“You.” A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop’s nose.

“You bet,” Slothrop dropping a maraschino cherry on the rug then squashing it as he takes a step backward, “I’m the man all right. Sure. What is it? Anything.”

“Come on.” They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean-Claude Gongue, notorious white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slaving. “Hey you,” hollering into the trees, “you wanna be a white slave, huh?” “Shit no,” answers some invisible girl, “I wanna be a green slave!” “Magenta!” yells somebody from up in an olive tree. “Vermilion!” “Think I’ll take up dealing dope,” sez Jean-Claude.

“Look,” Slothrop’s friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, “I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I’m not sure which one—”

“At this rate, Tamara’s gonna get here before tonight,” Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice.

“Don’t try to undermine my confidence in you,” advises the Large One. “You’re the man.”

“Right,” Slothrop tucking envelope inside pocket. “Say, where’d you get that zoot you’re wearing, there?”

“What’s your size?”

“42, medium.”

“You shall have one,” and so saying he rumbles off back inside.

“A-and a sharp keychain!” Slothrop calls after. What th’ heck’s going on? He wanders around asking a question or two. The fella turns out to be Blodgett Waxwing, well-known escapee from the Caserne Martier in Paris, the worst stockade in the ETO. Waxwing’s specialty is phonying documents of various sorts—PX ration cards, passports, Soldbücher—whilst dealing in Army hardware also as a sideline. He has been AWOL off and on since the Battle of the Bulge, and with a death rap for that over his head he still goes into U.S. Army bases at night to the canteens to watch the movies—provided they’re westerns, he loves those shit-kickers, the sound of hoofbeats through a metal speaker across a hundred yards of oildrums and deuce ’n’ a half ruts in the foreign earth makes his heart stir as if a breeze blew there, he’s got some of his many contacts to run him off a master schedule of every movie playing in every occupation town in the Theatre, and he’s been known to hot-wire a general’s jeep just to travel up to that Poitiers for the evening to see a good old Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. His picture may hang prominently in all the guardrooms and be engraved in thousands of snowdrops’ brains, but he has seen The Return of Jack Slade twenty-seven times.

The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just another evening at Raoul’s place, involving a future opium shipment’s being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn’t look like it’s going to come through, because the middleman hasn’t been heard from in several weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured by Raoul for the money because Italo, deciding the tank belongs to Tamara now, showed up last night and took it away to an Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan, thus causing Raoul to panic. Something like that.