MASH 06 MASH Goes to Morocco

by Richard Hooker

  “No kidding? Broads and all?”

  “Broads and all,” Seymour said. “We can’t keep it, though. It leaves the moment we get off. I did my best, but he rented it out to somebody else and I couldn’t get him to break the deal.”

  “Then how the hell are we supposed to get back?”

  “Trust me, baby. Would I leave you deserted somewhere in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Go on, Seymour,” Don Rhotten said.

  “So you turn at the top of the stairs, take the pipe out of your mouth and wave good-bye to the people.”

  “That damn pipe again! That stupid thing hurts my mouth, and it’s already cracked three sets of caps.”

  “But it fits, baby, you know that. The image. If Cronkite didn’t have his pipe, he’d probably still be covering the stock market for some lousy wire service.”

  “O.K., so you got thirty, forty seconds of film of me. What do you do with it?”

  “We run it tonight on the eleven o’clock ‘News Round up’; we run it on one of the late-hour talk shows; we run it again first thing in the morning on ‘Top o’ the Morning News’; and we run it again tomorrow night, on your regular spot.”

  “That’s only 40 seconds out of 420,” Rhotten said. “What about the rest?”

  “We run that film clip of you getting that Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Harvard.”

  “Sounds all right,” Rhotten said.

  “And then,” Seymour said, “a kicker like no other kicker in the history of television journalism!”

  “What’s that?”

  “For two days, we keep building suspense. We got the satellite for tomorrow. We show you getting off the airplane in Abzug, and into the Jeep …”

  “What Jeep? You haven’t forgotten, Seymour, what happened the last time you put me in a Jeep?”

  “You got sick to your stomach,” Seymour said.

  “That, too,” Rhotten said. “What I was talking about was cracking my caps. I forget where I was at the time.”

  “Israel, Don. The Jeep disaster was in Israel,” the thin one said.

  “Well, then, you remember how much trouble it was getting caps in Israel. What are we going to do in … where is it?”

  “Abzug, Don,” the thin one said.

  “In Abzug, if I crack my caps?”

  “We’re carrying three extra sets of caps, sweetie,” Seymour said. “And you only have to ride in the Jeep about fifty yards. All flat and level. No problem.”

  “So what’s the kicker?”

  “We fill the rest of the two minutes with color. Guys on camels, women in masks, that shtik. All you have to do is a voice-over. What we’re establishing is that Don Rhotten is on the scene in this far-off place, getting to the bottom of the story the State Department and the Pentagon deny. Maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have some guy who just got caught stealing for the third time. That’ll knock Smith out of the ratings!”

  “But what’s the kicker?”

  “The third day, via satellite, Don Rhotten says that his personal reporting, on the scene, has convinced him that his highly placed sources misled him. The United States is not secretly aiding the Abzugians.”

  “Who were they supposed to be fighting, anyway?” Rhotten asked. “The Israelis or the Arabs?”

  “Both,” the thin one said. “They’re at war with both sides.”

  “I’m supposed to say I was misled? How does that fit in with my image?”

  “Honesty!” Seymour said. “You’re an honest TV journalist, willing to publicly admit you made a mistake. It’ll be a first! It has never happened before. Durwood checked that out.”

  “And you absolutely guarantee that all I have to do is ride fifty yards in a Jeep, then in a limousine to the hotel, and don’t have to leave the hotel?”

  “You got my word of honor,” Seymour said.

  “To hell with your word of honor. I want it in writing,” Don Rhotten said.

  “You got it, baby,” Seymour said. “Durwood, get Don his rug and the hat with the big brim!”

  “Right, Chief,” Durwood said.

  “And then call downstairs and tell them to crank up the crowd of spontaneous fans. We’ll be down just as soon as we get Don-Baby into his caps and rug!”

  Don Rhotten was ready in just a few minutes. He rather liked his reflection in the mirror: the wide-brimmed hat, pinned up on one side, gave him a rather dashing appearance; the bush jacket added just the right flair.

  Seymour handed him a metal box, which was about a foot long and eight inches square, with a strap and microphone dangling from it.

  “What is this ugly thing?” Rhotten asked, examining it suspiciously.

  “It’s a tape recorder, Don-Baby. You push the button and talk into it. It records your voice.”

  “No fooling?”

  “Yeah, the real reporters use them all the time,” Durwood said. “They even work sometimes.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Rhotten ‘ said. “You don’t even have to plug it in, huh? Where’s the prompter? How am I going to know what to say?”

  “Durwood’ll hold up dummy boards, Don. No problem.”

  “I don’t like this business of mingling with the fans,” Don Rhotten said.

  “It’s only a couple of seconds, Don-Baby,” Seymour said. “And then we’re inside the station wagon and off to the broads on the plane.” He paused. “One thing, Don. You’re supposed to hang that tape recorder from your shoulder, not carry it in both hands like that.”

  “Gotcha,” Don Rhotten said, and flashed his famous smile. Then they all left the dressing room.

  Chapter Eight

  “Oh, God!’’ sang Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, addressing not the Deity but the Muse. “With what ecstasy you have set my soul afire!’’

  He was answered with a chorus of feminine sighs, which Jacques Offenbach had not written into the opera.

  “Like a divine concert, your voice has penetrated me!” Boris went on. Two large hotel keys came flying stageward through the air and a rather insubstantial pair of panties floated gently down from the balcony of the Paris Opera to have their brief moment of glory in the beam of the spotlight which followed the singer around the stage.

  “With a gentle and burning fire my being is consumed!” The lady beside Miss Penelope Quattlebaum gave a small moan, frothed slightly at the lips and slipped out of her seat as if it had been greased. Penelope Quattlebaum looked at her with mingled sympathy, horror and fascination as the lady’s husband, giving every evidence that he was quite accustomed to his wife slipping into a coma in the Opera, hauled her back into the chair, held her in place with his arm and straightened, more or less, her hat on her head.

  “Your glances into mine have poured their flame like radiant stars,” the huge, bearded singer sang. He paused for breath, and was answered by another feminine chorus of sighs and terms of endearment.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it?” Miss Penelope Quattlebaum’s escort, Mr. T. Dudley Dulaney, III whispered. Mr. Dulaney was, like Miss Penelope Quattlebaum, a member of the Foreign Service Corps of the United States of America. He was Deputy Fourth-Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Embassy, Paris, and among his manifold other duties was the custody of other junior Foreign Service Officers passing through Paris en route to or from other diplomatic posts.

  Normally, what the others got was a check of their shot records, a hotel reservation and a copy of Paris Tonight! (published for free distribution by the Greater Paris Hotelier & Innkeepers Association). T. Dudley had made an exception in Miss Penelope Quattlebaum’s case. He had bought her lunch and dinner, and had high hopes of being able to buy her breakfast. The hotel room in which she was billeted was a three-room suite in the Crillon Hotel, next door to the Embassy. It was normally reserved for Foreign Service Officers in the grade of Minister and above, junketing Congressmen and others high in the politico-bureaucratic hierarchy, for whom no expenditure of the taxpayers’ money could be considered sufficient compensation fo
r having to labor on alien shores.

  As a Foreign Service Officer, Grade Seven, Penelope Quattlebaum was nominally entitled to somewhat less grandiose accommodations, such as “the businessman’s special” at the Paris Hilton (a nine-by-twelve cubicle furnished with a single bed, a chair, a dresser and a three-foot-square shower). But Miss Quattlebaum was a rather unusual Foreign Service Officer. Not only was she a freshly commissioned member of the Corps, who needed a little sympathetic encouragement to get her over the shock of her first days outside the home country, but she was a female member of the Corps; and she was one, moreover, in the quaint patois of the Marine Guard who had brought her to Mr. Dulaney’s office, who was “stacked like a brick outhouse.”

  “Does this always happen?” Penelope whispered back as Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov drew breath into his lungs, which sent buttons popping off his costume.

  “He seems to have a strange effect on French women,” T. Dudley Dulaney whispered.

  “Ssssssssssssh! You cultureless American barbarian!” the lady to Mr. Dulaney’s right said, jabbing him painfully in the ribs with her umbrella. “The Maestro is singing! …”

  “And oh, my be-lov-ed Muse,” Boris sang, “I feel the passing of your perfume-ed breath over my lips and over my eyes!”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Miss Penelope Quattlebaum whispered, spreading her perfumed breath over his ear. “I mean, what is he, besides three hundred pounds of perfectly proportioned male animal with teeth like pearls and the voice of a god?”

  “Precisely,” T. Dudley Dulaney agreed, and got himself stabbed with the umbrella tip again.

  “Be-love-ed Muse,” Boris sang, “I am yours!”

  The response from the feminine portion of the audience was now mingled with ecstasy and sorrow. An animallike howl went up; there was another shower of hotel-room keys and intimate female apparel floating through the air, followed almost immediately by the sound of uncontrolled sobbing from those who, knowing the opera, were aware that Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov had just sung his last line.

  There were a few more lines of the opera, but so far as the feminine fans were concerned, it was over. The applause began before Nicklausse could tell Stella that Hoffmann was dead drunk. The audience didn’t want to hear that anyway.

  Suddenly, one deep masculine voice, carrying over the wailing soprano, filled the house.

  Penelope Quattlebaum was sure that her ears were playing a trick on her. She looked up behind her to the Diamond Circle and located the male who was shouting. He was in the box immediately beside the box of the President of the Republic, and he was an Arab in full robes. What he appeared to be shouting … but of course could not be shouting … was “Your mother wears army shoes!” over and over again.

  The curtains closed, and then immediately opened again. Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, who had sort of slumped into a chair after his last line, now rose and, with immense dignity, tinged with modesty, stepped to the footlights, smiled his dazzling smile, and bowed low. The applause and screaming rattled the chandeliers. He straightened. Something caught his eye. It was still another item of intimate feminine apparel, a pair of shocking-pink panties. He moved with an athlete’s quick grace across the stage and snatched them from the air as they fell.

  He held them in his right hand and bowed, and then rose and waved them again, over his head, as the audience went wild. This continued for a good thirty seconds; and then, with a gesture of graceful élan, he tossed the panties over his shoulder. He then raised both hands in front of him above his shoulder level and, smiling broadly, slowly lowered them. As the hands descended, so did the level of the roar of the crowd. By the time his hands reached the level of his waist, the only sound in the huge opera house was that of a man snoring somewhere in the fifth or sixth balcony. There was a sudden yelp of pain, and then all was silence.

  “My children,” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov said, his voice filling the house, “for tonight only, I am afraid that I will not be able to stand here for the customary half-hour acceptance of your compliments.”

  There was a groaning roar of disappointment.

  “I must take a plane to New York,” he went on. This time the groan reached deafening proportions, and here and there were cries of “A bas les Americains!”

  Boris raised his hands again and lowered them again, and again there was silence.

  “I will, of course, return,” he said. There was a roar of approval. He let it continue, even swell, and didn’t raise his hands for silence even when a quintet of ladies in the first balcony began to sing “The Marseillaise.” He watched with interest as a long line of page boys began to carry the traditional baskets of flowers on stage. He made a gesture with his hands, telling them to hurry up. The set was quickly filled with flowers, most of them long-stemmed roses. When the last basket had been deposited, he raised his hands for silence again.

  “We are gathered here tonight not only to hear my magnificent, unequaled voice,” he said modestly, “but also in the name of charity.”

  “A bas la charite!” a blue-haired lady on the distant side of fifty shouted suddenly from the Diamond Circle. “Je vous aime!” (A rough translation might be, “To heck with charity. I like you.”)

  Boris ignored the outburst. “The exact nature of the charity at the moment escapes me,” he said.

  The prompter hissed something from the prompter’s stand. Boris didn’t hear him precisely.

  “I am informed it is St. Imogene’s Home for Unwed Mothers,” he said.

  Madame le President, in the Presidential Box, stopped her husband in the very act of getting to his feet to correct and protest this defamation of his wife’s alma mater, St. Imogene’s School for Girls.

  “We must allow genius,” Madame le President said, “their little idiosyncrasies.”

  She told herself that this time there would be no ornately calligraphed expression of appreciation on stationery of the Elysée Palace. She would present her expressions of gratitude personally to the Maestro, just as soon as something called Monsieur le President away on the nation’s business. She knew just what she would wear: the low-cut dress with the high hem, the one M. le President forbade her to wear because he said it made her look like a hooker.

  “Which is,” Boris went on, “a noble institution long dear to my heart. With that in mind, my children, I am going to place these flowers on sale for ten francs a blossom, all proceeds to the fine unwed mothers at St. Imogene’s. Bear in mind, my children, that I, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, have personally sniffed each flower.”

  He bowed again and, still bowing, stepped away from the footlights. The curtain came down suddenly, and the house lights went up.

  “When are you going to Rome, darling?” Madame le President asked.

  “I’d thought we would go next week,” he said.

  “I have a headache,” Madame le President said. “You’ll have to go alone.”

  As hordes of women rushed to the stage, pushing and jostling, each jeweled hand waving the currency of the country, Miss Penelope Quattlebaum and Mr. T. Dudley Dulaney made their way to a side exit catering to the upper classes and those authorized to affix a CORPS DIPLOMATIQUE plaque above their license plate.

  It turned out to be another manifestation of Orwell’s theory that some equal pigs are more equal than others. There were a hundred cars in the V.I.P. area, each with a C.D. sign on the bumper. But there was only one Cadillac limousine with a C.D. sign along with the flag of the Sheikhdom of Hussid flying from its glistening fender.

  The Republic of France drew thirty-eight percent of its oil supplies from beneath the sands of the Hussid Desert. A dozen gendarmes, waving white batons and furiously blowing whistles, made sure that the Hussidic Cadillac was first at the exit.

  Miss Penelope Quattlebaum watched with fascination as more gendarmes formed a line, linking arms, to make a path between the Opera House exit and the open door of the Cadillac. She was sure that she was
about to see, up close, the President of the French Republic and his lady.

  She saw, instead, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, still in costume, holding a jeroboam of Dom Perignon ’54 in his hand. He ran quickly to the limousine and got inside.

  His voice, even more thrilling in close proximity, came from the car. Penelope Quattlebaum, a recent graduate of the State Department’s Crash Course in Arabic for New Diplomats, was thrilled that she understood what he was saying: “For Christ’s sake, Abdullah, get the damn lead out!”

  All eyes moved to the door of the Opera. With great, even regal, dignity, raising first one hand and then the other to the crowd, His Royal Highness Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug, followed by His Royal Highness Sheikh Hassan ad Kayam of Hussid, who held a bottle of slivovitz in each hand, emerged.

  “Mud in your eye,” Sheikh Abdullah solemnly intoned to those on the left, and then turned to those on the right. “Your mother wears army shoes,” he said benevolently.

  And then all three were in the back seat of the limousine. A siren howled; gendarmes furiously blew their whistles; the crowd parted. The limousine moved away from the Opera, past American Express, the Café de la Paix and, gathering speed, raced down Place de l’Opéra in the general direction of Orly Field.

  Penelope Quattlebaum let out an audible sigh. This was what she dreamed a life as a diplomat in the service of her country would be. It was another world, from Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where she had spent the first seventeen years of her life, and from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where she had been educated at the Slippery Rock State Teachers College.

  It was a good omen. The first Arabs she had ever seen, except on television, were the nobility: men of education, culture and refinement who appreciated the opera. It was cruel and callous of her, she knew, but this was the life she wanted, not the life her parents wanted to give her. They meant well, of course; but the prospect of taking over the Quattlebaum Dairy Farm & Quarter Horse Ranch of Emmaus, Pennsylvania (she was the only Quattlebaum child) was stifling and unattractive to someone of her cultural and artistic hungers.