“Do tell.”

“No thanks,” sez Shirley. “I’d really better not.”

“C’mon… aw…”

“Were those snowdrops back there?” Slothrop squinting into the lampshine ahead, “GIs? What’re GIs doing here in the British sector, do you know?”

“Maybe not,” Bodine guesses, “maybe only Shore Patrol, c’mon, let’s not get any more paranoid than we have to… .”

“Look, see, I’m doing (snuff) it and I’m not growing (snuff) fangs or anything… .”

“Well, I just don’t know,” Shirley kneeling backwards, breasts propped on the back of the seat, one big smooth country-girl hand on Slothrop’s shoulder for balance.

“Look,” Bodine sez, “is it currency, or dope, or what? I just like to know what to expect, cause if the heat’s on—”

“Only on me, far as I know. This is nothing to do with dealing, it’s a whole different drill.”

“She’s the rose of no-man’s laaaand,” sings Albert Krypton, coaxing.

“Why you going to Putzi’s?”

“Got to see that Springer.”

“Didn’t know he was coming in.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that?”

“Rebebber, dow,” Shirley talking with only one nostril here, “dot too buch, Albert, just a teensy bit.”

“Just that nobody’s seen him for a while.”

“Be inhaling now, good, good, O.K., now. Umm, there’s a little still, uh, kind of a booger that’s blocking it… do it again, right. Now the other one.”

“Albert, you said only one.”

“Look, Rocky, if you do get busted—”

“Don’t want to think.”

“Jeepers,” sez Shirley.

“You like that? Here, just do a little more.”

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing. Wanted to talk to somebody at that SPOG. Find out what was happening. We were just supposed to talk, you know, off the record, tonight in the dispensary. Neutral ground. Instead The Man shows up. Now there are also these other two creeps in civvies.”

“You a spy, or something?”

“Wish I was even that. Oh boy. I should’ve known better.”

“Well it sounds pretty bad.” And Seaman Bodine drives along not liking it much, brooding, growing sentimental. “Say,” presently, “if they do, well, catch up with you, I could get in touch with your Mom, or something.”

“My—” A sharp look. “No, no, no…”

“Well, somebody.”

“Can’t think of a soul.”

“Wow, Rocketman… .”

Putzi’s turns out to be a sprawling, half-fortified manor house dating from the last century, off the Dorum road and seaward down a sandy pair of wheel-tracks with reeds and tough dune grass growing in between, the house perched like a raft atop a giant comber of a sandhill that sweeps upward from a beach whose grade is so subtle that it becomes water only by surprise, tranquil, salt-pale, stretching miles into the North Sea like clouds, here and there more silver, long cell or skin shapes, tissue-thin, stilled under the moon, reaching out toward Helgoland.

The place never got requisitioned. Nobody has ever seen the owner, or even knows if “Putzi” is anybody real. Bodine drives the truck right on into what used to be the stable and they all get out, Shirley hoorahing in the moonlight, Krypton mumbling oboy, oboy through big mouthfuls of that frau bait. There is some password and security hassle at the door, on account of the pig getup, but Slothrop flashes his white plastic knight and that works. Inside they find a brightly lit and busy combination bar, opium den, cabaret, casino and house of ill repute, all its rooms swarming with soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies and folks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising hell at a noise level the house’s silent walls seal off completely from the outside. Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It’s a floating celebration no one’s thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?