So Pearly felt disquiet but no unusual disquiet as he escorted Cook’s Third Melrose into the over-warm command trailer. And Kurtz looked pretty much okay. The skipper was sitting in a cane rocking chair in the living-room area. He had removed his coverall-it hung on the door through which Perlmutter and Melrose had entered-and received them in his longjohns. From one post of the rocking chair his pistol hung by its belt, not a pearl-handled.45 but a nine-millimeter automatic.
All the electronic gear was rebounding. On Kurtz’s desk the fax hummed constantly, piling up paper. Every fifteen seconds or so, Kurtz’s iMac cried “You’ve got mail!” in its cheery robot voice. Three radios, all turned low, crackled and hopped with transmissions. Mounted on the fake pine behind the desk were two framed photographs. Like the sign on the door, the photos went with Kurtz everywhere. The one on the left, titled INVESTMENT, showed an angelic young fellow in a Boy Scout uniform, right hand raised in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute. The one on the right, labeled DIVIDEND, was an aerial photograph of Berlin taken in the spring of 1945. Two or three buildings still stood, but mostly what the camera showed was witless brick-strewn rubble.
Kurtz waved his hand at the desk. “Don’t mind all that, boys-it’s just noise. I’ve got Freddy Johnson to deal with it, but I sent him over to the commissary to grab some chow. Told him to take his time, go through the whole four courses, soup to nuts, poisson to sorbet, because this situation here… boys, this situation here is near-bout… STABILIZED!” He gave them a ferocious FDR grin and began to rock in his chair. Beside him, the pistol swung in the holster at the end of its belt like a pendulum.
Melrose returned Kurtz’s smile tentatively, Perlmutter with less reserve. He had Kurtz’s number, all right; the boss was an existential wannabe… and you wanted to believe that was a good call. A brilliant call. A liberal arts education didn’t have many benefits in the career Military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.
“My only order to Lieutenant Johnson-whoops, no rank on this one, to my good pal Freddy Johnson is what I meant to say-was that he say grace before chowing in. Do you pray, boys?” Melrose nodded as tentatively as he had smiled; Perlmutter did so indulgently. He felt sure that, like his name, Kurtz’s oft-professed belief in God was plumage.
Kurtz rocked, looking happily at the two men with the snow melting from their footgear and puddling on the floor. “The best prayers are the child’s prayers,” Kurtz said. “The simplicity, you know. “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.” Isn’t that simple? Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, b-” Pearly began.
“Shut the fuck up, you hound,” Kurtz said cheerfully. Still rocking. The gun still swinging back and forth at the end of its belt. He looked from Pearly to Melrose. “What do you think, laddie-buck? Is that a beautiful little prayer, or is that a beautiful little prayer?”
“Yes, s-”
“Or Allah akhbar, as our Arab friends say; there is no God but God.” What could be more simple than that? It cuts the pizza directly down the middle, if you see what I mean.”
They didn’t reply. Kurtz was rocking faster now, and the pistol was swinging faster, and Perlmutter began to feel a little antsy, as he had earlier in the day, before Underhill arrived and sort of cooled Kurtz out. This was probably just more plumage, but-
“Or Moses at the burning bush!” Kurtz cried. His lean and rather horsey face lit with a daffy smile. “’Who’m I talking to?” Moses asks, and God gives him the old “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam, uck-uck-uck.” What a kidder, that God, eh, Mr Melrose, did you really refer to our emissaries from the Great Beyond as “space-niggers”?”
Melrose’s mouth dropped open.
“Answer me, buck.”
“Sir, I-”
“Call me sir again while the group is hot, Mr Melrose, and you will celebrate your next two birthdays in the stockade, do you understand that? Catch my old drift-ola?”Yes, boss.” Melrose had snapped to attention, his face dead white except for the patches of cold-induced red on his cheeks, patches that were cut neatly in two by the straps of his mask. “Now did you or did you not refer to our visitors as “space-niggers”?”
“Sir, I may have just in passing said something-”
Moving with a speed Perlmutter could scarcely credit (it was like a special effect in a James Cameron movie, almost), Kurtz snatched the nine-millimeter from the swinging holster, pointed it without seeming to aim, and fired. The top half of the sneaker on Melrose’s left foot exploded. Fragments of canvas flew. Blood and flecks of flesh splattered Perlmutter’s pantsleg.
I didn’t see that, Pearly thought. 7hat didn’t happen.But Melrose was screaming, looking down at his ruined left foot with agonized disbelief and howling his head off. Perlmutter could see bone in there, and felt his stomach turn over. Kurtz didn’t get himself out of his rocker as quickly as he’d gotten his gun out of his holster-Perlmutter could at least see this happening-but it was still fast. Spookily fast. He grabbed Melrose by the shoulder and peered into the cook third’s contorted face with great intensity. “Stop that blatting, laddie-buck.”
Melrose carried on blatting. His foot was gushing, and the part with the toes on it looked to Pearly as if it might be severed fi7om the part with the heel on it. Pearly’s world went gray and started to lose focus. With all the force of his will, he forced that grayness away. If he passed out now, Christ alone knew what Kurtz might do to him. Perlmutter had heard stories and had dismissed ninety per cent of them out of hand, thinking they were either exaggerations or Kurtz-planted propaganda designed to enhance his loony-crafty image.
Now I know better, Perlmutter thought. This isn’t myth-making; this is the myth.Kurtz, moving with a finicky, almost surgical precision, placed the barrel of his pistol against the center of Melrose’s cheese-white forehead. “squelch that womanish bawling, buck, or I’ll squelch it for you. These are hollow-points, as I think even a dimly lit American like yourself must now surely know.” Melrose somehow choked the screams off, turned them into low, in-the-throat sobs. This seemed to satisfy Kurtz.
“Just so you can hear me, buck, You have to hear me, because you have to spread the word. I believe, praise God, that your foot, what’s left of it, will articulate the basic concept, but it’s your own sacred mouth that must share the details. So are you listening, bucko? Are you listening for the details?”
Still sobbing, his eyes starting from his face like blue glass balls, Melrose managed a nod.
Quick as a striking snake, Kurtz’s head turned and Perlmutter clearly saw the man’s face. The madness there was stamped into the features as clearly as a warrior’s tattoos. At that moment everything Perlmutter had ever believed about his OIC fell down.
“What about you, bucko? Listening? Because you’re a messenger, too. All of us are messengers. “Pearly nodded. The door opened and he saw, with unutterable relief, that the newcomer was Owen Underhill. Kurtz’s eyes flew to him. “Owen! Me foine bucko! Another witness! Another, praise God, another messenger! Are you
listening? Will you carry the word hence from this happy place?”
Expressionless as a poker-player in a high-stakes game, Underhill nodded.
“Good! Good!”
Kurtz returned his attention to Melrose.
“I quote from the Manual of Affairs, Cook’s Third Melrose, Part 16, Section 4, Paragraph 3-“Use of inappropriate epithets, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, are counterproductive to morale and run counter to armed service protocol. When use is proven, the user will be punished immediately by court-martial or in the field by appropriate command personnel,” end quote.
Appropriate command personnel, that’s me, user of inappropriate epithets, that’s you. Do you understand, Melrose? Do you get the drift-ola?”
Melrose, blubbering, tried to speak, but Kurtz cut him off. In the doorway Owen Underhill continued to stand completely still as the snow melted on his shoulders and ran down the transparent bulb of his mask like sweat. His eyes remained fixed on Kurtz.
“Now, Cook’s Third Melrose, what I have quoted to you in the presence of these, these praise God witnesses, is called “an order of conduct”, and it means no spicktalk, no mockietalk, no krauttalk or redskin talk. It also means as is most applicable in the current situation no spaceniggertalk, do you understand that?”
Melrose tried to nod, then reeled, on the verge of passing out. Perlmutter grabbed him by the shoulder and got him straight again, praying that Melrose wouldn’t conk before this was over. God only knew what Kurtz might do to Melrose if Melrose had the temerity to turn out the lights before Kurtz was done reading him the riot act.