Overreach’s eyes narrowed to cruel diamonds, cold in the face of a basilisk certain that he is God. And his voice, when he spoke, surged with omnipotence. “Up yours, Suss! Get out!”
Dichotomous Susskind, taken aback, snapped a finger at his special assistant, who promptly said “overweening,” but while the great producer was composing a sentence in which he could use it, he saw something irresistibly confident and threatening in Overreach’s face that compelled him to back quietly out of the room, strangely awed.
Overreach stood up, his head and shoulders imperious, and in a voice oddly thickened he husked, “Now I am Caesar!”
* * *
In an adjoining building the Smedley V hugged itself as it processed registration cards. An advanced model, it had been equipped with electro-shock tentacles for purposes of self-defense against an “unjust aggressor.” Who would want to attack me? it was given to wondering; am I not wondrous lovable? Am I not more adorable than kittens’ paws? The details of its predecessor’s demise had been carefully withheld from it, lest acute psychosis ensue, and it brooded over why it had been programmed to throw up a force field upon the appearance of humanoid shapes without necks. Nobody ever tells me anything, it flickered irritably.
The Smedley V paused over a registration card, ions pulsing across punch holes. A discrepancy? Can there be any such name? It coughed out the card into a REJECT basket.
* * *
John Goldfarb, alias Rhett Birnbaum, stretched out on his dormitory bunk and dreamed of himself flashing across goal lines and then being ravished in the end zone by a worshiping Haya Condios. He had not seen her following him out of Overreach’s office.
Chapter Five
HAYA CONDIOS, whose real name was Jenny Ericson, flounced into the New York office of her Strife magazine editor and tossed a file onto his desk like Salome carelessly flipping the head of John the Baptist into her mother’s lap. “The bundle on Mr. O., Chris—as seen by his ‘private secretary’!” She flopped into a brown leather chair that hated her and smirked luxuriously, primping her rolled-up bun of hair. “Well?” she prodded. “No huzzahs?”
“Huzzah,” murmured Chris Bright weakly.
“He never caught on for a second.”
“You’re as good as Fred Demara.”
“Like hitting an elephant with a banjo. Good God is that man dense!”
“The article is a blast, then?” The editor’s voice held out the dismal promise of an empty piñata.
“Of course it’s a blast!” hooted Jenny.
“What a waste,” muttered Bright, flipping a paper clip moodily into a wastepaper basket. The clip’s gentle “ping” hardened the wax of suspicion in Jenny’s ear.
“What do you mean?” she pried, her eyes narrowing.
The editor stared out the window like one hopelessly searching for Harold Lloyd on the ledge. “We can’t run it,” he said bleakly.
“What?” she gasped.
“Not!” he affirmed.
“But you haven’t even read it!”
“Machts nichts,” growled Bright. He could also say “buongiorno,” and thought himself grand.
Jenny leaped up like an angry beanstalk. “Louder—and funnier!”
“Siddown!”
She sat, largely because it was easier to glower from a sitting position, and the brown chair grunted spitefully, wishing it were a bed of nails and not dull. It loathed female journalists.
Bright reached for a cigarette, but “Shnook, I will give you cancer!” hissed the grainy shreds of tobacco and, changing his mind, he went for his pipe instead. The cigarettes, sighing, resumed their debate over filters and the morality of jack-booted musicians trampling through tobacco fields. Nicotine stained curses and cries of “Point of order!” rattled the interior of the crushproof box.
“The President’s decided to surround himself with a university brain trust,” began Bright, dipping the pipe bowl into a plastic tobacco pouch.
“I know that!” fumed Jenny Ericson.
“He’s offered Overreach a top post,” Bright continued.
“Are you crazy?” erupted Jenny. “Overreach is no egghead, he’s a dunce!”
“That’s the point, boobala! We know that! But the world can’t know it!”
Jenny snorted like Midas contemplating tin. “Who are you kidding, Chris! Since when has patriotism ever moved your bowels!”
“Will you shut up and listen?” shrilled Bright. Jenny folded her arms with an aggressive efficiency that made the brown chair want to throw up. She kept still as Bright momentously tamped his tobacco and lighted a match.
“We’ve got the best writer-photographers in the country,” he lied. “Best—bar none. Which means we’ve got some nuts on the staff, and shut up!” He interrupted her before she could interrupt. He put match to tobacco and puffed, for the possibility that plants had souls had never disturbed his sleep at all. “Maybe some were Commies,” he resumed; “maybe some worship armpits. I don’t know and I don’t care. But it could lay us wide open to retaliation by Mr. O.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Was U. S. Steel?”
“Chris, how in blazes could——”
“Overreach has been appointed head of CIA.”
Jenny Ericson shut her mouth. The brown chair couldn’t believe it. The cigarettes quietly crumpled, but the crushproof box defended its reputation.
Unexpectedly, Bright beamed. “Ready now for your consolation prize?”
Jenny puckered.
“We checked out that candid snap of Rhett Birnbaum.”
“Yes?” breathed Jenny expectantly.
“You’re right—he’s a dead ringer for the Ambrose Bierce of the football world, Wrong-Way Goldfarb.”
Jenny gasped.
“Uh-huh,” nodded Bright. “Could be. So hustle your fanny back to Sub U. and dig.”
Jenny’s smile was the icy deviltry of a piranha eying a finny glitter of goldfish choosing up sides for a game of touch tag.
Chapter Six
ON THE third Saturday of September, “Rhett Birnbaum” smothered Stanford with five touchdowns. A week later he destroyed UCLA with six. And the week after that he ran riot against Baylor with eight. “Rhett Birnbaum” was in love.
Miss Condios, on “instruction from Mr. Weed,” had become his guide to Los Angeles. Together they passed hours and days examining spiteful-fanged sabertooths in the La Brea Tar Pits, scuffing over inlaid gold stars on Hollywood and Vine, and hissing at biceps at Pismo Beach.
Goldfarb never uttered of his ecstasy. They never touched. She was a cool, detached maiden from some Arthurian legend, and he imagined himself a Lancelot with scruples. He planned to stun her with heroic deeds and then vanish into the wilds of Palm Springs, waiting for her to find him and adore, blubbering.
The night before the Notre Dame game they supped at a dramatic Sunset Strip bistro. A violin sang poignantly of love, and Jenny, eying Goldfarb in the flickering candlelight, feigned an awed sigh. “You’re so great, Rhett. Almost the greatest.”
Goldfarb’s eyebrow rose ever so slightly, and he forced himself to stare at his fingernails. “Almost?” he whispered, as he’d heard Randolph Scott do a hundred times.
“Oh, well,” said Jenny with the air of the obvious, “there’s only one Wrong-Way Goldfarb. Or there was.”
The candlelight, the cue, and the violinist playing “None But the Lonely Heart” removed all power of choice. John Goldfarb slowly raised his eyes to Jenny’s and uttered softly, “I am he!”
The following afternoon “Rhett Birnbaum” galloped 95 yards into his own end zone, giving Notre Dame the margin of victory. Haya Condios disappeared. And a week later Strife magazine featured a cover story bannered: WRONG-WAY GOLDFARB RIDES AGAIN!
John Goldfarb turned a quiet corner and kept walking.
Chapter Seven
AN AGING eagle, restless with his lot, perched on the limb of a barren fig tree and dreamed of himself rampant on the banners of Ro
man legions. He glowered at the Fawzi Arabian desert stretched beneath him, his diseased kidney pulsating in time with the slow shimmerings of heat rising up from dunes. “I never asked to be born into this world,” he brooded. Then, belching demurely, he turned his thoughts to squealing piglets, hysterical beneath the shadow of his great wings. He also tried to think of chipmunks but, never having seen one, encountered considerable difficulty and had the good sense to desist before severe headache set in. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across—” the rest of the line eluded him and he gave it up.
The fig tree clung rooted beside a dirt road that stretched to infinity in two directions, and where it touched the southerly horizon a column of dust spiraled up angrily, swirling closer, faster. The eagle shifted irritably. “Let me live in a house by the side of the road——” he began, but suddenly flapped, screaming, into the sky as a jeep containing two men roared past the tree, churning up dust in its wake.
Northward, two proud-nosed Bedouin warriors looked up silently at the circling, screeching eagle and wondered; for it was their habit to wonder. And at the sound of the charging jeep they hurled black, burning stares down the road and unlimbered their rifles, for it was their duty to guard the approaches to the November palace of King Fawz. On roared the jeep, and one of the Bedouins, whose name was Abdelrahman and liked it, threw up his arm in a command to halt. Tires screeched, and erupted, and Abdelrahman now had a foreign body in his eye. He rubbed it, cursing.
“Official business!” barked the jeep’s driver, a sun-bronzed young man in the khaki livery of the American Embassy.
Abdelrahman’s companion, who refused even to think about his name, stood quietly deliberating the propriety of asking for a cigarette, while Abdelrahman himself sauntered to the side of the jeep and thoughtfully tapped his rifle butt against the Great Seal of the United States. Then he rubbed a forefinger into his moist, red eye and, brooding slitheringly on the spurn that patient merit of the unworthy takes, he waved the jeep on. It spurted away in a burst of sand and closed his other eye.
“All this Mickey Mouse security,” complained the driver.
“Understandable,” temporized his companion, a florid-faced gentleman wearing baggy seersuckers, Panama hat, and frazzled expression. With one hand he steadied two cardboard cartons that were resting on the back seat. “Old Fawz and the Imam of Doom have——”
“Sir?”
“Doom. They’ve been squabbling over a strip of disputed oil land along the border. And the Imam’s traditional instrument of diplomacy is six inches of Damascus steel. And things.”
“Oh.”
“Indeed. The Imam is very, very wickie.” He clutched at his hat as they bounced over a pothole. “Try to miss the next one, would you?”
“Yes, sir.” The driver shook his head. “These people sure have funny ways.”
“You’re new here; you’ll learn. And perhaps you’d best bear in mind a little story I once heard.”
“Yes, sir?”
“As the story goes, a—look out, there’s another one!” They missed the pothole by millimeters and the Panama hat sighed. “Well,” he resumed, “it seems that a frog is approached by a scorpion who asks if he’ll carry him on his back across the Nile. ‘No,’ says the frog. ‘Halfway across you’ll whip out your stinger, and I’m dead.’ ‘Look, stupid!’ says the scorpion, ‘if I did that, I’d drown too!’ So the frog agrees and starts swimming across the Nile with the scorpion on his back. And halfway across, the scorpion whips out his stinger and promptly stabs the frog. ‘You promised you wouldn’t do that!’ gurgles the frog. ‘Now we’ll both drown.’ ‘I know,’ replies the scorpion, ‘but this is the Middle East!’”
The driver, who was not wise, was about to question the point of the story when the man beside him suddenly whipped off his hat and used it to beat away an eccentric eagle that had apparently taken it into its head to simulate a carrier-landing on the hood of the jeep.
“Shoo! Scat!”
The eagle, which had wanted no more than to assume a striking pose on the jeep’s radiator cap, flapped skyward to contemplate the problem of evil, and the jeep ascended an abrupt rise, turned sharply, and was confronted by a formidable iron gate that opened into a massive, walled city beyond. Bedouin guards leaped up to challenge, and a leader of the group, a man who would have been proud of his name had he been able to remember it, quickly took in the Great Seal and stared up at the man in the Panama. “Imshi, yaa beek!” he cried. “Imshi!”
“What?”
The Bedouin waved them on impatiently. “Go, go!”
The gate swung open and the jeep vanished into the area beyond. The leader of the Bedouins watched its dust trail contemptuously. “Fife year he is ambassador here,” he sneered in pointed English; “still he cannot speak Arabic!”
“What?” asked another Bedouin in Arabic, and his leader boxed his skull.
A half mile beyond the gate the jeep halted abruptly with a jarring bounce.
“What the hell is that—sir?”
The ambassador answered with a rhetorical look.
“In Fawzi Arabia?” squeaked the driver incredulously.
They both stared out at the newly leveled site where Arab workmen, damp in sweat-stained floppy tunics and kaffiyehs, were rolling out matted blankets of sod, positioning tackling dummies, and setting up goal posts. “The King’s favorite son—the one who saved his life once during an uprising—he’s matriculated at Notre Dame.”
“But what’s——?”
“Come on, come on! I’m in a hurry!”
The jeep jerked forward, bouncing the cartons against the back seat, and the ambassador steadied them. Ahead loomed the sprawling palace of King Fawz, its fairyland spires and lascivious domes breathing intimations of concubinage and excess.
“The boy’s made the football squad,” explained the ambassador quietly. “Coming home on vacation soon and old Fawz decided he should stay in trim.”
The driver whistled in soft amazement. “Is that far out or is it!”
The ambassador turned to eye him. “Where were you stationed previously?”
“Tokyo, sir.”
“You’re in for some surprises. Wait until you’ve met His Majesty.”
“A kook, sir?”
“What is a kook?”
“A screaming nut, sir.”
“Pinkerton, your lightning insights leave me breathless.”
They beetled to a grainy halt before the palace steps. The hand brake craawked beneath Pinkerton’s expert hand and there was stillness.
The ambassador stared through the windshield at the distant football field. “His Majesty has requested pro football game films through Point Four,” he intoned expressionlessly. Then he looked at Pinkerton. “So he’ll know.”
He climbed down out of the jeep.
Pinkerton lifted out the cartons and started to carry them up the steps when the ambassador grabbed them from his hands. “No, no; I’ll take them in. Wait out here.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ambassador, lugging the cartons by their protruding grips, ascended steps of veined green-and-white Jordanian marble. “I am expensive, I am expensive…” whispered each step as he trod upon it, and I know, I know … thought the ambassador in reply. He achieved the summit and oozed through wide portals to the palace foyer.
Mustafa Guz, the King’s aide, waddled wide-eyed across the room, his arms outstretched in greeting. His massive belly cleaved the sultry air before him in jiggling bursts and the tassels of his red shoes snickered against slightly uneven mosaics of gold-and-ivory tile.
“Ah, Ambassador Cronkite! What a pleasure!” The tips of his fingers struggled for a grip on Subtle Cronkite’s shoulders as the ambassador set down the cartons and fumbled for a handkerchief.
“Hello, Guz, how’s the boy?”
“Middling. Yourself?”
“Hot.”
Cronkite mopped his brow. Guz stared down at the cartons and the
n lifted a quizzical eyebrow at him. “From the Vice-President of the United States,” explained Cronkite. “Birthday gift for His Majesty.”
“Ahh! Charming!”
“I’m to deliver greetings. May I see him?”
Twin bats of apprehension flitted across the surface of the aide’s eyes, then vanished into the black pools of his pupils with a leathery rustling of wings. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t dare disturb him!”
“Now look, Guz, I’ve come sixty miles through dust and——”
“Ah! You’ll stay the night, then! And perhaps in——?”
“Oh really, Guz, I can’t. I’ve got to get back immediately!”
Guz fidgeted clasped hands across his stomach and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Cronkite, exasperated, eyed him for a long moment, beating the Excalibur of his will against impenetrable Saracen walls. Then he gave it up. “Very well, then.”
Guz looked relieved, then indicated the cartons with a delicate gesture. “May I ask…?”
“Matching luggage.”
“Ah!”
“Yes.”
Cronkite wondered what Guz was thinking, but there was no reading him. In five years at this post he had learned that it was impossible to read any of them, at any time, under any circumstances, and he idly ruminated the baffling consequences of Arabs playing charades.… Guz was still contemplating the luggage in silent ponder and Cronkite itched to be gone. These silences always set him on edge. They all did it: clammed up right in the middle of a conversation to brood on things hidden since the foundation of the world. Cronkite wondered how Perle Mesta would handle them, and shuddered. He was a good sort, Guz—Harrow, Cambridge—quite Westernized, really; but deep down in his pointed shoes he was one of them.…
Cronkite awoke to find himself staring at the aide’s shoes, and looked up quickly. Guz was watching him. The ambassador reddened.
“And now, if you’ll forgive me…” he hemmed.
“Of course.”
They bowed formally, and Cronkite turned and strode briskly away, the aide’s stare warm on his back. At the portals he turned for an afterthought.
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home Page 4