Draft riots
And here I was with a pop-happy skipper in an old leaky jinxed gallows-propelled space tramp with all the heaviest guns of the planet trained on us: the Countess de Gulpa (not nearly so unimportant as Pierson would have liked me to believe), the CIA and the Board, Blum and the Movie Studio. I figured we'd be lucky to reach Hoboken. As a matter of fact, we got a few miles farther to what is now lower Manhattan.
Four kids insisted on guiding us to the Double G in New York and when we walked in, I saw that the whole place changed. The gallows were gone but there were two nooses on the wall above the bar with brass plaques: 'Rope used to hang Baboon O'Toole—June 3, 1852.' 'Rope used to hang Lousy Louie—June 3, 1852.' And a photo of Baboon and Lousy Louie standing side by side on a double gallows.
The decor is now the New York of 1860: vintage crystal chandeliers and huge female nude in a gilded frame over the bar. I spot Marty sitting with four thuggish-looking wooden-faced characters drinking champagne, and he waves to me.
'You boys join us and have some bubbly.'
We sit down and the thugs give us a cold fishy who-are-these-nances look. The fever does convey certain advantages. We all have a virus feel for weak points in any opponent and Krup has given us some basic courses in unarmed psychic combat. The techniques mostly run on a signal switch—I love you/I hate you—at rapid intervals, but this is only effective once a weak spot has been found.
We soon have these four hoods in line with just the right shade of show-you. Hoodlums are ducky soup. Anyone who has to be tough on the surface is riddled with weak spots. But don't try the switcheroo on the wrong people. Try it on a tiddleywink and it can bounce back with a meat cleaver. And don't tangle with some Mafia don sitting in front of his grocery store.
When we walk into the Double G in Tamaghis, we sea a heavy padlock on the gallows mechanism with a lead seal and a notice on a brass plaque: 'All public hangings forbidden by order of the DNA Police.'
'Yep,' the bartender tells us. 'That's right. No more publics. It's the law.'
Death requires a random witness to be real and a public hanging is real because of random witnesses. In the Garden of Eden, God left Adam and Eve alone to eat the fruit of the Hanging Tree and then popped back in like a random house dick who just happened to be passing in the hall when he heard amorous noises.
'What's going on here?'
'See any dogcatchers of Sirens in the street?'
'Well, no, come to think of it.'
'You won't.'
The bartended is a little, thin, middle-aged Irishman with glowing gray eyes. He is dressed in a tight-fitting green suit. He picks up ten glasses in each hand, spreads them out on the bar, and starts polishing. 'We had a riot here. The boyos killed every dogcatcher in Tamaghis and most of the Sirens....' He holds up a glass to the light. 'The kids all want to get out to Waghdas now and find the answers. I tell them every time you find an answer you find six questions under it, like leprechauns under a toadstool.'
New York—the Double G—1860 ...
A little, skinny, middle-aged Irishman dressed in a filthy green suit bangs on the bar with his beer mug and a respectful silence falls. He jumps up onto the bar, his face contorted like an evil leprechaun as he spits the words out: 'The bankers on Wall Street and the sheenies is buying their sons out for three hundred dollars.' His eyes glow and the hair stands up on his head. 'And what about you and me who don't see three hundred dollars a year in one piece? We get drafted into the frigging army to fight for the frigging niggers.'
