There were shoppers everywhere. Counter after counter. Salesgirls, mostly white, with a sprinkling of Japanese as department managers. The din was terrific.
After some confusion Mr. Baynes located the men’s clothing department. He stopped at the racks of men’s trousers and began to inspect them. Presently a clerk, a young white, came over, greeting him.
Mr. Baynes said, “I have returned for the pair of dark brown wool slacks which I was looking at yesterday.” Meeting the clerk’s gaze he said, “You’re not the man I spoke to. He was taller. Red mustache. Rather thin. On his jacket he had the name Larry.”
The clerk said, “He is presently out to lunch. But will return.”
“I’ll go into a dressing room and try these on,” Mr. Baynes said, taking a pair of slacks from the rack.
“Certainly, sir.” The clerk indicated a vacant dressing room, and then went off to wait on someone else.
Mr. Baynes entered the dressing room and shut the door. He seated himself on one of the two chairs and waited.
After a few minutes there was a knock. The door of the dressing room opened and a short middle-aged Japanese entered. “You are from out of state, sir?” he said to Mr. Baynes. “And I am to okay your credit? Let me see your identification.” He shut the door behind him.
Mr. Baynes got out his wallet. The Japanese seated himself with the wallet and began inspecting the contents. He halted at a photo of a girl. “Very pretty.”
“My daughter. Martha.”
“I, too, have a daughter named Martha,” the Japanese said. “She at present is in Chicago studying piano.”
“My daughter,” Mr. Baynes said, “is about to be married.”
The Japanese returned the wallet and waited expectantly.
Mr. Baynes said, “I have been here two weeks and Mr. Yatabe has not shown up. I want to find out if he is still coming. And if not, what I should do.”
“Return tomorrow afternoon,” the Japanese said. He rose, and Mr. Baynes also rose. “Good day.”
“Good day,” Mr. Baynes said. He left the dressing room, hung the pair of slacks back up on the rack, and left the Fuga Department Store.
That did not take very long, he thought as he moved along the busy downtown sidewalk with the other pedestrians. Can he actually get the information by then? Contact Berlin, relay my questions, do all the coding and decoding—every step involved?
Apparently so.
Now I wish I had approached the agent sooner. I would have saved myself much worry and distress. And evidently no major risk was involved; it all appeared to go off smoothly. It took in fact only five or six minutes.
Mr. Baynes wandered on, looking into store windows. He felt much better now. Presently he found himself viewing display photos of honky-tonk cabarets, grimy flyspecked utterly white nudes whose breasts hung like half-inflated volleyballs. That sight amused him and he loitered, people pushing past him on their various errands up and down Market Street.
At least he had done something, at last.
What a relief!
Propped comfortably against the car door, Juliana read. Beside her, his elbow out the window, Joe drove with one hand lightly on the wheel, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip; he was a good driver, and they had covered a good deal of the distance from Canon City already.
The car radio played mushy beer-garden folk music, an accordion band doing one of the countless polkas or schottishes; she had never been able to tell them one from another.
“Kitsch,” Joe said, when the music ended. “Listen, I know a lot about music; I’ll tell you who a great conductor was. You probably don’t remember him. Arturo Toscanini.”
“No,” she said, still reading.
“He was Italian. But the Nazis wouldn’t let him conduct after the war, because of his politics. He’s dead, now. I don’t like that von Karajan, permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic. We had to go to concerts by him, our work dorm. What I like, being a wop—you can guess.” He glanced at her. “You like that book?” he said.
“It’s engrossing.”
“I like Verdi and Puccini. All we get in New York is heavy German bombastic Wagner and Orff, and we have to go every week to one of those corny U.S. Nazi Party dramatic spectacles at Madison Square Garden, with the flags and drums and trumpets and the flickering flame. History of the Gothic tribes or other educational crap, chanted instead of spoken, so as to be called ‘art.’ Did you ever see New York before the war?”
“Yes,” she said, trying to read.
“Didn’t they have swell theater in those days? That’s what I heard. Now it’s the same as the movie industry; it’s all a cartel in Berlin. In the thirteen years I’ve been in New York not one good new musical or play ever opened, only those—”
“Let me read,” Juliana said.
“And the same with the book business,” Joe said, unperturbed. “It’s all a cartel operating out of Munich. All they do in New York is print; just big printing presses—but before the war, New York was the center of the world’s publishing industry, or so they say.”
Putting her fingers in her ears, she concentrated on the page open in her lap, shutting his voice out. She had arrived at a section in The Grasshopper which described the fabulous television, and it enthralled her; especially the part about the inexpensive little sets for backward people in Africa and Asia.
. . . Only Yankee know-how and the mass-production system—Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, the magic names! —could have done the trick, sent that ceaseless and almost witlessly noble flood of cheap one-dollar (the China Dollar, the trade dollar) television kits to every village and backwater of the Orient. And when the kit had been assembled by some gaunt, feverish-minded youth in the village, starved for a chance, for that which the generous Americans held out to him, that tinny little instrument with its built-in power supply no larger than a marble began to receive. And what did it receive? Crouching before the screen, the youths of the village—and often the elders as well—saw words. Instructions. How to read, first. Then the rest. How to dig a deeper well. Plow a deeper furrow. How to purify their water, heal their sick. Overhead, the American artificial moon wheeled, distributing the signal, carrying it everywhere . . . to all the waiting, avid masses of the East.
“Are you reading straight through?” Joe asked. “Or skipping around in it?”
She said, “This is wonderful; he has us sending food and education to all the Asiatics, millions of them.”
“Welfare work on a worldwide scale,” Joe said.
“Yes. The New Deal under Tugwell; they raise the level of the masses—listen.” She read aloud to Joe:
. . . What had China been? Yearning, one needful commingled entity looking toward the West, its great democratic President, Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Chinese people through the years of war, now into the years of peace, into the Decade of Rebuilding. But for China it was not a rebuilding, for that almost supernaturally vast flat land had never been built, lay still slumbering in the ancient dream. Arousing; yes, the entity, the giant, had to partake at last of full consciousness, had to waken into the modern world with its jet airplanes and atomic power, its autobahns and factories and medicines. And from whence would come the crack of thunder which would rouse the giant? Chiang had known that, even during the struggle to defeat Japan. It would come from the United States. And, by 1950, American technicians and engineers, teachers, doctors, agronomists, swarming like some new life form into each province, each—
Interrupting, Joe said, “You know what he’s done, don’t you? He’s taken the best about Nazism, the socialist part, the Todt Organization and the economic advances we got through Speer, and who’s he giving the credit to? The New Deal. And he’s left out the bad part, the SS part, the racial extermination and segregation. It’s a Utopia! You imagine if the Allies had won, the New Deal would have been able to revive the economy and make those socialist welfare improvements, like he says? Hell no; he’s talking about a form of state syn
dicalism, the corporate state, like we developed under the Duce. He’s saying, You would have had all the good and none of—”
“Let me read,” she said fiercely.
He shrugged. But he did cease babbling. She read on at once, but to herself.
. . . And these markets, the countless millions of China, set the factories in Detroit and Chicago to humming; that vast mouth could never be filled, those people could not in a hundred years be given enough trucks or bricks or steel ingots or clothing or typewriters or canned peas or clocks or radios or nosedrops. The American workman, by 1960, had the highest standard of living in the world, and all due to what they genteelly called “the most favored nation” clause in every commercial transaction with the East. The U.S. no longer occupied Japan, and she had never occupied China; and yet the fact could not be disputed: Canton and Tokyo and Shanghai did not buy from the British; they bought American. And with each sale, the workingman in Baltimore or Los Angeles or Atlanta saw a little more prosperity.
It seemed to the planners, the men of vision in the White House, that they had almost achieved their goal. The exploring rocket ships would soon nose cautiously out into the void from a world that had at last seen an end to its age-old griefs: hunger, plague, war, ignorance. In the British Empire, equal measures toward social and economic progress had brought similar relief to the masses in India, Burma, Africa, the Middle East. The factories of the Ruhr, Manchester, of the Saar, the oil of Baku, all flowed and interacted in intricate but effective harmony; the populations of Europe basked in what appeared . . .
“I think they should be the rulers,” Juliana said, pausing. “They always were the best. The British.”
Joe said nothing to that, although she waited. At last she went on reading.
. . . Realization of Napoleon’s vision: rational homogeneity of the diverse ethnic strains which had squabbled and balkanized Europe since the collapse of Rome. Vision, too, of Charlemagne: united Christendom, totally at peace not only with itself but with the balance of the world. And yet—there still remained one annoying sore.
Singapore.
The Malay States held a large Chinese population, mostly of the enterprising business class, and these thrifty, industrious bourgeois saw in American administration of China a more equitable treatment of what was called “the native.” Under British rule, the darker races were excluded from the country clubs, the hotels, the better restaurants; they found themselves, as in archaic times, confined to particular sections of the train and bus and—perhaps worst of all—limited to their choice of residence within each city. These “natives” discerned, and noted in their table conversations and newspapers, that in the U.S.A. the color problem had by 1950 been solved. Whites and Negroes lived and worked and ate shoulder by shoulder, even in the Deep South; World War Two had ended discrimination . . .
“Is there trouble?” Juliana asked Joe.
He grunted, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Tell me what happens,” she said. “I know I won’t get to finish it; we’ll be in Denver pretty soon. Do America and Britain get into a war, and one emerges as ruler of the world?”
Presently Joe said, “In some ways it’s not a bad book. He works all the details out; the U.S. has the Pacific, about like our East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They divide Russia. It works for around ten years. Then there’s trouble—naturally.”
“Why naturally?”
“Human nature.” Joe added, “Nature of states. Suspicion, fear, greed. Churchill thinks the U.S.A. is undermining British rule in South Asia by appealing to the large Chinese populations, who naturally are pro-U.S.A., due to Chiang Kai-shek. The British start setting up”—he grinned at her briefly—“what are called ‘detention preserves.’ Concentration camps, in other words. For thousands of maybe disloyal Chinese. They’re accused of sabotage and propaganda. Churchill is so—”
“You mean he’s still in power? Wouldn’t he be around ninety?”
Joe said, “That’s where the British system has it over the American. Every eight years the U.S. boots out its leaders, no matter how qualified—but Churchill just stays on. The U.S. doesn’t have any leadership like him, after Tugwell. Just nonentities. And the older he gets, the more autocratic and rigid he gets—Churchill, I mean. Until by 1960, he’s like some old warlord out of Central Asia; nobody can cross him. He’s been in power twenty years.”
“Good God,” she said, leafing through the last part of the book, searching for verification of what Joe was saying.
“On that I agree,” Joe said. “Churchill was the one good leader the British had during the war; if they’d retained him they’d have been better off. I tell you; a state is no better than its leader. Fuhrerprinzip—Principle of Leadership, like the Nazis say. They’re right. Even this Abendsen has to face that. Sure, the U.S.A. expands economically after winning the war over Japan, because it’s got that huge market in Asia that it’s wrested from the Japs. But that’s not enough; that’s got no spirituality. Not that the British have. They’re both plutocracies, rule by the rich. If they had won, all they’d have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he’s wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans—the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn’t have permitted it.”
Juliana thought, Spoken like a devout Fascist.
Evidently Joe perceived by her expression what she was thinking; he turned toward her, slowing the car, one eye on her, one on the cars ahead. “Listen, I’m not an intellectual—Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces—of history. You see? I tell you; I know, Juliana.” His tone was earnest, almost beseeching. “Those old rotten money-run empires, Britain and France and U.S.A., although the latter actually a sort of bastard sideshoot, not strictly empire, but money-oriented even so. They had no soul, so naturally no future. No growth. Nazis a bunch of street thugs; I agree. You agree? Right?”
She had to smile; his Italian mannerisms had overpowered him in his attempt to drive and make his speech simultaneously.
“Abendsen talks like it’s big issue as to whether U.S. or Britain ultimately wins out. Bull! Has no merit, no history to it. Six of one, dozen of other. You ever read what the Duce wrote? Inspired. Beautiful man. Beautiful writing. Explains the underlying actuality of every event. Real issue in war was: old versus new. Money—that’s why Nazis dragged Jewish question mistakenly into it—versus communal mass spirit, what Nazis call Gemeinschaft—folkness. Like Soviet. Commune. Right? Only, Communists sneaked in Pan-Slavic Peter the Great empire ambitions along with it, made social reform means for imperial ambitions.”
Juliana thought, Like Mussolini did. Exactly.
“Nazi thuggery a tragedy,” Joe stuttered away as he passed a slow-moving truck. “But change’s always harsh on the loser. Nothing new. Look at previous revolutions such as French. Or Cromwell against Irish. Too much philosophy in Germanic temperament; too much theater, too. All those rallies. You never find true Fascist talking, only doing—like me. Right?”
Laughing, she said. “God, you’ve been talking a mile a minute.”
He shouted excitedly, “I’m explaining Fascist theory of action!”
She couldn’t answer; it was too funny.
But the man beside her did not think it was funny; he glowered at her, his face red. Veins in his forehead became distended and he began once more to shake. And again he passed his fingers clutchingly along his scalp, forward and back, not speaking, only staring at her.
“Don’t get sore at me,” she said.
For a moment she thought he was going to hit her; he drew his arm back . . . but then he grunted, reached and turned up the car radio.
They drove on. Band music from the radio, static. Once more she tried to concentrate on the book.
“You’re right,” Joe said after a long time.
“About what?”
“Two-bit em
pire. Clown for a leader. No wonder we got nothing out of the war.”
She patted his arm.
“Juliana, it’s all darkness,” Joe said. “Nothing is true or certain. Right?”
“Maybe so,” she said absently, continuing to try to read.
“Britain wins,” Joe said, indicating the book. “I save you the trouble. U.S. dwindles, Britain keeps needling and poking and expanding, keeps the initiative. So put it away.”
“I hope we have fun in Denver,” she said, closing the book. “You need to relax. I want you to.” If you don’t, she thought, you’re going to fly apart in a million pieces. Like a bursting spring. And what happens to me, then? How do I get back? And—do I just leave you?
I want the good time you promised me, she thought. I don’t want to be cheated; I’ve been cheated too much in my life before, by too many people.
“We’ll have it,” Joe said. “Listen.” He studied her with a queer, introspective expression. “You take to that Grasshopper book so much; I wonder—do you suppose a man who writes a best seller, an author like that Abendsen . . . do people write letters to him? I bet lots of people praise his book by letters to him, maybe even visit.”
All at once she understood. “Joe—it’s only another hundred miles!”
His eyes shone; he smiled at her, happy again, no longer flushed or troubled.
“We could!” she said. “You drive so good—it’d be nothing to go on up there, would it?”
Slowly, Joe said, “Well, I doubt a famous man lets visitors drop in. Probably so many of them.”
“Why not try? Joe—” She grabbed his shoulder, squeezed him excitedly. “All he could do is send us away. Please.”
With great deliberation, Joe said, “When we’ve gone shopping and got new clothes, all spruced up . . . that’s important, to make a good impression. And maybe even rent a new car up in Cheyenne. But you can do that.”