Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Well, what more appropriate way for Tyrone to Get It one cold morning than this:
It’s a blueprint of a German parts list, reproduced so crummy he can hardly read the
words—“Vorrichtung für die Isolierung, 0011-5565/43,” now what’s this? He knows the
number by heart, it’s the original contract number for the A4 rocket as a whole. What’s
an “insulation device” doing with the Aggregat’s contract number? And a DE rating
too, the highest Nazi priority there is? Not good. Either a clerk at OKW fucked up,
which is not unheard-of, or else he just didn’t know the number, and put the rocket’s
in as the next best thing. Claim, part and work numbers all have the same flagnote,
which directs Slothrop to a Document SG-1. Flagnote on the flagnote sez “Geheime Kommandosache!
This is a state secret, in the meaning of § 35 R5138.”
“Say,” he greets General Wivern nipping in through the door, “like to get ahold of
a copy of that Document SG-1.”
“Haw, haw,” replies the General. “So would our chaps, I imagine.”
“Quit fooling.” Every piece of Allied intelligence on the A4, however classified,
gets stuffed into a secret funnel back in London and all comes out in Slothrop’s fancy
cell at the Casino. So far they’ve held back nothing.
“Slothrop, there are no ‘SG’ documents.”
First impulse is to rattle the parts list in the man’s face, but today he is the shrewd
Yankee foxing the redcoats. “Oh. Well, maybe I read it wrong,” making believe look
around the paper-littered room, “maybe it was a ‘56’ or something, jeepers it was
just
here. . . .”
The General goes away again. Leaving Slothrop with a puzzle, kind of a, well not an
obsession really . . . not yet . . . Opposite the parts listing, over in the Materials
column now, here’s “Imipolex G.” Oh really. Insulation device made of Imipolex G eh?
He kicks around the room looking for his handbook of German trade names. Nothing even
close to it there . . . he locates next a master materials list for the A4 and all
its support equipment, and there’s sure no Imipolex G in that either. Scales and claws,
and footfalls no one else seems to hear. . . .
“Something wrong?” Hilary Bounce again, with his nose in the doorway.
“It’s about this liquid oxygen, need some more of that specific impulse data, there.”
“Specific . . . do you mean specific thrust?”
“Oops, thrust, thrust,” English English to the rescue, Bounce diverted:
“For LOX and alcohol it’s about 200. What more do you need to know?”
“But didn’t you chaps use petrol at Langhurst?”
“Among other things, yes.”
“Well it’s about those other things. Don’t you know there’s a war on? You can’t be
proprietary about stuff like that.”
“But all our company reports are back in London, Perhaps my next time out—”
“Shit, this red tape. I need it
now
, Cap’n!” He goes around assuming they’ve assigned him a limitless Need To Know, and
Bounce confirms it:
“I could send back by teletype, I suppose. . . .”
“
Now
yer talkin’!” Teletype? Yes, Hilary Bounce has his own, private, Shell International
Network Teletype Rig or Terminal, just what Slothrop was hoping for, right in his
hotel room, back in the closet behind a rack of Alkit uniforms and stiff shirts. Slothrop
finesses his way in with the help of his friend Michele, whom he’s noticed Bounce
has an eye on. “Howdy babe,” up in a brown stocking-hung garret where the dancing
girls sleep, “how’d you like to get fixed up with a big oilman tonight?” Some language
problem here, she’s thinking of getting connected through metal fittings to a gross
man dripping somehow with crude oil, a sex angle she’s not sure she’d enjoy, but they
get that one straightened out, and presently Michele is raring to go sweet-talk the
man away from his teletype long enough for Slothrop to get on to London and ask about
Imipolex G. Indeed, she has noted Captain Bounce now and then among her nightly admirers,
noted in particular an item of belly-brass that Slothrop’s seen too: a gold benzene
ring with a formée cross in the center—the IG Farben Award for Meritorious Contributions
to Synthetics Research. Bounce got that one back in ’32. The industrial liaison it
suggests was indeed dozing at the bottom of Slothrop’s mind when the Rocket Guidance
Transmitter Question arose. It has even, in a way, inspired the present teletype plot.
Who’d know better than an outfit like Shell, with no real country, no side in any
war, no specific face or heritage: tapping instead out of that global stratum, most
deeply laid, from which all the appearances of corporate ownership really spring?
Okay. Now there is a party tonight over on the
Cap
, chez Raoul de la Perlimpinpin, young madcap heir of the Limoges fireworks magnate
Georges (“Poudre”) de la Perlimpinpin—if “party” is the word for something that’s
been going on nonstop ever since this piece of France was liberated. Slothrop is allowed—under
the usual surveillance—to drop in to Raoul’s whenever the mood strikes him. It’s a
giddy, shiftless crowd out there—they drift in from all corners of Allied Europe,
linked by some network of family, venery and a history of other such parties whose
complexity his head’s never quite been able to fit around. Here and there faces will
go by, old American faces from Harvard or from SHAEF, names he’s lost—they are revenants,
maybe accidental, maybe . . .
It is to this party that Michele has seduced Hilary Bounce, and for which Slothrop,
soon as his reply from London has come nattering through, in clear, on Bounce’s machine,
now proceeds to dude himself up for. He’ll read the information through later. Singing,
With my face shined up-like a microphone
And uh Sta-Comb on my hair,
I’m just as suave-as, an ice-cream cone, say,
I’m Mis-ter Debo-nair. . . .
and turned out in a green French suit of wicked cut with a subtle purple check in
it, broad flowered tie won at the trente-et-quarante table, brown and white wingtip
shoes with golf cleats, and white socks, Slothrop tops off now with a midnight-blue
snap-brim fedora and is away, clickety clack out the foyer of the Casino Hermann Goering,
looking sharp. As he exits, a wiry civilian, disguised as the Secret Service’s notion
of an Apache, eases away from a niche in the porte-cochere, and follows Slothrop’s
cab out the winding dark road to Raoul’s party.
• • • • • • •
Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollandaise.
Word of this has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli. Roasts lie growing
cold on the room-long buffet tables. A third of the company are already asleep, mostly
on the floor. It is necessary to thread one’s way among bodies to get to where anything’s
happening.
What’s happening is not clear. There are the usual tight little groups out in the
gardens, dealing. Not much spectacle tonight. A homosexual triangle has fizzed over
into pinches and recriminations, so as to block the door to the bathroom. Young officers
are outside vomiting among the zinnias. Couples are wandering. Girls abound, velvet-bowed,
voile-sleeved, underfed, broad-shouldered and permed, talking in half a dozen languages,
sometimes brown from the sun here, others pale as Death’s Vicar from more eastern
parts of the War. Eager young chaps with patent-leather hair rush about trying to
vamp the ladies, while older heads with no hair at all prefer to wait, putting out
only minimal effort, eyes and mouths across the rooms, talking business in the meantime.
One end of the salon is occupied by a dance band and an emaciated crooner with wavy
hair and very red eyes, who is singing:
J
ULIA
(F
OX-TROT
)
Ju-lia,
Would you think me pe-cul-iar,
If I should fool ya,
In-to givin’ me—just-a-little-kiss?
Jool-yaaahh,
No one else could love you tru-lier,
How I’d worship and bejewel ya,
If you’d on-ly give-me just-a-little-kiss!
Ahh
Jool
-yaaahhhh—
My poor heart grows un-ru-lier,
No one oolier or droolier,
Could I be longing for—
What’s more—
Ju-lia,
I would shout hallelujah,
To have my Jool-yaaahh,
In-my-arms forevermore.
Saxophony and Park Lane kind of tune, perfect for certain states of mind. Slothrop
sees Hilary Bounce, clearly a victim of the hallucinogenic Hollandaise, nodded out
on a great pouf with Michele, who’s been fondling his IG Farben trinket for the past
two or three hours. Slothrop waves, but neither one notices him.
Dopers and drinkers struggle together without shame at the buffet and in the kitchens,
ransacking the closets, licking out the bottoms of casseroles. A nude bathing party
passes through on the way down the sea-steps to the beach. Our host, that Raoul, is
roaming around in a ten-gallon hat, Tom Mix shirt and brace of sixguns with a Percheron
horse by the bridle. The horse is leaving turds on the Bokhara rug, also on the odd
supine guest. It is all out of shape, no focus to it until a sarcastic flourish from
the band, and here comes the meanest customer Slothrop has seen outside of a Frankenstein
movie—wearing a white zoot suit with reet pleats and a long gold keychain that swings
in flashing loops as he crosses the room with a scowl for everybody, in something
of a hurry but taking the time to scan faces and bodies, head going side to side,
methodical, a little ominous. He stops at last in front of Slothrop, who’s putting
together a Shirley Temple for himself.
“You.” A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop’s nose.
“You bet,” Slothrop dropping a maraschino cherry on the rug then squashing it as he
takes a step backward, “I’m the man all right. Sure. What is it? Anything.”
“Come on.” They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean-Claude Gongue, notorious
white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slaving. “Hey you,” hollering into the trees,
“you wanna be a white slave, huh?” “Shit no,” answers some invisible girl, “I wanna
be a
green
slave!” “Magenta!” yells somebody from up in an olive tree. “Vermilion!” “Think I’ll
take up dealing dope,” sez Jean-Claude.
“Look,” Slothrop’s friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom
Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, “I want you to hold
this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before
Tamara, and I’m not sure which one—”
“At this rate, Tamara’s gonna get here before tonight,” Slothrop interjects in a Groucho
Marx voice.
“Don’t try to undermine my confidence in you,” advises the Large One. “You’re the
man.”
“Right,” Slothrop tucking envelope inside pocket. “Say, where’d you get that zoot
you’re wearing, there?”
“What’s your size?”
“42, medium.”
“You shall have one,” and so saying he rumbles off back inside.
“A-and a
sharp keychain!
” Slothrop calls after. What th’ heck’s going on? He wanders around asking a question
or two. The fella turns out to be Blodgett Waxwing, well-known escapee from the Caserne
Martier in Paris, the worst stockade in the ETO. Waxwing’s specialty is phonying documents
of various sorts—PX ration cards, passports, Soldbücher—whilst dealing in Army hardware
also as a sideline. He has been AWOL off and on since the Battle of the Bulge, and
with a death rap for that over his head he still goes into U.S. Army bases at night
to the canteens to watch the movies—provided they’re westerns, he loves those shit-kickers,
the sound of hoofbeats through a metal speaker across a hundred yards of oildrums
and deuce ’n’ a half ruts in the foreign earth makes his heart stir as if a breeze
blew there, he’s got some of his many contacts to run him off a master schedule of
every movie playing in every occupation town in the Theatre, and he’s been known to
hot-wire a general’s jeep just to travel up to that Poitiers for the evening to see
a good old Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. His picture may hang prominently in all
the guardrooms and be engraved in thousands of snowdrops’ brains, but he has seen
The Return of Jack Slade
twenty-seven times.
The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just another evening
at Raoul’s place, involving a future opium shipment’s being used by Tamara as security
against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend
Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds
for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral
to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime
the opium deal doesn’t look like it’s going to come through, because the middleman
hasn’t been heard from in several weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him,
which she got from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured
by Raoul for the money because Italo, deciding the tank belongs to Tamara now, showed
up last night and took it away to an Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan,
thus causing Raoul to panic. Something like that.
Slothrop’s tail is being made indecent propositions by two of the homosexuals who’ve
been fighting in the bathroom. Bounce and Michele are nowhere in sight, and neither’s
that Waxwing. Raoul is talking earnestly to his horse. Slothrop is just settling down
next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel’s Alice, same
forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling,
crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into
the house and right behind them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of
the garden but—why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes of King
Kong, treads spewing grass and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes
to a halt. Its 75 mm cannon swivels until it’s pointing through the French windows
right down into the room. “Antoine!” a young lady focusing in on the gigantic muzzle,
“for heaven’s sake, not now. . . .” A hatch flies open and Tamara—Slothrop guesses:
wasn’t Italo supposed to have the tank?—uh—emerges shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing,
Italo, Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal. “But now,” she screams, “I
have you all! One coup de foudre!” The hatch drops—oh, Jesus—there’s the sound of
a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech. Girls start to scream and make for the
exits. Dopers are looking around, blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways.
Raoul tries to mount his horse and make his escape, but misses the saddle and slides
all the way over, falling into a tub of black-market Jell-o, raspberry flavor, with
whipped cream on top. “Aw, no . . .” Slothrop having about decided to make a flanking
run for the tank when YYYBLAAANNNGGG! the cannon lets loose an enormous roar, flame
shooting three feet into the room, shock wave driving eardrums in to middle of brain,
blowing everybody against the far walls.