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Futtern Sie mir Zucker, schnell!

Feed me sugar, quick!

Merrill gobbles sugar, Lifesavers, mints, orange juice and chocolate, raising his fallen sugar count so that he's out of insulin reaction and headed in the opposite direction, toward acidosis and coma. Which requires that he take more insulin. Which starts the cycle over again. Even in dreams, Trumper exaggerates.

Coming into Munich, Bogus tries to be objective; he unearths his tape recorder and on the bus records this statement: 'Merrill Overturf and other irregular people are unsuited to conditions demanding careful routines. Diabetes, for example ...' (Thinking, Marriage, for example...)

But before he can shut the recorder off, the man next to him asks in German what Trumper is doing, fearful, perhaps, of an interview. Feeling the tape is already botched, and sure that the man understands only German, Trumper keeps the tape running and replies in English, 'Just what is it, sir, that you have to hide?'

'I speak English rather quite some well,' the man replies, and they ride in deathly silence into Munich.

To make peace, at the bus terminal Bogus lightly asks the offended passenger who Fehls Zunder was. But the man expresses some distaste for the question; not answering, he hurries off, leaving Bogus to endure the stares of several nearby eavesdroppers, for whom the name Fehls Zunder seems to have rung an unpleasant bell.

Feeling foreign, Trumper wonders, with considerable surprise, What am I doing here? He bumps awkwardly along a strange Munich street, suddenly unable to translate the German shop signs and voices garbling around him, imagining all the terrors that could be taking place in America at this moment. A run-amok tornado lashing the Midwest lofts weighty Biggie forever out of Iowa. Colm is buried by a blizzard in Vermont. Cuthbert Bennett, drinking in his darkroom, accidentally swallows a highball glass of Microdol-X, retires to the seventeenth bathroom and flushes himself out to sea. While Trumper, isolated from these dreadful events, drains a heavy beer in the Munich Bahnhof, having decided to take the train from here to Vienna. He is aware that he's been waiting for the point in his trip when he'll be suddenly exhilarated, struck with the adventure of returning.

It's not until he arrives, still unfeeling, in Vienna that he considers the possibility that adventure is a time and not a place.

He wandered down the Mariahilferstrasse until the awkwardness and weight of his tape recorder and the other items in his duffel wearied him into waiting for a Strassenbahn.

He got off the tram at Esterhazy Park, near which, he remembered, there was a large secondhand shop; here he bought a secondhand typewriter with odd German symbols and umlaut keys. For his purchase, the shopkeeper agreed to give him a generous exchange of schillings for his German marks and US dollars.

Trumper also bought an ankle-length overcoat; the epaulettes had been torn off the shoulders and there was a neat, small bullet hole in the back, but otherwise it was in stunning shape. He proceeded to outfit himself as a sort of postwar spy, in a baggy, broad-shouldered suit, several yellow-white shirts and a six-foot purple scarf. The scarf could be arranged in various ways and made a tie unnecessary. Then he bought a suitcase with more straps and buckles and thongs than it had room. But it fitted with the rest of his attire. He looked like a traveling spy who had been a passenger on the Orient Express between Istanbul and Vienna since 1950. Finally, he purchased a hat like the one Orson Welles wore in The Third Man. He even mentioned the film to the shopkeeper, who said he must have missed that one.

Bogus sold the duffel for about two dollars, then lugged his recorder, extra shirts and the new typewriter in the spy's suitcase through Esterhazy Park, where he ducked into a large bush to pee. His rustling in the hedges alarmed a passing couple. Her look was anxious: A girl is b

eing raped, or worse! His reaction was a sneer: A couple with no better place to do it. Trumper emerged from the hedge alone and with great dignity, lugging the suitcase in which a severed body could be stuffed. Or was he a parachutist who had just made a quick change out of uniform, his dismantled bomb safely hidden in the suitcase, now making his casual way to the Austrian Parliament?

The couple hurried away from his ominous costume, but Bogus Trumper felt just right. He felt the way he ought to look for an Overturf hunt through Vienna.

He took another Strassenbahn to the Inner City, riding around to the Opera Ring and leaving the tram at Karntner Strasse, the city's biggest nighttime alley, smack downtown. If I were Merrill Overturf, if I were still in Vienna, where would I be on a Saturday night in December?

Trumper stalks quickly through the little streets off the Neuer Markt, looking for the Hawelka, the old Bolshevik Kaffeehaus still popular with assorted intellectuals, students and opera cashiers. The coffeehouse gives him the same cold shoulder he remembers - the same lean hairy men, the same big-boned sensual girls.

Nodding to an apparent prophet at the table by the door, Bogus thinks, Years ago there was one like you, dressed all in black, but his beard was red. And Overturf knew him, I think ...

Trumper asks the fellow, 'Merrill Overturf?'

The man's beard seems to freeze; his eyes dart as if his mind is remembering all the codes it ever learned.

'Do you know Merrill Overturf?' Bogus asks the girl who's sitting nearest the frozen beard. But she shrugs, as if to say that if she did, it hardly matters now.

Another girl, a table away, says, 'Ja, he's in films, I think.'

Merrill in films?

'Films?' says Bogus. 'Here, you mean? In films here?'

'Do you see a camera running?' asks the fellow with the beard, and a waiter passing between them cringes at the word Kamera.

'No, here - in Vienna, I mean,' Trumper says.

'I don't know,' says the girl. 'Just films is all I heard.'

'He used to drive an old Zorn-Witwer,' Trumper says to no-one in particular, searching for identifying marks.

'Ja? A Zorn-Witwer!' a man with thick glasses says. 'A 'fifty-three? A 'fifty-four?'

'Ja? A 'fifty-four!' Bogus cries, turning to the man. 'It had an old gearshift that slid in and out of the dash; it had holes in the floorboards - you could see the road moving. It had lumpy upholstery ...'

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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