“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Zlott,” said Eustaly to this manic head of hair, taking the floor back.
But Zlott wasn’t done. “As to this Mrs. Bodkin, this—”
Zip! Mrs. Bodkin was on her feet again, shaking her fist, shouting this and that. Zlott replied in kind, and here came Mrs. Elly Baba, siding with Mrs. Bodkin against Mr. Zlott. But Mrs. Bodkin would have none of that, and made one or two suggestions to Mrs. Baba, who replied with immediate ferocity.
Others were popping to their feet now, and with every sentence, every curse, every insult, the battle lines were drawn and redrawn and redrawn again, the alliances shifting back and forth like a tennis ball over a net, and above it all stood Eustaly, his expression pained, his hands out in a gesture imploring peace, his mouth working as he tried once again to butter the mob to tractability.
I looked at Angela, but she was staring in fascination, enthralled, like a child watching heavy traffic. I knew there was no point trying to attract her attention now, so I had no one to whom to communicate my growing conviction that our presence at this synod of addlepates was a waste of time, energy, and adrenalin. I was slumming in a boobery, nothing more. This bag of mixed nuts was unlikely to stick together long enough to finish introducing themselves, much less go out in unison to kill innocent bystanders like me.
When I thought how shaken I’d been all evening, how completely I’d accepted Murray’s notion that these goobers might be dangerous enough to kill me, I didn’t know whether to be sheepish or sore. But one thing was certain: at the first opportunity, I’d give Angela the high sign and we’d tiptoe back to what I was almost ready to consider the sane world.
In the meantime, Eustaly was still at work up there on the platform, and I had to admit the man was good. Slowly but inexorably he was calming the birds once more, getting them to sit down, to be quiet, to listen.
Eventually there was silence. The group itself seemed somewhat abashed at the violence it had tapped, and above them Eustaly withdrew a snowy handkerchief, patted his cheeks and forehead, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, really, I am surprised at you.”
No one answered him. They were, I think, surprised at themselves.
“This is not to our best advantage,” Eustaly went on. “We all desire, I know, to run this meeting in as orderly and efficient a manner as possible, so as not to take too much time from our busy schedules. I am sure, then, that you will all approve any attempt to keep order here.”
He looked around, face by face, and got the nods of agreement he was requesting.
“Fine,” he said, and smiled in gratitude. “Excellent. I knew I could count on your good sense.” He raised his head and called, “Lobo!”
Lobo? I turned my head, and here came the monster. Stolid, heavy, implacable, he tromped past us and up onto the platform, where he stood behind Eustaly, facing us, and folded his arms.
Smiling like a tax assessor, Eustaly told us, “Lobo will help us all keep our tempers.” Then he picked up his sheet of paper again and said, “Next, Mr. Sun Kut Fu of the Eurasian Relief Corps, ERC.”
Mr. Sun Kut Fu was in the row directly in front of us. He stood up, a thin young dapper intense Oriental, and bowed briefly and contemptuously at us. He looked like an Ivy League college student, of the brilliant but argumentative type professors hate so much. “ERC,” he said, in a voice that sounded like a pair of scissors, “is the wave of the future. The day of the European is gone, the day of the American is ending, the day of the Asiatic is just beginning, our sun has just risen. Under the glorious leader Mao Tse-tung, having eliminated the Stalinist, Khrushchevist, Cominternist revisionists, the backsliding bourgeois of Russia and Eastern Europe, the world will know such peace and prosperity as has never existed before. Pax China! And where is the enemy? Not the slothful, overfed American, not the decadent European, not the deluded masses of the emerging nations, no. The true enemy is he who uses our ideals to subvert our goals. The so-called Communist Party! Yes, here in New York City there remains a nest of these Kerenskyites, oh, I don’t care what they call themselves, these one-worlders, these—”
“Thank you,” Eustaly said, somewhat forcefully. “Thank you very much. We must move on.”
Mr. Sun Kut Fu seemed to hesitate on the brink of rebellion, but behind Eustaly loomed the impressive figure of Lobo, and after a second Mr. Sun Kut Fu sat down.
Eustaly next introduced Mrs. Elly Baba, who repeated for the edification of the group pretty much what she’d already told me personally, and after that it was my turn.
I heard my name, my organization, my organization’s initials, and I didn’t quite know what to do. I stood up, gazed down at such faces as Gothic cathedrals are decorated with, and for just an instant I was bursting with the desire to tell these people who I really was, and then to tell them who they really were, and then to turn around and march contemptuously out on them.
If it had just been the Bodkins and the Babas, I think I would have done it, but there were also the two on the stage to consider, and the two on the stage were something else again. Eustaly, no matter what odd groups he took it into his head to assemble, did not himself give the appearance of being a harmless nut. As to Lobo, he probably wasn’t the brightest guy in all the world, but on the other hand, brains aren’t everything.
It was for the benefit of Eustaly and Lobo, therefore — not to mention my own benefit — that I said, fast and loud, hoping it would have the ring of sincerity to it, “We of the CIU believe there shouldn’t be any more borders. Unrestricted travel, that’s what we say, and we say if they put up a border we ought to knock it down. So that’s what we do. I thank you.” And I sat down.
Eustaly beamed on me with real pleasure. “Admirably brief, Mr. Raxford,” he said. “Admirable. Let us hope that those who follow you will profit from your example.” He consulted his list and said, “Next is Mr. Hyman Meyerberg of the Progressive Proletarian Party, PPP.”
Hyman Meyerberg, when he stood up, was tall and somewhat heavy, the man of good physique who’s allowed himself to go to seed, so that now he looks as though he’s covered with a layer of dumpling. He also looked like a cabdriver, and had thinning hair, balding badly above the forehead. You could tell he usually wore one of those caps. He said, with heavy sarcasm, “I agree with Mr. Sun Kut Fu, who spoke earlier, about the Communist cause being endangered by revisionists, but what he and his kind don’t seem to realize is he’s just as much a revisionist as the bureaucrats in Moscow. Stalin was the man, developing the doctrines of Lenin, building the true Marxist state, and all these Trotskyite Maoists with their primitive chauvinism have to be wiped—”
Meyerberg was cut off abruptly by a sudden growl, low and menacing, the sort of sound a hibernating bear might make if you poked it with a stick. We all looked at Lobo, who had unfolded his arms and allowed them to hang at his sides, and who was staring fixedly at Meyerberg. Meyerberg cleared his throat, scratched his nose, hitched his trousers, and sat down.
Eustaly, employing the delicate fiction that Meyerberg had sat down of his own accord, said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Meyerberg, I’m glad to see you maintaining the tradition of brevity begun by Mr. Raxford. Now, next we have Mr. Louis Labotski of the American Sons’ Militia, ASM.”