Behind them was a group of twenty that startled him. So, it was true that gypsies had been resurrected. They were dressed in the exotic clothes familiar to him, since he had associated with them in England and in Europe. He planned to ask them if they knew their benefactor, but he never got around to doing so. By the time he remembered, it was too late.
The party flew in a long straggling line under an early noon sun and over forests, marshes, roads and railroad tracks. Turpin had a railroad! They came down on the designated area, Louis Chauvin Street, one end of which had been roped off as a landing place. Little St. Louis or Turpinville was bright with Christmas lights and decorations and noisy with revelers. It seemed to Burton that the two thousand he had heard about some weeks ago had increased to four thousand. The streets were jammed with dancers and paraders dressed in outlandish costumes. It was more like Mardi Gras than Yuletide. Five bands were playing five different types of music, ragtime, Dixie-land, hot jazz, cool jazz and spirituals. Scores of dogs ran around barking.
The group pushed their way through the crowds while liquor bottles and cigarettes and cigars of marijuana and hashish were pressed upon them. The odor of booze and grass was almost solid, and everybody was red-eyed.
Turpin, still clad in his Santa Claus suit, stood on the front porch of his huge red-brick headquarters to welcome them.
“The joint is jumping, the jerks are joyous and jazzing is jake!” Turpin cried. “Give me some skin, brothers and sisters!”
Frigate was the only one who knew what he meant. He held his hand out palm up and Turpin slapped it. “Right on, brother!”
While the others followed his example, Frigate explained to Burton that some late twentieth-century blacks must have been resurrected here. The outlandish greeting came from that era.
“That’s what he meant when he said there was plenty of snow for Christmas,” Frigate said. He pointed at two black males sitting on the steps and staring blankly straight ahead of them. “They must be on heroin. Snow in the vernacular.”
Turpin was revved up, but his high spirits were not of the alcoholic variety. His eyes were clear, and his speech was distinct. Everybody else might be stoned and, hence, vulnerable, but not canny Tom.
They went inside the Rosebud to the vestibule, which was almost as large as Grand Central Station. There was a big crowd there and twenty long bars of polished mahogany or gold behind which white-skinned androids in tuxedoes served drinks. Burton had to step over several unconscious men and women to follow Turpin. He took them into a big elevator and up to the third floor. They went into an office, which Alice said looked like the reception room in Buckingham Palace.
Tom asked them to sit down. He stood in front of a twenty-foot-long desk and ran his brown eyes over them before speaking- , „ .
“I’m the boss,” he said, “and I run this place like it’s a choochoo train and I’m the engineer. I have to. But I let them have a good time. Most of them are pretty good, they behave like they should, don’t go beyond the limits I laid down for them.
“The thing is I know some of them’d like to be the boss, so I keep an eye on ’em like fleas on a dog. The Computer does that for me. Trouble is I didn’t pick most of the people here. Anybody I resurrected, I studied their past. But I couldn’t tell by that what people the people I picked was going to pick.
“Besides the ones that’d like to sit on my throne, there’s two different kinds of people here. Most of them are good-timers, they was whores and pimps and musicians on Earth. But some of them arc church people, Holy Rollers, Second Chancers or New Christians. They raise hell about the hell-raisers, and the hell-raisers raise hell about their interfering.”
“Why don’t you just get rid of all of them and start over?”
Star Spoon said.
Burton was surprised. She seldom spoke up unless directly addressed or asked for an opinion. Moreover, it was a strange question, not in keeping with what he knew about her nature.