Nowhere (17 page)

The message I came up with was crafted from bygone slang of the 1930’s and ‘40’s, which would be instantly intelligible to any Yank however young, owing to nostalgia-film programs, but would surely be nonsensical language to one who had learned his English abroad.

SCREWBALLS VS. GOOFS. WOULD

NIX MOOLAH FOR ALL. UNCLE

DUDLEY FEELS LIKE SAP, WANTS

TO TAKE POWDER.

I handed the form to the clerk. “Please send this literally, letter by letter. Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to say anything understandable to you, even if you think you’re fluent in English.”

He took it and held it high, in two hands, for a perusal. When he was done he winced and shook his head. “I’d think the Firm might have come up with a better code than this.”

“What do you know about it?” I asked hotly. “That’s impenetrable, if I do say so myself.”

“I’m afraid no one else would,” said he. “It’s pathetically pellucid. You dismiss them all as eccentrics and wouldn’t give money to any of them. You feel like a fool and want to go home.”

I scowled at him. “Are you another ex-GI who was stranded here when the war ended?”

“I’m too young for that. But I have seen many of your motion pictures, including the excellent Boston Blackie films starring Chester Morris. Also those of Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Frazee, Vera Hruba Ralston—”

“Just a moment,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “What do you take me for? You’re making up those names. I’m a native American filmgoer, yet I’ve never heard of these people.”

“So much the worse for you,” said the clerk. “May I suggest you visit one of our cinemas during your stay in Saint Sebastian and acquire an education in your own movies. We have the very latest. Showing at the moment is the latest in the series about Rosie the Riveter. There’s a new Western starring Johnny Mack Brown, and others with Charles Starrett, Bob Steele...”

These names being meaningless to me (I who, along with everyone else of a certain culture in New York, regard myself as a scholar of the films of Bogie, Bette, Coop, Hitch,
et al.),
I asked, “Are you speaking in some kind of code?”

He sighed. “What can I say if the leading artists of your own country are unknown to you, except that frankly I am shocked. Those names are household words in Saint Sebastian, I assure you. Every child can recite them and more.”

“But
are
there any children in this country?” I asked resentfully. “I’ve seen hardly any.”

“Of course you haven’t,” said the clerk. “They’re at the cinema all day.”

I concluded that he was pulling my leg for certain. “And these moviehouses are everywhere, though I have yet to see a marquee?”

“Indeed they are,” said he. “And they have no marquees. Public advertising of any kind, beyond the simple descriptive legend on a shop window, is illegal in Saint Sebastian. Everybody knows where the motion-picture houses are. There’s one close by wherever you live, generally in the same street, and weekly schedules are sent to every household and of course posted in the outer lobbies of the cinemas.” He smiled. “Oh yes, the movie theaters are in buildings which were formerly schools and churches.”

“Aha.” I was still far from sure he was not jesting. “That’s why one sees so few people on the streets? They’re all at the movies?”

“Except for those of us who are not so fortunate,” said he, making a lantern jaw of self-pity. “I can’t go until after business hours.”

I leaned on the counter. “You’re telling me that most of the population of this country, adults and children, spend most of their days at the movies?”

“Sure Mike!” he said with energy. “That’s where all the bozos are, and the tomatoes and the small fry too. I don’t mean maybe.”

However reluctantly, I began to believe him. It was at any rate established that he was conversant in jargon that could have fooled me. I was embarrassed, and briefly considered, with a purpose to regain some ground, performing my Cagney imitation, but soon decided that that was all too routine even amongst native Americans who did not have the exotic cinematic lore at his command. I must be more ingenious to hold my own with this fellow. I decided I had no choice but to invent, to cut from the whole cloth, an actor who never existed, and to imitate him for the cable clerk.

“Tell me who this is.” I screwed my mouth up, made one eyelid sufficiently heavy to lower itself halfway, and spoke in a droning tone: “If you mugs think you can make a monkey outa me you got rocks inna head.”

The clerk narrowed his eyes. “Just a minute.... That’s not Barton MacLane? No, let me...Jack LaRue? No... Charles Bickford?”

“You’ll be guessing all night,” I told him triumphantly. “You see, I—”

“No, no, give me another chance! Did I hear a little bit of accent? Eduardo Ciannelli?”

“Believe me, you should give up,” I said quickly. “It’s an actor who made only a couple of low-budget pictures by comparison with which a Republic horse-opera was
Aïda.
Uh, his name was, uh, Ben Spinoza.”

“Latin type?”

“You could say so.”

The clerk snapped his fingers. “Yes, of course! He’s playing in a film that just opened at the Linden Street cinema:
Gats ‘n’ Gals.
” He pouted. “I haven’t been able to get there yet because of this damned job of mine.”

I started to say, “That’s imposs—” but decided it was really beneath me to keep this up. Instead I said coolly, “Please send this cable as soon as possible.”

“To the Firm?”

I had yet to mention to whom it would be sent. Again I wondered whether this know-it-all was more than he seemed, but I decided against asking him, for whether or not he was, he would be certain to pretend to be—if that syntax will hold. Perhaps he had got that modus operandi from those old American movies, in which the heroes are invariably yea-sayers whose strides are jaunty, whose fedoras are cocked over one eye, and whose initially saucy girlfriends eventually go soft (“Aw, you big lug,” etc.). But then I was thinking of the mainstream pictures: God knows what went on in the obscure B flicks so popular in Saint Sebastian.

“Yes, the Firm, Washington, DC.”

“Isn’t it rather Langley, VA?”

Again I was briefly suspicious, but on reflection I decided that McCoy had probably used the same channel of communication with the home office, a shockingly primitive one for an intelligence agency of a major world power, but no doubt that was just the point: the enemy would never look for such simplicity, which made impotent their computerized decoders. Anyway, it was a theory.

I sighed and told him to proceed. “Say, while I’m here: what’s your position on the Blonds?”

“Aha. Well, personally I am incapable of bigotry. I think a fairhaired individual is quite as good as anybody else. I wouldn’t want one for a friend, maybe, but—”

“Just a moment. You wouldn’t?”

“A man has a right, has he not, to make the pals he chooses? I don’t have the slightest interest in the culture of the Blonds. Why should I be forced to have an intimate who plays chess, a game I have never been able to understand; eats vegetables, which I loathe; and never has a cold, whereas the one I feel coming on at the moment will continue for months.”

“Those are typical Blond tastes and traits?”

He grimaced. “They really are a pack of baboons. I say that without prejudice, of course. They are welcome to any advantages they can wrest from decent people.”

“Do they have much of a resistance movement?”

He laughed and used another locution that must have derived from an old Hollywood production on a rube theme. “Gee whillikers, I wouldn’t see any reason why. They’re the happiest bunch you’ll ever see, and why not. They don’t do any work.”

“They lie around and play the banjo?”

He frowned. “No. They play things like the cello and bassoon. Really dreary stuff. They’re very boring people and much too lazy to want to change a social arrangement that suits them more than it does the rest of us.” He looked at the cable form. “If you’re going to leave us soon, you should make the most of your remaining time here.”

“What would you suggest?”

He seized the pencil stub I had put back on the counter and put its end in his mouth, which explained the toothmarks on it. “Well, the Lido, if you like to swim. Longchamp, if you bet on the ponies. The Prater can be fun if you enjoy carousels. A cruise through the canals is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Picnicking in the Bois can be delightful, as is motoring to the nearby countryside to see the Summer Palace, the Greek amphitheater, or the great mosque erected during the Turkish Occupation, which is now the Museum of Quilts. Or may I suggest a visit to the Bourse. In the third cellar below the trading floor one can find Roman baths, their reservoirs and conduits still in working condition, their mosaics exquisite.”

I said, with obvious irony, “Saint Sebastian is then a microcosm of Europe? Surely you have as well your own Versailles, Brandenburg Gate, and Erechtheum with a Caryatid Porch?”

He shrugged in satisfaction. “We are peculiarly blessed, I must admit. For that reason we Sebastianers are not great travelers.”

“Also, on leaving the country one’s overdraft and credit balance must be paid, no?”

“In fact that would be against the law.”

“To leave the country?”

He shook his head. “No, no: to discharge one’s debts
in toto.
”

“Can you be serious?”

The clerk spoke gravely. “It would be a profession of lack of faith in one’s countrymen. No crime could be more heinous. Every Sebastianer has a God-given right to be owed money by others. Only in this way does he establish the moral pretext for running up his own large debts. Else our economy would collapse.”

The dismal science has never been my strong suit. Whenever I’ve tried to understand how, in the same world, filled with the same people, buying and selling the same things, there can be regular periods of great prosperity, followed immediately by recessions, my brain spins on its axis (this would make sense only if the good times resulted from the purchase of Earth goods by visitors from Mars, who however on the next occasion took their business to Jupiter).

“If you say so,” was my response. “But tell me: who makes these policies and/or laws? Not the prince?”

“Golly all get out,” said the clerk, in an as usual without-warning resort to vintage-film idiom, “I think they must come down from the old days, most of them, but there is a legislative body that probably does something, though don’t ask me what. Oh, and there are some ministers. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you should stop at Government Square, just around the corner.”

“All right, I shall.” Ordinarily I’d walk a mile to elude the so-called social studies or those who practice them, but until officially relieved I was on a fact-finding mission—and I had no strong interest in seeing the derivative sights aforementioned (which suggested too strongly for me those scale models of the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, the Eiffel Tower, and so on, constructed to lure tourists to otherwise colorless American backwaters). “Just tell me two more things. If the churches have been transformed into movie houses, what’s become of the clergy? Yesterday I saw a man in priest’s garb, riding a bicycle.”

“They’re now projectionists,” he said enthusiastically.

“I suppose those at the top of the hierarchy, the bishops and so on, are film critics.” I was joking only by half.

“Certainly not. That’s illegal in Saint Sebastian! Anyone saying more than that he either liked or disliked a movie would be arrested and flogged.”

I raised my brow. Now and again the ways of this country were not altogether foolish. “My last question concerns the language I heard some people speaking. In fact they were Blonds. What might that be?”

“It’s some slang used only by Blonds. We call it Sebastard.”

“It has ancient origins?”

“Naw,” sneered the clerk. “They invented it so we wouldn’t understand them when they spoke to one another in front of us. But who would want to know what a Blond was saying anyway?”

He gave me directions as to how to reach Government Square, and I left the cable office. The square proved to be that in which the concierge of my hotel had been pilloried, which I had seen when McCoy drove me back from the palace. The punitive device had another occupant today: shockingly, a boy who looked to be no more than nine or ten.

I stopped and spoke in commiseration. “You poor lad. What could you have done to deserve that?”

“Played hooky,” said he in his voice of high pitch. “But I’m sick of Ken Maynard movies, and anyway I didn’t want to sit in school all day in this nice weather. I wanted to go down to the river and mess around, fish or something.” He had a saddle of freckles across his nose.

“I used to catch tadpoles when I was your age. I have degenerated since. You want me to let you out of this thing?” The gates of the pillory were secured with loose bolts that looked as if easy to dislodge.

He shook his head, on which the hair was cut high above the ears. “I could get out any time I want, these holes are so big.” Wiggling his hands and feet, he demonstrated that fact for me. “But they’d just catch me again, and next time the punishment would be worse. Know what it is? You have to eat
pesto!
” He made a horrible face.

I continued across the square to what in New York would have been a multiple dwellingplace of modest size. With its half-dozen stories, it was the largest building hereabout. I could see some sort of placard on its front doors. If government was to be found on the square, this seemed most likely to be where.

When I reached the sign, which was crudely made of cardboard and inscribed in felt-penned capitals, I read:

W.C.—3RD FLOOR FRONT

CHAMBER OF LEGISLATORS—3RD FL. FRONT

MINISTRIES—ATTIC

COURT OF JUSTICE—CELLAR

Nearby, on the wall of the building, was a proper brass sign which discreetly proclaimed the presence, in the same edifice, of Dr. C. Moritz, Podiatrist; Mellenkamp & Co., Novelties; The Brockden School of Ventriloquism; and the House of Costumes.