The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  “Neither do we,” Q said crisply, “but it’s the only way we can get you into Sinkiang. You leave for Moscow on Aeroflot in the morning.”

  “Aeroflot?” whined Jerry. Christ, those Russian stewardesses! he thought. “I get airsick on Aeroflot,” he complained.

  Q glared at Jerry firmly. “We’re getting the family plan discount,” he explained.

  “But I’m flying alone…”

  “Precisely.”

  “Dramamine?”

  “If you insist,” Q said primly. “But the Bureau frowns on foreign substances.”

  “My mission?” Jerry asked.

  “Catch the Chinks and the Maf in the act. Bust them.”

  “But we have no jurisdiction.”

  “Hence the Russians,” said Q, “Use your head.”

  “They have no jurisdiction either.”

  “You’re not that naive, Cornelius.”

  “I suppose not,” Jerry said wistfully.

  According to the thought of Chairman Mao, the village was an anachronism: one hundred and fifty-three flea-bitten nomads, along with their animals (mostly diseased horses and threadbare yaks) encamped in a cluster of leather yurts on the margin of the Gobi. From the correct point of view, the village might be said not to exist.

  From this same point of view (as well as from several others) the three hundred old men who galloped in from the wastes of the Gobi might also be said to be nonexistent. Nevertheless, the nomad encampment had a certain reality for the old warriors; in fact an archetypal reality stretching back in a line of unbroken tradition from the days of the Great Khan and his Golden Horde still burning clearly in their ancestral memory to the misty and arthritic present.

  Village. Burn. Pillage. Rape. Kill.

  Outside the umbrella of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, the old barbarians existed in a happier reality of simple, straightforward traditional imperatives.

  Therefore, unmindful of the fact that the village was an anachronism, the old warriors, in the time-honored tradition of the Golden Horde, rode into the encampment, slew the men and children, made a pass at raping the women to death, slaughtered the animals, burned the yurts, and continued to ride eastward, secure in the knowledge that they had fulfilled another quantum of their timeless destiny.

  A long concrete runway broke the monotony of the Sinkiang wastelands with the more absolute monotony of its geometric perfection. At right angles to the runway, a railroad spur wandered off toward the horizon. From the viewpoint of the pilot of the C-5A approaching this three-dimensional nexus, the runway and the railroad spur formed a T with a finite bar and an infinite upright. If anything, the pilot thought this sloppy. It is likely that he did not fully comprehend the thought of Chairman Mao; a more erudite man might have appreciated the symbolism.

  “It is a clear demonstration of the cynical perfidy of the Chinese gangster element enshrined behind the facade of the Maoist clique. Comrade Cornelius,” Commissar Krapotkin observed genially, drawing a glass of tea from the silver samovar and handing it across the table to Jerry. Krapotkin was a short barrel of a man who wore his double-breasted Mod suit like a uniform. Perhaps it is a uniform, Jerry thought, as he took a spiked sugar-cube out of his mother-of-pearl pillbox and inserted it between his teeth. The Russians were doing their best to be hip these days and it was hard to keep up.

  As Jerry sipped tea through the sugar-cube between his teeth, Krapotkin lit up an Acapulco Gold and continued to make small-talk: “While they gibber and squeak their anti-Soviet obscenities in Peking, they deal with the worst gangster element of the decadent capitalist society by their back door in Sinkiang, which, by the way, is of course rightfully Soviet territory.”

  “I wouldn’t call the Maf the worst gangster element of decadent capitalist society,” Jerry observed mildly.

  Krapotkin produced a metallic sound which Jerry tentatively identified as a laugh. “Ah, very good, Comrade Cornelius. Indeed, one might argue that the distribution of heroin, contributing as it does to the further corruption of the already decadent West, is an act which contributes to the long range progress of the working-class.”

  “But providing the reactionary adventurist regime in Peking with hard American currency does not,” Jerry rejoined.

  “Exactly, Comrade! Which is why my government has decided to cooperate with the American narcs. Once the Maoist clique has been exposed in the act of selling heroin to the Maf, we should have no trouble totally discrediting them with progressive elements throughout the world.”

  “And of course the Mafia will be discredited as well.”

  “?”

  “The Maf is essentially a patriotic organization like the K.K.K. or the Loyal Order of Moose.”

  Krapotkin roached his joint. “Enough of the pleasantries, Comrade,” he said. “Are you prepared for the drop?”

  Jerry fingered his violin case. “My cover?” he inquired.

  “You will be a Mafia hit man assigned a contract on the heir-apparent to Mao Tze Tung,” Krapotkin said. “Our agents in Palermo have uncovered just such a plot.”

  “The real hit man?”

  Krapotkin smiled. “He has been disposed of, I assure you.”

  From a certain viewpoint, Jerry reflected, Krapotkin was right.

  Not 90 seconds after the C-5A had taxied to a halt with its tail facing the juncture of the rail-spur-runway T as if preparing to fart along the track, the great doors in the nose opened like the petals of an aluminium flower, a ramp was lowered, and a black Cadillac disgorged, pulling a house trailer of grandiose proportions and Miami-Beach-Gothic design. The C-5 A continued to disgorge Cadillacs like a pregnant guppy, each one pulling a trailer larger and more rococo than the last.

  Something less than three hundred old men galloped haltingly across the wastes of Sinkiang on faltering ponies. A dozen or more of the Mongol warriors had burst blood vessels in their tired old brains from the excitement of the last massacre. The blood was running thin. Where once the steppes had echoes to the pounding hooves of the Golden Horde as the whole world trembled before a tide of barbarians that filled the field of vision from horizon to horizon, now there was naught but an expiring handful of decrepit savages. Sic transit gloria mundi. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was practically moribund. The survivors envied those few of their comrades lucky enough to have died a warrior’s death sacking the last village in an endless chain reaching back to the glory days when the villages had names like Peking and Samarkand and Damascus.

  But something—call it pride or manly virtue—kept the pitiful remnant of the Horde going, riding ever eastward into the sunrise. Perhaps it was the hope that somewhere on the endless steppe there still remained a village large enough (but not too large) to bring them all the glory of death in one last gory, triumphant, final massacre. Flailing like tattered battle flags in their befuddled old brains the simple imperatives which shaped their lives and hopes and destinies: Village. Burn. Pillage. Rape. Kill.

  Jerry Cornelius, still clutching the violin case, stood alone in the gray wasteland, and watched the Russian helicopter disappear into the slate-colored sky with a certain sense of foreboding. You just can’t trust those Russians, he thought. Now where was the car?

  To the east was a large boulder. Behind it, and not without a certain sense of relief, Jerry found a late model black Cadillac sedan, well-waxed and shiny. So far, so good.

  Inside the car, Jerry found his new persona. Doffing his clothes, he assumed the persona; a black pin-striped suit with pegged pants and thin lapels, a white button-down shirt, a white tie, a diamond stickpin, pointed black Italian loafers, argyl socks, a box of De Nobilis, and jars of black shoe polish and vaseline, with which he gave himself a Rudolph Valentino job, atop which he affixed a green porkpie hat with a leopard skin band. Thus accoutered, and with a round toothpick in his mouth at a jaunty angle, he sealed the car, turned on the air-conditioning, and set out across the wasteland.

  Only when he discovered that the radio would
bring in nothing but Radio Moscow and that the tape library contained naught but Tschaikowsky did the full extent of Krapotkin’s treachery become apparent.

  As the train hove into sight of the rail-spur-runway junction, the soldiers of the People’s Army were able to contain cries of awe, amazement and dismay only by diligent application of the thought of Chairman Mao.

  For there in the depths of Sinkiang was, considering the circumstances, quite a decent facsimile of Las Vegas. A semicircle of trailers rimmed a large kidney-shaped swimming pool. Done up in pastels, sporting picture windows, and sprouting numerous extensions, wings, and breezeways, the trailers resembled the lower or casino floors of Las Vegas hotels. Complex mazes of cabanas, beach chairs, bocci courts, pavillions, greenhouses, handball courts and pigeon coops which filled the interstices between the trailers completed the illusion. Behind the semicircular Las Vegas facade towered the tail of the C-5A, reminiscent, somehow, of Howard Hughes and all that his shadowy persona implied. Parked among the spectral casino hotels were an indeterminate number of black Cadillacs.

  Around the pool, waiters in red tuxedoes served tepid Collinses to fat men in sunglasses stretched out in beach chairs, warming themselves with complex arrays of sunlamps. Starlets in bikinis paraded their pinchable asses by the poolside.

  The officials in the caboose immediately called for the reserve train which had been parked fifty miles down the track in anticipation of such a necessity.

  Approaching his destination from the south, Jerry Cornelius spotted a cluster of pagodas, huts and barracks, among which huge billboards had been erected bearing immense portraits of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Enver Hoxha, and other popular personalities of the People’s Republic of China. Everything was festooned with calligraphy like a wedding cake. Intermittent strings of firecrackers exploded. Hatchet men chased each other through the winding streets. Soldiers of the People’s Army performed the calisthenics. The sharp syllables of Chinese dialects filled the air like razorblades. Gongs sounded. Paper dragons danced in the streets. Perpetual twilight hovered over the scene, which, upon closer inspection, proved to be constructed of balsa wood, rice paper and papier-mâché.

  Warily, Jerry swung the Cadillac wide of this Chinese version of Disneyland and circled toward the tail of a C-5 A which dominated the landscape. Soon reality (such as it was), changed and he found himself on the outskirts of what appeared to be a suburb of Las Vegas: the lower stories of casino hotels mounted on wheels and parked in a semicircle around a huge kidney-shaped pool, facing the Chinese apparition across the chlorinated waters.

  Having spied a heavily-guarded boxcar behind the facade of the Chinese reality, Jerry was not surprised to see a dozen thugs with machineguns guarding the C-5A. The $50,000,000 must be on the plane.

  For a moment, Jerry parked the Cad along the Orient-Vegas interface, playing at pondering his next move.

  Shortly, he drove on into the Mafia camp, parked the Cadillac next to a fire hydrant outside a barbershop, and melted into the scene with barely a ripple. Yes indeed, this was his kind of town!

  Eastward across the wastelands, here and there a rider dead on his horse, a scungy pony faltering under its rider, the spirit burning brighter as the blood thinned as if their ancient flesh were ectoplasmating into naught but the weathered parchment-dry quintessence of tradition-cum-desire, the desperate determination not to die a peasant’s death, the image of the Final Massacre burning its forlorn hope into the backs of what was left of their arteriosclerotic brains, the husks of the Golden Horde doddered onward, ever onward.

  “Ya get da Big Picture, Cornelius?” The Rock said, sipping at his Collins as he and Jerry lay side by side in beach chairs, sunning themselves at poolside. Jerry, dressed in neon-blue bathing suit, contrasting yellow terry cloth robe, Japanese rubber sandals and silvered Air Force shades, had resisted the dangerous urge to order Pernod, and as a consequence was nursing a foul rum concoction. Only the presence of his violin case close at hand soothed his jangled nerves. And the sunlamps threatened to melt the shoe-polish in his hair.

  “I’m not paid to get the Big Picture, Rock,” Jerry said, keeping in character, though from a certain viewpoint what he was saying was true.

  The Rock scratched his hairy paunch with one hand and with the other, clawlike, pinched the ass of a passing starlet, who giggled appropriately.

  “I like yer style, kid,” The Rock said. “But doncha have any curiosity?”

  “Curiosity killed a cat.”

  “I’m a dog man myself, Cornelius, so who gives a shit? What I say is dese Chinks have been asking for it. Just because da punks got a few H-bombs and ICBMs is no reason for them to get the idea they can burn the Maf and live ta talk about it. Yeah, after ya hit their number two padron, that smart-ass punk in Peking will have ta look over his shoulder a few times before he tries putting milk-sugar in our heroin again.”

  “Just who is their number two?”

  Rock pointed his De Nobili at the empty raft anchored out in the center of the kidney-shaped pool. “Da Big Boy will make this year’s deal out on da raft—neutral turf. Whatever Chink is out there with him—zap!”

  “Won’t the Reds…?” Jerry inquired.

  “Da Cads are full of heavies with choppers,” The Rock grinned. “When you hit da number two, dey hit da People’s Army.” The Rock chucked himself under the chin with his right forefinger as if flicking a bead of sweat at the giant posters of Mao, Stalin, Hoxha and Lenin glowering like spectral Internal Revenue agents across the moat-waters of the pool.

  Jerry decided to develop a sudden hankering for Egg Foo Yung.

  Major Sung passed the opium pipe across the black-lacquered table to Jerry, who inhaled the sweet smoke and fingered his violin case voluptuously as Major Sung caressed his copy of the Little Red Book obscenely and said: “Of course I am familiar with your work in England, Colonel Kor Ne Loos.”

  “Your English is excellent, Major,” Jerry lied. “Harvard?”

  “Berlitz.”

  “I should be reporting to the honorable Heir-Apparent to godlike Mao,” Jerry chided.

  Major Sung frowned and kicked the brass gong which sat upon the table. Kung-fu, Jerry noted warily. He revised his estimate of Major Sung laterally. “As you of course know,” Sung said with an oriental leer, “the peacock often hides his egg behind an embroidered fan.”

  Jerry started—he certainly hadn’t expected anything like this! “The dragon has been known to preen his scales before he pounces,” he rejoined.

  Outside the pagoda, a chorus of two hundred kindergarten students were chanting the latest Number One on the Chinese Top 40, “Death To The Violators Of The Spirit Of Mao’s Urine.” Jerry tapped his fingers on the table in time to the catchy rhythm, which he recognized as a variation on “Rock Around The Clock.”

  “May I take that to imply that the pasta contains an asp?” Major Sung said. It was clearly not a question.

  Jerry smiled. “As Confucius says, a fox with a dagger may behead a drunken lion.”

  Major Sung laughed. “As Chairman Mao has observed, the enemies of the Revolution will devour their own entrails if they can make a fast buck in the process.”

  Bowing and scraping, a Sergeant in a kimono entered the chamber with tea and fortune cookies.

  Major Sung cracked open his pastry and read aloud: “Death to the revisionist running dogs of the Wall Street imperialists and their would-be lackeys in Prague.”

  Jerry’s fortune cookie said: “Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.”

  As Jerry, in his pin-stripe suit, porkpie hat, and Italian loafers, lounged against the right front fender of the Cadillac, which he had parked inconspicuously at poolside, a fat man in a flowered Hawaiian shirt and black Bermuda shorts boarded a speedboat at the Vegas end of the pool. Stuffed between his thick lips was an El Ropo Supremo Perfecto Grande. Set jauntily on his bald head was a red sailor cap on the brim of which “The Big Boy” had been embroidered in Atlantic City in bold blue thre
ad.

  As a Meyer Davis orchestra in one of the poolside cabanas struck up “Amore” and a stripper began to peel on the diving board, the white speedboat set out across the pool toward the raft.

  Meanwhile across the pool, fifty soldiers of the People’s Army marched back and forth bearing placards serializing the menu of Hong Fat’s restaurant in severe calligraphy and psychedelic posters of Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Jim Morrison while the People’s Army Brass Band played “Chinatown, My Chinatown” to which a chorus of Red Guards waving the Little Red Book sung the “Internationale” in Sinosized Albanian. To this heady send-off, an old bearded Chinese in a military tunic (with a curious if superficial resemblance to Ho Chi Minh) rowed a punt toward the raft in neutral waters.

  At poolside, Jerry’s trained eye picked out heavies in blue serge suits moving unobtrusively toward their Cadillacs. They all carried violin cases, Jerry placed a bet with a convenient bookie that the cases did not contain violins. The best he could get was the wrong end of 9–4 odds.

  Alone on the raft at last, The Big Boy and the Heir-Apparent swapped bon mots as the strains of “High Hopes” mingled with the thin voices of schoolchildren chanting “My Mao Can Lick Your Mao” in a corrupt Canton dialect.

  “Ya dirty mother, last year’s dope was cut with milk-sugar.”

  “As Chairman Mao has observed, when dealing with corrupt mercenaries of the exploitative class, the doctrine of ‘no tickee, no washee’ is fully justified.”

  “Remember what happened to Bugsy Siegal!”

  “Confucius once said that a toothless dragon does not fear the orthodontist.”

  Behind the Chinese Disneyland, the People’s Army had placed six machinegun nests in a circle around the boxcar of heroin.

  Twenty heavies with choppers ringed the C-5 A. Inside, five more heavies guarded $50,000,000 in unmarked small bills.

  “Fifty million! That’s robbery. You Chinks are crooks.”

  The Meyer Davis orchestra played “It Takes Two To Tango.” The People’s Army Brass Band countered with a Chinese version of “Die Fahne Hoch.”