Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

McBride did a little jig step on the activating steps that roused the sleeping dogs and sent them back with hardly a peep of protest into the unstirring limbo in which they made their noiseless abode and spent their dateless hours. Showing off, he grinned at Yossarian.

"Where are the loudspeakers?"

"We haven't found them. We aren't authorized to look far yet. We're only checking security for the President."

"What's that water?"

"What water?"

"Oh, shit, Larry, I'm the one who's supposed to be hard of hearing. I hear water, a fucking stream, a babbling brook."

McBride shrugged impartially. "I'll check. We're looking into both ends today. We can't even find out if it's supposed to be secret. That's secret too."

Approaching the bottom of the lopsided ellipse of this staircase, Yossarian caught glimpses below of shoulders and trouser cuffs and shabby shoes, one pair a dingy black, one pair an orange brown. Yossarian was beyond surprise when he reached the last flight and saw the two men waiting: a lanky, pleasant redheaded man with a seersucker jacket and a swarthy, seamy, chunky man in a scruffy raincoat, with ill-shaven cheeks and a blue beret. The latter wore a surly look and compressed a limp cigarette between wet lips. Both hands were deep in the pockets of his raincoat.

They were Bob and Raul. Bob was different from the agent in Chicago. But Raul was the spitting image of the man outside his building and in his dream in Kenosha. Raul badgered his moist cigarette about his mouth, as though in moody exception to some restriction against lighting it.

"Were you in Wisconsin last week?" Yossarian could not help asking, with a guise of affable innocence. "Around the motel near the airport in a place called Kenosha?"

The man shrugged neutrally, with a look at McBride.

"We were together every day last week," McBride answered for him, "going over the floor plans of that catering company you brought in."

"And I was in Chicago," offered the redheaded man named Bob. He folded a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and tossed the crumpled green wrapper aside to the floor.

"Did I meet you in Chicago?" Yossarian faced him doubtfully, positive he had never laid eyes on him. "At the airport there?"

Bob answered leniently. "Wouldn't you know that?"

Yossarian had heard that voice before. "Would you?"

"Of course," said the man. "It's a joke, isn't it? But I don't catch on."

"Yo-Yo, that guy in charge of the wedding wants six dance floors and six bandstands, with one as a backup in case the other five all don't work, and I don't see where they can find the room, and I don't even know what the hell that means."

"Me aussi," said Raul, as though he hardly cared.

"I'll talk to him," said Yossarian.

"And something like thirty-five hundred guests! That's three hundred and fifty round tables. And two tons of caviar. Yo-Yo, that's four thousand pounds!"

"My wife wants to come," said Bob. "I'll have a gun in my ankle holster, but I'd like to pretend I'm a guest."

"I'll take care of it," said Yossarian.

"Moi also," said Raul, and threw away his cigarette.

"I'll take care of that too," said Yossarian. "But tell me what's happening here. What is this place?"

"We're here to find out," said Bob. "We'll talk to the sentries."

"Yo-Yo, wait while we check."

"Yo-Yo." Raul sniggered. "My Dieux."

All three looked left into the tunnel. And then Yossarian saw sitting inside on a bentwood chair a soldier in a red combat uniform with an assault rifle across his lap, and behind him near the wall stood a second armed soldier, with a larger weapon. On the other side, in the amber haze telescoping backward into the narrowing horizon of a beaming vanishing point, he made out two other motionless soldiers, in exactly that grouping. They could have been reflections.

"What's over there?" Yossarian pointed across toward the passageway to SUB-BASEMENTS A-Z.