Five to Twelve (12 page)

He gazed at the screen, and took courage from what he saw. Men were dying untidily, crazily and in vast quantities. They were dying of bayonet wounds, bombs, bullets, shells, fear, bad surgery, insane strategy and sheer stress. So who the Stopes was he, Dion Quern, to complain about a bomb
in his chest? Everybody carried a bomb of one kind or another. What the hell! There had to be an end to living.

And yet… And yet this was a different kettle of quandaries from when he had chosen to accept the possibility of death by sky-diving to the rescue of a naked Juno. That was a private luxury: this was just an infuriating bondage. And yet it was just the same kind of bondage as was being much appreciated by those poor inarticulate jokers in the antique movie. They were all living–and dying–with tin hearts. And for every one of them there was a Leander somewhere with a little red button.

Dion tossed the empty
altbier
bottle at the waste-hole, which opened silently, silently swallowed, and closed silently. Then he reached for another bottle and flipped the cap.

He had toyed with the idea of telling Juno about the death-box he was nursing at blood temperature. But would she have believed him? Yes, possibly. And if she had believed him, what would she have done?

Answer: she would have sent for the U.S. cavalry, smashed the Lost Legion, and uttered tearfully and with some emotive ejaculation while an obscure pact vaporized.

So that was a reasonable reason for keeping the merry knowledge to himself.

However, there were some small complications. Such as having to toss an atomic grenade into the House of Commons in–if Leander was a reliable informant–three more days. Or such as not tossing the grenade and then simply waiting for the button-presser to press a button.

It really was quite tiresome.

And the most tiresome aspect was that Dion did not know what, if anything, he was going to do.

He wanted to smash the doms. But would that be accomplished by elevating six hundred loud mouths to a higher plane? And, in any case, surely Don Quixote had a right to choose his own windmills?

“I think too ferkinmuch,” said Dion aloud, still observing the sadly bloody drama on the screen.

“I feel too ferkinlittle,” he added as an afterthought.

The bottle of
altbier
being emptied, he tossed it at the waste-hole and selected another.

“Cogito ergo somesuch,” he remarked definitively. A young German had just bayoneted a French officer and was praying to the corpse for forgiveness. The thirty-twenty was full of trauma and sadness and death.

He sank himself in the gore and proceeded to methodically finish the carton of
altbier
. Two thirds through the movie and halfway through the last bottle, he was just contemplating the sublime possibility of calling up another carton when the plate buzzer made a nuisance of itself.

He listened to it for a while, fascinated, toying with the idea of changing the entire future history of mankind by simply not answering it. Curiosity got the better of him. He switched to receive and almost instantly the screen showed the face of Leander Smith. He was evidently in a public call box.

“Hi, saviour,” said Leander cheerily.

“Good night, bastard,” retorted Dion, reaching for the cut stud. “You have a facility for being totally unloved and unwanted. I’m going through hell on the Western Front, and I require no assistance from anyone. How the Stopes do you always manage to plug in to my dried up thought-stream?”

“Hold it,” said Leander, as he saw Dion move towards the stud. He held up the snuff box with his finger deliberately
poised over the button. “You wouldn’t cut me dead, old sport, would you?”

“Yes, joker. If you were unable to cut me dead also.”

Leander smiled. “
Esprit de corps.
I like it. There’s not enough of it in the world these days… You are alone, I trust?”

“Your trust is not unfounded. The good dom dallies briefly in Europe. Now state your sentiments and return to limbo.”

“We have a rendezvous, brother ghost.”

“I have not forgotten your foggy humour in the park.”

“It is well. The assignment has been advanced one day.”

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses… Who is playing games with what’s left of my life?”

“The High Command, dear sibling. They move in somewhat mysterious ways.”

“Their non-happenings to perform,” added Dion. “So I live less and laugh louder. Very interesting. Now let me return to my little fairy tale, and I will bid you a very good night.”

“Not so fast, friend of my youth. There are details to arrange.”

“So arrange them, and stop wasting the valuable twilight of my life.”

“You know a bar, the
Vive le Sport
”

“I know a bar, the
Vive le Sport
”

“I’ll meet you there, midnight tomorrow.”

“You may be exceedingly lucky.”

Leander beamed. “I hope so. Otherwise, you may be exceedingly dead.” He cut the connection, thus depriving Dion of the Parthian shot he had not had time to formulate.

Dion kicked the bed three times and wished Juno were
present so that he could strangle her and drop her lifeless body over the balcony, half a mile to earth.

But Juno was not present, and there was no one to kill, maim or make love to. Defeated, frustrated, he settled himself in front of the thirty-twenty and returned to
All Quiet on the Western Front.

He was just in time to see the hand of a young and incredibly weary German soldier reach out to touch a butterfly. He was also in time to see an enemy sharpshooter cancel the action with a bullet.

S
HE
was small, slender and soft in the way that only infras could be soft. She was no more than a child—twenty-five, perhaps—but already poverty, or near poverty, had etched a few lines on her. Left to her own devices, she would age quite rapidly. By sixty—if she managed to avoid having too many children and lived that long—she would be quite old. Juno had found her singing for lions in a Munich
bierkeller.
She was mostly English, and her name was Sylphide.

Juno brought her back to the box while Dion was trying to scribble poetry with his antique pencil. He had been recalling his encounter with Leander in St. James’s Park and was extrapolating upon it. He had also just crossed out the word dewdrop and substituted raindrop. One should not allow art, he felt, to get too perilously near life—particularly if the effect was maudlin.

So the verse read:

Then Juno arrived with Sylphide, like a trireme with a sailing dinghy in tow.

“Hail, meistersinger. I missed you.”

“Hail and farewell. I missed nothing. How were the sports in Munich?”

“More grateful than they are over here… What’s that you’re writing?”

“Your epitaph… Now, who is this child you have clearly stolen?”

“Her name is Sylphide, and she is going to bear me a son.”

Dion inspected the girl whose womb he was required to fertilize. She was frightened and she seemed less than repulsive. He was pleased on both counts.

“Enchanté de faire votre connaissance
,” he said with a courtly bow.

“Merely, monsieur. J’espére que notre connaissance sera trés heureuse pour tous.”

“Your French is almost as limited as mine,” said Dion. “How did this big bitch trick you into coming back to England?”

“Please,” said Sylphide nervously. “Dom Juno has been very kind. She has already given me one thousand lions.”

“Another thousand on conception,” added Juno, “and then a thousand on delivery.”

“Dead or alive?” enquired Dion maliciously.

Juno’s good temper was rapidly evaporating. “Don’t play too rough, little one,” she advised. “And don’t abuse my infra. She’s paid to conceive not to take punishment.”

Dion began to laugh. “
My
infra! By the lord of misrule, what do you think you are—a seventeenth century sultana?”

“Cut the transmission. We have spent half the day jetting and we are rather tired… Now, talk nicely to the squawk box and get us something to eat.”

At the mention of food, Dion realized that he himself was hungry. He had been drinking a lot, but he could not
remember the last time he had eaten. He went to the vacuum hatch and spoke into the pick-up. “Accoutrements for three,” he said. “First, avocado stuffed with shrimps. Second, pasta chuta. Third, Mexican strawberries with cognac. Fourth, Cheshire cheese, Danish butter, Finnish crispbread. To drink: two litres of rosé, half of Hennessey XO, black coffee, cream, demerara sugar. Ten from now. Out.”

“Stopes!” exclaimed Juno with delight. “The man creates poetry in food also.” Impulsively, she flung her arms round him.

“Unhand me, cow,” snapped Dion. “The Last Supper was a dramatic occasion, was it not?”

“Signifying?”

“Signifying that life is frequently shorter than you think, and no one has yet calculated the square root of tomorrow.”

Juno began to get angry again. “Who or what has scrambled your transistors, stripling? You are like a bear with a sore amplifier. If it’s a fracas you are looking for, you can have it.”

“Not in front of the child,” advised Dion drily. “Who knows what indelible impression it might leave upon her yet untarnished womb.” He turned to Sylphide. “I presume that this will be your first?”

“Yes, it will.”

“You wouldn’t want to keep the infant?”

She looked at him helplessly. “What could I do with a child?”

“Ah, so. A fitting comment on our lovely world.” He glanced at Juno. “Where does this innocent live, sleep and endure the ravages of passion? Or have you not yet considered? This box is hardly big enough for a
ménage à trois.”

“I have considered,” retorted Juno. “For the time being,
Sylphide has a room of her own on the twenty-third floor. Later, we shall see.”

“When the fruit, no doubt, is ripening on the tree,” added Dion.

Further verbal skirmishes were cut short by the arrival of the meal.

While they ate, Dion learned a little more about Sylphide. She was twenty-three and had been unclaimed. Her mother—still, possibly, alive somewhere—was a half Dutch, half English infra and her father an English squire. The dom who had paid for her conception did not live to collect on the investment, having got herself killed while carrying out research in synthetic viruses. So Sylphide had received the usual bounty of a state orphanage until she was eighteen. Thereafter she had lived on domestic work for high-bracket doms, occasional prostitution, and occasional work as a sponsong singer in bars, clubs,
bierkelkrs
and brothels. She was already tired of life—which, possibly, was why she was prepared to settle down to a career of regular pregnancies.

“Don’t you think there is something overripe in the state of Denmark?” enquired Dion, when he had heard her story.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Nor does he,” said Juno acidly. “I must warn you, Sylphide. Given three decimal places of chance, Dion will torment the life out of you. He’s an atavism. It’s his way of beating his chest… If he makes too much trouble, tell me, and I’ll reprocess him.”

Dion ignored her. “I mean that the world is a dazy-crazy place when alleged females like Juno drip power and lions while you and your kind can only get by if you drip babies.”

“But Dom Juno is a dom,” protested Sylphide uncompre-hendingly.

“Dom Juno is a dom,” he mimicked. “What a lucid sentiment! A tree is a tree is a tree. And where the Stopes does that get us? They can’t have programmed all rational thought out of you, child. Surely there is something left between your ears—or is it all concentrated between your legs?”

Sylphide burst into tears.

Juno picked up the bottle of Hennessey. “That’s your ration, playboy. One more volley of anti-social rhetoric out of you, and I’ll launch you down a long, long slipway.”

Surprisingly, Dion was ashamed. “Sylphide,” he said gently. “Dehydrate. Juno is right. Statistically, she’s bound to be right once in a while, and this happens to be it… I’m a psych-happy, frustrated, full-volume midget, and I humbly beg your pardon. You have jetted a thousand miles to have your womb blown up, not to have your head opened. I am filled with chagrin, to say nothing of remorse.”

Ignoring Sylphide, Juno looked at him anxiously. “Dion, what
is
wrong? Whatever it is, it’s getting wronger and wronger.”

“Nothing,” he said lamely. “I’m the spectre of a ghost, that’s all. Forgive me, children, for I know not what I do.”

He took the bottle of Hennessey from Juno and poured himself a substantial dose. He downed it irreverently in one, and then stood up.

“Midnight, monumental, looms,” he announced enigmatically. “I must leave you briefly, dear playmates. I go to take counsel with one whose finger caresses most affectionately a tiny button. Doubtless in my brief absence, you will decide whose bed shall presently be glorified this night.” He gave Juno a penetrating look. “In the interests only of futurity, I would recommend that the distinction falls to Sylphide.”

T
HE
condemned man, thought Dion cheerily as he walked through the brisk November morning to collect an atomic grenade for the proposed elevation of the British legislature, had drunk a hearty breakfast. It being something of an occasion, he had allowed himself two prairie oysters and one bottle of champagne. In spite of which he still felt rather tired. What had been left of the previous night he had spent with Sylphide in her twenty-third floor box.

Since she was a complete stranger and an infra, he had made love to her several times and with considerable ardour. Enthusiasm did not have to be simulated for she was—in a dark and oddly vacant way—very attractive. Also she knew exactly what to do with her legs, her arms, her breasts and her tongue. Which was a considerable relief; for if one was going to dance, one should certainly not dance badly.