“Be sure he reads the card.”
“Of course.”
Again they bowed, and Cronkite descended into sundrenched nirvana.
Guz waited a moment and then, sighing heavily, he picked up a carton in each hand and trundled wearily across the foyer toward the throne room, his shoulders hunched despondently. He paused momentarily before a full-length mirror and eyed himself, feeling ridiculous. “How did it go in Boston, Willie?” he intoned hollowly at his reflection and, after waiting a decent interval for the possibility of reply, lumbered onward.
* * *
The throne room of King Fawz was more massive than an aircraft hangar, more opulent than a blood-red ruby set in the navel of an Eastern queen. And it was lined, at the moment, with miniature railroad tracks. Chuffa-chuffa-chuffa: fifty solid-gold cars clickety-clacked past tiny trestles, palm trees, camels, oil trucks, crossings and signals, while high on a throne encrusted with emeralds and pearls and things that glitter burbled the ancient, legendary Warrior-King, gleefully manipulating an Aleppo-silver switch box. The black patch over his left eye was a dark cave in a jagged, rose-red sandstone cliff of Petra, and his right eye beamed voomishly as the engine puffed steam and emitted an eerie whistle. Uneasy lay what head? He cackled and applauded, thinking spears at unseen enemies who he imagined coveted his plaything. The Imam of Doom, for example.
The engine stopped.
The King scowled.
The King pushed buttons.
Pulled levers.
Pounded the switch box with a gnarled and mighty fist.
“Guz!” roared Fawz in a rage. “Guz!”
Below him, hunching poised at the base of wide steps leading up to the throne, sat an electric golf cart equipped with a Ferrari engine. Fawz leaped into it, sibbing, and falconed toward his trains, his gold-and-red robes billowing wraithlike behind him.
“Guz!”
He irrupted upon the offending engine, which quivered faintly and made an abortive effort to change color and blend into its surroundings. Fawz ripped it from its couplings and dashed it against the floor, maiming it severely. Then he raced along the track line in an orgy of petulant destruction, sedulously ripping up freight cars and trestles. He craved to scream “Banzai!” but was unfortunately ignorant of the expression, and had just laid violent hands upon a pearl-studded milk truck when Guz, toting the luggage, materialized beside him. The King’s arched throwing arm faltered in midair as the aide’s accusing stare locked with his own.
“Your Majesty,” began Guz, “I was——”
“Spik English!” roared the King, for only thus could he learn to communicate with oil-company Vice-Presidents.
“I was speaking English,” replied Guz with sang-froid, and the King resolved to deal with his insolence at a more convenient moment. “Choo-choo no goot!” he raved, and hurled the milk truck against a marble pillar, where it gushed forth its creamy soul in despondent tricklings.
Guz eyed him in the manner of a clerk at Tiffany’s. “Your Majesty—it is the best: pure gold!”
Fawz replied gaily by tearing up a length of track and biting it in half. “Pure junk!” he bellowed, spitting out gold dust. “Buy new! All new! Platinum!” And leaning an angry foot against the cart’s accelerator pedal, he zoomed across the throne room, droning.
Guz raced after him with the luggage. “Your Majesty! Your——!”
But His Serene Majesty had already burst out into a corridor at full tilt, careening erratically along its infinite length as giant Nubians holding electric fans dodged for their lives. Plaster flew as the King banged into walls, and it was for this reason that the palace, while splendiferous, was slightly chipped. On, on zoomed the King, on, out, bouncing down palace steps, his robes flying, his jaw set in a pout militant.
“Your Majestyyyyyy!” hunted the cry of Guz through endless corridors, far away, the slap, slap of his feet against tile muted through forgotten space, as onward sped the golf cart, onward toward the football field where Fawz hoped the joy of novelty would heal the deep psychic wound so cruelly gouged by the nasty choo-choo. Nasty, nasty choo-choo! He tried desperately not to think about it.
Guz, panting, raced down the palace steps, past the college of Koranic studies, beyond the mosque, and then halted, his heart pounding, by the royal garage. It housed eight Rolls-Royces in various pastel colors, one for each day of the week. Except Sunday. The King never drove on Sunday. He preferred to ride camel-back, which was hard work, solely in order to spite the shade of Pope Urban II. It was a centuries-old tradition in his family and not to be mocked.
Guz sighed, seeing that he would never overtake the King, then tossed the luggage into Monday’s car, which was blue, and drove toward the practice field.
Fawz rolled up to a side line, clucking with sulky satisfaction as Arab workmen daubed white lime onto the sod, laying out the yard lines. Ever since Ammud’s glowing letter, the one in which he had announced that he was “a certainty” to make the Notre Dame varsity, the doting old madman had neglected all but his train set in order to con every available scrap of information about the game of football. He had searched the literature more ardently than a philologist, and had screened football movies endlessly. He had seen Knute Rockne twenty-seven times, not counting the screenings that he had slept through.
Ammud’s last letter had announced that he would be “home very quick for small vacation.” It had puzzled Fawz that there should be “vacation” in midseason, but Guz had assured him that Catholic schools were forever declaring holidays and maintained an inexhaustible calendar of saints for that very purpose. So Fawz had a stately practice field decreed, for he thought it more practical than a dome—or “whatever.”
How he loved Ammud! Oh, yes, he had many other sons—thirty-three, to be exact; or was it thirty-four?— but only Ammud commanded his whole heart. Why, those rebels would have killed him had not Ammud taken the bullet meant … Fawz recollected the incident with bliss, then clucked happily as he conjured Ammud’s second home-coming surprise—the coonskin coat that he had ordered cut to the exact style of the one worn by Jack Oakie in Varsity Rag.
“Touchdown! Foos!” he rorfled quietly but with spirit as he surveyed the field in a pigskin daze, dreaming up appropriate tortures for workmen whose lines turned out crooked.
Guz had come up behind him quietly. Pausing to catch his breath, he overheard the King’s senile maunderings. In spite of himself, a wave of fondness drenched his beard, and over his face came the expression of a highly intelligent sheep dog who has had thirty years’ service with retarded sheep. He remembered Fawz at nineteen, mounted on wind and freshly ascendant to the throne, his father slain by an assassin’s knife. Powerful neighbors had bullied and threatened, offering the boy life in exchange for his crown, and mobs of agitators had roamed the streets crying, “Death to the kid!” But young Fawz never flinched. And with the will of a moontide, leading charge after charge, he sent the land-grabbers reeling back across their borders, swearing and crying for a surgeon. Guz remembered. And he forgave the old man the wild whims of his dotage. But at times it was trying, very trying.
“Your Majesty,” he essayed again, moving forward, but in a wink old Fawz had whipped a tiny transistor radio from the secrets of his robe and a blast of Arabic music sent Guz staggering backward.
“Hah!” exulted Fawz, brandishing the radio proudly. “Japanese!”
The music stopped and the voice of an Arabic announcer gabbled forth, extolling the exquisite merits of Mother Mohammed’s Candied Tusks. Fawz irritably switched stations, then moosed forward among the tackling dummies. He pinched the fabric of one of them and shot a quizzical glance at his aide.
“Gold lamé,” intoned Guz.
The King grunted approval. Then he gazed oddly at the goal posts and lurched over to the nearest, poking a hand experimentally at its base. He pulled away a splinter and threw a wild, baffled look at Guz. “Wood!” he croaked with outrage.
“It’s the custom.”
“Custom!”
“Custom, yes, custom!”
“Hah!”
“Indeed!” Guz was thoroughly irritated.
The King pouted stubbornly. “Not pretty,” he growled.
“They’re exactly like the goal posts at Notre Dame!” bawled Guz and “Shurrup!” bellowed the King, his fit coming upon him. “Make all platinum!”
“But the expense!” persisted Guz, stamping his foot in frustration, and from the spot gushed a small geyser of oil, splattering and soaking him with wet, black arrogance and irrefutable rebuttal. Fawz, cackling triumphantly, spurted away in a bemused cloud of sand and wild Arab rhythms. He was King and he knew it.
“Your Majestyyyyyyy!” bawled Guz, not budging from the spot. And the King, who knew the breaking point of his minions, halted and waited for him to catch up.
Guz came puffing. “Your Maj-esty!” bleated the oil-dripping djinn as he proffered the luggage cartons. “These are birthday presents—gifts from the American Vice-President!”
The King’s face ignited like a flaming skewer of shish-kebab.
“Present?!” he glipped.
“Present!”
“Hah-hah-hoooo!” And ignoring the oil slick on the packing, Fawz rapaciously hauled one of the cartons into the golf cart and ripped away cardboard in a frenzy of anticipation. Ahhhhh! It was beige and grainy and handsome and keen and——
The King’s good eye probed closer to the leather grip. He fingered the tag. He read it. And off-white with horror (for he could never quite manage white) he hurled the bag away from him, cutting loose a bellow of rage that carried clear across the Red Sea. His enemies heard it and quaked.
Chapter Eight
CHRIS BRIGHT glared at her like Tamerlane finding his wife in bed with Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora. “But I think it’s great!” he yelped, pounding fist against desk top.
“And I think it’s disgusting!” she rasped, pounding him in the id.
Blue spirals of hate curled up from the editor’s pipe and snaked around Jenny Ericson’s neck. “And how did you win the Pulitzer?” he snorted. “With take-outs on revival meetings?”
“One almost did,” she rebutted calmly. She was thinking of her picture story on El Fego Gantre, the South American revivalist who had created a diplomatic furor when Walt Disney refused him permission to pitch his tent in Disneyland. Mr. Gantre had been especially outraged when told that there were “no atheists on the submarine ride.”
“Jenny,” pleaded Bright, “this is a slice of life!”
“It’s a slice of Henry Miller.”
Tame stuff, thought the orange sofa against the wall, for it had once belonged to a Hollywood producer and had seen it all.
“Look,” argued Bright: “in Samoa the broads go nekkid from the waist up——”
“Filthy!”
“—and in Arabia the King’s got a harem! So what?!”
“The word harem,” she replied icily, “is a euphemism for socialized prostitution. The concept is vulgar, odious, and repulsive.”
“No more so than your underwear.”
Jenny Ericson flushed a shade of red unheard of even among lipsticks. “I don’t have to take this!” she seethed.
“No,” firmed Bright’s mouth; “but you will take this assignment!”
“I—will—not!” She rose like Circe poised for metamorphic triumph at a banquet table glutted with drunken Greeks.
Give her the sack, give her the sack! thought the brown chair. But Bright merely glared and banged his pipe empty against an ash tray decaled with a sister magazine’s current “Man of the Year,” an automotive genius named Kitsel Ponzi who had swept the market with a compact car made entirely of chrome, and which he had been shrewd enough not to call a “Kitsel.”
Bright felt impotent against Jenny’s glacial brittleness. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Sure.” He swiveled his back to her and stared down at the ice skaters in the plaza below. Then suddenly he was Lucifer breathing upon the face of fetid waters, hopeful of a rival creation. “You’re right,” he cried crisply. “Beat it!”
Jenny smirked contemptuously and flounced to the door. “Sending a ‘Les’ on a harem take-out,” she heard Bright thinking aloud; “I must be senile.”
Her hand froze on the doorknob. “You son of a bitch!” she said quietly.
“Yeah, senile,” repeated Bright to the window.
“You son of a bitch!” shrilled Jenny, whirling around. “You take that back!”
Bright swiveled around lazily, an automated Buddha in Macy’s window. “Sure, Iceberg, sure,” he soothed. Then he flicked on his intercom and quietly asked for Dimitri Strobe. “Nice boy, Dimitri,” he grinned up at Jenny; “takes pictures like you used to.”
“Like I——!” She stormed up to Bright’s desk. “That inflated wombat couldn’t sell baby pictures door-to-door!”
“At least he hasn’t gone stale.”
“Stale!” she yelped.
“Stale,” he affirmed, stuffing fresh tobacco into his pipe. “Dimitri will give us a fresh angle.”
She knew what she was doing. She knew it was a child’s trick and that she was thinking like a child and she didn’t care and the Goldfarb story was rotten and she hadn’t turned a good trick since the Overreach story had been “B”-filed and dammit anyway!
“Chris,” she sleeted, “I’ve changed my mind.”
By concentrating on his most recent golf score Bright was barely able to overmaster the triumphant gloat struggling for a handhold on his lips. He didn’t dare utter for fear he would cackle.
“But I do it my way!” demanded Jenny.
“Mother knows best.”
“Mother should have kicked your butt as a child!”
“My sin is great.”
“Hah!” It could have meant anything.
Jenny stamped to the door and whirled in a green gas of acrimony. “Fresh angle!” she sneered. “I’ll give you an angle even Euclid never heard of!”
Bright knew better than to say, “Buongiorno,” and settled for a smug look as the door slammed.
Good riddance! thought the brown chair. The sofa began reminiscing about the casting of Island of Lost Women, but was quickly quelled by a reproving look from a hanging portrait of Clare Boothe Luce.
Bright swiveled around contemplatively for another scan of the ice skaters. He hated the freaking show-offs with all his soul and would sit by the window for hours hoping that one of them would fall ass over teakettle while executing a figure eight.
That “Lesbian” shot had done it, he reflected; yeah, that had done it. Not that it was true; Iceberg Ericson knew neither Lesbos nor its namesakes; woman delighted her not. But then neither did man. And that was her trouble. Bright knew about the five-o’clock sessions, four times a week, at the swank Park Avenue address. She reeked of the couch; he could smell the leather on her. And he didn’t like it. Too often he’d seen the creative spark sucked up and extinguished by an analyst’s tape recorder. What Jenny needed, he reasoned, was what she most feared. And this assignment might be the next best thing: get close to the stuff.
He suddenly leaned forward, beaming like Dracula in a blood bank: one of the flashier skaters had taken a spill.
Bright chuckled with childlike glee and then leaned back, refreshed. He wondered what Jenny’s “angle” might be.
Chapter Nine
THE CHIEF of the U. S. State Department’s Middle East Division heard angry voices pummeling the walls of the President’s office. He strained lobes to overhear, fixing his eyes on the Picasso behind the receptionist’s desk.
“Mr. Whitepaper?”
Miles Whitepaper looked down at the receptionist, nodding. Prune-eyed and elderly, she resembled the first fruit of Adam’s sin grown old. Upon entering the White House, the new First Lady had fired every pretty girl in it and replaced them with withered crones. Even scullery drudges had not been exempt.
“The President will see you immediately. Go right in.�
�
Whitepaper nodded again, ramrodded past the Marine guard at the door, and oozed in quietly. Then he leaned against the door, striving for unobtrusiveness, as the President rocked furiously in his chair. “What are you planning to send him next?” the Chief Executive was thundering, “a recording of the Highland Grenadier Band playing ‘Gawd Strike the Sultan Blind’? Hah?! Is that what you’d like to send him?!”
“It was an honest mistake,” bleated the U. S. Vice-President abjectly.
“Cuba was an honest mistake!” yipped the President. “The Indian Mutiny was an honest mistake! Can’t I have one intelligent crook on my staff?!”
“But——”
“I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it!”
A fourth man in the room cleared his throat significantly, nodding toward Whitepaper. The President turned his head and pinned him with a wild look. “Well, come on, Whitepaper, come in or get out!”
“Yes, sir.” The Middle East expert hustled over to him.
The President rocked now with a slow, appraising rhythm. “So you’re the new boy,” he muttered.
“Yes, sir,” intoned Whitepaper fatuously; “I’m the new boy.”
The President grunted noncommittally, his eyes still fierce. He motioned for introductions. “Miles Whitepaper—the Vice-President [they shook hands]; he was elected, there’s not a damn thing we can do about him.” He indicated the other man. “Heinous Overreach [they shook hands]—at the moment head of CIA.”
Overreach retreated into his new-found tower of strength and austerity, flicking a sly, pathetic glance at his wrist watch.
“A great honor,” murmured Whitepaper.
“Maybe you won’t think so when I’ve told you what this idiot has done!” snapped the President.
“Who, sir?” queried Whitepaper, and Overreach bristled. Another little snot? he wondered.
“This idiot,” seethed the President, indicating the Vice-President. “For months,” he explained, his voice edged in black, “for months we’ve been negotiating the lease for an Air Force base in Fawzi Arabia; an air base vital to the security of the free world! And at the crucial moment, at the most delicate moment, this—this donkey here sends King Fawz a birthday gift! And what kind of a gift? Luggage! Matching luggage! Matching pigskin luggage!” He leaned back in his chair, arms folded, while Whitepaper was still marveling at his flawless syntax. “Now tell me, Whitepaper—why wouldn’t any intelligent statesman [he threw a blue look at the Vice-President] send a Moslem King a gift of pigskin luggage?!”
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home Page 5
