Public Burning (45 page)

“It wasn't like that at all—!” Why was I arguing with him? I knew no one could keep pace with a concerted smear campaign. The man in political life must come to expect the smear and to know that, generally, the best thing to do about it is to ignore it—and hope it will fade away. “I was only doing my—”

“Duty! Right? I know, and you couldn't
stop
doin' it! We hadn't even got around to makin' them Jap warlords cry cockles, and you was already down there in Los fuckin' Angeles, all duded out in your gold-braid monkey suit and good-conduct ribbon, runnin' for a suck at the public teat, tellin' the yokels hack home how it was in the fuckin' foxholes! ‘The clean forthright young American what fought in defense of his country in the stinkin' mud and jungles of the Solomons!'
Hoo hah!—Nick
, ya break me up! Fuckin' genius,
you
are, a real bullwhacker—you shoulda been in
show
business!”

“Now, see here—!”

“Aw, Commander, don't—haw haw!-don't gimme that look! Save it for your dumb fuckin' mutt!” He seemed to remember something and broke into more guffaws. The two dogs we ran down probably. I recalled there was a drugstore hack there across from the Willard Hotel, and I needed more antacids. Not the time to go hack, though. Do it later. I was furious, but I knew I couldn't let myself he seen to lose my equanimity. The burdens of life sometimes outweigh the pleasures, you can't let it get you down, makes a bad impression on the public. After all (I told myself) I believe in the battle, it's always there wherever I go. I perhaps carry it more than others because that's my way. Besides, this would soon he over, we were coming onto Constitution now. Lot of activity up there, toward the Capitol…. “And now, by the sweet cock o' Uncle Jesus, you're the Vice fuckin' General Manager of the whole—WHOA!”

He swerved suddenly over to the curb where a lady was handing out pamphlets. She looked like a Jehovah's Witness type. This was my chance to get out. I reached down and tugged at my shoe. But he rolled on by, grabbing one of her pamphlets on the run, dragging her along a few clumsy steps, then roared ahead. “What…what is it?” I asked.

He peered at it, turned his nose down. “Ahh, it ain't nothin',” he grumped. He handed it hack over the seat to me. It was Ethel Rosenberg's final appeal for clemency, with two sketches above, one of her and the other of Julius, signed by Picasso. I'd seen them before. Picasso was a notorious Red, the Rosenbergs were just hurting their own cause with blatant associations like this, but it was nothing they hadn't been doing all along. “You shoulda seen the ones they was handin' out last night! Haw! There was some cute ones of you, Nick! You'd be prouda the dong they hung on ya!” He winked at me in the rear-view mirror and spread his hands out like he was measuring some big fish. “Of course, I can't say it was gettin' put to the best
use! R-raw
-haw-haw-haw-haw!”

“Now, that's uh, just about—!”

“Easy, Nick, haw haw, don't let it go to your head! I mean, there was a lot of 'em showin' you with your face smeared with shit, too. Or eatin' it—I gotta admit the shit looked good there, Nick, you'd make a terrific President! Yaw-haw-haw!” He was crumpled up over the wheel with laughter. “Hey, ya know? I seen that lady back there before! She was up at the White House tryin' to get in!”

“The White House—!”

“Yeah, she said she wanted to have an intercourse with the President!”

“You mean, interview…”

“Yeah, that's what the guard said, but
she
says, ‘Naw, I mean intercourse! I wanna see the nuts that're runnin' this country!'
Waw-haw-haw!
”

We'd stopped behind a sightseeing bus and I meant to jump out, but I couldn't get my goddamn shoe loose from under the seat. He reached around suddenly and nearly poked me in the face with a big cigar. “Woops! Excuse me, Nick! Whaddaya doin' down there on the floor? Here, no hard feelin's, have a cigar! I remember how you loved to blow through these things out on Green Island, I been savin' it for ya!”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don't—”

The bus started up. The cabbie thrust the cigar in my hand, swung around to get moving again.

I sat back, I had to think, I had to keep my head. It would have been stupid to have jumped out there anyway, the place was full of demonstrators. No mistake about it this time: they carried pictures of the Rosenbergs with pleas for mercy printed on them. All along, I'd been noticing something peculiar about these pro-Rosenberg people, I hadn't been able to put my finger on it, but suddenly it came to me:
they were all middle-aged!
There was hardly a kid among them, the young ones were all over on the other side,
my
side, these Rosenberg people were all…well…my age.…

“Hey, you may not believe this, Nick,” the cabdriver said, “but I know that broad on all them posters there.”

“Who, you mean—?”

“Yeah, Rosenblatt, the atom spy. I went to fuckin' school with her!”

“You mean, uh, Rosenberg—?”

“Yeah, she lived around the corner from me there on Whatchamacallit Street…”

“Sheriff?”

“That's it! Sheriff Street! Ain't that a laugh, Nick? Just goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, don't it? Sheriff Street! Jumpin' Jesus, lemme tell ya, she had a sweet ass on her, Nick! We useta sneak into the back lot there and peep in her window—”

“But she slept on the second floor, didn't she? I think I read—”

“We used ladders, Nick! We climbed trees! There was a fire escape. I had a buddy in the building behind—shit, we saw
everything!”

“The other rooms, too?”

“What other rooms, Nick?”

“They say that sometimes, uh, prostitutes rented out—”

“Right, Nick! It was a kinda whorehouse! Did I forget to mention that? That's probably where she learnt her game, right? Listen, by the time she was fifteen years old, buddy, she could do more things with a banana than you and me could ever dream a' doin' with our dingdongs in a lifetime! She sure showed all us boys a trick or two—I mean, I'm lucky to have a cock left at all, Nick, she subverted the goddamn thing to ribbons!”

“Really? But they always said she never even had a boyfriend until—”

“Don't you believe it, Nick! She was one hot little twat—all them Commies are, you know that! It's part of their religion! Sweet Betsy, she couldn't keep her pants on! I mean, it turned into a real act, she got famous, she went all over the fuckin' town doin' it in the moviehouses!”

“You mean the Major, uh, Bowes Amateur Nights—?”

“Haw haw! Amateur, my ass! Amateur, my
ass
, Nick!”

“I… I thought she always sang ‘Ciribiribin'—”

“She didn't
sing
it, Nick—she
did
it! God in ass-fuckin' star-spangled heaven, she was a sensation! They finally had to move her into the burlesque circuit to accommodate the mobs, it was worsen back there at the White House! We useta catch her act ever Saturday night. We was pretty dumb, don't hold it against us, Nick, but we thought it was
innocent
—ya know, just dirty sex, twirlin' her tits, suckin' up quarters with her cunt, things like that. We didn't realize she was suckin' up a lot more than quarters, and then flushin' it all straight to Russia! You read about it, Nick: she had A-bombs up there, Jell-O boxes, Red herrings, passport photos, Klaus Fucks, the Fifth Amendment—shit, she could probably get a whole fuckin' P-38 up her snatch and have room for Yucca Flat and the Sixth Fleet to boot! They say there was a ray gun in her navel, a walkie-talkie hid in her G-string, and a camera stuffed up her ass—when she spread her cheeks at us, we always heard this click and thought she was blowin' kisses at us out her rectum! What fuckin' innocents we was, Nick! Never again, hunh? I mean, we've grown up, ain't we, Nick? We're through suckin' Russky hind tit like babies, ain't we? We ain't on Green Island no more—!”

“I don't think this, uh, has any—”

“You tell 'em, Nick! By God, you tell 'em! You remember that persecuter—what's his name?”

“Saypol?”

“That's it! Saypol! ‘Imagine a wheel,' he says. Remember that? ‘In the center o' the wheel, Rosenblatt, reachin' out like the tentacles of a octopus—'”

“Uh, Rosenberg…”

“Right! Well, that sonuvabitch knew what he was talkin' about, Nick, he musta caught the act! She was like Plastic Man, I shit you not! Her hair wriggled out at ya like snakes, wrappin' ya up, ticklin' your ear, creepin' down your shirt, her toes jigged in all the aisles at once, she'd clip your foreskin with fingernails willowy as reeds, sock ya in the snoot with her clit!” I used to go to the burlesque in Los Angeles with my cousin. We must have gone to the wrong shows. “What an act! Her tits popped out at ya and lit up like beacons: one if by land, two if by sea—and Iemme tell ya, those weren't the only two fuckin' options Julie had, Nick, not with
them
bazooms! She'd do the Dirty Crab on her back, slappin' out Morse-code spy messages with the cheeks of her ass and then—”

“Did you say, uh, Julie…?”

“Yeah, right, Juliet. Juliet Rosen—”

“His
name is Julie. Her name, uh, is
Ethel.”

“Oh…?” He looked confused, crestfallen; but there was a sly grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Musta been a different Juliet Rosenblatt…” I realized we'd been stopped in front of the Senate Office Building for some time. I reached into my pocket for some money, noticing too late that my hand was smeared with horsedung. “Forget it, Commander. It's on the house. For old time's sake. Anchors aweigh, Nick. Lest we forget…”

“Oh. Well…” Some vague suspicion troubled me. Then, as I reached down to work my shoe free, I noticed for the first time the label on the cigar he'd given me: OPTIMO! I glanced up in alarm. He was gazing at me, the grin gone, his eyes dark with a kind of weariness, a kind of resignation, as though…as though he knew too much. I've got to keep calm, I cautioned myself. And I've got to get the hell out of here.

“Look,” he said, his voice mellowing, losing its hard twang, “can't we get past all these worn-out rituals, these stupid fuckin' reflexes?” It wouldn't do any good to grab him, I knew. The ungraspable Phantom. He was made of nothing solid, your hand would just slip right through, probably turn leprous forever. “They got nothin' to do with life, you know that, life's always new and changing, so why fuck it up with all this shit about scapegoats, sacrifices, initiations, saturnalias—?”

“I know who you are,” I rasped. I could hardly hear myself. “The game's up!”

I braced myself. I expected him to flash back in fury, I expected demonic sparks to fly from his eyes, fire from his parted lips, something violent and amazing. I was ready to die. But he only sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “I'm only a lousy cabdriver. Shit, I don't know everything. But I think you're on the wrong track. Easter Trials, Burning Tree, morality plays, cowtown vendettas—life's too big, you can't wrap it up like that!”

Where the battle against the Phantom is concerned, victories arc never final so long as he is still able to fight. There is never a time when it is safe to relax or let down. How had I let myself lose my shoe under his seat like this?

“I seen that mess you rigged up in Times Square. It's frivolous, Nick! You oughta burn Connie Mack and Sonja Henie up there. Or Native Dancer and Elsa Maxwell…”

I should carry a gun in my hip pocket like Irving Saypol, I thought. But you couldn't shoot him either, bullets just go through him. I fought to tear my shoe free—was he holding onto it somehow?

“Listen, it ain't too late, Nick, there's still time to turn back—forget this dumb circus, get on to something more—”

The shoe came loose! I threw my shoulder against the door and tumbled out. “You'll never get away with this!” I cried, shaking my shoe at him. I didn't know exactly what I meant by this, but I needed a line for the other people on the street and this was the first one that came to me. I jumped up and brushed myself off. Chief Newman would have been proud of my form. He always said I played every scrimmage as though the championship were at stake—and now, literally, it was. My shoulder hurt like hell, though.

He was shouting at me, something about the war, or the whore, or maybe he was hollering at me to shut the door, but I scrambled to my feet and made for the Senate Office Building—and crashed into a crowd of newsguys just coming out: Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, Elmer Davis, Bob Considine, Gabriel Heatter, the whole goddamn Fourth Estate.

“Whoa, what's up, Dick?” Pearson asked.

“The Phantom!” I cried. “He tried to get me!”

“What Phantom, Dick?” Pegler asked. “Where?”

“That driver, watch out—!” But the cab was gone. I swallowed, tried to stop gulping air. Couldn't let these bastards get the wrong impression. “There was a cab…”

“What'd he try to do,” Pearson asked, “steal your shoe?” He was stifling a grin, bugging his eyes. Making fun. Was this the thanks I got for saving his life when Joe McCarthy tried to kill him?

“Hmmm,” said Winchell, taking it from my hand and sniffing it. “Seems like he tried to take a crap in it.”

“That's pretty serious, all right,” said Elmer Davis, mock-solemnly. “Maybe we oughta tell Louella about it.” They all yuff-huff-huffed.

“You newsguys are all the same,” I said, snatching back my shoe. I was disgusted by their cheap cynical laughter. It wasn't me I was thinking about, it was the nation. Didn't they understand that the Vice President of the United States of America had just been locked in a one-on-one battle with the Phantom? That the security of the whole country and the cause of free men everywhere were at stake? They were sick with their own self-importance—I knew I had to blitz them, I had to shame them. “You think you're such big public heroes, but ultimately you're all dupes of the Phantom!” I cried. “What do you know about the truth? It's all sensationalism, cheap scandals, a lot of irresponsible rumor-mongering in the name of a free press!” I took out on them all of the fury and frustration that had been building up within me on the ride over. “That's just the kind of loose fellow-traveling attitude that got us into the mess we were in in the forties! Well, just wait! The people of this country are getting fed up with hucksters like you! There's going to be a day of reckoning—!”