“That’s all.”

“A kilo for you,” offers Säure.

“They can cremate it with me. All those Russians can stand around the furnace and get loaded.”

“Perhaps,” the most decadent young woman Slothrop has ever seen in his life, wearing fluorescent indigo eye-shadow and a black leather snood, comes slithering past, “the pretty American is not a devotee of the Green Hershey Bar, mm? ha-ha-ha….”

“A million marks,” Säure sighs.

“Where are you going to get—”

Holding up an elfin finger, leaning close, “I print it.”

Sure enough, he does. They all troop out of the Chicago, half a mile down through rubble piles, over pathways twisting invisible in the dark to all but Säure, down at last into a houseless cellar with filing cabinets, a bed, an oil-lamp, a printing-press. Magda cuddles close to Slothrop, her hands dancing over his erection. Trudi has formed an inexplicable attachment to Bodine. Säure begins to crank his clattering wheel, and sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder, thousands on thousands. “All authentic plates and paper, too. The only detail missing is a slight ripple along the margins. There was a special stamp-press nobody managed to loot.”

“Uh,” Slothrop sez.

“Aw, come on,” sez Bodine. “Rocketman, jeepers. You don’t want to do nothing no more.”

They help jog and square the sheets while Säure chops them up with a long glittering cutter blade. Holding out a fat roll of 100s, “You could be back tomorrow. No job is too tough for Rocketman.”

A day or two later, it will occur to Slothrop that what he should have said at that point was, “But I wasn’t Rocketman, until just a couple hours ago.” But right now he is beguiled at the prospect of 2.2 pounds of hashish and a million nearly-real marks. Nothing to walk away from, or fly or whatever it is, right? So he takes a couple thousand in front and spends the rest of the night with round and moaning Magda on Säure’s bed, while Trudi and Bodine lark in the bathtub, and Säure slips back on some other mission, out into the three-o’clock waste that presses, oceanic, against their buoyed inner space….

□□□□□□□

□□□□□□□

Säure to and fro, bloodshot and nagging, with a wreathing pot of tea. Slothrop’s alone in bed. The Rocketman costume waits on a table, along with Seaman Bodine’s treasure map—oh. Oh, boy. Is Slothrop really going to have to go through with this?

Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning. Trucks and jeeps sputter in the distances. Slothrop sits drinking tea and trying to scrape dried sperm off of his trousers while Säure explains the layout. The package is stashed under an ornamental bush outside a villa at 2 Kaiserstrasse, in Neubabelsberg, the old movie capital of Germany. That’s across the Havel from Potsdam. It seems prudent to stay off the Avus Autobahn. “Try to get past the checkpoint just after Zehlendorf instead. Come up on Neubabelsberg by canal.”