Gently Continental Read Online Free Page B

statements. Shelton, much photographed, is dumb. This thing has not before happened to him. In great alarm he backs into the office, slams the door, rings H.Q. It’ll be the Yard for this one, says the oldest press-man, who has seen more homicides than hot dinners, and in a moment they know, are sure, are certain, and begin furbishing Yard To Be Called? paragraphs. If no news happens, go out and make some.
    News, however, is making itself, beneath the eagle in Grosvenor Square, where a young attaché, Cyrus Fleischer, has been passed the lonely American’s one document. Fleischer is not much interested in the document. Fleischer has lately dated a blonde. All day Cy Fleischer has been in a daydream about this blonde, whose name is Elizabeth. He has seen Elizabeth on a series of documents, in the conference room, in the restaurant, a couple of times in the toilet, and now on the buff pages of the one document. But oddly, while staring at the one document, he finds other images disturbing Elizabeth’s, like a swinging ball that knocks down buildings, bulldozers, trucks, sweating negroes. Then other images still, like himself when young (not long ago), and a girl called Cecile, Cecile Legrande, who sure as hell had no connection with Elizabeth. But there he goes, through the dust and debris, a callow kid on his first date, Cecile Legrande, a tenement girl; Pop would have tanned his hide if he’d known. But why think of that? What brought it up? Cy wrinkles his still-freckled nose. Elizabeth fades, he sees the one document, calls up a moment of official attention. Then – wow! The ball, the bulldozers, the negroes, the trucks, Cecile Legrande, they whirl again in a startled picture, and Cy whoops, This goddam passport’s phoney! Because there isn’t any East 115a Street, and he, Cy Fleischer, knows there isn’t. Didn’t he hang around, watching them knock it down, when he was running after the girl out of the tenements? Yes sir, it was flattened, wiped out, razed, in the re-zoning project in ’57, became a garden-greenbelt precinct, has never been East 115a Street since. And this goddam passport – look at the date! Stamped January 5 of this year, address 78 East 115a Street, which came down before Cy went to college. Whadya know about that? The goddam passport
must
be phoney. Under no conceivable set of circumstances or procedure can it be anything else but phoney. And it is phoney – oh yes! Security tears it to small shreds. A nice fake, very nice, but look at that paper, ink, stamp. Good work, Cy, you’ll make the grade, boy. Cy Fleischer. Sweating on a blonde.
    And the American who had that one document, which turns out to be no document, barely cold, though removed now from the sacks and the summerhouse, he’s suffered the last of his indignities, has had his very identity stripped from him, is now not Clooney, perhaps not American, only certainly alone. Alone, and unnamed. A piece of carrion with no handle. Shorn of all points of departure from which to imagine something, anything, to clothe his great nakedness. No name, no nation, no birthplace, no domicile, no shared culture, no relatives, no friends, nothing. X, torn from his equation. From his short masquerade. His make-believe. His attitude of separation, of maintaining a distinct ego. X, a dangerous picture, the residuum left in the crucible.
    So Grosvenor Square ring Whitehall with this news of non-identity, requiring at the same time, now or sooner, a very close description of X; his height, weight, colouring, marks, teeth, prints, estimated age, together with information of his accent and manner, when he was alive, and all other information whatever; with the precise mode of his dying, and preferably the names of those responsible. Whitehall reply with polite brevity, having none of this information by them, then ring the local H.Q., who in turn ring the beleaguered Shelton. Shelton, by now, is beginning to