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.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Snitch Pudding

It was a dark wet Tuesday in January, about as cheerful and warm as the cold nose on a dead puppy. Stumbling soberly around North Beach, I stormed into Cafe Tosca and stared down the bus boy for a cigar and a drink and a rag to clean the blood off my shoes. A damp, alcoholic gloom nestled snugly in the old bar like a rheumatic baby ocelot into the withered teat of despair.

A clutch of elderly Italian men sat in the back planning to corner the Boise prosciutto market, each draining a bottle of Grappa and/or a tipple of Venetian turpentine. A dinghy, indifferent mediterranean painting hung on the yellowed wall like it was going to hang there for another fifty years waiting for a dusting from some future atom robot electro-maid. Down the long brown bar, a couple of downtown business girls conducted business about some business downtown with a reporter for the Chronicle, an ottery meat balloon named Clive, I think, hard to forget with that greased, centerpart hair, pencil moustache, and tropical-themed ascot with a little naked Hawaii girl that jiggled when he coughed.

I couldn't get the blood off my shoes, so I shifted gears and burnished it into sort of a brownish stain. Caruso tinnly damned his fate as a cheap clown on the Wurlitzer. I glanced up across the bar.

It couldn't be. Behind the rows of glasses scowled Crumples, the pickled flesh of his all-too animated corpse stuffed into a tailored white waistcoat and black tie serving the bottle of Lorenzo's Turpengrappa I'd ordered, with the exact ripple of forced politeness passing that coarse malevolent face that also wrinkled Mussolini's mug when he begged a couple hundred Panzers from Hitler. There was no escape from Crumples. In my life, he was a demented antedeluvian student loan collector who served you second hand paint thinner instead of a court summons. He hated me like eye cancer, but with a kind of quasi-benevolent consistency.

Crumples crinkled the skin curtains around his eyes, piling up folds like a Norwegian prison laundry. As a greeting, he made that sort of noise like an electrical short. I tossed a couple crumpled Jeffersons his way. Picking up a Two, a bloody tooth rolled out onto the walnut bar. He gave me a look with his good pupil like he'd box the thinking jelly out of that salad mould I called a head if only he was 78 years younger.

"Guy didn't want to part with his lettuce, " I explained. Cheap job, working for a hunting lodge accountant trying to track the hooker that stole the wad he'd skimmed from the moose accounts and then ran off with his wife, a perfumed chippie from Nantucket with an ironic allergy to whale vomit. Pathetic bastard tried to short me when I told him they were opening a back alley abortion clinic and notions shop in Castro valley. It only took one blackjack whip across the kisser to put the triple-timing bean-counter into the accounts paid column.

Crumples glared, boring holes in my forehead with a couple of twin .50 pupils. Down the bar, the business girls looked miffed, like Clive the reporter was talking them down to 6 bucks and a pint of tequilla.

Clive eventually oiled his way over, flanked by the curvier of the broads. He held out a limp hand with his business card and smiled with his little moustache that closed the top of his pie hole like a paranthesis. He was the kind of business reporter that wrote leads like "Red union slackers have harmed the war effort with specious demands for non-flammable pants."

"Mack, hey! Mack!, 'What's all this, then?' Hahaah ahhaha!" he said, laughing like a toy steam hammer while tilting his eyes at the floozy's impressive heavers.

That English bobby bit was the weakest joke since Calvin Coolidge met Paul Robeson and the tiny husk of a President started up with an Amos and Andy routine. Clive perpetrated this embarassment every time he saw me, expecting a laugh like he was a naked Chaplin in a room of full of drunk sorority girls and a loosened tank of nitrous oxide, which I happened to know was a habit of Chaplin's, from Oona's pedicurist, who was now my chiropractor. But for Clive the laughs always came in his head, anyway, from the adoring pretend audience who read his business-beat column. He wrote the worst business tips since Henry Ford was advised to avoid the transportation sector.

I forced a smile and tossed the blood-covered towel on the bar, which was a mistake because that's when a six foot rod of rebar crashed through the door window and pierced Clive right through his cheek, and now as he spun around and around bleeding all over the place I had to reach all the way back over to the bar to pick up the towel again and start wiping some of the gore off the girls, which was the most action I'd gotten since Dardenella left for Upper Volta on a mission for insurance fraud - to stop or perpetrate I didn't think to ask.

Funny thing - and this WAS funny- Clive wasn't dead. Oh sure, he'd looked better before a 72 inch steel rod was sticking sideways out of his face, but not all that much, and while Crumples with all the empathy a bucket of prison shivs searched the bathroom floor for a lost nickel to call the ambulance, I tried to comfort Clive as best I could by pouring gin in a glass with a straw and sticking it up his nostil so he could suck one back, but as he sat on the stool with the rebar through both cheeks and six fewer teeth some stumbling rummy came in and hung his hat on one of the rod ends, tilting Clive's head slowly to one side until it hit the bar, and Clive couldn't say anything because the rummy was his editor at Chronicle, Erasmus Veltwiddle, and also there was piece of rebar through his cheeks.

"Say, Eraser, " I asked the rummy, "You know anyone who'd want to hurt Clive? Specifically, with this six foot piece of rebar?" I tapped the rebar with a pencil for emphasis.

"Errrk!" Said Clive. Even the hula girl on his ascot was writhing.

"Sorry Clive, here, let me get my hat back," said Eraser.

"Arrghh..ooww!" said Clive.

"What was Clive working on besides Lily and Edna over there?" I asked. The girls waved gamely.

Eraser, who was still wearing his trademark green shade- under his hat - looked reflective, in the way an orangutan wonders whether he really should have eaten that abandoned shank of Komodo dragon.

"Something about the Davenport Foundation. Something about the foundation's money getting diverted for...what was it Clive?" said Eraser, turning to Clive and spilling his scotch and whiskey into Lily's decolletage, for which he was slapped, which merely caused him to chuckle.

"aaaaghh..." said Clive, as Crumples screwed up his face and tried to pull the rebar out, his Civil War army boot firm on Clive's cheek for leverage.

"Oh, yes," said Eraser, his red face redding up with ready remembrance. "A private army."

"PheoooO!" I whistled. The Davenport Foundation had more money than God's banker's insurance company's dirty accountant's mob lawyer. They were trying to find a cure for polio. Good luck on that. They were nutjobs like rabid squirrels, but they had the dough and they had talent. Maybe they were going to send a rocket for space doctors from Venus.


But a private army?

"AaH! AaH! AaH! AaH! AaH! " said Clive as Crumples jerked the rebar out six inches at a time.

"A private army?" I asked out loud.

"Yes, yes. Hundreds of guys, planes, horses, tanks, small arms. Some weird stuff too: bicycle howitzers, oversize floating shoes, flame throwing seltzer bottles, radium pellet sling shots, very high capacity small cars. Mostly they hire out-of-work tomato pickers and chinese short order cooks, occassionally rocket scientists and circus folk. " said Eraser. "They got a ranch out by Stanford."

"Some charity. More like our Lady of Pincer Movement."

"We haven't run anything yet until we can----" And CRASH, another piece of rebar went straight through the unbroken window and into Clive again, but the aim was too good, sliding perfectly along the original wound and not doing too much more damage to his cheeks. Eraser and I and the girls dove for cover. Then we got a burst of Browning auto rifle fire which finally cheesed off the old Italians in back who whipped out six or seven Tommy guns and returned fire. People in the street scattered. A huge green Buick ran off down columbus, engine roaring and tires squeeling. I watched heartbroken as broken bottles of very expensive scotch slowly dissolved the grease on the floor.

"Arreghghegaaagggghh!" said Clive. He was getting on my nerves. The mystery was getting in my mind. Lily was getting on my lap. I sipped a house cappucino. I was becoming curious.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: In the Deepest Darkness of the Dark Despair of Deadly Desparation

The Krauts were holding onto France like a gawky teenager in a bad moustache who'd shot his way on set and kidnapped Marlene Dietrich, and security was tighter than an Scottish tax accountant's daughter's frilly netherthings, but with pluck and luck and a baker's dozen of the zippy pills the fly-boys used we had made it all the way up the Seine and were now drifting past Notre Dame in just the sort of late morning fog that got Monet all up and artisty. But we were here to destroy an infernal machine, a radium-powered electronic existentialist thinking brain Himmler's boffins had cooked up to demoralize France by proving the futlity of moral action in a godless universe. We had to find it and fast, before the ambiguity of free action turned into the giant Gallic shrug of fatalistic indifference, and the Nazis cemented their evil grip on power with the finest available Argentinian gripping cement.

The passage across the churning grey Channel had not been easy, dodging U-Boats, E-Boats, and the supersecret (and highly intriguing) XXX-Boats, and as we creeped up on the French coast in a stolen herring boat under the very nostrils of Fritz, the black hair swirling about Regina Ottoman's burnished ivory countenance had saved us from a double-date with death and torture by perversely reminding a certain Squarehead navy lieutenant of his late mother, a stunning blond Prussian crypto-flapper who accidently started WWI by suggesting to Bismark she thought Belgium was lovely this time of year and wouldn't it be nice if they had the whole country to themselves?

The diesel of the old boat idled like John Rockefeller with a sinus infection. As the morning's vaguely croissant and wine vomit odor of Paris drifted towards the Left Bank, I propped a foot on the greasy oak railing and smoked up an entire case of Luckys, all to create an even thicker cloud of smoke under which Regina (in her black rubber and yellow chiffon dive suit), Blendy the Brit commando with the gammy leg and Claude the cheerful maquis electronic-brain expert, slipped out of the mealy herring-hold of the canal boat and into the Seine, roughly disguising ourselves as sea lions by holding furs above our heads and barking like terrier auctioneers.
But our cover was blown. We had interupted a group of Blintzepasteriekorps German officers who were lunching on the catholic grass with the division's newest attempt at a type of Adolph Hitler desert pastry to supplant the Napoleon, which basically the same but 2 feet high and stuffed hard with sweetened organ meats.

No warning: just as I tightened my rainjacket belt, tossed back a pint of Smedley Moot's 98 Percent Violent Rye and jumped in, a raking of Wermacht 20mm cannon fire across the water turned our F/V Petite Chu-Chu into a flying mass of fish-stinky matchsticks, and the report of the boat's explosion echoed off the flying-butressed walls of Notre Dame itself, interuppting to the annoyance of the priest a particularly sordid confession from Jean-Louis De Marchand, the biggest pimp, Vichy collaborator, antique tapestry and heroin dealer this side of the Rhine.
Bits of herring from our blown-up hold fell on Col. Frist 's croquet party, played there Nazi-style, with land mines. The officers tried to bat away the smoking herring as it fell, but the fish bits sleeted on them just like the appalling Kipper Incident that fatally demoralized the entire Massachusettes stag film industry back in '38. But how the Hun bunmakers fled, the shouts of their fleeing punctuated by an occassional mine explosion.

We stopped barking. The cannon started.

Claude shrugged - not easy to do in a wetsuit - and indicated to follow him under le water. I went reluctantly, knowing my Lucky would be extinguished but not our ultimate fate, and I looked up as the cannon rounds poked bubbly fingers of death into the pie of the river's surface. My underwater swimming had hardly improved since my last trip across the Atlantic in a leaky kayak tethered to a slow flying boat. I could barely see past the brim of my fedora, and all I could fixate on was the southern end of a North-bound Regina, but that served well. Curious Parisian fish shrugged and sipped little glasses of Dubonet, holding their cigarettes in an unusual, somewhat effete manner between their fins.

Perhaps my fedora-mounted oxygen tank was malfunctioning.

We slipped into a little cave and popped out into a dark, dank antechamber, lighting a flare. The place seemed to have last been used as Charlemange's compositing pile. Regina slipped behind a crypt and changed into a little white number with big red polka dots. In her long black hair, sculpted white neck, eyebrows shaped so perfectly you could trim hedges with them, holding a Sten gun with a a 900 round per minute rate of fire propped on one hip, she looked stunning.

"Gaah." I said.
"Stunning, Miss O." said Blendy, who was busily sharpening something.
"Mais oui, ho ho, vive la difference! You are a vision, mon cherie. " said Claude.


"Only as I am alive, and willing to die for freedom, for liberty, for equality." She said. "But we are not here for romance. We are here for Fromance. France. Sorry."

Gorgeous. Adorable. Deadly.

As I pulled out a suit and fresh fedora from the stash left by the Maquis behind a huge can of military-issue butter cookies from the Franco-Prussian war, Blendy abruptly tried to amputate his bad leg with a knife. He screamed quietly.

"Aren't you being a little dramatic?" said Regina. "British commandos! Always trying to cut off something! Here, stop that, stop that..." she gently pushed Blendy's knife away and used a large swastika flag as a bandage on the wound, giving him a shot of the new wonder pennicillin with a horse needle. I was somehow jealous.

The screaming this time was less quiet.

"I suppose that you are tired of life and are wishing us to get over all killed, non?" said Claude, cheerfully. I offered Blendy a swig of "Old Miss' 150 Proof Canal Water."

"Thanks, guv. Hrrrrraaaaagghghghgh." Commando vomit was no different than civilian. Some tough guy.

We got moving. Beside our torches, only the damp grey light from the occasional sewer grates broke through the deeply dank darkness to drive daggers of deadening despair into our guts, which churned with dreariest dread. Foot after meter, mile after kilometer, until the sewers became the catacombs, the vast Paris underground hamper of the medieval dead, skulls and skulls and bones and bones and the untold stories of thousands of lives lying lastingly untold.

"Who wants cucumber sandwiches?" asked Claude, unfolding a wax paper bundle.

The answer was a burst of gun fire that cracked loud and drilled more skulls right through than Kate Smith's version of "Mammy."

"HALT!" And a quick gunshot, 9mm.

One round, right through Blendy's skull- at least the one he'd been holding in his hand while preparing to make a labored Hamlet joke. We scattered and dove for cover.

"You are nicked, what, Olt Bean? Kome out mit your handersuppen!"

Fritzy Nazinheimer had the drop on us. We were spilt in five, hiding behind different funerary piles, or rather pyres for the ones that were already on fire from my dropping a cigarette on a late rennaissance silk merchant.

"My gun's jammed, oh!," Regina realized her mistake.

"Too bad, Amerikanzer Bobby-Sox Gibson girly-tomato das nice piece of ze tiny furniture! Perhaps you vill let ze men play now!"

Now he'd cheese'd her off. Miss Ottoman hated that particular phrase.

Regina started hurling skulls at the German, and as they hit the stone floor they made a sound like tipping a bisque-fire rack in a compulsory Rhodesian pottery class. (I say that in regard of a specific incident I'd been drinking years to forget.)

But hidden as he was behind a huge pile of Plague victims, Krauty McBismark was a tough target.


Regina kept throwing skulls: Pop! tinkle Pop! tinkle Pop! tinkle. Ludwig Van Lumpinshortz answered with the tinny fire of his Luger.

"Yaaaahhh!!" She yelled, tossing a 12th century Sorbornne music major with considerable force. The skull didn't break, but hit the large pile of skulls and rolled down, hitting several with a final descending minor third. She hurled a Gypsy girl and a pikeman and a juggler and two Left Bank whores at the same time.

"Even the dead resist you!" She yelled, drilling a Florentine jeweler into Fritz's chest like Binks Whittening, the famous Yale quarterback.

She bought us time.

The German, thoroughly rattled, fired until he ran out of ammo. Brilliant, honeyknees, I thought. Regina had planned exactly this. Henreich Hammerpants ran out from behind the pile of bones and threw his Luger in frustration at me, which I caught, then I reached into my pocket for a 9mm round I'd picked up off the floor , reloaded as he was running away and shot him in the ass.

He fell on an entire pyramid of orphans, their little bones scattering like kittens on cocaine.

Blendy ran over and threatened Fritz with the broken humerus of a 14th century Jewish goat tanner. "Where is the Electro-brain? Where is the Electro-brain!? ElektrischescomputercGehirn??!!" Blendy pressed the shards to his neck.

I held the empty gun to his face, staring him in the bloodshot green eyes. "Where?!!"

"Nein! Nein!" His buttocks writhed in pain.

"You are being very foolish. We have ways of making you talk, " said Claude, with a big smile. "Ahhh, I have always wanted to say that." He wrapped a kindly arm around Bernie Bratwurst's shoulders.

"Listen, Monsieur Nazi, you see that scar-faced, limping, angry looking Brit? He keeps insisting we strangle you with the nazi flag he has wrapped around his gammy leg, and cut up your remains for eel bait. Icky, icky. And the Americain- oui. Look at his eyes. He is a famous Chicago gangster, and his famous viciously naughty gang of nasty mobsters wants a trophy for their jazz dance hall. Mais, oui, vous. Stuffed and mounted cabbagehead. And the pretty girl, yes? Very pretty, and Oui? She wants to you to die very slowly by tearing your balls off and stuffing them up your how-do-you-say ah.. arsehole. Oui, oui, it is violent, non? I can not promise you what will happen if we have to argue about what to do with you all day. Now be a good fellow and tell us where it is.."

Bertholdt Brownshirtenschitz took a breath and spilled, spilled like the dam above Johnstown, spilled like a chocolate malt on Jean Harlow's best angora sweater. He even drew us a map.

The radium-powered existentialist thinking machine was very close, in a subterranean room underneath the Paris Opera House, which was currently mounting a curious German version of Porgy and Bess, retitled Einfach Hans und Frau wer auf einem Bauernhof schlecht sind - Simple Hans and Woman Who on a Farm Are Bad, famous in occupied France for their version of "Summertime" sung by a chorus of the 33rd Panzergrenadiers.

We left Fritzy hog-tied in a canoe and floated him down the sewers as he hummed "Deutchland Uber Alles," behind the tape over his mouth. In half an hour we were there, there at the Paris Opera's secret prop barn in an alley behind the Avenue De L'Opera, and we emerged from the stinky danky dampness into the street.

"What's that noise?" Asked Regina, fixing her lipstick.

"It sounds like...," I said

"Shh." Said Blendy.

"Ici!" said Claude. "Quick! Here! " He opened an ornate, dilapidated wooden door. I pulled out my stolen Luger. Very popular, this gun. Might be able to trade it to Crumples when I got back to San Francisco for a half payment on my bar tab.

We entered. There it sat, a vast grey machine towering three stories with blinking red and green and white lights like an axis Christmas Tree of doom, with a swastika where the star should be. It clattered like a thousand literary crickets on a thousand Royal typewriters getting paid by the word. The lights danced through the open door onto a puddle on the cobblestones, the mirror image scattered into rings by the tall leather boots strapped snugly around Regina's left leg, a leg so shapely she'd been paid $78 by a guy in San Jose making novelty lamps to use it as a model.

We crept around the side, staring up at the infinity of blinking lights and switches, watching punctuated paper cards sucking through enormously long plexiglass vaccum tubes into distant card receptacles, where a machine placed them into a clattering reader, and and array of automatic chutes and buttons buzzed and bleated and hosed until it came to a basket where it spit out a folding stack of yellow paper on a kind of teletype machine, producing a string of aphoristic french sentences.

"Claude?" said Regina. He picked up a printed sheet, twiddling his moustache. The sweet grin on his face turned over like oversailed rental sloop at the Nantucket Rum regatta.

"It says...it says...that all hope is a cancer of the suffering and weak."

"Let's take out this overgrown player piano," I said, taking out my Zippo to burn the paper. I lead on, following the most active vaccum tube back to it's source.

"There," Regina whispered, her lips so close to my ear I started thinking about something else entirely. She pointed to hunched figure in a sloppy german uniform, guzzling an illicit Coke and tossing the bottle into a huge pile of other bottles. He was intent on a tiny green screen and kept checking a dog-eared copy of Also Spake Zarathusa, typing on a keyboard into a card puncher, and crumpling one up four times for every card that went up the chute.

The sweaty pale young man with the bad teenage moustache and skin as cratered as the land the Battle of the Somme on Guy Fawkes Night, suddenly turned his head and noticed us and screamed, apparantly to himself, "Steuern Sie wechselnde Löschung!! Steuern Sie wechselnde Löschung!!," which Regina translated as "Control Alternate Deletion!! Control Alternate Deletion!! "

No time to figure that insane gibberish out. Like a vicious leopard leaping to gut a fluffy bunny with the sharp claws of freedom, I sprung across the room and grabbed the engineer by the throat, hooking his neck with my gun arm, and gave him a kind of death noogie.

"Sprekensie Anglais, Muchacho? Or would you prefer to say your final thoughts in Berlinian?" I asked.

"Unkle! Unkle!" he cried, whimpering like Goering's pommeranian. Blendy started preparing the plastic explosive, which in a moment of brutal whimsy he'd shaped like little Winston Churchills. "Don't hurt me - my brain is delicate for this business. You are .... Canadians, yes?

"Yeah, sure. From the Moosejaw Special Air Service. Whatever...eh."

"I'm Korporal Yobbs. What is it you want?,"

"I'm ready to blow the place, chaps," said Blendy, poking a Winston with a red and green wire.

Yobbs was aghast. "No, no the machine is...beautiful!" I smacked his face with the Luger.

Regina was looking at the keyboard and the piles of philosophy books that were getting sucked up into that damn fool electric brain contraption with Yobb's retyping them in some kind of crazy number language. Claude, the robot expert, came over and started typing.

"What is wrong with this machine? Nothing is happening."

Yobbs stayed quiet. I smacked him with the butt of the Luger. "Answer the cheerful Frenchie!"

"...The button...hit the red button...," he spluttered, blood trickling down his cheek and draining into the crater of a formerly huge chin zit. Claude hit the giant button, mounted behind the green oscillascopic screen. Generators slowed, the deafening clattering died, the lights stopped blinking. The device stopped was dead. I hit him again.

"Bad move, Stinky."

"Nein! Nein, no more! I mean hit der red button again." Claude did. The overhead lights dimmed and the ungodly contraption, shaking the ground, roared to life.

We waited about three hours.

"Bon! There we go!" said Claude. He began typing, checking the screen. "Oui, it is the correct program. Ahh, will complete it's calculations next Thursday. Merde! We'd better destroy it while we can."

"Almost ready," said Blendy.

Regina, who'd been thumbing through a little Schopenhauer, suddenly spoke up. "Claude, hold on, I have an idea."

It was typically brillant for my sexy little cupcake. Claude and Regina made the adjustments. Blendy disarmed the Churchills. We left quietly, taking the awkward little german with us, and slipped quietly back to the coast on a moonless night where the submarine HMS Unconscionable was waiting to take us back to London.

Back in a classy hotel in London a couple weeks later, relaxing I was drinking bourbon-enhanced tea and gin and reading the Times. And there was the proof our plan worked.

"Correspondents in Paris report the publication of a most curious book - "Eighty Simple Provencal Recipes and the Utter Futility of Being." The French french culinary community believes it to be an amateurish attempt to undermine the culture by the SS."

Regina emerged from the bath naked as a homeless hermit grab and combing her long black hair. Draping herself over my shoulder and smelling like a field of cinnamon daisies, she saw the article.

I whistled. She smiled.

"It worked. "

Her plan to scuttle the radionic brain's "program" by switching the cards of Husserl with the Joy of Cooking had succeeded, and we knew the Nazis would have to abandon the ElektrischescomputercGehirn. The existentialists were intellectually safe from everything but bad cooking. The French French would continue to fight.

I took the Luger out of my pocket and sighted it. Walk in with Regina and I bet Crumples would let me slide on the tab.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Deadly Being and Violent Nothingness

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."