Free Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Page A

and all why I wouldn’t be too concerned, but the
book on young Francis Ferdinand is, is he prefers our own New Levee and
highlife neighborhoods like that. So every alleyway down here, every shadow big
enough to hide a shive artist with a grudge, is a warm invitation to rewrite
history.”
    “I get any backup on this, Nate?”
    “I can spare Quirkel.”
    “Somebody get Rewrite!” Lew pretended
to cry, affably enough.
    F.F., as he was termed in his
dossier, was out on a world tour whose officially stated purpose was to “learn
about foreign peoples.” How Chicago fit the bill was about to become clearer.
The Archduke had put in an appearance at the Austrian Pavilion, sat through
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with a certain amount of impatience, and lingered
at the Colorado Silver Camp exhibit, where, imagining that camps must
necessarily include campfollowers, he proceeded to lead his entourage on a
lively search after ladies of flagrant repute that would have taxed the abilities
of even a seasoned spotter, let alone
    a greenhorn like Lew—running up
and down and eventually out into the Midway, accosting amateur actors who had
never been west of Joliet with untranslatable ravings in Viennese dialect and
gesticulations which could easily be—well, were—taken the wrong
way. Uniformed handlers, fooling elaborately with their whiskers, gazed
anywhere but at the demented princeling. Lew slid like a snake from one
architectural falsehood to the next, his working suits by the end of each day
smudged white from rubbing against so much “staff,” a mixture of plaster and
hemp fibers, ubiquitous at the White City that season, meant to counterfeit
some deathless white stone.
    “What I am really looking for in
Chicago,” the Archduke finally got around to confessing, “is something new and
interesting to kill. At home we kill boars, bears, stags, the usual—while
here in America, so I am told, are enormous herds of bison, ja? ”
    “Not around Chicago anymore, Your
Highness, I’m sorry to say,” Lew replied.
    “Ah. But, at present, working here in
your famous slaughterhouse district . . . are many . . . Hungarians, not true?”
    “Y— maybe. I’d have to go look
up the figures,” Lew trying not to get into eye contact with this customer.
    “In Austria,” the Archduke was
explaining, “we have forests full of game, and hundreds of beaters who drive
the animals toward the hunters such as myself who are waiting to shoot them.”
He beamed at Lew, as if mischievously withholding the final line of a joke.
Lew’s ears began to itch. “Hungarians occupy the lowest level of brute
existence,” Francis Ferdinand declared—“the wild swine by comparison
exhibits refinement and nobility—do you think the Chicago Stockyards
might possibly be rented out to me and my friends, for a weekend’s amusement?
We would of course compensate the owners for any loss of revenue.”
    “Your Royal Highness, I’ll sure ask
about that, and somebody’ll get back to you.”
    Nate Privett thought this was just a
kneeslapper. “Gonna be Emperor one of these days, can you beat that!”
    “Like there ain’t enough Hungarians
back home to keep him busy?” Lew was wondering.
    “Well, not that he wouldn’t be doing us a favor.”
    “How’s that, boss?”
    “With more them damned anarchistic
foreignborn south of Fortyseventh than you could point a Mannlicher at,”
chuckled Nate, “sure’d be a few less of em to worry about, wouldn’t it?”
    Curious
himself about who might be his opposite number on the Austrian side of this
exercise, Lew nosed around and picked up an item or two. Young Max Khäutsch,
newly commissioned a captain in the Trabants, was here on his first overseas
assignment, as field chief of “K&K Special Security,” having already proven
himself useful at home as an assassin, an especially deadly one, it seemed.
Standard Habsburg procedure would have been to put him out of the way at some
agreedupon point of