Stranger Than You Think Read online

  “Oi Gewalt!” my mad friend moaned. “A skeleton I’ll be yet.”

  Sure enough, the plot adjoining the agitated widow’s husband’s had a hand sticking out. My friend and I viewed it circumspectly, avoiding each other’s eyes from fear that suppressed smiles might erupt into something uncontrollable. Several wives were having a similar difficulty.

  “Truly, senora, the hand makes the sign of the cross,” my mad friend began. “But—” Abruptly, he buried his face in his handkerchief and coughed.

  “What my friend wishes to say,” I explained, “is that each country has its own language of gestures. Note, señora, that, though thumb and forefinger make the sign of the cross, little and ring fingers are also clenched.”

  My friend recovered from his coughing fit. “In our land, senora, the clenched fist with middle finger extended is a gesture without religious significance. It does, of course, have a secular meaning.”

  By this time the caretaker had appeared. “God forbid!” he wailed. “The notifications to proper authorities, the paper work—” He clutched his head in bony hands and the pith helmet rolled several meters downhill.

  “Calma,” I said. “Some saucer gawker has a perverted sense of humor.” I shook the gravel out of the latex-glove hand, rolled it, and stuffed it in my pocket.

  We were nearly back to the car when he caught up with us. “I thank you,” he said. “You cannot imagine the hours of bureaucrat anguish you have saved me.”

  “Like hell I can’t!” my friend said grimly. “My royalties for an overripe mango.”

  “I shall remove the weeds from your great aunt’s grave. I shall plant jacintos and claveles and water them daily.”

  “We shall be eternally grateful,” I said, rushing through the ronde of Latin leavetaking. We made our escape.

  After Suppe and Kartoffel Salat we settled down to a leisurely gorge of Bavarian potroast which, due to our lateness, was the only thing not crossed off the menu. Only a purist could have distinguished it from Sauerbraten. Halfway through my second hard roll I remembered. “Oh gad!”

  A waiter appeared. “Yah?”

  Not knowing whether this was German for “what do you want?” or Spanish for “are you already finished?” I asked for a telephone in English. “Got to call Shapiro,” I explained.

  When I returned my mad friend was arguing with his favorite wife about whether Spanish with a German or German with a Spanish accent sounds worse. A busboy removed some of our litter. A baldheaded Bavarian unveiled a trayful of assorted Schmaltzen-macherei and a bowl of whipped cream.

  “Now where were we?” my mad friend asked. He sipped coffee with a longing look at my glass of Rhenish rotgut.

  “The serpent,” I reminded him. “Where does dogma assure us that reptiles cannot develop intelligence? If our fishy ancestors could, why not a snake?”

  “I’ve often suspected piscine ancestry on your side,” a wife interjected, “But I disclaim it for my own.”

  “Oho!” my mad friend laughed, “The grunnion bit, Mr. Bones.”

  Wives looked at us expectantly.

  “Stripping the story and ourselves to bare essentials, we’ve all hand-caught them during the monthly high tides. As veterans of these fullmooned beach bacchanalia, we can swear before any and all tourists that the little fish is neither mysterious nor mythical.”

  “All right,” a wife said tiredly, “so we’ve all come home in the wee small hours with a case of sniffles and a bucket of grunnion. So what?”

  “Mme. Grunnion’s marvelous little instinct makes her lay eggs high enough on the beach so they won’t get wet before hatching time twenty-eight days later. Can you, Gods finest creature, with all your Vapours and Lunar Humours, disclaim a kinship with this tiny tidebound female?”

  All wives became thoughtfully silent.

  “And thou, mad friend of Celtic breed?”

  “I grow less sorry by the minute for having taken the pledge. Returning to your argument, I see no point in dragging theology into a simple affair of two chambered hearts versus the four chambered pump of a viviparous species. Small things like these distinguish us from the fish and warm the connubial bed. By the way, what’d Shapiro have to say?”

  “Oh, there’s a mixup somewhere. The telemetering gear started working again and they’ve zeroed in on it somewhere in New Mexico.”

  My mad friend thoughtfully slopped another dollop of whipped cream into his coffee. “Then what do you suppose the local saucer gawkers were looking at?”

  I pulled the obscenely gesturing glove from my pocket and unrolled it. “Odd,” I said. “See the holes where the fingernails ought to be? More like a claw than a human hand. That new grave must have been directly below where the whatever-it-was landed.”

  “I suppose so,” my friend mumbled.

  “Say, feel of this.”

  My mad friend ran his fingers over the rough surfaced glove with its faint hint of scaliness. “Strange,” he said. “Doesn’t feel exactly like latex. More like a sloughed lizard skin.”

  “I suppose a skin-shedding would require more squiriming space than could be found in the average flying saucer,” I said, “but why was he digging around that new grave?”

  “Please,” a wife said, “not while I’m eating.”

  My mad friend frowned. “If it’s true I’ll sue Him for breach of Covenant,” he said distinctly.

  And suddenly nobody was eating.

  THE COUNTRY BOY

  SIT IN A SIDEWALK CAFÉ LONG enough and the whole world will walk by. Hah I A half hour had passed without one familiar face. I was glowering into a French beer, gaining a new insight into the Gallic preference for wine when someone sat uninvited at my table. “Feelthy peectures?” he asked.

  It was my mad friend. I stared incredulously, then laughed. “You first,” he said.

  I shrugged. “A-world power pays me not to talk.” Not that there was any real secret. Millions knew IT was going to start a few days after the inauguration. This time America had selected the original Aw-shucks kid. His supporters gleefully described him as the ugliest president since Lincoln. They hinted he was more everything than the Emancipator. So far he was only uglier.

  The other side of the world gave him ten days to snafu. Then they’d deliver the Ultimatum and he was going to muff it. I knew it; my mad friend knew it; so did everybody else. But, business as usual, so here I was for this crummy geophysical fizzle where I’d probably get mine an hour before the optimists who’d voted for the wonder boy.

  My mad friend read my mind. “He can’t be real,” he groused. “So he was a doctor at 19. So he wiped out disease and lengthened the lifespan 20 years. But why, in his B 5-year-old decreptitude does he have to take up politics? I say it’s all done with mirrors.”

  “We’ll know in three weeks,” I gloomed. The waiter hovered.

  “Café,” my mad friend said. He glanced distastefully at my bock. “Remove this urine and bring my friend a bottle of Münchener Lowenbrau.”

  “Sí, señor,” the waiter answered.

  “No wonder that troglodyte couldn’t understand French!”

  “Refugee,” my mad friend clarified. “It never occurred to you to try Spanish?”

  “Never,” I admitted. “But why do you endanger your sinuses in this rainwashed realm of international iniquity?”

  “An extradition.”

  “A what?” The last I knew he’d been playing Great White Father to the autochthonous population of an Arizona town which only the threat of legal reprisals keeps me from naming. I could not imagine a Yaqui Indian in Paris. Much less could I imagine one being wanted bad enough to send my mad friend here.

  The waiter returned with coffee for my friend and a potable, non-local beer for me. “¿Los señores desean algo más?” he asked.

  “I desire to know why you didn’t speak Spanish in the first place.”

  The waiter shrugged apologetically. “You look like a goddam.” My mad friend laughed. “Where did you
ever get those tweeds?” he wondered.

  But I was not going to be led down the garden path. “You mentioned an extradition—”

  He saw what I was driving at. “I don’t work there any more.”

  “What! Those ungrateful wretches turned you out as soon as you’d ticketed enough tourists to build a new jail and squad room?”

  “Not exactly,” he explained.

  “I went into business for myself.”

  I have heard of private investigators but never of a private traffic cop. “Did you buy up a stretch of highway or do you have the toll concession on Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “Bring any women?” my friend asked with his usual mercurial change of subject.

  I nodded. “I don’t imagine anyone would foot the bill for your harem as long as it’s an extradition matter.”

  “You’re so right,” my mad friend agreed.

  Two furtive men in shabby overcoats sat down at the next table. Without asking, the waiter brought a half bottle of Valdepenas to one and something which looked like cider to the other. They began a political discussion in Catalán.

  “This seems to be a Spanish Republican hangout,” I said nervously.

  “It is,” my mad friend admitted.

  “Shades of McCarthy!” I exclaimed, “I’ll be investigated!”

  “Relax,” my friend said. “Have another beer.”

  “You know they’re harmless and I know it but do the hatchet men?”

  “What hatchet men?”

  “That scientific congress. I’m supposed to know Secrets.”

  “Do you?” my mad friend asked.

  ‘That’s beside the point. Hired assassins have their job and they’re singularly unimaginative about doing it.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” my mad friend said, “here comes one now.”

  “How would you know?”

  “He flashed his tin in the consulate when I was there yesterday.”

  The man who approached our table was definitely not the FBI type. He was of medium height, with a nondescript, faintly Byzantine look, and splendid teeth which his dark skin made even whiter. He wore a trench coat and boina, which is cut so like a beret that only a Spaniard recognizes the difference. Accompanying him was a rather attractive Mexican girl, wearing what I guessed was the new botch look. The mere thought of its cost made me acutely unhappy.

  “Look who I’ve found!” she said, then did a double take as she recognized my mad friend.

  “How many wives did you bring?” my mad friend asked.

  “Just this one.” We made room at the table and the waiter reappeared.

  “Avez-vous une Coca-Cola? the girl asked.

  “He speaks Spanish,” I said.

  “You want I should ask for Tequila already?”

  My mad friend sighed and inspected the man in trench coat and boina. The Byzantine stared back. Without looking, he took a glass of cognac from the waiters hand and tossed it off. “I know you,” he said.

  The last time I’d seen him he was resplendent in a Mexican cavalry officer’s uniform. The time before that he’d spoken archaic Sephardic Spanish. Now he was speaking English. “Are you really an FBI man?” I asked.

  “Want to see my papers?” he tossed them on the table.

  “They look real,” I conceded. “Except these say you’re a native American. Last time I saw you, you were born in Istanbul.”

  “Dear me,” he said, switching momentarily from American to British. “In those days I drank more than I should.”

  “Getting in the FBI would be easy,” my mad friend said. “If I believed in time machines.”

  One of the Byzantine’s little quirks was that he did. From what I’d been able to guess he wasn’t born an American and had never stood still long enough to acquire citizenship, save in Istanbul. And since he wouldn’t be born there for another 300 years, that could lead to complications. But how easy, with a time machine, to materialize at midnight in some courthouse and doctor a birth record. Ditto with the yellowing archives of the little red schoolhouse up to the big, carefully non-red university. I looked at the man in the boina and suddenly laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” the Mexican girl asked.

  “I imagine,” the Byzantine said in his archaic Spanish, “that he’s visualizing the situation in an office which had too many desks one morning. Hawkshaw greets everyone as though he’d been there for the last nine years. There would have been much innocent amazement on one hand and furtive checking of records on the other. But everything was there: vouchers and cancelled pay checks for nine years, dossier in order. And when Himself had gone through his own sealed files and read glowing semi-annual efficiency reports signed in his own hand—” The Byzantine shrugged.

  “They occupy sensitive positions,” he continued. “It would never do to flap off to a psychiatrist over a little lapse like not remembering the man at the desk next to yours all these years. If such a thing ever got out it might undermine public confidence in the Department.”

  “This is the kind of thing you should write,” my mad friend said.

  “Who’d believe it?” I muttered.

  The Byzantine tossed off another cognac. Abruptly, he stood and, excusing himself, disappeared in the general direction of the men’s room.

  “About this extradition,” I probed.

  My mad friend drew himself up magnificently. “I am now police chief of Speedtrap, Ariz.,” he said.

  “There ain’t no such town,” I protested.

  “You want to see my papers?” He tossed an open billfold and an extradition warrant on the table. Again, they looked entirely too real. “Go over the seal with a low power microscope and you’ll find we incorporated only two months ago,” he volunteered.

  “But actually to christen a town Speedtrap?”

  “Desert rats have a perverted sense of humor. Something to do with the vitamin content of Gila monster.”

  It couldn’t be the booze, I decided, for my mad friend has not touched the stuff since a certain experience in North Africa . . . But the FBI had returned from a pissoir somewhere in the café‘s subterranean portion. He had a 10° list to starboard.

  “It may be impolitic to mention it,” my mad friend said, “but you once told us your only trip to the past had created havoc by planting antibiotic-hardened microbes back where no one had any immunity. Wasn’t once enough to make you swear off?”

  The Byzantine looked about with exaggerated caution. “Who said I had a time machine?”

  “You did, winter before last.”

  The Byzantine looked at us suspiciously.

  “You were eating pancakes in the only decent steak house in Nogales,” I reminded.

  “And as I recall,” my mad friend contributed, “you were going to be 40 about now. There was conjecture as to whether you’d make it.”

  The Byzantine showed teeth in a dazzling renewal of confidence. “Things have changed,” he said. “I may live several more years.”

  “That’s heartening. I was afraid you had timed your career to end about the time the world did.”

  The Byzantine made a nervous hair-patting gesture and knocked his boina askew. Before he could lower his hand another cognac was thrust into it. The smile returned. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

  “He,” my mad friend said, pointing at me, “is already overloaded.”

  The Byzantine made a dogbedding-down-in-high-grass movement. I hoped his story would be better than the last he’d tried to foist onto me.

  “When I discovered,” he began, “that the world would end in 1960 my initial reaction was an On the Beach syndrome. Then I thought, why not tamper again? My own world was gone and yours headed for destruction. What could be lost?”

  “What indeed?” my mad friend wondered.

  “But there remained the question: Whence the fatal spore which grew into that planet sterilizing mushroom?”

  “Wasn’t that obvious?” my mad friend asked. “Your alleged wor
ld was unified, prosperous, and panChristian some three or four hundred years hence, until you unwittingly planted the plague in 562 AD.”

  “Sharp,” the Byzantine said in English. “But you forget.” He lapsed into Spanish again and I noticed his Sephardic tendency to convert ‘s’ into ‘esh’ was growing stronger. “There is only one time track. When I created this world I destroyed my own. My problem now was to go back and find the focal point which started man off on atomic research.”

  “Well, obviously you didn’t scrag Einstein in his infancy,” I said.

  “Pointless,” the Byzantine said. “There would still have been Rutherford.”

  “And Cavendish.”

  “And Curie.”

  “And Democritus.”

  “Heretics all,” my mad friend growled.

  “You might have started with Thales of Miletus,” I said.

  The Byzantine spread his hands in a helpless gesture and the waiter thrust a cognac into one. “Somewhere in history was a beginning—a nexus point whence all atomic research must stem. I visited many civilizations.”

  “Babylonia?” my mad friend asked. “Those temples were to get closer to the sun. If you walked E down the main street of one of those towns you went up a ramp right to the top of the ziggurat.”

  The Byzantine looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  Wearing a look of impossibly eager innocence, my mad friend pointed at me. “The man from the Saucer Works says launching ramps should always face E to take advantage of rotational velocity.”

  “You were looking for a nexus,” I reminded.

  “Ah sí. By now I knew the time machine a little better and could flicker at the low edge of visibility. Also, I had enclosed it and carried my own air, I always drenched it with disinfectant before going back, and thus caused no new plagues.”

  “But the nexus?” I insisted. “Where did atomic research begin?”