She called herself Regina Ottoman, after the Empire. Her jet black hair and razor sharp bangs offset her transluscent white body poured into a tight red dress like a Hedy Lamarr-shaped soft ice cream dispenser. Her lips were a perfect cherry red, and I attentively watched them forming the words "fuck," a notable beginning, and then "off," which was more of a disappointment. Yet they were directed out towards the bay, where an unable seaman on the USS Forestal was reading those lips with gray binoculars instead of the important semaphore that said "Flaming Tanker is Drifting To You." She sat down, disdainful and yet not incognizant of the futility of being, her curves folding with deliberative grace like the taffy in a taffy making machine. She was a spitwad of beauty shot smartly into the pocked buttocks of a forgettable world left by God in his other pants.
I outpace myself.
Out the greasy window of the dingy yellow Port office, the vast billows of black smoke and greasy fire drifted over Hunter's Point. I took a drag on a filterless Lucky and played it cool:
"So, Sugar Loaf, what say you ditch that roll of Buffalo nickels you call a boyfriend and you and I grab a slow boat through Rio and then, Kiddo, then maybe we get hitched in Paris." That came out wrong. First, the Nazis were in Paris. And second, it actually came out:
"Uh...duh....er...uhhhh."
"Close your mouth , Mack. Look, you're spotting your tie." She rose like Venus from an al fredo sauce, came over and deftly wiped the spittle off with a hanky. Her scent was a lovesick grove of wistful apricots, and burst of expensive vodka, and as she tossed her hair over an unmitigated shoulder I supressed a sonnet with some difficulty, beating back a rhyme for "wuv." That feeling, that love-twisted feeling like a electric eel looking for loose change under my small intestine, it was the only other thing cutting through the familiar fog of Gary's Indiana Gin, a gin so rough I refinished my furniture with it.
"I'm just here for business, " she said.
"Business." I said flatly, not imagining her dress suddenly disintegrating due to manufacturing defects. "I'm your man."
"No you're not. But I want you to kill one."
"Okay, sure, whatever. Who?" Hmm. Brain's Brain not work.
"Not literally of course. I want to destroy a reputation. The reputation of The Viscount Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van De Forfen."
"The Viscount Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van Der Forfen?" The Industrial Aristocrat and International Playboy. The War Profiteer. The Mattress King. The Noted Amateur Existentialist?"
"The Count Phillerph Von Pfoffer Van Der Forfen. The Fourth. Mack, You know I... work... on projects of special interest to the War Department. " She gazed outside at the fireboats sending their streams of water, uncomprehending, into a blazing aircraft carrier, the towering balls of flame and smoke glinting orange in her almost silver eyes. "Paris. The Montparnesse."
I was especially non-plussed. "You've slept with Jean-Paul Sartre- once again. "
"Yes. Well, spooning and a little structuralist dialectic. Of the act of sex he is disdainful. I slept with Simone De Beauvoir." Regina arched an eyebrow so perfectly shaped that if tossed into the air it would come right back.
"Le crap." I said.
"Don't be like that," she said.
Through all the years of 5 cent stogies and 4 cent rye and dollar poker and inexpensive barber shaves and a bad habit of picking imromptu saber fights in fencing clubs with my mask off, my face still had betrayed a boyish jealousy, an ignorant contempt of critical theory. But I just figured if a joe works alongside his brother men he ought to be able to have a decent place and eat regularly and live free as long as he doesn't hurt anybody; and if some pudding pants starts killing and enslaving people, well, maybe pudding pants gets scrapped off the cobblestones, and if two astonishingly hot women find a special, tender kind of love, who am I not to watch?
"OK. Sweet peaches." My endearments were labored and clearly annoying, like, increasingly, my breathing.
"Look, Mack, just shut up and listen, will you? The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth is here, in the city, at the Huntington. "
I whistled. "Toney digs, Cupcake! But what do I do, walk in with this old hat and drool on my tie and say 'what's up, P.P. , you crazy old horse bugger? Let's get go shoot pool at the Dew-Drop Inn and chat up a couple of B-girls? I should just wear a sign that says 'Deputy Mayor of Pallokaville.'"
She ignored this overwrought tirade. "Follow me."
I watched her bodacious backside working like two hams fighting in a christmas sock, poured six quick swigs of Racoon Rye down my gullet and grabbed my clean gun, a 5 lb ancient Navy Colt I picked up at the estate sale of Mark Twain's butler, so large it had the complete text of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" worked into the engraving.
"Fancy-Living, here we come."
I stopped a cab by firing the Black-powder colt into the air. The huge report so startled the cabby that he seemed to die of a heart attack and the cab veered off and crashed into a pile of electric wool socks for the Alaska export market, causing a small sheep-smelling fire. I pulled him out into the street, apologized with a respectful tip of the hat, and we headed to Nob Hill, or what I liked to call the Ass Pimple of Swankytown. I drove. She explained the plan.
Couple hours later I stood with my rented red diplomatic sash riding up and dislodging the borrowed medals, one for valor for the unsuccessful Russian invasion of Fiji and two that had something to do with an Oklahoma bake-off. The pocket of my monkey suit had a left over receipt for $400,000 in solid gold napkin rings and the name of a recomended professional toothbrusher. The collar was so stiff and high my head felt like the little metal ball on the tip of those new auto-pens. I stood there in the grand ballroom, bobbing like a top, stuck with a wrinkly round dame with huge emeralds who was still bitter over her family's freeze-out of profits from the Opium Wars.
A fireworks display of sparkles in my eyes as either the delerium set in or Regina came along in a clingly - no, I stick with clingly - white silk number to rescue me from the sad story of an emperor who didn't appreciate what opium did for his people. She was more dolled up than the original cast of a Chinese opera, but tasteful-like, and heads turned so quick that I spotted my old pal Smokey McCallister, Lawyer at Law, handing out business cards. But she was also pouring from the wiry arm of a tall, remote, hatchet-face no-chin man in an all black 'white' tie and tails, with a rusty moustache and sideburns saved from the Boer War, looking like a hairy can opener in tails.
"Allow me to present the noted American Existential thinker, Dr. Mack Brain," she said to the The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth," who nodded politely.
"Just call me Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen," he said, asking his butler to extend his hand on his behalf.
"Mack. Honored." I said. Regina gave me a look. I glanced at the crib notes on my detachable sleeve-collar. "I understand you have a marvellously --er --detached faith in the clarity of being."
"Only when manifested by personal suffering."
"But of course." We suddenly all laughed -and hollowly- at once, and I toasted the non-descript reliief of free will by inevitable death with a bottle of the 1827 Moet.
"So, Viscount.." and seeing his butler's face prodding me to continue "Phillerph ...Von Pforffer... Van De Forffen... the fourth ," The bat-nosed butler shook his head slightly to indicate I may have offended him with excess formality at the last bit, and indeed the Viscount said:
"Please, I had hoped we could all despair of the possibility of human friendship together yet in utter moral isolation without excessive formality." He looked sad.
"No, no, a slip of the habit, Viscount...Phillerph...Von Pforffer..Van.."
Regina, bless her, cut me off with a slight stretch and deft wafting of bosom, thus choking all conversation in the ballroom.
A caterer showed up offering a plate of fancy seafood treats. "Madam? Sir?"
"Thank you, no. I've had too many." said Regina.
"Hell is other crab puffs." I said. The laughter was despairing. Except from his Viscountness. He was nodding soberly, the sideburns catching his collar and splaying out sideways, making his face look even thinner.
"I too acknowledge the humor of your comment. A freely choosen clutch, as it were. A sudden synthesis of truths, essentially a dialectic, the post-Hegelian clash of crustacean and catering."
"Quite." I'd dealt with these rubber underwear types before. 'Quite' covers most bases.
"Viscount, tell us dear of your devastating critique of Lativa," asked Regina. It was clearly a favorite topic and the Viscount swelled up even more, and warmed to the "cultural renewal" of the 1874 execution by mass drowning of the infamous Anachromantic poets of Riga , cast adrift in the Baltic by order on a leaky barquentine and sinking to a recitiation of "Ode to A Flatulent Pedophile."
It was at this moment that I noticed a small, stooped hairy man with a a monacle watching the Viscount intently from the balcony. No more than 5' 2", his hair was slicked back and parted in the middle and he had a Prussian air about him and a razor thin moustache about his lip - but his lower lip. His right jacket pocket bulged. A gun? A package?
Regina put her hand on my shoulder as the Viscount continued. "Kriestenhemeier!"
Sparky Kriestenheimer, to be exact. The oily head of the San Francisco Prussian Beneficence Society, and the reputed head of the West Coast german spy network. Actually he was the head of the Japanese West Coast spy network. Clever that. But this was no place to start shooting up a swanky ballroom. Well, technically, it was exactly the place to shoot up a swanky ballroom, it's just that this would have served no purpose. It was the Viscount in my sights and I had a job to do. I watched Kriestenheimer as the Viscount droned on about Latvian anabaptism rituals, where people went to the lake to be saved and when they got there simply looked at it.
Kriestenheimer disappeared and then appeared and trotted across the dance floor directly toward the Viscount, plowing through twirls of waltzing couples.
"Von Pforffer Van De Forffen! Von Pforffer Van De Forffen!" He yelled in a scratchy clipped german accent, reaching into his pocket.
I fingered my gun, having just disguised it as a cat with an old beaver stoll when people were busy eating crab puffs, and holding it in plain view like a cat with a bottle of good scotch. Regina stepped back a little and discreetly pulled out a tiny pearl-handled harpoon gun, which she held between her knees.
"Kriestenheimer! Kriestenheimer!" The Viscount turned and yelled back.
"Von Pforffer Van De Forffen!" I was watching his ratty little eye, ready to blow him back to Limburgerville. We needed the Viscount alive.
But Sparky's hand came out of the jacket pocket empty and he embraced Phillerph crisply, kissing him on both cheeks. "Can it have been ten years since the last kunstkrieg?"
Regina quickly whispered into my ear:
"The KunstKreig - it was a late Weimar republic ostensibly dadaist pro-fascist gallery show in Frankfurt, where "degenerate" artworks were crushed in a gallery by a steam hammer and then force-fed in china cups to street waifs, to suggest the inability of modern art to sustain orphans for any significant length of time. "
"That's just wrong." I said.
"Miss Ottoman, may I present my old friend Mr. Max Kreistenheimer, and this of course is the hopeless ravishing Miss Regina Ottoman," said the Viscount's butler on his behalf. Kriestenheimer oogled her briefly, wrinkled his lower moustache, and returned to their conversation.
"These two were behind it, breaking Bonnards and smooshing Duchamps, luring orhpans with candy- the Viscount has been promoting a wholly fatalist wing among the existentialists, eliminating the lead movement in western philosophy as an anti-fascist political force. And now you will ask 'who cares?'"
"So who cares?"
"It's big, Brain, bigger than you or me. Ever here of the Resistance movement? What happens when despair within nothingnesss turns into the despair of meaninglessness?"
"uh...."
The Viscount and Kriestenheimer were exchanging something in envelopes, shaped like wads of federal lettuce that stained the manilla vanilla.
"It's bad, Brain. Bad like redneck vampires. Van Der Forfen refutes Sartre, and it means the French, they are idled by the absurd futility of all action, and they stop shooting Nazis. The pressure in Europe fades. " Regina's eyelashes fluttered ennuically.
"And we lose the war. "
"Correct. We must either discredit Von Der Forfen in logic, scandal, or in violence. "
"Say all three, Schnookums? Say we prove an firm basis for human meaning, dress him in a Nazi nurse costume and push him down the stairs at the Press Club? "
She considered this suggestion. She considered it daft.
Turning to avoid her withering - yet extremely sexy - gaze I espied Von Pforffer Van De Forffen and Kriestenheimer talking with someone near a corner, because I recently did the New York Times crossword. Then I sneezed from the remains of an ague. They were laughing manically for a minute before a sharp retort silenced them, from Jimmy Durante, who happened to be in town to accept an honorary doctorate of divinity.
Ha-cha-cha.
We followed discreetly. Von Pforffer Van De Forffen and Kriestenheimer were circulating among the swells, taking envelopes here and there- I saw them now, saw them for what they were: bag men for the bad guys, picking up the cookies and milk for Der Furher from a bunch of fat cat war-profiteering bastards who wanted to be on the winning side. I knew some of them, mostly from barrel-scraping infidelity cases: Randolph Beauregard Winston, the infamous Honey Bee Magnate. Clarice Vincentia Von Trapp, the "Capone" of Choral Music who had caused more than one contralto and occassionally entire competing alto sections, to "disappear." The Hon. Portnoy Plimpwagon, the "Ball Peen" King, currently bilking the government for $685 a hammer - a likely reason that corpses were starting to pile up on the docks with a 1" dent in their skulls. Hyacinth Smoots, the corpulent Austrian wife of the President of Texaco, who cut checks to dictators like invitations to her baby shower and had once personally invaded Francisco Franco.
Bums. Whores. Dirty whoring bums. All of em.
We followed at a discreet distance, and although all eyes were on Regina, it was my hand on her ass when she slapped me. But the gum on Regina's pumps caught something. An envelope. She opened it. There was a check alright, for $400,000 to the "Luxemborg Re-redecoration Society." But something else:
Blueprints, on paper so thin you could cut other paper with it from the side.
"What are they?" She asked.
"Hmm." Vacuum tubes after switches and switches and more vacuum tubes, hundreds of thousands of them a huge device, big enough to fill a gymnasium.
"If Popular Mechanics is right, and it always is, these are part of the plans for some kind of robot thinking machine. But this - this is looks like a radium bin - see, it says "radium bin," and this ...this is an entry slot, can you make an sense of this list? "
She stood close, reading with me.
"Something about 3 by 5 cards with a holes like voting maching. But see, on the cards? Schopenhauer. Nietzche. Hegel. Husserl. Kierkegarde. Even Sartre and Simone. "
"Like some kind of brainiac polka troupe!" I exclaimed.
"Quite."
"Then these must be plans for a thinking machine to think existentialist thoughts. But why?"
"I think I know," she said. "Or, rather I believe I think that I know. "
We began to put it together. There was no other conclusion: The Viscount Phillerph Von Pforffer Van De Forffen the Fourth and Sparky Kriestenheimer were colluding to develop an existentialist offshoot so misanthropic and fatalistic that the French, reading it, would be give up as the futility of moral action in a godless universe became inarugable. But the war was on - they couldn't develop the syllogisms in time. They needed a logic so irrefutable that it would turn despair into ultimate surrender, and they needed it yesterday. For that they were making: a radium-powered pro-fascist existentialist thinking computer.
"My God!" She said, wanting to scream but whispering instead. "The Ultimate Weapon!"
I held her in my arms. She pulled me closer.
"I may be drunk, I may be broke, I may be ugly, I may smell a bit. I may not have class, or a a fancy education, or a car, but as God, or some interchangeable entity composed of the simple totality of conscious free will, is my witness, we'll find it, baby. We'll find this unholy monstrosity and stop it, stop it before through the pure reason of machine logic it destroys all the reasons for human meaning, and hands Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and all the goons and thugs in the world, especially those I owe money to, the kind of victory that will crush all justice, all freedom, all the love. But no machine can stop...."
"Yes?" She looked up at me, with eyes so big and moist you could drain them and sell them for condominuim development.
"The love I have for you. "
And we kissed- like the collision of two inflatable boats paddled by cherubs and deflating from the shafts of Eros and sinking in the gushing warm sweet water like flat Coke left in the sun of romance.
"But first," I pulled out my Navy Colt. "We gotta a job to do."
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