Gravity's Rainbow (99 page)

Down an alleyway near the Michaeliskirche, a little girl comes tottering under an
enormous pile of contraband fur coats, only her brown legs visible. Ludwig lets out
a scream, pointing at the coat on top. Something small and gray is worked into its
collar. Artificial yellow eyes gleam unwholesomely. Ludwig runs hollering Ursula,
Ursula, grabbing for the coat. The little girl lets out a flurry of curses.

“You killed my lemming!”

“Let go, idiot.” A tug-of-war among the blurry patches of sun and shadow in the alley.
“It isn’t a lemming, it’s a gray fox.”

Ludwig stops yelling long enough to look. “She’s right,” Slothrop points out.

“I’m sorry,” Ludwig snivels. “I’m a little upset.”

“Well, could you help me carry these as far as the church?”

“Sure.”

They each take an armful of furs and follow her through the bumpy gassen of the town,
in a side entrance, down several flights to a subbasement of the Michaeliskirche.
There in the lamplight, the first face Slothrop sees, inclined over a Sterno fire
tending a simmering pot, is that of Major Duane Marvy.

• • • • • • •

YAAAGGGGHHHH— Slothrop hefts his armload of coats, ready to throw them and flee, but
the Major’s just all smiles. “Hi there, comrade. You’re just in time for some o’ Duane
Marvy’s Atomic Chili! Whyntcha pull up a
pew
’n’ sit down?
Yaah
-ha-ha-ha! Little What’s-her-name here,” chuckling and copping a feel as the girl
deposits her delivery with the enormous stash of furs that occupies most of this room,
“she’s kind of indiscreet sometimes. I hope you don’t feel like that we’re doing anything
illegal, I mean in your zone and everything.”

“Not at all, Major,” trying for a Russian accent, which comes out like Bela Lugosi.
Marvy is out with his pass anyhow, most of which is handwritten, with here and there
a seal stamped onto it. Slothrop squints at the Cyrillic handwriting at the bottom
and makes out Tchitcherine’s signature. “Ah. I have coordinated with Colonel Tchitcherine
on one or two occasions.”

“Hey’d ya hear what happened up in Peenymunde? Buncha ’suckers just come in hijacked
Der Springer right out f’m under the Colonel’s nose. Yeah. You know Der Springer?
Bad ass, comrade. That ’sucker got so many arns in the far don’t leave much for free-enterprisers
like me ’n’ old Bloody Chiclitz.”

Old Bloody Chiclitz, whose mother, Mrs. Chiclitz, named him Clayton, has been lurking
behind a stack of mink capes with a .45 aimed at Slothrop’s stomach. “Say he’s O.K.,
buddy,” Marvy calls. “Y’all bring us s’more that champagne why don’tcha.” Chiclitz
is about as fat as Marvy and wears hornrimmed glasses, and the top of his head’s as
shiny as his face. They stand there with their arms around each other’s shoulders,
two smiling fat men. “Ivan, you’re lookin’ at 10,000 calories a day, right here,”
indicating the two paunches with his thumb, and winking. “Chiclitz here goam be the
Royal Baby,” and they both collapse with laughter. But it is true. Chiclitz has actually
figured out a way to cash in on redeployment. He is about to wangle with Special Services
the exclusive contract for staging the equator-crossing festivities for every troop
ship that changes hemispheres. And Chiclitz himself will be the Royal Baby on as many
as he can, that’s been written in. He dreams of the generations of cannon fodder,
struggling forward on their knees, one by one, to kiss his stomach while he gobbles
turkey legs and ice-cream cones and wipes his fingers off in the polliwogs’ hair.
Officially he is one of the American industrialists out here with the T-Force, scouting
German engineering, secret weaponry in particular. Back home he owns a toy factory
in Nutley, New Jersey. Who can ever forget the enormously successful Juicy Jap, the
doll that you fill with ketchup then bayonet through any of several access slots,
whereupon it flies to pieces, 82 of them, realistically squishy plastic, all over
the room? or-or Shufflin’ Sam, the game of skill where you have to shoot the Negro
before he gets back over the fence with the watermelon, a challenge to the reflexes
of boys and girls of all ages? Right now business is taking care of itself, but Chiclitz
has his eyes on the future. That’s why he’s running this fur operation, with the Michaeliskirche
serving as a depot for the whole region. “Retrenchment. Got to get capitalized, enough
to see me through,” splashing champagne into gold communion chalices, “till we see
which way it’s gonna go. Myself, I think there’s a great future in these V-weapons.
They’re gonna be really big.”

The old church smells of spilled wine, American sweat, and recently burned cordite,
but these are raw newer intrusions that haven’t done away with the prevailing Catholic
odor—incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating from the lips of the flock. Children
come in and go out, bringing furs and taking them away, chatting with Ludwig and presently
inviting him along to check out the freight cars down at the marshaling yards.

There are about 30 kids on Chiclitz’s payroll. “My dream,” he admits, “is to bring
all these kids back to America, out to Hollywood. I think there’s a future for them
in pictures. You heard of Cecil B. De Mille, the producer? My brother-in-law’s pretty
close to him. I think I can teach them to sing or something, a children’s chorus,
negotiate a package deal with De Mille. He can use them for the real big numbers,
religious scenes, orgy scenes—”

“Ha!” cries Marvy, dribbling champagne, eyeballs bulging. “You’re
dreaming
all right, old buddy! You sell those kids to Cecil B. De Mille it’s f’damn sure they
ain’t goam be
singin’.
He’ll use them little ’suckers for
galley slaves! Yaah
-ha-ha—yeah they’ll be chained to th’ oars, just haulin’ ass, rowin’ old Henry Wilcoxon
away into th’ sunset to fight them Greeks or Persians or somebody.”

“Galley slaves?” Chiclitz roars. “Never, by God. For De Mille, young fur-henchmen
can’t be rowing!”

Out at the edge of town are the remains of an A4 battery, left where it stood as the
troops fled south, trying to escape British and Russian pincers. Marvy and Chiclitz
are going to have a look, and Slothrop is welcome to come along. But first there is
the matter of Duane Marvy’s Atomic Chili, which turns out to be a test of manhood.
The champagne bottle is there within easy reach, but drinking from it will be taken
as a sign of weakness. Once Slothrop would have been suckered in, but now he doesn’t
even have to think it over. While the two Americans, blinded, noses on fire and leaking
incredible quantities of snot, undergo what the authoritative
A Cheapskate’s Guide to the Zone
aptly describes as “a Götterdämmerung of the mucous membranes,” Slothrop sits guzzling
champagne like soda pop, nodding, smiling, and mumbling
da, da
now and then for authenticity’s sake.

They ride out to the site in a green, grinning Ford staff car. Marvy soon as he slides
behind the wheel turns into a fanged dipsomaniac—
eeeeerrrrr
leaving rubber enough to condom a division, zero to 70 before the echo’s died, trying
to run down bicyclists right ’n’ left, stampeding the livestock, whilst Bloody Chiclitz,
whooping happily, a champagne bottle in each fist, urges him on—Marvy bellowing “San
Antonya Rose,” his fav’rite song, Chiclitz screaming out the window admonitions like
“Fuck not with the Kid, lest instead of fucker thou become fuckee,” which takes a
while and draws only a few bewildered Fascist salutes from old ladies and little children
at the roadside.

The site is a charred patch becoming green with new weeds, inside a copse of beech
and some alder. Camouflaged metal stands silent across a ghostly crowd of late dandelions,
gray heads nodding together waiting for the luminous wind that will break them toward
the sea, over to Denmark, out to all points of the Zone. Everything’s been stripped.
The vehicles are back to the hollow design envelopes of their earliest specs, though
there’s still a faint odor of petrol and grease. Forget-me-nots are growing violent
blue violent yellow among the snarl of cables and hoses. Swallows have built a nest
inside the control car, and a spider has begun filling in the web of the Meillerwagen
boom with her own. “Shit,” sez Major Marvy. “Fuckin’ Rooskies done stole
ever
thing, no offense, comrade.” They go kicking through green and purple weeds, rusted
food tins, old sawdust and chips of wood. Surveying stakes, each with a tatter of
white nailed on top, still chain away toward the guide-beam transmitter 12 kilometers
away. Eastward. So it must’ve been the Russians they were trying to stop. . . .

Red, white, and blue winks from the dusty deck of the control car. Slothrop drops
to one knee. The Schwarzkommando mandala: KEZVH. He looks up to see Marvy giving him
a sly fat smile.

“Why shore. I shoulda known. You don’t have no
insignia
on. Sheeeee . . . you’re-you’re like th’ Soviet CIC! Ain’tcha.” Slothrop stares back.
“Hey. Hey, who’re you tryin’ to git? Huh?” The smile vanishes. “Sa-a-a-y, I shore
hope it ain’t Colonel Tchitcherine, now. He’s a
good
Rooskie, you know.”

“I assure you,” holding up the mandala, cross to vampire, “my only interest is in
dealing with the problem of
these
black devils.”

Back comes the smile, along with a fat hand on Slothrop’s arm. “You all set to go
round ’n’ round with thim, whin y’r comrades git here?”

“Round, and round? I am not sure that I—”

“You
know. Come on. Why all thim
boogies
’t’s camped outside o’ town! Hey, Ivan,
god-damn
’at’s goam be fun. I spint all day today cleanin’ my Colt’s,” caressing the sidearm
in its holster. “Goam make me a coonskin cap outa one o’ thim ’suckers, ’n’ I don’t
have to tell you what part’s goam be danglin’ down there in back, do Uh? Hah?” Which
tickles Bloody Chiclitz so much he like to chokes laughing.

“Actually,” Slothrop making it up as he goes along, “my mission is coordinating intelligence,”
whatever that means, “in operations such as this. I am down here, in fact, to reconnoiter
the enemy position.”

“Enemy’s right,” Chiclitz nods. “They got guns and everything. Only thing a coon ought
to have in his hands is a
broom!
”

Marvy is frowning. “You, you ain’t expecting us to go out there
with
you, now. We can tell you how to git there, comrade, but you’re
crazy
to go out there alone. Why don’tcha wait’ll tonight? Scheduled to stort about midnight,
ain’t it? You can wait till then.”

“It is essential that I gather certain information in advance,” poker-face, pokerface,
good, good . . . “I do not have to tell you how important this is . . .” a pregnant
Lugosi pause, “to
all
of us.”

Well, that gets him directions out to the Schwarzkommando and a lift back into town,
where the businessmen pick up a couple of those Eager Fräuleins and go roistering
off into the sunset. Slothrop stands in their exhaust, muttering.

Next time it won’t be any custard pie, you asshole. . . .

Takes him an hour to get out to the camp on foot across a wide meadow whose color
is deepening now as if green dye flowed and seeped into its nap . . . he is aware
of each single grassblade’s shadow reaching into the shadows east of it . . . pure
milk-colored light sweeps up in a bell-curve above the sun nearly down, transparent
white flesh, fading up through many blues, powdery to dark steel at the zenith . . .
why is he out here, doing this? Is this Ursula the lemming’s idea too, getting mixed
up in other people’s private feuds when he was supposed to be . . . whatever it was . . .
uh. . . .

Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and that S-Gerät, s’posed
to be a hardboiled private eye here, gonna go out all alone and beat the odds, avenge
my friend that They killed, get my ID back and find that piece of mystery hardware
but now aw it’s JUST LIKE—

LOOK-IN’ FAWR A NEEDLE IN A HAAAAY-STACK!

Sssss—searchinfrasomethin’ fulla moon-beams,

(Something) got ta have yoooou!

Feet whispering through weeds and meadow grass, humming along exactly the breathless,
chin-up way Fred Astaire did, reflecting on his chances of ever finding Ginger Rogers
again this side of their graceful mortality. . . .

Then, snapping back—no no, wait, you’re supposed to be planning soberly now, weighing
your options, determining your goals at this critical turning point in your . . .

Ya—
ta-ta
, LOOKIN’ F’R A NEEDLE IN A—

Nonono come
on
, Jackson, quit fooling, you got to
concentrate. . . .
The S-Gerät now—O.K. if I can find that S-Gerät ’n’ how Jamf was hooked in, if I can
find that out, yeah yeah Imipolex now . . .

—searchin’ for a (hmm) cellar full o’ saffron . . .

Aw . . .

At about which point, as if someone’s simple longing has made it appear, comes a single
needle-stroke through the sky: the first star.

Let me be able to warn them in time.

They jump Slothrop among the trees, lean, bearded, black—they bring him in to the
fires where someone is playing a thumb-harp whose soundbox is carved from a piece
of German pine, whose reeds are cut from springs of a wrecked Volkswagen. Women in
white cotton skirts printed with dark blue flowers, white blouses, braided aprons,
and black kerchiefs are busy with pots and tinware. Some are wearing ostrich-egg-shell
necklaces knife-hatched in red and blue. A great cut of beef drips from a wooden spit
over a fire.

Enzian isn’t there, but Andreas Orukambe is, nervous as wire, wearing a navy pullover
and army fatigue trousers. He remembers Slothrop. “Was ist los?”

Slothrop tells him. “Supposed to be here at midnight. Don’t know how many there are,
but maybe you’d better clear out.”

“Maybe.” Andreas is smiling. “Have you eaten?”

The argument, go or stay, proceeds over supper. It is not the tactical decision-making
Slothrop was taught in officer school. There seem to be other considerations, something
the Zone-Hereros know about and Slothrop doesn’t.