And this doesn't surprise me at all. This is from the author who wrote a book in which a tribe enthusiastically agrees to follow a stranger into battle against an alien empire, and then asks who he is.
So what would have happened during Heller's presentation to all the hookers if Vantagio had looked at his ID and seen that he wasn't underage?
Anyway, this chapter. Heller gets up the next morning, tidies up his new clothes (including that Eton collar - this is very important), and grabs a shoulder-strap satchel that "looked, for all the world, like one of those kiddy schoolbook bags." Remember, it is essential that Heller look younger than he is. He grabs a wad of fishing lines, some tools and some baseballs, then hires a cab to take him to a specific garage in Weehawken, New Jersey.
And then it becomes evident that L. Ron Hubbard could not be arsed to proofread his own book.
I suddenly chilled. Up until then I had not grasped what Heller was going to do! He was on his way to get his car! Bury knew where that car was. It would be rigged!
Gris, three chapters ago:
And suddenly it dawned on me what he was up to. He had believed that tale about it being too hard to drive in New York! He was going to bring the Cadillac into town!
Oh! No, no, no! There was no way to warn this naive simpleton! One of the things Bury would surely have done was to have that Cadillac rigged to explode!
A revelation so dramatic he had it twice.
There's a litany of street names and geographic locations so that, if you so desired, you could track Heller's progress on a map. I'm vaguely curious whether or not the route Hubbard gives us is accurate, but not enough to actually check. Heller has his driver stop one block from the destination, and when the man objects, tears a fifty dollar bill in half to get him to stick around, which I always thought counted as defacing currency.
"Trucks! Trucks! Trucks! The whole area in front of the huge, low building was jammed with trucks!" Workers are unloading crates... into the garage?... but are having a problem. One man is insisting that the goods can't be stored there, but won't say why (because there's a bomb), and when he spots Heller lurking around he flees.
Heller decides to dodge all the Trucks! and try a new approach. He gets the cabbie to take him to Crystal Parkway, Bayonne, which makes the driver uneasy.
The New York cabby had to look at a map. "This is a foreign country," he explained. "It ain't as if you were still in civilization. This is New Jersey. And you can't ask directions. The natives lie!"
Hmm. This almost feels real. I mean, the wording is a bit stilted, but this actually sounds like something a New Yorker would say about New Jersey. Unless TV has lied to me.
Street names, Heller asking about some sort of statue near the waterline, they get there, Heller gives the driver the other half of the fifty and a twenty dollar tip so he can "hire a native guide" to get home. Heller prepares to enter a "very splendid building. A new condo."
There's a dedicated elevator for the building's penthouse, operated by a "very dark, very Sicilian" man. Heller asks to see Mrs. Corleone, name-dropping Jimmy "The Gutter" Tavilnasty. And the elevator guard asks for I.D., but not the mobster who has decided to become Heller's personal benefactor, or the police officer investigating a triple homicide with Heller on the scene. This one guard has shown more common sense than 98% of the book's cast, simply by doing his bloody job.
The elevator operator makes a call, eyes Heller suspiciously, frisks him, and rides up with him. He nudges Heller down a "beautifully decorated hallway," then into a "gorgeous room, all done in modern gold and beige." As opposed to Renaissance gold, or Roaring Twenties gold.
The room's occupant is resting on a couch, a blonde, blue-eyed, forty-something woman whose hair, redundantly described as corn silk, is braided into a sort of crown shape atop her head. When she stands to greet her guest she turns out to be taller than even Heller, "a real Amazon!"
The woman is, of course, Babe Corleone, head of the New Jersey mafia. She welcomes Heller as one of Jimmy's friends and offers him something to drink. Heller asks for some beer.
She wagged a finger at him, kittenishly.
Kittenishly?
"Naughty. Really naughty. You realize that would be against the law."
So the mob boss, who routinely breaks the law to earn her ill-gotten pay, refuses to give an apparent teenager a beer and orders Heller some milk - or rather, she commands a lackey to to get some "God (bleeped) milk!" once she hears that they're out. Hubbard is taking this running gag and grinding it against your face like a sheet of sandpaper.
This chapter's close to twelve pages long, by the way.
Babe asks about Jimmy, who Heller says was hot on the job last he saw him, and then Heller inquires about Babe's family because he doesn't know about mafia terminology. This makes Babe reminisce about the dearly-departed "Holy Joe," and how he was a traditional mobster who stuck with smuggling and bootlegging, none of this drugs crap like what that New York jerkwad Faustino "The Noose" Narcotini is pushing.
And yes, this is exactly how the names appear in the book. It's always "Faustino 'The Noose' Narcotini," or "Jimmy 'The Gutter' Tavilnasty," or "'Holy Joe' Corleone."
After politely expressing confidence that Babe will succeed against those nasty drug-pushers, Heller suddenly asks if she's Caucasian. This is the second time this chapter I've had to force myself to keep reading.
What follows is two good pages of stupid genealogy, but intentionally so. Babe, you see, is a former Roxy chorus girl, and when Holy Joe married her the "old cats carped and meowed and criticized" because she wasn't a Sicilian. So Babe hired a doctor to come up with her family tree, which proved that not only is she a descendant of Charlemagne, but she's a genuine Sicilian because her north Italian parents moved there for four years during World War Two. And there's your joke.
The most baffling thing about this whole sequence is that it's - or I'm reading it as - an actual, critical satire of genealogy and racial science. Babe throws around terms like "Proto-Negroid" and "dolichocephalic--means long-headed, which is to say, smart," which sound like stuff from the bad old days of eugenics, and were certainly out of style even during the dark days of the 1980's. Gris sneeringly guesses that she's repeating what that "doctor" she hired told her, words that were certainly chosen to please, and notes that American women have a strange preoccupation with family trees.
Which makes the author's presentations of things like psychology and the U.S. government all the more bizarre. Here is a brief glimmer of sanity, something in the book that bears an actual resemblance to the world we live in, buried beneath paranoia and hyperbole and crushing cynicism.
Heller, of course, is only bringing up the subject because of that thrice-damned Prince Caucalsia story. He perks up when Babe describes the Caspian racial group, who migrated from around the Caucasus Mountains, and asks if she's ever heard of Atalanta. She confuses this for Atlanta, but just before Heller can explain an ancient legend from another planet to a person who isn't supposed to know that he's an alien, another Sicilian bursts in with urgent words for Babe Corleone.
While Gris tries to place the guy (it's the clerk from the brothel), Babe is stunned, and summons the elevator operator (Geovanni, if you're interested) to yell at him for not telling her that "this was that kid?", the one who saved Gracious Palms. And now is when this career criminal decides that Heller deserves a beer, "to hell with illegality!"
But Heller turns her down. Instead he wants to talk to Bang-Bang Rimbombo (and once again I say what?!), as he thinks he's got some "car trouble." Gris suddenly deduces that Heller must have remembered that newspaper article he spent an inordinate amount of time reading, and headed to the mob boss who employed the car bomber so he could get his Cadillac defused. Babe orders a limo to take him to Bang-Bang's (what?!) place, gives "Jerome" a big ol' smooch on the cheek, and the chapter finally, finally ends.
Back to Chapter Five
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