Beethoven seemed real enough, though. Stolid Germanic fellow, five feet six, solid build, pustules all up and down his cheeks.
Huey kept on moving, stretching, rocking, easing back and forth in the mud, making small progress in the pelting rain, the rednecks in the distance cheering him on (or so he would like to think).
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It was a real bitch, a down-home Saturday-night fish-fry son of a bitch, slogging through all this mud, with this Beethoven stuck next to him, matching him stride for stride. It’s a long way from the capital to here, and a longer way back, he thought.
But nothing could be done about it. It had been Beethoven’s idea to quit the city. That made some sense to him: there was certainly no reason to hang around there, fighting for food, fighting even harder for attention, trying to clear some space among the mottled hordes, all of whom wanted him dead. (That was the conviction that had come over Huey in this place, an insight that he trusted, had relied upon from the immediacy of old experience: there people were so caught up with themselves that they could kill him.) If Beethoven wanted to get out, that was all right with Huey Long. Beethoven had his reasons, Long had others, but the idea was to put distance between themselves and the rest of them.
Oh, he wished he could get rid of this character too, but Beethoven had fixed him with those shining eyes, those deep, yearning, Boss-obsessed eyes that Huey Long could understand, having seen them at a thousand rallies.
“There is no emperor,” Beethoven had said. “I thought he was there, but I was wrong.”
Well, that was all right with Huey. There were no emperors in America either, not with every man a king. Every man a king: it had gotten him this far. It would get him farther still.
“The emperor is dead,” Beethoven had said again. “Everyone is dead, everything is dead. That must be the only explanation. That is why we are here. In death there
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Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
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is nothing but betrayal. Of course, I saw that in the Missa Solemnis, that solemn mass. By the end, deaf and crazy, I could see through to the bottom of it all. I’m not deaf here, though; I am filled with sound and light, but for no purpose. There is no emperor.”
“You’re wrong,” Huey had lied. “Sometimes there is an emperor.”
Anything to pacify, to jolt Beethoven from those strange and sullen rages that would overtake the man. Meanwhile, you kept on going, regardless of the company you kept. The Boss still had his plans. Give him a break, give him an even chance at this fish-fry, and he would find a way to make it work for him. Getting out of the city was a decent enough first step. It wasn’t so much a city as an encampment anyway. Beethoven had called it a city, but that was wrong, really, a different terminology from a different time and place.
All right, he said to himself: just keep moving.
“Pfui!” spat Beethoven.
It was strange how Huey could understand some German monosyllables and not others, how Beethoven’s language wavered back and forth between foreigner talk and understandable Esperanto. It was yet another thing that was just too complicated for him, something that he didn’t need to talk about, didn’t want to consider.
“The emperor betrayed me,” said Beethoven. “First he, and then the others. All of them. And they left us here to deal with that betrayal.”
“You seem to be a little bit wound up, son,” said Huey. “You should calm down a little.”
“We need a new start,” said Beethoven. “That was what they had promised, what I was looking for. But how
can there be a new start when it is all da capo again and again and no fine!”
“I don’t understand you,” said Huey, not unkindly. “I can follow some of your talk, but not all of it.” He paused, trying to find some common ground. “This is pretty shoddy goods for me too, you know. One moment I’m walking through the capitol building and the next I have a slug in my heart that hurts like an explosion, like a firecracker lifting your balls to heaven, and I’m looking up at that damned ceiling, and then I wake up here. That isn’t too easy, you know. It wasn’t easy for you, I know—I was killed, son. I was murdered—assassinated. They killed me because they knew I was going to be the next president.” He paused for breath. “That’s a hell of a transition to make, you know, from being maybe the next president to waking up in this stinking place. It is a strange, strange business.”
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