Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Shoot Me With a Kiss, Sugar Baby

I gaped into the black hole in the cold steel barrel of a 9mm Luger, its barrel a drain, a drain opening to fear and doom, like a 2AM call to an old lady’s plugged toilet in suburban Billings. But what grabbed me like two fingers up the nostrils was the look in the big brown eyes on the face of the angel that was ready to get me reacquainted with my maker: a look of betrayal, of rage, of anger, of revenge, of fear, of contempt, of determination, then a brief moment of whimsy and perhaps gas, then back to hatred, accusation and murderous intent, emotions that boiled red like vermillion borscht under a big blond cloud of hair so shining and turbulent it might have been the Turner sunset on my life.

Aethelgifu De Havilaand stood aiming that Kraut pea shooter. I’d been there in the office deep in thought and Portnoy's Problems gin, poring over the coroner’s report about the late, unlamented Hollywood sleazesack Billy Mars when she'd strutted in purposefully, sporting a tailored hunter green twill suit, matching pumps, a green brim hat with a broad black band, and an extra clip of 9mm, all of which set off her perfect fire engine lips. Her face was like marble, smooth and white as a golf club salesman, but one tear rolled down her cheek and gouged a black line from her mascara on her on face as she balanced the shooty tool in a white glove, her hand shaking slightly with tension, her eyes blinking in amazement that it was her own hand about to drill the only man she ever wanted with the steel bit of vengeance, the man known as Mack Brain, the very me himself, who'd burst through the hard candy shell of her heart by licking it enough to finally crunch through to the cherry nougat of love.

I still held the photo of Sparky Kriestenheimer leaving the ferry with what looked like a gun in his pocket, a fine, worthless reminder that I should have had a gun in my pocket. An image rattled in my head like a bee trapped in a gumball dispenser: a gloved, tapered finger pulling that metal hook and a little hunk of lead waiting patiently in the chamber to explode forward by the fall of the hammer's blow and a nickel's worth of saltpeter, sulfur and carbon, and how very little wool would slow it down, worsted or not. The only thing between me and that cold, indifferent bullet and a manila death in an office partition was the emotional state of a girl so stunning passing doves tended to smack into utility poles. And before either of us said anything I got the feeling she was about to floss me right out of the teeth of life.

One muffed word, and it was case closed. They'd hang an estate sale sign on my office: 3 bucks for a typewriter, a buck for a ratty old couch with unusual stains, a three sheaf stack of unsolved investigations, 3 cents each, and a Monkey Wards suit with a small hole over the heart needing a Latvian tailor. Three months bach rent would never get paid. A case of Guatemalan scotch would never be drunk, at least not by me. A hundred two-bit insurance scams would go awry. Twenty or thirty Kraut schemes would get on unmolested, putting the wax polish on the defeat of freedom. A soon-to-be divorcee in Emeryville would never get the snaps of her husband in bed with an infamous Chinatown entertainer simply known as “Sheleila Wu” and three or four curious and illegal electrical devices.

The silence was thicker than pea and concrete soup. I could smell her there, her scent like baby bunnies prancing through a field of fireweed, which for her was the smell of fear. Sutter street below was odd, quiet. No streetcars, swells, or streetsweepers or streetwalkers or street brokers or street mimes, at least none who were making any racket. Twilight turned deep night-blue, like the evening's valet had suggested something more formal. The wallpaper continued to be beige and overwrought. Somewhere, a chicken clucked.

Aethelgifu suddenly looked cold, dangerous and out of place, like a tiger sizing up a baby elephant seal. But even now, she was hotter than habenero pie.

"Don't move anything, Mack. Nothing. Especially not that. I don't want to kill you. Not till I'm ready."

"Baby, I apologize." I said.

"For what?" she asked.

"That was a shot in the dark," I said. "Bad choice of words. What'd I do?"

"I can't trust no-one," she said, girlishly, a little distracted, brushing her hair back with the barrel.

"You're gonna shoot everyone you can't trust? Is there free ammo now with every bottle of peroxide?"

"You can shut up, smart guy!" She said, and waved the pistol femininely and threateningly, like a silk hanky of death. She put another silk-gloved hand silkily around the wooden grip.

I looked at her face. Worse last sights than Aethelgifu in a fit of homicidal humors.

"You’re not a Nazi, are you, Aethelgifu?"

"And you're NOT!?"she yelled, with a clap of fresh rage. She lined up the gun on my face, her pupil bisected by raised sights, her head tilted, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek and right past a perfect lower lip, another tear starting, mascara running, and her long blond locks falling over her other eye. "Pastely got you to set me up! I’m… you...."

I'm not proud of what I did next.

It wasn't a sudden, cat-like move that started with me leaping over the desk and ended with Aethgifu swooning in my arms, the Luger dropping on the floor with a thud; it wasn't a remark so clever and endearing, like "Shoot me with a Kiss, Sugar Baby," that a smile crept across her face and she ran to me, crying and begging forgiveness till she fell listless into my arms and we kissed sweeter and harder and steamier than two freight locomotives with a trainload of caramel colliding on the licorice tracks to the Big Rock Candy Mountain; it wasn't something darker, like taking the .32 I never carried in my shoe and gunning her down lovingly from under the desk, the light of her eyes winking out poignantly in sepia tones from under the cheesecloth over the lens.

What I actually did was faint. I wish I could say that I meant to faint, as a clever ruse, but no, maybe it was too much coffee and Mummanschnaaps on an empty stomach, but more likely it was old-fashioned cowering-type, scardey-baby fear- I blacked out and fell over like a Western Cedar with the vapors.

....

Before I opened my eyes I recognized the all-too familiar engines of a Dornier flying boat, droning on like Gobbels about a Little Rascals movie, winds whipping its ugly metal face. I had a headache like angry Scotsmen were using 4 lb sledges to adjust a newspaper press in my skull. I woke to see Aethelgifu tied up, gagged, facing me on the other bench, eyes as wide as Kate Smith on seeing five bowls pudding after a three hour fast, pleading with her parenthetical eyebrows, shaking her head. I was tied too, hands in front, already sick to my stomach as the Kraut plane pitched and plunged and yawed through heavy rain and pre-dawn darkness, somewhere unpleasant over somewhere else horrible.

It was a situation I preferred to being dead, but only just. How in Zombie Jesus did the Nazis keep getting me? I may be as slippery as an eel playing power forward for the Oilers, but the Huns are as persistent as a Fuller Brush man, except with Panzer divisions. Dastardly bastards. If I could just get the ropes free. But I was safe from Aethelgifu’s murderous tempest: I'd gone from the spoon back into the soup, from the fork back into the frying pan, from Curtains to window treatments.

A man inched up through the cabin. Of course: Pastley Marstonbury, Aethelgifu's war-profiteering employer, with all the charisma of last Thursday's legume loaf, escorted by his tubby little spy-pal, Sparky Kriestenheimer. They groped along lines in the open cargo bay, trying to keep balance. Marstonbury drew himself up like the caricature artist at the state fair doing a bad picture of himself and scaring off the customers.

"You may be wondering why you're still alive," said Pastely.

He leveled a revolver at me, trying to look tough. The tall, overweight, shoulderless wonder, dressed in white linen: it was like being threatened by a bowling pin. "You can thank my wife Jenny for that - she pleaded for your life. We stumbled on your little domestic spat just while we were deciding whether to kill you. So, Congratulations. You've been promoted from corpse to the next pop-quiz at Torture Middle School. "

Jenny. She'd saved my life for the fourth time, and all I'd gotten for her was a two-for one coupon for Morphine at the Owl pharmacy.

And now Pastely tickled Aethelgifu's chin with the very Luger she'd held so describably against me. A rage grew in me, a rage like never before, a rage big and angry and off-beet colored and it started to leak out of my ears and spill on my last clean shirt, and you never get that kind of rage out, not with bleach and an army of tired, diminutive Lativian house maids. That bastard was touching her. Pastley looked about as threatening as a narcoleptic hamster, but he had a gun, and a gun changes a chump to a dangerous chump faster than you can say Fatty Arbuckle. Aethelgifu turned away from him, glancing at me as if to say:

"Mack, Dear, I'm awfully sorry about all that about to shoot you business. Clearly, I was misled by Mr. Marstonbury here, who had convinced me you were a Nazi spy, when, on present evidence it can really only by deduced that he was the spy all along. What a perfect silly I am! If we ever get out of the alive, I promise I'll make it all worth your while with some special lady tips I picked up from the Raj's daughter in-law-...."

"ENOUGH!," said a German commander, slapping her and silencing the already silent silence, a tall, gaunt man with a demeanor like he was perpetually waiting for replacement upholstery for a '28 Buick.

"Where are...we? " I looked outside through a small greasy window...a dilapidated coastal town, grey and white buildings, apparently devoid of life, a few orange groves and palms.....occupied Africa?

Sparky sparked up. "Your beloved San Jose, Dr. Brain!"

"San Jose is not beloved," I countered.

"We have been planning precisely this for many months. Soon, the entire Bay Area will be under the Furher's control, part of the glorious new Reich!" Sparky snapped his heels and stumbled slightly as the Dornier lurched, landing moistly into San Francisco Bay, from where it had probably taken off a few minutes ago.

"You been eating Crazy Pie!”

"Your mockery, already superfluous, will soon be even more especially superfluous!" It wasn't the best threat, but to be fair to the Nazis, they threaten people all day, pushing around little girls and insulting old women and terrifying milk farmers and getting families to turn each other in and stabbing meter maids and bullying ice skaters and shooting innocents by the van load in the back and sometimes they simply run out of material.

"Behold!" said Sparky, a little self-consciously.

The plane taxied up to a concrete ramp, a huge dark ship suddenly came into view in the early morning light, its bulk cutting out the sunrise. It sported deck houses fore and aft like a tanker, and flew a Texaco logo and a big Mexican flag, and, as if to emphasize the point, the ship was festooned here and there with colorful decorations and pinatas.

The enormous rusty Mexican ship heeled over like a hippopotamus with lumbago as she kept her engines at full, turned to starboard and power up to the flats just to the East of our flying boat. I got a glimpse of her stern: the Santa Angeles, out of...Mexico City. Something was very wrong. First of all, there was no tug, or dock - she was being driven up on the beach. Second, Mexican sailors - particularly deck officers - do not commonly wear sombreros.

We were taken off the plane; me, Aethelgifu, a couple of gopher faced guards, the officer with a cold, unrefreshing gun on my neck and Pastley and Sparky giggling like a couple of bobby-soxers. Bullies and sadists - the total bastard class throughout time. I was getting mad again. When I got half a chance I'd tear out their pancreases and play organball in the nearest squash court, or better still, send them through eighth grade again.

We watched as the ship, big as a skyscraper and twice as fast, ground heavily into the beach with a soft crunch and a huge, reverberating rattle. Someone hooked a heavy cable to a bulldozer to pull the ship as far in as it would go.

"… night nighty, Brain," said Kriestenheimer. And a blindfold went on.

As the lights went out it hit me. It was more than subterfuge. We were about to be invaded. That ship was about as Mexican as a ski chalet.

Kriestenheimer kept pushing me along with the gun, toward the ship.

What to do? Nothing was obvious, and something huge and horrible was happening, like a hot air balloon deflating on top of a kiddie pool. All I could think: Act, man, act, act faster than a Barrymore with an overdue bar tab!

Then I could hear us passing an throaty diesel engine , the bulldozer, just to my right. It was Aelthefigu that gave me the opening. She suddenly screamed out: “Earthquake!”

Actually there was no earthquake. But all the meticulous German briefings went over the possibility in some detail; unfortunately for them, they were ready for just this contingency, had a plan, and immediately dropped to the ground and covered their heads.

Or so I was told. But now there was a running bulldozer right here: I felt around and climbed on the tracks, feeling around with my fingers from under the ropes till I found the controls: it shuddered like an alcoholic belly dancer as I somehow got it moving with my hands on one lever and my teeth on the throttle.

The blindfold was tight and it was all dark and linen-ny but in a second I was going forward, sensing the downward slope of the muddy beach and kept moving, kept spinning around and driving that little bulldozer until I felt the crash and shudder as the blade smacked the iron of the ship, reversed, sort of, drove hard forward again - but the Krauts weren't shooting yet.

A second. A second to save San Jose. I had a feeling I’d regret this.

Crash and crash and crash again. Finally - a huge hole opened in the brittle old ironwork: my head snapped back - and with it the blindfold, and I plowed through the sand and water right through the ship's starboard bow, the iron side tearing open with a sound already horrible enough without the mariachi band playing on the fore-deck. And suddenly, out they started to spill, not oil at all, but four or five hundred fully-equipped German soldiers, a pinata of paratroops, a dozen or two fighting around the hole to get by the dozer blade to scramble to the beach, and I had a second or two with the blade blocking when they couldn't fire into me.

I drove forward again, trying to plug the hole in the ship like stuffing mice back down a drain with a hammer. A Luger piped up behind me, bullets ricocheting off the metal seat back- must be Kreistenheimer. Pastely was hiding somewhere, Aethelgifu was out of sight. I felt the moment and started to sing, sounding the Battle Hymn of the Republic to the heavens, the transmission grinding in tune like a hurlyburly, and I shoved the blade hard in the maw again and again, cramming in a couple three unlucky Heinie troops for tar and oakum. In the chaos a few sombreros floated down from the ship and settled on the shallows, the water growing pink.

Finally, the dozer blade was stuck fast in the hole. I’d managed to solve the problem I’d just created. But now I had to run back up the flats without getting shot, hands still tied, and stumbled up the beach, bullets whizzing around by now, and I managed to get behind a huge rusty old anchor, which looked like it dated back to 49er days, but was solid enough to spit back modern gunfire.

I let out just the sort of breath you take when you don't really have time to take a breath before something else really exciting happens.

Then from under a fluke, Aethelgifu popped up like a Jack-in-the-Box, except without a bra, and holding a knife, its blade dripping with blood. She turned her deep brown eyes on me, moist with feeling. I sat there, unmoving. That silk gloved hand suddenly thrust upwards, severing the rope around my hands, and we kissed, kissed like kissing fish under the Mistletoe, her body squishy and tight against me, her lips soft and warm, her knife dropping to the beach right next to Pastely’s ghastly body, which wouldn’t have spoiled the mood except for the full company of German soliders clambering up the ship’s ladders 20 yards away, sounding like a thousand tin cups being dropped into a scrap pile. No time for the better mushy stuff now, so I just squeezed her breasts affectionately and kissed her forehead and picked up the knife.

“Stay here, Smooshy-kins.” I whispered in her ear.
“You’re mussing my hair, Macky-Moo, but if you have to save San Jose, go ahead, Skooshy-Booshy face.” She said, fighting back tears, her hands on my lips.
“Binky-boo, I’m sorry I was so slow solving this case.”
“Oh Darling! And I’m so very sorry I thought you were a Nazi-watzi!

The long cable still tethering bulldozer and ship lay on the beach. An idea popped in my head.

“Baby-Waby, I need to get on that ship. Stay here and ….“ I gave her the plan. She looked up at me like a baby doe watching a car wreck. But it couldn’t be helped.

I ran now, ran like lighting and grabbed a sombrero and started swimming close in on the sea-side of the ship, the sombrero a perfect cover, drifting innocently and festively along the waterline to the rope ladder coming off the stern quarter, and began climbing just as the storm troopers were gathering to disembark on the shore-side of the tanker. I crested the side and swung onto the deck only to face the back of a guard. No time. I slammed the sombrero over his head and strangled him with the decorative tassels. He died quiet, and somewhat festive.

“Siesta in peace, Sea-Kraut,” I said.

The attention of the whole company was towards shore, and I was able to slip into the wheelhouse, grabbing the telegraph, pulling the lever and signaling the engine room for full reverse. The three deck officers came at me but they too where encumbered by their sombreros as I let the full force of my rage fly in a flurry of fists, beating the three Bosches down to the steel decks in a bloody heap. Then then ship shuddered heavily and the whole deck company fell into a chaotic pile of confused Krauts as the Santa Angeles backed at full power into the Bay again. Now I could only hide and hope that Aethelgifu got the rest of the plan in action.

She had. With the late Pastley’s burp gun on the remants of the Dornier’s crew, she forced them to drag the long loose cable connecting the bulldozer still sticking out from the hole in the bow, and the ship itself, and put the loop on the anchor as the ship steamed away at nearly 10 knots.

The cable tightened, and with a sound like a ten ton cork it snapped the bulldozer out of the hole like a drainplug. The bow opened to the sea as the ship still backed deeper in to the channel at full speed, and the Santa Angeles began to sink like the heart of whatever Republican it was that ran against Roosevelt in 1936, taking Hitler’s hopes of a dastardly sneak attack on the Bay Area into the deep.

Unfortunately, it was also taking me with her, but by this point the naval air base at Alameda woke up and a flight of Wildcats was coming to strafe the Dornier. And one of our own PBY Catalinas was coming for the Santa Angeles as she was sinking slowly, and just as the chilling waters of the Bay started lapping on my shoes and three hundred Krauts were heil-hitlering Davy Jones, the PBY landed near and sent out a rubber boat to rescue the one flat-foot, distinguishable from my total lack of swastika or sombrero.

…

Back in the office, the photos of the Billy Mars autopsy weren’t any more glamorous the second time. He was even dead by Hollywood standards. But the report was pretty conclusive: Mars was ventilated by a 9mm- almost certainly Sparky's. He'd got onto Kreistenheimer and Marstonbury when they tried to hire him to produce a post-Bay Area invasion propaganda film - California Über Alles - meant to pacify the new Bay Area Reichsland. Not only had he been stopped from paying me for the Errol Flynn affair, he'd been stopped from tipping me off about the whole surprise attack when he'd fallen dead off the ferry into the Bay, and he'd screwed his last talent.

I needed a drink and dragged my own butt to the Rusty Nail. I walked in that dank, overturned whaleship, smelled the century old tar, and saw a pile of angry grey laundry in a bow tie - Crumples, of course - who was about as happy to see me as if I was handing him the hospital bill for the consumption treatment for his three late daughters. He grumpily put ice in a mason jar - if that was possible - and filled it with a clear liquid of uncertain origin. He'd never poisoned me rapidly yet, and I drank a good draught which tasted something like off-market Bolivian Absynthe, but plywoodier.

Then a scent to my left: angels, pomegranates, a entirely different kind of fresh laundry, and a little bit of love-funk. I turned to see Aethelgifu, smiling, wearing a pink dress more tightly formed than a Prussian rifle drill team, and whole lot foofier.

"Shoot me with kiss, Sugar Baby?" I said.

And a bigger smile crept across her face. And then she pulled another gun.

Rebar For Tootsie Rolls: Kill Three, And It's One, Two, Four

A pissy grey mist greyed up San Francisco like a congregation of Lutheran actuarial table editors, and I chewed through my sure-fire investment plan: get extremely charming in the vicinity of drunk rich girls with daddy problems.  This plan that would have to percolate while I munched on a stale donut drowned in coffee from Owl's Pharmacy, the little blobs of wax from the paper cup floating like icebergs on a hot oil spill, and as I watched a black funeral-special street car pass by on Market Street, it's sole passenger undisturbed for once lying down on public transit, a clutch of the local street walkers tried to look sad by smoking less rapidly. I spit into the gutter, but with respect.

And here was the Fairmont. I screwed up my dignity from zip to inscrutable and blazed my way in, staking out a stool between the stink of swank and the Pied Piper painting in the dark, woody barroom, where the coatrack, covered in minks, looked like a bigfoot with chicken legs. Soon enough, I was chatting up a steely Lana Turner-looker for a while before it got hard to see only one Turneresque tomato, thanks to enough quart-sized Mai-Tais to fill the whole toilet bowl I was planning to vomit in about two minutes- but hey, even two quasi-Lanas is never enough when your looking at a face so sweet you could mix it with butter and call it frosting and a bosom so patriotic she couldn't have seen her shoes if her legs weren't so long. Just the juice to forget Renata from the whole Errol Flynn hullabaloo- she'd hopped a steamer back to Brazil when her Aunt Juanita died and left her the more profitable half of a coat hanger factory.

The blond was blond as a Norwegian peroxide factory, and dangerous as that factory exploding, and if an entire baker's dozen of ex-girlfriends hadn't just organized through some sort of secret woman communications network into kind of ex-girlfriend trade union and mailed me a whole box of bits of things I'd left around, like keys, bullets, straight razors, empty bottles of Gin Boom's Even Rotter Rot-Gut, mismatched socks, an irritating sheaf of papers from their new attorney Bill Marginpale, a crushed pack of Lucky's, a receipt from Madame Very Happy's in the Tenderloin, my old .32, and a stick of ABC Beeman's gum from 1931, I might have tried to pretend to ignore her. But trying to ignore that lean, soft peppermint tab of all-girl saltwater taffy was like to trying to distract yourself from the noose you were about to stick your head in by trying to concentrate on the rotten cabbage people were throwing at you.

"Aethelgifu," she said. "You were going to ask my name. Aethelgifu De Havilaand." She held out her hand, her skin soft as a baby bunny in an angora hat full of whipped cream.

"Brain. Dr. Doctor Mack Brain. Private GumDoctorVestigatorShoe." I said. Sometimes that worked, when English was my first language, instead of rum.

"Hiya, Doc."

Her broomy eyelashes fluttered slowly, like a shop floor being swept by janitor still grumbling over his bad experience with General Sherman. The bartender came by, winking like a cheap lightbulb every 48 seconds to check on her and she indicated two more Mai Tais with a practiced wave of her fingers. The band in the Papagaya room played a slow one, South American, judging by the distant bongos and the plucky, mango-sweet melody that wafted through the grand hallway. I'm no music critic, except when Kate Smith tries the blues, but it was nice enough, an the swells in monkey suits and silk dresses danced like swans with trust funds, floating dreamily, like WWII was just local color.

Aethelgifu gazed at the dancers, her head high, her eyes half-closed, listening, maybe envying. She moved with distracted, deliberate grace, like a Ziegfeld dancer with an opium habit.

"I used to be a Ziegfeld dancer, but I had a bad opium habit, so I moved here. Fresh start, you know?" She said. "You believe in fresh starts, don't you, Doc?" Her hand grazed my arm. Those fingers were well-manicured, the little fingernails shining red like little fire engines, and one drove around in a little circle on my sleeve, looking for the exit to Treasure Island, where the fire was growing.

Aethelgifu looked away, more coy and desperate than a knocked-up debutante at the Association of Handsome Young Men of Inherited Wealth Convention, in just that way so she knew I’d be gazing across her neck at the shining cascades of platinum blond hair pouring down and over her bare shoulder and to even more interesting bits and byways on the Aethelgifu Highway. The metaphors in my mind mixed like a dacquri-mixing cement-truck. All of a sudden, it got real hard to thinky well.

She turned back to me, a proud, melancholy look in her saucery, intelligent dark eyes, the radiance of her face radiating like extra-radioactive radium. “Mack," she cooed, "I like your face, it’s a hard face, but kind, sad eyes, maybe like a rabid doberman puppy. The kind of face a girl whose had a bit of a rough go of it might trust in a pinch.” She leaned closer, her soft poofy parts unwrinkling my clothes. Her complex, compelling scent, a rare Chanel No. f_xx(x,y)=∞, like buttered mints abandoned in a Mediterranean orange grove through which ran an playful otter in heat, wantonly wafted into my head without so much as a lease and a $14 deposit.

“I don’t know why Mack, but I trust ya. I’ve never met a man I trusted so quick like this. It’s something about the way you carry yourself, heavy with worry but always ready to push a girl out of the way of a cement truck that had it’s brake likes cut, a tough guy on the outside, and a cold streak that could freeze the airport, the kind of cool and strength that makes a girl feel safe, but inside, inside here, Mack, I can tell, you couldn’t hurt a ant, a least one that didn’t owe you money.”

Damn dames. No matter how many Squarehead skulls you play jacks with , no matter how many atomic robots you unman, no matter how many pimps you work over with a blackjack and a Al Jolson record for two-bit whiskey shots and nickles for tips for Crumples the bartender at the Rusty Hobnail, they still peg you for that soft little wet kitten nose of an organ back-alley docs like me call your ticker, and all your good sense goes out the window, so no matter how many times it's happened, when that silky little love muffin slips a sliver dagger right through it, you never see it coming. And that little kitten nose under my gaberdine suit was thumping now like the wall in an hourly Market Street hotel room, and though the shriveling, sober part of my brain announced that Aethelgifu De Havilaand instigates more disasters than secret European defense treaties in 1914, it was outvoted by the kitten in my heart, the drunk in my brain, the wolf in my pants, and then my liver uncharacteristically abstained and went and ordered another round for all of us, and I seem to recall nodding at every pretty little word the pefect red lips of Aethelgifu mouthed, like "spies" and "money," and "do" as in "him in." She was playing me for a sap and I was the maple tree, but on whose pancakes I was going was anyone's guess.

---

The upshot was that the next week I was in Sausalito at an all-night fondue, charades and money-laundering party. As the arrangement worked, my ex-girlfriend Jenny sent me an invitation. Normally, I'd think she was just showing off the all-steel and glass modern mansion, gleaming with windows above and below, left and right, around and through. It was like living in the ice man's storehouse. She's set up house with Pastely Marstonbury, her latest husband, the shipping magnate, who, no doubt due to his shrewd business acumen, was making a pile on nitrates in the middle of the World’s biggest war, and their suspiciously attractive live-in maid, another stunning blond, this one a sly little 500lb high explosive sex bomb, one Aethelgifu de Havilaand.

Pastley sat around counting huge stacks of cash from filling the world's appetite for explosive gases, and I had to ask myself why the U.S. Government wasn't kiting a check like usual.

"Sweet pile of cabbage, eh, Brain? Ever seen anything like it?" he said. He spoke like he was failing to swallow a digestive biscuit.

"Ever need a bookie, I can hook you up." I said. " I can get you a 1500 to one shot on whether a guy'd show a complete stranger a stack of clams like that."

Pastely had the build of a bowling ball and a personality to match: dense with hard resin and tough to stop with your face. I could never have guessed what Jenny saw in him except for the fact that he was behind a pile of hundred dollar bills so high I could barely see his hat. Dressed like a real society dame, with an expression that said "Help Me!", she looked better than a million bucks, which I could tell easily enough because it was sitting there right next to her, but a furrow creased her brow, she was trying to tell me something with her hands, flicking her eyes to her right, where a little red receipt book sat on a night stand.

Marstonbury even laughed like a bowling ball,"Hah....hooooooooo...HA!" "Naw, Brain, Jenny vouched. She said you was straight. That's good enough for me!" It was moments like this, looking right at a Spam-faced, beet-red, creamed-corn brained war-profiteer with all the charm of a pickled goiter, that got you thinking maybe Trotsky was on to something.

Aethelgifu walked in her maid outfit, her little, very little, form-fitting, tres French maid outfit, pretending she didn't recognize me, handing out little sausages in blankets and glasses of champagne. Pretty strange house-warming party, the four of us, Aethelgifu joining us after the fifth bottle of Moet, playing "Cash Charades," where you folded up the money to give origami clues. Pastely did his impressions by rolling up bills and sticking them up his nostrils and insisting he was a walrus at least six times. The total lack of charm never wore off. I feigned a sudden skin infection.

"Been fun, but Blorack's Disease, you know," I said, scratching my neck, "got to get back to the city for the anti, er - Blorak ointment."

Jenny called me a cab, and shot me a glance toward my pocket. Aethegifu shot me a glance toward the door. Pastely shot a glance toward Aethelgifu's cleavage, which glanced off and hit the ceiling before he fell off his chair plastered. Finally, dizzy with pricey booze and sheer cash fumes, I stumbled toward the door, scratching my arms, and grabbed the cab back to the ferry dock. It was growing light.

--

The ferry back to the city creaked and groaned, its ancient dough-pounder engine racing at 3 RPM through a flat Bay with an oil-clogged, bull-kelp choked mirror of the ship, skies dreary and feet weary in the 5AM gloom, foggier than a forced recital of the Federal Register with a hangover, the East Bay working stock gulping burned coffee from the commissary to get half awake for a full day of petty humiliation ahead. Then, the crack of a gunshot.

Crack!

The sudden splash off the port side toward Angel Island washed away nothing but my last hopes of ever getting paid from Errol Flynn’s agent, a grateful movie pimp named Billy Mars, grateful because thanks to my detective work, an elaborate ruse involving an amateur production of Gold Diggers of 1933 to foil a clutch of L.A. Nazi sympathizers, and Renata’s quick if implausible disguise as a Western Union boy, Flynn was back filming battle flicks for the Allies, all sins forgotten, except of course the new statutory rape charge the San Francisco D.A. was all girly with excitement about.

I got outside to the rail, where I immediately recognized the body, bouyant as it was from his enormous, trademark yellow spotted ascot. Billy Mars was big in Hollywood, pal, but Billy Mars was shot, a floating, over-dressed corpse, his giant ego now just a deflating balloon in the collective memory of Tinsletown - that was reality, and he’d bit the foot-long chili dog of death while on his way to my office to drop off the check, as it turned out later. But the only future for that sea-soaked check would be three month’s office rent in a dingy Sutter street office for some lucky Dungeoness crab, were he so inclined to cash the it and enter the detective business and make it pay better than me, which he would because most sea-creatures don’t get their clients shot.

The ferry was still 20 minutes out, nearly drifting, her engine cut to about one turn every fortnight, just to hold position. There were four or five hundred people milling on the greasy decks, about half of them leaning over the rails on the weather side looking at Mars’ body bumping up against the gunwales while a third class boy with a big nose and acne to emphasize the fact tried to fish him out with a boat hook. I took a long swig of imported Mummanschnaaps, and tried to imagine Veronica Lake weaing a lake, and nothing else. As it put it back in my pocket, I noticed the sweet touch of money, and pulled out one of the bills from last night's bizzare party - Jenny left a lipstick kiss on it, and a scribble that said "Get this bill checked! - J." Counterfeit? I looked right into U.S. Grant's alcoholic face, just as ugly as it should be. It looked real enough. Didn't make sense anyway- why would a nitrate tycoon have millions in clown cash? One other thing: Marstonbury's red receipt book was in the pocket with it.

I approached the kid hooking Mars, dragging him out delicately by an Italian loafer. “I’m a detective, “ I declared, flashing my dick license for the first time today in an official context. I pointed to the body. “This is Mars. And the stiff owes me money.” I left the part about not working for the police out.

The 1^st Mate walked up with false confidence, like you do when you’re almost in charge. He was young, short, balding, pale as bleached linen that just found out his life savings in pork bellies were selling short. Mars lay on the deck exactly like a drowned sleazebag Hollywood producer. “The Sea has claimed another good soul,” said the Mate sanctimoniously, his gold trimmed uniform two sizes too large.

“Not unless the Sea shot him during absolution.” I said, turning the body over to reveal the round, sticky gunshot wound in his gut..

I searched Mars' pockets for clues. A receipt for $42.50 from the Top of the Mark- sheesh, I knew a lot a guys that didn’t make that in a month. A check for $2300 from Soda Works Consolidated, LLC, for “consultation.” And, oh, a small brown leather note book, full of phone numbers with intials, and another set of symbols: squares, triangles, circles with dots, and hearts. Holy Beans. The actual Lana Turner's number was almost certainly in here. There: L.T. Cocomo 02020. Noted. I looked back at the 1^st mate.

"Listen, Sea-Major, you’re going to have to get a complete passenger manifest before we dock. Radio the City Cops; we have to search everyone at the Pier. Someone on this leaky meat scow drilled your stiff here, and it wasn’t for oil.”

We chugged into the Ferry Terminal. I was feeling testy and judiciously emptied the magazine of my .45 in case the cops weren’t chummy. I felt a little sick, and vomited over the side. Unfortunately for the newspaper vendor below, we’d already arrived.

I made my way down to the search area. The line of hats on the dock shuffled as the police questioned everyone, all fairly routine, they took down the names, made sure no one had obvious blood stains or smoking revolvers, and sent them on their way. They took a few photos. I took a gander at the line, no luck, no clues. Just wave after wave of tired, donut-munching faces, about as interesting as a stack of 1923 laundry receipts. Nothing more here.

***

Back at the office. The sun was coming in the window directly into my head, and I adjusted the venetian blinds, which promptly fell off the brackets, my hands going right through as I tried to grab them and I struggled for three minutes to extract myself from the ensuing tangle of metal and string that eventually claimed one sleeve of my jacket, which tore off and left the hole in the armpit of my shirt exposed. SNAFU. I finally sat down, I leaned back, the chair squeaking, my torn sleeve and tangled ball of blinds lying on the floor, a few armpit hairs poking out of the hole in my shirt like curious marmots in spring.

I poured through Mars’ brown book and a few other papers, tracking down his latest movie projects for someone who might pay be to find out who perforated his candy-ass carcass. There was "Back to Attu," with Johnny Weistmueller as a heroic Aleut taking on Japanese minesweeper with torpedoes strapped on either side of his kayak, "Tahoe Landing" with John Garfield as a Brooklyn street tough with dreams of the first dockside dinner theater on Lake Powell, and "Bonnie Prince Charlie," starring Bela Lugosi as the young Scottish hero. It was a picture alright, a picture of Mars, the Hollywood golden boy, losing his grip. Something was distracting him.

Then, I got the mail.

I'd sent the $100 Jenny slipped me to the lab boys at Police Headquarters, with instructions to check it out and keep it for keeping the whole thing quiet. The report was on my desk. I opened it, pulled out the report of a photostat of a teletype from the Secret Service: funny money, and worse, the paper matched the government paper used in german currency. Squarehead dough. Kraut cabbage. Nazi moolah. Another German plot. Did Hitler really have nothing better to do than break my balls every three weeks?

One other request from the SF cops: go over the photos from the ferry. Here they were: face after face, mug after mug: Sausalito slackers, Marin bohemians, Larkspur la-di-dahs. But a lot more broken Californians, the hard years in their faces, all creeds, condemned to gratitude to the fat cats for $5 a week, a drying crust on a spent bowl of cream: hard lines, gaunt cheeks, sad, glazed, resigned eyes. The war brought work, but the Depression had carved the lines around those eyes. Here, San Francisco, in this Eden. If it wasn't for Roosevelt, these folks would be tearing people like Marstonbury a new cream hole. Nearly did anyway, a couple years back.

Focus: what was out of place? Something, someone. Here a view from an upper deck and a figure caught my eye, a squat, short man, from the back, with a European cut on a perfect, linen suit, the crescent side of his face just visible, with a huge cigar stuck in it. I knew the guy.

Kriestenheimer. That is, Max "Sparky" Kriestenheimer, the 5' 2" head of the Prussian Benevolent Society of San Francisco, and the General Secretary of the Luxemborgian Redecoration Society, confidente of the Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van Der Pforffen the Fourth, suspected as the only actual Japanese spy on the West Coast and the only pro-fascist interwar Dusseldorf dadaist, strutting around without a care in the world, and there, there, I got out the magnifying glass: a little oil stain, and the wrong kind of bulge in the wrong pocket: a 9mm, and his right, respectively.

Kriestenheimer. I gulped the last of the Mummanschnapps. Half of Hollywood wanted Billy Mars dead, and he gets scratched by an itty-bitty two-timing art spy. If we could crack the Japanese codes, I'd bet the residuals on Gone with the Wind that somewhere there was telegram of appreciation to Tojo from David O. Selznick.

So Kriestenheimer was back. But why kill Mars?

I checked Marstonbury's little red receipt book that Jenny slipped into my pocket. Here was the mark for $3 million, about twice the stack I'd seen, with a note: SK/ U203. If I hadn't commandeered one myself six months before, I'd have missed the reference: a U-BOAT, U-203! As if war-profiteering wasn't enough, Marstonbury was on the take from the Nazis! But $3 million prop schlamoolias? What did the Krauts buy for that? Was Billy Mars somehow in the way? Was the Baking Soda company a German front too? Was Errol Flynn an alcholic?

I heard a click.

I looked up. The door was wide open, and the figure that was blocking my light was a welcome sight, a nimbus of blondness around her head, her body distinctly Aethelgifu-shaped, with an incomparable scent, like free pasteries in a Catholic girls reform school... in the South of France!

"Stand-up real slow, Mack, " she said, waving something shiny.

A wicked looking Luger, aimed at my heart.

The Complete Rebar for Tootsie Rolls is at IronCandy.blogspot.com. A safety reminder: don't try anything you see here at home.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Total Decor

In that cold, airless office I gritted my teeth like I was about to have my leg sawn off by a coke-addled baboon with a discount Caribbean medical degree, just like the one on my own wall from the University of Occasionally Submerged Regions of Trinidad, where I'd taken my specialty in Intermediate Lesions and planned a career as a back-alley Hollywood dermatologist before I got sidetracked into private investigations by the Case of the Dissolute Phlebotomist. After that, and a few more bumps on the head, and it was booze, broads, Bromo, and brie, if the broads happened to be Frogs. But today's bird was Brazilian, who clung to me like a three-toed sloth with agoraphobia, which suited me fine when this special sloth had the oomph of Ann Sheridan and a nice set of pipes that she tooted for tips at Rita Lita's Rumba Club and Laundry, the one down on Geary street; and we could see it from here, burning at the moment from an arson attack by the expatriate Andorran Anti-Dancing Squad (formed of a certain Monsieur LeRanc and three radical Calvinist ski instructors) in their biggest anti-hoofing terrorist strike, ever. It was why Renata sat closer to me now than Richard the III to Richard the III's hump, and it didn't help her natural distress at seeing her place of work on fire that we were here to meet the au currant enfant terrible of architecture, Phillip Johnson, and blackmail the man for the location of the missing movie star Errol Flynn. Renata nervously adjusted her hair to full ahead.

It was a stunning view of downtown San Francisco across a huge picture window, where the railcars rolled across the Bay Bridge and the sun flickered off the raw sewage in the bay, winking at us like a sparkly brown Tinkerbell. Renata leaned in, her dress and lips and hat the only source of color in the relentlessly spare, modern room, like a Mardi Gras parade float in the middle of a frozen lake in Lucrative Government Contract, Minnesota.

"Mack, I'm frightened," she said, grabbing my arm. I smelled her fragrant hair, and the fruit in her hat, and then the fruit bat in her hat flew off just like that.

"Don't worry, Baby. They're just preening Bauhaus dandies, kneeling before the might of De Stijl." I whispered, reassuringly.

The walls were bare black and white, every surface polished like a knob in a Market Street alley. Sterility didn't describe it: if it was just sterile, there had once something alive needing to be sterilized. I hadn't been this uncomfortable since I drank too much bitter in the George and Dragon in Windsor and mistook Princess Elizabeth for a B-Girl. (How was I to know it was the underage heir to the throne of England - in a well-tailored summer dress -asking me to buy her wildly over-priced champagne?)

There were three black wood chairs, all angles and straight lines, probably comfortable only for the more emotionally-repressed kind of SS officer. There was one drafting table, a polished black granite tilting rectangle, a single #4h De Staebler pencil with a perfectly conical tip, and a neat stack of architectural papers tied up with a little silver bow. The telephone was a black bakelite cube with a silver handset. A row of design books was stacked in ascending order of height and ideological purity. There was a little picture of Albert Speer in a Father Christmas outfit at an Austrian dinner party handing out little plastic Reichstags.

I glanced at the papers on the drafting table. A thin, precise graphite "X" covered a block of family houses and deco office buildings only twenty years old, just west of downtown, and the simple note held their fate: "Crush them, now. "

We awaited the pleasure of Phillip Johnson, motionless at his fancy architect desk, a profile of posturing proto-purity shadowed against the California light.

Renata and I sipped mimosas the personal secretary Clarence offered. Clarence was once a famed Armenian tenor sidelined with leprosy, which ended his career when his finger broke off and flew into the audience and cracked the monocle of the Times opera critic in the middle of the Ring cycle. Waiting for us to finish, he was about as patient as Napoleon with a toothache. I glared him out of the room with the kind of look I'd once given Losie the Bookie when he'd plum forgot to actually place my $500 on Seabiscuit.

Johnson happened to be in town, evicting lower middle class families on his own time, designing a new office tower so radical it was 30 stories high but with only four very, very long sheets of glass, one floor, and a landing pad for X-Ray powered flying cars from the future. He sat rod-straight in his chair, turning towards us without wrinkling his dark suit.

He fixed me with grey, pointy eyes. "Do you know what this is, Dr. Brain?" He opened a purple velvet case, and pulled out a straight-edge, made of platinum, shining like a pack of Shriners on free gin and hookers night. He polished it with a silk cloth. It was a little over a yard long.

"This, Dr. Brain, is a meter. "

Renata raised her hand as if to ask a question. Johnson gave her a look colder than a traditional Eskimo liquid nitrogen beer cooler.

"It is the source. Inarguable measurement. Pure titanium, timeless, clean, a efficient machine in itself, with no moving parts. The future is the machine, Brain. Predictable, eternal, indifferent to past or future. A house, to quote Le Corbusier, is a machine for living in. A work building is a machine for production. Fascism is simply a machine for ruling. "

I pulled out a Lucky. "You got a machine for a light?"

"You don't care for my politics, do you?"

I found my own Zippo. "Whatever floats your Bismarck, Johnson. I'm here because Errol Flynn is missing. "

"And what is this matter to you?"

"I'm getting paid Hollywood dough, and that always matters. Thing is, you were seen in frenchy kiss flagrante with Errol Flynn three weeks ago at a party in Bel Air. "

"And..?" he said, archly, like Constantinople's original Roman cisterns.

" I couldn't care less. Whatever steam powers your lift crane, reinstalls your air conditioning unit, or employs a 3 bit, 16 tooth iron-silica mud-powered tungsten carbide drill to pierce the Appalachian salt dome, it's 1942, not the Middle Ages, and we're in California, not Jesusnuts, Arkansas. The only thing I got a problem with is your taste in kidnap victims, and.." here, I shifted my spine,"...your lack of cushions. What're these chairs made out of anyway? Used Panzer tank oil pans?"

"Why did I agree to see you again? There is much work to do, " he said. Ruthlessly.

"I believe I was blackmailing you. A 'musical' mash note to Flynn from you, found in the men's room at the Brown Derby, published in the tabloids?" I retorted cruelly, but evenly.

"Oh yes, but of course," he said airily. It was like I threatened him with never hearing a life insurance sales pitch again.

"So Tracy, mind if I call you Tracy? I hear that's how you draw. So, about Flynn. Where is he?" I pushed. I let an edge in my voice, like I was a type of bear who was about to growl or make some milder sort of threatening, warning kind of noise.

"I don't know, " said Johnson, turning away as if he were going somewhere. He was clearly testing my will.

The time for talk had ceased. It was time for action, not words. Deeds, not syllables. Motion, not egghead passivity. Now, not then, or even before that. There was no reason to listen, discuss or cogitate . It was all about the Now of it, about decision-making, and following through with sudden, hammering action, about THE GO! No going round and round and round all clogged up with a bunch of random thoughts and never getting anywhere because it was easier to pretend to think or to write about pretending to think than to make a move that needed to be made long before the thinking or the writing ever began in the first place. That time was over. It was done with. It was ended. It was folded, put away on hangers and salted with mothballs. There would be an imminent act of will, the action of the mind directly on the material world, and damn the backbiting and the doubts and the consequences: No delay. No hesitation. No equivocating. No more controlled, double-blind studies and unavoidable peer-reviewed publication delays. The past was dead, the future was unwritten. Now was the only reality. Now was the time to decide. And an impulse would be made manifest, and acts executed, and I, and I alone, in the perfection and purity of my own will to execute, would make the move. Action: the only freedom. Now! Right Now!

Johnson eventually came back from the bathroom, and sat down and folded his hands. I got up quick and walked casual-like to the desk and put my lighter right next to the office building plans. He seemed a little taken back, like a defective toaster at Sears that keeps nervously launching black toast into the ceiling at random moments, leaving bread-shaped marks you'd have to pass off as decorative painting if you didn't want to bother cleaning it.

I flicked the lighter at the originals in my hand. "That's the only draft!" Flick. "I know nothing about this!" Flick. "Please!" Flick. Fire. The plans, coated in chemicals, burned like kerosene on Purgatory's oily rag dump. "You Goddamed Philistine! That was four weeks of tracing!" The fire roared, Johnson's surprise and rage lit by the orange light, like some demon, maddened by the poor quality of the electrical work. He grabbed some of the papers and ran around the room, waving them madly and blowing on them, going "Whoof! Whoof! Whoof!" before he stuffed them into the one glass of water in the room, crumpling and soaking the remains. Then, smoke rolling across the ceiling, he held the burned ends in his hands, waving away the smoke, and would have opened a window if the window had been openable but wasn't because he'd designed it that way.

"Where is Flynn?!

"You get nothing! "

I would have been offended if there weren't large circles of soot on his face surrounding his round glasses to detract from his condescension.

I pointed at him. "Remember, you brought it to this." I turned to Renata: "Alright, Muffin, send in the Decorators."

Johnson crowed. "You're a fool, Brain. Like this country." He removed his glasses for emphasis, revealing two large white spots on his sooted face where the frames had been. "We're weak, addled by the gooey delusions of common men, like democracy or Norman Rockwell vignettes, and we're all happy if we get a one bedroom craftsman home with it's sickening crown molding and a third-hand Tin Lizzy to take us to the moving pictures to watch this Michael Mouse or Donald Pigeon dance around. Germany is showing us the way to glory: no more coddling, no more comfy chairs or cozy houses that cradle the mind and make men's mind's bowls of tapioca pudding sitting on vinyl upholstery. I said you get nothing. You get nothing."

"We'll see about...hmm, well that's a bad cliché. Let me rephrase that to maintain your interest." I pulled my .45, still rusty and with few blood spots from the last Nazi-lover to give me lip. Johnson noticed but sat still, a vaguely foreign-loving smirk on his face.

But he stared agape as a couple three big palookas I knew in the Victorian restoration racket came in and started directly and quietly pasting up ochre and blue floral print wallpaper, with a red deer and cherubs border, on the unblemished walls.

"No...it's..pre..pre-Edwardian."

"That's right, pal. With all the little flowery bits. And it's just the start, unless you cough up."

Johnson made an uncertain noise, like a small valve closing a steam boiler on the Oakland ferry. I waved my rusty .45 at the clock, the one with no numbers on it, and reminded him not to move. In less than five minutes, half the walls in the office were like the King of Naples having a opium-withdrawal nightmare in Buckinghamshire, a tidal wave of curly-ques, gilding, a whole Rococo rigmarole by way of Encino. The blood drained from Johnson's face.

Then the furnishings began to arrive.

Renata brought in a set of knock-off Tiffany lamps, plus one made from a mannequin leg, in stockings. Rocko, one of the assistants, hung a rhinoceros head on the newly florid wall. Another brought in a Polar Bear skin throw rug. Johnson held cool for a while, until they brought in the chartreuse, jungle-themed Louis XIV settee, with gilt accents. In came a tapestry of Diana skewering a leopard, with an actual leopard skins sewn into the cloth. He reeled back, breathing hard, saving himself from falling with a stiff arm against the new Gothic-themed gold plate fish tank, with the little mermaid caryatids, gargoyle head corners and the arms of Poseidon lid, disturbing the piranhas. It came in rapid order: the porcelain tea set with themes of rural England in the 16th century, the complete set of science fiction magazines, the Vargas cheesecake calendar for 1941, the pre-made silver-trimmed Italian bakelite plasterwork, the turn of the century Coca-Cola posters with the plump Gibson girls smiling vapidly into the void.

"You don't look well, Johnson." He was swaying slightly. "Hey look, I found something special for you. You're gonna love this. Some new artist, guy named Keane. Renata?"

She brought the first painting in. Big Eyes. Then another. Bigger eyes. Then another. Huge, huge eyes. Children appeared in dark colors with morose, liquid eyes, staring, staring, staring, one after the other, more children in stripped shirts, pleading for something unknown from the viewer, forever, pleading. "Is this straight?" she asked Johnson, whose mouth was open, hands at his sides, a slight hunch, no sound emitting, his eyes shark-like, dead to all sensation.

Johnson collapsed on the floor, and curled up into a fetal position, sobbing quietly. In fifteen minutes his office had been reduced to a dotty, dope-addicted antediluvian Aunt Mae' s sitting room just after getting her inheritance from a historical New Orleans cathouse. It was shocking, seeing a proud man weeping softly from an overdose of schmaltz.

"Is he okay?" Renata asked, braziliany.

"Who cares?" I said. "Serves him right." Johnson looked as miserable as kitten cruelly insulted in a bathtub.

"The Eyes! The Eyes! The Eyes!" he whimpered.

"Now I don't know Mondrian from Hallmark, but if you tell good Doctor Colt here where Flynn is, I'll make it all go away, and you can mold away in your mausoleum."

**

A few hours later Renata and I were driving off to an address in Stanford Johnson coughed
up, some shed on the remote parts of the campus itself where they stored the sets for the student theater. Almost cowboy country out there, except for the sharp scent of tenure. It was getting dark now, the heat of the day evaporating faster than the virginity of the drama coeds. We parked the borrowed Dodge and walked through campus.

"Bobby Sox it up, baby. You think you can pass for an exchange Hygiene student? ," I asked Renata."

"I was the major in Middle English poetry once," she said wistfully, taking off her hat and putting up her hair in an adorable pony-tail, "but there were only the eight poems translated into Portuguese, and they were all late medieval odes to kitchen utensils."

"Close enough."

"Whither goest the left-most spoon, goest I,
Venison stew onto thine lips with pie..."

"Got It."

"Roundly to thy mouth, mouthest this silver'd
'O', fat with Diana's bounty, to thy consumption..."

"Ok, then.."

"Windingly wonderous wandering
To my Beloved's Palestine..
Wither'd in the wanting,
Thither to thine intestine,"

"Sure..."

Then I spotted an opportunity for a disguise I thought I might need. I quickly snuck up on a professor who was distracted by some coed with a grade issue, judging by the feel he was copping, before blackjacking him for his tweed jacket and pipe, pantsing him so he couldn't follow, and running away under the arch and past the quad. I tried to think of smarter things to say about that D.H. Lawrence book I'd read on a bus to Phoenix, if there was some sort of literary emergency.

The war-time campus felt half-empty, although I’d heard through the grapevine the research side was going gangbusters, coming up with an amazing variety of military inventions, the kind that instantly went into the wrong hands and people like me and my buddies in the OSS had to clean up. It had been a whole two months, for example, before the plans for the terrifying ketchup gas mortar shell developed at the Berkeley Heinz Institute was seen in action against our Allied irregulars in France, who’d quickly learned to counteract it’s effects by washing in Cola, thank god, or they would’ve gone down like so many pommes frites. Even worse things were in the planning, more condiment-based weapons mayhem that Satan’s Blue-Plate Special: the sweet relish grenade, marmalade anti-tank mine, the Worcestershire mortar, the 37mm jam cannon, the mayonnaise torpedo. The Thousand-Island thrower had already been deployed in Guam, the results were horrifying, the victims, unidentifiable. I thought of my lunch today, and shuddered.

We walked along near the library, I puffing on my pipe to look more professorial. Renata was trying to tell me something when we came upon a spotty-looking student, an 4-f engineer freshman from the sticks by the upturned boater, raccoon coat and slide-rule holder he sported. I caught his eye and he blanched.

“You,” I said, screwing up my eyebrows and looking down my nose like I was about to crush his all his hopes with a C minus, “When is the play on tonight?”

“The light opera? Sir? …I think its over at the theater at 8, Sir. Please…don't...”

“Alright then, uh, back to your studies with you. There’s a war on!”

“Yes, yes…” And he took off at a full run, raccoon fur flying. I could get to like this professor stuff.

“Mack,” said Renata firmly, “Put that away.” I looked at my left hand. Hmm. Prof. waving a .45 auto.

Eventually we found the set-storage shed, a Quonset hut temporary building out behind the advanced physics lab. Johnson had mumbled something about a ship where we might find Flynn. The door was unlocked. I rolled it back quietly as possible and went inside with the light off, the gun drawn and cocked, Renata following. The room was practically empty: a few scraps of cardboard, piles of fabric, beer bottles and panties on the floor, a phonograph with a few jazz records and the smell of Mary Jane hanging heavily in the air. It was the theater department alright, but there was nothing here. I was about to call the Decorators to send Johnson a neo-classical fountain when I looked at the floor - tempera paint marks everywhere, leading out. The sets had been moved.

Suddenly, we heard a rattle at the door, and Renata and I ducked behind a muslin painting of a sea of cowering orphans from a production of the Three Penny Opera.

A small yet barrel-chested man with a large ginger mustache and only four fingers total came in -Clarence, Johnson's secretary. He turned on the light with a sketchy-looking thumb, and his face fell like Mallory off Everest, although I should mention considering his leprosy, not literally. He ran around for a moment, absurdly looking under pieces of paper, for any trace of the abductee. He quickly figured out that the set had been moved, and made the only logical conclusion - Errol Flynn was appearing on stage for the first time with the Stanford Freshman Drama Club's production of the Pirates of Penzance. Except tonight, presumably hog-tied, gagged, and swordless, he wasn't even making scale.

I waited for Clarence to leave, and we followed at a safe distance, trying to act like any English professor and attractive coed sneaking away from a remote campus building in the evening. Clarence hobbled away at speed on his good leg straight for the theater, his reduced hands, half-nose and one ear scattering the business majors faster than you could say Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his black cape flapping in the wind striking me as unnecessarily dramatic.

He ran up to the box office, demanding a ticket at the top of his opera trained voice, and gesticulating wildly with his walking cane, which confused and pleased the poor girl in the booth, who was about to give the 97 extra seats in the 150 seat theater away. We strolled up a few seconds later, got free tickets and walked in and relaxed until the singing began, sitting through the First Act and "Modern Major General" in some horror, performed as it was in a piece of surrealist casting by a 7 year old wearing an elk head holding a machine gun. Clarence sat in front, watching the ship set intently, eyes upwards. He got antsier and antsier. Suddenly he leapt up, mid-pun, and climbed the rigging. As the Dadaist direction scuttled anyone's ability to predict anything, his onstage leap aroused no concern. A spotlight followed him, up the shrouds and ratlines, up to the Crow's Nest, past the dancing William Howard Taft at the crosstrees and the ostrich with the Kaiser helmet. He barely made it past the allusion, and then he spotted me chasing and climbed faster.

I grabbed a pirate hat and the weapon Renata tossed me, and as I climbed I met Clarence with violence, and fought off his rubber sword blows with a couple good bamboo cutlass whacks. But hanging on the rigging with one hand, Clarence had pushed his leper luck two tendons too far, and his hand came off, and he plunged to the stage with enough time to sing “How Beautifully Blue the Sky,” before his final call, or in this instance, splat. His hand with its two final fingers still grasped the rigging, tighter than a Scotsman's prostate exam.

I crawled into the nest, to applause, sword raised and saw a figure bent over. Someone was tied up in the stage scow’s Crow’s Nest, wrapped up tight like a case other than this one. But it wasn’t Flynn at all. It was a girl, in chain mail, pointy shoes and fake moustache, basically your typical Stanford coed, named Cecilia Davenport, Pirate #13, according to the program. I untagged her.

"What happened, dumpling?, " I asked, with compelling, enviable charm, untying her further, and pulling her up to stand. The audience cheered, except for Renata, who shot green-eyed darts when she saw Cecilia was sleek and curvy and built like the HMS Metaphore, which was the version being sung in the fall.

"I...I..took my mark up here and some man suddenly grabbed me and tied me up. I screamed but it was in the right place in the First Act."

"Did he look like Errol Flynn by any chance?"

"He was ...dreamy, little moustache, Englishy accent, strong, drunk...fey, perhaps. He was awfully nice about it all. Was that really Errol Flynn? "

"I don't know, sugar loaf." Just then I noticed the Prof' I took the pipe and jacket from, pointing me out to a couple of Stanford hired goons with pressed meat faces and limited appreciation for light opera. I mimed driving at Renata to get her to meet me at the car, grabbed a line and swung offstage, whacking a goon with the fake cutlass for good measure, dislodging his gum and headed for the exit through an appreciative throng. The other goon popped off a few .38 rounds and ran after me as only a fat man with tiny feet can.

Flynn was running too. But where? We were only behind half an hour, but where now? Was it all a ruse, a trap, a deceit, a game..? Was he a Kraut, a commie, a patriot? I'd been saving up for Park Place and some joker had been buying up all the railroads, and now the rent was due, and I had nothing but a Baltic avenue mortgage to pay and a little race car to get Renata and me out of college alive.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: A Snack Box of Buttered Lap Dogs

It was noisy and steamy and smelling of cinnamon rolls and the wet wool clothes of a hundred Christmas shoppers. I commanded my stool in Blum's soda joint, wolfing down their aces coffee cake to get taste of the whole Axis clown affair off my tongue and to butter over the symphony of honking noses that scored my nightmares. My shoulder ached badly from a direct hit with a pencil-moustached human cannonball named Dietrich, and the scab was just forming over the scar on my left cheek from a sharpened Kraut pie tin, which was also poisoned with an actual poison dart frog glued to it. If Lily hadn't sprayed it instantly with Army-grade Frog Off, Crumples would be crumpling up my bar tab by now and dunning my only living relative, as least the one on the paper where I wrote down my references, Archduke Ferdinand.

Aside from Lily, the attack hadn't been pretty at all, parachuting with the commandos right into the big Tent in the Vienna Jocularitosche Zircus, Sten guns blazing, tossing incediaries in all directions, chasing down the escaped American fascist clown troop and executing them one by one by following the sound of squeaky shoes in the confusion; all in a desperate move to stop the plans not only for the deadly "Silly" string, but something called the Death Cooking Ray, a micro-small radiation-wave transmitter able to cook the inside of a human skull -or in tests, a frozen enchilada - at 20 yards, plans which had been given to them by the German- Japanese underground diplomatic contact in San Francisco, Kreistenheimer, member of the Luxemborgian Redecoration Society, the Weimar kunstkrieg poet buddy of the late Viscount Phillerph Von Pforfer Van Der Forffen the Fourth, who I'd beaten into alliterative euphony a couple months ago.

The circus volks shot at our squad with the Death Cooking Ray gun, but just like the lab boys' predictions we foiled them literally by protecting ourselves with large sheets of Reynolds Wrap, which reflected tiny radiation bolts right back at the clowns and dropped them like a bag of lead noses, the superheated grease paint giving them a kind of crispyness that would have been a whole lot better on a Thanksgiving turkey. It was a screwball device, the acme of clown technology. When we went to collect the pieces of the Death Ray through the oily smoke and twisted balloon animals of war, it's advanced timing mechanism just kept blinking "12:00."

The world had dangled on the point of the tip of the edge of a extra-pointy knife suspended above the Apocolypty Merry-go-Round of Doom upon which Hunny Von Strudel-Muncher bought the world a ride for a couple wooden Nazi nickels, and for all my buddies' busy, bloody work ridding the circus of it's comic relief, the greasy group of gritty grunts got a handed a soft lump of cold Spam and a three day pass to East Nothing-ham and drank deep the peculiar satisfaction of making the world slightly less funny. I knew the feeling well.

We said our goodbyes between mouthfuls of filched pastries and strong beer as we left Austria individually, guided by pro-Allies locals, clear in their thinking because they'd known Hitler in junior high school. The escape through Switzerland: not easy, stuffed in the Vatican's touring polka troupe's St. Benedict's Tuba case. But I was alive and a lot of joes weren't, and the world got a fresh crop of dead clowns.

It was a bad war.

For me, it was 14 Trans-Atlantic hops home in a unheated C-46, routing madly through Lisbon, the Canaries, the Azores, The Pokey Shards, Iceland, La Isla Guano, Greenland, The Lesser Antipodes, Black Labrador, the southern northeast West Virginia, and Broken Supercharger Wyoming with a critical shipment of Swiss carbon paper and military giraffes bound for Pearl, and the next week found me right back in San Francisco, tired and broke with a 10 day beard and a 9mm- ventilated slouch hat, and it wasn't long before I was runk, dangry, wracked by guilt, sleeping on the office couch and seasoning leftover giraffe stew with paprika and brandy on the hotplate, wishing Lily or Dardenella or Jenny was here to darn my socks, massage my kidneys and practice mattress Pilates.

But the cake seemed just like the Allies these days, warm and buttery and sweet and falling into crumbs the second they got poked. I stared at the walnut paneling hung with the Victory Posters: Abbot and Costello for War Bonds, Marlene Dietrich's Zip Your Lips campaign, Eddie Cantor's step-by-step Gas Masks for Children and Pets, and Rita Hayworth War Bonds Something Something holy cross splinters look at those gams. There was a muttering noise, a waft of pipe smoke. John Dos Passos was at his regular stool next to me, yammering on about the color of old beer, fuming over Stalin's pact with Hitler and nursing a cup of cold coffee, his progressive principles deflating like a Navy Blimp left by its wife for a richer, better-looking blimp. I wasn't in the mood.

"Another jolt of Java, Mack?" said Cleo, the cheery plump waitress, who I probably knew better than my own mother, which wasn't hard because two hours after giving birth to me during the 1 am run of a horse-drawn street car she'd left me wrapped in a copy of the Chicago Tribune, (Headline: Horseless Carriage Helps Whoreless Marriage) in an box of empty laudanum bottles on the lobby counter of the Continental Hotel after pretending to check in as "Miss Eramus Thaddeus, " a fictional character from a series of Evangelical pamphlets about the daughter of a gold magnate who briefly doubts the divinity of Jesus and ends up two weeks later in a brick flop in the Five Points selling her virtue at 3 cents a go, cursing Susan B. Anthony for ever suggesting women should vote and therin bringing her to profligate deportment, moral dissipation and gonorrhea.

I looked at Cleo and her sunny dark face and bright brown eyes. She was always cheerful, and in the middle of us busy losing World War II. What the hell would spoil her day?

"Yeah, more coffee, doll." Wartime coffee, which seemed about 2/3 burned toast. Still good with cake.

"Say Mr. Mack," she whispered, like it was a secret, "that sweet Charles couple and their dog Asta was by here and left me a message for you to meet them at Forbidden City tonight."

"What time?"

"Around cocktail hour."

"With them that's sometime between 3 pm and 2 am." Hmm. The Charles'. Detectives. Writers. The Bon vivantiest anti-Fascist Manhattan Drainers in the Bay Area. Nora was a fine, poised slice of girl that cut through life on wit and gin and a body that could get a steamship to stand up in the water and dance a samba. Always a little awkward - we'd had a fling back in '33, when drinking made me look good, at least when she did it. These days they took all the Hollywood cases, like Katherine Hepburn's secret love child by Walter Brennan, or Mickey Rooney's White-Slavery ring, while people like me and Sam Spade usually mopped the gutter for scraps from pimps with IOUs on them. Which reminded me, Spade still owed me money for fencing that huge ruby he supposedly melted out of the middle of some lead bird sculpture a while back.

I knocked Dos Passo's hat off friendly-like to let him know I was leaving, and hoofed it down to Sutter to discuss things with Sam. A couple hours later, as I nursed the bruises on my knuckles, we parted bitter friends but I had 300 bucks from the fence job to warm my heart.

It was a short walk to Chinatown and Charlie Low's Forbidden City, a grand night club wrapped in a restaraunt folded inside a clip joint. It was classy but abrupt. The fortune cookies that came with the check said "You will pay now."

It was big and swanky inside, sort of the Cotton Club by way of Hong Kong. Photos with celebrities cluttered the wall. I sat at the bar. Charlie was there himself. I chatted up the skirt on the next stool for a moment before some Hollywood joker named Reagan tapped me on the shoulder and started explaining to me why I should keep my eyes off his girl Jane, and how he was such big shot in the war shooting propaganda films in LA, and how I by Jeepers I'd better watch myself. I curled my bleeding fingers around the blackjack I carried for just this sort of situation, and when the balloon-head wouldn't shut up, I inquired what on earth was that behind him and flattened him like an onion-skin laundry bill run over by a cement mixer.

Charlie took my side - chatting up skirts was a significant part of his business - and with the help of a couple of stocky prep-cooks Reagan took a free bus ride to Palookaville. Jane followed him outside after I completed my recitation of The Rubyaht of Omar Khayyam and she'd polished off her third Manhattan. I found out later he was working with chimps.

But where were Nick and Nora? I looked like a fool sitting here alone, nursing a black eye from my erudite discussion with Spade and a Mai Tai with a little red umbrella with what I was pretty sure was the Chinese for "Sucker" printed on it.

Just then a dog loped in with what can only be described as a suave, roguish terrier demeanor. It was Asta, of course, running to me, wagging his tail and barking a bit to tell me he had a message tied on his collar.

My Darling Dr. Mack,

Pookie's all gummed up with the ague that's going around and we simply had to retire to the St. Francis for the night. But do be patient and don't pout like you do after your recreational fisticuffs. How perfectly beastly you were to Sam! If you needed money, why not fix a horse race like decent people? But I forgive you.

You'll crack open that shell of yours when you see the delicious present I've sent you from Rio.

Your Nora Always,
Mrs. Nick Charles.

So I patted Asta on the head and he scampered out, and when I looked up, a goddess had risen, and stumbled a bit, and parted the beaded curtains backwards like Athena springing from the brow of Zeus in a New Orleans whorehouse, and she had more dark waves than the Black Sea, tall and tan and young and lovely, and she passed Zhi, the angriest waiter in town, and when she passed him he went "AAh!" as he burned himself on a bowl of steaming ginger pepper crab. Brazillian, she seemed, from the way she samba-ed across the room, the slow fire in her black eyes, the half empty bottle of Cachaca sticking out of her purse, and the discreet fresh fruit and tiny Brazillian flag in her hat. She came right for me, her ivory silk dress fluttering about her like a flight of doves around a clutch of Zeigfeld girls.

"Mr. Dr. Brain?"

"Yes, I am indeed so."

"I am Renata Chlumska", of Rio."

"Charmed. Say, isn't that a Swedish name?"

Yes. I'm orginally from Dublin." She sat down at the bar, close enough that the Chanel #5 dissolved the part of my brain that exercises good judgment. "I am told you are the man to whom I must speak. A good man. A strong man. Yes." She ran her fingers down my sleeve. "A man-y man. Brain, you must listen to me. You are a man! Are you listening, Man?"

If listening meant technically hearing her voice while staring her decolletage which rose and fell like a soft beige throw pillows futures market on which my life savings was invested, then the answer was yes.

"So what I am going to tell you now, Mr. Man, right now, you must listen to with the upmost attention, not forgetting a word, Mr. Dr. Man! You are listening?"

"Yes!"

"Because I must tell you this, and it is...of upmost.. importance. Listen now, Listen." She leaned in close, so close, her hair falling on my shoulder, her perfect cherry lips brushing my earlobe, the Chacaca on her breath getting me drunk.

"Mr. Brain...Erroll, Erroll Flynn, Errol Flynn and...Phillip... Phillip Johnson.." And then she passed out like someone hadn't paid the Brazil bill. I caught her in my arms, and lacking clear options, threw her over my shoulder and started walking out, little grapes from her hat bouncing off the floor.

Zhi, built like a barrel of jerky and holding an enormous cleaver, gave me a look like I was tomorrow's crispy duck.

"Nerves," I explained. "Her nerves must be broken." I tossed him a buck for the drinks, stepped outside, and facing a twenty block girl-schlep, pulled the .45 and stole a cab from a cabbie I didn't like.

Back in the Sutter building office, Renata sleeping off something on the couch, I kept the lights off, except a desk light for the news clippings I plowed through. Errol Flynn: well, we all knew he was musical. And Phillip Johnson* was a big shot architect, fond of straight lines and bent boys, and perhaps as the Chicago papers slyly insinuated, a German sympathizer, running headlines in 1935 like "Hitler-Lover Builds Cube House." He put the anti-semitic charm in Father Coughlin's broadcasts and tried to start an American fascist party but with tailored shirts, and made a sightseeing tour of the bombing of Warsaw, taking time to note the classy German uniforms. When he wasn't busy tracing straight lines, Johnson was putting stone masons and hod-carriers out of work with the new glass and steel rage. He didn't like curves in buildings, or human beings.

It was shaping up to some sort of serendipity of sordid. I stretched and gargled a mug of WPA Old Saddle Horse Rum, brewed on an Oakie Relocation Co-Op in Bermuda, lit a Lucky and kept reading. More Johnson stories: fussy lines, boxy buildings, snappy clothes, the annexation of Czechoslovakia....... there was a pattern here. There was a Johnson house spec for Charles Lindbergh, whose palling around with Goering and suggesting the surrender of Britain had gotten embarassing, and who was now trying to make up for it by shooting down Japanese planes on his own time. Another lead to an office concept for Henry Ford, you know, the one with the picture of Hitler on his desk and vice versa. So far the only connection with Flynn was pressed shorts.

I didn't like where this was going: Detroit was a real possibility. And Hollywood. I'd disliked both, for different dames, one for sending me up, one for selling me out.

I gazed at Renata, piled up like a pile of adorable floral print laundry with long silky gams. I listened to her soft Brazillian breathing. Nothing but tight curves, Renata, like a fine sleek yacht with big tits, one you could sail to Tahiti and not notice the Pacific. But the mysterious mystery mystified me, and we might miss Tahiti.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Red Nose Honking

All of it, the tryst with the Hygiene lecturer at Stanford, beating the consumptive accountant with his eight-pound calculator, egging on the self-loathing Hughes Aircraft pilot, the deadly pie fight on Coit Tower, the trail of enormous foot prints in the mud off Alameda Naval Station, all came to the big universal set of all points lying in the set of no points: me left standing in the billowing smoke with a hang-dog look on my face and a useless tip crumpled in my fist, a note for a last second meeting at the big tent with a Dr. Gruber, former Psychoanalyst to Greta Garbo's psyhchiatrist, before a vast aerosol explosion rent the hopes of men, spraying pink strings, bits and globs over an area the size of a free beer parking lot, and shattering the already thready illusion of safe fun at a 2 bit 3rd string 4 flushing suburban Fresno circus.

Images flashed: the soggy cardboard box of comedy noses and glasses dissolving in the rain in an alley in the Mission. The poo-eating grin of the used very tiny car salesman. A Market Street theater full of confetti from the escape of a bucket-wielding bum with a paper flower in his hat. The hypnotic twirl of a bow tie as the bald red-haired one stood over an unlucky sailor who bled his life out in a Haight street gutter from a seltzer bottle blow to the temple. It was all a waste. It didn't amount to bubblegum stuck on the sidewalk, adhering later to the heel of a some swell tomato's kitten pumps only to be discarded in cute little wrinkled nose disgust into the dustbin of American dreams.

The explosion had been so massive that peanuts and bits of tiger meat were still falling. How clever I thought I was, how much I had penetrated this mystery with shoe-wearing, liver-hardening research, how many blowhard alderman I'd tied to the back of streetcars for another petit-four of detail that might have saved a few lives on the front lines. It was all nothing. I was late. I had failed. In a dusty backwater of the California desert, a distant suburb of Fresno called Hopeville might as well be Smoking Holes Estates. I grabbed my head with both hands and lowered to ground, stuffing back a hot scream of despair. The scene was pathetic and maddening, like a regional dinner theater production of Die Fleidermaus.

Bits of smoldering pie filling stuck to the few standing walls. Broken figures with conical hats crawled from the blackened hulks of overturned tiny cars. Thousands of ropes of strange pink stringy loops covered everything, tangled in Mrs. Primrose's beard, both heads of each of the famous Morris twins, and tangling up the mass of elephant named Daffodil, like a haggis rolling around in the notions drawer. The gooey pink yarns hung from the cannon and the lion cage, afire here and there; the diver had been trapped mid-air and she hung over the tiny pool suspended like a dead tuna auditioning for an Esther Williams movie. Gaily colored strings of magic infinite hankerchiefs burned under the bright desert sky.

A terrified Rhesus monkey in a red fez sat nervously in the broken remains of the trapeze tower, shaking too much to light his cigaraette.

Movement: out of the corner of my eye someone attempted to speed away on a minature tricycle. I was way beyond patience, or care. My rusty .45, a "present" from a Tenderloin pimp and late victorian furniture re-upholsterer named Pinky Fitzwater, raised itself my hand and in one movement the gun blast, the sound huge in the still, dry afternoon air, dropped the fleeing spy into the bitter earth, nose honking as his face bit the dust.

I walked over to where he lay, his enormous high collar tangled in the trike's chain, the blood oddly invisible on his red wig. I kicked him hard enough to get through the pillows.

"Where's Gruber? GRUBER!" I demanded.

"Schiesse!" He burbled, the blood bubbles spitting out his real nose, the speech of the dying shlamaozzle slurred almost beyond recognition. I bent down to listen. "Gruber's gone! GONE! You fool!! " He whispered. And a last effort at defiance - "Heil Hitler!, he gurgled, as I got a flower-full squirt of water in the eye. "Hee! Hee! Hearghhhh..." His eyes glazed. The blood trickled across his fake stubble, and at the end, his shoes seemed to deflate.

But Dr. Gruber? Gone escaped, or Gone dead?

Back in the City, I drowned my sorrows with the "5 shots 4 bits" deal at the Yellow Kitty, with the flashing neon sign of a giant-eyed hepcat either drinking or vomiting into a martini glass, a joint so sketchy Picasso might have done the blueprints, and so cheap the glasses were made by Dixie. The brandy was labled "fresh," but you appreciate that quality when the bottles are stored in the pathologist's office next door.

Then Lily walked in, bouncing adorably in all directions like a silk bag of koala bears. She somehow sensed I was back in town. Maybe it was my phone call to Pinky, blubbering about how something called Silly String was going to lose us the war when the 101st was trapped in Sicily by a kind of giant Kraut mechanical spider, developed right here in California by a pro-fascist juggling troupe, and they'd gotten clean away. For a pimp, Pinky had a heart, and of course decent taste in reproduction fabrics. He probably sent her right away, a sort of thank you for a little parking problem I'd fixed for him over parking a whore on the mayor's couch with the mayor still lying down on it.

With her dark chestnut hair poured over that soft vanilla skin, Lily looked good stuffed in that brown polka dot dress, good like a Vargas fudge sundae. Wasp-waisted and bumpier than a hillbilly freeway, she stalked over and sat right down next to me, sliding her hips into the crook of my non-drinking arm. Her face was oval and smooth; her lips, not inexperienced.

"Need a little company, Mack? Need your prime rib salted?" She was never exactly writing cartoons for the New Yorker.

"Lily, listen, I got some serious drinking to do here...,"

She pouted a little, crossing her arms. "Hey, sugar thighs, a triple gin and coke. Cherry AND onion."

"Vodka and Everclear for me, hold the gallstones. " I called to Morrey. " And don't call me' sugar thighs. '"

"I was just saying hi to Morrey, " she retorted, high as a weather balloon filled with laughing gas, with which she was also apparantly filled.

"Him? He's too ....what is it?..tripapalegic for you. " Morrey had hopped out of earshot, bottle in teeth, yamulka typically soiled.

"Never stopped me before," she said, smiling like a lilac baby bunny was riding a candy unicorn across the rainbow between her ears. How the hell did she pick up a Brooklyn accent in Sonoma? Something wasn't right. But what was so right was violating the designed stress load on that dress.

"I oughta wipe that smile off your face by strongly suggesting that you adopt a less seductive expression."

"Oh, yeah? Why don't ya try kissin' me?" Her voice sliding high and girlish and slightly squeeky, like Betty Boop on helium.

"How much is that gonna cost?"

"Hmm.., maybe a sawbuck. Maybe a diamond ring. Depends on your mood, Brain." She started tracing the outline of my right ear right on my right ear.

Sometime around then Morey hopped carefully by with the drinks and the world eventually became a grey haze with little lights like seeing a Christmas tree through the house fire the hot bulbs on it started. The last thing I remembered was her sweet, creamy lusciousness coming inexorably in my direction, like I was crossing the street on a sunny day and suddenly noticed I was about to be hit by an ice cream truck.

I woke up in a cab, with a strange, clammy .38 in my hand. There was a smell of gunpowder and tequila and old cigarettes and blood: a perfume department to a private dick. It was still dark. The yellow checked Buick was somewhere near the Sunset. I could hear the roar of the surf. My tie: askew. My pants: itchy. My skull felt like it had an Irishman with a brain tumor and his own hangover retiling the bathroom in it. Oh yes, and in the driver's seat the cabbie had two big old holes in his hat that went right through the windshield, about the same caliber as this gun.

There was only one obvious conclusion: I was really hungry. And one other conclusion: I'd been set up, and me waking up right now hadn't been part of the plan. But people were always setting me up, especially when I was close to something big, so often I was developing a resistance to chloral hydrate. I'd been set up more times than a 5 cent peep show tent. I'd been set up for murder before twice, and transporting a minor for immoral purposes (in the case of THE RE-REINSURANCE COQUETTE), war crimes (in the case of THE BATTLE OF VERDUN) , and once for solicitation (in the case of DR. BRAIN OR LOOSE LORETTA?)

But why now? I'd failed. The pink aerosol string pro-axis juggler strike force got clean away. Unless they thought I knew something I didn't, or they suspected I didn't realize I knew something I did, or I was about to find out something else that wasn't something I knew before but was probably extremely important and once I figured it out I would certainly get right on it, and that meant lights out for whoever put this gun in my hand, if I indeed figured out what exactly whatever it is was.

Seemed like half the time I got in a cab someone ended up staying in Motel Styx. I said, it seemed like half the time I got in a cab someone ended up staying in Motel Styx. Heck, 20% of the time I got on a streetcar, some punk ended up in traction. The statistics on my '34 Kaiser weren't much better, and that's not including the people I was specifically trying to kill.

I felt bad for that joker of a corpse, the tip vacuum driving the cab. Steve Lieber by his license. I knew that name from- what was it ? The City symphony - this guy was the back-up assistant percussionist. I recognized him from when he got in a fight during a Mahler performance with an Austrian violist who accused him of being late on a note with the timpani and ended up head first in it. Fired, started shooting junk, watching Flash Gordon serials and stag films obsessively in dinghy all-night Tenderloin cinemas and driving a hack and following that cab to the death.

The whole thing told me more than Lily was trouble, trouble like a 1000 loose Alaskan King Crabs in the Turkish bath trouble. But like that situation, you could just wait in the corner, with a little lemon and butter ready. Time doesn't always work against you. The set up told me more than a month's worth of pounding the city directory, or a lucky tip from a street juggler with diplomatic contacts in Berlin. It told me the whole thing was still going on, and it was bigger than tactical pink aerosol string. But first I had to get out of there. I ripped up the cardboard sign on Lieber's chest that said "Mack Brain killed this guy," in laundry marker, and walked back to my office, where I'd been temporarily staying since 1932. I took the gun and the marker and went through Lieber's pockets for loose change like anyone, I guess. It's a rough world. He had 12 bucks and a bus locker key, which I took, as a clue, and cab fare home.

Of course the cops were waiting for me. Lt. Lefty McGoongle stood smoking a fat Cuban in the hallway, face like a warthog, only hoggier, greasy vienna sausage fingers adjusting an antediluvian bowler hat, presumably some kind of inheritance. McGoongle and I knew each other well, like Napolean and Wellington.

"Hiya, Hoggie. Is it your birthday? Here's a present!" I unhinged the cylinder, emptied it and handed him the .38, and started dropped the cartridges on the floor, one by one. The Lieutenant's block-faced meat buddies made a move toward me but he held them back.

"We got a tip about you, Mack. You iced a cabbie tonight. In the Sunset. " He meated up the gun with his fingers, re-oiling it in the process. " Why'd you plug the percussionist, Brain? Huh? huh? Why? Why'd ya do it? For the money? He diddled your whore? For kicks? Why Brain? Why? Why? Why? Huh? Why?" It was the most advanced interrogation technique since my toddler nephew Scott demanded to know why strawberry ice cream didn't grow in the strawberry patch.

"Maybe I was grumpy. But you can count, can't you Hoggie? Notice anything funnny?"

Five rounds had bounced off the floor.

"Wasn't the cabbie shot twice?," Hoogie asked the palookas. One of of the spam-slabs nodded.

"Doesn't prove anything, " he said.

"Look, when I go out, I don't usually plan on shooting more than five people. So I don't carry extra ammo. Search me, my place. Just tidy up a bit when you're done- my maid just joined the Soviet navy. Look, I'll spell it out in short words: I leave an empty round for safety, a habit I got from your mama, so you know that. That would leave THREE rounds - Hey, Stumpy, don't bother dusting that thing, it's only going to have my fingerprints on it - Your cabbie was shot with another .38. AND since when do I carry a .38?

"All right, it's a bit unlikely. But you're not off the collar for this, Brain. This ain't over, Brain, till I say it ain't over. No. Is ain't over. Me say Over. Capiche?" All too well, I thought. He pulled out something out of his green and yellow plaid jacket. "Okay, know this guy?" He held up a photo of a large man in a polka dotted mu-mu with an oversize ruff collar - and a head smashed as flat as the pulp for tomorrow's Examiner on the juggler-killer story. "Went by the name Klaus Von Meinheimer, alias Chucky the Chuckler."

"Not enough to laugh at him until now." Cripes, I was hard-boiled today. "Know where I can find Lily?"

"She's still working the Yellow Kitty." She often drew her johns as a B-girl, trying to sell Morrey's vast stock of Icey Mae's Triple Distilled Yak Butterd Rum he bought off a abandoned Bosnian tramp steamer in Oakland in 1913.

Me and McGoongle split ways, seething, like the Pope and Hugenots after arguing over "irregardless" on a triple word score box.

He was going to point to his eyes with two fingers and then to me in the universal I'm watching you gesture but missed and poked himself . "Acck!..ur, look, Brain, just don't leave town. "

I still had eight bucks from Lieber's cab, and was headed to the Yellow Kitty when I reached in my pocket and pulled out the bus locker key. Worth checking out. Lily could wait, she'd just sell a couple more bottles of the rum and maybe a dram of finest South Dakotan lambrusco.

I hoofed it to the bus terminal, downtown near the Bay Bridge. Locker 230 on the key, right on the floor, a large locker. It opened sweet and easy, like a first kiss, like I was meant to take it to the prom and unzip it's dress in the car. But instead of getting to third base I pulled out a 6 foot wooden mallet hammer, stained liberally with what was, judging from the white pancake makeup mixed with it, dried clown blood. A lady at the bus cafe counter gave me a look like I was some kind of maniac.

For the moment, I put it back, and on the whim of a hunch, unwadded the business card of my last contact, dropped a nickel in the local booth and simply asked the operator to dial Kickapoo-2-7646. Dr. Gruber's number.

A woman answered, in a voice like a mink glove massage with absinthe oil.

'Hello?"

"I'm calling for Dr. Gruber."

"This is Dr. Gruber. How may I help you?" A woman. Of course. A lady psychiatrist. And by the sound of her voice, as sultry as a opium-addled Louise Brooks in New Orleans in August in a velvet tennis dress, clearly in the Freudian rather than Jungian school.

"This is Brain." A silence.

"Brain. You're... alive."

"Alive. You too. "

"A...Live. I'm .. glad." Hard to read the sarcasm under that accent, somewhere between Rekjyavik, Vienna, and Larkspur. My guess was that "Glad" was an Icelando-Marinic word for "Extremely Surprised."

"You and I should talk."

"Okay. Where?" If this got any more terse it would be like some Calvinist father explaining intercourse. We made a date, so I brought a juggling pin I'd found in Fresno.

Hopped a cable car back to Columbus, said hi to Crumples, who was working here too, grim as a an iternerant funeral worker, and hobbled upstairs to a choice booth at Cafe Vesuvio, which Pinky himself had reupholstered. That should have been a hint.

I saw a female shape so shapely that the hourglass would run slow, a scrumptious dilly sealed in a trim tweed suit and pencil skirt so well-cut I found myself strangely moved by tan plaid. There wasn't a lot of wool, but the static charge was building.

She turned around. But the lady psychiatrist was ...Lily. Lily was the dilly.

"Heya Mack." She was cute before but now she got really my attention, and that .44 short barreled revolved she was pointing at my family cartridge was the least of it.

"You always bring field artillery on a date, 'Lily?', if that's your real name?"

"That's Lillian, thank you," she said, her voice low and sweet as an unpicked pineapple and yet as cool as the iceberg that sank the Titanic.

"That the second time you've set me up in two days. You still look like a dream, dollface," I said, and what little part of my eyes weren't filling with soft, gooey piles of cotton candy girly goodness was looking for an escape route over the bannister. But with her tapered porcelin finger on Big Bertha there, my options were limited.

"You look like one of those nightmares where you're caught in farm machinery." Her clear grey eye fixed on mine, like a texas rig drilling to the earth for the goopy hot black gold of knowledge.

"You found something, in that cabbie's locker," she stated, as fact; but how could she have known? "You've been doing some bad thinking, Brain, and as today's science proves, all mental disorders result from bad thinking. In the future, bad thinking will be cured by expensive, colorful pills, which might lead to heart palpitations, dizzyness, lethargy, and unpleasant oily discharge. But right now if you love your country, you'd better work it out."

"You had that woman at the terminal watching the cabbie's locker," I said, the walls of stupidity falling to the jackhammer of reason. Then I threw her the juggling pin. She instinctively began juggling it and the gun in one hand. I moved in and grabbed her in a tight hug. The gun and the pin dropped the floor and I kicked the gun down the stairs to Crumples, who in spite of his deep anger would never shoot anyone unless there was money in it or his corn was acting up. Now I had my .45 on her.

"Fudgesicles!" She said, her lips close to mine as I held her in my arms as Lillian for the first time. She smelled good for a psychiatrist, like a vanillia cinnamon boat transporting musk deer in a fresh breeze to the Lollypop Archipeligo.

"Hmm. Let's see now, baby, a juggler, a barstool share cropper and a Doctor." She struggled a little. "You set me up twice in two days. You a filfthy Nazi, Lillian?" I shook her like an almond tree- and the almonds started coming out.

"Think about it Brain, the hammer in the locker - that was Chucky the Chuckles's blood on the Mahler hammer!" It was a Mahler hammer! Steve the cabbie must have killed Chuckles with it during the performance Mahler's Sixth symphony last night, while I was out like the electricity in Mexico. Nice touch that.

"Chucky was the Nazi! Liber was our agent!" Her eyes were pleading.

"Agent?" I said. Something was coming together.

"I wasn't the one that drugged you Brain, but I needed what you knew. I'm with...I'm with... the War department. I infiltrated the juggling act. Just like you I learned about the Death String too late. We've got ...we've got to stop them. " Then waterworks came on, and this woman, tough and sharp and delicate as a the corner of a Shaker table, buried herself in my shoulder, where I could feel her up a little bit, and I melted like a chocolate malt under an industrial hair dryer.

But no there was no time for love here in the Lady Psychiatrist's booth. The clowns were still on the move.

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