Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: In the Deepest Darkness of the Dark Despair of Deadly Desparation

The Krauts were holding onto France like a gawky teenager in a bad moustache who'd shot his way on set and kidnapped Marlene Dietrich, and security was tighter than an Scottish tax accountant's daughter's frilly netherthings, but with pluck and luck and a baker's dozen of the zippy pills the fly-boys used we had made it all the way up the Seine and were now drifting past Notre Dame in just the sort of late morning fog that got Monet all up and artisty. But we were here to destroy an infernal machine, a radium-powered electronic existentialist thinking brain Himmler's boffins had cooked up to demoralize France by proving the futlity of moral action in a godless universe. We had to find it and fast, before the ambiguity of free action turned into the giant Gallic shrug of fatalistic indifference, and the Nazis cemented their evil grip on power with the finest available Argentinian gripping cement.

The passage across the churning grey Channel had not been easy, dodging U-Boats, E-Boats, and the supersecret (and highly intriguing) XXX-Boats, and as we creeped up on the French coast in a stolen herring boat under the very nostrils of Fritz, the black hair swirling about Regina Ottoman's burnished ivory countenance had saved us from a double-date with death and torture by perversely reminding a certain Squarehead navy lieutenant of his late mother, a stunning blond Prussian crypto-flapper who accidently started WWI by suggesting to Bismark she thought Belgium was lovely this time of year and wouldn't it be nice if they had the whole country to themselves?

The diesel of the old boat idled like John Rockefeller with a sinus infection. As the morning's vaguely croissant and wine vomit odor of Paris drifted towards the Left Bank, I propped a foot on the greasy oak railing and smoked up an entire case of Luckys, all to create an even thicker cloud of smoke under which Regina (in her black rubber and yellow chiffon dive suit), Blendy the Brit commando with the gammy leg and Claude the cheerful maquis electronic-brain expert, slipped out of the mealy herring-hold of the canal boat and into the Seine, roughly disguising ourselves as sea lions by holding furs above our heads and barking like terrier auctioneers.
But our cover was blown. We had interupted a group of Blintzepasteriekorps German officers who were lunching on the catholic grass with the division's newest attempt at a type of Adolph Hitler desert pastry to supplant the Napoleon, which basically the same but 2 feet high and stuffed hard with sweetened organ meats.

No warning: just as I tightened my rainjacket belt, tossed back a pint of Smedley Moot's 98 Percent Violent Rye and jumped in, a raking of Wermacht 20mm cannon fire across the water turned our F/V Petite Chu-Chu into a flying mass of fish-stinky matchsticks, and the report of the boat's explosion echoed off the flying-butressed walls of Notre Dame itself, interuppting to the annoyance of the priest a particularly sordid confession from Jean-Louis De Marchand, the biggest pimp, Vichy collaborator, antique tapestry and heroin dealer this side of the Rhine.
Bits of herring from our blown-up hold fell on Col. Frist 's croquet party, played there Nazi-style, with land mines. The officers tried to bat away the smoking herring as it fell, but the fish bits sleeted on them just like the appalling Kipper Incident that fatally demoralized the entire Massachusettes stag film industry back in '38. But how the Hun bunmakers fled, the shouts of their fleeing punctuated by an occassional mine explosion.

We stopped barking. The cannon started.

Claude shrugged - not easy to do in a wetsuit - and indicated to follow him under le water. I went reluctantly, knowing my Lucky would be extinguished but not our ultimate fate, and I looked up as the cannon rounds poked bubbly fingers of death into the pie of the river's surface. My underwater swimming had hardly improved since my last trip across the Atlantic in a leaky kayak tethered to a slow flying boat. I could barely see past the brim of my fedora, and all I could fixate on was the southern end of a North-bound Regina, but that served well. Curious Parisian fish shrugged and sipped little glasses of Dubonet, holding their cigarettes in an unusual, somewhat effete manner between their fins.

Perhaps my fedora-mounted oxygen tank was malfunctioning.

We slipped into a little cave and popped out into a dark, dank antechamber, lighting a flare. The place seemed to have last been used as Charlemange's compositing pile. Regina slipped behind a crypt and changed into a little white number with big red polka dots. In her long black hair, sculpted white neck, eyebrows shaped so perfectly you could trim hedges with them, holding a Sten gun with a a 900 round per minute rate of fire propped on one hip, she looked stunning.

"Gaah." I said.
"Stunning, Miss O." said Blendy, who was busily sharpening something.
"Mais oui, ho ho, vive la difference! You are a vision, mon cherie. " said Claude.


"Only as I am alive, and willing to die for freedom, for liberty, for equality." She said. "But we are not here for romance. We are here for Fromance. France. Sorry."

Gorgeous. Adorable. Deadly.

As I pulled out a suit and fresh fedora from the stash left by the Maquis behind a huge can of military-issue butter cookies from the Franco-Prussian war, Blendy abruptly tried to amputate his bad leg with a knife. He screamed quietly.

"Aren't you being a little dramatic?" said Regina. "British commandos! Always trying to cut off something! Here, stop that, stop that..." she gently pushed Blendy's knife away and used a large swastika flag as a bandage on the wound, giving him a shot of the new wonder pennicillin with a horse needle. I was somehow jealous.

The screaming this time was less quiet.

"I suppose that you are tired of life and are wishing us to get over all killed, non?" said Claude, cheerfully. I offered Blendy a swig of "Old Miss' 150 Proof Canal Water."

"Thanks, guv. Hrrrrraaaaagghghghgh." Commando vomit was no different than civilian. Some tough guy.

We got moving. Beside our torches, only the damp grey light from the occasional sewer grates broke through the deeply dank darkness to drive daggers of deadening despair into our guts, which churned with dreariest dread. Foot after meter, mile after kilometer, until the sewers became the catacombs, the vast Paris underground hamper of the medieval dead, skulls and skulls and bones and bones and the untold stories of thousands of lives lying lastingly untold.

"Who wants cucumber sandwiches?" asked Claude, unfolding a wax paper bundle.

The answer was a burst of gun fire that cracked loud and drilled more skulls right through than Kate Smith's version of "Mammy."

"HALT!" And a quick gunshot, 9mm.

One round, right through Blendy's skull- at least the one he'd been holding in his hand while preparing to make a labored Hamlet joke. We scattered and dove for cover.

"You are nicked, what, Olt Bean? Kome out mit your handersuppen!"

Fritzy Nazinheimer had the drop on us. We were spilt in five, hiding behind different funerary piles, or rather pyres for the ones that were already on fire from my dropping a cigarette on a late rennaissance silk merchant.

"My gun's jammed, oh!," Regina realized her mistake.

"Too bad, Amerikanzer Bobby-Sox Gibson girly-tomato das nice piece of ze tiny furniture! Perhaps you vill let ze men play now!"

Now he'd cheese'd her off. Miss Ottoman hated that particular phrase.

Regina started hurling skulls at the German, and as they hit the stone floor they made a sound like tipping a bisque-fire rack in a compulsory Rhodesian pottery class. (I say that in regard of a specific incident I'd been drinking years to forget.)

But hidden as he was behind a huge pile of Plague victims, Krauty McBismark was a tough target.


Regina kept throwing skulls: Pop! tinkle Pop! tinkle Pop! tinkle. Ludwig Van Lumpinshortz answered with the tinny fire of his Luger.

"Yaaaahhh!!" She yelled, tossing a 12th century Sorbornne music major with considerable force. The skull didn't break, but hit the large pile of skulls and rolled down, hitting several with a final descending minor third. She hurled a Gypsy girl and a pikeman and a juggler and two Left Bank whores at the same time.

"Even the dead resist you!" She yelled, drilling a Florentine jeweler into Fritz's chest like Binks Whittening, the famous Yale quarterback.

She bought us time.

The German, thoroughly rattled, fired until he ran out of ammo. Brilliant, honeyknees, I thought. Regina had planned exactly this. Henreich Hammerpants ran out from behind the pile of bones and threw his Luger in frustration at me, which I caught, then I reached into my pocket for a 9mm round I'd picked up off the floor , reloaded as he was running away and shot him in the ass.

He fell on an entire pyramid of orphans, their little bones scattering like kittens on cocaine.

Blendy ran over and threatened Fritz with the broken humerus of a 14th century Jewish goat tanner. "Where is the Electro-brain? Where is the Electro-brain!? ElektrischescomputercGehirn??!!" Blendy pressed the shards to his neck.

I held the empty gun to his face, staring him in the bloodshot green eyes. "Where?!!"

"Nein! Nein!" His buttocks writhed in pain.

"You are being very foolish. We have ways of making you talk, " said Claude, with a big smile. "Ahhh, I have always wanted to say that." He wrapped a kindly arm around Bernie Bratwurst's shoulders.

"Listen, Monsieur Nazi, you see that scar-faced, limping, angry looking Brit? He keeps insisting we strangle you with the nazi flag he has wrapped around his gammy leg, and cut up your remains for eel bait. Icky, icky. And the Americain- oui. Look at his eyes. He is a famous Chicago gangster, and his famous viciously naughty gang of nasty mobsters wants a trophy for their jazz dance hall. Mais, oui, vous. Stuffed and mounted cabbagehead. And the pretty girl, yes? Very pretty, and Oui? She wants to you to die very slowly by tearing your balls off and stuffing them up your how-do-you-say ah.. arsehole. Oui, oui, it is violent, non? I can not promise you what will happen if we have to argue about what to do with you all day. Now be a good fellow and tell us where it is.."

Bertholdt Brownshirtenschitz took a breath and spilled, spilled like the dam above Johnstown, spilled like a chocolate malt on Jean Harlow's best angora sweater. He even drew us a map.

The radium-powered existentialist thinking machine was very close, in a subterranean room underneath the Paris Opera House, which was currently mounting a curious German version of Porgy and Bess, retitled Einfach Hans und Frau wer auf einem Bauernhof schlecht sind - Simple Hans and Woman Who on a Farm Are Bad, famous in occupied France for their version of "Summertime" sung by a chorus of the 33rd Panzergrenadiers.

We left Fritzy hog-tied in a canoe and floated him down the sewers as he hummed "Deutchland Uber Alles," behind the tape over his mouth. In half an hour we were there, there at the Paris Opera's secret prop barn in an alley behind the Avenue De L'Opera, and we emerged from the stinky danky dampness into the street.

"What's that noise?" Asked Regina, fixing her lipstick.

"It sounds like...," I said

"Shh." Said Blendy.

"Ici!" said Claude. "Quick! Here! " He opened an ornate, dilapidated wooden door. I pulled out my stolen Luger. Very popular, this gun. Might be able to trade it to Crumples when I got back to San Francisco for a half payment on my bar tab.

We entered. There it sat, a vast grey machine towering three stories with blinking red and green and white lights like an axis Christmas Tree of doom, with a swastika where the star should be. It clattered like a thousand literary crickets on a thousand Royal typewriters getting paid by the word. The lights danced through the open door onto a puddle on the cobblestones, the mirror image scattered into rings by the tall leather boots strapped snugly around Regina's left leg, a leg so shapely she'd been paid $78 by a guy in San Jose making novelty lamps to use it as a model.

We crept around the side, staring up at the infinity of blinking lights and switches, watching punctuated paper cards sucking through enormously long plexiglass vaccum tubes into distant card receptacles, where a machine placed them into a clattering reader, and and array of automatic chutes and buttons buzzed and bleated and hosed until it came to a basket where it spit out a folding stack of yellow paper on a kind of teletype machine, producing a string of aphoristic french sentences.

"Claude?" said Regina. He picked up a printed sheet, twiddling his moustache. The sweet grin on his face turned over like oversailed rental sloop at the Nantucket Rum regatta.

"It says...it says...that all hope is a cancer of the suffering and weak."

"Let's take out this overgrown player piano," I said, taking out my Zippo to burn the paper. I lead on, following the most active vaccum tube back to it's source.

"There," Regina whispered, her lips so close to my ear I started thinking about something else entirely. She pointed to hunched figure in a sloppy german uniform, guzzling an illicit Coke and tossing the bottle into a huge pile of other bottles. He was intent on a tiny green screen and kept checking a dog-eared copy of Also Spake Zarathusa, typing on a keyboard into a card puncher, and crumpling one up four times for every card that went up the chute.

The sweaty pale young man with the bad teenage moustache and skin as cratered as the land the Battle of the Somme on Guy Fawkes Night, suddenly turned his head and noticed us and screamed, apparantly to himself, "Steuern Sie wechselnde Löschung!! Steuern Sie wechselnde Löschung!!," which Regina translated as "Control Alternate Deletion!! Control Alternate Deletion!! "

No time to figure that insane gibberish out. Like a vicious leopard leaping to gut a fluffy bunny with the sharp claws of freedom, I sprung across the room and grabbed the engineer by the throat, hooking his neck with my gun arm, and gave him a kind of death noogie.

"Sprekensie Anglais, Muchacho? Or would you prefer to say your final thoughts in Berlinian?" I asked.

"Unkle! Unkle!" he cried, whimpering like Goering's pommeranian. Blendy started preparing the plastic explosive, which in a moment of brutal whimsy he'd shaped like little Winston Churchills. "Don't hurt me - my brain is delicate for this business. You are .... Canadians, yes?

"Yeah, sure. From the Moosejaw Special Air Service. Whatever...eh."

"I'm Korporal Yobbs. What is it you want?,"

"I'm ready to blow the place, chaps," said Blendy, poking a Winston with a red and green wire.

Yobbs was aghast. "No, no the machine is...beautiful!" I smacked his face with the Luger.

Regina was looking at the keyboard and the piles of philosophy books that were getting sucked up into that damn fool electric brain contraption with Yobb's retyping them in some kind of crazy number language. Claude, the robot expert, came over and started typing.

"What is wrong with this machine? Nothing is happening."

Yobbs stayed quiet. I smacked him with the butt of the Luger. "Answer the cheerful Frenchie!"

"...The button...hit the red button...," he spluttered, blood trickling down his cheek and draining into the crater of a formerly huge chin zit. Claude hit the giant button, mounted behind the green oscillascopic screen. Generators slowed, the deafening clattering died, the lights stopped blinking. The device stopped was dead. I hit him again.

"Bad move, Stinky."

"Nein! Nein, no more! I mean hit der red button again." Claude did. The overhead lights dimmed and the ungodly contraption, shaking the ground, roared to life.

We waited about three hours.

"Bon! There we go!" said Claude. He began typing, checking the screen. "Oui, it is the correct program. Ahh, will complete it's calculations next Thursday. Merde! We'd better destroy it while we can."

"Almost ready," said Blendy.

Regina, who'd been thumbing through a little Schopenhauer, suddenly spoke up. "Claude, hold on, I have an idea."

It was typically brillant for my sexy little cupcake. Claude and Regina made the adjustments. Blendy disarmed the Churchills. We left quietly, taking the awkward little german with us, and slipped quietly back to the coast on a moonless night where the submarine HMS Unconscionable was waiting to take us back to London.

Back in a classy hotel in London a couple weeks later, relaxing I was drinking bourbon-enhanced tea and gin and reading the Times. And there was the proof our plan worked.

"Correspondents in Paris report the publication of a most curious book - "Eighty Simple Provencal Recipes and the Utter Futility of Being." The French french culinary community believes it to be an amateurish attempt to undermine the culture by the SS."

Regina emerged from the bath naked as a homeless hermit grab and combing her long black hair. Draping herself over my shoulder and smelling like a field of cinnamon daisies, she saw the article.

I whistled. She smiled.

"It worked. "

Her plan to scuttle the radionic brain's "program" by switching the cards of Husserl with the Joy of Cooking had succeeded, and we knew the Nazis would have to abandon the ElektrischescomputercGehirn. The existentialists were intellectually safe from everything but bad cooking. The French French would continue to fight.

I took the Luger out of my pocket and sighted it. Walk in with Regina and I bet Crumples would let me slide on the tab.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Deadly Being and Violent Nothingness

She called herself Regina Ottoman, after the Empire. Her jet black hair and razor sharp bangs offset her transluscent white body poured into a tight red dress like a Hedy Lamarr-shaped soft ice cream dispenser. Her lips were a perfect cherry red, and I attentively watched them forming the words "fuck," a notable beginning, and then "off," which was more of a disappointment. Yet they were directed out towards the bay, where an unable seaman on the USS Forestal was reading those lips with gray binoculars instead of the important semaphore that said "Flaming Tanker is Drifting To You." She sat down, disdainful and yet not incognizant of the futility of being, her curves folding with deliberative grace like the taffy in a taffy making machine. She was a spitwad of beauty shot smartly into the pocked buttocks of a forgettable world left by God in his other pants.

I outpace myself.

Out the greasy window of the dingy yellow Port office, the vast billows of black smoke and greasy fire drifted over Hunter's Point. I took a drag on a filterless Lucky and played it cool:

"So, Sugar Loaf, what say you ditch that roll of Buffalo nickels you call a boyfriend and you and I grab a slow boat through Rio and then, Kiddo, then maybe we get hitched in Paris." That came out wrong. First, the Nazis were in Paris. And second, it actually came out:

"Uh...duh....er...uhhhh."

"Close your mouth , Mack. Look, you're spotting your tie." She rose like Venus from an al fredo sauce, came over and deftly wiped the spittle off with a hanky. Her scent was a lovesick grove of wistful apricots, and burst of expensive vodka, and as she tossed her hair over an unmitigated shoulder I supressed a sonnet with some difficulty, beating back a rhyme for "wuv." That feeling, that love-twisted feeling like a electric eel looking for loose change under my small intestine, it was the only other thing cutting through the familiar fog of Gary's Indiana Gin, a gin so rough I refinished my furniture with it.

"I'm just here for business, " she said.

"Business." I said flatly, not imagining her dress suddenly disintegrating due to manufacturing defects. "I'm your man."

"No you're not. But I want you to kill one."

"Okay, sure, whatever. Who?" Hmm. Brain's Brain not work.

"Not literally of course. I want to destroy a reputation. The reputation of The Viscount Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van De Forfen."

"The Viscount Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van Der Forfen?" The Industrial Aristocrat and International Playboy. The War Profiteer. The Mattress King. The Noted Amateur Existentialist?"

"The Count Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van Der Forfen. The Fourth. Mack, You know I... work... on projects of special interest to the War Department. " She gazed outside at the fireboats sending their streams of water, uncomprehending, into a blazing aircraft carrier, the towering balls of flame and smoke glinting orange in her almost silver eyes. "Paris. The Montparnesse."

I was especially non-plussed. "You've slept with Jean-Paul Sartre- once again. "

"Yes. Well, spooning and a little structuralist dialectic. Of the act of sex he is disdainful. I slept with Simone De Beauvoir." Regina arched an eyebrow so perfectly shaped that if tossed into the air it would come right back.

"Le crap." I said.

"Don't be like that," she said.

Through all the years of 5 cent stogies and 4 cent rye and dollar poker and inexpensive barber shaves and a bad habit of picking imromptu saber fights in fencing clubs with my mask off, my face still had betrayed a boyish jealousy, an ignorant contempt of critical theory. But I just figured if a joe works alongside his brother men he ought to be able to have a decent place and eat regularly and live free as long as he doesn't hurt anybody; and if some pudding pants starts killing and enslaving people, well, maybe pudding pants gets scrapped off the cobblestones, and if two astonishingly hot women find a special, tender kind of love, who am I not to watch?

"OK. Sweet peaches." My endearments were labored and clearly annoying, like, increasingly, my breathing.

"Look, Mack, just shut up and listen, will you? The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth is here, in the city, at the Huntington. "

I whistled. "Toney digs, Cupcake! But what do I do, walk in with this old hat and drool on my tie and say 'what's up, P.P. , you crazy old horse bugger? Let's get go shoot pool at the Dew-Drop Inn and chat up a couple of B-girls? I should just wear a sign that says 'Deputy Mayor of Pallokaville.'"

She ignored this overwrought tirade. "Follow me."

I watched her bodacious backside working like two hams fighting in a christmas sock, poured six quick swigs of Racoon Rye down my gullet and grabbed my clean gun, a 5 lb ancient Navy Colt I picked up at the estate sale of Mark Twain's butler, so large it had the complete text of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" worked into the engraving.

"Fancy-Living, here we come."

I stopped a cab by firing the Black-powder colt into the air. The huge report so startled the cabby that he seemed to die of a heart attack and the cab veered off and crashed into a pile of electric wool socks for the Alaska export market, causing a small sheep-smelling fire. I pulled him out into the street, apologized with a respectful tip of the hat, and we headed to Nob Hill, or what I liked to call the Ass Pimple of Swankytown. I drove. She explained the plan.

Couple hours later I stood with my rented red diplomatic sash riding up and dislodging the borrowed medals, one for valor for the unsuccessful Russian invasion of Fiji and two that had something to do with an Oklahoma bake-off. The pocket of my monkey suit had a left over receipt for $400,000 in solid gold napkin rings and the name of a recomended professional toothbrusher. The collar was so stiff and high my head felt like the little metal ball on the tip of those new auto-pens. I stood there in the grand ballroom, bobbing like a top, stuck with a wrinkly round dame with huge emeralds who was still bitter over her family's freeze-out of profits from the Opium Wars.

A fireworks display of sparkles in my eyes as either the delerium set in or Regina came along in a clingly - no, I stick with clingly - white silk number to rescue me from the sad story of an emperor who didn't appreciate what opium did for his people. She was more dolled up than the original cast of a Chinese opera, but tasteful-like, and heads turned so quick that I spotted my old pal Smokey McCallister, Lawyer at Law, handing out business cards. But she was also pouring from the wiry arm of a tall, remote, hatchet-face no-chin man in an all black 'white' tie and tails, with a rusty moustache and sideburns saved from the Boer War, looking like a hairy can opener in tails.

"Allow me to present the noted American Existential thinker, Dr. Mack Brain," she said to the The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth," who nodded politely.

"Just call me Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen," he said, asking his butler to extend his hand on his behalf.

"Mack. Honored." I said. Regina gave me a look. I glanced at the crib notes on my detachable sleeve-collar. "I understand you have a marvellously --er --detached faith in the clarity of being."

"Only when manifested by personal suffering."

"But of course." We suddenly all laughed -and hollowly- at once, and I toasted the non-descript reliief of free will by inevitable death with a bottle of the 1827 Moet.

"So, Viscount.." and seeing his butler's face prodding me to continue "Phillerph ...Von Pforffer... Van De Forffen... the fourth ," The bat-nosed butler shook his head slightly to indicate I may have offended him with excess formality at the last bit, and indeed the Viscount said:

"Please, I had hoped we could all despair of the possibility of human friendship together yet in utter moral isolation without excessive formality." He looked sad.

"No, no, a slip of the habit, Viscount...Phillerph...Von Pforffer..Van.."

Regina, bless her, cut me off with a slight stretch and deft wafting of bosom, thus choking all conversation in the ballroom.

A caterer showed up offering a plate of fancy seafood treats. "Madam? Sir?"

"Thank you, no. I've had too many." said Regina.

"Hell is other crab puffs." I said. The laughter was despairing. Except from his Viscountness. He was nodding soberly, the sideburns catching his collar and splaying out sideways, making his face look even thinner.

"I too acknowledge the humor of your comment. A freely choosen clutch, as it were. A sudden synthesis of truths, essentially a dialectic, the post-Hegelian clash of crustacean and catering."

"Quite." I'd dealt with these rubber underwear types before. 'Quite' covers most bases.

"Viscount, tell us dear of your devastating critique of Lativa," asked Regina. It was clearly a favorite topic and the Viscount swelled up even more, and warmed to the "cultural renewal" of the 1874 execution by mass drowning of the infamous Anachromantic poets of Riga , cast adrift in the Baltic by order on a leaky barquentine and sinking to a recitiation of "Ode to A Flatulent Pedophile."

It was at this moment that I noticed a small, stooped hairy man with a a monacle watching the Viscount intently from the balcony. No more than 5' 2", his hair was slicked back and parted in the middle and he had a Prussian air about him and a razor thin moustache about his lip - but his lower lip. His right jacket pocket bulged. A gun? A package?

Regina put her hand on my shoulder as the Viscount continued. "Kriestenhemeier!"

Sparky Kriestenheimer, to be exact. The oily head of the San Francisco Prussian Beneficence Society, and the reputed head of the West Coast german spy network. Actually he was the head of the Japanese West Coast spy network. Clever that. But this was no place to start shooting up a swanky ballroom. Well, technically, it was exactly the place to shoot up a swanky ballroom, it's just that this would have served no purpose. It was the Viscount in my sights and I had a job to do. I watched Kriestenheimer as the Viscount droned on about Latvian anabaptism rituals, where people went to the lake to be saved and when they got there simply looked at it.

Kriestenheimer disappeared and then appeared and trotted across the dance floor directly toward the Viscount, plowing through twirls of waltzing couples.

"Von Pforffer Van De Forffen! Von Pforffer Van De Forffen!" He yelled in a scratchy clipped german accent, reaching into his pocket.

I fingered my gun, having just disguised it as a cat with an old beaver stoll when people were busy eating crab puffs, and holding it in plain view like a cat with a bottle of good scotch. Regina stepped back a little and discreetly pulled out a tiny pearl-handled harpoon gun, which she held between her knees.

"Kriestenheimer! Kriestenheimer!" The Viscount turned and yelled back.

"Von Pforffer Van De Forffen!" I was watching his ratty little eye, ready to blow him back to Limburgerville. We needed the Viscount alive.

But Sparky's hand came out of the jacket pocket empty and he embraced Phillerph crisply, kissing him on both cheeks. "Can it have been ten years since the last kunstkrieg?"

Regina quickly whispered into my ear:

"The KunstKreig - it was a late Weimar republic ostensibly dadaist pro-fascist gallery show in Frankfurt, where "degenerate" artworks were crushed in a gallery by a steam hammer and then force-fed in china cups to street waifs, to suggest the inability of modern art to sustain orphans for any significant length of time. "

"That's just wrong." I said.

"Miss Ottoman, may I present my old friend Mr. Max Kreistenheimer, and this of course is the hopeless ravishing Miss Regina Ottoman," said the Viscount's butler on his behalf. Kriestenheimer oogled her briefly, wrinkled his lower moustache, and returned to their conversation.

"These two were behind it, breaking Bonnards and smooshing Duchamps, luring orhpans with candy- the Viscount has been promoting a wholly fatalist wing among the existentialists, eliminating the lead movement in western philosophy as an anti-fascist political force. And now you will ask 'who cares?'"

"So who cares?"

"It's big, Brain, bigger than you or me. Ever here of the Resistance movement? What happens when despair within nothingnesss turns into the despair of meaninglessness?"

"uh...."

The Viscount and Kriestenheimer were exchanging something in envelopes, shaped like wads of federal lettuce that stained the manilla vanilla.

"It's bad, Brain. Bad like redneck vampires. Van Der Forfen refutes Sartre, and it means the French, they are idled by the absurd futility of all action, and they stop shooting Nazis. The pressure in Europe fades. " Regina's eyelashes fluttered ennuically.

"And we lose the war. "

"Correct. We must either discredit Von Der Forfen in logic, scandal, or in violence. "

"Say all three, Schnookums? Say we prove an firm basis for human meaning, dress him in a Nazi nurse costume and push him down the stairs at the Press Club? "

She considered this suggestion. She considered it daft.

Turning to avoid her withering - yet extremely sexy - gaze I espied Von Pforffer Van De Forffen and Kriestenheimer talking with someone near a corner, because I recently did the New York Times crossword. Then I sneezed from the remains of an ague. They were laughing manically for a minute before a sharp retort silenced them, from Jimmy Durante, who happened to be in town to accept an honorary doctorate of divinity.

Ha-cha-cha.

We followed discreetly. Von Pforffer Van De Forffen and Kriestenheimer were circulating among the swells, taking envelopes here and there- I saw them now, saw them for what they were: bag men for the bad guys, picking up the cookies and milk for Der Furher from a bunch of fat cat war-profiteering bastards who wanted to be on the winning side. I knew some of them, mostly from barrel-scraping infidelity cases: Randolph Beauregard Winston, the infamous Honey Bee Magnate. Clarice Vincentia Von Trapp, the "Capone" of Choral Music who had caused more than one contralto and occassionally entire competing alto sections, to "disappear." The Hon. Portnoy Plimpwagon, the "Ball Peen" King, currently bilking the government for $685 a hammer - a likely reason that corpses were starting to pile up on the docks with a 1" dent in their skulls. Hyacinth Smoots, the corpulent Austrian wife of the President of Texaco, who cut checks to dictators like invitations to her baby shower and had once personally invaded Francisco Franco.

Bums. Whores. Dirty whoring bums. All of em.

We followed at a discreet distance, and although all eyes were on Regina, it was my hand on her ass when she slapped me. But the gum on Regina's pumps caught something. An envelope. She opened it. There was a check alright, for $400,000 to the "Luxemborg Re-redecoration Society." But something else:

Blueprints, on paper so thin you could cut other paper with it from the side.

"What are they?" She asked.

"Hmm." Vacuum tubes after switches and switches and more vacuum tubes, hundreds of thousands of them a huge device, big enough to fill a gymnasium.

"If Popular Mechanics is right, and it always is, these are part of the plans for some kind of robot thinking machine. But this - this is looks like a radium bin - see, it says "radium bin," and this ...this is an entry slot, can you make an sense of this list? "

She stood close, reading with me.

"Something about 3 by 5 cards with a holes like voting maching. But see, on the cards? Schopenhauer. Nietzche. Hegel. Husserl. Kierkegarde. Even Sartre and Simone. "

"Like some kind of brainiac polka troupe!" I exclaimed.

"Quite."

"Then these must be plans for a thinking machine to think existentialist thoughts. But why?"

"I think I know," she said. "Or, rather I believe I think that I know. "

We began to put it together. There was no other conclusion: The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth and Sparky Kriestenheimer were colluding to develop an existentialist offshoot so misanthropic and fatalistic that the French, reading it, would be give up as the futility of moral action in a godless universe became inarugable. But the war was on - they couldn't develop the syllogisms in time. They needed a logic so irrefutable that it would turn despair into ultimate surrender, and they needed it yesterday. For that they were making: a radium-powered pro-fascist existentialist thinking computer.

"My God!" She said, wanting to scream but whispering instead. "The Ultimate Weapon!"

I held her in my arms. She pulled me closer.

"I may be drunk, I may be broke, I may be ugly, I may smell a bit. I may not have class, or a a fancy education, or a car, but as God, or some interchangeable entity composed of the simple totality of conscious free will, is my witness, we'll find it, baby. We'll find this unholy monstrosity and stop it, stop it before through the pure reason of machine logic it destroys all the reasons for human meaning, and hands Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and all the goons and thugs in the world, especially those I owe money to, the kind of victory that will crush all justice, all freedom, all the love. But no machine can stop...."

"Yes?" She looked up at me, with eyes so big and moist you could drain them and sell them for condominuim development.

"The love I have for you. "

And we kissed- like the collision of two inflatable boats paddled by cherubs and deflating from the shafts of Eros and sinking in the gushing warm sweet water like flat Coke left in the sun of romance.

"But first," I pulled out my Navy Colt. "We gotta a job to do."

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: THE MILK OF HUMAN VIOLENCE

I polished off a Joe's Special at Joe's Joe's Special Specialty House, and finished the hot black coffee dashed with Craig's Largely Wood-Free Rye, glancing down the fog on California Street for some cow-mouthed palooka I was tailing that was cheating on his wife with, as it turned out, a fetching redhead assistant carpet salesgirl, whose own carpet, I saw from my fancy color negs, didn't exactly match the drapes. I was churning with that fascinating contradiction when the fetching but gin-polluted waitress came by to refill my coffee with steak sauce. That's what you get for ordering a cup o' Joe in Joe's Joe's Special Special place.

Low, low work, marital infidelity. Sitting in cars, peeking in windows like a prairie dog with a fedora, hiding in noisy iceboxes, putting a mike in the lampshade, putting a lampshade over some Joe named Mike. I hadn't had a Nazi spy ring or a Chinatown murder or a municipal bond amoratization rate to check out in two months to relieve the monotony of confirming the amazing fact that Joe Lunchbox has a little love dumpling on the side. Not to mention it was hard to cash the checks when the tears smudged the ink, and bounced anyway, because the rutting little weasel involved invariably cleared out the account right while I was setting my hopes of a full jar of mayonnaise unrealistically high, and all I could look forward to was maybe an empty night of bad love in lieu of cash from the desperate proto-divorcee.

I took out my wallet to pay Joe, reached in and brushed the flies out of the way. Nothing in there but happy memories. Joe gave me one of those looks that a 300lb chef gives a barrel of rotten spinach. Lean month since my last three genius clients shot each other simultaneously over creative differences in a modern dance piece about the death of Trotsky. As an indirect result, my car was gracefully stolen by Martha Graham. I was so tapped out I was living on my office couch and showering at Dardenella's hydrant, whose patience was getting thinner than her panties in her teenager neighbor's fantasies. I'd resorted to stealing a tux and attending fancy parties for the venison puffs and high-living comestibles until I was caught with a bowl of pudding leaking through my diplomatic sash.

There at the old Pine Sol-smelling counter I stood with the kind of a look an 8 year old gets when he realizes he's accidently run over the new beagle puppy. Rattling in my pocket was 27 cents. 4 cents short. I'd seen richer pockets in a Bombay dust factory. Then a pasty-faced gorilla in a blue suit that barely hid a sawed-off shot gun walked up with an outstreched pie-sized hand and held out a nickel - it looked like a elephant foot with a bottle cap stuck in the middle.

"Thanks, pal. I'll pay you back next time I visit the zoo. "

You had to beat this kind of thing back. If you're grateful, it gets to be a bad habit, and the next thing you know you're into Frankie the Fish Head for 10 grand over an ill-timed deuce of clubs. But this muscle slab's black eyes were too small to shrink any farther, and the steam-shovel jaws didn't open, but with the slightest tilt of the head, a feat for a man with no apparent neck, he indicated a silhouette in a back booth.

The way the light through the blinds struck that particular dark shape you could tell she was loaded for bear.

Phyllis Poetilla. The deadliest girl in town, even if you didn't count the chlamydia. A notorious Tenderloin madam and sometime Disney distributor, she left a trail of broken hearts, empty accounts, severed limbs and cheerful sailors from the Oakland docks to Russian hill.

She crooked her index finger and wiggled it compellingly. "Dr. Brain." She said, professionally, although in her profession that could mean anything from fronting a bootleg print of Snow White to a sudden need for 26 cases of pennicillin.

"Phyllis. You're looking well." She was always some crazy combo of expensive and cheap, like a Faberge Egg full of pressed ham. The material was expensive, but her decolletage got up and danced without a formal introduction, and charged 10 cents for it.

"An economic necessity. You're looking desperate."

"Nah, sugar, I'm sitting on top of the world."

"Under of a cardboard box of crap on the top of the world, I'd say. You've got bigger holes in your shoes than the Lusitania. But I wanna check something. Prosciutto, rattle his cage." The gorilla came at me like a freight train. But I was like a penny on the tracks. I'd already tied his shoes together when I'd asked casual-like what on earth that was behind him. The result was like Casey Jones hitting a salad bar.

"Sharp, Mack. I hate that in a man. Except when I need it. Thinker and a fighter. Now I figure a guy like you can handle himself- that's two palookas for the money. Meet me at this address at nine. I'll make it worth your while. "

She got up and wiggled off, while some other goon of hers dragged Prosciutto along like a bag of idiot meat.

I looked at her card.

BAY AREA SECRET CASTLE OF LOVE
2-4-69 Bush
(Hard Right on Johnson)
San Francisco, California

KENTUCKY 5497 Ask for the Comprehensive Phyllis

Unnecessary double-entendres in a cathouse ad annoyed me. It's like living in a mansion and putting out a huge sign on the lawn that says "Guess what? I live in a Mansion!" The Chanel #5 on the card smelled mostly like bait- a gilded chum bucket for lovelorn chumps. But money flows from loneliness, and I needed money more than I needed self-respect. I had a suspicion this job would drive me lower than a groundhog limbo dancer. But you don't pay Joe, or any other chef with fragmentation grenade on hand in the kitchen, in pride.

It was raining downtown, cold and wet and bouncing like a shower of kitten noses, and I managed to soak my last pair of dry socks (one argyle, the other Stanford Varsity) before I casually yanked a couple of tourists off the cable car and rode bitterly to Bush street.

It was just my luck that the cloth from the umbrella I'd stolen from the tourists was not really attached at all, and the second I opened it it blew away, covering the windshield of an Oldsmobile which spun out of control and took out a Tibetan restaraunt which was empty because as a sideline I'd happened to have written a less than stellar review of the joint, Madame Than's Yak Noodles N' Chips, just last week in the Examiner. I turned left at the resulting sesame oil fire, briefly hosed off the crying passengers, and found Phyllis's -a bright red and lilac Victorian with the real San Francisco rarity of a wrap-around porch and attached pig-iron foundry, where the off-duty girls poured cast-iron molds of presidents and famous European historical figures for sale at disreputable university book shops. At least, that was the story.

I was about to knock on the door with the velvet cushioned knocker when insert knockers joke here Phyllis came around outside, holding a briefcase. She was all business, like Henry Ford breaking a sit-down strike with a pack of Pinkerton goons, if Henry Ford was a wearing an overstuffed red satin dress and wielding a pretty little chromed .32 auto instead of mooning over the picture of Hitler on his desk. Ironic, because it was a Pinkerton problem. Phyllis laid it out- ten or twelve slabs of pasty-faced, mustachioed Pinkerton detectives snooping around, questioning the girls. They wouldn't be bribed off and they even turned down special favors. Why? Always the question. Pinkertons were the biggest whores and goons around. Odd indeed. It was worth a 100 a day and expenses to her to find out. I was getting hired as a private counter-dick.

"Sure, no sweat. " I said. Unlike a church or a bank, with a whorehouse you know exactly where the money's coming from. She kissed me on the chin and gave me the the briefcase. It had a file with photos of the Pinkertons, $500 cash, a card with the triple underlined address of a good tailor, and my own pitted and slightly rusty .45 retrieved from Mystic Eva's Pawn and Psychic Readings (2 locations.) I never trust a man whose gun is too clean.

"Friday," she said. "I need to know by Friday."

"Not much time, Toots."

"And Mack, I hate to tell ya but your girl's stepping out on ya. Get me the info and I tell you who." She closed the door.

Boy, that dame could pull strings like a piano factory. I walked, through the looming towers of cement and glass and the rain and neon lights and the heaving sea of hats. A paperboy cried out Rommel's Victory in North Africa. A single daisy dropped in the street was run over by meat van. A mother smacked her crying little girl with a soaking wet copy of Being and Nothingness. I walked on, tried put Dardenella out of my mind by concentrating on municipal bonds and drinking a pint of Vjorn's Stumbling Icelander Gin - it was enough to get me to the tailor in one piece.

An hour later I had a cash, a gun, a mission, a new wool suit and a wicked hangover. I was begining to feel like an American again.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Where Blood Stains The Linoleum

Crumples' unbelievably disagreeable face, crinkled and pitted and rutted like some aerial photo of the Battle of the Somme, soured up even more when I asked for a Muu-Muu Tartan for Dardenella, so to say a scotch and mango daquiri, and a pint glass of McCaber's Woolly Old Pickled Sheep Nose Ale of Notable Strength for me. He was the only man I knew whose decades of back-alley boxing greatly improved his face, and he'd started in the bare-knuckle 56 rounds a fight days against animated meat slabs like "Miterbox" Marx the Heavyweight Midget and Sparks "No-Arms" McElroy, a disappointed expert telegraph tapper who had his feet legally re-registered as fists.

Crumples' arm plowed a furrow in the thick dust on the bar, shooting me a look of seering contempt as he fumbled with the paper umbrella for the dacquri, breaking it utterly and furiously crumpling the splinters into a ball before dropping the tiny little logjam onto the crushed ice, like a wolf-spider might decorate a dead but juicy horsefly for his girlfriend, which he knew was about to eat his head. Crumples was famous at the Rusty Hobnail for crushing ice by contemptuously ignoring it, and he was even more angry at me for having the G-Men pick him up and beat him into a sheet of Spam, until they realized he couldn't have spiked my Irish Startup drink with knock out drops from the pulpy fruit of the Concussion tree, because of the lipstick marks on the telltale napkin. It wasn't Crumples' shade by a longshot.

Dardenella was dressed against the fog with a violet silk number with a chevron of alternating sable and bakelite stripes and one of those necklines fallen so low they called it Black Monday and even if I didn't know fashion from taxidermy, I could tell that on Eleanor Roosevelt that same dress might have been confused for a restrictive scarf. Delectable D took a drag on her brand new 36" cig holder that I'd had remade from that blond cookie's sniper rifle, the one I appropriated before she was sent up to the Lindberg Correctional Home for Whacked-Job Nazi Broads, there to watch the earth rotate around the sun 45 times to life.

The cherry on the cigarette was practically the only light in the room, and the orange red light splashed on her perfect cheekbones in the syrupy gloom. The Rusty Hobnail was the last of the overturned '49er ships used as bars and restaraunts in San Francisco- they'd had an abortive attempt at an art deco remodel back in '19, but that just left a gold leaf -flapper Caryatid holding up the false keel ceiling, next to the last human remains of Dinky the Lascar sailor, whose head dangled from a beaded rope with a paper sign in green Magic Marker that said "Last Guy With a Bad Check." Women's underwear of disputable volume hung from the rafters. The pickled egg jar had a mark that made me suspect that it was Confederate in origin, from the war. Class joint. The society girls on Nob Hill, if they ever got drunk , lost and found themselves in here, would probably hang themselves from their pearl strands in despair.

Crumples called the caryatid "Shirley"- her breasts were both bare and covered in cracked yellow varnish- and winked at her dauly with a twinkle or perhaps a displaced eye-booger and the sort of repulsively lascivious grin that might send you to a remote Benedictine monastery to reconnect with moral cleanliness. And here in a whale-oil stained dark, time passed like molasses going uphill to a furniture store in Romania in January on a passport forged in green crayon while waiting for its grandmother to find her purse in the car.

"I'm bored, Mack," said Dardenella. "Why don't we go out dancing, at the Savoy? Runny Beans and His Lip Service Band are playing a whole set of Cab Calloway arrangements of the Ring Cycle."

"Sorry, Baby. You know we gotta wait for Abdul."

"The loathsome little rat! How I hate him!" She pouted, in such a way that it got me thinking of ways to give her more disappointing news. I pushed the cig holder out of the way, knocking over a whale-oil lamp, and stroked her cheek and neck and kissed her on her nose, a nose reknowned throughout Northern California for her perfect oval nostrils. She smelled nice, like lilac and truffles and a sea breeze over a field of candy strawberries.

"Buck up, kid, " I said, blasting the growing fire with the nitrogen extinguisher I always kept handy in a death trap like the Rusty Hobnail. Then I notice a surprised change in her expression.

The shift in the aroma toward stale gyro meat, cheap rye, and second-hand cigars meant Abdul Jimenez was standing behind me: a disagreeable Swiss character actor, used car salesman and political consultant for big water interests. Suddenly, everything went white.

"Like It?" He burbled.

"I can't see anything, Abdul, but you might remember I can shoot by smell."

"'Number One Grandpa?' " Said Dardenella. "Who the fuck elects grandpas?" This phrase confused me.

"I call it a 'novelty T-Shirt'," said Abdul, walking around a taking a chair. "Hey that's some sparkly dame you got here - what's your name, Sweet Cheeks?"

"Mrs. Ballcracker to you."

"Oh.ho..ho, Mack, she's a spicy noodle, eh? Here, check out these other shirts," he said, offering them hanging on his arm, the tips of his tiny moustache pointing to his cotton bearing hands.

I picked through a few - ordinary undershirts with sayings cheaply printed on them, like they were stolen from some deranged athletic club - with sayings like 'Hot Stuff" and "I'm with Stupid" and one moronic idea that looked like a picture of a tuxedo and the only one that made any sense at all- "23 Skidoo."

"And you're planning to CHARGE for these?," I said.

"Not much, frankly. It was the dumbest thing I could think of. It's just a front. I'm going to soak them in liquid opium and ship them around the country safely and then refine it into heroin."

"Nice to catch up. Why tell me?"

"I wanted you to know why I'm going to have to kill you," he said, whipping out a specialty 20mm handgun with a 4 round cylinder that must have weighed fifteen pounds. I seen one once before, at the climax of the case of Fats Scharnhorst and the Exploding Hindenberg.

"Mack!" Dardenella exclaimed considerably, diving under the table,

"Sorry, Abdul, I missed something there. We go back a ways. I never liked you, and I did sleep with your wife, and got you fired and then had your mother evicted, and snuck in and hid your car keys, and I think I ratted you out to the cops about fifteen times, but we go back. Why tell me your little smack scheme and then say you're going to kill me, you pan-Equitorial fruitcake? "

"Maybe I don't like you either, Brain. Maybe I'm a twisted hero-hating bastard. Maybe I haven't had a chance to try out my little cannon here. Maybe I've got tapioca for a conscience, and I'm looking for a few laughs. "

"You've confused me with someone who's not drunk. " I tossed back the ale - about as refreshing now as a bucket of hot sand. And what the hell was Crumples doing anyway? The samba? "What do you want, Jimenez?" Everyone wants something. I'd learned that in the detective business and once when I went to a Halloween party dressed as Jean Harlow.

"The Brown Envelope. And tell Crumples to shut off that bloody samba music."

"Take a powder, Crumples. " He stopped mid-step, crestfallen, his face collapsing like an earthen dam in an LA rainstorm.

Goddamn. Jimenez knew about the envelope. And he knew I could get it. If he knew what it really meant, it explained everything: The mysterious Buicks. The albino massage therapist. The bicycle bomb. The robot hookers. Did he know how many good men had died for the Brown Envelope? How many cops? How many actuaries? How many classical trombonists? The Brown Envelope - it was such stuff that dreams are mailed in.
"You're going to tell me where it is, and how I can get it." Jimenez glowered in a sick and strangely misplaced kind of triumph, like a poodle who's just swallowed an ashtray.

The Brown Envelope had built a que for death longer than the line for water at the Death Valley Rock Sucking Contest, and I wasn't about to spill just because some rye-swilling balloon-head was pointing a howitzer at my latest girlfriend.

"Say Baby, how bout a manicure?" I said.

Abdul looked at his hand. "But I just had them done this week..."

Dardenella was faster than greased lightning with an art history degree cashing a check. She whipped out her nail clippers and snipped in just the right way at just the right moment, and Abdul and his newly severed Achilles Tendon came crashing to the floor, him screaming in eerie silence, and as his gun hit the floor a monstrously huge report rattled every bottle of watered rye and the old oak ribs and Dinky the Lascar's head swayed sardonically in a circle. I kicked the gun away and got a foot on Adbdul's throat.

"You alright? I aksed Dardenella. She was panting, her chest heaving up and going down a bit, before poofing out , and then sinking and then poofing up again, was holding the bloody nail clippers from the end like a dead fish, and the blood dripped to the floor like Chinese Blood Torture, of floors.

"Mack, you're getting me a new pair of clippers. OH!" She was looking to the bar and held her hand to her mouth in distress, dropping the clippers with a tinny clank.

"OW!" It was Crumples. There was a spattering of blood on the racks of bottles and the bar. He'd taken the 20mm cannon round on the chin. Where it promptly skipped off. He'd probably done more damage to himself shaving that morning. The round itself left a 2 foot hole in the wall with a lovely view of the Bay, and the first sunlight to hit that place in a century scorched the linoleum.

Tough old guy, Crumples, like seal jerky from the Napoleonic Wars. You had to hand him that.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Bronx Cheer Bombadier

--
It had been as wonderful a night as you can have in East Greenland in Spring. I was dizzy with Dardenella, who had hopped the secret long-range gyrocopter with me for the Trans Atlantic flight to Hendon air base. That was a cold flight, so cold her nipples probably arrived several seconds before we did.

Probably why I let my guard down. Churchill himself had called- that is, called me a brainless hedgehog buggerer, and demanded that I be held accountable for single-handedly ruining the cruiser HMS Hammerblowwith a straw and a box of uranium powder that clearly should not have been left lying around labeled "confectionary sugar." How was I to know that our impromptu repairs to the radium-powered robotic torso of fake-FDR would lead us to the Hammerblow instead of home to Heidelberg?

But right then the in-transit "Sweaty" Stacks And His Flinging Fardrops band was making The Fatty Arbuckle Memorial Air Force Base and Greater Nuuk swing, and when they played "Ol' Groat's Man-Frog Boogie," in A minor, I twirled Dardenella so hard she snapped the Town Quonset's baleen wainscotting with her Mary Janes. I eventually convinced an ingenuous Des Moines Air Corps captain that the decanter of Hennesey was actually fermented walrus vomit, a famous local beverage, and it was free booze till curfew, when a moon-faced MP armed with a harpoon cannon pulled us out of the photo booth at a peculiarly awkward moment when I was arguably flossing with her garter belt.

Snug at the hotel, or by some standards, moth eaten seal fur hut, I stuffed Dardenella in the down comforter, and then I put her to bed.

"Darling, don't ever leave me, " she cooed, like the famous besmitten water yak of Beruit.
"I'll be back to love you momentarily," I replied logically.

Since it was a strictly no-smoking hut, I slammed the flap and stepped outside into the gentle blizzard for a quick pipe of Captain Beemish's Old Tar-Yarn. In the stiff Nor' Easter, the acrid smoke rose and zipped away like an unstable electron with antisocial tendencies.

"Who on earth is reroofing at this time of night?" asked Dardenella.
"No one, Mentholyptus Drops. Go to sleep."

Through the darky dark and blowing snow and sleeting sleet, I noticed a lurking shape lumber in and out a view. Danger! I picked up an ancient whale gun and as I was cramming shot, marbles, razors, dried marmets and some 1937 cupcakes into the barrel a thud thudded on my temple like a Stanley Steamer over a pet gerbil named Larry.

This was the first time I was hit by an aria- an old wax cylinder, which is softer than vinyl, but it was filled with lead, which is heavier. Pain. Darkness. Darkness like a black box of black velvet soaked in pitch and dropped into an underground lake in an abandoned coal mine in a particularly uneducated part of West Virginia.

I woke up zipped inesacapably in an army sleeping bag in a Kayak cutting quitely through the smooth, deadly Arctic water, surprised to see Herman Goering paddling. No, it was Moon-face, the 320 lb MP, wearing an unusual combination of light blue sealskin parka and swastika armband. The Sergeant was a filthy Heinie! And just ahead a Dornier Flying Boat idled ominously in the grabby, pushy, surly, pokey cold. I naturally had a tiny specialty .45, so small it was actually wider than it was long in my wool socks, but it might has well have been on the moon, and as the bag got wetter and colder it got smaller and smaller, so that I felt like a big soggy kidnapped cold wet apple worm being delivered to the Red-breasted Robin of death.

There was one option, riskier than pleasing an excitable floozy in the Buffalo nitroglicerin factory with a 1.5 hp electric massager: I could wriggle in the kayak hole like Josephine Baker for a free box of opium and try to tip Moon-Face out into the deadly North Atlantic. I worked back and forth in my sleeping bag, rocking the boat with my elbows trapped inside the musty down -

"Hey," yelled Moon-Face. "No! Mein Gott in Schnitzel!"

The kayak tipped hard and there was a crack through thin ice and a distinct BLOOOP, like a someone dropped a Wells-Fargo safe in a vat of creme broule. The armband floated up with extra poignancy to the surface of the inky black sea, along with a small plastic duck he kept for company. It finally disappeared, fading into black with a fatalistic squeek.

BRRRAPRPRPRPRPRAP! Automatic weapons fire from the Dornier! Holes and Feathers! The rifle fire ripped through my bag at all kinds of points and the feathers floated in the sky - but nothing hit me, save a couple of rounds grazing my scalp and pouring sticky hot blood on the inside of the fluffy bag, which was still wedged tight in the hole with me flopping around like landed swordfish hopped up on Venezualan Bungo weed. I then realized that a skin kayak was not usually armored against fuzzy bunnies, let alone the newly chattering 20mm cannon, and as growing flurry of feathers hid me, the kayak was sinking faster than Jack Benny's hopes of getting lucky in Stalingrad.

The Dornier started turning into the wind, back towards me, satisfied I was doomed, and there dragging behind was the trailing antenna and my chance, if I could somehow grab it. I got an arm through a feathery cannon hole and searched the kayak - and, in tremendous luck, I found a 25, 000 foot roll of telegraph wire. Apparantly, from the brochure in the bow, Moon-Face Heinie was laying cable literally for once, to the secret German meterological station out on Disagreeable Oyster Point.

The Dornier passed, engines taxiing, it's wake alone ready to swamp what little of me was still above water. I made an sudden roll to the right and managed to grab the antenna dragging in the water with my teeth, and made a one-handed Fisherman's Bend, or was it a Washerwoman's Dalliance? to the telegraph wire, tying down the other end to the painter.

Several minutes later, I was clearly the world sea speed holder for small skin canoes as I skimmed the waves at 137 mph with the Dornier high ahead at about 7000 feet. In this way I also set several trans-Atlantic records that have generally gone unrecognized, and 16 hours later I let the line go, skimming my way neatly into Brest Harbor, as the suddenly unburdened Dornier rose up too quickly, stalled, and spun in, finally crashing into Francois' Boulangerie D'Obsene, scattering titty cakes and penis-shaped eclairs high into the air. This created enough of a distraction for me to alight softly on the beach and begin running away, but the sleeping bag zipper was still stuck and I was eventually captured by a recuperating 15th Panzer division accountant whose legs had been amputated after a experimental hydrogen-powered calculator explosion, and were replaced with roller skates. Embarassing. Soon, I was in the hands of the SS, and at the sight of the " SS Quality Assurance Customer Service Questionairre" passed out cold, exhausted, but not before accidently stabbing myself in the leg with the pen.

--

It was a sound, familiar and ugly. By now, I knew it well. No one forgets the sound of being pounded in the head with a complete RCA cylinder copy of Wagner's Ring cycle, featuring Helga Clauswitz with Austro-Hungarian State Orchestra at Der Swankinmeister Opera House in Vienna in 1917. It's just that this time, as I looked down, I was becoming dimly aware -between blows in C minor- that I was in the bomb-bay of a Heinkel 177 strapped to a 5oolb HE bomb looking over what must be lower Manhattan in the evening, because I could also smell Newark. This partly explained my dizzyness, and that there was no plane, blimp, gyrocopter or plump downy goose between me and the questionable mercies of the East River.

A humorless Luft-Kraut gave me a look that was the curiously precise opposite of pleasant. He waved a sinister greeting with a black fingerless glove, by which I mean he had no fingers, and made to pull a red lever that, though I couldn't read Hun, most certainly did not say "Candy Corn Dispenser."

"How does it feel to know that your whole life has led up to this moment, as merely another munition for Third Reich?"

Before I could reply, a tall, black haired cookie with a Louise Brooks haircut, a yard long cigarette holder made out of a leopard tibia decorated with Disney characters, black fingernails an inch long and wearing a form-fitting black jacket and black leather boots so high they were technically guilty of statutory rape in 42 states, smacked me in the neck with another yet pompous aria. She was a looker, all right, the kind of tomato that's usually the last thing you ever see.

"Some clowns pay for this sort of thing, Toots, and here the Luftwaffe's giving it away." I burbled. This would have been more bitterly witty if my broken teeth bits hadn't muffed up the delivery, making "Luftwaffe giving it away" sound more "Let's Alfalfa sitting lady," a phrase I had actually heard once in a bar in Winnipeg.

"And now I must offer you my regrets," said the humorless hatchet faced fascist fly boy.

Then Cookie kicked me in the ribs, spiked me in the throat with her heel, squirted me with a soda bottle and gave me an Indian burn. Finally she bent down to sarcastically kiss me on the head and said one of the most welcome sentences I've ever heard.

Cookie leaned over me andwhispered "Darling Brain, there's a parachute taped to the underside of the bomb. A parachute! You have a chance if..."

"Farewell, Dr. Brain!"

And now I was being sent return mail to Amerika on the biggest bomb since Gone With the Wind II: The Reconstruction Era. I looked at the officer with his corpsy white hovering over the red handle of my doom. "Do you expect me to talk?"

"Talk?" He paused, looked a little confused, inspected a thick set of paperwork on a clipboard marked "SS" in large, weirdly cartoony letters. "Errr...Excuse me...," he said, grabbing an intercom handset for an abrupt conversation. He whipped out a pencil and went over a checklist, and looked up, crestfallen.

"I am...zis is most embarassing....we have a had something of a bureaucratic error, and it has now come to my attention zat no one has marked off 'interogated throughly' on the list. I must apologize"

I looked down at Empire State through the night clouds. "Not at all. Happens all the time."

"Ah here it is! Under ze 'Emergency Exceptions for Amerikanzer Detective Scum.'"

He tripped the lever without ceremony, and I was falling faster then Belgian Endive futures in October '29, the airstream whacking me like a Norwegian whacking whale. I could just see Cookie pointing vigorously to the left, and the big bomber veered off north into the night, while I had a date of infamy with the Big Apple.

I was able to wriggle my wrist out of the ropes - I could just reach my right jacket pocket. A knife! She'd slipped it to me like a picture of The Uterus in Hygine class. I promised myself to look Cookie up after the war.. Then I fumbled around with the knife, and dropped it, 25,000 feet over the best hot pastrami on the Lower East Side.

Fortunately, I was falling at the time, and I was able to reach out and get it back. As New York was getting noticeably closer and the warhead was screaming, I sawed myself free, reached around the bomb and found the parachute pack. A note was attached: "Dear Mack - Hope this works! - Love, Liebchen, " signed with a little heart and smiley face. Who was this dame? I struggled to get the pack on, and with about 2000 feet left managed it and pulled the ripcord, watching the bomb fall away in front of me - a new problem, as it occured to me I was about to parachute into a huge explosion.

But a gust caught it and it hit the East River. No force known to man could explode the East River, except itself, and the muck swallowed the monster like a fallen Catholic girl with a penis-shaped eclair. Then I heard the second monstrous BLOOOOP! I'd heard that week, and floated gently down to Clinton Street, smelling the pastrami of freedom.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Obscure Greek Word Conspiracy

I lit my pipe and watched the suck of the yellow flame into the dark whiskey and pine smelling leaves, and I felt the rainwater soak into the hole in my left Oxford, the black one. The brown one was waterproof. I stepped into the booth for the phone to ring, waiting for the smoke to cover up the smell of the apparantly incontinent alcoholic Turkish fishermonger who last used the place, to, it seemed clear, complain to a herring merchant in the Dardenelles about the bad batch he just received.

The phone appropriate tinkled.

"Brain? Mack Brain? Dr. Mack Max Marion Brain?"
"Spit it out, Chief."
"Aaacchchhcchchchch....."
"Did you just spit something out or are you being strangled?"

Fourteen quick burps from what sounded like a BAR rifle that woke up on the wrong side of the bed popped on the other line.

"You're being strangled AND shot?"
"Garreshshhghhgaaahchh/"

Then there was the distinctive rumble of a 1928 DeGrise Steam Shovel warming up, and the menacing clank of its chain linkage and bucket assembly betoke no beneficent intent.

"Just my &%$#ing luck. Okay. Do you want me to call the cops or just come right over?"
"Hoarachscchchaaaachchhh...Aieee!..Gaccchhhshshshhcchchchch!"
"Alright, just hang on. What? Operator? Collect?"

I dropped in a Buffalo nickel and considered taking my own sweeet time for that cheap bastard. But Hedy Lamarr needed him alive.
---

Unfortunately, the line went dead before I had an address. The guy had money, so it was probably in the toney part of town. That narrowed it down: a rich neighborhood with an operating steam shovel. I hailed a cab, calling it a monument to modern transportation, then I got one to stop and handed the driver a $5 and popped one of those special go pills the Fly-Boys used. I topped off with some more cough syrup, took a drag on the special Jamaican pipe tobacco, tossed the bottle out the window and off we went. If only I had been sober to begin with.

It was not so much that the cab was fast, as that the curvature of space-time began to warp inward somewhere on the up side of Pacific Heights. Yet, I'm a grown man. I'm the first to admit that the driver might have motivated to speed by a fare as high as the moon screaming to shut up so I could listen for a steam engine because Roosevelt needed the Finnish robot scientist to tell Hedy Lamarr about the electro-atomic relay coupling before he was strangled by Nazi spies disguised as an Esther Williams' swim dance troupe. In frustration I may have fired a couple of .45 rounds through the roof. But it was hot. I needed the air, and the air was also were the chartreuse were-elephants and Errol Flynn dressed as Marie Antoinette were dancing their mysterious dance of the all-knowing nothingness. This was also the moment I was the catalyst but not legally responsible for accidently shooting some bum poet named Kerouac in the elbow.

Finally, above a sandstone Edwardian Mansion rose a cloud of yellow dust from the suspicious collapse of the sitting room. The interior lights exposed the steam shovel's remorseless steely bucket whose jaws opened and clanked shut and opened again. Menacing!

I left the cab, or rather the driver poked me out of the door into a street puddle with a broom handle. My legs were wobblier than an overweight belly dancer, and after a brief ecstatic vision of the loving reunion of Krisha and Mary Magdelene in a Helsinki sauna bath, I collapsed like a bag of mechanics' laundry on the ornate red door.

The door opened. It was Herb Caen. That guy really did know everybody.

Suspecting he was a collaborator, I screamed "You'll never last in this town!" before passing out to a another vision: it was the city in the future. Guys had long scruffy hair and were beating drums. Girls were running around nearly naked, dancing in the street. "F" on 1, "A+" on 2, I thought. But then a giant blimp flew over, with gondolas brimming with weapons, machine gunning everything in sight. The enormous tail had a giant smiling Hitler wearing a dashiki and blue sunglasses and straw hat and making an "OK" sign, as drums exploded, houses burned and the girls ran away, breasts jiggling in terror.

I was unconscious. One thought: "I can't...let....all...of. ..this...happen!"

I awoke to green velvet room with an enormous Turner painting of an avalanche wiping out a aristocratic picnic. "Scotch and Soda," said Herb, handing me a glass sardonically. No one could hand over a glass sardonically like Herb. He was so casually debonaire I once watched him take out a squad of fascist infantry in Spain with a cocked eyebrow. So what was he doing running around with the secret Esther Williams death squad?

My head felt like it had two old people whose property taxes had just been raised living in it. My religious ephinanies took a back seat to an overwhelming desire for a can of Clammato. But I reached for my .45 and discreetly pulled it on him when his back was turned to reach for the spare soda dispenser.

"Brain. Relax. I was the one who called you. We were lucky they left the keys in the steam shovel after they locked us in here. We have work to do."

That's when I noticed that my gun had been replaced with a bottle of hair tonic. No sense pulling the trigger unless I wanted to improve his appearance. A door opened and Dardenella suddenly slinked in, wearing a tight silk bathrobe with giant shoulder pads which I knew from previous experience could be used to store ammunition, lunch or penicillin, depending on the circumstances. She looked gorgeous, good like a cool summer lake in hot August weather full of women who looked just like her.

"Brain. Darling! You're here, you're alive!" She rushed over and squeezed me. "Closer, Closer!" She cried.

"If I was any closer, you'd need a obstetrician. Now what's going on, Schnookum-lips?"

"That nazi-cootch Coulter escaped with the help of the fake Esther Williams, her transvestite swim team and the atomic robots and kidnapped Hedy Lamarr, the X-47 electro-relay design and also Eleanor Roosevelt and are fleeing as we speak across to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland in a new german submarine-dirigible."

"Hmm. That's exactly what I thought you'd say."

Caen wrly pointed to a spindly blue gyrocopter, armed with flares and depth charges.

"Time's a wastin'. Here's a manual and a thermos of Manhattans."

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: The Tinkly Shell Game of Atomic Empires

THUD! -I had to admit, it felt strange - SMACK - beating the crap - WHAP - out of Franklin Roosevelt - with a tire iron -BAM - what with him - BIFF - in the wheelchair and -OOF -being the Joe in charge of America. I even had moments of doubt that - UFF- it wasn't the fake Roosevelt I that had located in flagrante-UGH- with a Gilbert and Sullivan soprano and sometime -SCHMITT -Finnish Masseuse named Rosalita Bjeregrensen-PONK!- in a dime an hour Marina hotel -CLAAAANG!, and about the time I cracked a pool cue over his head and stuck the shards in the wheels so they would either lock or make a cool motorcycle noise, he finally stood, where I could see that he was only 5' 3," and was hopping about like a fork in a stuck toaster.

I also couldn't help but notice that my Geiger counter was ticking like like an extra-tickey stock ticker on Black tickey Tuesday. And I could help but notice the 2 inch dent in his head, and the bolts falling off his spats.

"Yes, You have guessed, meaty human- I am Cyclotronic 6B, a Radium Robot-Man! You have damaged me! Must repair! Get vacuum tubes tied!" He was steaming mad, or, simply, steaming.

I knew it! It couldn't be the real Roosevelt who ordered innocent Americans into camps?

He raised his arm to strike, knocking off an appalling painting of two waifs with eyes as big as plates by some guy named Keane that was giving me the heebie-willies something fierce. The Robot fixed his deadly ironic robot gaze at me and fired a small rocket from his cigarette holder, which flew out the window and blew up some Okie's fruit stand. A lucky break for him - he went on to invent the smoothie.

"You have nothing to fear but Me itself!" His spectacles began shooting some kind of ray that turned the wallpaper somewhat more tasteful. But hydraullic fluid was now leaking out of it's nose and pants.

"You can trust your car to the man who wears a star!"shrieked Cyclotronic 6B Radium Roosevelt, rotating his arm like wagon spokes and destroying everything in the room except me and Rosalita and a half empty-jar of Helm's Mayonaisse which I didn't want explained. Feathers flew out of pillows and stuck to Rosalita as she ran around the room away from the deadly Roosevelt Arms.

Hmm. Mayonnaise. That's exactly what it had taken took to get Heinreicha Coulter the Nazi assassin to talk. After five or six hours of threatening, cajoling, bribing and slapping her around with nothing but a set jaw and 28 rounds of Deutchland Uber Alles for our efforts, Dardenella had walked in with an egg salad sandwich and Heinreicha began wimpering like an admonished wiener dog puppy left in a hatbox. Her father had been verbally humiliated by a Dusseldorf deli assistant manager when she was six, over a question of dressing. All I'd had to do was wave the sandwhich at her face.
" Where are they!?"
"Noo...Nein...Noo..."
"Are you sure? Sure you're not hungry....for delicious egg salad??!!"
"Aieeee!"
"With pickle bits?"
"Aaaaach! I vill tell you. Take it away!"

Thus Henreicha lead me to the Marina Coin-Op Auto Motel. Dardenella stuck her with a couple hits of heroin she kept conveniently in her purse, and dragged her to tender mercies of Hoover's FBI for further interogation and make-up tips. Hoover, apparantly, was an autumn.

But in the meantime Radium Roosevelt was chasing Rosalita and me towards the Palace of Fine Arts in the night, leaving a trail of glowing drops on the street and chugging like a 4 cent steam engine. "Have you a towel? You aren't nuts/ to clean up your guts/ that I disembowel/ Burma Shave!!" quoth the evil mechanical man in a questionable electro-New England accent as we ran, me firing a few rounds from my trusty- in the sense of predictably useless -.38 Police Special. This thing was about as special as a sale on week old eclairs. The bullets just enraged Roosevelt still further, polishing him if anything. "Your New Deal is Death!" he promised.

The night air that we ran in a total death panic through was soft and flowery, and the stars twinkling over the end of the pier where were about to meet our doom at the hands of a Radium powered Democrat. Rosalita grabbed me tighter than Rita Hayworth wearing a rubber glove as an evening gown.

"I'll never have the chance to be emotionally undemonstrative again," stated the dedicated Finn at the end.
"Don't worry, Toots, I'll take this metal monster down," I said, raising my $15 ball point pen with a hope of jamming it into Roosevelt's UV joint, if I ould find it in time. He HAD to have a UV joint. Right?

Steaming, arms rotating at about 200 RPM, one glowing red eye hanging down by a spring, collar unsprung and tie askew, the robot came closer."This is a date which will end in tragedy!" it said, and then, the arm rotation slowed down, and it became unstable, wobbling like a Wobblie wasted on wood alcohol. A shredded hydraullic hose popped out , and sprayed gallons of glowing fluid on the pier. Then, the infernal contraption simply cried "Fireside Chat!" and fell into the water, leaving a column of bright green steam to rise into the night.

But this begged a bigger question. Assuming this wasn't the real Roosevelt, what had those palookas done with the President?

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Chapter Twin .50s - The Sodden Wavering

Dardenella was waiting in the bar of the slightly less expensive the Three Seasons, wearing a dress indistinguishable from a miserly film of black oil paint. Her hair was chesnut enough to roast on a fire, and lips were like a red airfield beacon, so there was the usual flight pattern of men around her trying to get clearance to land like Wildcats on the Lexington. I brushed them aside by firing off a couple of rounds from my .38, kissed her like I was headed off on a suicide mission in the morning and helped myself to six or seven of the pile of free drinks on her table, flicking the little umbrellas contemptuously at the scattering Toms, one landing gently down on the bleeding leg of one of the slow ones. I offered him a suggestion that Dr. Alexander Hamilton would take care of everything, and folded it into an origami crane for a bit of apologetic flair.

The gunfire attracted onlookers, pressing their moist noses against the window for a better view of the romantic devastation. I noticed a wavy waft of long blond hair outside. Then Dardenella screamed!

As a spiderweb pattern of death opened in the plate glass window, her best hat exploded in a snowstorm of silk, netting and tiny wooden bird splinters! If her hair hadn't been piled high as the Stanford rowing crew's workout sweats she would have been laid out for the big dirt nap and I'd be looking for another girlfriend on the side. As it turned out, a quick coif and a foggy layer of Aquanet could fix what a shot an inch lower would have taken the entire drunken incompetence of San Francisco General Hospital to fail to do.

It had to be Heinreicha.

"You're alright baby. We gotta blow. 23 Skidoo. We've got a date- for a menage a-trois of revenge!~" I said.

Dardenella was upset. "I'll tear that Nazi bitches' arms off! I'll gum her hair to P-40 prop! . I'll sew her lips to Goering's Ass!."

"I like the way you think, sugarlumps."

I ran outside to the intersection and spotted a stopped rider on an Indian motorcycle. I waved one hand in the air like a moth for distraction and pulled out his goggles and snapped them back on his face.

"Sorry, Pal, Police business. Here, Call the Chief at his home number, " I said as I pushed him off, got on the bike and got Darenella on the back. As she grabbed me to hold on her chest pushed softly into my back like a couple of silk lunch bags full of fresh warm tapicoa pudding. I hit the throttle and we roared off.

Dardenella roared in my ear - she'd gone line by line through the Bay Area City Directory of Fascists and Totalitarians and had a hunch they were meeting at the Japanese Tea House in Golden Gate Park.

"I checked the cop reports. There's been at least 147 murders in the city of federal officials, Democrats, US Army Air Force personell, jazz musicians and attractive brunettes - all people sworn to stop Hitler. At every single crime scene is a woman with long blond hair, long black boots. It's been so bad the San Francisco police have actually begun to investigate. They always find a single 9mm casing, enammeled with a pink swastika. Look out!" I swerved casually to avoid an oncoming baseball stadium.

We were hot on the trail of Heinreicha the Bulleteer, the deadliest German since a cook from Hamburg invented E Coli at the 1909 Chicago World's Fair.

Riding along the paths I gently rolled the bike into the pond near the tea house rather than pay the outrageous nickle for parking on a motorcyle I didn't even own. We went in -but of course since the War started the tea house was run by Austrians.

Impatiently I grabbed the first man I saw with a name tag that said "Hello, My Name is Hans- ask me about our Alpine Tea Ceremony" and smacked him around until I happened to look out the window and notice Henreicha paddling by in a bicycle boat with a man so small, dangerous and shifty he made Peter Lorre look like Jimmy Stewart. I told Hans "sorry, maybe Abe Lincoln can help" and tucked a fiver in his apron for the trouble and the Thompson .45 I picked up from behind the postcard rack.

There was nothing to do but follow them on another paddle boat. We clammored in and peddled away.

It was a clear sky around the little forested park hill and the round lake. Hundreds of children were playing and beating each other up. The dappled sun slapped aroung the water. The ducks were pecking each other, and shunning the coots. A goose was extorting bread from another goose with compromising photos. A swan was on his back plastered from drinking two quarts of Mad Dog. The day was beautiful, but the world was ugly, and would be, tilled we scoured the sink scum of totalitarianism from it with bleach and grit for extra cleansing power.

As if to underscore the point, three huge holes drilled into the wood on our boat and water spouts from a deadly yet refreshing spray of bullets splashed high.

Normally, when you chase down the bad guys in SF, you go the nearest chase clock, punch your card, receive the car keys , cop a little air down Jones street, take out a couple of fruit stands, crash into the bay, and Bob's your Uncle. This was different. I was in just the sort of nightmare situation every private dick fears: in a Tommy gun firefight with an expert female Nazi sharpshooter around the paddleboat lake in Golden Gate park on family day. I squeezed off a few dozen rounds as she paddled round the bend, and I shouted at the sweaty but game Dardenella to increase speed to .25 of a knot. I started picking apart my cotton candy and tossing and burning it to lay down a smokescreen.

The chase has a long tradition in town, every since Stinky Yamaguchi tried to outrun Sherriff "Handlebar Bob" McFierce in his stolen '02 Horseless Smokester, nearly getting away before a carelessly tossed stick of gum put the kibosh on his wheels turning when he hit Market street. This was so far back that Stinky was sent up San Quentin for 16 to 20 for felony interference with a magical elf carriage, the only applicable law on the books.

But this was today, not yesterday. Here, not there. Now, not then. 1 O'clock, not 11 am. It was time for justice.

Rebar for Tootise Rolls: Chapter .45 Auto: The Stink of Disimilitude

Having captured the S.S. EssEss with a well-placed sharpened bamboo stick, we steamed into San Francisco Bay, leaking like a 4 year old on his fifth pint of lager. It was great to see the Golden Gate again while some Sinatra-crazed jilted bird wasn't hurling herself off to get back at her Evangelical parents for sending her to millinery school. But as we pulled up to the docks and the brow was extended, I turned it all over in my mind like an turnover with lot of jelly and only one cherry in it, and it all added to one thing: a big pile of Hippo stink with the vanilla frosting of deceit. Sure, the commandant had cleared Crumples the Bartender after a little session with sodium pentathol and an eyeless Mickey Mouse doll, but somewhere in San Francisco a whole clump of Nazis was running around free as millionaire sparrows.

After the incident in the galley with the Russian life insurance salesman, Jenny clung onto my arm like a honey-soaked staticky balloon animal Jean Harlow, and of course now she was dressed only in an impromptu frock made of pale green actuarial tables. We hailed a taxi and got in.

"Where to, Mack?"
"Ingvar's Real I-talian Bistro, on Columbus. And step in it. On it. Sorry, Buddy."

The driver stabbed holes of glaring into my hat. I turned to Jenny. She was adjusting the mortality table for 47 year old single operators who smoked, which drove me crazy with a crazy kind of sexy desire. I could not take my eyes off the percentile risk columns. If I'd had a slide rule I probably would have been slapped.

The '42 Dodge lurched violently left and right down California street, which was a problem because it was straight road downhill. The driver's turns were so sharp a cable car had to pull a u-ey to get out of the way. I watched the sad, determined faces of several Businessman in gray flannel as they bounced off the bumper like fiscally secure corn stalks.

"Hey, Pal, want to crank it down a notch?" I inquired. "There's an extra fiver in it for you if we get there at all." He didn't say anything. "You see that cab up ahead? It's not killing anyone. Try following that."

Silence. We had just crested the top of a hill and taken out a small troop of retail candy store trainees. That's when I finally took my eyes off Jenny long enough to notice that the driver's brains were inappropriately splattered on the passenger window. A silencer! This Joe was silenced alright. Jenny screamed and raised her hands to her mouth, ironically rending the mortality estimates for taxi drivers with more than twenty years experience. I would have been more turned on if we weren't plummeting down Nob Hill at 85 mph.

I pushed the driver over and grabbed the wheel, and though I couldn't slow it down I tried to steer for something softer than the Chronicle Building, like a school bus. Right now I wished I bought that policy the Russian was trying to hustle me when I was smacking him around in the ship's galley with a pair of brass knuckles and a french horn-a couple of years in Stalin's Magadan breaking ice into cubes had taught him the value of persistent salesmanship. Fortunately at that moment, the X-tra Comfy Super-Soft Mattress Delivery Truck making its weekly deliver to the San Francisco Chronicle swerved to avoid a malemute puppy and overturned spilled matresses everywhere, just enough to overturn the cab and eject us both into the matresses, which had as it turned out impressive lumbar support.

"Funny, I've been working on getting you in bed a long time, schnookums, " I was contractually obligated to say. The tumble in the mattress had ripped so many of the remaining actuarial tables from Jenny that only collision damage estimates from 1937-42 Buicks kept us from getting arrested.

She undid my tie and made an impromptu skirt. You couldn't see everything, but you could see the future.

Fortunately we were near North Beach and Ingvar's. We walked past a goateed hepster inspired by Jenny's jello-cake walk to wolf-whistle and I had to put the beatnik down. We got to Ingvar's. It wasn't exactly a great place. The speciality of the house, lutefisk risoto, had put more people in the hospital than the Andrea Doria; on the other hand it was cold, dank and dark. I peered through the whale oil lamp light for our contact.

A silhouetted figure at one of the barrel tables with a checkered cloth on the top took a long drag on a hookah, and a sickly orange light struck his crooked nose and 16 inch Van Dyck, which cut through the rising grey smoke. He was thinner than a dieting willow branch. His skin was a syphillitic shade of green, and his black and silver hair could have greased a 6 by 6. He wore a kind of Teutonic zoot suit, with a giant hat and pants and an old fashioned high collar with bolo tie clip made from what I hope was a monkey skull. This was the other Russian guy all right, trouble with a capital Rouble. He motioned for us to come over with a skeletal finger.

"I am indeed Professor Clammato. You must be Brain. And this charming companion is, Miss Diver, I presume?"

"Creeped out, I'm sure" she said.

"You vill of course share a drink with me?," He sort of offered or hissed, or fissed, in a sort of ashy Sino-spanish-Lativian accent. "Ingvar! Another formaldyhyde and lemon! I svear by it. The cellular tissues- they do not dissolve."

"Fine, but make mine a Naked Dane, that's anise vodka and mezcal, with a sprig of pine."

"Ya, I know, I came up wit dat, " said Ingvar's enormous droopy moustache. "To gedda girl in high school. Ha. Ha!" He creaked like a knock-off Louis XIV chair. Looking at Ingvar it was a wonder he hadn't added morphine.

"I'll have a morphine and Coke," said Jenny. "A-Cola," she added. "And you got any women's clothes in the back? I'm a little breezy here." Indeed, her nipples were more at attention that a formal review of the Royal Navy.

"Ya sure, I'm in touch vit my sexuality."

"So, Brain," said Clammato, with his pimento-like pupils trained on a small red leather book. "As you know I am a Professor of Hydraullic Engineering and Women's Studies at Berkeley. As such, I have been privileged to be the recipient of a large federal grant to cure monthly cycles. I noticed several weeks ago a certain teaching assistant named Henreicha Coulter at a formal dinner with a Death's Head hairclip which I believe she left on by accident. "

Just then Ingvar arrived with a blue silk dress for Jenny with shoulder pads so sharp she could mug a sailor.

"I have done some investigation with my contacts," Clammato continued. She is somewhat conservative in politics, in the sense she was kicked out of the Nazi party by Speer personally for making others uncomfortable with inflammatory proposals. Her thesis proposal is for aggressive kitten eugenics, " He wagged his beard sadly. " I have been a fool not to see the signs. When the invasion of Poland was announced, she brought out champagne and strudel for the undergraduates. She is so blond a DC-3 once mistook her hair for a landing light in the fog and crashed into a beauty salon. One student even referred to her 'jackbooty.'

I was starting to put the pieces together."Is she by any chance an expert rifledame?" I asked.

"If you mean does she brandish a K-98 Mauser sniper rifle to hunt squirrels in Golden Gate park at distances exceeding 1000 yards, I would say 'yes.'"

Finally a lead. But the danger was increasing. Our dinner had arrived. Only Ingvar wasn't actively trying to kill us.