GRAVITY RAINBOW (67 page)

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 Saure 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 failed 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 conies 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 Nato back on the fantail with his guitar, playing Buenos Aires tristes and milongas. Belaustegui is down working on the generator. Luz and Felipe are asleep.

By the 20 mm mounts, Graciela Imago Portales lounges wistfully. In her day she was the urban idiot of B.A., threatening nobody, friends with everybody across the spectrum, from Cipriano Reyes, who intervened for her once, to Accion Argentina, which she worked for before it got busted. She was a particular favorite of the literati. Borges is said to have dedicated a poem to her ("El laberinto de tu incertidumbre/ Me trama con la disquietante luna…").

The crew that hijacked this U-boat are here out of all kinds of Argentine manias. El Nato goes around talking in 19th-century gaucho slang-cigarettes are "pitos," butts are "puchos," it isn't cana he drinks but "la tacuara," and when he's drunk he's "mamao." Sometimes Felipe has to translate for him. Felipe is a difficult young poet with any number of unpleasant enthusiasms, among them romantic and unreal notions about the gauchos. He is always sucking up to El Nato. Belaustegui, acting ship's engineer, is from Entre Rios, and a positivist in the regional tradition. A pretty good knife-hand for a prophet of

science too, which is one reason El Nato hasn't made a try yet for the godless Mesopotamian Bolshevik. It is a strain on their solidarity, but then it's only one of several. Luz is currently with Felipe, though she's supposed to be Squalidozzi's girl-after Squalidozzi disappeared on his trip to Zurich she took up with the poet on the basis of a poignant recitation of Lugones's "Pavos Reales," one balmy night lying to off Matosinhos. For this crew, nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive.

Squalidozzi did show up again though, in Bremerhaven. He had just been chased across what was left of Germany by British Military Intelligence, with no idea why.

"Why didn't you go to Geneva, and try to get through to us?"

"I didn't want to lead them to Ibarguengoitia. I sent someone else."

"Who?" Belaustegui wanted to know.

"I never got his name." Squalidozzi scratched his shaggy head. "Maybe it was a stupid thing to do."

"No further contact with him?"

"None at all."

"They'll be watching us, then," Belaustegui sullen. "Whoever he is, he's hot. You're a fine judge of character."

"What did you want me to do: take him to a psychiatrist first? Weigh options? Sit around for a few weeks and
think
about it?"

"He's right," El Nato raising a large fist. "Let women do their thinking, their analyzing. A man must always go forward, looking Life directly in the face."

"You're disgusting," said Graciela Imago Portales. "You're not a man, you're a sweaty
horse."

"Thank you," El Nato bowing, in all gaucho dignity.

Nobody was yelling. The conversation in the steel space that night was full of quiet damped
ss
and palatal
ys,
the peculiar, reluctant poignancy of Argentine Spanish, brought along through years of frustrations, self-censorship, long roundabout evasions of political truth-of bringing the State to live in the muscles of your tongue, in the humid intimacy just inside your lips… pero che, no sos argentine…

In Bavaria, Squalidozzi was stumbling through the outskirts of a town, only minutes ahead of a Rolls Royce with a sinister dome in the roof, green Perspex you couldn't see through. It was just after sunset. All at once he heard gunshots, hoofbeats, nasal and metallic voices in English. But the quaint little town seemed deserted. How could this be? He entered a brick labyrinth that had been a harmonica factory. Splashes of bell-metal lay forever unrung in the foundry dirt. Against a high wall that had recently been painted white, the shadows of horses and their riders drummed. Sitting watching, from workbenches and crates, were a dozen individuals Squalidozzi recognized right away as gangsters. Cigar-ends glowed, and molls whispered back and forth in German. The men ate sausages, ripping away the casings with white teeth, well cared for, that flashed in the light from the movie. They were sporting the Caligari gloves which now enjoy a summer vogue in the Zone: bone white, except for the four lines in deep violet fanning up each gloveback from wrist to knuckles. All wore suits nearly as light-colored as the teeth. It seemed extravagant to Squalidozzi, after Buenos Aires and Zurich. The women crossed their legs often: they were tense as vipers. In the air was a grassy smell, a smell of leaves burning, that was strange to the Argentine who, terminally homesick, had only the smell of freshly brewed mate after a bitter day at the racetrack to connect it with. Crowned window frames gave out on the brick factory courtyard where summer air moved softly. The filmlight flickered blue across empty windows as if it were breath trying to produce a note. The images grew blunt with vengeance. "Yay!" screamed all the zootsters, white gloves bouncing up and down. Their mouths and eyes were as wide as children's.

The reel ended, but the space stayed dark. An enormous figure in a white zoot suit stood, stretched, and ambled right over to where Squalidozzi was crouching, terrified.