The Crying of Lot 49 Page 8

  “Hello,” said Oedipa.

  “I was dreaming,” Mr Thoth told her, “about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel,” laughing, “as if I have been 91 all my life. Oh, the stories that old man would tell. He rode for the Pony Express, back in the gold rush days. His horse was named Adolf, I remember that.”

  Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the bronze marker, smiled at him as granddaughterly as she knew how and asked, “Did he ever have to fight off desperados?”

  “That cruel old man,” said Mr Thoth, “was an Indian killer. God, the saliva would come out in a string from his lip whenever he told about killing the Indians. He must have loved that part of it.”

  “What were you dreaming about him?”

  “Oh, that,” perhaps embarrassed. “It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig cartoon.” He waved at the tube. “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine. Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?”

  She had, as a matter of fact, but she said no.

  “The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930’s. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.”

  “Dressed all in black,” Oedipa prompted him.

  “It was mixed in so with the Indians,” he tried to remember, “the dream. The Indians who wore black feathers, the Indians who weren’t Indians. My grandfather told me. The feathers were white, but those false Indians were supposed to burn bones and stir the boneblack with their feathers to get them black. It made them invisible in the night, because they came at night. That was how the old man, bless him, knew they weren’t Indians. No Indian ever attacked at night. If he got killed his soul would wander in the dark forever. Heathen.”

  “If they weren’t Indians,” Oedipa asked, “what were they?”

  “A Spanish name,” Mr Thoth said, frowning, “a Mexican name. Oh, I can’t remember. Did they write it on the ring?” He reached down to a knitting bag by his chair and came up with blue yarn, needles, patterns, finally a dull gold signet ring. “My grandfather cut this from the finger of one of them he killed. Can you imagine a 91-year-old man so brutal?” Oedipa stared. The device on the ring was once again the WASTE symbol.

  She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the center of some intricate crystal, and said, “My God.”

  “And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,” said Mr Thoth, “and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  “No, my God.”

  So she went to find Fallopian, who ought to know a lot about the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo if he was writing a book about them. He did, but not about their dark adversaries.

  “I’ve had hints,” he told her, “sure. I wrote to Sacramento about that historical marker, and they’ve been kicking it around their bureaucratic morass for months. Someday they’ll come back with a source book for me to read. It will say, ‘Old-timers remember the yarn about,’ whatever happened. Old-timers. Real good documentation, this Californiana crap. Odds are the author will be dead. There’s no way to trace it, unless you want to follow up an accidental correlation, like you got from the old man.”

  “You think it’s really a correlation?” She thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long. Two very old men. All these fatigued brain cells between herself and the truth.

  “Marauders, nameless, faceless, dressed in black. Probably hired by the Federal government. Those suppressions were brutal.”

  “Couldn’t it have been a rival carrier?”

  Fallopian shrugged. Oedipa showed him the WASTE symbol, and he shrugged again.

  “It was in the ladies’ room, right here in The Scope, Mike.”

  “Women,” he only said. “Who can tell what goes on with them?”

  If she’d thought to check a couple lines back in the Wharfinger play, Oedipa might have made the next connection by herself. As it was she got an assist from one Genghis Cohen, who is the most eminent philatelist in the L.A. area. Metzger, acting on instructions in the will, had retained this amiable, slightly adenoidal expert, for a percent of his valuation, to inventory and appraise Inverarity’s stamp collection.

  One rainy morning, with mist rising off the pool, Metzger again away, the Paranoids off somewhere to a recording session, Oedipa got rung up by this Genghis Cohen, who even over the phone she could tell was disturbed.

  “There are some irregularities, Miz Maas,” he said. “Could you come over?”

  She was somehow sure, driving in on the slick freeway, that the “irregularities” would tie in with the word Trystero. Metzger had taken the stamp albums to Cohen from safe-deposit storage a week ago in Oedipa’s Impala, and then she hadn’t even been interested enough to look inside them. But now it came to her, as if the rain whispered it, that what Fallopian had not known about private carriers, Cohen might.

  When he opened the door of his apartment/office she saw him framed in a long succession or train of doorways, room after room receding in the general direction of Santa Monica, all soaked in rain-light. Genghis Cohen had a touch of summer flu, his fly was half open and he was wearing a Barry Goldwater sweatshirt also. Oedipa felt at once motherly. In a room perhaps a third of the way along the suite he sat her in a rocking chair and brought real homemade dandelion wine in small neat glasses.

  “I picked the dandelions in a cemetery, two years ago. Now the cemetery is gone. They took it out for the East San Narciso Freeway.”

  She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to—an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second—but there was no way to tell. She glanced down the corridor of Cohen’s rooms in the rain and saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this.

  “I have taken the liberty,” Genghis Cohen was saying, “of getting in touch with an Expert Committee. I haven’t yet forwarded them the stamps in question, pending your own authorization and of course Mr. Metzger’s. However, all fees, I am sure, can be charged to the estate.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Oedipa said.

  “Allow me.” He rolled over to her a small table, and from a plastic folder lifted with tweezers, delicately, a U. S. commemorative stamp, the Pony Express issue of 1940, 3¢ henna brown. Cancelled. “Look,” he said, switching on a small, intense lamp, handing her an oblong magnifying glass.

  “It’s the wrong side,” she said, as he swabbed the stamp gently with benzine and placed it on a black tray.

  “The watermark.”

  Oedipa peered. There it was again, her WASTE symbol, showing up black, a little right of center.

  “What is this?” she asked, wondering how much time had gone by.

  “I’m not sure,” Cohen said. “That’s why I’ve referred it, and the others, to the Committee. Some friends have been
around to see them too, but they’re all being cautious. But see what you think of this.” From the same plastic folder he now tweezed what looked like an old German stamp, with the figures ¼ in the centre, the word Freimarke at the top, and along the right-hand margin the legend Thurn und Taxis.

  “They were,” she remembered from the Wharfinger play, “some kind of private couriers, right?”

  “From about 1300, until Bismarck bought them out in 1867, Miz Maas, they were the European mail service. This is one of their very few adhesive stamps. But look in the corners.” Decorating each corner of the stamp, Oedipa saw a horn with a single loop in it. Almost like the WASTE symbol. “A post horn,” Cohen said; “the Thurn and Taxis symbol. It was in their coat of arms.”

  And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn, Oedipa remembered. Sure. “Then the watermark you found,” she said, “is nearly the same thing, except for the extra little doojigger sort of coming out of the bell.”

  “It sounds ridiculous,” Cohen said, “but my guess is it’s a mute.”

  She nodded. The black costumes, the silence, the secrecy. Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn.

  “Normally this issue, and the others, are unwatermarked,” Cohen said, “and in view of other details—the hatching, number of perforations, way the paper has aged—it’s obviously a counterfeit. Not just an error.”

  “Then it isn’t worth anything.”

  Cohen smiled, blew his nose. “You’d be amazed how much you can sell an honest forgery for. Some collectors specialize in them. The question is, who did these? They’re atrocious.” He flipped the stamp over and with the tip of the tweezers showed her. The picture had a Pony Express rider galloping out of a western fort. From shrubbery over on the right-hand side and possibly in the direction the rider would be heading, protruded a single, painstakingly engraved, black feather. “Why put in a deliberate mistake?” he asked, ignoring—if he saw it—the look on her face. “I’ve come up so far with eight in all. Each one has an error like this, laboriously worked into the design, like a taunt. There’s even a transposition—U. S. Potsage, of all things.”

  “How recent?” blurted Oedipa, louder than she needed to be.

  “Is anything wrong, Miz Maas?”

  She told him first about the letter from Mucho with a cancellation telling her report all obscene mail to her potsmaster.

  “Odd,” Cohen agreed. “The transposition,” consulting a notebook, “is only on the Lincoln 4¢. Regular issue, 1954. The other forgeries run back to 1893.”

  “That’s 70 years,” she said. “He’d have to be pretty old.”

  “If it’s the same one,” said Cohen. “And what if it were as old as Thurn and Taxis? Omedio Tassis, banished from Milan, organized his first couriers in the Bergamo region around 1290.”

  They sat in silence, listening to rain gnaw languidly at the windows and skylights, confronted all at once by the marvellous possibility.

  “Has that ever happened before?” she had to ask.

  “An 800-year tradition of postal fraud. Not to my knowledge.” Oedipa told him then all about old Mr Thoth’s signet ring, and the symbol she’d caught Stanley Koteks doodling, and the muted horn drawn in the ladies’ room at The Scope.

  “Whatever it is,” he hardly needed to say, “they’re apparently still quite active.”

  “Do we tell the government, or what?”

  “I’m sure they know more than we do.” He sounded nervous, or suddenly in retreat. “No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t our business, is it?”

  She asked him then about the initials W.A.S.T.E., but it was somehow too late. She’d lost him. He said no, but so abruptly out of phase now with her own thoughts he could even have been lying. He poured her more dandelion wine.

  “It’s clearer now,” he said, rather formal. “A few months ago it got quite cloudy. You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered.”

  No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

  5

  Though her next move should have been to contact Randolph Driblette again, she decided instead to drive up to Berkeley. She wanted to find out where Richard Wharfinger had got his information about Trystero. Possibly also take a look at how the inventor John Nefastis picked up his mail.

  As with Mucho when she’d left Kinneret, Metzger did not seem desperate at her going. She debated, driving north, whether to stop off at home on the way to Berkeley or coming back. As it turned out she missed the exit for Kinneret and that solved it. She purred along up the east side of the bay, presently climbed into the Berkeley hills and arrived close to midnight at a sprawling, many-leveled, German-baroque hotel, carpeted in deep green, going in for curved corridors and ornamental chandeliers. A sign in the lobby said WELCOME CALIFORNIA CHAPTER AMERICAN DEAF-MUTE ASSEMBLY. Every light in the place burned, alarmingly bright; a truly ponderable silence occupied the building. A clerk popped up from behind the desk where he’d been sleeping and began making sign language at her. Oedipa considered giving him the finger to see what would happen. But she’d driven straight through, and all at once the fatigue of it had caught up with her. The clerk took her to a room with a reproduction of a Remedios Varo in it, through corridors gently curving as the streets of San Narciso, utterly silent. She fell asleep almost at once, but kept waking from a nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her bed. Nothing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see. When she finally did settle into sleep, she dreamed that Mucho, her husband, was making love to her on a soft white beach that was not part of any California she knew. When she woke in the morning, she was sitting bolt upright, staring into the mirror at her own exhausted face.

  She found the Lectern Press in a small office building on Shattuck Avenue. They didn’t have Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger on the premises, but did take her check for $12.50, gave her the address of their warehouse in Oakland and a receipt to show the people there. By the time she’d collected the book, it was afternoon. She skimmed through to find the line that had brought her all the way up here. And in the leaf-fractured sunlight, froze.

  No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, ran the couplet, Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo.

  “No,” she protested aloud.” ‘Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.’” The pencilled note in the paperback had mentioned a variant. But the paperback was supposed to be a straight reprint of the book she now held. Puzzled, she saw that this edition also had a footnote:

  According only to the Quarto edition (1687). The earlier Folio has a lead inserted where the closing line should have been. D’Amico has suggested that Wharfinger may have made a libellous comparison involving someone at court, and that the later ‘restoration’ was actually the work of the printer, Inigo Barfstable. The doubtful ‘Whitechapel’ version (c. 1670) has ‘This tryst or odious awry, O Niccolò,’ which besides bringing in a quite graceless Alexandrine, is difficult to make sense of syntactically, unless we accept the rather unorthodox though persuasive argument of J.-K. Sale that the line is really a pun on ‘This trystero dies irae. . . .’ This, however, it must be pointed out, leaves the line nearly as corrupt as before, owing to no clear meaning for the word trystero, unless it be a pseudo-Italianate variant on triste (= wretched, depraved). But the ‘Whitechapel’ edition, besides being a fragment, abounds in such corrupt and probably spurious lines, as we have mentioned elsewhere, and is hardly to be trusted.

  Then where, Oedipa wondered, does the paperback I bought at Zapf’s get off with its “Trystero” line? Was there yet another ed
ition, besides the Quarto, Folio, and “Whitechapel” fragment? The editor’s preface, signed this time, by one Emory Bortz, professor of English at Cal, mentioned none. She spent nearly an hour more, searching through all the footnotes, finding nothing.

  “Dammit,” she yelled, started the car and headed for the Berkeley campus, to find Professor Bortz.

  She should have remembered the date on the book—1957. Another world. The girl in the English office informed Oedipa that Professor Bortz was no longer with the faculty. He was teaching at San Narciso College, San Narciso, California.

  Of course, Odeipa thought, wry, where else? She copied the address and walked away trying to remember who’d put out the paperback. She couldn’t.

  It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s, suds in the fountain, students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen—the sort that bring governments down. But it was English she was hearing as she crossed Bancroft Way among the blonde children and the muttering Hondas and Suzukis; American English. Where were Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina who’d mothered over Oedipa’s so temperate youth? In another world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who’d thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again. Among them they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts.