HOWARD WALDROP

THE EFFECTS OF ALIENATION

In a world where the Nazis won World War II, some careers might have developed
very differently...

It always seemed to be snowing in Zurich that winter, but as Peter walked toward
the cafe, he found himself looking up at an astonishingly blue sky.

Cold, still colder than a well-digger's ass, but clear nonetheless. He was so
taken aback he stopped. There was a dull sun, looking as frozen as an outdoor
Christmas tree ornament, over to the west. The houses and buildings all seemed
new-washed; even the slush on the sides of the street was white, not the usual
sooty gray. Perhaps the crowd for the opening night might be larger than even
he had hoped, If Brecht were still alive, he would have said, "Weather good for
a crowd, good for a crowd."

There was a stuttering hum in the air, a summer sound from another country and
time, the sound of a fan in a faraway room. It got louder. Then above the lake
the airship Herman Goring II pulled into view like an art deco sausage on its
daily run from Freidrichschaffen across the border to Berne. Some mighty Germans
aboard; an admiral's and two generals' pennants flew from the tail landing ropes
just below the swastikas on the stubby fins. Peter's eyes were getting worse (he
was in his fifties) but he noticed the flags while the thing was still two
kilometers away. The airship passed out of sight beyond the nearest buildings.
Its usual course was far northwest of Zurich-one of the Aryans must have wanted
a look.

Higher up in the sky he saw the thin slash of white made by the Helsinki-Madrid
jet, usually invisible far above the snowy clouds over Switzerland, Peter hadn't
seen it for months (not that he'd even been looking). To people here, the
passenger planes were something you only occasionally saw, like summer. Well,
maybe that will change tonight, he thought. They'll never look at a jet plane
or a rocket the same way again,

Then he asked himself: Who are we fooling?

He went on down the street to the Cabaret Kropotkin.

The actor doubling in the role of the blind organ grinder was having trouble
with his Zucco, so in the last run-through he had to sing a cappella. Another
headache, thought Peter. Brecht's widow sent the offending instrument out: The
one thing you could get done in Switzerland was have things fixed. More trouble:
The ropes holding some of the props had loosened; they had to be restrung.

Peter tugged on a carabinier. "Zero," he said to the actor, "you really should
lose some weight." Peter had the voice of a small, adenoidal Austrian garter
snake.

The other actor (in the Cabaret Kropotkin, everyone was an actor, everyone a
stagehand, an usher, waiter, a dishwasher) pulled himself to his full height.
He towered over Peter and blocked his view of the stage. He let go of his end
of the rope.

"What? And lose my personality?" said Zero. "It's glands!"

"Glands, my ass," said Peter. "On what we make, I don't know how you gain
weight." He pulled on the guy rope.

"Do what? Gain? Back in America, I used to weigh--"

"Back in America," said Shemp, the other actor with a leading role in the play,
"back in America, we all had jobs. We also knew how to keep a rope tight." He
jerked it away, burning their hands.

"Quit trying to be your late brother!" said Zero, sucking on his fingers. "You
just don't have Moe's unique personality."

"And he didn't have my looks. Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!"

Peter shook his head, twisted a turnbuckle past the stripped place on the
threads.

"Vaudeville!" said Zero. "God, how I don't miss it!"

"Eight shows a day!" said Shemp. "Your name up in lights!"

"The only thing your name is going to be up in is the pay register," said
Brecht's widow from the cabaret floor where she had returned without a sound,
"if you don't get those ropes straightened out."

"Yes, comrade Ma'am," said Shemp for all of them.

A little after 5 p.m. they finished the last rehearsal and it was time for
supper. They'd had to cook that, too. A healthy cabbage soup with potatoes and
a thick black bread Zero had kneaded up that morning.

Madame Brecht, who wore her hair in a severe bun, joined them. The conversation
was light. The Poles, Swedes, English, American, German, French and Lithuanians
who made up the ensemble had been together for such a time they no longer needed
to talk. One look, and everybody knew just how everybody else's life was going.
When they did speak, it was in a sort of pig-Esperanto comprised of parts of
all their languages, and when the Madame was around, great heaping doses of
Hegelian gibberish.

Not that a single one of them didn't believe that being right there right then
wasn't the only place to be.

Bruno, the old German gaffer, was staring into his soup bowl like as the floor
of Pontius Pilate's house.

Shemp whispered to Peter, "Here comes the fucking Paris story again."

"I was there," said Bruno. "I was in the German Army then. What did I know? I
was fifty-three years old and had been drafted."

Madame Brecht started to say something. Peter caught her eye and raised his
finger, warning her off.

"Paris!" said the old man. looking up from the table. "Paris, the second time
we took it. There we were in our millions, drums beating, bugles blaring, rank
on rank of us! There was the Fuhrer in his chariot, Mussolini following behind
in his. There they were pulling the Fuhrer down the Champs Elysees, Montgomery
and Eisenhower in the lead traces, de Gaulle and Bomber Harris behind Poor
Bomber! He'd been put in at the last moment after they shot Patton down like a
dog when he refused. Then came all the Allied generals with their insignia
ripped off. It was a beautiful spring day. It was fifteen years ago."

There were tears streaming down his face. and he looked at the Madame and smiled
in a goofy way.

"I remember it well," continued Bruno, "for that night, while looting a store,
under the floor boards, I found the writings of Mr. Brecht."

"Thank you for your kind reminiscence, Bruno," said the Madame.

"Suck up!" said Zero, under his breath.

"Just another hard-luck story," said Shemp.

"I like it very much," said Peter to Zero quietly. "It has a certain decadent
bourgeois charm."

"Does anyone else have an anecdote about the Master?" asked the Madame, looking
around expectantly.

Peter sighed as someone else started in on yet another instructive little
dialectic parable.

Arguing with Brecht had been like talking to a Communist post. When the man's
mind was made up, that was that. When it wasn't was the only time you could
show him he was being a Stalinist putz; only then had he been known to rewrite
something.

The first time Peter had met Brecht, Peter had been nineteen and fresh off the
last turnip truck from Ludow. All he wanted was a Berlin theater job; what
Brecht wanted was a talented marionette. He'd ended up doing Brecht's comedy by
night and Fritz Lang's movies by day, and in his copious free time learning to
spend the increasingly inflated Weimar money, which eventually became too cheap
to wipe your butt with. Then Peter found himself in America, via Hitchcock, and
Brecht found himself in Switzerland, via Hitler.

Peter sighed, looking around the table. Everybody here had a story. Not like
mine, but just like mine. I was making movies and money in America. I was
nominated for the Academy Award twice, after playing Orientals and psychopaths
and crazy weenies for ten years. There was a war on. I was safe. It was that
fat old fart Greenstreet, God rest his soul, who talked me into the USO tour
with him. There we were, waiting for Glenn Miller's plane to come in, near the
Swiss border, six shows a day, Hitler almost done in, the biggest audiences we'd
ever played to when BLAM!-the old world was gone.

And when I quit running, it's "hello, Herr Brecht, it is I, your long-lost
admirer, Peter, the doormat."

"And you?" asked Madame. "What can you tell us of our late departed genius?"

Peter ran through thirty years of memories, those of the first, and the ones of
the last fifteen years. Yes, age had mellowed the parts of Brecht's mind that
needed it. Yes, he had begun to bathe and change clothes more often after his
second or third heart attack, which had made things much more pleasant. He had
exploited people a little less; possibly he'd forgotten how, or was so used to
it that he no longer noticed when he wasn't. No, the mental fires had never
gone out. Yes, it was hard to carry on their work without the sharp nail of his
mind at the center of their theater. He could also have said that Brecht spent
the last three years of his life trying to put The Communist Manifesto into
rhymed couplets. He could have said all that. Instead, he looked at the
Madame. "Brecht wanted to live his life so that every day at 6 p.m. he could go
into his room, lock the door, read cheap American detective stories, and eat
cheese to his heart's content. The man must have had bowel muscles like steel
strands."

Then Peter got up and left the room.

Walter Brettschneider was the Cultural Attache to the Reichsconsul in Zurich and
was only twenty-five years old. Which meant, of course, that he was a major in
the Geheime Staats Polizei. His job at the Consulate included arranging and
attending social and cultural affairs, arrangements for touring groups from the
Fatherland to various Swiss cities (Zurich, he thought, rather than Berne, being
the only city in the country with any culture at all). His other job was
easier-he could have been assigned to one of the Occupied Lands, or South
America, or as liaison with the Japanese-which every day was becoming more and
more of a chore for the Reich; his friend back in Berlin in the Ministry of
Manufacture told him the members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
had come up with many technical innovations in the last few years; they were now
making an automobile as good as the Volkswagen and had radio and televiewing
equipment that required only three tubes.

That second job of his consisted of forwarding to Berlin, each year or so, a
list of thirty to forty names. Of these, a dozen or fifteen would be picked.
These people would suddenly find that their permanent resident alien status in
Switzerland was in question, there were certain charges, etc. And then they
would be asked by the Swiss to leave the country.

Everyone was satisfied with the arrangement, the Swiss, the Reich, in some
strange way the resident aliens, as long as they weren't one of the dozen or so.
Switzerland itself was mined and booby-trapped and well-defended. If the Reich
tried to invade, the Alps would drop on them. Germany controlled everything
going in and out-it surrounded the country for two thousand kilometers in every
direction-the New Lands, New Russland, New Afrika, New Iceland, the lands along
the shiny new Berlin-Baghdad eisenbahn-except the contents of the diplomatic
pouches, and some of those, too.

If the Fatherland tried to use the Weapons on the Swiss, they lost all those
glittery numbered assets, and endangered their surrounding territory.

So the system was understood. After all, as the First Fuhrer had said, we have
a thousand years; at a dozen a year we will eventually get them all.

Edward, his assistant, knocked and came in.

"Heil Bormann," he said, nonchalantly raising his hand a few inches.

"OK," said Brettschneider, doing likewise.

"You remember that the two younger cousins of the Swabian Minister for Culture
are arriving Thursday?" asked Edward.

"I had tried to forget," said Brettschneider. He opened the big 1960 calendar
on his desk to February 13th, made a note. "Will you please make sure the
schedule in the hall is marked? Why, why do people come to Switzerland in the
winter?"

"I certainly have no idea," said Edward. "What's doing?"

"There's a new show at the Kropotkin tonight. They're not saying what it is, so
of course I have to go see."

"Not the kind of place you can take the cou--"

"Most assuredly not. But then again, last month they did the decadent American
classic Arsenic and Old Lace. Quite amusing in its original version. Of course,
in theirs, the Roosevelt character wasn't Theodore. And Jonathan was made up to
look like the Second Fuhrer--" Brettschneider looked up at the three photos on
his wall-Hitler, Himmler, Bormann-Himmler's was one of the old official ones,
from eleven years ago, before the chin operation, not the posthumous new
official ones-" no, not really the kind of place, the type of plays two young
women should see."

"Have a good time," said Edward. "I have to accompany the Reichsminister's wife
to the Turkish thing."

"Oh? Yes? How's your Turkish?"

"It's being given in English, I am led to believe. I'll drop back in later
today, in any case."

Edward left. Brettschneider stared at the doorway. For all he knew, Edward
might be a colonel in the G.S.P.

"It's too bad they don't make Zambesi cigarettes anymore," said Caspar, the
scene designer, as he smoked one of Peter's cheap German cigars. "We'd have them
free. It was before your time, before you met Brecht, back in the early
Twenties. He was always trying to write pirate movies and detective novels.
Before Marx. He designed an ad campaign for the tobacco company. He took an
unlimited supply of Zambesis in payment. He grew to detest them before the
company went out of business. I thought them quite good."

"I'd give anything to smoke a Camel again," said Shemp. They were putting down
tablecloths and ashtrays, and lighting the candles out front. Zero was pumping
up the beer spigots over behind the bar. Madame was, as usual, nowhere to be
seen, but, say something wrong, you could be sure she would hear it. The woman
was fueled by the thought that someone, somewhere, wasn't thinking about Bertold
Brecht.

"I heard they don't make them over there anymore," said Caspar. "The Turks, you
know? They claim, in Germany, Airship Brand is the same thing as Camels used to
be."

"They're as full of shit as Christmas geese," said Shemp. "God, what I wouldn't
give for a slice of goose!"

And so it went until time to open, when the Madame suddenly appeared in front of
Peter and said, "You work the door until 1930 hours. Then you may get into
costume."

"Yes, comrade Madame," he said.

There was no use arguing with her. It would have been like asking Rondo Hatton,
Why the long face?

He went to the door. Under the covered walkway quite a nice crowd had gathered
early. Peter looked at the sign out front with its double silhouette of
Kropotkin and Brecht and the hand-painted legend: Tonight!-Cabaret Kropotkin-The
Zurcher Ensemble-new BRECHT play!

It wasn't really Brecht. It wasn't exactly a play. It wasn't exactly new.
They'd been working on it steadily in the three years since Brecht's death.

He undid the latches as the people surged expectantly toward him. He opened the
doors, stood back, nodded his head toward the tables.

"Trough's open," he said.

Brettschneider arrived a few minutes to eight, went in, nodded to Caspar, who
was bartending, and found a spot at a table near the stage with three Swiss
students. He listened to their talk a while-it must be nice to live in their
world. They were treating the night as a lark; a dangerous place, reputed to be
filled with drugs and lady Bolsheviks with mattresses tied to their backs.

Hesse was over in the corner. Brettschneider nodded to him. He doubted the old
man saw him, as his eyes were becoming quite bad (he was, after all, 83 years
old now); he would go over and say hello during the interval.

There were a few of what passed as Swiss celebrities present, some Germans, a
few Swiss arms dealers,

Across the length of the stage was the patented Zurcher Ensemble half-curtain
let down on a length of pipe. Behind it was the bare back wall. Across this
were strung a few twinkling lights, like a Christmas tree with too few bulbs.
People moved back and forth across the stage, quite visible to the audience from
the neck up.

The band took its place in front of the curtain-banjo, piano, clarinet-and began
a jazz, arrangement of "The Internationale"-one or two people stood, and the
rest began clapping along. When that was done, they played the old favorite
"Moon of Alabama" from Mahoganny, and "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with
Anyone Else but Me." Brettschneider drank a chocolate schnapps and began to feel
quite warm. The 'cabaret was already thick with the blue smoke of a hundred
different tobaccos.

Then the lights went down. From the ceiling a sign dropped: Cabaret Kropotkin-a
hand came down from above and beat on the top of the sign, which unfolded into
three parts: Cabaret Kropotkin-The Zurcher Ensemble Presents Bertolt
Brecht's-Die Dreiraketenmensch Spaceoper! The half-curtain came up. Another sign
dropped in: Scene: The Rocket Men's Club. Time: The Future. Moritaten.

An actor dressed as a blind man came on with a barrel organ and began singing
"The Night We Dropped the Big One on Biggin Hill."

Zero, Peter, and Shemp, in their Rocket Men Cadet uniforms, walk by the beggar
who is then escorted off stage by a policeman.

"Here we are at last!" says Zero. "Just out of Basic Training! Our first taste
of the Outer Reaches!"

"I'm ready for some inner reaches!" says Shemp.

"Beer again!" says Peter.

The flies pulled up revealing a bar's interior, tables. Dropping in were huge
posters of von Braun and Dornberger, and a portrait in the frame reserved for
Fuhrers. The audience found it hilarious.

Brettschneider wrote in his notebook: Unnecessary fun made of Himmler Jr.

When things quit falling, unfurling and drooping in from the overheads, there
were swastikas whirling like propellers and a giant, very pink rocket with a
purple nose cone to be seen.

The three students then sang, as appropriate title cards were revealed, "It's Me
for the Stars, and the Stars for Me," followed by Zero's "Once You Get Up
There." Then one of their instructor officers, Major Strasser, came in and had a
drink with them.

"But don't you find it cold here?" asks Peter.

"We Germans must get used to all climates, from the Sahara to the poles of
Saturn," says the major.

Then the chorines danced on and sang "Dock Your Rocket Here" and a chorus line,
not of cadets but true Rocket Men, danced on, including one small grotesque
figure in sunglasses.

Brettschneider wrote: more . . . H. Jr., beneath his first entry.

The cadets and Rocket Men ran off with the chorines, and a new card dropped in:
The Field for Rockets. Training. On one side of the fence the three cadets
stood at attention; on the other a girl skipped rope to the chant:

*

"My girlfriend's name is Guernica
Her Daddy bombed 'Merika . . ."

The Drill Instructor, called Manley Mann, comes on and yells at the cadets.

"Where you going, you stupid lot?"

"Up Up Up."

"How you goin'?"

"Fast Fast Fast."

"At night, whatcha see inna sky?"

"Nazi Socialist Moon!"

"Gimme a thousand pushups,"

The cadets dropped down, began to count, "One Vengeance Weapon, Two Vengeance
Weapon, Three Vengeance Weapon . . ." There was stage business with the pushups,
most of it dealing with Zero's attempts to do nothing while yelling at the top
of his voice.

When they finished, Manley Mann said, "Right. Today we're gonna learn about the
MD2D3 Course Plottin' Calculator. Walk smart follow me follow me-" and off.

Another card: Six Weeks Later. Cadet Barracks. Night.

Then came Shemp's solo, as he looked out the window at a bored-looking stagehand
holding up a cardboard moon. He did some comic patter, then went on to sing "I
Wish I Had a Little Rocket of My Own."

Then the lights went up, the Intermission sign dropped down, and the
half-curtain was lowered to the stage.

Backstage the Madame was furious. "I told you we must take that song out!" she
yelled at Shemp. "You realize you made the audience identify with your
character? You know that's against all the Master's teachings! You were supposed
to sing the 'Song of the Iron Will."' Shemp weaved like a punchdrunk boxer,
running his hands through his dank, lanky hair. "I got mixed up," he said.
"They played the wrong music, so I sang it. Yell at the band."

"You must always always remember the Verfremsdungeffekt. You must always remind
people they are watching a performance. Why do you think the stagehand holds
the prop moon so everyone can see him? Are you an idiot? What were you
thinking?"

Shemp paused, ticking off on his fingers. "I do. I always do. I don't know.
Yes. Nothing."

"Why must I be saddled with morons?" Shemp said something under his breath.

"What?! What did you say?!"

"I said I gotta get a drink of water, or I'm gonna lose my voice next act."

"That's not what you said!"

"Yes it is, comrade Ma'am."

"Get out of my sight!"

"At once," said Shemp, and disappeared offstage.

Zero sat on a crate in the alleyway. It was bitterly cold, but this was the
only place he was sure Madame wouldn't follow him. Peter came out, lit up a
butt one of the waiters had brought him from a customer's ashtray.

"We gotta find another way to make a living," said Zero, his breath a fog.

"We've said that every night for sixteen years now," said Peter. "Christ, it's
cold!"

"Wasn't it Fitzgerald that said nothing much starts in Switzerland, but lots of
things end there?"

"How the fuck should I know?" said Peter.

"Well, I don't want to be one of the things that ends here," said Zero.

Peter thought of lines from a movie he'd been in long ago, lines dealing with
exile, expatriation, and death, and started to say one of them, but didn't.
Besides, they'd already used the best lines from that movie in the play.

"It's like I told that fat great Limey actor once," said Peter. "'Chuck,' I
said, 'if you have to pork young men, just go for god's sake and do it, and come
back and learn your goddamn lines; just quit torturing yourself about it!"'

"Are you saying I should pick up a little boy?" asked Zero.

Peter shrugged his shoulders. "Where else is there to go but here, Zero?" he
asked.

Zero was quiet. Then: "Sometimes I get so tired, Pete. Soon we'll be old men.
Like Bruno. Then dead old men..."

"But theater!--" began Peter.

"--and Brecht!--" said Zero.

"--will live forever!" they finished in unison. They laughed and Zero fell off
his crate into the snow. Then they brushed themselves off and went back inside.

Brettschneider had made his rounds of the tables during the break. He looked
over his notes, made an emendation on one of them. He ate a kaiser roll, then
drank a gin-and-tonic, feeling the pine-needle taste far back in his throat.

Then the band came back, played the last-act overture, and cards dropped back
in.

There was a classroom lecture on the futurist films of Fritz Lang, Metropolis
and Frau im Mond, which then went backwards and forwards to cover other
spaceward-looking films: Himmelskibet, F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht, Der Tunnel and
Welttraumschiff/Starlet, at which Zero insisted on confusing Leni Reifenstahl
with the Dusseldorf Murderer.

Brettschneider wrote: unacceptable reference to Reichsminister for Culture.

Then the play moved on to Graduation Day, where the massed cadets (represented
by the three actors, some mops and brooms with mustaches painted on them, and a
boxful of toy soldiers) sang "Up Up for the Fatherland" and were handed their
rocket insignia.

The actors changed onstage into their powder-blue uniforms (overalls) with the
jackboots (rubber galoshes) as a sign came down: First Assignment. Rocket Man
City-Peenemunde.

Another sign: Suddenly-A Propaganda Crisis!

Major Strasser comes up to the three Rocket Men. "Suddenly," he says, "a
propaganda crisis!"

"Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!" says Shemp, staggering.

"Attention!" says the major. "Our enemies in the U.S.R. far beyond the Urals
have launched one of their primitive reaction-motor ships. It is bound for the
far reaches of the Solar System. Our information is that it is filled with the
Collected Works of Marx and Lenin, and the brilliant but non-aryan playwright
Bertolt Brecht."

(There was a boo from the audience, followed by laughter. The actors onstage
held still until it was over.)

"Your first assignment is to intercept this missile before it can spread
unapproved thinking to Nazi Socialist space, and beyond, and to destroy it."

There was a blackout; four signs were illuminated, one after the other:

*

Three Go Out.
One Gets Killed.
One Goes Mad.
One Doesn't Come Back.

The first two signs were lit. In the darkness, Zero is in a balsawood framework
shaped like a small rocket. To his uniform has been added a bent coat hanger
representing a space helmet.

His voice is roaring, he is determined. The band is raucous behind him but his
singing overpowers it.

*

"Target in sight!
It's easy, all right!
Just line up the guns
and watch all the fu--
Ooops!"

A papier-mache meteor, painted red and trailing smoke vertically, comes but of
the darkness. It smashes into Zero's ship, which flies to flinders. Zero, his
coat-hanger helmet now gone, floats up into the air on wires in the dark, a
hideous grin on his face.

The spot-lit placard: One Goes Mad.

Shemp's balsawood spaceship. Zero floats directly in front of it. "Whoa!"
yells Shemp. He punches things on his instrument panel, running his hands over
his coat hanger. "Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!" Then he sits bolt upright, unmoving
except for the lips, making perfect sense in a monotonous voice, reciting the
successive graph plots on a Fibonacci curve, as he and his ship, trailing
vertical smoke, are pulled by ropes out of the light into the darkness at the
back of the stage.

The spotlight searches around, finds the sign: One Doesn't Come. Back. Peter in
his ship. He is mumbling the Soldier's Creed. At the other side of the stage,
light comes up on a toy rocket. Peter takes out a dart gun, fires twice at the
toy, his arm outside the ship's framework as he reloads the rubber-tipped darts.
One finally hits the toy rocket-it explodes like a pinata.

Then an oogah klaxon horn is blown backstage, causing the audience to jump, and
Peter's ship is bathed in flickering red light. "Uh-oh," he says. "Trouble."
Then the band begins to play softly, and he sings "I Wonder What Deborah's Doing
in Festung Amerika Tonight?"

The ship tilts downwards.

Blackout. A sign: Mars.

When the lights come back up the stage is clear. A red silk drop cloth covers
the ground. For a full minute, nothing happens. Then Peter's balsawood ship,
him inside, flies out of the wings and he lands flat on his ass, legs straight
out while pieces of wood bounce all over.

He stands up, brushes himself off. As he does so, stagehands begin to ripple
the red silk, making it look like drifting, gently blowing sand. Peter takes off
his coat hanger, takes a deep breath. A book falls from above, bounces at the
rear of the moving red stage. Then another follows. Peter looks up. A book
slowly lowers toward him on a wire. He reaches up and plucks it from the air.
Others fall around him occasionally throughout the scene. Peter begins to read.
His eyes widen even more. He looks up at the audience. He reads more. Then he
stands up. "Holy dialectical shit!" he says.

Then the lights came up, and the chorines, stagehands, actors, ushers and
dishwashers came in, taking their bows. Zero floated down from the ceiling on
his wires, blowing kisses. Then the Madame came out, glaring at Zero, turned
and took a bow to the audience for having survived Brecht.

Then they all passed among the tables, holding out baskets for donations.

Brettschneider stayed at his table drinking, while the audience mingled with the
members of the Ensemble. He noticed that he'd written nothing in his notebook
since the couple of entries just after intermission. When he saw Peter take
something from Madame, put on his coat and go out the door, Brettschneider
wrote: Suspects then all followed their usual routines. Then he gathered up his
own things, nodded to Caspar who was still tending bar, and went back to his
home and to bed.

Christ, it's even colder than this morning, thought Peter. He turned off the
main avenue, went down a side street. The snow, which this morning had seemed
so white and pure, was now gray, crusted ice. Even so, as he turned into a
small courtyard, he saw that only a few sets of footprints had come and gone
that way the whole day.

Near the middle was a rusty iron gate. He went in with a loud groaning squeal
from the metal. On the wall was a brass plate that said Union of Soviet
Republics Consular Offices. Peter went to the mail drop, took the envelope out
of his thin overcoat pocket. On the outside, written in Madame's florid script
was From Your Comrades at the Cabaret Kropotkin. Peter tore open the envelope,
took out a few hundred francs, slapped some medical adhesive tape over the torn
flap, tied it around twice with some twine, and dropped it in the slot.

As Brecht had said: First the beans, then the morals.

He went back up the avenue, crunching through the frosty ice on the way. The
night was still clear, bitterly frigid. He looked up at the winking stars, and
saw the slow-moving dot of Space Platform #6 on its two-hour orbit.

He heard a streetcar bell. He knew of a place he could go and get a cup of real
coffee and watch a fireplace burning for an hour or two, where the thought of
Herr Brecht would never cross his mind. He began whistling "In the Hall of the
Mountain King."