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.
