Closing Time (43 page)

"From an egg sandwich in the cafeteria there, right?"

Arriving at an airport in turbulent disorder because of flights canceled by unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas, Yossarian had quickly spotted a dark, tidy, dapper man of average height and slightly Oriental cast waving aloft a plane ticket in a signal to attract him.

"Mr. Gaffney?" he'd inquired.

"It's not the Messiah," said Gaffney, chuckling. "Let's sit down for coffee. We'll have an hour." Gaffney had booked him on the next flight to Washington and gave him the ticket and boarding pass. "You will be happy to know," he seemed pleased to reveal, "that you'll be all the richer for this whole experience. About half a million dollars richer, I'd guess. For your work with Noodles Cook."

"I've done no work with Noodles Cook."

"Milo will want you to. I'm beginning to think of your trip as something of a Rhine Journey."

"I am too."

"It can't be coincidence. But with a happier ending."

Gaffney was dark, stylish, urbane, and good-looking-of Turkish descent, he disclosed, though from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, New York. His complexion was smooth. He was bald on top, with a shiny pate, and had black hair trimmed close at the sides and black brows. His eyes were brown and narrow and, with the raised mounds of his fine cheekbones, gave to his face the intriguing look of someone cosmopolitan from the east. He was dressed faultlessly, spotlessly, in a fawn-colored single-breasted herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern, brown trousers, a pale-blue shirt, and a tie of solid rust.

"In the dream," said Yossarian, "you were dressed the same way. Were you in Kenosha yesterday?"

"No, no, Yo-Yo."

"Those clothes were in the dream."

"Your dream is impossible, Yo-Yo, because I never dress the same on consecutive days. Yesterday," Gaffney continued, consulting his appointment diary and licking his lips in obvious awareness of the effect, "I wore a Harris tweed of darker color with an orange interior design, trousers of chocolate brown, a quiet-pink shirt with thin vertical stripes, and a paisley tie of auburn, cobalt blue, and amber. You may not know this, John, but I believe in neatness. Neatness counts. Every day I dress for an occasion so that I am dressed for the occasion when an occasion arises. Tomorrow, I see by my calendar, I'll be wearing oatmeal Irish linen with green, if I go south, or a double-breasted blue blazer with horn buttons and gray trousers if I stay up north. The pants will be flannel. John, only you can say. Did you have sex in your dream?"

"That's not your business, Jerry."

"You seem to be doing it everywhere else."

"That's not your business either."

"I always dream of sex my first night out when I travel alone. It's a reason I don't mind going out of town."

"Mr. Gaffney, that's lovely. But it's none of my business."

"When I go with Mrs. Gaffney, there's no need to dream. Fortunately, she too likes to perform the sex act immediately in every new setting."

"That's lovely too, but I don't want to hear it, and I don't want you to hear about mine."

"You should be more guarded."

"It's the reason I hired you, damn it. I'm followed by you and followed by others I don't know a fucking thing about, and I want it to stop. I want my privacy back."

"Then give up the chaplain."

"I don't have the chaplain."

"I know that, Yo-Yo, but they don't."

"I'm too old for Yo-Yo."

"Your friends call you Yo-Yo."

"Name one, you jackass."

"I will check. But you came to the right man when you came to the Gaff. I can tell you the ways they keep you under surveillance, and I can teach you to avoid surveillance, and then I can give you the measures they employ to thwart someone like you who has learned to thwart their surveillance."

"Aren't you contradicting yourself?"

"Yes. But meanwhile I've spotted four following you who've disguised themselves cleverly. Look, there goes the gentleman we know as our Jewish G-man, trying to get on a plane to New York. He was in Keposha yesterday."

"I saw him somewhere but wasn't sure."

"Possibly in your dream. Pacing in the motel parking lot and saying his evening prayers. How many do you recognize?"

"At least one," said Yossarian, warming to the counterintelligence business in which they now seemed to be conspiring. "And I don't even have to look. A tall man in seersucker with freckles and orange hair. It's almost winter and he's still wearing seersucker. Right? I'll bet he's there, against a wall or column, drinking soda from a paper cup."

"It's an Orange Julius. He wants to be spotted."

"By whom?"

"I'll check."

"No, let me do it!" Yossarian declared. "I'm going to talk to that bastard, once and for all. You keep watch."

"I have a gun in my ankle holster."

"You too?"

"Who else?"

"McBride, a friend of mine."

"At PABT?"

"You know him?"

"I've been there," said Gaffney. "You'll be going again soon now that the wedding has been set."

"It has?" This was news to Yossarian.

Gaffney again looked pleased. "Even Milo doesn't know that yet, but I do. You can order the caviar. Please let me tell him. The SEC has to approve. Do you find that one funny?"

"I've heard it before."

"Don't say much to that agent. He might be CIA."

Yossarian was displeased with himself because he felt no real anger as he strode up to his quarry.

"Hi," said the man, curiously. "What's up?"

Yossarian spoke gruffly. "Didn't I see you following me in New York yesterday?"

"No."

And that was going to be all.

"Were you in New York?" Yossarian was now much less peremptory.

"I was in Florida." His mannerly bearing seemed an immutable mask. "I have a brother in New York."

"Does he look like you?"

"We're twins."

"Is he a federal agent?"

"I don't have to answer that one."

"Are you?"

"I don't know who you are."

"I'm Yossarian. John Yossarian.'w

"Let me see your credentials."

"You've both been following me, haven't you?"

"Why would we follow you?"

"That's what I want to find out."

"I don't have to tell you. You've got no credentials."

"I don't have credentials," Yossarian, crestfallen, reported back to Gaffney.

"I've got credentials. Let me go try."

And in less than a minute, Jerry Gaffney and the man in the seersucker suit were chatting away in untroubled affinity like very old friends. Gaffney showed a billfold and gave him what looked to Yossarian like a business card, and when a policeman and four or five other people in plain clothes who might have been policemen also drew close briskly, Gaffney distributed a similar card to each, and then to everyone in the small crowd of bystanders who had paused to watch, and finally to the two young black women behind the food counter serving hot dogs, prepackaged sandwiches, soft pretzels with large grains of kosher salt, and soft drinks like Orange Julius. Gaffney returned eventually, immensely satisfied with himself. He spoke softly, but only Yossarian would know, for his demeanor appeared as serene as before.

"He isn't following you, John," he said, and could have been talking about the weather as far as anyone watching could tell. "He's following someone else who's following you. He wants to find out how much they find out about you."

"Who?" demanded Yossarian. "Which one?"

"He hasn't found out yet," answered Gaffney. "It might be me. That would be funny to somebody else, but I see you're not laughing. John, he thinks you might be CIA."

"That's libelous. I hope you told him I'm not."

"I don't know yet that you're not. But I won't tell him anything until he becomes a client. I only told him this much." Gaffney pushed another one of his business cards across the table. "You should have one too."

Yossarian scanned the card with knitted brow, for the words identified the donor as the proprietor of a Gaffney Real Estate Agency, with offices in the city and on the New York and Connecticut seashores and in the coastal municipalities of Santa Monica and San Diego in lower California.

"I'm not sure I get it," said Yossarian.

"It's a front," said Gaffney. "A come-on."

"Now I do." Yossarian grinned. "It's a screen for your detective agency. Right?"

"You've got it backwards. The agency is a front for my real estate business. There's more money in real estate."

"I'm not sure I can believe you."

"Am I trying to be funny?"

"It's impossible to tell."

"I'm luring him on," Jerry Gaffney explained. "Right into one of my offices pretending he's a prospect looking for a house, while he tries to find out who I really am."

"To find out what he's up to?"

"To sell him a house, John. That's where my real income is. This should interest you. We have choice rentals in East Hampton for next summer, for the season, the year, and the short term. And some excellent waterfront properties too, if you're thinking of buying."

"Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian.

"Are we back to that?"

"I know less about you now than I did before. You said I'd be making this trip, and here I am making it. You predicted there'd be blizzards, and now there are blizzards."

"Meteorology is easy."

"You seem to know all that's happening on the face of the earth. You know enough to be God."

"There's more money in real estate," answered Gaffney. "That's how I know we have no God. He'd be active in real estate too. That's not a bad one, is it?"

"I've heard worse."

"I have one that may be better. I also know much that goes on under the earth. I've been beneath PABT too, you know."

"You've heard the dogs?"

"Oh, sure," said Gaffney. "And seen the Kilroy material. I have connections in MASSPOB too, electronic connections," he appended, and his thin, sensual lips, which were almost liverish in a rich tinge, spread wide again in that smile of his that was cryptic and somehow incomplete. "I've even," he continued, with some pride, "met Mr. Tilyou."

"Mr. Tilyou?" echoed Yossarian. "Which Mr. Tilyou?"

"Mr. George C. Tilyou," Gaffney explained. "The man who built the old Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island."

"I thought he was dead."

"He is."

"Is that your joke?"

"Does it give you a laugh?"

"Only a smile."

"You can't say I'm not trying," said Gaffney. "Let's go now. Look back if you wish. That will keep them coming. They won't know whether to stick with Yossarian or follow me. You'll have a smooth trip. Think of this episode as an entr'acte, an intermezzo between Kenosha and your business with Milo and Noodles Cook. Like Wagner's music for Siegfried's Rhine Journey and the Funeral Music in the
Gotterddmmerung
, or that interlude of clinking anvils in
Das Rheingold
."

"I heard that one last night, in my room in Kenosha."

"I know."

"And I learned something new that might help the chaplain. His wife thinks he's already had one miracle."

"That's already old, John," belittled Gaffney. "Everything in Kenosha is bugged. But here is something that might be good. To Milo, you might suggest a shoe."

"What kind of shoe?"

"A military shoe. Perhaps an official U.S. Government shoe. He was too late for cigarettes. But the military will always need shoes. For ladies too. And perhaps brassieres. Please give my best to your fianc�e."

"What fianc�e?" Yossarian shot back.

"Miss MacIntosh?" Gaffney arched his black eyebrows almost into marks of punctuation.

"Miss MacIntosh is not my fianc�e," Yossarian remonstrated. "She's only my nurse."

Gaffney tossed his head in a gesture of laughter. "You have no nurse, Yo-Yo," he insisted almost prankishly. "You've told me that a dozen times. Should I check back and count?"

"Gaffney, go north with your Irish linen or south with your blazer and flannel pants. And take those shadows with you."

"In time. You like the German composers, don't you?"

"Who else is there?" answered Yossarian. "Unless you want to count Italian opera."

"Chopin?"

"You'll find him in Schubert," said Yossarian. "And both in Beethoven."

"Not entirely. And how about the Germans themselves?" asked Gaffney.

"They don't much like each other, do they?" replied Yossarian. "I can't think of another people with such vengeful animosities toward each other."

"Except our own?" suggested Gaffney.

"Gaffney, you know too much."

"I've always been interested in learning things." Gaffney confessed this with an air of restraint. "It's proved useful in my work. Tell me, John," he continued, and fixed his eyes on Yossarian significantly. "Have you ever heard of a German composer named Adrian Leverkühn?"

Yossarian looked back at Gatfney with tense consternation. "Yes, I have, Jerry," he answered, searching the bland, impenetrable dark countenance before him for some glimmer of clarification. "I've heard of Adrian Leverkühn. He did an oratorio called
Apocalypse
."

"I know him for a cantata,
The Lamentations of Faust
."

"I didn't think that one had ever been performed."

"Oh, yes. It has that very touching children's chorus, and that hellish section in glissandos of adult voices laughing ferociously. The laughter and sad chorus always remind me of photos of Nazi soldiers during the war, your war, herding to death those Jewish children in the ghettos."

"That's the
Apocalypse
, Jerry."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive."

"I'll have to check. And don't forget your shoe."

"What shoe?"

25

Washington

"A fucking shoe?" Wintergreen ridiculed Yossarian on the next leg of his Rhine Journey. "What's so great about a fucking shoe?"

"It's only a fucking thought," said Yossarian, in one of the hotel suites constituting the Washington offices of M & M E & A. For himself with Melissa he had favored a newer hotel of comparable prestige and livelier clientele that boasted, he recalled with a kind of blissful vanity as he lay in the hospital with his condition stable and the danger of brain damage and paralysis past, a more various choice of superior-grade XXX-rated films in all the languages of UN member nations. "You've been saying you wanted a consumer product."