Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

Opus One, Posthumous

This is how my posthumous account got written.

One night I woke up to a body I could do practically nothing with and a mind I could do practically anything with. Given the choice I’d have preferred it the other way around. But who can choose, in this diminished life or the past one? When I emerged from another methodical beating at the gloved hands of the Black Men I found myself paralyzed from the waist down but able to read the minds and destinies of people present and to come, so, who knows, maybe one day yours.

Yes, your mind and destiny too, assuming that after your first demise you find yourself, like me, administratively suspended in the other-side Préfecture de Police, awaiting either return to void or transfer to the Great Good Place of your twenty-fifth year, age and ailments and embitterments shed, hot for love again.

The Great Good Place is the pretentious term my senile rival in omniscience knows Paris by. I am positive about this because most of the time His Mind is an open book to me. Those capital letters, incidentally, are typographical irony. So far as I’m concerned, he’s strictly lower-case. Granted: he was once credited with spectacular cosmic tricks but that was in pre-scientific days, and now he sleeps most of the time. I have to admit, though, that he can still blast people (as you’ll see if you stick around with me) albeit on a strictly limited scale, the odd sexual offender here, the straight sexual offender there, when he notices them, which isn’t often.

It’s more than I can do, though. Omniscience and impotence is a terrible combination, believe me. I see and foresee but can’t forestall. After emergence, I tried that with my Administratively Suspended companions: kept pestering them with, Jesus, don’t do this, don’t do that or you’ll never be transferred to Paris, and they’d exchange meaningful looks which I had no trouble deciphering since (to repeat myself) I could leaf though their minds as easily as through pornographic mags, no big difference. Anyhow, things got tense in the Living Quarters with them calling me bats each time I warned and prophesized, too many whacks on the head, so one day I swung away from them between my new crutches and set up in one of the million or so rooms of the Préfecture. To kill time I explored minds and learned the stories of all the people who ended up and who will end up in the Préfecture and decided to write about them. Writing’s as good a way as anything else to kill time if you can’t use your body for better things.

So I chose one batch of poor bastards (Batch MLX 59833) and started writing about them the way it happened, strictly omniscient point of view of course, given my special talents in that direction, even though that narrative technique has gone out of favor and the know-it-alls call you a mind-reading Fly on the Ceiling and swat you if you use it.

Anyhow here it is, for better or for worse, my Opus One, Posthumous. Maybe later I’ll come up with a better title for it.

Part One

Long First Day At The Prefecture

Chapter One

Is

Suddenly Maggie Williams is again.

It happens in the promised twinkling of an eye, but without last trumpets or angelic choirs and she’s still corruptible.

Maggie Williams, first of the poorly Chosen Five to emerge from no-being, hadn’t been for twenty-two years. Naturally she hadn’t known it. There’s no sense of time in no-being. No sense of anything. No sense to it at all. No present, no past and absolutely no future there, short of resurrection.

She hadn’t stood for the last ten of her eighty-three years. Now she stands unassisted. Blind for as many bitter years, she now sees.

Sees what?

Hardly sees the gigantic colorless shabby bureaucratic room with all those pillars and empty benches and those high peculiar walls. Doesn’t at all see the lofty stepladder and on top of it the little middle-aged man in a gray smock and a filthy beret, filing files in one of the thousands of drawers that make up the wall from floor to ceiling.

What Maggie Williams does see, almost dazzled by the sight, is a lovely milk-white girl, perfectly nude, with green eyes and a generous red mouth. A cascade of fiery hair spills over her freckled shoulders. Fiery crotch-fleece below attests to the authenticity of the color of the cascade above. The girl’s legs are long and lithe, her breasts as explosive as howitzer shells. There’s a tag attached to her beautifully turned right ankle.

Maggie, catholic about the gender of love objects in her sexually active years, is instantly smitten, an odd reaction, she’s aware, for a woman of her quavering age. Maggie smiles at the girl and the girl instantly smiles back at Maggie. She looks smitten too. She’s faintly familiar. Maggie raises her hand in greeting. When the girl simultaneously does the same thing in reversal she becomes totally familiar.

Maggie realizes that she herself is the girl and the girl is she, reflected in a tarnished full-length wall mirror.

Oh God! she whispers, burning with even more intense love for the girl of twenty-odd she’d been so long ago and is again. She’s drunk with joy at the miracle (that will be her defense much later for her scandalous behavior). Her renovated body longs to express that joy in a dance. She recalls that she had once been a professional dancer.

Why had been though? Why that mournful pluperfect? Is. The great present of the present tense. Is. Is a professional dancer again. Also an amateur sculptress and jewelry designer, she further recalls. Of course she can’t exercise those talents here, not having the raw material of statues and jewelry handy.

But she does have the raw material of dance with her lovely naked body and the desire to dance the dance of blessed Is. That’s what she does now.

While Maggie Williams leaps about ecstatically, the four other members of Batch MLX 59833 materialize in the gigantic bureaucratic room, naked and young and tagged (one of them strangely). Unaware of materialization, they’re still in the grip of supposedly final things.

For the squat hairy man, it’s a tree looming in the windshield of his skidding truck.

For the man in horn-rimmed glasses, despair and ten-story plummet with cartwheeling buildings and sky, the sidewalk coming up fast.

For the two others, a woman and the strangely tagged man, the supposedly final thing is less dramatic: a run-of-the-mill sterile white room with scared and grieving faces looking down into theirs.

Now – though they don’t know it yet – they’re here in the Great Good Place for good people of the right nationality.

But will they be here for long?

Flinging herself about with graceful abandon, Maggie Williams dedicates her dance to the Most High she’d never believed in before, except for three months at thirteen when, terrorized by periodic blood, she’d yearned for purity in a convent. She believes now, with all her newly discovered soul. She understands that this is divinely commanded resurrection.

Panting, her body gleaming with perspiration, she falls to her knees next to a great pillar, like a church pillar, casts her eyes upward and then closes them on tears and fervently thanks God for an end to was and had been, thanks Him for miraculously renewed light and youth and beauty after so long.

Concentrated on her prayer of thanks, as she had been on the dance of joy, Maggie Williams doesn’t notice any of the four others until she opens her wet eyes again. She breaks off thanksgiving and stares in disbelief at the pillar and what’s protruding from it. She breathes, Ohh!

Protruding from the pillar, no mistake possible, is a great male organ, at repose, with a tag attached to it.

Maggie moves on her knees and rounds the pillar. Casting her eyes upward again she beholds the most beautiful naked man she’d ever seen and she had seen and enjoyed countless many, but so long ago, so terribly long ago.

O God, that heroic heart-cleaving wedge of a torso: broad shoulders slanting down to muscled loins and O God those lovely muscled thighs on each side of O God O God. She guesses at adorably tight small muscular buttocks behind those thighs. Maggie gazes even higher at sky-blue eyes, long blond hair and a blond drooping mustache above a full red mouth. She burns to be explored and adored by that mouth to the tickling accompaniment of that mustache.

He could only be another gift, like light and youth, tagged for her like a Christmas present.

She smiles at him shyly, eyelashes fluttering in incendiary demureness. Then she returns her gaze to the tagged part of him, expecting to see radical modification. There is none at all.

She clasps her hands behind her neck and slowly bends back into a lovely tense sharp-nippled arc and waits for him to rise to the occasion and salute her supple beauty.

She waits and waits, uncomfortably, but nothing outstanding happens.

Maggie finally realizes that those open sky-blue eyes are staring, not at her, but at inner things. She straightens up and reaches out for the peculiarly positioned tag. On one side she sees tiny words in French, on the other, Louis Forster, 1877-1927 Fournée MLX 59833. With great care she removes the tag but lingers on the support. Like marvelous velvet Louis is. The precious weight of it.

Louis begins responding now, responding and responding. My God, my God, she murmurs at the incredible extent of the response. Soon her hands are cupping his buttocks, adorably tight, small and muscular, as suspected, and she’s unable to articulate her deep thankfulness for the supreme gift, except for a muffled Mmm, Mmm.

Atop the high stepladder the little middle-aged man in the gray smock and the filthy beret gapes down goggle-eyed at the couple, a cloudy drop of saliva forming on his lower lip.

He mutters: "Ah, Bon Dieu, Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu!"

As if in reaction to all these ill-inspired evocations, in two tongues, of the Most High, there comes a brief petulant mutter in the sky above the celebrated metropolis, surprising in that pure blue. It’s inaudible except to a surviving handful of the Faithful. Even to them it sounds more like a distant celestial breaking of wind than genuine wrathful thunder. But most of the Faithful are old and hard of hearing.

Chapter 2

Ire

Roused from dreams of bygone omnipotence, I, the Eternal Eye, awake in wrath. Things abominable are being perpetrated close at hand. I feel that quite strongly. I feel all manner of abomination in the world, of course. To merely skim the endless black catalogue of iniquities and lubricity: tagging of edifices of worship, violation of virginity and dietary laws, child and self abuse and, most heinous of all, blasphemous complaints. But for long now these things have been no more than a buzz in Mine ear, save for the blasphemous complaints. To have awakened Me, this wrongdoing must be much closer to home, in the Great Good Place where I dwell and largely sleep. I shall now locate the precise area of infection.

Can it be? Again? Yet again? I shall betake Me to the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police and view the latest arrival of Good Americans and determine the nature of the abomination and duly chastise it.

Awake, I shall unavoidably be assailed by the worldwide chorus of petitioners and protesters on the subject of Good Americans. I had hoped that now, in semi-retirement, no longer concerned with the universe but, intermittently, with one tiny speck of it by the River Seine, I would cease being importuned by supplicators. I hear them now despite the deaf ear I turn to them. From all the nations of the world, save the mightiest of these, rises the bickering envious chorus: Why the Americans and not us? Why? Why? Why? When awake I hear it without cease, sickened to the soul by those endless wails and jeremiads concerning My Second Chosen People, couched in trivial terms: Why the Americans? Why them and not us? Who needs wings and harps and unisex white gowns? Who wants them? What we want After is Paris, like the Americans. Why them and not us?

It cannot be denied that the Great Good Place, as I prefer to name it, is an enviable destination, richly endowed with four-star fleshpots which I delight in frequenting. The inhabitants’ heavy-footed heavy-tongued eastern neighbors (whose cuisine, let it be said in passing, stinks to high heaven) are wont to say: "Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich." Happy as God in France. True. Not that I would belittle the land of the Second Chosen People. It is marvelous of course, despite the inferior quality of the fleshpots. They name it God’s Country; hyperbole, to be sure, but how can I not be flattered at that? I like to visit it from time to time but am not sure that I would like to dwell there.

The Great Good Place is something else altogether. I must confess that now in My declining tranquil days of semi-retirement I take pleasure in strolling about, in the cool of the day if possible, in certain quiet provincial-like quartiers shaded by leafy chestnuts. I shun crowds. Clamor and agitation tire me quickly. I am grateful for the Great Good Place’s numerous quiet empty churches where I can rest untroubled. Grateful too for the calm of its vast cemeteries. Nobody recognizes Me in the form I assume during My visits. To look upon Mine unmediated Face is to be dazzled to blindness and insanity. But take heed not to jostle a certain bearded old gentleman with the red Commander of the Légion d’Honneur insignia in his lapel buttonhole. The last offender to have done that was reduced to a smear, seconds later, by a Number 38 bus on the Porte d’Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt line.

That intervention took much out of Me. It is no longer as in time past when for six days, as I dimly recollect it, I labored mightily without respite, banishing dark chaos, creating lesser and greater lights in the firmament, summoning forth the ocean and the dry land and all manner of beast and bird and, in a moment of culpable weakness I was later to rue, Man.

A day’s rest sufficed to recover from those labors and on Monday I was up and about, everywhere at once, inspiring prophets and saints, imposing diets and ritual, upholding, downbringing, halting the sun, cleaving the seas, decimating evil-bent hosts, generating whirlwinds and out of them posing mighty insoluble conundrums to blasphemous wailers on their dung-heaps, etc, etc.

Where did I get the energy in those days? Only in dreams can I exercise that omnipotence now.

But I digress. That vast envious chorus strives to rouse Me to wrath against My Second Chosen People. They cry out in their trivial parlance: "Don’t they already control everything in this life? Monopolize the global hamburger-circuit and the global cinema-circuit with their miraculous special effects, daring to compete with Thee in that? And how about those defiant Babel-like towers of theirs, violating the heavens? Or the way they rain long-distance brimstone and fire on so-called rogue cities, having the chutzpah to measure themselves with the Most High Himself by decreeing who, among nations, is Good and who Evil.

"Instead of wrathful punishment (say the spiteful jealous voices) why that reward, After, for puffed-up presumption? Why are the meeker Australians or Canadians or even the citizens of the UK excluded from it? They’re hard to find, granted, but good people live in those lands too. So why Birmingham, Alabama and not Birmingham, England? Why a place like Woonsocket, Rhode Island and not Toronto or Melbourne or London?"

So murmur the envious hosts.

How many times have I not heard that plaint? I could say in answer to it that I have a weak spot in My vast heart for a people with My Name ever on the ready on their lips, a pious people that proclaim their trust in Me on their very currency. But I choose not to justify Myself. I elect the people I like. My ways are impenetrable. I thought everybody knew that. And, parenthetically, let it be known that I hold in special abhorrence people who strive to justify My ways to Man. The last individual who tried that on a large scale was stricken blind for his pains.

I owe no explanations. It’s that way because that’s the way it is. In other words, putting it in an even smaller nutshell and to silence the blasphemous wailers once and for all: that’s life and if you don’t like it, leave it.

But if so you do, count not on awaking After to the great good things in the Great Good Place unless it be that you boast the right citizenship and have been a paragon of proper behavior.

Proper behavior? Proper behavior? What manner of Abomination do Mine eyes now behold? Can such things transpire in the sanctity of the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police?

Why are the Newly Arrived shamelessly bare?

And there, O, to what hideous idol is yonder kneeling naked daughter of Baal rendering deep homage, more than lip service?

The Cities of the Plain were smitten and blasted for less grave transgressions. Still another unforgivable confusion has been perpetrated by My servants. My Chief Steward, Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque, must amend this and forthwith. Laxity and slackness and negligence grow apace in the Administration.

I have long been discontented with Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque’s management. He has already received warnings. No one is indispensable in the Scheme of Things excepting, of course, Myself, creator of that Scheme. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque can always be replaced by Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini, able and ambitious man. Perhaps overly ambitious? Give the matter thought.

But hold! What do Mine eyes now descry?

O supreme abomination: My lower echelon servant aloft on the ladder, what doeth he? In time past a self-polluter of his ilk would have been broken with a rod of iron, dashed in pieces like a potter’s vessel, reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. But, as already stated, I now command but a tithe of My glorious old puissance. Still, at whatever cost, I shall gird up My loins and commence generating chastising power.

Generating, generating.

Generating, generating.

Still generating.

A fussily-dressed scented young man bearing a pile of dossiers wanders into the vast bureaucratic room, which he hardly sees. His vision is inward as he tries for the millionth time to recall beloved faces and names out of the fog of memory. Of course he can’t, not at his modest echelon.

He halts and stares at the unusual spectacle of statue-like Arrivals, unannounced and clearly erroneously processed because stark naked. His white frozen melancholy features almost achieve a gleeful expression. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque has slipped up again.

There are two men, one disgustingly hairy like an ape, the other better, fairly well equipped, but nothing outstanding. There is a plain sad female with perceptible breasts.

The young man’s eyes shift from the depressing sight. They widen and widen in his white mask-like face at what he now beholds with beating heart: the most absolutely gorgeous man in creation, monopolized – lucky she! – by a kneeling vulgar female with big boobies. But here? Here? The most marvelous scandal is in the making. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque is going to be in for it. Marvelous, marvelous, beyond words!

Generating. Generating.

Generating. Generating.

Generating process now completed.

Waxing wrathful I now summon My miserable lower-echelon servant in a voice of sky-splitting earth-shaking thunder: Cease and desist from the sin of Onan! Desist and cease at once!

He heeds not the Divine Voice.

He dares to persist in seed-spilling Abomination.

He shall receive the Final Warning.

In the vast bureaucratic room an attentive ear might have picked up an angry squeaking sound like that of an incensed mouse, somewhat amplified. But no ears are attentive here. The man on the ladder and the fussily dressed young man are all eyes. The ears of the four last materialized are still stopped by slumber. Maggie Williams’s ears (to mention only her ears) are stopped too, devoted as she is to closer things.

In response to those indignant squeakings the stepladder starts rocking, in the grip of some mysterious force.

The middle-aged man in the filthy beret and gray smock breaks off his rhythmic activity. He squawks and grips the crazy ladder. It grows unbearably hot. It teeters. He leaps off it and grabs the half-open drawer for salvation. The dossiers he was holding in his inactive hand flutter down like giant drab wounded butterflies. Papers scatter everywhere. Ten meters from the floor, he dangles white-wristed from the drawer. His toes drum desperately on the drawers below.

The ladder topples and crashes to the floor inches from the young man’s two-toned shoes, almost braining him. He jumps back gracefully and perceives imbecilic old Henri dangling near the ceiling. And O what else is dangling? Not at all bad for a man his age.

At the racket, doors burst open simultaneously. Dusty female lower-echelon functionaries in gray smocks gape at the disruptive things going on in the room. Aghast at the spectacle, they emit desperate little cries. Some giggle hysterically. Wringing their hands, they trot about jerkily in tiny ineffectual circles like barnyard fowl with severed heads. But their white mask-like faces express no emotion.

Another door opens. A middle-echelon female functionary with iron-gray hair done up in a big bun sweeps the scene with her frigid gray gaze. Three whistles dangle from her squat neck. Her marble-white features seem petrified into permanent sternness. She claps her hands twice. It sounds like two blocks of wood shocked together with splintering force.

"Mesdames! Mesdemoiselles! Stop this cackling immediately!"

The panicked lower-echelon female functionaries stand stock-still. The middle-echelon functionary’s voice rings out in a tone more of vengeful satisfaction than scandal:

Absolutely no Arrivals were scheduled for this date. The fourth administrative blunder in as many months! But never as shocking as this one. Somebody will pay the piper this time. In the meantime, find decent clothing for them all, instantly! At least for the short time they will remain here.

She points at Maggie Williams and Louis Forster who are totally lost to their surroundings.

Those two will be voided in minutes without need for a high-level inquiry. And the others as well, I should not be greatly surprised.

She marches over to the wall where the lower-echelon middle-aged functionary, Henri, is still suspended white-wristed from his drawer. She commands him to adjust his clothing and descend, in that order. Henri obeys his hierarchical superior but reverses the order. Using the handles of the drawers as foot and handholds, sweating abundantly, he descends with difficulty. Safely grounded, he turns his back a second on the women and then faces them again, tucked in and decently buttoned and pretexts a sudden imperious call of nature up on the ladder a minute before. No one is taken in by the excuse.

You will be reported, decrees the stern-faced female functionary with the iron-gray bun.

She marches over to a long gilded Empire table. It bears three telephones. One is pale gray and of conventional size. The second is much larger and deep gray. The third telephone is gigantic, requiring both hands to lift it. It is black and reposes under a vast glass bell like a giant version of the glass bell employed to protect orchids or ripe Camembert. She gives it the widest of berths. Heedless contact with the bell could have terrible consequences.

The authoritarian female functionary seizes the pale gray telephone and dials with two brief zips. She painfully manages an obsequious smile and makes deferent little bows as she recounts the scandalous blunder in the Reception Department to her hierarchical superior. The term indescribable indecency is recurrent.

More functionaries burst into the gigantic room.

In the meantime, with all that racket, no surprise, the remaining Four awake one by one.

Chapter 3

Where?

The first of the remaining Four to focus on outside things is MAX PILSUDSKI, the squat hairy man standing next to a pillar. He looks like everybody’s idea of a naked truck-driver, which is exactly what he is: naked and a truck-driver. More exactly, had been. For the moment, though, he doesn’t realize he’s a had-been. He vividly recalls the tree gigantic in the splintering windshield of his truck and then nothing. A terrible accident, he understands, and maybe coma, but now he’s come out of it and is standing in what must be a rehab center. They’ve done a goddam good job on him too. He feels a little woozy (who wouldn’t?) but otherwise like a million bucks. Funny thing though about his body: buck-naked and no more sag and flab to it and the hair on it not grizzled anymore but black.

Who’s making that racket? That jabbering don’t sound like English. Sounds like Mexicans with bad head colds. Standing where he is, next to the pillar, the only person he can see is a guy in the raw with the cut of a Yid. Looks like an egg-head too with those horn-rimmed glasses.

The young man in horn-rimmed glasses who looks like everybody’s idea of a naked futile New York intellectual is SEYMOUR STEIN. He now opens his eyes and comes up with exactly the same matter-of-fact materialistic interpretation of his present situation as Max Pilsudski: he’s a patient in a rehabilitation center. He feels tremendous bitterness at survival. He’d fucked up his life and had even fucked up his would-be departure from it. How he’d hungered for no-being! Instead, he’s back to being Seymour Stein, the crown-prince of shmucks, the only man in history to have screwed up a ten-story dive onto a sidewalk. How had he possibly survived? Maybe he’d overshot the targeted sidewalk and plunged into an open sewer manhole, shit unto shit, and had been fished out? He starts weeping at this latest of a lifetime of failures and gropes for a handkerchief. Instead of pockets he finds skin everywhere, vastly improved skin, the grossness of his mid-fifties effaced. A real medical miracle.

But why is he naked? And what’s that racket going on? Isn’t that French?

Helen Ricchi, the plain sad-faced girl with the small but witty breasts, awakens to banging and cries in French, not the French of Québec, the city of her birth, but the French of France. Helen had been a high-school teacher of French in Denver, Colorado. She opens her eyes and notes that her white hair is back to mousy brown now, no great improvement, and her body back to what she takes to be youthful unattractiveness. Helen accepts the new situation – the mysterious place she’s in, nudity and rejuvenation – with incurious fatalism as she’d accepted everything after the tragedy that had befallen her as a two-week bride forty years before. She’d never asked questions. She waits now without impatience for whatever might happen next.

LOUIS FORSTER is lingering in a badly distorted memory of a close to final thing. Paralyzed, he’s undergoing a toilette – the last one before the funeral toilette two days later – at the hands of a shy young nurse who suddenly loses her shyness and her uniform. He tries to pull away from her caressing hands and her sharp-pointed breasts grazing his thighs and her mouth, her mouth. But he has no muscles to do it. He tries to cry out: What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you tetched? Stop doin’ that! Let go of me! But he has no breath to cry it.

Louis escapes the avid naked nurse as his open blue eyes shift from inward to outward focus. He emerges.

But things are still going on here, wherever here may be. He stares down at a closely associated nude woman kneeling as in adoration before him. Louis lets out a great cry of revulsion, lots of breath to do it this time.

What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you tetched? Stop doin’ that! Let go of me!

Lost to the world, she persists in adoration. He pulls back and she follows on her knees like a penitent. He places his hands on her shoulders and pushes free of her with a moist pop. Maggie staggers back on her knees, sprawls and encounters a stunning wall.

Horrified at his state and cupping it inadequately with both hands Louis dodges behind a pillar.

By this time the deputized lower-echelon female functionary has returned, holding a heap of towels and a box of safety-pins. She apologizes to the functionary with the iron-gray bun and explains that this was all she’d been able to come up with in the way of clothing. Her superior shrugs and then commands: Gloves! The lower-echelon functionary removes gloves from her pocket and pulls them on. They are long rubber gloves of the kind that protect those who are in unavoidable contact with the mortally contagious. Her superior closely supervises the parsimonious distribution of towels to the Arrivals.

The hairy truck-driver and the archetypal New York intellectual are each issued a single towel. Hey, what the fuck’s going on here? the truck driver growls to the horn-rimmed Yid. This is one hell of a rehab center.

I’m beginning to think it isn’t a rehab center, Seymour Stein replies, wrapping the towel about his loins.

This is Las Vegas, Nevada, ain’t it? says Max.

I don’t think it is, says Seymour.

He totters over to a dingy closed window. His last window had been wide open. Through the grime he thinks he can make out celebrated landmarks. He totters back, shaken to the core of his new being.

N-no, it’s definitely not Las Vegas, N-Nevada. Looks a lot like P-Paris, France.

Max feels better. Naw, it’s Las Vegas, okay. We got a Eiffel Tower too. Twice the size of theirs.

But Max still can’t understand why they don’t speak English here. He scowls and tries to puzzle it out.

Two towels are issued to Helen Ricchi. The middle-echelon female functionary herself takes care of the garbing of the guilty couple. She pulls on the long rubber gloves and then throws a towel at Louis and tosses two safety-pins on the floor at his feet. She commands sobbing Maggie to cease sobbing and stand up. She muffles the girl’s lovely body, still shaken by sobs, with no fewer than seven towels. She pulls the uppermost towel vengefully tight to flatten Maggie’s breasts, no easy task.

At that moment, propelled by an imperious shove, an ornate door bangs open dramatically.

The functionaries freeze to attention.

Chapter 4

The Corsican’s Judgment

Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini stands dramatically framed, as intended, on the threshold of the lesser of the two ceremonial doors. He’s been alerted via the pale gray telephone to the broad outlines of the scandal going on in the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police.

He takes in the scene with a keen Napoleonic scan. He is of Corsican origin and intensely aware of it, even though he possesses only fragmented memories of his native island. His stern features seem cast in gray gun-metal and his bearing is imperial. They compensate, perhaps over-compensate, for his small stature and the shortcomings of his sub-prefectoral uniform, which looks like something fished out of an ashcan, threadbare and moth-eaten. The braid is bedraggled. The trimmings are frayed. One of the tarnished brass buttons is missing. Another button dangles from a single thread.

Pretending budgetary restrictions (actually out of pure anti-Corsican prejudice, Sub-Prefect Marchini is convinced) Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque has long refused to grant him a new uniform worthy of his echelon. Sub-Prefect Marchini, a true Corsican in this, has a hair-trigger sense of honor and refuses to come to terms with humiliation by having his unworthy uniform mended and the brass buttons sewed back on. Sub-Prefect Marchini detests Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque with frigid burning hatred, a true Corsican in this too.

The woman functionary with the iron-gray bun euphemistically whispers the details of the scandal to him, pointing at Maggie sobbing in a corner of the room and at Louis, or rather at the pillar behind which Louis is hiding.

Just as she points at the upset stepladder with more euphemistic details concerning Henri, the stepladder starts smoking. The room is filled with the sacred scent of balsam, santal, myrrh, frankincense, stacte, onycha and galbanum.

And now, lo!, the stepladder commences burning with a fire that burns but does not consume.

The functionaries are dazzled by the intrusion of color in their space, chromatic agony for them. With the exception of a young and ignorant newly appointed Grade A5 functionary, they all step back in awe, aware that this is the dreaded Final Warning for one of them. A5 shields his eyes against the unbearable red and moves toward three sand-filled buckets in a corner.

"Imbécile! the middle-echelon female functionary hisses. Do not attempt to extinguish that fire!"

The fire vanishes unassisted. It leaves a gagging stench of brimstone. Henri’s mossy teeth chatter with fright.

Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini takes instant command of the situation. He understands that the long but patiently awaited moment to topple his enemy has come. A Corsican proverb has it that vengeance is a dish more delectable cold than hot. The Burning Ladder proves that The Eye of the Supreme Echelon has witnessed the scandal. That Eye is now focused upon him. Although the privilege of judging and exiting the mistakenly Materialized lies beyond his area of competence, Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini is strongly tempted to earn good points by short-circuiting the chain of command, undoing the latest and most outrageous blunder of his