"You have been selected for partisan training. Your instruction begins tomorrow. During ten days of training, you will be paid five times your present pay. As soon as you join partisans in the field, the rate will be ten times present pay and an equal share of any booty taken. You will be wearing cadet uniforms from now on. You can come and go as you like after training hours."
Hans walks up and down measuring the boys with his eyes and writing measurements down on a clipboard. He hands the list to partisans, who return with a stack of uniforms and boots which they dump on a table.
We direct the boys to strip and bathe.
The boys are drawing water from the cistern and pouring it over each other with the usual horseplay and merriment. Paco sidles in behind Nemo and pretends to fuck him, rolling his eyes and showing his teeth and snorting like a horse. "Cabrón!" Nemo screams, dodging away as he empties a bucket of water over Paco's head.
I am the eternal spectator, separated by unbridgeable gaps of knowledge, feeling the sperm gathering in tight nuts, the quivering rectums, smelling the iron reek of sex, sweat, and rectal mucus, watching the writhing brown bodies in the setting sun, torn with an ache of disembodied lust and the searing pain of disintegration.
Silver spots boil in front of my eyes. I am standing in the empty ruined courtyard hundreds of years from now, a sad ghostly visitant in a dead city, smell of nothing and nobody there.
The boys are flickering shadows of memory, evoking bodies that have long since turned to dust. I am calling, calling with a throat, without a tongue, calling across the centuries: "Paco ... Joselito ... Enrique."
Screen play/part one
It is on the second floor. A brass plaque: "Blum & Krup." A metal door. A bell. I ring. A cold-eyed young Jew opens the door a crack.
"Yes? You are client of salesman?"
"Neither." I hand him my card. He closes the door and goes away. He comes back.
"Mr. Blum and Mr. Krup will see you now."
He ushers me into an office decorated in the worst German taste with pictures of youths and maidens swimming with swans in northern lakes, the carpets up to my ankles. There, behind a huge desk, are Blum and Krup. A vaudeville team. Blum is Austrian and Jewish, Krup is Prussian and German.
Krup bows stiffly without getting up. "Krup von Nordenholz."
Blum bustles out from behind the desk. "Sit down, Mr. Snide. I am the master here. Have a cigar."
"No, thanks."
"Well, we will have some fun at least. We will have an orgy." He goes back to his chair on the other side of the desk and sits there watching me through cigar smoke.
"And why have you not come here sooner, Mr. Snide?" asks Krup in a cold dry voice.
"Oh well, there's a lot of legalwork in this business ..." I say vaguely.
"Ja und Assenwerke." (Yes and asswork.)
"We want that you stop with the monkey business and do some real business, Mr. Snide."
"We are not a charitable institution."
"We do not finance ass fuckings."
"Now just a minute, Blum and Krup. I wasn't aware you were my clients."
Krup emits a short cold bray of laughter.
Blum takes the cigar out of his mouth and points the butt across the table at my chest. "And who did you think was your million-dollar client?"
"A green bitch synthesized from cabbage?"
"Well, if you are my client, what am I expected to do exactly?"
Krup whinnies like a cynical horse.
"You are to recover certain rare books now in the possession of a certain Countess," Blum says.
"I am not even sure I would know these books if I saw them."
"You have seen samples."
"I am not sure the samples correspond in any way to the alleged books I am retained to recover."
"You think you have been deceived?"
"Not 'think.' Know."
The room is so quiet you can hear the long gray cone of Blum's cigar fall into an ashtray. Finally he speaks. "And suppose we could tell you exactly where the books are?"
"So they are in someone's private bank vault surrounded by guards and computerized alarm systems? I am supposed to sneak in there and carry out a carton of books slung over my shoulder in a rare tapestry, stamps and first editions in all my pockets, industrial diamonds up my ass in a finger stall, a sapphire big as a hen's egg in my mouth? Is that what I am expected to do?"
Blum laughs loud and long while Krup looks sourly at his nails. "No, Mr. Snide. This is not what you are expected to do. There is a group of well-armed partisans operating in an adjacent area, who will occupy the Countess's stronghold. You will have only to go in after them and secure the books. There will be an outcry against the partisans who have so savagely butchered a rich foreign sow... Then stories will filter out about the Countess and her laboratories, and there'll be something in it for everybody. The CIA, the partisans, the Russians, the Chinese ... we will have some fun at least. Might start a little Vietnam down here."
"Well," I say. "You have to take a broad general view of things."
"We prefer a very specific view, Mr. Snide," says Krup looking at a heavy gold pocket watch. "Be here at this time Thursday and we will talk further. Meanwhile, I would strongly advise you to avoid further commitments."
"And bring your assistants and the books what you got," adds Blum.
When Jim and I go to see Blum and Krup on Thursday, we take along the books the Iguanas have given me. Krup looks the books over, snorting from time to time, and as he finishes leafing through each one, he slides it down the table to Blum.
"Mr. Snide, where are the books you are now making?" asks Krup.
"Books? Me? I'm just a private eye, not a writer."
"You come to make with us the crookery," snaps Blum, "we break you in your neck. Hans! Willi! Rudi! Heinrich! Herein!"
Four characters come in with silenced P-38s, like in an old Gestapo movie.
"And now, your assistant will get the books while you and your Lustknabe remain here. Hans and Heinrich will go with him to make sure he does not so lose himself."
Hans and Heinrich step behind Jim. "Keep six feet in front us at all times." They file out.
In half an hour Jim is back with the books. B & K spread them out on the table and both of them stand up and look at them like generals studying a battle plan.
Finally Krup nods. "Ach ja. With these I think it is enough."
Blum turns to me, almost jovial now, rubbing his hands. "Well, you and your assistant and the boy, you are ready to leave, hein?"
"Leave? Where to?"
"That you will see."
Hans, Rudi, Willi and Heinrich march us up some stairs onto a roof and into a waiting helicopter. The pilot has a blank cold thuggish face and he is wearing a 45 in a shoulder holster. He looks American. The guards strap us into our seats and blindfold us and we take off. The flight lasts for about an hour.
Then we are herded out and into another place, a prop job. Dakota, probably. About three hours this time, and we set down on water. They take off our blindfolds and we now have a different pilot. He looks English and has a beard.
The pilot turns around and smiles. "Well, chaps, here we are."
They untie us and we get out on a jetty. It is on a small lake, just big enough to set the plane down. Around the lake I see Quonset huts and in an open space something that looks like an oil rig. A barbed-wire fence surrounds the area with gun towers. There are enough armed guards around for a small army.