The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

  That's what you think, Kim thought. Heavy concentration of Johnson Intelligence in the area.

  "They are into smuggling and they own the best cathouse in town..."

  "That would be the Black Cat."

  "Right... First-class prime cut...Then there's the Comte des Champs...He's head of French Intelligence for the northern sector...A doper...Special heroin comes from further east..."

  "Pinkish brown crystals?"

  "Right."

  "It's special."

  "And two American queens, Greg and Brad, run an antique store and do decorating jobs...Not exactly what they seem to be...I heard one of them talking Arabic, which he doesn't know a word of."

  "You overheard him."

  "That's right. Listening at his door like. Chatting away with his dish boy like a good one he was."

  Posing as two style queens, they are Johnson Agents, better trained than any secret service in the world, with the exception of the Japanese Ninja, in the use of small arms, knives, staffs, chains and nunchakus, blowguns and improvised weapons, codes, and all the arts of concealment...

  He has them in stitches with his kitchen Arabic...

  "Oh really? That means 'fuck' in Arabic..."

  "No wonder he looked at me so funny."

  Greg was brought up in Cairo. Arabic is his first language. It's the agent's kick to conceal things, to be so much more than people think you are and once you sniff the agent kick you need it and you need it steady...The danger, the constant alertness, the purpose and one day you throw off your beggar rags and stand revealed as British Intelligence as you snap out orders in English, German, French, Arabic and a number of obscure dialects...

  They turn in at a gate. In a little gatehouse a magnificent old Arab in a fez is smoking his kief pipe, shotgun propped in a corner...

  The driveway winds through willows and cypress.

  "The American Consul and his wife will be there. They did a mentalist act in vaudeville...Got cured with an oilwell— that's Texan for 'get rich'—and contributed to the right campaign fund."

  The carriage pulled up at a portico and the horse was led away by a stableboy. The house looked Spanish, with a red tiled roof, small barred windows in front...John led the way into a large room with oak beams and a fireplace.

  "Mr. Kim Carsons, the renowned shootist."

  A tall thin young man with a pencil ginger mustache, in slacks and jodhpurs stood up languidly.

  "I'm Tony Outwaite." He held out a cool firm hand.

  Kim immediately recognized the young man he had seen in his dream of last night. A bit showy, he thought, these English always have to underline everything.

  Tony had cool gray eyes, impeccable poise and assurance. About seven hundred years of it. He got it the easy way. Kim had to work for his.

  "Didn't care for London, did you?" Tony gestured to a table on which there was a bowl of blackish pudding.

  "Like some majoun before the others get here?"

  Kim dipped out a tablespoonful of the candy, which tasted like Christmas pudding.

  "Ah just right," he said. If it's right it should be like soft rich gummy fruitcake with no residual bitter taste of cannabis.

  "There's a spot of something extra in that...Shall we take a stroll before dinner?"

  "Capital."

  Behind the house, which was much larger than the fagade indicated, a wooded slope led down to a cliff over the sea...paths, wells, pools of water and little streams with stone bridges. They sat down on a cypress bench at Tony's direction.

  Ah very comfortable, Kim's ass told him...The bench, the pools, the stone bridges, the trees all carefully contrived. Such stage managers the English.

  "Don't think too much of us." It was a statement, not a question. "Like South America, isn't it?"

  "Yes. High jungle."

  "You've been there?"

  "In a manner of speaking, yes...Could you grow Banis-teria caapi here?"

  "Ayahuasco, yage, pilde? No. Too cold. Frost, you know. Too cold for oranges here...I have, however, extracted the active principle...Harmaline, telepathine. There's a dash of that in the candy..."

  Time jumps like a broken typewriter. Kim finds himself back in the salon, shaking hands with other guests. Ah this must be the Australian, fat and unctuous, exuding jovial corruption, and the Lesbians, slinky and sinister with dead cold undersea eyes like gray nurse sharks and the Count des Champs with junk coming out his ears. What a fraudulent old piece of work. I'd hate to be trapped in his chateau. Kim remembers with a shudder his encounter with the Count de Vile in Venice. Invitations to the old chateau should be viewed with extreme wariness and close attention to escape routes. Kim has already exchanged hand signals with Greg and Brad...One long squeeze and two short...

  He turns his attention to the American Consul and his wife. Mr. Davis is a slim man in his early sixties, wearing a gray sweater...He is just too nice to be true. His wife has a distant ethereal look...Quite deceptive, Kim decides, sensing her expert where-do-you-fit-in inventory. Kim withdraws into a neutral observation post..."Going Swiss," he calls it. George Hargrave is telling a long story about an eccentric English lady who tried to stop a firing-squad execution on the beach by throwing herself in front of the rifles.

  Everyone laughs politely...for the hundredth time...

  Dinner is served and it's a perfect replica of an English dinner—roast lamb, roast potatoes, and mint jelly..."From a little shop in Gib," spinach with hollandaise sauce... peaches and cream for dessert...

  Tony is writing down the name of the shop for Greg and Brad and drawing a map..."Real marmalade and Earl Grey tea..."

  "We lost our Fatima..."

  "What a pity, she did such nice..."

  "It went too far..."

  "It's no use facing them with it, no use at all..."

  "Standing over someone with his throat cut, knife in hand, would swear by Allah they had nothing to do with it..."

  "It's the way their minds work."

  "What are you getting from your Indian?"

  "Six thirty..."

  "Not bad at all..."

  Unreality seeps from the heavy curtains, the glassed bookcases, the deep leather armchairs and couches, impermanent dwellings of provincial camp followers.

  "Is it true," she demands, "that Rome is withdrawing two divisions?"

  "Heard the news? The zone has been nationalized."

  Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

  It's all falling apart...in the hill stations and the copra plantations...the garrisons and outposts...mutters of rebellion everywhere like heat lightning...the far corners of the earth...talking about servants and shops, comparing money changers, exchanging recipes...a lot of it is what Kim calls the "double conversation" that seems quite ordinary on the surface but conveys a double meaning...

  "I'd hurry if I were you...The shopkeeper says he may not be able to get any more mint jelly before next year..."

  (Funds cut.)

  Greg turns brightly to the Count..."Oh that brown sugar you're so fond of...Completely sold out..."

  Le Comte turns paler, it's quite an accomplishment.

  "Can't one make do with the local molasses?" Kim puts in...

  Le Comte shoots him a who-asked-you-to-put-in-your-two-cents-worth look.

  "Is it true that you are withdrawing two divisions?" an outspoken Lesbian demands...

  The Governor hems and haws. He knows that Rome itself is menaced by barbarians moving down from the north. Troops are being pulled back from England, Germany, North Africa. He is making preparations to leave as unobtrusively and expeditiously as possible. One day the colonists will wake up to find there is no garrison left.

  "They've gone. Left during the night..."

  Time to pack up and get out if they're lucky. Back to Rome, London, Paris, where they will complain about the smaller quarters and the lack of servants...

  4

  Kim was outside of time, he could look down and see time spread out below h
im. There was the farm at Saint Albans, Jerry Ellisor and Rover, a squirrel caught in midair as it falls from the top of a persimmon tree, shot through the head...

  Old Man Bickford's son bent over by the 44 slug...the car jumping the curb and crashing through a shop window, glass fragments glinting in flickering streetlights—the bruised purple cheekbones and blue eyes of Judge Farris looking at him with cold distaste...only he wasn't there wasn't anywhere in any of the scenes just the empty place a low-pressure area, a dead spot he was pulling himself out of the picture and as he did so it was caving in behind him disintegrating with a nitrous smell of burning film...

  And now directly below him was a vast marketplace stretching to the sky in all directions...and Tony pointing..."It's the market, Kim...you can buy anything you want and pay with waiting...That's the coinage here...you want it, you got it...just look...weapons, drugs, boys of all shapes and sizes...It's all yours...Of course we want something in return, that's reasonable isn't it...?"

  Kim shrugged..."I can see the reason for it, yes, if that's what you mean..."

  Tony was moving away..."Well if you're going to be that way about it..." His voice petulant, distant...

  An Arab policeman stands in front of him. "Passport," he says in Arabic. Kim hears himself answer in the same language as if someone else is speaking. The policeman is examining his passport. He is carrying a cheap automatic in a button-down flap holster. 380, Kim decides. The policeman hands the passport back and moves on. Kim finds that he can think in the grafted language, noting the cop's dead wooden suspicious face. It is like using an unknown instrument but he is quickly getting the feel of it.

  Returning to the Ganymede Hotel, Kim finds the building much larger than he remembers, the gardens a vast area of trees and pools and streams, arbors and summer houses. The town itself is now a huge marketplace. The weapons section alone occupies an area the size of Lower Manhattan.

  Guns, bows, knives, boomerangs, bolos, blowguns, slings, clubs, whips, spears, gas guns, electric sticks and canes...crossbows and elastic rubber bows...tiny revolvers shooting poison darts...tiger-snake venom, venom of the blue-ringed octopus and the sea wasp, smoothbore-shot pistols loaded with cyanide crystals and little metal barbs, devices that send sharp metal disks spinning like hornets...

  The Street of Knives: lined with stalls and forges...smell of hot iron and ozone...the principle of the spring knife, one of Kim's early patents, has flowered and proliferated...the handle is a spring usually covered with leather or rubber. When the knife is used to slash, the spring does the work...documentary shows the spring weapon in action. Here is a man with a samurai sword and a heavy spring handle. He demonstrates how he can lop off" three heads, the resistance of each neck lending impetus to the blade.

  "Hand move. Knife catch up."

  When the spring knife is used for a thrust, flesh compresses the spring, goosing the blade in...knives that fly out of the handle...swords thin and flexible as a whip...a cane with a knife that flies out propelled by a light powder charge and is then retracted by a spring, rather like a light air hammer with a double-edged knife as the cutting tool...And the dreaded Steel Flower, a dart tipped with little slivers of razor-sharp flexible steel. These elastic silvers, compressed by flesh, open up inside to form a barb that makes withdrawal extremely difficult.

  The Street of Pictures: A narrow winding cobblestone street of shabby studios and massage parlors littered with film garbage...nitrous reek of darkrooms and the ozone smell of flashbulbs hangs in the air like a yellow haze...photo displays in dusty windows...tinted erotic photos...Tom Flash Photo Studio.

  Whenever Kim goes to the market he accumulates a safari...a riot of perfumes...It's the unguent, soap and perfume section...Kim opens a jar and sniffs...My God, it's gamy...smell of young hard-ons, rectal mucus (one of Kim's made-up words), moldy jockstraps, and gym shoes...He pays the outrageous price absently. He has plenty of money. ,

  He buys some insect phenergens from a reliable dealer. One whiff brings anyone off three times in a row...quite a potent weapon actually and with regulated dosage a decided adjunct...proud beauties need it special...A gamut of smell weapons...scents designed to attract some noxious creature...a scorpion, a centipede, a venomous snake, or disease vectors like the tsetse fly or the kissing bug that lives on armadillos and conveys the horrible earth-eating disease...Many smell weapons work on the "sweet cover" principle, luring one into a good deep breath like rotten blood a heavy sweet odor so you wonder what flower could smell that sweet and suck in a lungful doubles you over like a kick to the crotch...gardenia and carrion...roses and baby shit...sea air and gangrene...smelling salts and asparagus jism...the smell of modern evil is said to resemble burnt plastic and rotten oranges...only different...so many smells you can't quite classify because you never quite smelled them before and you have to approximate. And the most dreaded of all smell weapons—Lady Macbeth...the smell that never leaves, you can wash and scrub till your skin is raw, douse on the lotions and perfumes and deodorants but you can never wash away Lady Macbeth...You go into a restaurant, the patrons double over retching...you can't go into a shop or a subway or even walk the streets...(We are happy to report that the use of Lady Macbeth has been outlawed by all civilized intelligence agencies.)

  Kim sees a witch's cradle and knows he is in the occult section...a crystal ball big as a pumpkin, exquisite opal and moonstone balls...juju dolls, powders and philters...witch knives and robes and altars and incense and cords and grimoires...depressing junk for the most part.

  Kim is interested in devices for concentrating and directing magical intent, could mean the difference between a BB cap and a 30-30...Consider the Australian practice of putting the bone on your enemy. You get a hollow human bone...(the more horrible the death was, the better the bone) so you fill your bone with all kind of shit, jump out at your enemy and put the bone on him...

  "Got plenty good bones, Meester..."

  "Hundred-Cut bones?" (The bone donor died from the Hundred Cuts, an old Chinese piece of folklore.)

  "Rabies bone?"

  "Flayed man bone?"

  What Kim has in mind is a device for attracting and concentrating the death wish just as his night sight is supposed to concentrate light...

  "Oh I must have that"...a headband of black mamba skin with a huge black opal just where the third eye is supposed to be.

  And clothes...every period, every material...electric eel skin, gila monster, gorilla-skin overcoat, centipede-skin cape...clothes designed to conceal and activate recorders and cameras...all manner of trick pockets for drugs and weapons and petties...a krait, a coral snake, a dozen black widows in a tube to be released in Mrs. Worldly's John...metal jockstraps, kneecaps, elbow spikes...sheathes and holsters from head to foot...shoes with spring soles, with cushions of air, oil, mercury...knives that spring out from the toe when you press down on the heel...a razor-sharp half-moon of steel that slides forward and locks...gloves with retractable claws...gloves with lead in the fingertips for the deadly spear hand to the throat, with lead along the sides for a karate chop...gloves with the palm side laced with razor-sharp down-curving blades...gloves with a rubber cup in the palm that traps a cushion of air for a slap to the trigeminal nerve, also useful for rupturing eardrums...come-along gloves with a palmful of fishhooks...electric gloves lined with rubber...

  Kim adds to his wardrobe, packing purchases into a Gladstone bag of gila monster skin and toddles along to the Biologic and Chemical section, which has the aspect of a vast abandoned medical and research complex...goats bleat in Emergency, Arab families have moved into the wards, cooking in beakers, surgical trays, and bedpans. Children push each other up and down the halls in crash carts and stretchers. One electrical genius has rigged the Intensive Care Unit into pinball machines. Kim stops to chat with a tattooed Maori boy who has a vial of blue octopus venom. Kim buys it for his twenty-shot dart revolver (neurotoxic...unconscious in three minutes, dead in an hour). He draws his smoothbore 44 loa
ded with number-six shot and decapitates a cobra that has crawled out of a rusty instrument cabinet.

  There's the Mushroom Man with his black-market plutonium talking to a CIA man who works for Qaddafi. There is a selection of disease cultures, some of which purport to contain active cultures of diseases thought to be extinct.

  Kim runs into Cash Tod, a biologic broker.

  "Olafson says he's got the Sweats. Here are his charts."

  Kim leafs through the papers..."Monkeys, is it? Monkey business too, if I know Olafson."

  The Sweats was a plague that swept through England in the fourteenth century. There is an account in The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nash. In a few hours the victims sweat away all their bodily fluids and are reduced to desiccated mummies. The disease is spread by the bodily fluids and excretions exuded or propelled from the victim as body temperatures soar to 120°, turning entrails into a caldron. In some cases steaming excrement and urine spurts from the patient to a distance of thirty feet, spattering unfortunate relatives, physicians, and curiosity seekers. A singer exploded on stage, favoring the furthest balconies with his lethal exudations.

  The end product, a desiccated mummy, is noninfectious, and brutal death-wagon drivers pound the mummies down to a yellow dust for ease of transport and handling.

  "He's working on the Freezies now...accelerated hypothermia...victims freeze to death with blankets piled on them..."

  "Tampering with the thermostat. Well it's more a blueprint than a tested product...of course we don't want to be associated with any human experiments..."

  "One looks away..."

  "What a beautiful sunset..."

  "And here is the Rots...First symptom is a reek of carrion...it's the smell that spreads it. Masks are ineffective. You smell the Rots with your whole body."