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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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