Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell Overture here, back in the shadows, hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass—zoom, zoom, dodging around corners, scooting down alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it’s the quietest engine on the road except for the King Tiger tank… .

Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to bother him. He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before closing time, and manages to raise a little, baloney for a day or two maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot.

This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a bed? He has a moment’s relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant and rings up the desk at the Hotel Nimbus. “Ah, yes,” English English, “can you possibly tell me if the British chap who’s been waiting in the foyer is still there, you know…”

In a minute on comes a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you-there. Oh, so seraphic. Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at all the people at dinner staring at him—blew it, blew it, now They know he’s on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia’s just out of hand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it’s part of Their style… .

Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorways drilling by… he must avoid the hotel and the three cafés now, right, right… . The permanent Zürchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue as the city twilight, deepening blue… . The spies and dealers have all gone indoors. Semyavin’s place is out, the Waxwing circle have been kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight do the Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to another hotel? Probably not. It’s getting cold. A wind is coming in now off the lake.

He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafés, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they’d come to this vantage to score… perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street… dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse… .