold 1946. Dorothy Hart’s advocates are the loudest, but Jill Darnley has a majority on her side. It’s all gibberish to Slothrop—it will be months yet before he runs into a beer advertisement featuring the six beauties, and find himself rooting for a girl named Helen Riickert: a blonde with a Dutch surname who will remind him dimly of someone. . . .
The house at 2 Kaiserstrasse is styled in High Prussian Boorish and painted a kind of barf brown, a color the ice-cold lighting doesn’t improve. It is more heavily guarded than any other in the compound. Gee, Slothrop wonders why. Then he sees the sign with the place’s stenciled alias on it.
“Oh, no. No. Quit fooling.” For a while he stands in the street shivering and cursing that Seaman Bodine for a bungler, villain, and agent of death. Sign sez THE WHITE HOUSE. Bodine has brought him straight to the dapper, bespectacled stranger who gazed down the morning Friedrichstrasse—to the face that has silently dissolved in to replace the one Slothrop never saw and now never will.
The sentries with slung rifles are still as himself. The folds of his cape are gone to corroded bronze under the arc-lighting. Behind the villa water rushes. Music strikes up inside and obliterates the sound. An entertainment. No wonder he got in so easy. Are they expecting this magician, this late guest? Glamour, fame. He could run in and throw himself at somebody’s feet, beg for amnesty. End up getting a contract for the rest of his life with a radio network, o-or even a movie studio! That’s what mercy is, isn’t it? He turns, trying to be casual about it, and goes moseying out of the light, looking for a way down to that water.
The shore of the Griebnitz See is dark, starlit, strung with wire, alive with roving sentries. Potsdam’s lights, piled and scattered, twinkle across the black water. Slothrop has to go in up to his ass a few times to get past that wire, and wait for the sentries to gather around a cigarette at one end of their beat before he can make a dash, cape-flapping and soggy, up to the villa. Bodine’s hashish is buried along one side of the house, under a certain juniper bush. Slothrop squats down and starts scooping up dirt with his hands.
Inside it is some do. Girls are singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” and if it ain’t the Andrews Sisters it may as well be. They are accompanied by a dance band with a mammoth reed section. Laughing, sounds of glassware, multilingual chitchat, your average weekday night here at the great Conference. The hash is wrapped in tinfoil inside a moldering ditty bag. It smells really good. Aw, jeepers—why’d he forget to bring a pipe?
Actually, it’s just as well. Above Slothrop, at eye level, is a terrace, and espaliered peach trees in milky blossom. As he crouches, hefting the bag, French windows open and someone steps out on this terrace for some air. Slothrop freezes, thinking invisible, invisible. . . . Footsteps approach, and over the railing leans—well, this may sound odd, but it’s Mickey Rooney. Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy’s freckled madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-losing-my-mind face. Mickey Rooney stares at Rocketman holding a bag of hashish, a wet apparition in helmet and cape. Nose level with Mickey Rooney’s shiny black shoes, Slothrop looks up into the lit room behind—sees somebody looks a bit like Churchill, lotta dames in evening gowns cut so low that even from this angle you can see more tits than they got at Minsky’s . . . and maybe, maybe he even gets a glimpse of that President Truman. He knows he is seeing Mickey Rooney, though Mickey Rooney, wherever he may go, will repress the fact that he ever saw Slothrop. It is an extraordinary moment. Slothrop feels he ought to say something, but his speech centers have fa
iled him in a drastic way. Somehow, “Hey, you’re Mickey Rooney,” seems inadequate. So they stay absolutely still, victory’s night blowing by around them, and the great in the yellow electric room scheming on oblivious.
Slothrop breaks it first: puts a finger to his mouth and scuttles away, back around the villa and down to the shore, leaving Mickey Rooney with his elbows on that railing, still watching.
Back around the wire, avoiding sentries, close to the water’s edge, swinging the ditty bag by its drawstring, some vague idea in his head now of finding another boat and just rowing back up that Havel—sure! Why not? It isn’t till he hears distant conversation from another villa that it occurs to him he might be straying into the Russian part of the compound.
“Hmm,” opines Slothrop, “well in that case I had better—”
Here comes that wiener again. Shapes only a foot away—they might have risen up out of the water. He spins around, catches sight of a broad, clean-shaven face, hair combed lionlike straight back, glimmering steel teeth, eyes black and soft as that Carmen Miranda’s—
“Yes,” no least accent to his English whispering, “you were followed all the way.” Others have grabbed Slothrop’s arms. High in the left one he feels something sharp, almost painless, very familiar. Before his throat can stir, he’s away, on the Wheel, clutching in terror to the dwindling white point of himself, in the first windrush of anaesthesia, hovering coyly over the pit of Death. . . .
• • • • • • •
A soft night, smeared full of golden stars, the kind of night back on the pampas that Leopoldo Lugones liked to write about. The U-boat rocks quietly on the surface. The only sounds are the chug of the “billy-goat,” cutting in now and then below decks, pumping out the bilges, and El Ñato back on the fantail with his guitar, playing Buenos Aires tristes and milongas. Beláustegui is down working on the generator. Luz and Felipe are asleep.
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