GRAVITY RAINBOW (88 page)

"S-Gerat's going for ?10,000 these days, half of that in front. You interested?"

"Nope. But I did hear at Nordhausen that you already have it."

"Wrong."

"Gerhardt-"

"He's all
right,
Klaus." The look is one Slothrop's had before, from auto salesmen signaling their partners
got a real idiot here, Leonard, now
don't spook him please?
"We planted the story deliberately in Stettin. Wanted to see how a Colonel Tchitcherine will respond."

"Fuck. Him again? He'll respond, all right."

"Well, that's what we're going up to Peenemunde today to find out."

"Oh, boy." Slothrop goes on to tell about the run-in at Potsdam, and how Geli thought Tchitcherine didn't care about Rocket hardware nearly so much as working out some plot against that Oberst Enzian. If the two marketeers are interested, they don't show it.

The talk has drifted on into that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating that Slothrop's mother Nalline loved to float away on in the afternoons-Helen Trent, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble Backstage Wife…

"Tchitcherine is a complex man. It's almost as if… he thinks of Enzian as… another
part
of him-a black version of something inside
himself.
A something he needs to… liquidate."

NARRISCH: Do you think there might be some… some
political
reason?

VON goll (shaking his head): I just don't know, Klaus. Ever since what happened in Central Asia-

NARRISCH: You mean-

VON GOLL: Yes… the Kirghiz Light. You know, it's funny-he's never
wanted
to be thought of as an imperialist-

NARRISCH: None
of them
do. But there's the girl…

VON GOLL: Little Geli Tripping. The one who thinks she's a witch.

NARRISCH: But do you really think she means to go through with this-this plan of hers, to find Tchitcherine?

VON GOLL: I think…
They
… do…

NARRISCH: But Gerhardt, she
is
in love with him-

VON GOLL: He hasn't been dating her, has he?

NARRISCH: You can't be implying-

"Say," splutters Slothrop, "what th' heck're you guys
talkin'
about, anyway?"

"Paranoia," Springer snaps reproachfully (as folks will snap when interrupted at a game they enjoy). "You wouldn't understand that."

"Well excuse me, got to go vomit now," a klassic komeback among charm-school washouts like our Tactful Tyrone here, and pretty advanced stuff on dry land, but not out here, where the Baltic is making it impossible not to be seasick. Chimps are all doing their vomiting huddled under a tarp. Slothrop joins at the rail a miserable lot of musicians and girls. They instruct him in fine points such as not vomiting into the wind, and timing it for when the ship rolls toward the sea, Frau Gnahb having expressed the hope that no one would get any

vomit on her ship with the kind of glacial smile Dr. Mabuse used to get, especially on a good day. She can be heard in the pilot house now, bellowing her sea chanty. "Oooooo," goes Slothrop over the side.

And this is how their desperate enterprise goes a-rollicking up the coast of Usedom, under a hazy summer sky. On shore, the green downs roll up in two gentle steps: above them is a chain of hills thick with pines and oaks. Little resort towns with white beaches and forlorn jetties wheel abeam rheumatically slow. Military-looking craft, probably Russian PT boats, will be seen now and then lying dead in the water. None challenge the Frau's passage. The sun is in and out, turning the decks a stark moment's yellow around everyone's shadow. There's a late time of day when all shadows are thrown along the same east-northeast bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to sea from Peenemunde. The exact clock time, which varies through the year, is known as Rocket Noon… and the sound that must at that moment fill the air for its devout can only be compared with a noontime siren the whole town believes in… and guts resonate, hard as stone…

Before you sight it, you can feel the place. Even draped over a gunwale, cheek against a fender smelling of tar, eyes tearing and insides sloshing as the sea. Even barren and scorched as Rossokovsky and the White Russian Army left it in the spring. It's a face. On the maps, it's a skull or a corroded face in profile, facing southwest: a small marshy lake for the eye-socket, nose-and-mouth cavity cutting in at the entrance to the Peene, just below the power station… the draftsmanship is a little like a Wilhelm Busch cartoon face, some old fool for mischievous boys to play tricks on. Tapping his tanks for grain alcohol, scratching great naughty words across fields of his fresh cement, or even sneaking in to set off a rocket in the middle of the night…

Low, burned-out buildings now, ash images of camouflage nets burned onto the concrete (they had only a minute to glow, like a burger's silk mantle-to light this coastal indoors, this engineers' parlor full of stodgy shapes and neutral tones… didn't it only flare? no need to put right, nothing monitory, no new levels to be reached… but who would that be, watching so civil and mild over the modeltop? face all in these chromo sunset colors, eyes inside blackrim lenses which, like the flaring nets, now are seen to have served as camouflage for who but the Bicycle Rider in the Sky, the black and fatal Edwardian silhouette on the luminous breast of sky, of today's Rocket Noon, two circular explosions inside the rush hour, in the death-scene of the

sky's light. How the rider twirls up there, terminal and serene. In the Tarot he is known as The Fool, but around the Zone here they call him Slick. It's 1945. Still early, still innocent. Some of it is).

Charred helpless latticework: what was wooden now only settles, without strength. Green human shapes flash in the ruins. The scale is very confusing, along here. The troops look larger than they should. A zoo? a shooting gallery? Why, some of both. Frau Gnahb wallows in closer to land, proceeds up the marshy shoreline at half speed. Signs of occupation increase: lorry-parks, tents, a corral teeming with horses pied, sorrel, snow-white, red as blood. Wild summer ducks up exploding, wet and showery, out of green reeds-they swing aft over the boat and descend in its wake, where they bob quacking in two-foot excursions. High in the sunlight, a white-tailed eagle is soaring. Smooth-lipped bomb and shell craters hold blue sea water. Barracks have had their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling Europe. But trees, beech and pine, have begun to grow in again where spaces were cleared and leveled for housing or offices-up through cracks in the pavement, everywhere life may gain purchase, up rushes green summer '45, and the forests are still growing dense on the upland.

Passing now the great blackened remains of the Development Works, most of it strewn at ground level. In series, some ripped and broken, others largely hidden by the dunes, Narrisch reverently telling them one by one, come the concrete masses of the test stands, stations of the cross, VI, V, III, IV, II, IX, VIII, I, finally the Rocket's own, from which it stood and flew at last, VII and X. Trees that once screened these from the sea now are only stalks of charcoal.

Pulling around the northern curve of the peninsula, test-stand wall and earthworks receding-moving now past Peenemunde-West, the Luftwaffe's old territory. Far away to starboard, the cliffs of the Greifs-walder Oie shimmer through the blue haze. Concrete launching-ramps used to test the V-l or buzzbomb point at the sea. Runways pocked with craters, heaped with rubble and wrecked Messerschmitts swing by, down the peninsula: over the skull's arc, south again toward the Peene, there-above the rolling hills, miles off the port bow, the red brick tower of the cathedral in Wolgast, and closer in the half-dozen stacks of the power station, smokeless over Peenemunde, have survived the lethal compression-loads of March… White swans drift in the reeds, and pheasants fly over the tall pines inland. A truck motor snarls somewhere into life.

Frau Gnahb brings her boat around in a tight turn, through an inlet, to the dock. The summer calm lies over everything: rolling-stock inert on its tracks, one soldier sitting against an orange-topped oil drum trying to play an accordion. Maybe only fooling around. Otto lets go of his chorus girl's hand. His mother cuts the engines, and he steps broadly to the dock and jogs along, making fast. Then there's a brief pause: Diesel fumes, marsh birds, quiet idleness…

Somebody's staff car, racketing around the corner of a cargo shed, slides to a stop, bouncing forth out of its rear door a major even fatter than Duane Marvy, but with a kindlier and dimly Oriental face. Gray hair like sheep's wool comes twisting down all around his head. "Ah! von Goll!" arms outstretched, wrinkled eyes shiny with-is it real tears? "von Goll, my dear friend!"

"Major Zhdaev," Springer nods ambling over the brow, as behind the major now this truckload of troops in fatigues seems to be pulling up here, kind of odd they should be toting those submachine guns and carbines just for some stevedoring…

Right. Before anyone can move, they've leaped out and made a cordon around Zhdaev and the Springer, pieces at the ready. "Do not be alarmed," Zhdaev waving and beaming, strolling backward to the car with his arm around the Springer, "we are detaining your friend for a bit. You may proceed with your work and go. We'll see that he gets safely back to Swinemunde."

"What the devil," Frau Gnahb comes growling out of the pilot house. Haftung shows up, twitching, putting hands in various pockets and taking them out again: "Who are they arresting? What about my contract? Will anything happen to us?" The staff car pulls away. Enlisted men begin filing on board.

"Shit," ponders Narrisch.

"You think it's a bust?"

"I think Tchitcherine is responding with interest. Just as you said."

"Aw, now-"

"No, no," hand on sleeve, "he's right. You're harmless."

"Thanks."

"I warned him, but he laughed. 'Another leap, Narrisch. I have to keep leaping, don't I?' "

"Well what do you want to do now, cut him loose?"

There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is

on his back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight.

"Somehow…" Slothrop
does
wish the man would quit talking this way, "I owe him-
that
much."

"Well I don't," Slothrop dodging a sudden plume of yellow chimpanzee vomit. "He ought to be able to take care of himself."

"His talk's grandiose enough. But he's not paranoid
in his heart
-in this line of work, that's a disaster."

One of the chimps now bites a Soviet corporal in the leg. The corporal screams, unslinging his Tokarev and firing from the hip, by which time the chimp has leaped for a halyard. A dozen more of the critters, many carrying vodka bottles, head en masse for the gangplank. "Don't let them get away," Haftung hollers. The trombone player sticks his head sleepily out a hatch to ask what's happening and has his face walked over by three sets of pink-soled feet before grasping the situation. Girls, spangles aflame in the afternoon sun, feathers all quivering, are being chased forward and aft by drooling Red Army personnel. Frau Gnahb pulls on her steam whistle, thereby spooking the rest of the chimps, who join the stampede to shore. "Catch them," Haftung pleads, "somebody." Slothrop finds himself between Otto and Narrisch, being pushed ashore over the brow by soldiers chasing after chimps or girls, or trying to wrangle the cargo ashore. Among splashes, cursing, and girlish shrieks from the other side of the boat, chorus girls and musicians keep appearing and wandering back and forth. It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.

"Listen." Frau Gnahb leaning over the side.

Slothrop notices a canny squint. "You have a plan."

"You want to pull a diversionary feint."

"What? What?"

"Chimps, musicians, dancing girls. Decoys all over. While the three of
you
sneak in and grab Der Springer."

"We can hide," Narrisch looking around gangster-eyed. "No-body'll notice. Ja, ja! The boat can take off, as
if we
were
on board!"

"Not me," sez Slothrop.

"Ha! Ha!" sez Frau Gnahb.

"Ha! Ha!" sez Narrisch.

"I'll lie to at the northeast corner," this madmother continues, "in the channel between the little island and that triangular part that's built up on the foreshore."

"Test Stand X."

"Catchy name. I think there'll be enough of a tide by then. Light a fire. Otto! Cast me off now."

"Zu Befehl, Mutti!"

Slothrop and Narrisch go dash behind a cargo shed, find a boxcar, and hide inside. Nobody notices. Chimps are running by in several directions. The soldiers chasing them seem by now to be really pissed off. Someplace the clarinet player is blowing scales on his instrument. The boat's motor sputters up into a growl, and screws go churning away. A while later, Otto and his girl come climb in the boxcar, out of breath.

"Well, Narrisch," Slothrop might as well ask, "where'd they take him, do you think? eh?"

"From what I could see, Block Four and that whole complex to the south were deserted. My guess is the assembly building near Test Stand VII. Under that big ellipse. There are underground tunnels and rooms-ideal for a headquarters. Looks like most of it survived pretty well, even though Rossokovsky had orders to level the place."

"You got a piece?" Narrisch shakes his head no. "Me neither. What kind of a black-market operator are you, anyway? no piece."

"I used to be in inertial guidance. You expect me to revert?"

"W-well what are we supposed to use, then? Our wits?"