Up Christopher to Madness

coincidental, I need hardly add.”

“Instead of getting down on his knees and yelling an Act of Contrition in the poor man’s ear,” said The Kerry Pig.

“As a result of which,” Big Patsy continued, “every pothead, hippie, hipster and lady of the evening is now free to walk the city streets unmolested, whilst the entire might of the law is coincided on hunting we three down as if we were wild beasts of the field or suchlike: which it’s All Your Fault.” And he gazed at Red Fred with no small measure of discontent.

“And in conclusion,” Wallace Fish began, concluding with alarming rapidity as Big Patsy deftly inserted his elbow between the aforementioned’s fifth and sixth ribs.

“In conclusion,” Big Patsy took up the standard for his stricken comrade, “since the source of our discomfort stems at least indirectly from your direction, I and the boys has held solemn conclave together and have, like, decided that the source of our deliverance will emanate from the selfsame source, to wit—you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Red Fred.

“I do not stutter,” Big Patsy informed him:

“Do I understand you want me to get you out of here? Is that what I am to understand?”

Big Patsy beamed benevolently. He tugged at the dimpled front of his Countess Mara tie and allowed a fatherly twinkle to infest his right eye. “As they said in them halcyon days of the Red and Blue Network, you have answered the $64 question. Or we could introduce your person to an entirely new and novel version of The Watusi.”

“Mashed potatoes!” added Wallace Fish.

Red Fred suddenly felt harassed. The Worker’s Handbook had some pretty stiff things to say about allowing the pawns of the Capitalist/Fascist Demagogues to knuckle you under. “I’ll do no such thing.”

Fourteen seconds, six feet and one hundred and twenty-nine bruises later, Red Fred, rationalizing wildly on The Worker’s Handbook interpretation, acquiesced in cavalier style: “I’ll do that very thing.”

It should be pointed out at this juncture that Red Fred’s Village Voyages were not conducted on a renovated bus; they were not conducted on foot; they were not in fact conducted by plane, train, chariot, felucca or yak-cart. They were conducted on a series of small open-sided wagons, hitched together and pulled by a tiny steam engine built to look like a tandem pair of pink gastropods. A fringed awning surmounted this perambulating snailery; a charming caboose played denouement with the legend RED FRED’S VILLAGE VOYAGES affixed thereon; and several ladies and gentlemen of the species homo hippicus were employed to station themselves at irregular intervals around the cars. See authentic bohemian Greenwich Village. Cha-cha-cha!

On the second Wednesday in August following Angie the Rat’s handsome funeral (13 heart-broken mourners 13), Red Fred’s Village Voyages putted lackadaisically past the heat-prostrated eyeballs of one hundred and sixteen of New York’s Finest, beating its way uptown toward the East Side Airlines Terminal. Aboard were only Red Fred and three authentic, bohemian (what they used to call) beatniks.

The shades were by Ray-Ban, the slacks of Italian silk, the berets and bop-kick goatees courtesy of a four- year-old photo of Dizzy Gillespie in Down Beat and the open-toed thong sandals from Allan Bloch. They looked flea-ridden, esoteric and intense. One of them slept. One of them scratched. One of them sweated.

The “boys” were leaving the scene.

To split: to, like, make it. If you got eyes.

And other ethnic phrases of a similar nature.

The police re-marked the caravan sleepily. The intelligence that Fred had, on more than one occasion, denounced them as cossacks, kulaks, and cosmopolite hirelings of the infamous Joint Distribution Committee, had not yet reached them. True, from time to time, more as a conditioned reflex than anything else, they served him with a warrant for violating City Statute 1324 (entitled: An Ordinance Against Running Stagecoaches On Streets Not Illuminated With Gaslamps); and at Yuletide they put the arm on him for “charitable” contributions odd and sundry. But aside from that, he was seldom bothered by them.

As the snail undulated its way along MacDougal Street there came into sight at a point just abaft The Kettle of Fish a tall, gaunt, gold-encrusted police officer with a face like a horse who has not only just read Baudelaire for the first time but has scribbled How True! in the margin.

This was Captain Cozenage, whose record while in charge of the Homicide Squad was without parallel in the annals of crime: as a result of which he had been, in rapid succession, switched to the Loft Robberies, Pigeon Drop, Unlicensed Phrenologists, and Mopery Squads: and was now entrusted with a letter-of-marque to suppress steamboat gamblers on the East River. (“Only stay the Hell out of Headquarters!” begged the Commissioner.) His staff consisted, in its entirety, of Patrolman Ottolenghi, a hot lay-preacher for the Exmouth Brethren, an obscure and dehydrated evangelical sect believed at City Hall—quite erroneously—to exert an enormous influence in the boondocks of Staten Island. When Cozenage struck out, windmills for miles around quivered; for this reason—and because of fear being the ingrained better part of Red Fred’s valor—the snailery bolted to a halt beside Manhattan’s own Javert.

“Good morning, Captain,” Red Fred greeted him, rather nervously. With Cozenage you never knew what was coming next; he had once read through one of Fred’s impassioned printed appeals to the Workers and Peasants of the Bronx and found nothing more to complain of than two dangling participles and an improper use of the ethical dative; and then proceeded to summons him for entering into the verbal indentureship of a minor without consent of a magistrate; a reference to Fred’s casual hiring of a high school boy to help pass out the pamphlets, which puzzled the bejeezus out of sixteen judges before being finally tossed out of court.

“You people from out of town?” Captain Cozenage now inquired gloomily of the caravan’s three passengers.

“Like the most, Pops,” Big Patsy answered, striving monstrously to counterfeit the personality he had assumed, but feeling, vaguely, that he was somehow not succeeding. With some earnest hope of mending matters, he added, “Just now on our way back to Muncie, Indiana, home of the largest mason-jar factory in the civilized world.”

The Captain nodded. “‘Native of Cyther’s cloudless clime,’” he intoned. “‘In silent suffering you paid the price/And expiated ancient cults of vice/With generations of forbidden crime.’”

Big Patsy shuddered, turned ashen, and wished to Hell that he had dressed in his best: how they would guffaw at Charles Street Station, at such time they saw him in this antic motley.

But Cozenage merely smiled with gloomy unction. “Bawdy-Lair,” he murmured. “‘FLOR DEE MOLL.’ Now then!” (Big Patsy, The Kerry Pig, Wallace, and Red Fred, swallowed, convinced that the agent de police was merely playing cat-and-mouse with them.) “Did you people encounter any suspicious characters on your trip?”

Silence.

“Nobody tried to entice you into any little games of three-card monte in the passenger saloon of a sidewheel steamer?” Captain Cozenage inquired, hopefully.

Four heads were dumbly shaken from side to side. The Captain’s face fell. He had, some three months earlier, interrupted a bocca tournament on a shad-barge moored off South Street; but since then, nothing.

Patrolman Ottolenghi now for the first time made himself heard. “‘And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day,’” he groaned, “‘saith the Lord: there shall be many dead bodies in every place, they shall cast them forth in silence.’ Brethren—” he began. The Kerry Pig slowly and mesmerically crossed himself.

“Well, Captain,” Red Fred ventured timorously, “I’ve got to be getting these folks around. Heh. Heh.”

Ottolenghi, rolling his vacuous blue eyes in terrible righteousness, flailed wildly in the direction of the Caricature espresso house, intoning sonorously, “‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven…’” and seemed intent to expound in uninvited and morbid detail on this theme when Big Patsy, endeavoring at one and the same time to Method-act his role and allay the officer’s fervor, added