Very Old Bones (9 page)

I went over to Tubbs-Bosco and greeted him with a question: “
Zigarette, bitte?
” He smiled, proffered a Lucky Strike, and asked me to sit down beside his whore, whom I glanced
at with a certain shock to the system, for she looked very like my Aunt Molly, one of the grand people of the universe. I squinted at her, disbelieving my eyes, and saw she looked not like Molly at
all but really like Juliette Levinsky, a blond Jewess of great beauty who was the love of my life for a year or more, and yet this woman was not a blonde; and when I looked at her from another
angle she resembled neither Molly nor Juliette. Clearly this face required further scrutiny.

“Have you seen the Meister?” I asked Bosco.

“Not since before the fall,” he said.

“Which fall is that?” I asked.

“Fall? Fall? What do you mean fall?” he asked.

“I mean fall. It’s what
you
said. Whose fall? What fall are you talking about?”

“That’s my question,” he said.

“The Meister,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that,” Bosco said.

“When did you see him last?”

“Last week. We had a meal together. We both had
Heilbutt vom Rost, mit Toast.
”

“What do I care what you ate? Where is he? He’s no longer at the theater.”

“He sold the theater,” Bosco said.

“
Heilbutt vom Rost
is my favorite German dish,” I said. “I had it on Good Friday, with
Krauterbutter.
”

“The Captain threw you in, of course. You knew that.”

“I suppose I did,” I said.

“I’d have him killed, if I were you,” said Bosco.

“That’s extreme,” I said. “Not my way. I admit I considered it, however.”

“The Captain’s in London,” Bosco said. “Living it up at the Strand and the Ritz, dining out at the Connaught and Brown’s Hotel, shopping on Savile Row, screwing all
the girls in Soho. And you call yourself a spy?”

“I never call myself a spy,” I said.

I looked at the whore. She looked like my third-grade teacher, who used to rub herself against the edge of the desk while lecturing us: A beautiful woman. A tall redhead with long blond hair.
She was smitten with me. Followed my career all through grammar school. No one quite like her, the sweet little dolly.

“
Heilbutt vom Rost
I could go for right now,” I said.

“I can get it for you half price,” Bosco said.

“Where’s Geld?” I asked.

“Geld is where you find him,” Bosco said. “In the Russian zone by this time, I’d venture.”

“You always said he was a double agent.”

“No, I merely suggested that he was a provocateur-killer with a finger in every political honeycomb in Europe. Even his toenails are illegal. He’s a great man. He’s entitled to
finger anything or anybody he pleases. You know who the greatest man in the world is?”

“Of course,” I said. “Harry Truman. For dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I never thought so many were undoable.”

“And the second-greatest man in the world?”

“The pilot who bombed Hiroshima. Think of the night sweats and headaches he’s had to put up with ever since.”

“In my opinion,” Bosco said, “there’s only one war, with intermissions.”

“That’s how it should be,” I said. “Let me tell you the greatest bunch of men I ever came across. The glory brigades who landed at Normandy on D Day, pissy with fear,
climbing that fucking cliff into the path of those fortified Nazi cock-suckers, soaked to the soul in blood, brine, sand, and shit, choking with putrescible courage and moving ahead into the
goddamn vortex of exploding death. Who’s got balls? Those guys had
cojones
big as combat boots. I arrived two weeks after Normandy, a goddamn latecomer, a slacker, a shitassed mewling
little yellowbelly, and I got separated from my outfit for three days with no food or water and then I saw a Nazi, a fat fucking killer of women and children and newborn baby Jews, an asswipe
shitface murdering swine of a fucking Nazi prick, and I got him in my sights and shot him through the nose. Then somebody shot at me. It was dusk. I couldn’t see where the shot came from, but
obviously he had a
Kamerad
on his flank, and so I went back into my cave, my earthworks, and laid low. Four days without food by this time, and we piss and moan when we miss a meal. I
crawled as far into my earthworks as earth would allow and I heard someone up there walking around calling, “Here, doggie, come on, nice little doggie,” all this with a kraut accent, of
course, thinking I’d fall for the old dog-biscuit offer. He probably didn’t even have a dog biscuit. Then it grew silent and I went dead out, probably slept two more days. It
might’ve been a month. Who knows how long, or how well, or how deeply, or how significantly, or how richly, or how comfortably we sleep when we’re fucking asleep? We’re asleep,
aren’t we? So how the hell are we supposed to know how well, or how deeply, and so on? But to get to the point—are you with me?”

“Dogfood,” said Bosco.

“Good,” I said. “So I came up from the earthworks, crawling out like some goddamn creature of the substructure, some toad of the underground river, some snake of the primeval
slime, some cockroach from the cooling ooze of creation. I came up and looked out into the sky and saw it was fucking dawn or fucking twilight, what you will. Another fucking crepuscular moment,
let’s call it. And I said to myself, it’s going to be all fucking right in half an hour. But
what
was going to be all right?”

“There’s a question on the floor,” Bosco said.

“Exactly,” I said. “What is it?”

“Crepuscularity,” he said.

“Of course. So I surveyed the scene as best I could and saw that the Nazi I’d shot through the nose was still there in the distance. I had a perfect vision of how he’d fallen,
how his helmet went up on the right ear, how the blood coursed down his ex-nose into his mouth, et cetera. I listened for any telltale sign of that sly fucker with the goddamned dog biscuits and I
stayed put but made demarcative notations in my brain of what lay between that Nazi son of a bitch and myself, what approximate distance I had to traverse, for I had already decided, with a form of
self-defense made known to me by every cell in my body, that if I did not eat within several minutes I would die.

“I have no stomach for death, especially my own, and so I calculated the hectares, the rods, and the metrical leftovers between the Nazi and me, and I slithered on my belly like a lizard
up from the putrid slush, the foul paste, the vomitous phlegm of a slop-jar swamp, and in time I reached my target, of whose freshness I was assured, unless I had been asleep for several days. I
took his helmet off, cut off his head and let it roll, sliced his clothing, ripped him up the middle and cut a split steak off his stomach, turned him over and cut two chops off his buttocks, stuck
him in the gizzard and ripped him sideways just so he’d remember me, slithered back to my cave with the steak and chops in his helmet, waited till dark, sealed up the cave so no fire would be
seen, cut out a chimney for the smoke, then dined on filet of Nazi, chops on the Rhine, and lived to tell the tale.”

The whore looked me in the eye.

“You made steak and chops out of a German soldier?” she inquired.

“Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” I asked her.

“You just said it.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. Whores should be fucked but not heard.”

She signaled to a man at the bar who was a perfect double of the hanged man in the film I’d just seen. Clearly there is a problem of identity here, I thought, as four of the men at the bar
(one looking incredibly like the Captain) moved toward our booth and separated me from Bosco and the blond whore forever.

The hanged man came for me, while the other three converged on Bosco. We all went down as they stomped and punched us, then dragged us to our feet with the intention, I presume, of taking us
elsewhere to cut our throats. But the hanged man could not resist punching me one more time while one of his fellows held me. Incredibly, I wrenched myself loose, though not in time to escape the
punch, which sent me reeling backward toward the front door of the bar.

“You Nazi carbuncle,” I said to the hanged man, and the thought came to me then of how well I used the language, and that if I pursued the writing life seriously I might become as
successful in one art form as my father had been in another. The sugar whore came into the bar as I was reeling toward the door and when she saw me falling she let me fall, then took me by the arm
and raised me up. This interrupted my beating and I gathered my wits and kicked the hanged man in the vicinity of the scrotum, causing him what I’d estimate to be moderate pain. While two
thugs dragged Bosco toward the back room, I grabbed the sugar whore by the hand, thinking how our visions, even in dreams, define us, how we are products of the unfathomable unknown, how, for
instance, I knew that my sugar whore was not a whore at all but a transpositional figure—Joan of Arc, Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Teresa of Avila—sent to ferry me out of danger; and, knowing
this, I realized how superior I was to all in this barroom, how few people in the world could have such a beatific vision in this situation, and I pitied the crowd of them as I grabbed the whore by
the wrist and ran with her out into the night streets of Frankfurt, where we would romp as lovers should, I, a prince of this darkness, about to embrace the saintly and virginal lark.

“Will they come after us?” I asked the whore.

“There is time and chance in all things,” she said.

When she said that, I could not resist putting my hand under her blouse to touch the scar I had seen, if it was a scar. I felt the ridges of it, let my fingers move upward between her mounds,
touch her tips.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” she said, her voice a chorus of holy venereal rhapsodies.

We walked on dark streets, in time coming to the banks of the Main River. On an embankment where grass grew amid the rubble, a figure dressed as a bat knelt over a supine blond woman whom I
recognized as the librarian I unrequitedly loved for two years during adolescence. What retribution, I thought. How cruelly the Godhead dispenses justice. The librarian was bleeding from several
orifices.

“Don’t look,” my sugar whore said, and so I kissed her opulent mouth and put my hand under her skirt, stroking the naked thigh, the tender curve of her posterior puffs.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” she said.

I began to see the pattern: Bosco in the pay of the Meister, who was in the pay of Archie Bell of G-2, the main connection to army intelligence, Archie’s cover blown by my arrest and so he
is shipped to Korea to bide his time for subsequent return; and the Meister moves to the Russian zone, where he is at home, and will now be viewed as a fugitive from the very structure to which he
still gives allegiance; though naturally he is a double-bladed allegiant, without pride, without pity, the pluperfect hypocrite with yet a third face toward any allegiance that offers him the
solace of money, or pudenda. There he will sit, accumulating slaves in his icecap of Slavic disorder, a Pharaoh, a Buddha, a slavering three-headed Cerberus, lackey to the gluttonous, glutinous
garbagemasters of east and west, the accumulators, the suppurating spawn of cold-war politics, putrid fiscality, and ravenous libido.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” said my sweet whore of this magical night as I raised her blouse for a bit of a suck.

We walked hand in hand toward the riverbank and both of us pointed to the same thing in the same instant. There, bobbing on the surface of the water, moving slowly with the current, came
Bosco-Tubbs, minus his glasses, his head rotating as it bobbed, and for a moment I thought of leaping in and saving the man from drowning. But then, when he bobbed sideways, I perceived clearly
that his head was connected to no body, only skull flesh, with livid neck fractions dangling free, and I knew it was pointless to effect a rescue. He was too far gone.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” said my honeypot, pushing my hand away from the concatenation of her thighs.

“May we go somewhere, then,” I asked, “and spend a gentle hour together?”

“We can go where my pimp lives,” she said. “Would you like that?”

“Is it far?” I asked.

“About ten miles,” she said.

“That’s a long walk,” I said.

“We could take the
Strassenbahn
. You take the number four and then transfer to the number six, then take the yellow bus and transfer to the red bus, and there you are.”

“It would be easier if we drove,” I said, and with my Swiss knife I slit the canvas top of an old Mercedes convertible parked in front of us, hotwired it as a detective had taught me
when I was covering the police beat, and away we went into the rosy-fingered dawn, moving out of fucking crepuscularity at last.

It was about an hour before dawn when I called Giselle to tell her I’d stolen a German policeman’s car and was with a whore named Gisela at a place called
Fritz’s Garden of Eden. I said I’d fallen in love with the whore because her name was the German correlative of Giselle. I think this miffed Giselle, but she nevertheless got out of bed
and dressed, and as she was going out the door she thought of her camera.