Chapter 14: the Ideological Singularity

The action in Barca Nona, a Barcelona watering hole circa 1925, rises to High Chaos just as Count Julius Evola, self-styled political philosopher and Dadaist, pronounces his Fascist Manifesto before the astonished crowd of Worthies. As the band of Jazz All-Stars has grown silent, our Humble Narrator, Dashiell Hammett, takes pointed exception to Evola’s views. The Establishment erupts into an explosion of glass and Cool Cats in every direction. Hammett carries off the final metaphor.

The Reader is reminded that this is a continuation of Undivided: the Redemption Inquiry. The 14th chapter of the novel and the fourth of…

Part the Third—Zeitgeists: In which The Right Reverend Rav Krishna declaims to his followers, in the visitors suite of the maternity ward, the long and tortuous history of the descent of Humanity’s Soule and Its Darke Twin, The Other, through the four levels of the soul as defined in the Lurianic Kabbalah. It falls out that the turning points in said history coincide precisely with the years—1309, 1925 and 2009—in which The Blessing of the Sun doth intersect with The Festival of the Passover, each year illuminated by a barroom fracas. The Soule of Humanity hath ascended, in the telling, to the realm of Creation, the realm from which the seeds of the Future seek their womb in the world.

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Emma Goldman gives the nod to her companionable eunuch, Jamie, “Tell Mr. Hammett what we’ve dug up on the Barcelona Affair.” The poor sucker spills. “Well, Dash, if you really want to know it’s kind of a snooze so far. Two stories actually. The first claims the city was named after Hannibal’s father, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca. End of story.” Emma snorts, “Yes, Jamie, boring old Camel Hair Parka.” They guffaw in unison at their little private joke. Jamie stokes up again, “The other legend is a bit more keen. Seems Hercules was out chasing the Golden Fleece with Jason and his chums when ship number nine runs aground. Where do you think they crash?” On cue the three of us clink our glasses and belt out, “Barcelona!” As soon as we down our hooch and reload, Jamie continues. “Yes indeed. And when the hero of heroes finds his men, they’ve already made themselves quite at heim in the seaside paradise they’ve discovered. They name it after their wrecked ship, Barca Nona, the ninth boat. The name of this very gin joint in which we amuse ourselves tonight.” Emma chimes in again, “So, according to old Sir James George, there must be twelve laborious tasks ahead of us here, that is if I read his book aright. Let’s see now.” And she begins to tick off the labors of Hercules on her fingertips. 

“First off, slay the Nemean Lion. No problem. Then two, we bump off the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra. A bit trickier, but we’ll persevere. Three, capture the Golden Hind of Artemis. Some fast footwork there. Four, nab the Erymanthian Boar. Hard to figure out which one of these boozers is Erymanthian! Five is the charwoman’s bit, clean the Augean stables in a single day. A boatload of shite, as Jamie would say. Six, we rub out the Stymphalian Birds. Nasty business, those gals. Number seven, bring back the Cretan Bull. Probably a dim-witted creature. Eight, round up the Mares of Diomedes. By God, we are reduced to horse thieves. Nine, for the boys, purloin the girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Ou la la. Number ten, boost the cattle of the monster Geryon. Cattle rustlers, too! Next to last, number eleven, grab the apples of the Hesperides. Dash, you’ll have to do for Atlas and bump off Ladon. How ‘bout them apples! And last but by no means least, capture and bring back Cerberus. Nice doggie.” Tickled at her own wit, Emma smiles a thin-lipped smile at her homme du jour, “I think that about covers it. Eh, Jamie?” Jamie nods in lazy agreement, “Yes, we’ve got our work cut out for us, I’ll say. Ought we look around this bistro and see if we can commence right here? The place is rife with monsters and other skeery sheit!” They just crack each other up. I’m okay with being a third wheel and all. I need a little room to act fast if need be, times being what they are. A terrific up-tempo version of “Tea for Two” has us all tapping our toes.

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Meanwhile, back at the science table, Heisenberg and Bohr are not yet convinced of Gödel’s particular genius. It’s all they can do to cover for their oddball pal Wolfie. Einstein, however, cottons to this strange young man when Gödel joins him some years later at The Institute for Advanced Study. He escorts Herr Warum to his citizenship hearing in Jersey. On the way to the judge’s chambers Gödel reveals to Einstein that while prepping for the hearing he’s stumbled upon a disturbing inconsistency in the US constitution, an inconsistency that might lead willy-nilly to fascist dictatorship. The Third Reich, Meine Gott! Einstein puts the kibosh on that one, says the judge won’t look too kindly on a foreigner critiquing the U.S. constitution. Wouldn’t you know it, the judge at the citizenship hearing does in fact ask Gödel if he imagines something like the Nazi takeover of Germany might happen in the US of A. Gödel launches into his crackpot constitutional spiel when Einstein makes like he’s having a coughing fit and gives the judge a wink, you know, to beg for tolerance of the little misfit’s wild imagination. The judge, another member of the tribe, Einstein’s tribe, changes the topic and completes the hearing, bim bam bop. No time to contemplate the US government turning fascist.

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Tadzhikistan 1925. A band of Red Army regulars, led by Major General Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski, pursues their foe deep into the rugged terrain of the Vanch Mountains. Believing the anti-Soviet White Russians to be cornered in a cave, Topilski orders them to open fire into the breach in the rock. A wild, hairy creature bolts from the cave right into a shower of bullets, falls to the ground and dies. A White Russian survivor tells his captors they were attacked in the cave by a band of hairy ape-men. On the spot examination by the troop’s medic confirms the non-human characteristics of the creature. A latter-day Enkidu, not a temple courtesan in sight.

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“Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau!” bellows André Breton, a cri de coeur to his fellow wild men, artists, poets, philosophers and anarchists all, jammed around the table at Barca Nona. “As Isis collaged her shredded lover, so may The Unconscious employ us as her fingers in our work of assemblage. You, Man-child Ray-gun, you must be the first to break ground in this exhumation.” Breton, with exaggerated flourish and bow, swinging to the syncopation of Georgie Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm,” hands Man Ray his prize fountain pen. The American expat plucks the instrument from the pincers of the French alienist and aims his laser beam eyes at the blank square of white linen stretched out upon the operating surface. The Queen of Montparnasse at his side, Man Ray stands shrouded in her scarf, Stieglitz-style, and inscribes the first panel of the ‘exquisite corpse’, obscured from the view of others. The Gallerie Pierre crew popped in from gay Paree, still intoxicated with their heady first success, the grand Surrealist exhibition. Same year as the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, the launching pad for Art Deco and death knell for not so new Art Nouveau. The Corpse, a parlor trick ginned up that year in Paris, grabs center stage in all their reindeer games, the hip cats’ latest foray into spontaneous divination. Artistic automatism, the ghost seduces the machine. 

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The Barcelona seaside is the gods’ own playground for Anarchists. Barcelona, the birthplace of the general strike of 1919. Mirabile dictu, the Anarchists bequeath the nation an eight-hour workday that spreads like wildfire to workers everywhere. Unfortunately a military coup follows four years later. In 1923 Spain installs an inept dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. The man is incapable of formulating any clear policy or mustering a shred of political acumen. And he can’t pay for his ill-conceived grandiose public works program. The foolhardy dictator’s mercurial style alienates his allies and foments chaos in Spain’s diplomatic corps. Spanish fascism, and a nasty Civil War, lurks in the wings. Catalonia is a hotbed for revolt. Barca Nona, its nerve center.

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Meanwhile, Einstein’s young subcontinental protégé, S.N. Bose, more than a little bored, swivels his head from the physics of his beer drinking companions to the metaphysics at the next table. Straight away Bose’s gaze alights upon the gaunt face of an aristocratic young man seated hard by. The spectral gent has turned his chair with its back to his own table companions. He sits and recites Shakespeare in a deadpan voice addressing the air, the monotonous crooning of a zombie lover, over “The Sheik of Araby” tickling our ears in the background. The contrast is to die for:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

“Well done, sir!” Bose digs it, most genuinely and spontaneously, “An utterly ethereal reading of Shakespeare. Striking. One might even say stark, your rendition of the bard’s sonnet. Remarkable how your tone shifts the reader’s focus from the poet’s ardor for his Beloved to the bald fact of death. The figure in the ground, by Jove! The way you linger over the words and phrases that emphasize loss and decay. The lover is neatly excised from the sonnet and replaced by the immortal words of the sonnet itself! Shakespeare might read it just that way.” Bose smirks, “From his grave!” He sticks out his hand, “S.N. Bose, my friends call me Nat.” The ghost-poet stares at the Indian physicist, still as a stone. Finally, words bubble from his barely parted lips, “Yes, I see. Is that your Nat-ture? My friends, the few that I have, call me Ludwig. Because that is my name. Ludwig Wittgenstein.” The band shifts gears to the ever wistful “Somebody Love’s Me.” Philosopher grimaces greeting to physicist. Bose pauses a moment to gather his thoughts, then fires off a poetic arrow from his own quiver:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
Your touch, stronger than wine
As the aura of your fine oils
Your name is spilled oil.
Worlds say yes to you.
Drag me after you, let’s run.
The King leads me to His chambers.
We’ll enjoy you, delight in you.
We’ll remember your touch, surpassing wine.
Unswerving are your lovers.
I am dark and lovely, Jerusalem’s daughters,
As Kedar’s tents or Solomon’s tapestries.
Don’t stare at me, I’m darkened
Because the sun itself tans me.
My brothers belittled me,
Made me the vineyards’ keeper.
My vineyard, my own I’ve not kept.

“A Hebrew poem from a Hindu,” remarks the inscrutable Ludwig, face distorted in an ironic rictus, “with some clever bits of translation. I rather like ‘worlds’ instead of ‘girls’. A Hebrew pun with some punch.” “Yes, an actual Aryan from the land of Aryans who simply adores Hebrew poetry,” replies Nat with a bemused smile. “ I prefer my lovers with some blood running through their veins, the intoxication of the flesh. But then, I am a dark man from Southern climes, neglecting my homeland for the sake of toiling in the vineyards of these brainy Northern folk. My brothers here,” he says with a nod toward his table, “are physicists and mathematicians. And yours?” Wittgenstein grimaces again, “These are not my brothers. They invite me to discourse upon the nature of language, but any attempt at real intellectual exchange immediately descends into bellicosity and farce. Look what nonsense they’re engaged in!” Wittgenstein points with the boney finger of a Jeremiah prophesying the doom of a decadent empire. Bose gazes beyond his new friend to the crowd of eccentrics that lean over the adjacent table. They all beam in manic delight at having achieved the feat of folding their tablecloth down to an eight by eight inch square.

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Kiki, unofficial Queen of Montparnasse, purrs in her boozy seductress drawl to the other lovebirds at her table, “Pauli and Galarina dears, you take the next turn. It’s crazy. Come now. You mustn’t be wet blankets.” Although they’ve sailed to Barcelona together, the Éluards’ marriage is on the shoals. Gala retrieved her suicidal hubby from Saigon last summer. Seems he isn’t so copacetic about the ménage they had with his buddy Max Ernst. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. The three of them are back in the saddle together at Barca Nona, but the tension is thick as foie gras. Strains of “Don’t Bring Lulu” waft in from the bandstand. Breton, once in Gala’s thrall as well, all but snarls as he barks daggers, “Yes, Paul. Why don’t you and your moll have a shot at it.” Manny and Kiki re-jigger the tablecloth so that only the barest hint of their scrawl is visible to the next victims. The Éluards cloak themselves in Kiki’s scarf as per ritual decorum. Young Dali, ten years the junior of Mme. Éluard, an unknown sybarite, dreams from the shadows of his future connubial felicity with her. She does not notice him that night, in spite of it being the year of his coming out in Barcelona. He may peep with impunity.

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Wittgenstein turns back to Bose and moans, “You see what I’m dealing with? Odiousness and baseness. Human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but these so-called artists and anarchists are more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than I had any reason to suspect. I was mistaken when I thought we were grappling with the same problem, the impossibility of linguistic expression. Now I see it’s simply the impossibility of decent human behavior!” A distant smile crosses Wittgenstein’s face, “You know, I was there in Zurich when Hugo Ball orated his Dada Manifesto. Very amusing. I especially liked the part where he goes like this: Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da.” Pause for effect. “I memorized it! Very funny, very rhythmical. Dispenses with all pretense of ‘artistic’ or ‘philosophical’ meaning. Great. But this Surrealism scheisse is just pseudo-religion if you ask me.”

Bose humors the crabby philosopher, “You think scientists and mathematicians are so different from your crowd of artists? A few of them—most notably Heisenberg, Schrödinger and even my hero, Einstein—dash around like wild men ‘making whoopee’, just as chaotic as your anarchic artists. And many are every bit as naive and irresponsible when it comes to politics and philosophy. Complete inconsistency. Some are downright pre-moral children in their attitudes toward their fellow humans. Heisenberg, for example, talks about a youthful stint serving with The Freikorps, putting down The Bavarian Soviet Republic, as a ‘game of cops and robbers.’ Think of it. A thousand communists died in the street-fighting. Some game! The noble Spaniard manqué—Paco as we like to tease him—clearly leans fascist and doesn’t really figure the social consequences for his non-Aryan colleagues. He fits in quite well in this country of his ancestors, I’m afraid. For my money, the real problem is the Germans. The Treaty of Versailles hasn’t worked out so well for them, and they are sorely displeased not to be every bit the colonial power as our dear Brits. I believe they are brewing something nasty. This will not end well for the European neighborhood.”

Wittgenstein nods, sober as a judge. “I for one prefer socialism. Very humane. But we’ve got you beat at the artists table. You see that sinister looking Italian over there with the dark rings under his eyes?” He points to a ghoulish figure of a man, lurking in the shadows, a clown who affects a cape and a monocle. Bose shivers. “Who is he? The man looks like an evil clown. Say, did you catch ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ at the cinema this year? Your fellow’s the real thing! Lon Chaney has nothing on this character. A real raksha. A monster in an age of cinematic monsters.” Wittgenstein snorts, “You have no idea. That’s dead on. Julius Evola. Changed his name from Giulio just to amplify the imperial. Claims to be a Dadaist, spouts off about all kinds of mystico-magical thinking. It all boils down to an infantile wish for omnipotence. A darling of the Italian fascists.” Both men shudder. They couldn’t have known at the time that the lunatic’s ideas would be resurrected by a neo-fascist movement in the good ol’ US of A in the next century, spearheaded by an insane internet media entrepreneur and soldier of fortune working at the behest of a reality TV dictator.

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Parade of technology 1925. The Leica 35mm camera and the Thompson submachine gun, both advertised to the general public. A well-armed hoi polloi, whether it be for an insurrection, a stick-up or a fashion shoot. There’s Lucky Lindy waving his diploma fresh from military flight school, ready to take to the air with the U.S. mail. The Victor Talking Machine Company rolls out its Orthophonic Victrola on self-proclaimed ‘Victor Day’. Ol’ Cal Coolidge earns a first for political broadcast on radio. His wildly successful presidential campaign is orchestrated by none other than the father of PR itself, Edward Bernays. Using Uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories about the motivational value of lust and fear, he inspires Joseph Goebbels and a whole generation of women smokers. Speaking of propaganda, the newly founded USSR boasts the start of TASS, a national telegraph agency. Charles Francis Jenkins gives us ‘radiovision’, synchronized sound and picture transmitted five miles from Anacostia to DC for an audience of government bigwigs. Ten minutes of a miniature windmill. A bit of a snooze, but the content providers will rush to fill in the gap. Later that same fateful year Londoner John Logie Baird renders the first television images in grayscale. Not to be outdone, whimsical Brit, Grindell Matthews, unveils his ‘luminaphone’, a contraption that turns light rays into the sounds emitted by a pipe organ. God’s own Sunday sermon! On a more serious note, Robert Millikan discovers cosmic rays, Edward Hubble proves the existence of other galaxies and Richard Adolf Zsigismondy receives a Nobel in Chemistry for the secret of Ruby red glass. Nearly all of it right from the pages of L. Frank Baum, a seer, a women’s suffragist, Theosophist and, ah well, sometime advocate of Native American genocide?

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The Spaniards—Picasso, Miro and Dali—bolt down shots of aguardiente, Spanish firewater. Old man Picabia and Breton, the overheated headshrinker, square off against Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Tzara drops in from Sweden to booze it up with his old pals, but Breton can’t resist ribbing him as the ‘Clown Prince of Dada’. He pokes the bull again, “Come on, O Sad Ass, you have to admit that Surrealism has devoured and digested Dada.” Tzara doesn’t blink. The former Samy Rosenstock just got word from the Romanian government that his application for a permanent name change is a done deal. He feels pretty good—Swedish girlfriend, new name and all—so he throws a left hook back at the Frog shrink, “You are so stuffed with your self-consumed self that you cannot assimilate other people’s ideas and all you can do is regurgitate them!” Before Breton gets off another slug, the gin joint quintet strike up the band with a truly rambunctious version of that paean to corporate sociopathy, “Oh Lady Be Good”. A group of talented kids shanghaied from Gay Paree by none other than Josephine Baker. She came to town for a gig at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, a really swell joint down the street. Barca Nona is the unofficial after hours club. The musicians are hot—Sidney Bechet on soprano, Stephane Grappelli on fiddle, a gypsy kid named Django on guitar, and none other than visiting royalty, young Duke Ellington on piano. And the drummer Sonny Greer’s got a set of skins that has everything, including the kitchen sink. They’re wailing.

Next thing you know, Herr Heisenberg sashays over to the artists’ turf and asks the Queen of Montparnasse for a dance. Man they could cut the rug. “Everybody Loves My Baby” sets the perfect tone. Meanwhile the Dadaists and the Surrealists find something they can finally square on. They stand to a one in absolute opposition to the French and Spanish War against The Republic of the Rif. There was a break in the music and Breton hoists himself upright again, a slight wobble to his warble. He clears his throat with a loud cough, raises a glass of carajillo, and declaims their credo to the crowd, “On behalf of the Bureau of Surrealist Studies and our friends new and old, I would like to clearly articulate our position with respect to our brothers the Berbers of the Rif Republic. We Surrealists pronounce ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we place our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and define our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question.” Murmured approval and general hubbub.

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March of the Totalitarians 1925. January 3, Benito Mussolini, a pivotal speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. He’s crystal clear, says those Blackshirts are his boys and dares any fool to try to remove him from office. Then he cinches the deal by promising law and order in forty-eight hours. January 16, Lenin is dead, the anarchist Trotsky yields to Stalin and resigns as chairman of the Russian Revolutionary Military Council. The cult of personality around Stalin has begun and before the year’s end he is ‘Dear Leader’. February through April, the Kurds attempt to reinstate the caliphate. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rises to new dictatorial heights and spares no treasure in annihilating the Kurds. March 12, Sun Yat-sen’s death lights the fuse of the powder keg that burns between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek.

July 18, Hitler meets Goebbels and publishes “Mein Kampf: Part I.” He spends 1925 preparing for the coming out of the Nazi party the next year. The future of Zyklon-B is secured as IG Farben arises from the merger of six chemical companies on Christmas Day. August 8, the KKK marches 40,000 strong down Pennsylvania Avenue to the US capitol. September 9, under the command of Marshal Henri-Phillipe Petain, a combined Franco-Spanish force moves against the Berbers of the Rif, earning Petain his chops as a proto fascist years before becoming the leader of Vichy France. His comrade in arms in the Rif War is none other than Colonel Francisco Franco, the future El Caudillo, eventual dictator of fascist Spain. Franco leads the first wave of troops ashore at Al Hoceima in 1925. This landing in the heartland of Abd el-Krim’s tribe, combined with the French invasion from the south, spells the beginning of the end for the short-lived Republic of the Rif. December 5, Abdul al-Aziz ibn Saud transforms an ancient family emirate into a nascent totalitarian state with the capture of Medina, forcing the pan-Arabist, Sharif Ali, to abdicate his throne.

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Josephine Baker, within arms reach at the table next to ours, turns to the Duke with her unbeatable sass, “Tell that Frenchman if he’s got a question about color he should come over here and ask me. I’d tell him. I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that makes me mad. I wanted to get far away from those who believed in cruelty, so then I went to France, a land of true freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity. I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” She smiles at Duke and waggles her cigarette holder at him for a light. The most sensational woman anyone ever saw. So says my pal Ernie Hemingway. I gotta hand it to her, beauty and cojones. The Black Pearl. Gets the Croix de guerre and Rosette de la Résistance for her work against the Nazis in the next war. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Duke, well he just smiles and nods and gives her a light, already mellow on the Mary Jane the gypsy kid scored for the band. Then I really get a real chill down my spine. The joker in the monocle and cape at the artists’ table stands up and makes like he’s about to sing. I don’t like his looks. Turns out I like his song even less. Fancies himself Baron Julius Caesar Andrea Evola. Death warmed over. A smooth talker, alright. The lies roll out of his mouth like Model-T’s from a Ford factory. I can barely listen as he spews his honey-coated venom. He’s got the hypnotic gaze of a cobra about to swallow its prey whole. The creep stares around the room, catches each man’s eye, as he rises to speak.

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“Gentlemen! And you few ladies. We stand on the precipice of greatness, soldiers in the war for the hearts and souls of humanity.” A faint rumbling as he cases the joint for reactions. He revs up his foul engine, “We believe that the best soldier is one who fights with a precise knowledge of his cause and that ideas—even if they are only intimated, or vaguely grasped, more than clearly formulated—are the essential reality in every genuinely important historical upheaval. Indeed, to exhume meaning from the graveyard of political and spiritual ideas requires a kind of necromancy for which we as artists and philosophers are uniquely prepared. What is a nation, after all, but the physical embodiment of its spiritual purpose? Neither linguistic nor ethnic nor territorial unity is considered sufficient to give the idea of nation its true content. A nation is a predestined, cosmic unity. Such is the case in Spain: a unity, a destiny, an entity subsisting beyond every person, class or community in which it is actualized.” Pure unadulterated grade A hornswoggle, but his uncanny sense of drama hypnotizes the unsuspecting listeners. “That is, it is about the spiritual and transcendent idea of the nation, as opposed to every community—of the right or left—and every mechanism. A true entity of its perfect truth, a living and sovereign reality. Spain tends, consequently, towards its own definite destination. In this regard, we must not only speak of a return in full to worldwide spiritual cooperation, but also of a universal mission of Spain, of a creation by the solar unity that it represents, of a new world.”

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You could’ve heard a pin drop. Einstein mutters to Pauli, “Sounds just like that scheisskopf, Bergson, and his pseudo-philosophical drivel about the nature of time. Nearly cost me my Nobel with his meshuganeh philosophy.” He stares daggers at Evola, who continues pontificating metaphysical hogwash with the conviction of a brilliant madman, “Say no to the agnostic State, at most, a police officer in a grand style, ‘the night watchman state’. Rather, let us have the State of all, total and totalitarian, justifying itself, the ideal and perpetual notion of Spain. Eradication of parties and of parliament follows naturally. Spanish society infiltrated by warriors of a New Order, fighting for traditional home and family values, the Catholic interpretation of life. If the Spanish national movement is really penetrated by them, anti-Communists and anti-Bolsheviks, what follows is the whole of a new hierarchical Europe. Through the virility of violent action and eradication of weaker cultures, Spain mounts Hercules’ pyre and achieves superhuman destiny.”

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There is foam frothing out the corners of his mouth. Unbelievable. What rock did this guy crawl out from under? My blood is boiling. The Baron of Bushwa is turning the whole crowd into a bunch of saps. Before I know what I’m doing I jump from my chair right into the little jerk’s face. The words leap out of me, “You sir are Yeats’ rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.” Nate Bose and Luddy Wittgenstein nod with approval. I’m on a roll. “You don’t fool me. I went to Catholic school and you sir are no Christian. Your message is goddam Götterdämmerung, you and your gang of power-mad goons. Just like the Pinkertons I used to work for until I realized that busting heads to bust unions was just plain wrong. Traditional home and family values like hell! Your whole mad cabal is gonna blow up or enslave every quaint little hamlet that comes into the crosshairs of your so-called ‘destiny’. Jump on your own funeral pyre, that’s your business. But drag the whole continent of Europe with you? You got another thing comin’. I fought in the War. I know what that kinda misery looks like. It ain’t pretty. You wanna start another big one? Bring on the hounds of hell? That’s just wrong, mister, wrong as fascism!”

Right in front of that whole crowd of frozen stiffs I draw back to cold cock the little runt. Suddenly the joint is under attack. Sounds like an army of Tommy guns firing slugs like nobody’s business, glass shattering everywhere. Somebody yells “Anarchists!” and somebody else shouts “Policía!” Everybody is on their feet hightailing it for the exits. The Duke, cool as a cucumber, cakewalks to the door, murmuring to anyone savvy enough to listen, “No, no, no, no. Don’t give your right name. This joint is walkin’.” It’s strange. Real strange. I don’t see any side arms or uniforms. I hang back as the room empties. Every piece of glass in the whole damn place, including the giant fin-de-siècle plate glass mirror behind the bar, blown to smithereens. Weird. No bullet holes, no splintered furniture, not a body wounded. Can’t figure it. Then I see him. The one they call Wolfie. Sitting there still as a stone, his face every shade of purple. The Pauli Effect. That’s what I overheard the science boys call it. Every time Wolfgang Pauli goes into a laboratory they all know they have to skedaddle. Kaboom go the test tubes. This one was a doozy. I’ll wager he felt the same kind of crazy I did about Evola’s rant. Really stoked his mojo. I sidle over to him, put my hand on his shoulder. He just goes limp. I can practically feel the steam percolate out of him. I pat the little fellow on the back, take a look around the joint. What a mess, and nobody to pick up the tab. Hope the place is insured.

Standing in the forecastle to get my bearings, something aft ward catches my eye, at the artists’ table. They must’ve finished their little parlor game cause the tablecloth is blown out like a spinnaker instead of being folded into little squares, one for each genius to scribble on. Wolfie’s coming around, so I secure his moorings and mosey over to the ‘exquisite corpse’, Andy Breton’s cute name for their group art project. I’d kind of like to take a gander at it. I never was much of a connoisseur of fine art, but something about this piece grabs me. As I close in, it clobbers me right over the head. All chaos, violence and wavy lines. I says to myself, “Dash, dammit, that’s it! That awful vertiginous feel I had looking into the Italian fascist’s Svengali eyes, like staring straight into the abyss. Creeps under your skin, grabs your guts and doesn’t let go.” I can’t make out anything definite as I study the ‘cadavre’. A weird abstract checkerboard. Then all of a sudden a figure pops out at me, out of the chaos of the disjointed corpse. A damned horse. Demonic tortured creature, limbs going ways they shouldn’t, straining against an invisible horror. So damned crazy it’s beautiful. Both eyes on the same side of the mad creature’s head. A saber swipe cleaves my soul in two. I know what I have to do. Dashiell Hammett is nobody’s fool. Not leaving this one for the cleanup crew. Nobody the wiser, I nab the corpse, roll it under my arm and sail out the door with Wolfie in tow.

♠     ♠     ♠

 The reader is instructed to proceed directly to Chapter 15: The Golem in the Attic.