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
"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
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
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
"And..?" he said, archly, like
" 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
"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.
"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
"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
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
"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
"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
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
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
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
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.
"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.
