Trends come and go in all eras, but I should say that only in ours do they get successively more vile: in recent years it had become fashionable to detonate explosives in public places in the name of some usually unrecognizable cause. Frankly, I think the urge to destroy comes first, and then he who has it looks for a slogan to mouth while blowing up people and things, with the idea that his mayhem thereby becomes perfectly reasonable.
At the moment I did not require a precise identification of the caller’s group: I had wasted too much time already. I dropped the phone and, I think, was out the door before I heard it hit the desk. I took the stairs in two bounds and was in the street on the third.
A short, redhaired daughter of joy, a regular on the beat, was just sauntering past the building. “Hi, Rus!” said she. (I sometimes exchanged a bit of chaff with these ladies.) “You don’t look like you got it on straight, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
It is with some pride that I can report my unthinking response as gallant: I swept this (fortunately little) tart up off her feet and, carrying her in the crook of my arm, like an outsized loaf of bread, I gained most of the block to the south before the explosion came, destroying not only my building but also the restaurant next door and the liquor shop across the street, along with its companions, the Asiatic spice shop and the shallow doorway of the hôtel de passe of which my current burden, the petite harlot, was a relentless customer if she could find a series of live ones. And of course all windows were shattered for a quarter of a mile by the punch of sound.
Being at a right angle to the blast, and a street away, we suffered only the bruises sustained in the plunge to the street I took owing to the aural shock. Which Bobbie, for such was her name, had the effrontery to chide me for!
“Chrissakes, Rus,” she sibilated indignantly, hopping to her feet and brushing at the scuffed buttock of her designer jeans, which incidentally she wore a good deal more modestly than did most current females who were freebies.
“So don’t thank me for saving your life!” I said. I was still sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, looking towards Twenty-third Street. I had not yet made the foregoing list of casualty-buildings. Indeed, for a moment or two I was enjoying the odd serenity that claims me on the very threshold of total collapse. I could reflect gratefully that while the Whatever Liberation Front were thoroughgoing swine to plant that bomb, I could not hate them for warning me, in fact demanding that I leave the premises. I could only assume that if the restaurant were still occupied, a similar call had been placed next door, and to whoever was available in the other buildings.
Still breathing deeply from my exertion, though otherwise, so far as I was aware, in standard condition (which is to say, at thirty-five somewhat flabby though underweight; hair, teeth, and eyes OK)—I am holding back the narrative here, because I have always been fascinated by the tendency of reality to be amateurishly timed.
Meanwhile, various persons came running towards the locus of the explosion, from up or down Lex and out of the numbered side streets. Bobbie was sufficiently eager for business, owing no doubt to her exigent pimp, to solicit several of the males in the collecting crowd, and in fact she finally netted a chap with a gray mustache and tinted eyeglasses, who led her to a double-parked Chrysler Imperial whose engine was idling and whose plates had been issued by the state of New Jersey.
Eventually, though in reality it was probably all of twenty seconds, I got to my feet, remembering to hope that I had not fallen into the dog dirt that was once again extant, now that the population had become blasé about the poop-scoop ordinance, and finding none on a finger-search of my clothing, I approached my late office-cum-home, much of which was no doubt represented now in the pile of rubbish that filled the street. But more, in fact most, as I could see when the angle permitted, had plunged to the lower portion of the building, and had been followed by the roof and the furnishings thereof: vanes and vents and great slices of the surface of Tar Beach. The jagged walls of the first three stories contained all that had stood above and made a kind of giant topless box of rubbish.
Somewhere in the thick of things was the play on which I had heroically labored for so long, without, however, having had the sense to make an extra copy of it for preservation in a safe place.
On the other hand, one might profitably see this experience as the opportunity for a new beginning, and in truth nobody had ever seemed to cotton to that now buried work even as an idea—even when sitting drunk on the next bar stool (having got there on my money) in my local, a Third Avenue establishment frequented by people who fancy themselves as belonging to the intelligentsia because they can often name the principal players in prewar movies, follow pro football, and drink less hard liquor than any previous generation.
The police cars began to arrive; and the fire department, in many companies and with much apparatus, clanged in from all points. Before I could collect my wits (which of course had been badly jostled), such a crowd of professionals and amateurs of disaster had collected that I found it difficult to report to anyone in authority.
“Would you let me through?” I asked a beefy, beery man who had apparently come from the Hibernian bar a block or so north: he still clutched his glass of foam.
“Naw,” he genially replied. “I was here first, pal.”
“But I lived in there,” I protested.
“Call that living?” He remained rooted.
I abandoned this fruitless colloquy when a cop came through the nearby crowd.
“Officer!” I cried. “That was my home, where the bomb went off!”
But he, too, was indifferent and pushed me aside with the heavy and, I always suspect, mocking courtesy of the New York police officer. “Exkewse me. Hey. Awright. Lemme. OK, folks. Huh? Naw. Yeah?” So far as I could hear, though they seemed to cover every eventuality, none of these noises was made in actual response to anything said by anybody else.
I tried another cop or two, with no better success, but then, seeing some television newspeople arrive and emerge from their vans with hand-held cameras and lights, I decided to make application in that quarter, and maneuvered myself through the crowd until I confronted Jackie Johansen, a local channel’s sob sister, easily recognizable but in person displaying a graininess of cheek and lifelessness of bleached hair not evident on the home screen.
“Jackie!” said I. “I’m the man concerned. It was my home that was bombed. You’ve got an exclusive interview!”
She stared briefly at me with her pale eyes, and then turned to one of the males in her entourage, a short, very hairy, clipboard-holding man in worn denims and Nike shoes, and asked: “Who the fuck is this?”
“A nothing, a schmuck,” said he, thrusting into the crowd, breaking a route for Jackie and a lithe fellow toting a camera. They vanished.
“Ah, humanity!” sighed someone to my right. I turned and saw a derelict whose discolored skin and blue teeth looked vaguely familiar: he had been amongst the lot on the steps of the post office when I came home only—what?—an hour or two ago. Now I had no home. Foul as he was, I had an impulse to hurl myself on his malodorous chest and cry my eyes out—but this was gone in an instant. I grimaced and headed away from the crowd.
But this embarrassing acquaintance was relentless! He stayed on my heels, moving remarkably nimbly for a wino, crying outmoded historical banalities, which for some reason annoyed me more at this moment than obscenities would have: “ ‘Man is a political animal.’...‘Power tends to corrupt.’...‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ ”
I’m afraid that all I could think of at this juncture was the feeble “ ‘Let ’em eat cake.’ ” I hustled on towards Third Avenue, having no destination in mind, but was soon stopped by a jeer.
“That’s ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,’ ” shouted the bum. “Not gâteau, nor was it said by Marie Antoinette!”
I was stung by this gibe. I turned slowly, ransacking my brain for something, anything, that could be launched as
a Parthian shot.
But before I managed to make a sound, my tormentor came close to me and said, in a quiet but authoritative voice, as contrasted to his derelict’s bombast: “Follow me. I’m one of Them.”
I don’t know why, but I trusted him, probably on the mere strength of his scholarly pretensions, to be at least more than a common bum. He pushed, as if drunkenly, past me, maintaining the imposture, and lurched to the corner of Third. I came along behind. The avenue was deserted, all of local humanity being over at the site of the blast on Lex. My man staggered to the curb and stepped down into the gutter between a parked VW Beetle and a large, battered gray van, where, hands at his crotch, he was seemingly preparing to urinate but was actually checking discreetly on the clearness of the coast; having determined which to be acceptable, he scratched at the door of the van. One of its panels soon opened, and he stepped up and in, and I followed suit.
During the few instants before the door was closed it was dark in there, and I could not so much as see who had let us in, and only now did I reflect on the ambiguity in the term “Them.” “They” might well have been the people who had blown up my home.
But then the lights came on, and I could see why they had been turned off: the interior of the vehicle was virtually an electronics laboratory, the walls of which were covered with dials and switches and meters, and cables crisscrossed the floor. A dour man in a spotless coverall and wearing a headset shared this constricted space with the “derelict” and me.
I asked a necessary question: “Who are you fellows?”
My bum—who incidentally even in close-up seemed to have genuinely bad skin and bleary eyes, unless it was a masterpiece of makeup—said: “I think you know that sort of thing is never spelled out, really as a matter of taste or style, not because of any need for great secrecy. After all, everybody knows that when some agency goes unnamed, it must be what you think it is and not the Department of Agriculture.”
I must say I was relieved. “Ah, you’re the—”
“Firm,” he said quickly. “Or sometimes the Bunch, or even the Troop. Less often the Pack, but sometimes, jocularly, the Gang. And then—”
The man in the headset broke in querulously: “I’m late for my break, Rasmussen!”
“All right, so go already,” Rasmussen replied, in the idiom everyone, even secret agents, picks up when in New York. He took the earphones from the other man and put them across his own crown. He then sat down on a little stool before a panel that was an electronics extravaganza, and switched off the interior lights while the other man slipped out the rear of the van.
When the lights came on again Rasmussen said: “Now then, let’s have your story.”
“If you’ll tell me why you are wearing the headset.”
He cocked an eye at me. “I must warn you, Wren: there’s no tit for tat in covert work.”
“You know my name?”
He looked as though he might have blushed, had his complexion not already been too variegated to show more color. “All right, call me guilty of an indiscretion. I suppose you’d find out anyway, soon enough. We live in a time when it is unfashionable to keep secrets: this is especially true of undercover operatives. Wilcox, there, who just went out for coffee and Danish: I happen to know he sells everything he hears in this job to Sylvester Swan, the muckraking columnist.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” said I. “I demand, under the Freedom of Information Act, to hear what you know about how I was bombed out of house and home this evening, and who that really was who called me and identified himself as the Sebastiani Liberation Front, and how I narrowly escaped before the building blew up, and why the cops and TV people dismissed my efforts to tell them what happened.”
Rasmussen was looking at me with a sly smile. “Wren, my dear fellow, you’ve lots to learn. I suppose you don’t realize that you have just fecklessly spilled all the beans in your possession. You have withheld nothing with which to bargain. Suppose you were in the enemy’s hands at the moment? Your goose would be well done!”
“Come on, Rasmussen, I’m not playing a game.”
“But we are, old boy, as you would know if you read any blockbusting thrillers. We’re having the time of your lives, and— Wait a minute!” He adjusted the earphones and fiddled with some knobs. His smile became a grin that grew dirtier. “This is rich,” he whispered. “His boyfriend just came back from the ballet, three hours late. They’re in bed now and having quite a set-to. Somebody’s going to burst into tears in a moment, and somebody’s going to have to atone.”
I winced. “Is it really useful to do that sort of eavesdropping, Rasmussen? So some Russian diplomat is an invert: is that really scandalous nowadays?”
“Russian?” he jeered. “This is——.” The name he gave, which of course I suppress here, was that of a leading American statesman.
“Good gravy, that’s worse! How can you possibly justify that sort of thing as legitimate information-gathering?”
Rasmussen scowled. “Don’t get pious on me, Wren. Do you want your country to be run like a queer bathhouse?” But his face soon returned to a prurient smirk, in response to what he was hearing. “I can’t wait to see the videotapes.”
“You’ve got a hidden TV camera in there?”
“Over the bed,” he gloated. “In a phony air-conditioning vent. And of course it’s our boy in there with that old queen.”
“Is there no limit to your swinishness?” I asked in disbelief. “I don’t know that I even approved of the Abscam entrapments, and they played only on the natural greed of all men. But sex!”
He stared suspiciously at me. “You’re clean in that area, I hope.”
“I certainly am! But what’s that got to do with—”
“Wren,” Rasmussen said, taking off the headset, “sit down here.” He gestured at a nearby floorbound coil of cable. I did as he suggested, having nowhere better to go.
He found a pipe somewhere and filled it from a pouch. He lighted up deliberately. “We’ve had an eye on you for a while,” he said at last, spewing some smoke down at me. “You’ll be pleased to know you passed every test.”
“Test?”
He smiled in that superior, benevolent fashion of the man who has done something disagreeable to you for your own good—doctor, schoolmaster, policeman. “It won’t do any harm at this juncture to reveal that Ben Rothman works for us.”
“In his deli? By selling pastrami and corned beef?”
Rasmussen took the pipe from his lips and exhaled in a torrent of thick smoke. “And the man who gave you a dollar, outside the French restaurant.”
“Oh, come on, what was the purpose of that?”
“Take a look at the bill.”
I fished it from my pocket, where it had lain doggo during the attack of the small girls. I uncrumpled and examined the face of the dollar, expecting to find George Washington replaced by the head of a rhesus monkey or the like, but not so.
“Turn it over,” said Rasmussen, directing more smoke my way. “Look at the reverse of The Great Seal.”
This is the circle to the left, in which is depicted a truncated pyramid surmounted by an eye inside a triangle over which, on a proper bill, is arched the Latin phrase Annuit Coeptis. Below the pyramid, on a curved scroll, should properly be Novus Ordo Seclorum. On the one I held, the words Omne Animal hung over the pyramid, while underneath one could read: Post Coitum Triste.
“Very funny,” I said sullenly. “All right, you’ve proved you can make contact with me so delicately that not even I know it. But what’s your purpose?”
While I was off guard he snatched the dollar from me, claiming it as the property of the Firm. Sucking on his pipe, which gurgled repulsively, he buried the bill in his pocket. He resumed. “At the moment of greatest emergency, namely when the bomb was about to go off, you not only saved yourself but had the presence of mind to carry that little hooker out of danger.”
“Don’t tell me Bobbie was still another of
your people?”
He shook his head, emitting smoke. “ ’Fraid not. She’s just a whore so far as we know—unless she works for the Competition. I hope not, because on occasion I’ve used her services, and I’d hate to think that in the violent transports of lust I might have disclosed some information from classified material.”
“I take it I will eventually hear an explanation of why you posed these challenges to me. Frankly, it had better be plausible.”
The rear of the van, which was sealed off from the front seat by a solid partition, was filling with smoke, though seated on the floor as I was, I was still below the worst of it.
Rasmussen asked, “What do you know about Saint Sebastian?”
“Was not the person of that name, if indeed he existed at all, so pierced with the arrows of his enemies that he subsequently became the patron saint of pinmakers?”
Rasmussen scowled. “The Saint Sebastian to which I refer is the little country of that name—”
“Ah! The Sebastiani Liberation Front!”
He closed his eyes in chagrin. “I’m afraid this will get nowhere if you interrupt continually.”
“But that’s what the voice said on the phone. The only reason I was able to escape the building before it blew up was a call I got about a minute before the explosion: a man with a heavy accent, Slavic perhaps, but with also a bit of the German and God knows what else. On the other hand, I suppose it could have been faked.” I peered sharply at Rasmussen: he or one of his colleagues would certainly have been capable of it.
“No news to us,” he said disdainfully. “Naturally we had your place wired. That call was made by a member of an underground movement known as the Liberation Front of Saint Sebastian. These people are in the United States at this moment, on a fund- and sympathy-raising campaign for their cause.”
“They have chosen a mightily ingratiating means of doing both,” said I, showing my teeth. “How dare they come over here and blow up things and ask for help! Don’t we have enough homegrown scum to do that sort of thing?”
Rasmussen leaned back and displayed a faint derisive smile. “Aren’t we becoming a wee bit stuffy, Wren? Wasn’t it our own Tom Jefferson who said the tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants?”