"That's libelous. I hope you told him I'm not."
"I don't know yet that you're not. But I won't tell him anything until he becomes a client. I only told him this much." Gaffney pushed another one of his business cards across the table. "You should have one too."
Yossarian scanned the card with knitted brow, for the words identified the donor as the proprietor of a Gaffney Real Estate Agency, with offices in the city and on the New York and Connecticut seashores and in the coastal municipalities of Santa Monica and San Diego in lower California.
"I'm not sure I get it," said Yossarian.
"It's a front," said Gaffney. "A come-on."
"Now I do." Yossarian grinned. "It's a screen for your detective agency. Right?"
"You've got it backwards. The agency is a front for my real estate business. There's more money in real estate."
"I'm not sure I can believe you."
"Am I trying to be funny?"
"It's impossible to tell."
"I'm luring him on," Jerry Gaffney explained. "Right into one of my offices pretending he's a prospect looking for a house, while he tries to find out who I really am."
"To find out what he's up to?"
"To sell him a house, John. That's where my real income is. This should interest you. We have choice rentals in East Hampton for next summer, for the season, the year, and the short term. And some excellent waterfront properties too, if you're thinking of buying."
"Mr. Gaffney," said Yossarian.
"Are we back to that?"
"I know less about you now than I did before. You said I'd be making this trip, and here I am making it. You predicted there'd be blizzards, and now there are blizzards."
"Meteorology is easy."
"You seem to know all that's happening on the face of the earth. You know enough to be God."
"There's more money in real estate," answered Gaffney. "That's how I know we have no God. He'd be active in real estate too. That's not a bad one, is it?"
"I've heard worse."
"I have one that may be better. I also know much that goes on under the earth. I've been beneath PABT too, you know."
"You've heard the dogs?"
"Oh, sure," said Gaffney. "And seen the Kilroy material. I have connections in MASSPOB too, electronic connections," he appended, and his thin, sensual lips, which were almost liverish in a rich tinge, spread wide again in that smile of his that was cryptic and somehow incomplete. "I've even," he continued, with some pride, "met Mr. Tilyou."
"Mr. Tilyou?" echoed Yossarian. "Which Mr. Tilyou?"
"Mr. George C. Tilyou," Gaffney explained. "The man who built the old Steeplechase amusement park in Coney Island."
"I thought he was dead."
"He is."
"Is that your joke?"
"Does it give you a laugh?"
"Only a smile."
"You can't say I'm not trying," said Gaffney. "Let's go now. Look back if you wish. That will keep them coming. They won't know whether to stick with Yossarian or follow me. You'll have a smooth trip. Think of this episode as an entr'acte, an intermezzo between Kenosha and your business with Milo and Noodles Cook. Like Wagner's music for Siegfried's Rhine Journey and the Funeral Music in the Gotterddmmerung, or that interlude of clinking anvils in Das Rheingold."
"I heard that one last night, in my room in Kenosha."
"I know."
"And I learned something new that might help the chaplain. His wife thinks he's already had one miracle."
"That's already old, John," belittled Gaffney. "Everything in Kenosha is bugged. But here is something that might be good. To Milo, you might suggest a shoe."
"What kind of shoe?"
"A military shoe. Perhaps an official U. S. Government shoe. He was too late for cigarettes. But the military will always need shoes. For ladies too. And perhaps brassieres. Please give my best to your fiancée."
"What fiancée?" Yossarian shot back.
"Miss MacIntosh?" Gaffney arched his black eyebrows almost into marks of punctuation.
"Miss MacIntosh is not my fiancée," Yossarian remonstrated. "She's only my nurse."
Gaffney tossed his head in a gesture of laughter. "You have no nurse, Yo-Yo," he insisted almost prankishly. "You've told me that a dozen times. Should I check back and count?"
"Gaffney, go north with your Irish linen or south with your blazer and flannel pants. And take those shadows with you."
"In time. You like the German composers, don't you?"
"Who else is there?" answered Yossarian. "Unless you want to count Italian opera."
"Chopin?"
"You'll find him in Schubert," said Yossarian. "And both in Beethoven."
"Not entirely. And how about the Germans themselves?" asked Gaffney.
"They don't much like each other, do they?" replied Yossarian. "I can't think of another people with such vengeful animosities toward each other."
"Except our own?" suggested Gaffney.
"Gaffney, you know too much."
"I've always been interested in learning things." Gaffney confessed this with an air of restraint. "It's proved useful in my work. Tell me, John," he continued, and fixed his eyes on Yossarian significantly. "Have you ever heard of a German composer named Adrian Leverkühn?"
Yossarian looked back at Gatfney with tense consternation. "Yes, I have, Jerry," he answered, searching the bland, impenetrable dark countenance before him for some glimmer of clarification. "I've heard of Adrian Leverkühn. He did an oratorio called Apocalypse."
"I know him for a cantata, The Lamentations of Faust."
"I didn't think that one had ever been performed."
"Oh, yes. It has that very touching children's chorus, and that hellish section in glissandos of adult voices laughing ferociously. The laughter and sad chorus always remind me of photos of Nazi soldiers during the war, your war, herding to death those Jewish children in the ghettos."
"That's the Apocalypse, Jerry."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
"I'll have to check. And don't forget your shoe."
"What shoe?"
25 Washington
"A fucking shoe?" Wintergreen ridiculed Yossarian on the next leg of his Rhine Journey. "What's so great about a fucking shoe?"
"It's only a fucking thought," said Yossarian, in one of the hotel suites constituting the Washington offices of M amp; M E amp; A. For himself with Melissa he had favored a newer hotel of comparable prestige and livelier clientele that boasted, he recalled with a kind of blissful vanity as he lay in the hospital with his condition stable and the danger of brain damage and paralysis past, a more various choice of superior-grade XXX-rated films in all the languages of UN member nations. "You've been saying you wanted a consumer product."
"But a shoe? By now there must be fifty fucking shoe companies turning out shoes for fucking feet for fucks like us."
"But none with an exclusive franchise for an official U. S. Government shoe."
"Men's shoes or women's shoes?" pondered Milo.
"Both, now that women get killed in combat too." Yossarian was sorry he had started. "Forget it. There's much about business I don't understand. I still can't see how you guys bought eggs for seven cents apiece, sold them for five cents, and made a profit."
"We still do," bragged Wintergreen.
"Eggs spoil," Milo ruminated pitifully. "And break. I'd rather have a shoe. Eugene, look it up."
"I'd rather have the plane," Wintergreen grumbled.
"But after the plane? Suppose there's no more danger of war?"
"I'll look it up."
"I'm not happy with the plane," said Yossarian.
"Are you thinking of leaving us again?" Wintergreen jeered. "You've been objecting for years."
Yossarian was stung by the gibe but ignored it. "Your Shhhhh! could destroy the world, couldn't: it?"
"You've been peeking," answered Wintergreen.
"And it can't," said Milo, with heartache. "We conceded that much at the meeting."
"But maybe Strangelove's can?" Wintergreen needled.
"And that's why," said Milo, "we want the meeting with Noodles Cook."