by John Sladek
Amy kept close watch on the building all through the afternoon while Grover worked at cracking the code. Without food or bladder relief he continued after dark, working by the map light. Just after sunset, he nudged her.
‘Eureka, Amy,’ he whispered. ‘You wouldn’t believe the length them cummunisks will go to. Looky here. The secret of their code is the number pi itself!
‘You know how I told you it stood for wheels within wheels—well, it means a lot more than that. Pi is the key to the whole cummunisk conspiracy!’
He handed her a sheet of paper on which he’d written out the first thirty places of pi. Underneath was his translation:
‘First I thought it was a very ordinary message,’ he said. ‘Whatever the rest meant, a ship called the Sea Nun was piping nodes of SOS for aid, probably somewhere near the Russky city of Odissa, on the Black Sea.
‘Then I decided the words themselves were code, PIPE = BRIAR = BUSH = H-SUB. NODE = NO‘D’ = ON ‘D’. SEA NUN = C. NUN = SISTER = RESIST. SOS = MAYDAY = MAY FIRST(The big Russky holiday), AID is obvious. ODISSA, that I left alone because it’s on the Black Sea, and Sea Nun confirms it. The last word was the toughest, SOAR could be ROSA. Together with the first word it could mean SUB ROSA or SECRET, but that wasn’t enough. It also seemed to mean flying. But when I thought about sub (submarine) rosa (red) and secrets, I realized it must mean rockets fired from H-powered subs, rockets of the Poseidon type.’
He held out the newly-constructed message.
H-SUB ON D.C. (But direct current or the capital?)
RESIST MAY FIRST
AID ODISSA RED SUB ROCKET.
‘So far, so good. Then I took a look at this: the cipher I had used.’
‘Posieduan R. Probably a Russky variation of Posiedon, with R for rocket. Now I was getting someplace. But I still wasn’t sure about the D.C. part. I began by retranslating the first five letters, P.O.S.I.E., like this:
‘In the Roman, or “perfect” alphabet, there is no J, so P is the 11th letter from the end and L is the 11th from the beginning. P is a reflection of L, a “new el”. That gave me the first word, NEWEL.
‘O is zero, nothing, the perfect void. Nothing can come from nothing, so I left it alone, as a word.
‘S being the third letter of our word, I naturally looked to see what words can be formed from S plus any two letters following it in the alphabet. The only three in order that make a word are STY. If you write STY like this, it becomes a rebus.’
He wrote:
‘That is, “S + wine’ ‘or swine (contained in sty). So the third word was PIG.
‘I is a speck, the first blemish on the void, the simplest pencil mark or spot. I decided these “Frenchmen” would use the French word for spot, TACHE.
‘E is the third of the diatonic C-major scale’s tones. It is also the fifth letter. Where there is a third and a fifth, there must be a fourth, and it is of course the position of E in the word TONES itself. So our fifth word is TONS.’
He excused himself from the car and went behind the willow tree for a moment. When he returned, he showed her this new ‘extrapolated’ message and its reversal:
NEWEL O PIG TACHE TONS
SNOT EH CAT GI POLE WEN
‘I wrote this,’ he said wearily, ’in the Pyramid form.’ Another sheet.
‘Removing the shape of the letter pi gives:
‘Since Pé is pi,’ he concluded, ‘even now our diameters erode! Spelling enters acrostic nuances under number systems. Our side already inserts documents of deception in Secret Service agents’ statements: “O + pen”: a rebus.’
Something peculiar in his tired smile led Amy to suspect that this little speech was itself an acrostic. Grover was having a little joke with her, the magnificent man!
‘If loud offers veer ever…’ she began, but he shushed her.
‘Listen, we can’t get the FBI just yet. If we use the phone on the corner, Pé will see us. If we go to fetch them, he’ll give us the slip. For now, I guess we’ll just have to pin him down and hope for the best.’
‘But couldn’t I stay here and watch him while you went to the FBI?’
He laid a hand on her arm. She felt dizzy. ‘I wouldn’t want to chance it, Amy. You’re too precious.’
Flight 974 from Minneapolis to New York was a peculiar assortment of citizens. At least twenty looked to the stewardess like women dressed up in men’s clothes—unwillingly, or so it seemed, for they spent the first hour after takeoff fiddling with belts and loosening ties, wiggling their shoulders with discomfort. They were going to some kind of convention, and they kept slapping each other on the back and kidding about ‘observing the conventions’ when they got there. Their passports said Male, and Marilyn wondered if they might not just be those ‘queer’ sorts of persons she’d heard so much about.
Then there was that man in the awful wrinkled dirty dinner jacket who kept asking her all kinds of technical questions about the plane—how much fuel it carried, how many miles to the gallon and so on—and finally there were two of the smallest nuns she had ever seen, and a strange veiled woman in black, apparently pregnant.
The two little nuns, midgets almost, sat in back, reading their miniature breviaries and fingering tiny rosaries—and looking apprehensive. Marilyn walked slowly back past all the men and asked if the sisters were feeling comfortable.
‘Oh yes, thank you,’ they piped. The younger one added, ‘My, it certainly is a long ways down.’
‘Yes, we’re at thirty thousand feet now—about six miles.’
‘As much as that!’
‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘I was a little frightened after the plane took off,’ the old one admitted. ‘So fast! And all the people down on the ground looked like little dolls!’
They certainly didn’t seem sensitive about their size, so Marilyn squatted by the seat and asked them the question she’d been turning over in her mind ever since takeoff.
‘Are you by any chance an Irish order, sisters?’
‘Oh my, no!’ The older one chuckled, wrinkling her little face like a fist. ‘We’re Little Sisters of the Amish.’
‘I used to work for a religious organization myself,’ said Marilyn. ‘The Billy Koch Crusade.’
‘A very good organization, and a very good man. I’m sure Mr Koch did a great deal of good work before his accident. Sister Mary Jane here just got back from one of our missions among the pygmies. I’m Sister Maia. All our missionary work is with the little folk.’
‘I’m Marilyn Temblor. If there’s anything you need, sisters…’
Seeing the unkempt man was signalling her frantically, she excused herself and went forward.
‘Ah, how much fuel is left now, please?’
‘Don’t you worry, sir. There’s plenty of fuel to get us to New York.’
‘Ah? Ahm.’ He sat back and looked more worried than before.
Next she stopped to see how the woman in the veil was getting along.
‘I hope you’re not expecting your baby real soon,’ she blurted out, and laughed nervously.
‘I’ll let you know,’ murmured the woman.
‘Would you like any milk or anything?’
The muffled voice gave some reply that sounded like ‘Ashes, ashes!’
‘Where’s Fouts?’ asked one of the women-men.
‘Now you know, that’s not a very interesting question,’ replied the one who kept turning around to give the dwarf nuns dirty looks.
‘Don’t listen to Mother Feinwelt. He’s all worked up because them midgets get to dress in nun’s habits and he can’t.’
‘Shut up, Gertrude. As a matter of fact, I told Fouts Friday at six instead of Friday at five. A little schadenfreudian slip there. Anyway, it’ll teach him a lesson.’
Marilyn went forward to fix the cocktails. A moment later there was a timid knock at the door of the stewardess compartment.
‘How far are we from Florida?’ asked the man in the w
rinkled dinner jacket. His breath stank of months of steady drinking, his fly was open and his cummerbund turned around sidewise.
‘I don’t really know, sir. Shall I ask the pilot?’
He showed tiny teeth and puffy pink gums in a smile. ‘Oh no, that won’t be necessary. You see, I have here…’ He groped in his oversize jacket pocket for a moment, ‘I have here this gun. So I’ll talk to the pilot myself, if you don’t mind. I want him to fly toward Florida—more specifically, toward Cuba.’
At that second, the woman in the veil let out a long scream and slid to the floor. Sister Mary Jane was there even before Marilyn. ‘Quickly!’ she said. ‘Boil some water!’
Twenty-Two
The riot began with an incident of a familiar type. A group of Negroes watching the White Shirt torchlight parade refused to ‘move on’ at a policeman’s order. The cop, a rookie named Joe Haarman, drew his gun and perhaps repeated the order. Among the group was a girl eleven years old…
If anyone expected an apology or promise of investigation by the police, they didn’t know Chief Wiggin. He went on TV that evening to say:
‘Haarman was just doing his job. We’re going to back him up all the way. You can’t go around asking every hoodlum his age before you shoot. A cop has to think fast in a situation like that. And don’t forget, men like Haarman are out there every night, risking their lives to protect you and yours.’
UP YOU AND YOURS, WIG signs appeared instantly in many windows all over the Negro district. Negro citizens’ groups started the long, tedious process of making official protests and trying to get the chief to say maybe Haarman had after all been hasty. Others preferred direct methods.
To stave off trouble, riot cops began unwarranted slum-to-slum searches for hidden caches of weapons.
The Justice Department is worried. Five hundred Federal marshals are called on duty and issued with gas masks, Mace, riot guns, side-arms and clubs. The Attorney General addresses them:
‘I want to make this clear—your mission is not to aggravate violence, but to quell it. Should any disturbances break out, they are to be handled as peacefully and diplomatically as possible. I don’t want to see a lot of pictures in the papers tomorrow of kids with bleeding heads, pregnant women being dragged by the feet, and so on. Is that clear?’
‘Yeah, we got it, sir. No pictures.’ Winks. Smack of weighted club on palm. ‘You leave everything to us, sir.’
Cardinal James Homer, whom the papers describe as ‘flinty’, ‘an outspoken conservative’, is giving a sermon at the dedication of a new Knights of Columbus chapel, a slick new building in the midst of the ghetto.
‘Dangerous radicals and shiftless degenerates need to be taught a lesson. The trouble with most of our lawmen is they just don’t shoot to kill!’
The doors burst open and several hundred Black Nationalists, White Shirts, cops and snarling dogs all swarm in and chase each other around the sanctuary. Marshals close in outside, smash out the new stained-glass windows of SS. Christopher and Filomena and lob in teargas.
‘O Jesus!’ says one cop, seeing where he is. ‘O Jesus! The Mafia ain’t gonna like this…’
One story spreads that Haarman is a Catholic, another that he is a Jew. White Shirts at the convention hall hear that a black cop killed a little white girl who refused to submit to him. Catholics hear that Masons have murdered the cardinal.
A dozen night-rider Klansmen in full hooded regalia are packed into a hotted-up old Merc tearing down the Southwest Freeway on their way to the White Shirt rally.
‘How many notches you got on that old shotgun, Billy Bee?’
‘Well, I don’t rightly recolleck…lessee…this one don’t count, cause after we hanged and burned and shot the son bitch, he up and ran off…what’s that burnin’ yonder?’
‘Git off my eyehole so’s I can see. Hot damn! Looks like the convention hall itself!’
A clever White Shirt has set their own convention hall on fire to guarantee the sympathy of many potential voters (the convention, and choosing a candidate, are mere formalities anyway). The White Shirts come charging out, armed with guns, tire irons, homemade clubs prepared weeks in advance for this emergency. In the street their numbers are swelled by Klansmen and Nazis; they run, yelling and screaming for a hundred feet before they encounter a shoe shine boy.
But as they stop to attack him they realize they’ve been decoyed: black militants and street gangs close in from both ends of the street, armed with garbage-can lids, guns, zip-guns, broken bottles and chains.
The first police on the scene take one look and barricade both ends of the street to let them fight it out. But a quick head count shows more black than white; they put in a call for the riot squad.
The riot squad moves in with teargas, clubs and Alsatians, chopping their way for no particular reason to the center of the mob, which closes right in behind them. They’re rescued an hour later and withdraw with heavy casualties, including a gassed dog and a cop with canine throat slashes.
Enzio (‘The Head’) Gagliardi comes out of a Negro club where he’s just been collecting an insurance premium (twice the club’s rent) to find his Cadillac’s been worked over. His ice-blue eyes move from detail to detail: All tinted glass smashed, the radio gone, the hood spray-painted with slogans and plastered with posters of Chairman Fat Tsing: ‘LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN FAT,’ he spells out.
‘Republicans, eh? So Fats Funicolo wants to play the Old Rules, does he? I guess I’m not too old to handle a heater. Get some of the boys together. Call Cleveland, Chi, L.A., Vegas…’
‘But, boss, we and Fats are all brothers in Cosa Altra.’
‘Fuck that. Anybody breaks the pretty dual aerials off my little honey here ain’t nobody’s brother! Call a war council.’
A vigilante mob called the Big Stick Men, all wearing tricorner hats and carrying muskets, set up an ambush for any un-American elements that might wander by. They manage to pick off a black postman and a paper boy who might be of foreign extraction.
Then the Islamic Brotherhood of the Black Claw outflanks and roars down on them, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, and assisted by the machete-swinging Bolivian Urban Guerilla Brigade.
‘Hold your fire!’ shouts the Big Stick commander, raising his saber. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’
‘But Commander, they’re all wearing dark glasses!’
The muzzle-loaders won’t fire anyway, and in half an hour the street is empty but for broken glass, blood slicks, and a tricorner hat perched on a lamppost.
The Black Buddhists decide to sit down in protest on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Klan move in at once with blacksnake whips and hobnail boots. The cops sit by until they’ve had their fun, then tell them to keep back on the sidewalk.
‘I don’t like this,’ says one cop, spraying Mace liberally over some dying buddhists. ‘I mean, they didn’t leave a hell of a lot for us, did they?’
‘Wait till we get them back to the station house,’ his partner says. ‘Plenty of life in there yet. What I like to do is hamstring two of them and make them race on all fours down the hall, goosing them up with cattle prods. The winner gets maybe a drink of water, and the loser gets his prick cut off—you know, “accidently he stood too close to the paper guillotine”…I know cops that won’t use nothing else for a sap, just one of them filled with buckshot…’
The Klan are jealous. ‘We’re leaving now,’ their leader calls. ‘But we’ll be back—with a steamroller.’
The original ‘sides’ are blurring already. Among the city cops are Catholics, Jews, Negroes and sympathizers with the Klan; this is true also of the FBI, the Federal marshals and the militias of three states who are now getting into the act. Some Catholics are White Shirts; some Jews are anarchists; some Catholics and Jews own Negro tenements; the landlord of a poor white slum contributes heavily to the American Nazi Party. All of the organizations involved, from Big Stick and the Klan to Students for
Chairman Fat, include spies from the FBI, CIA, city police and cops from three states, as well as spies from other groups. Splits and coalitions are common and frequent. It’s getting harder to decide who ‘they’ are.
No one is necessarily what he seems, and no one is ‘just’ an anarchist, Negro or cop. Ad hoc committees are formed almost spontaneously, often without names; everyone is able, finding himself performing any atrocity, to believe it is not the real him doing this—and there are enough secret sympathies to justify anything.
A strategist at the Pentagon tries to work it all out with the help of CIA reports.
He dictates a memo to the general staff: The main possible types of conflict are
Racial
Religious
Ethnic
Income level (relative prosperity)
Relative authoritarianism
Relative age
Sexual preference (relative heterosexuality)
or some combination of any of these. No classification of these seems complete: an anti-Semite usually hates a Black Muslim who hates a black Jew who hates a homosexual Jew and a white Jew about equally, who hate each other, and who also both may hate a white Jewish cop who hates his superior who hates an anti-authoritarian young man who hates an authoritarian young man who hates and envies anyone wealthier than he.
“The city is an equation of x unknowns…there may actually be more sides than individuals,’ he concludes, ‘and everyone is not just alone, but incomplete…’
The general staff decide he means ‘put the Marines in to guard the Arab embassies’, which they do. The Arabs call up the State Department every five minutes thereafter, reporting Zionists sneaking around in camouflaged uniforms.
