Gravity's Rainbow (67 page)

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 Säure 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 comes 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 Ñato back on the fantail with his guitar, playing Buenos
Aires tristes and milongas. Beláustegui 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 Acción 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 Ñato goes around talking in 19th-century gaucho slang—cigarettes are “pitos,” butts
are “puchos,” it isn’t caña 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 Ñato. Beláustegui, acting ship’s engineer,
is from Entre Ríos, and a positivist in the regional tradition. A pretty good knife-hand
for a prophet of science too, which is one reason El Ñato 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 Zürich 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 Ibargüengoitia. I sent someone else.”

“Who?” Beláustegui 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,” Beláustegui 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 Ñato 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 Ñato bowing, in all gaucho dignity.

Nobody was yelling. The conversation in the steel space that night was full of quiet
damped
s
s and palatal
y
s, 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 ché, no sós argentino. . . .

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 Zürich. 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 maté 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.

“They after you, amigo?”

“Please—”

“No, no. Come on. Watch with us. It’s a Bob Steele. He’s a good old boy. You’re safe
in here.” For days, as it turned out, the gangsters had known Squalidozzi was in the
neighborhood: they could infer to his path, though he himself was invisible to them,
by the movements of the police, which were not. Blodgett Waxwing—for it was he—used
the analogy of a cloud chamber, and the vapor trail a high-speed particle leaves. . . .

“I don’t understand.”

“Not sure I do either, pal. But we have to keep an eye on everything, and right now
all the hepcats are going goofy over something called ‘nuclear physics.’”