“One does not simply rebel against and leave the Heavenly Host. Once an angel, always an angel.”
—God, addressing the devils in Pandæmonium.
On May Day of the Year of the War, I decided to seek a job.
Up to that point, I had been pretending to be the famous essayist Bryan Ray,
but all my projects had failed, thus I needed to reinflate my ego. So I went out to
pound the pavement. And, after getting no results, I went home to take a nap.
My house is one small room with gray flowered wallpaper and
a bookcase against the fourth wall, plus a table to dine on. That is all.
When I entered my abode, I noticed a newspaper on the table.
Eyeing the article at the top of the page, I found that it was my own
obituary! “How could this be?” I said aloud to myself; “I’m not even dead
yet!” However, no matter how many times I adjusted my monocle and reread the
article, the facts remained the same: I, Bryan Ray, “single husband, father,
and dog-lover,” reportedly “died fighting the good fight,” when the airplane
that I was piloting crashed in flames.
I shook my head in disbelief at this work of fiction. Just
then, the bookcase on the wall of my house rotated and revealed the figure of a
well-dressed patriarch. He extended his arm and clutched my hand and shook it,
and he said:
“Greetings, Bryan. Allow me to introduce myself: I am your
handler from the Worldwide Espionage Agency. We would like you to undertake a
secret mission. The reason we faked your death by printing that obituary in the
newspaper is that we would like to use you to identify and eliminate a
dangerous enemy upon the mountains of Ararat.”
“But why?” I cried.
And the man answered: “To stir up trouble in the East.”
Upon agreeing to cooperate, I was given a new identity:
Bryan Ray 2. Since my former identity had already been extinguished, the only
thing remaining to be done was to crown me a British Knight and assign me a
sidekick for this covert expedition. My handler thus
introduced me to General Hemingway, who likewise emerged from the darkness
behind my bookshelf. “He is codenamed ‘The Friendly Kitten’,” my handler
explained, “despite bearing zero resemblance to a newborn cat and possessing an extremely murderous nature.”
This role of the General was played by Peter Lorre.
My handler brought us up to date on the developments in the
operation: We were told that the agent who preceded me in this position, before
getting blotted, had convinced himself that the enemy was hiding out in a hotel
across the street from a Milk Chocolate Factory in
Switzerland, whose headquarters happened to be located in a hallway next to the conveyor belt that the chocolate bars ride on once
they’re wrapped. “Bryan Ray 2 and General Hemingway,” said my handler, “I want
you boys to travel to this hotel and find room number Omega – that should be
easy to remember because it’s a very lucky symbol, which resembles a
horseshoe – and, when you open the door and begin to look around, note that I
have hired an attractive damsel to play the role of your wife. (I did not need
to do this, but I did it anyway, because I like you guys.) She will be stepping
out of the shower when you first meet her – the
room shall be quite steamy from all the hot water, and she shall be wearing nothing but a towel. OK,
go and begin your mission now. Find the HQ inside the Milk Chocolate Factory.
Then get some sleep. And if your wife and the man with whom she’s having an
affair ask who sent you to interrupt their lovemaking, tell them, ‘My handler’s
name is I AM NEITHER PRESENT NOR ABSENT.’ Or, if that’s too much to remember, call
me ‘I AMN’T’ for short: Just say, ‘I AMN’T sent me.’ They’ll know who you
mean.”
§
When General Hemingway and I arrive at the hotel, we are
surprised to find that my handler was telling the truth: he has indeed provided
us with an attractive wife, who happens just to be stepping out of the shower
when we arrive. Entering our suite, we also encounter our fellow hotel guest
Adam the Adversary, who doesn’t even seem to mind the fact that the General and
I have arrived in room Omega for the purpose of continuing the mission at the point where our deceased predecessor left off when his plane went down in
flames. Adam the Adversary continues sipping his gin and making suggestive comments to our wife.
I turn and look at General Hemingway and give him a nod. He
nods back and approaches the Adversary in a threatening way. Adam smiles and
leaves.
Once we’re alone, I nudge my squire to introduce me to my
wife. She shakes her head and blinks and says: “Now that the mist has cleared,
I seem to be seeing you for the very first time. I’m so pleased to meet you,
Bryan Ray 2.” I then ask her why she agreed to play my wife if she is so
interested in that old Adversary Adam. She insists that she fought hard to get
this role because she truly believed in it when she read the agency’s script,
but that her shower scene was so long, and she spent so much time admiring her
own beauty while waiting, and . . .
“But what about the Adversary?” I interrupt.
She explains: “Oh, you should pay no attention to Adam –
he just happened to be nearby: he means nothing to me.”
So the General and I leave to contact a fellow agent who
works as the organist of a church in San Francisco.
§
Approaching San Francisco in our taxi cab, the gates of the
city open for us. We then exit the cab and look up and see the church rising directly
in front of us. We walk forth and enter.
One eerie note from the organ pervades the air. Following this sound, the General
and I soon espy the organist,
whose back is facing us: The man is slouched over his keyboard and not moving.
I point to this sight and nod at General Hemingway; the General nods back, and
we slowly begin to pace toward the fellow.
“That’s rather a strange tune that you are playing,” I say
loudly, as I tap the man on the shoulder.
The music stops and the organist falls over and topples off
the bench. His body lands in a heap on the floor.
“Looks like he’s dead,” says General Hemingway.
I kneel with the intention of searching through the fellow’s
suitcoat pockets, but I notice that his fist is closed tightly, as if he
managed to snatch a piece of his murderer’s attire and died protecting it. I
pry open the organist’s fingers and discover that our man was clutching a
cufflink.
“Look at this,” I hold the clue so that General Heminway can
see it, while adjusting my monocle.
§
We then head to Gran Casino to meet my wife. She is
standing near the roulette wheel. I greet her with a kiss and a hug; however,
while doing so, I accidentally drop the cufflink of the assassinated organist
onto the gambling table, and it lands on number seven.
“Has everyone finished making their bets?” asks the dealer.
“Oh no!” says an Unfortunate Traveler who happens to be
standing near us. “It looks like one of my cufflinks happened to fall out just
now and land on the table here – I’ll just pick it back up and keep it: I
didn’t mean to bet the farm on green double zero, ha ha!”
The dealer laughs along and waits patiently for the man to
finish pocketing items from the table, including the luxuriously
glittering cufflink.
“But wait,” says General Hemingway, pointing at the place
where the cufflink had landed, and then pointing at the Unfortunate Traveler
who just retrieved it; “that was not the green double zero spot; rather, it was
the number seven. And that cufflink belongs to my compatriot here.”
Hemingway pats me on the shoulder of my suit, and then he gestures to my
nametag, which reads “Bryan Ray 2.”
“Are you accusing me of making a mistake?” says the
Unfortunate Traveler, as he squints at my nametag while adjusting his monocle.
Then he smiles brightly, like a child, and says: “Hey! you and I both share the exact same
name.”
“Please stop stalling, and let the dealer spin the wheel,”
says the spy who is playing the role of my wife.
“Don’t change the subject,” says General Hemingway, pointing
firmly at the Unfortunate Traveler. “You just snatched a memento that does not
belong to you.”
The Unfortunate Traveler now holds up both of his arms
innocently, to show the cufflinks on his shirt. “If what you say is true, then
why does the missing link match these on my cuffs?”
It is revealed that the cufflinks on the Unfortunate
Traveler’s shirt indeed resemble the one that General Hemingway and I pried
from the hand of the murdered church organist in San Francisco.
“But look!” General Hemingway announces while pointing to
the still-raised arms of the Traveler: “If the accessory truly came from this
man’s shirt, then why is neither cuff devoid of a link?”
“Oh, that’s easy to explain,” says the Unfortunate Traveler:
“I lost a cufflink at the church service that I attended earlier today in San
Francisco, so I swung by my hotel room and installed a replacement before
coming to the casino.”
The dealer now spins the roulette wheel as General Hemingway
and I huddle to discuss our next move. The roulette ball comes to a stop on the
number seven.
“Nobody wins,” mutters my wife Cortina.
“Cortina,” I say, “listen, honey. General Hemingway and I
are going to leave for a spell, to perform a secret mission. We’ll be gone” (I
check my wristwatch) “for no more than five minutes. After that, we shall return.”
And I kiss my wife’s forehead.
General Hemingway now stands beside me while I address the
Unfortunate Traveler: “Sirrah. Would you care to make a wager?”
The Unfortunate Traveler looks to the left and right,
then answers: “This is the Gran Casino. The whole reason I came here was
to make wagers.”
“Do you like mountain-climbing?” I ask.
He says: “I love mountain-climbing.”
Therefore, I bet the Unfortunate Traveler that
General Hemingway and I can climb to the top of the nearest mount faster than he can.
The three of us hail a taxi and drive to the mountains of
Ararat. I enjoy daydream visions of my wife Cortina while I climb happily
toward the peak. In the meantime, General Hemingway misleads the Unfortunate Traveler out
to a steep cliff on the side of the most desolate, icy region.
I shout to my partner Hemingway when I’m near the top:
“Look, Hemmy, I’m almost there! I feel so healthy and fine, after breathing this mountain air and puffing on my churchwarden pipe, that I am starting to have second thoughts about what
we agreed upon performing this afternoon – the revenge plot, I mean. I think
I’d like to back out; I’m getting cold feet.”
Overhearing my remark, the Unfortunate Traveler looks
shocked. He then casts a fearful glance at General Hemingway. At last he grasps
why the General has led him over to this cliff instead of
climbing with me toward the pinnacle. Thus, before General Hemingway can
answer my above speech from across the echoing mountainside, the Unfortunate
Traveler shouts:
“Do you mean that you gentlemen never intended to race me to
the mountaintop at all but rather planned on tossing me to my death and making it look like an accident?”
General Hemingway begins to push the Unfortunate Traveler
towards the brink of the steep cliff, as he says: “You slew our friend in the
organ loft, back in San Fran. Now you’re going to pay the debt that you owe.”
The Unfortunate Traveler’s boots continue sliding toward the
cliff’s edge as Hemingway pushes him. “Wait a minute,” cries the Unfortunate
Traveler; “I didn’t assassinate any organist!”
“Then why do your cufflinks match the one that his cold,
dead hand was clutching?” snarls General Hemingway. And he shoves the man off
the cliff, and he falls to his death.
§
When we return to our room at the hotel near the chocolate
factory in Switzerland, we are greeted by my spy-wife Cortina, who is holding a
telegram.
“What’s this?” I say.
“Read it,” says Cortina. “It’s from our handler.”
General Hemingway and I crane our necks toward the paper that Cortina has placed upon the table. In unison we sound out the coded symbols:
“You killed the wrong man. The Unfortunate Traveler was innocent. Try again.”
Once the meaning of this message sinks in, General Hemingway
guffaws.
My spy-wife Cortina, shocked at this reaction, grows enraged
and flies into a tirade: “This is not a laughing matter,” she says. “I did not enter
the field of espionage as some sort of joke, only to destroy lives without
regard for ethics. My desire was to become a crimefighter, but now I fear that we
are no different than the criminals. Whose side we are on, anyway – the
victims’ or the villains’? I can continue working as a spy only if I know that
my deceptive practices are leading to a better world; but if we’re actually
making things worse, then count me out.”
I gasp and cry to Cortina: “No, don’t quit!”
She shakes her head and says: “I’ll arrange for the agency
to find a replacement – they can falsify some divorce papers for us, and you’ll be
issued a new wife.”
Just before leaving the room, Cortina pauses and looks back
over her shoulder at me and says, with tears in her eyes, “It’s really too bad
– for the truth is that I fell in love with you at first sight; in fact, I
still am in love with you, and I will always love you.” Then she
shuts the door behind her and dashes down the steps.
When Cortina enters the lobby, she spies Adam the Adversary lurking
behind some synthetic houseplants. “Are you hiding from me?” she says.
“No,” Adam answers. “I was just pacing around this fake garden
here, preparing to leave the hotel and go cultivate the real ground
out-of-doors.”
“Will you take me with you?” asks Cortina.
The Adversary smiles: “I thought you’d never ask.”
§
Back in the hotel room, still stunned from Cortina leaving
us so abruptly, General Hemingway and I console each other for our loss; then
we begin to discuss what our next move should be.
We end up climbing out the window of our hotel room and
using the clothes line to sneak into the Chocolate Factory across the street.
Once inside, we snoop around observing the ins and outs of the assembly line; and we discover, in the hallway, a hidden entrance labeled “Underground
Messaging Service.” We then engage in legal lobbying techniques to importune
two of the nearest workers to open this entryway. Eventually they agree to press a button, which slides the silver slab aside, and General
Hemingway and I then storm the Messaging Service, which is the holiest place of
this establishment. (The term “Angel” simply means “Messenger,” in both Hebrew
and Greek.) We follow a king-size bar of chocolate along a conveyor belt until
we are close enough to grab ahold of and remove its golden wrapper. On the
shiny side of the parchment is scrawled a message addressed to Adam the
Adversary. This secret communique reveals that Adam himself is the Master Spy
whom we have been seeking all along; moreover, an attachment included as a
postscript offers incontestable proof that it was Adam who murdered our fellow
agent in San Francisco: the organist in the church loft.
After carefully xeroxing all this evidence and then
shutting the door to the Chocolate Factory’s hidden Underground Messaging
Service, General Hemingway and I sprint outside and breathe deeply of the Swiss atmosphere while pursuing the airplane that we now know is carrying away my double-agent
spy-wife and Adam the Adversary.
The plane is heading into enemy territory. As multitudes of evil henchmen attempt to repel us, General Hemingway and I leap
up and grab onto the aircraft’s wings and infiltrate its fuselage.
“This place is a maze!” the General remarks while gawking back and forth and up and down at all the zigzagging rows of seats arranged in
dizzying patterns throughout the vast interior.
“Look there!” I say, pointing at my wife and Adam, who are
seated next to each other in the cockpit.
General Hemingway and I run as fast as we can in their
direction. Cortina looks back and sees us coming. She unbuckles her safety belt
and stands up and moves aside, so that the General and I can dive atop the
Adversary together. We tackle him, and each of us holds one of his arms, so
that he cannot get away.
Cortina now pulls a pistol out of her purse and aims it at
Adam. “Gentlemen,” she addresses General Hemingway and me, “don’t tear him limb
from limb like my maids did to Orpheus. Let us instead bring him to justice,
alive and kicking.”
Just then, however, the plane begins to shake, and all of us
lose balance. At first, we assume that the cause is severe turbulence, but when
we look in the periscope, it shows that a fleet of jets labeled “Worldwide
Espionage Agency” are bombarding the craft with a myriad of armaments.
Huge pieces of wooden framing come crashing down in flames
upon us all. During the confusion, somehow Adam the Adversary ends up in possession of Cortina’s pistol. As there are only moments left before the airplane explodes and
crashes into the mountains, Adam has time for just one single
gunshot: He wavers between Cortina and me, then pulls the trigger.
Luckily (or unluckily, depending on which of us agents you have money on), the Adversary’s bullet ends up fatally striking General Hemingway.
My wife and I thenceforth decide to retire from spying.
THE END
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