Is He? Not anymore, Hamm, my friend, not anymore…or He is and He isn’t, it’s tough to explain, so difficult nowadays with everyone of no extraction, all these late designates of fractional Faith — the questions, is He a Mischling, who knows, and, anyway, are They, Whoever They are, Whoever They ever are (up to you), the type to make such distinctions; it’s up to Him to decide, the chosen now finally choosing. Who are you, that’s never been voluntary before. Freewill and all, freewilled. This time around, martyrdom’s wholly assured. But He’s not on any of the transports (Mada spits on Hamm’s yarmulke, palms it down into his kink), and neither is he dead…Frank Gelt says, having slid downstairs and across the waxed lobby of the Hotel Under the Sign of the Hotel’s newest Polandland franchise, the Hotel Under the Sign of the Sign of the Hotel in the house’s silkslippers, he’s waving in front of him, in their faces, a sheaf of papers that gives the impression at least of being thick, smallprinted, and tiresome if not entirely, unappealably official — still they’ve been religiously stamped and signed, approved like nobody’s business: nothing registered, he says, apparently He has no number, no designation, whispering crisp quickly to Die once they’ve sequestered themselves in their most modest of suites, with all tips paidout, shades drawn, door locked with the radio on, so as to buzz their conference from any who’d pry: He’s wanted dead, Gelt says, but only by authorities on the Most High, orders direct from the Sanhedrin, Shade himself; lowerlevels have instructions only to turn Him over, ascend Him upstairs. An orchestra chokes. And then come the sermons.
Must’ve entered on a false passport, says Die in complimentary smoking-jacket falling open, exposing his hairless, smallnippled chest; he’s lying on his fourposter, canopied in black, originally topped with the taxidermied head of a grandly shot stag whose eyes, which are glass, he’d suspected of hiding surveillance cameras, microphones, or both, and so had the head ripped from the wall, now hugged under an arm, deantlered. Or, he says, maybe He’s paying His way through, if He can afford it, if He isn’t too cheap. How hard is it to be here illegal, unaccounted for, off the books — that’s the question He should be asking Himself. More like: is anything at all illegal here, eins, zwei…and will anyone ever be called to account?
