GRAVITY RAINBOW (46 page)

Slothrop: Think I'll go take my nap now…

Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n…

If he were sensitive about such things, it'd all be pretty insulting, this first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to stay calm. There is a pause-then on come the real ones, slowly at first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences

in vials in sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members, layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it.

At last, one day at the Straggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and hunk of bread he's been toting around all morning in a paper bag, suddenly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya Dubya Two here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change of luck for Slothrop. "Pssst, Joe," he begins, "hey, mister."

"Not me," replies Slothrop with his mouth full.

"You interested in some L.S.D.?"

"That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrong cafe, Ace."

"I think I've got the wrong country," Schweitar a little mournful. "I'm from Sandoz."

"Aha, Sandoz!" cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella.

Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG, being one of those free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel, working for them on a per diem basis and spying on the side.

"Well," Slothrop sez, "I'd sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex G."

"Gaaah-"

"Pardon me?"

"That stuff. Forget it. It's not even our line. You ever try to develop a polymer when there's nothing but indole people around? With our giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf's grave. You haven't spent much time with the indole crowd. They're very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven't known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years-keepers of a tradition, aristocrats-"

"Wait
a minute…"Jamf dead? "You say Jamf's
grave,
now?" It ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never really alive so how can he be really-

"Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg."

"You ever-"

"What?"

"Did you ever meet him?"

"Before my time. But I know that there's a lot of data on him in the classified files at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you want…"

"Uh…"

"Five hundred."

"Five hundred what?"

Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn't got 500 anything, unless it's worries. The money from Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin's, across the Gemuse-Brucke, deciding he'll walk everywhere from now on, chewing his white sausage and wondering when he'll see another.

"First thing you want to do," Semyavin advises him, "is go to a pawnshop and raise a few francs on that, ah," pointing at the suit. Aw no, not the suit. Semyavin goes rummaging in a back room, comes out with a bundle of workmen's clothes. "You should start thinking more about your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I'll see what else I can find."

White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffling goes back outside, down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Nieder-dorf, stone walls now developing like baking bread in the failing sun, oboy oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another of them Tamara/Italo drills here, 'n' then he'll be in so deep he'll just never get out…

At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black Rolls parked, motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he can't see inside. Nice car. First one he's seen in a while, should be no more than a curiosity, except for

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4:
You
hide, they seek.

Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell Overture here, back in the shadows, hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass-zoom, zoom, dodging around corners, scooting down alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it's the quietest engine on the road except for the King Tiger tank…

Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to bother him. He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before closing time, and manages to raise a little, baloney for a day or two maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot.

This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a bed? He has a moment's relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant and rings up the desk at the Hotel Nimbus. "Ah, yes," English English, "can you possibly tell me if the British chap who's been waiting in the foyer is still
there,
you know…"

In a minute on conies a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you-there. Oh, so seraphic. Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at all the people at dinner staring at him-blew it, blew it, now They know he's on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia's just out of hand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it's part of Their style…

Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorways drilling by… he must avoid the hotel and the three cafes now, right, right… The permanent Zurchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue as the city twilight, deepening blue… The spies and dealers have all gone indoors. Semyavin's place is out, the Waxwing circle have been kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight do the Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to another hotel? Probably not. It's getting cold. A wind is coming in now off the lake.

He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafes, whose specialty is not listed anywhere-indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was
they
all had in common: whatever they'd come to this vantage to score… perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street… dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse…

Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits inside, choosing a seat that'll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he's getting the spy-sign from a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a couple tables away. Another front-facer. On his table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white… no it's a baby, with a label on its diaper sez LA REVOLUCION… oh, they're all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is supposed to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who turns out to be an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking for a reaction… the key passage is at the very end of the line where the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones is saying, "Now

I'm going to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free from the stain of Original Sin…," It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from Slothrop, but what he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable, and presently the Argentine has loosened up enough to confide that he and a dozen colleagues, among them the international eccentric Graciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War's over there…

"You say
Germany?
You gone goofy? It's a mess there, Jackson!" "Not nearly the mess we left back home," the sad Argentine replies. Long lines have appeared next to his mouth, lines learned from living next to thousands of horses, watching too many doomed colts and sunsets south of Rivadavia, where the true South begins… "It's been a mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Peron on his way… our last hope was Accion Argentina,"
what's he talking about, Jesus I'm hungry,
"… suppressed it a month after the coup… now everybody waits. Attending the street actions out of habit. No real hope. We decided to move before Peron got another portfolio. War, most likely. He already has the
descamisados,
this will give him the Army too you see… it's only a matter of time… we could have gone to Uruguay, waited him out-it's a tradition. But perhaps he will be in for a long time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed hopes…"

"Yeah, but Germany-that's the last place you want to go."
"Pero che, no sos argentino…
."A long look away, down the engineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South he left. Not the same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle's seen toasts to Tangerine raised in ev-ry bar across, now… Squalidozzi wants to say:
We
of all magical precipitates out of Europe's groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses… We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got
-
but even into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate, the land has never let us forget…
But what he asks aloud is: "Here-you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go to supper. Would you do me the honor?"

In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop's starving.

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible,

fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that
openness:
it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity… that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky…"

"But-but bobwire," Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin' away, "that's
progress
-you, you can't have open range forever, you can't just stand in the way of progress-" yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who's springing for his meal.

Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice. "In ordinary times," he wants to explain, "the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times… this War-this incredible War-just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean.
Opened it."

"Sure. For how long?"

"It won't last. Of course not. But for a few months… perhaps there'll be peace by the autumn-
disculpeme,
the spring, I still haven't got used to your hemisphere-for a moment of spring, perhaps…"

"Yeah but-what're you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it? They'll run you right off, podner."

"No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless." Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but
up at the ceiling
-"So is our danger."

The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain, staying submerged for much of the day, spending nights on the surface to charge batteries, sneaking in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi

won't go into the fueling arrangements in much detail, but there are apparently connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground-a community of grace, a gift of persistence… Squali-dozzi is in Zurich now contacting governments that might be willing, for any number of reasons, to assist his anarchism-in-exile. He must get a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word is relayed to Spain and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zurich. He is being watched. He can't risk betraying the contact in Geneva.

"I can help you out," Slothrop licking off his fingers, "but I'm short of cash and-"

Squalidozzi names a sum that will pay off Mario Schweitar and keep Slothrop fed for months to come.

"Half in front and I'm on the way."

The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for the check. They arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days. "Good luck."

"You too."

A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock, a fading of light.

The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside. He wakes up curled among the cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration through his bones… red light filtering very faint back through a bulkhead from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window and looks out. Alps in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as he figured on. Oh, well… He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed, lighting up one of Squalidozzi's corktips thinking, Jeepers, not bad, guys just jump in the airplane, go where they want… why stop at Geneva? Sure, what about-well, that Spain? no wait, they're Fascists. South Sea Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well Africa's the Dark Continent, nothing
there
but natives, elephants, 'n' that Spencer Tracy…