He looked sharply along those walls, keeping his gaze above eye-level and peering with special penetrating attention into the corners. No surveillance cameras. So that was all right.
He sniffed sharply, spreading the wings of his nose, really flaring the old nostrils.
“Garlic,” he muttered. “No question. Known it and grown it. All my life. Ha! And...”
Something else, there was definitely something else, but he couldn't get it. Not, at least, in the reception area.
“Damn garlic,” he said. “Like a bore at a party. A bore with a loud voice.”
At the portal which lead into the editorial offices, that interior warning voice spoke again. Only two words, but Hecksler heard them clearly: GET OUT!
“Not happening,” he said, and issued the Saturday-silent world of Zenith House a tight and unpleasant grin that likely would have turned Herb Porter's blood if he'd seen it. “Screaming lone eagle. Suicide mission, if that's what it takes. Nobody goes home.”
A step further and the smell of garlic was gone, as if someone had rubbed the stuff around the doorway. What replaced it was an entrancing odor Hecksler knew well and loved above all things: the tangy, bitter smell of burst gunpowder. The smell of battle.
The General, who had hunched over a bit without even realizing it (the first impulse when going into an unknown and possibly dangerous area, he knew, was to protect the family jewels), now straightened up. He looked around with a mad glare that would have done more than turn Herb's blood; it would have sent him fleeing in a blind panic. After a moment he relaxed. And now, below the bulging eyes, the lips first parted and then began to draw up. They reached the point where you would have said lips must stop and still they continued, until the corners seemed to have reached the level of Hecksler's bulging blue eyes. The smile became a grin; the grin became a bigger grin; the bigger grin became a grimace; the grimace became a cannibal's leer; the cannibal's leer became an insane cannibal's leer.
“Zenith House, I am here!” he thundered into the empty corridor with its faded gray industrial strength rug and its framed book jackets of bosomy maidens and marching giant bugs on the walls. He struck his chest with a closed fist “You house of mockers, I am here! You den of thieves, I am here! Designated Jew, I AM HERE!”
His first impulse, curbed only with difficulty, was to remove his not inconsiderable penis from his pants and urinate everywhere: on the carpet, the walls, even the framed jacket covers if his admittedly aging piss-pump could fling the stream that high (twenty years before he could have washed the ceiling tiles, by God), like a dog marking its territory. Sanity didn't reassert itself because there was none left in the haunted belfry of his brush-cut-topped head, but there was still plenty of guile. Nothing must appear out of place here in the hallway. Chances that the D. J. would come in first on Monday were mighty slim.
“Goddam slacker is what he is,” Hecksler said. “A goddam commissary cowboy. Ha! Seen a thousand of em!”
And so he walked down the main corridor as decorously as a nun, passing doors marked WADE EDITOR IN CHIEF, KENTON, and GELB (that one another Jew, undoubtedly, but not the Jew) before coming to one marked... PORTER.
“Yessss,” Hecksler said, bringing the word out in a long and satisfying hiss, like steam. There wasn't even any need to pick the lock; the D. J. 's door was open. The General stepped in. And now... now that he's in a place where he no longer has to be careful... gosh!
The urine which General Hecksler withheld in the hall goes into Herb Porter's desk drawers, starting with the lower and working to the upper. There is even a final squirt for the keyboard of typewriter.
There's an IN/OUT box filled with what look like submission letters, manuscript reports, and a personal letter (although typed) which begins Dear Fergus. Hecksler tears it all up and sprinkles the pieces on top of the desk like confetti.
Next to the IN/OUT is an envelope marked GOTHAM COLLECTIBLES, addressed to Mr. Herbert Porter care of Zenith House, and marked CONFIDENTIAL. Inside, the General finds three items. One is a letter which says, in essence, that the folks at Gotham Collectibles were mighty glad they could find the enclosed rarity for such a valued customer. The rarity is a Honus Wagner baseball card in a glassine envelope. The last enclosure is a bill in the amount of two hundred and fifty American men. The General is astounded and outraged. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a yid baseball player? And of course he is a yid; Hecksler can pick them out anywhere. Look at that schnozzola, by the jacked-up Jesus! (Unaware that Honus Wagner's schnozzola is pretty much identical to Anthony Hecksler's own.) Iron-Guts takes the card out of its envelope, and soon the image of Honus Wagner has joined the other, considerably less valuable, confetti on Herb's desk.
Hecksler begins to sing softly, a beer jingle: “Here's to you... for all you do... you des-ig-NAYY-ted Jew...”
There are the file cabinets. He could tip them over, but what if someone below heard the thud? And it seems meaningless. If he opens them, he knows what he'll find: just more paper. He's ripped enough of that for one day, by God. Also, he's getting a little pooped. It's been a stressful morning (a stressful week, a stressful month, a stressful goddam life). If he could find one more thing... one more meaningful thing...
And there it is. Most of the stuff on the walls is uninteresting—covers of books the D. J. has edited, photos of the D. J. with a number of men (and one woman) who the General supposes are writers but look to him suspiciously like wankers—but there's one picture that's different. Not only is it set off from the others, in its own little space, but the Herb Porter in it has an actual expression on his face. In the others, the best he's managed is a sort of oh-fuck-I'm-getting-my-goddam-picture-taken-again squint, but in this one he's actually smiling, and it is a smile of unquestionable love. The woman he's smiling at is taller than the D. J. and looks about sixty. Held in front of her is the sort of large black satchel purse which by law only woman of sixty or over may carry.
Hecksler croons, “I see me, I see you, I see the mother, of a designated Jew.”
He pulls the picture from the wall, turns it over, and sees the sort of cardboard backing he would have expected. Oh yes, he knows his man: sly tricks in front, cardboard backing behind. Yowza.
Hecksler pulls out the cardboard, then the picture of Herb and his beloved Marmar, which was taken at the twenty-fifth anniversary party Herb organized for his parents out on Montauk in 1978. Iron-Guts drops trou (they go down fast, perhaps because of the large fold-up knife in the right front pocket), grabs one skinny butt-cheek and gives it a brisk sideways yank, the better to present the back door, the tan track, the everloving dirt road. Then the former United States General, who was personally decorated by Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, rubs his ass briskly and thoroughly with this picture which Herb loves above all others.
Gosh, what a time we're having!
But good times wear a person out, especially an older person, especially an older bonkers person. Enough be enough, as Amos might have said to Andy. The General hauls up his pants, squares himself away, then sits down in Herb's office chair. He did not pee in this chair, mostly because it never occurred to him, so the seat is nice and dry.
He swivels slowly around and looks out Herb's window. No view; just a few feet of empty space and then the windows of another office building. Most of those are covered with venetian blinds, and where the blinds aren't drawn, the offices are perfectly still. No doubt somewhere in that building, as in this, executives are squeezing in a little overtime, but not in sight of Herb Porter's window.
The sun comes slanting in on General Hecksler's face, cruelly spotlighting his age-roughened skin and the burst veins at his temples; another vein, this one blue, pulses steadily in the middle of his deeply lined forehead. His eyelids are folded and wrinkled. More and more of them become visible as the General, who has dozed but not really slept in weeks, moves to the border which divides the land of wakefulness from that of Nod.