With each pronouncement, his head had turned a quarter of an inch, at the same time as his mouth had creased into a Punch-and-Judy smile. His monocle flashed a Morse code.
Behind the monocle was the faintest lurking of an Orient eye. I imagined the left eye was Peking, the right Berlin, but no. It was the monocle’s magnification that focused the Orient. His brow and cheeks were a fortress of Teutonic arrogance, built to last two thousand years or until his contract was canceled.
“What did you call me?” he asked, with immense politeness.
“What you called me,” I said, faintly. “A stupid,” I whispered, “goddamn son-of-a-bitch.”
He nodded. He smiled. He banged the car door wide.
“Get in!”
“But you don’t—”
“—know you? Do you think I run around giving lifts to just any dumb-ass bike rider? You think I haven’t seen you ducking around corners at the studio, pretending to be the White Rabbit at the commissary. You’re that”—he snapped his fingers— “bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Warlord of Mars— the illegitimate offspring of H. G. Wells, out of Jules Verne. Stow your bike. We’re late!”
I tossed my bike in the back and was in the car only in time as it revved up to fifty.
“Who can say?” shouted Fritz Wong, above the exhaust. “We are both insane, working where we work. But you are lucky, you still love it.”