After the missile was hurled out toe window-probably, George knew, to be found by somebody who would immediately turn it over to Sheriff Jim Cartwright-he began thinking of alternate plans.
He found, however, that instead of devising schemes for escape or deliverance, his mind insisted on going off in an entirely different direction. The face of the monk from his dream pursued him. He had seen that face somewhere before, he knew; but where? Somehow, the question was important. He began trying in earnest to re-create the face and identify it-James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, and a monk in a painting by Fra Angelico all came to mind. It was none of them, but it looked somehow a little like each of them.
Suddenly tired and discouraged, George slouched back on the bunk and let his hand lightly clutch his penis through his trousers. Heroes of fiction don't jack off when the going gets rough, he reminded himself. Well, hell, he wasn't a hero and this wasn't fiction. Besides, I wasn't going to jack-off (after all, They might be watching through a peephole, ready to use this natural jailhouse weakness to humiliate me further and break my ego). No, I definitely wasn't going to jack-off: I was just going to hold it, lightly, through my trousers, until I felt some life-force surging back into my body and displacing fear, exhaustion and despair. Meanwhile, I thought about Pat back in New York. She was wearing nothing but her cute black lace bra and panties, and her nipples are standing up pointy and hard. Make it Sophia Loren, and take the bra off so I can see the nipples directly. Ah, yes, and now try it the other way: she (Sophia, no make it Pat again) is wearing the bra but the panties are off showing the pubic bush. Let her play with it, get her fingers in there, and the other hand on a nipple, ah, yes, and now she (Pat-no, Sophia) is kneeling to unzipper my fly. My penis grew harder and her mouth opened in expectation. I reached down and cupped her breast with one hand, taking the nipple she had been caressing, feeling it harden more. (Did James Bond ever do this in Doctor No's dungeon?) Sophia's tongue (not my hand, not my hand) is busy and hot, sending pulsations through my entire body. Take it, you cunt. Take it, O God, a flash of the Passaic and the gun at my forehead, and you can't call them cunts nowadays, ah, you cunt, you cunt, take it, and it is Pat, it's that night at her pad when we were both zonked on hashish and I never never never had a blow-job like that before or since, my hands were in her hair, gripping her shoulders, take it, suck me off (get out of my head, mother), and her mouth is wet and rhythmic and my cock is just as sensitive as that night zonked on the hash, and I pulled the trigger and then the explosion came just as I did (pardon the diction) and I was on the floor coughing and bouncing, my eyes watering. The second blast lifted me again and threw me with a crunch against the wall.
Then the machine-gun fire started.
Jesus H. Particular Christ on a crutch, I thought frantically, whatever it is that's happening they're going to find me with come on the front of my trousers.
And every bone in my body broken, I think.
The machine gun suddenly stopped stuttering and I thought I heard a voice cry "Earwicker, Bloom and Craft."-I've still got Joyce on my mind, I decided. Then the third explosion came, and I covered my head as parts of the ceiling began falling on me.
A key suddenly clanked against his cell door. Looking up, I saw a young woman in a trench coat, carrying a tommy gun, and desperately trying one key after another in the lock.
From somewhere else in the building there came a fourth explosion.
The woman grinned tensely at the sound. "Commie motherfuckers," she muttered, still trying keys.
"Who the hell are you?" I finally asked hoarsely.
"Never mind that now," she snapped. "We've come to rescue you-isn't that enough?"
Before I could think of a reply, the door swung open.
"Quick," she said, "this way."
I limped after her down the hall. Suddenly she stopped, studied the wall a moment, and pressed against a brick. The wall slid smoothly aside and we entered what appeared to be a chapel of some sort.
Good weeping Jesus and his brother Irving, I thought, I'm still still dreaming.
For the chapel was not anything that a sane man would expect to find in Mad Dog County Jail. Decorated entirely in red and white-the colors of Hassan i Sabbah and the Assassins of Alamout, I remembered incredulously-it was adorned with strange Arabic symbols and slogans in German: "Heute die Welt, M or gens das Sonnensystem," "Ewige Blumenkraft Und Ewige Schlangekraft!" "Gestern Hanf, Heute Hanf, Immer Hanf."
And the altar was a pyramid with thirteen ledges-with a ruby-red eye at the top.
This symbol, I now recalled with mounting confusion, was the Great Seal of the United States.
"This way," the woman said, motioning with her tommy gun.
We passed through another sliding wall and found ourselves in an alley behind the jail.
A black Cadillac awaited us. "Everybody's out!" the driver shouted. He was an old man, more than sixty, but hard and shrewd-looking.
"Good," the woman said. "Here's George."
I was pushed into the back seat-which was already full of grim-looking men and grimmer-looking munitions of various sorts-and the car started at once.
"One for good measure," the woman in the trench coat shouted and threw another plastic bomb back at the jail.
"Right," the driver said. "It fits, too-that makes ft five."
"The Law of Fives," another passenger chuckled bitterly. "Serves the commie bastards right. A taste of their own medicine."
I could restrain myself no longer.
"What the hell is going on?" I demanded. "Who are you people? What makes you think Sheriff Cartwright and his police are communists? And where are you taking me?"
"Shut up," said the woman who had unlocked my cell, nudging me none too affectionately with her machine gun. "We'll talk when we're ready. Meanwhile, wipe the come off your pants."
The car sped into the night.
(In a Bentley limousine, Fedrico "Banana Nose" Mal-donado drew on his cigar and relaxed as his chauffeur drove him toward Robert Putney Drake's mansion in Blue Point, Long Island. In back of his eyes, almost forgotten, Charlie "The Bug" Workman, Mendy Weiss, and Jimmy the Shrew listen soberly, on October 23, 1935, as Banana Nose tells them: "Don't give the Dutchman a chance. Cowboy the son of a bitch." The three guns nod stolidly; cowboying somebody is messy, but it pays well. In an ordinary hit, you can be precise, even artistic, because after all the only thing that matters is that the person so honored should be definitely dead afterwards. Cowboying, in the language of the profession, leaves no room for personal taste or delicacy: the important thing is that there should be a lot of lead in the air and the victim should leave a spectacularly gory corpse for the tabloids, as notification that the Brotherhood is both edgy and short-tempered and everybody better watch his ass. Although it wasn't obligatory, it was considered a sign of true enthusiasm on a cowboy job if the guest of honor took along a few innocent bystanders, so everybody would understand exactly how edgy the Brotherhood was feeling. The Dutchman took two such bystanders. And in a different world that is still this world, Albert "The Teacher" Stern opens his morning paper on July 23, 1934, and reads FBI SHOOTS DILLINGER, thinking wistfully If Icould kill somebody that important, my name would never be forgotten. Further back, back further: February 7, 1932, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll looks through the phone-booth door and sees a familiar face crossing the drugstore and a tommy-gun in the man's hand. "The god-damned pig-headed Dutchman," he howled, but nobody heard him because the Thompson gun was already systematically spraying the phone-booth up and down, right and left, left and right, and up and down again for good measure… But tilt the picture another way and-this emerges: On November 10, 1948, the "World's Greatest Newspaper," the Chicago Tribune announced the election to the Presidency of the United States of America of Thomas Dewey, a man who not only was not elected but would not even have been alive if Banana Nose Maldonado had not given such specific instructions concerning the Dutchman to Charlie the Bug, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew.)