Goldfarb traced a finger along Jenny’s arm, lightly. “Yeah,” he said, “he might.” He kissed her hair softly.
“Goldfarb.”
“Yes.”
“I’m——”
Reflected sunlight made her blink, and she threw up a shielding hand. Suddenly her eyes dilated with amazement. Naked beneath a flaw in the plastering of the sphinx lay a patch of gleaming blue metal stamped: U-2 RECON …
She tried to sound casual. “What were you doing at CIA that day?” She felt him stiffening under her hands.
“What?”
“That day we ran into each other at State—you had it written on that piece of——”
“You’re mistaken!”
“I am not.”
“You are!”
“Why does he call you ‘Agajanian’?”
“Who?”
“Cardinal Spellman, who do you think?”
“I dunno. He’s eccentric.”
She fixed him with an odd stare. “I’m broiling,” she said expressionlessly; “let’s go.”
* * *
In the throne room Subtle Cronkite mopped his brow with a handkerchief and stifled his yearning to emit a thin, piercing scream.
“More rose water?” inquired Guz solicitously, lifting a carafe and tilting it to pour-readiness.
“I do believe I will,” murmured Cronkite.
Fawz watched him gulp it down and fussed impatiently. “Yes, yes, yes? No, no, no! Hurry!”
Cronkite mopped his brow again. “Your Majesty,” he explained jerkily: “the Point Four program has certain—limitations. I must regretfully repeat—I must, you see—that your request is—ah—” He groped for a sufficiently delicate and ambiguous word, playing for time by taking another sip of rose water. “Ah, yes,” he resumed, “inappropriate.”
Fawz turned to Guz and spoke grimly in Arabic, in which he was wondrous fluent: “Khallais min hel farooba! Illoh il chachacha Fawz U. byiloubu, gigil veronel foos!”
Guz cleared his throat and turned unreadable eyes on Cronkite. “His Supreme Majesty begs to remind your government that the only possibility of reopening negotiations on the proposed air base depends solely and finally on the ability of your government to arrange a football game between Fawz U. and Notre Dame.”
Cronkite dipped his handkerchief in the carafe of rose water and then quietly ate it.
“Be sure he reads the card,” murmured Guz in an inscrutable undertone.
* * *
“All okay. Film go to America.”
“Peachy,” replied Jenny tersely. She was surrounded by stacks of old newspapers and wore a look triumphant.
“All fix you go too.”
“I’ve decided to stay awhile.”
Samir shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever. Easy come, easy go.” He padded away silently.
Jenny smirked down at the ads she had circled. One version read: JOHN GOLDFARB, PLEASE COME HOME! and was signed “Mother.” The second version, the later one, was slightly different:
* * *
JOHN GOLDFARB, WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME!
(signed) All of the Gang
P.S. We miss you, guy!
* * *
Chapter Thirty-one
ASHLEY ENTERED briskly and extended a memo. “Urgent, sir; from the SecState.”
Whitepaper, in a gay mood, took the memo smiling. “Thank you, my good man; grazie, grazie.”
Ashley stepped outside and waited.
* * *
In another part of the building Deems Sarajevo sat hunched over his desk in cabalistic conclave with Heinous Overreach. Suddenly Sarajevo stopped talking and cocked his head. “Listen—did you hear something?”
“No,” grunted Overreach, “what?”
“I—I don’t quite know how to describe it. It was—like the cry of some strange animal in pain.”
Overreach snorted. “You’ve been in the Congo too long.”
Sarajevo was sharpening his tongue for reply when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Sarajevo here.”
The Secretary of State’s eyes bugged out. “Whitepaper!” he rasped. “Don’t you know better than to discuss classified information over the telephone!”
Overreach could overhear a whining voice leaking through from the other end of the line.
“It may be a disaster,” barked Sarajevo, “but it is not a mistake! Now handle it!”
More whining.
“Yours is not to reason why!” shrieked Sarajevo. “Now do it, dammit, just do it!”
He slammed the receiver into its cradle and looked ashamed of himself. Overreach eyed him smugly.
“You and your striped-trouser boys!”
“You and your classified ads!”
* * *
Yookoomian poked his head into Whitepaper’s office. “I’ve got your party at South Bend, sir.”
Whitepaper lifted his head from his desk top and slowly picked up the telephone.
“Father Hesburgh?… Miles Whitepaper, Department of State.… No, no—my pleasure…”
Whitepaper took a deep breath, gulped, and plunged ahead, speaking rapidly without pause for a full minute. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair and listened, ashen-faced.
“Oh.… You—you don’t play bowl games.…”
Chapter Thirty-two
HE COULD have been Lord Jim watching the Patna go down. Or Calvin Coolidge reading an invitation to appear on “Open End.”
“You took pictures of me?” choked Goldfarb.
“How did I know you were a U-2 pilot?” pleaded Jenny.
“You sent pictures of me to that goddam magazine?”
“I never mentioned your name!” she bawled defensively. “I called you ‘Griswold Love’!”
“But it’s my picture!” he shrilled. “They’ll see my picture!” Then he collapsed, groaning, onto a hassock.
“Now what in hell is your problem?” cried Jenny. “Who’d recognize you outside of the nuts who sent you here?”
“They didn’t send me here!” raved Goldfarb. He thrust an arm out, pointing north. “They sent me there! There! And I don’t want them to know I’m here!”
“You are nuts.”
His voice fell to a murmur. “Don’t you understand? Wrong-Way Goldfarb does it again—right? Wrong-Way Goldfarb louses up the Cold War—right? Right?” He put his head into his hands. “Agajanian’s a nice name; I like it.”
When he looked up again she was gone.
* * *
Jenny roamed the harem, looking for Samir, hoping to get the pictures back. But he was not in evidence. Another custodian lurked in the shadows, someone dressed like Samir, but not Samir at all; his eyes were close-set and small, and he stood in the center of a shuffleboard square, his head cocked at an angle as though listening to an invisible choir; or twangling instruments.
Jenny marched briskly to Sable, who was squatting on cushions, playing bridge.
“Bloody French cards,” she was grumbling as Jenny knelt beside her; “jacks look like queens, queens look like——”
“Sable, where’s Samir?”
Sable turned to eye her. “’Bout time you got back.”
“Sable! Where’s——”
“Play, play, Queen Vic-tor-i-a!” snarled Miss Touloos, munching at a slice of salami plain. Sable threw a card and turned a meaningful eye on Jenny: “Nep-o-tism.”
“What?”
“Your trick, Lady Chattersley!” thrust Miss Touloos, and Sable swept in the cards and played one from her hand. “’Im and that Mahmoud,” she continued; “they was fee-splittin’! Sneakin’ cousins and nieces in ’ere and greasin’ off thirty per cent!”
Jenny clutched Sable’s shoulder. “Sable, please, where is he?”
“With ’is bloomin’ ancestors,” snapped Sable. “And so’s Mahmoud.” She reached for a trick, but Miss Touloos slapped her hand.
“I played the queen!” squealed Sable.
“Eez not queen,
” gloated Miss Touloos, lifting Jenny’s head up off the cards and sliding in the trick. “Eez jhock!”
She led out a black king.
* * *
“Did he guggle?” asked the Imam softly, cradling the pink telephone in long, tapered fingers.
“No,” whispered Ibn Caliban at the other end of the line.
“Ben Gurion!” sibbed the Imam, for it was the most hideous thing he could think of.
“He called for someone,” whispered the new eunuch of the Fawzian harem; “at the end, he called for someone.”
“Who?”
“A Miss Beaver.”
“He loved her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Thank heaven for small favors.”
“Anything else, Your Imamship?”
The Imam suddenly grew crafty. “Hear anything lately?”
There was a wary pause at the other end. “Oh—just the proper things.”
“Just the proper things,” echoed the Imam.
“Yes.”
“No twangling instruments?”
“No.”
“Very well,” sighed the Imam, unable to trap him. “Iggle.”
“Iggle.”
The Imam hung up the phone, handing it, like a celebrity at Sardi’s, to a hooded flunky who gathered up its yards of extension cord and carried it from the room. Then, cupping jowls in his hand, he scruted the immobile phalanx of toes below him.
The voice of Uris floated up in troubled accents. “I don’t like it, Holmes; I don’t like it!”
“Make it good,” threatened the Imam.
“Phones can be tapped.”
“So can your skull. You have an alternative?”
“Send Fawz gifts of concubines. Then we——”
“Is this going to be like the horse?” interrupted the Imam, baring his teeth.
“Forget it,” mumbled Uris.
The Imam belched, dreaming of new worlds to horrify.
Chapter Thirty-three
ANGINA, MUSSED, giggled in the darkness.
“What?” whispered Ashley.
“Nothing.”
“What!”
“Oh—you know.”
“C’mon, what?”
“Well, it’s—Ashley, it is a funny place to be doing it. Ya know? I mean, it’s like doing it in Grant’s Tomb.”
“But this isn’t Grant’s Tomb.”
“I know.”
It was the Jefferson Memorial.
“If your folks would just get to bed at a decent hour…” grumbled Ashley.
“Gosh, how can Daddy sleep, worrying about all that crazy Arabian jazz? If he could only figure out what’s going on there!”
“We know what’s going on there,” growled Ashley. “They’ve got a football team that wants to play Notre Dame.”
Angina puckered her mouth in faint contempt. “Oh, Ashley, that’s crazy! There’s something else back of it! That’s what Daddy thinks!”
Ashley looked stern. “That’s classified information.”
“Oh, well, it’s family.”
“Bullshit.”
“Ashley, that isn’t couth.”
“I went to school with one of them.”
“One of who?”
“The Fawzians. Prince Ammud.”
“Really?” gleamed Angina. “Gosh, he’s the one started the whole thing! Daddy thinks——”
“Angina, we shouldn’t be discussing classified information in the Jefferson Memorial!”
“I hear tourists coming! Freeze!”
In Pompeii, it might have worked.
* * *
Angina padded into the kitchen to brew hot chocolate and discovered her father raiding the refrigerator. He wore rumpled trousers, a T shirt out at the waist, and lamb’s-wool slippers. His eyes were puffed from lack of sleep.
“You bring that creep home with you?” he growled.
“Ashley’s not a creep!” bridled Angina, moving to the cupboard for a saucepan. “Mom in bed?”
“No. D.A.R. meeting.”
Angina filled the pan with tap water. “For your information,” she sulked, “Ashley probably knows whole lots more about that crazy Arab thing than your whole agency.”
“I don’t have to take that crap from my own daughter!” shrilled Heinous Overreach, slamming the refrigerator door so that it caught the crease in his trousers.
Ashley suddenly materialized, leaning in the kitchen doorway. “Hi!” he grinned.
Overreach eyed him malevolently, yanking his trousers free. “So what do you know that I don’t!” he rasped.
Ashley looked bewildered and Angina rushed into the breach. “He’s a bosom pal of that Prince what’s-his-name, that’s all!”
Overreach looked stunned, and then gradually cunning, a milk bottle gripped in his hand like creamy state secrets.
“Ammud?”
Ashley nodded mutely.
Hope tickled the back of Overreach’s neck, and he pulled the cap off the milk bottle and drank straight from its throat. Then he leered over the bottletop, murmuring through white-smeared lips, “Let’s play spy!”
Ashley stiffened, looking pious. “Sir, do you think we should be discussing classified information in——”
“You snotty little son of a bitch!” spat Overreach.
“Father!” screeched Angina.
Chapter Thirty-four
COLDLY AND irritably, Goldfarb laid out his nightly centipede of pillows. “Don’t tell me your troubles,” he mouthed crisply; “I’ve got enough of my own.”
“I sorry.”
She sat on the edge of the bed in childlike misery.
“Forget it.” He slammed a pillow down savagely and flopped down on his bed of pain.
“You can sleep on the bed,” piped Jenny timidly.
“I never sleep with asps!” thrust Goldfarb. Then he tried to sleep. But an onsurge of sobbing balked his efforts. “Cut it out,” he gruffed. “You’re going to be okay.”
The sobs persisted.
“Look, will you cut it out? As long as you’re with me you’re safe!”
“It isn’t thaaaaat!” bawled Jenny from the bed.
“Well then, what, for heaven’s sake?”
“No one’s ever called me an assssp beforrrrrrre!”
Goldfarb propped his head on an elbow, listening to her unashamed weeping. “There we were,” he mumbled to himself, “a thin, red line…” Suddenly he leaped up, clomped over to the bed, and stared down helplessly at her sobbing, sprawling frame, the pillow wet now with her tears. Tears baffled him. He felt like a department-store Santa, on his knee the girl pleading for a “real talking doll,” behind her the charwoman mother in the patched and repatched cotton dress, the threadbare babushka, the hopeless eyes. “Will you cut it out? I’m sorry!”
“No, you’re nooooooooott!”
“I am, I am!” he yelped. Then he climbed onto the bed. “See?” he cajoled roughly. “I’m sleeping in the bed! It wasn’t your fault, I forgive you!”
“You hate me!”
“No, I don’t!” he yipped.
“But you don’t like me!” she blubbered.
“Why shouldn’t I like you!” bellowed Goldfarb.
“Because I got them calling you ‘Wrong-Way’ agaaaaiiinnnnn!”
“I love the name ‘Wrong-Way’!” he thundered. “I love it, I love it, I love it!”
Jenny’s weeping abruptly tapered to the narrow end of sighs, and she turned moist eyes on him. “You’re a [sniffle] nice person.”
“Thank you,” he intoned fatuously. And, sighing, closed his eyes to sleep.
She lay watching him for several minutes. “Are you asleep?” she prodded at last.
“Yes.”
“I can’t.”
“Count humps.”
She sighed, then turned over on her back, staring up at some rather thought-provoking ceiling mosaics depicting nymphs and satyrs in poses not foreign to them. She felt vaguely surprised that she w
as not shocked.
There followed an extended silence.
“Goldfarb?”
“Umm.”
“Could you be—real strong if—if I were to tell you something sort of—sick?”
His voice was muffled in his pillow. “After eight hours of ‘didahowatrowa,’ I challenge you to make me sick.”
Her shy hand reached out to his shoulder tentatively, and then gripped it with firm pressure. “Well, the word around the harem is—I mean, the team the King wants you to play…”
“Don’t tell me—there is a Baghdad Tech.”
“N—no,” she stammered.
Creepy, spooky, slithering prickles commenced a forced march up the column of his spine, death’s-head banners flying. “Then who?”
She told him. And slowly, agonizingly, the U-2 pilot’s hand groped upward along the wooden bedpost, a bloodless, veined, writhing claw; upward, upward until the bedpost crackled, splintering, breaking in a spray of flying particles, ripping away in his demented clutch. Jenny put an arm around the sobbing U-2 pilot and pressed her face against his. “You poor thing,” she crooned, over and over again; “you poor, poor thing…”
Sudden blasts of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” routed them both, sent them flying under the bedcovers. “We’ll play the banjo gaily, we’ll sing the songs of…”
The cart brass-banded past the door, fading, fading, fading.
“He’s gone,” said Goldfarb crisply, still hugging Jenny to him. Adrenalin had cleansed him of self-pity.
“Hm-hmmmm,” throated Jenny, eying him as though it were a soft summer evening, she were Europa, and he were no bull.
His gaze brushed lightly over her face. “But he might come back,” he whispered.
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home Page 12