18/2/94

Unsafe at Any Spelling

We have reason to suspect someone is trying to infiltrate the nationג€™s menus and signs.

    It was three minutes past nine on a weatherless Wednesday morning. Delaney was already in his seedy chair, his feet up on the pile of bills next to the broken stapler. A mouse chased a cockroach across the littered floor. Delaney grepsed, lit a cigar and snapped open the newspaper.
    Dick J. Delaney was the privatest of private eyes: nobody had ever heard of him. He was an ace of the old-fashioned sort, a lone wolf in a world of corporate agencies and slick, computerized college grads who thought legwork was treading across the shag rug to get from the laser printer to the fax.
     Delaney took a sip from a Styrofoam cup, downing the last dregs of coffee left over from yesterday's meeting with the landlady.
    A small item in the paper caught his attention: "IDF adopts five-day workweek." Good thing, he mulled, they didn't do that before the Six-Day War. He went on to read about the police investigation of Aryeh Deri, and smirked. Years, it took them. Delaney could've wrapped it up in a day and a half. If they ever tried to put together a case against Arafat....
     Suddenly, he froze. He got the feeling he was not alone. He heard a silk stocking rustle against another, and guessed there was a leg inside each. Through the stink of his cheap cigar he smelled $800-an-ounce perfume. He lowered the newspaper, slowly.
      Legs spoke. "You Delaney?"
    "No, Winnie the Pooh. You want to use the bathroom or something?"
    "I want to use your services. If you're not too busy."
    "Maybe I can squeeze you in. Have a seat -- wait, put this newspaper on it first, my last client was a leper."
    Delaney sized her up. She was right out of a Marvel comic. The lithe limbs, the phony mole on her cheekbone, the pout, the poise, the icy mystique. But with brains. She looked half cheetah, half librarian. Delaney sucked in his gut.
    "I ain't cheap," he said.
    "I ain't poor," she said, and flipped a bankroll into his lap. "That's for the time I've taken up so far."
    He didn't know what not to do first, pounce on the wad of bills or the woman, but he was not about to give her the satisfaction of doing either. "It'll do," he said blandly.
    She crossed her legs; it made his day. "Perhaps I should tell you why I'm here," she said.
    "Perhaps."
   She steeled herself and looked him hard in the eyes. ג€œMurder.''
   ג€œUh-huh.'' He stifled a yawn. ג€œAnd the victim?''
   ג€œThe English language.''
   ג€œWhat?ג€'
   ג€œVerbs, diphthongs and gerunds.  Cacography. Punctuation. And the spelling. God, the spelling.''  
   As victims go, he thought, this is a first. ג€œI don't get it.''
    ג€œHaven't you ever been to Benei Beraq? Alenbi Street? Rehov Vashington? You ever flown out of Natbag? You're not catching on, Delaney: it's a plot. All over Israel there are snake bars and boweling alleys and countless similar crimes perpetrated on menus, on bus stops, on signs.''
   ג€œSo what? Israelis are sloppy spellers.''
   ג€œWrong, Dickie-boy. We have reason to suspect it is one single mastermind.  Our experts in logotypoglyphics are certain of it. We want him eliminated. Quietly.''
   ג€œ ג€˜Weג€™?''
    "No, I mean --" But it was too late.
     "Out with it, baby doll. Who're you working for?"
    She gritted her teeth. "The government."
    "Liar."
    "-- of Russia."

WHERE IN this country does one start a search for a master lousy speller? And why would someone risk his life just to infiltrate the nation's menus and signs? Why should the Russians care? And finally, who was that woman?
   First things first.
   He hopped a bus to Avraham Lincoln Street, and a few blocks away on King Gorge he found his first shred of evidence: ג€œ--> To Centrsl Buss Station.''  He followed the sign until he came to another, a hand-scrawled, photocopied notice taped to a street light: ג€œ--> To weding of Shlommo and Cimdy,'' and a block later, ג€œNo Etnry.'' He etnered. The trail ended at a big, ugly, mad, black dog.
   Something told him he was being set up. It seemed just a little doubtful that a mastermind criminal would leave a trail of arrows pointing to his lair. On the other hand, Delaney was sure one arrow somewhere in the city was going to point Mr. X right in the ol' hunkers.
    Delaney crossed the street to the Interior Ministry to check a -- hey, wait a minute! He backtracked. The sign read ג€œInferior Ministry.''
   If it was an inside job, as he suspected, this'd be the place to nail the vile creep.
    Delaney found him in a drab little office on the top floor. Only the keenest of bloodhounds would have paused at this archetypically amorphous room, with its desk and chair and man and files and rubber stamp. And dictionary. That was the giveaway. Bureaucrats never use a dictionary.  
   The sleuth burst in. ג€œFreeze, sucker! I have a gub.'' 
   The man put his hands up. He looked scared. Real scared. He was a pinguid little skunk, with spidery black eyebrows and hairy knuckles. His shirt was stained yellow under the armpits. His nostrils glistened. His cheeks were pock-marked and bore little red scabs from constant picking. He whimpered. ג€œDon't shoot,'' he begged. ג€œI'm only the proffreader.''
   Delaney pressed the gun on the man's stubbly nose and hissed: ג€œWhere's Mr. Big?'' The little fellow answered with an involuntary coup d'oeil toward a door off to the side.
   Stealthily, leading with his hardware, Delaney introduced himself to the next room with the subtlety of an exclamation mark.
   The gaunt figure inside responded with punctuated silence. He was hunched over a drawing board, penciling in a large suffix on an immense green sign. The pencil, Delaney noticed, was viciously sharp. The suffix was misspelled.
   On the far wall was a despicable display of the most lurid crimes against an Indo-European language, the life's work of a coprological sadist. The most prominent was a framed photograph of the same gaunt man posing by a road sign: ג€œNATBAG 38 km.'' Suddenly, he remembered. The public outcry. It was the most notorious sign of its time. Everyone clamored to know what sort of dimwit would post a transliterated colloquial Hebrew acronym instead of the obvious ג€œBen-Gurion Airport.'' But Delaney could see that this guy was no shnook. 
   Delaney jabbed his gun at the photo. ג€œWhy?'' he croaked.
   The gaunt man smiled crazily. ג€œFor the money,'' he said, adding parenthetically, ג€œbut the scandal was too much. They took it down.'' He went back to his odiferous orthography. "Hey," he said. "How many A's in 'Ra'anana?' "
   Delaney gawked at the exhibits on this wall of shame. The spurious spellings, the assaulted syntax, the garroted grammar, the terrorized typography, the abominable alliteration. ג€œI don't get it. You were hoping to make a fortune from --''
   ג€œNo, not me. The syndicate.''
   ג€œThe Mafia?''
   ג€œNo, the Knesset." He put down his pencil. "Look, bucko, this is big, too big for a chump like you. Go chase after marital infidels. You could get hurt here."
    Delaney cocked his Derringer. "Draw!" he said. The gaunt man picked up his pencil and resumed his nefarious work. "Now, spill the beans or I spill your guts. Are you saying that bad English is good for the country? Who're you in cahoots with? Who's paying you?''
   ג€œThe President's Residence. The Rabbinate Cabinet. The Industry Ministry. Sharir, Shamir, Zamir, Tamir, Namir, Peres, Peretz, Meretz, from Tibi to Bibi and back again, the entire blessed Knesset is in on this. It's a wall-to-wall coalition."
   Delaney sagged. He could see the rhyme, but not the reason. He did not at all like where this investigation was leading. What was he going to do, burst in on the Knesset, wave his .45 around and demand to know who had committed a split infinitive on the wine list at Chez Shpiegelman?
   The ace detective holstered his hostility and slumped into a chair. "You're capitalizing on my tax money...." he whimpered elliptically.
    "Ix-nay. Foreign interests. Foreign funding. Like I told you, muchacho, this is big."
    It was beginning to come together for Delaney.  The clue was that curious story in the papers a few days ago about the secret meeting of the Senate Committee on Un-American Activities. Israel was being overrun by un-American activities. The Oslo accord. Relations with China. Toyotas. Russian aliya.  They were antsy in Washington, and now he knew why. Culturally, diplomatically, linguistically, America's colonial influence was being chipped away to smithereens.
    This gaunt shtoonk with the sharp pencil was a mere tool in the war of attrition. As the legible language was disappearing word by word, it was becoming less and less necessary as more and more men and women from Minsk and Pinsk upped and went to Hadera and Gedera. 
    America was going the way of the Roman Empire via the Tower of Babel. But subtly, surreptitiously. Not like they'd done in Iran.
    Delaney was mortified. He'd been hoodwinked. His voluptuous visitor was a double agent. If he bumped off this scoundrel of sloppy spelling, the developing world would snuff him out before he got to the CIA. And if he didn't plug him, by the end of the decade it would be curtains for Coca-Cola, IBM, Skippy's peanut butter, Israeli civilization as we know it. Either way, he didn't think Miss Dandy Long Legs would be throwing her arms around him in appreciation.
    "So," said the gumshoe as he affixed the silencer, "are ya gonna drop dead by yourself, or do I have to help?"
    The gaunt man was this close to being erased, yet he grinned. A crooked, demented facial warp that gave Delaney the creeps. From behind the thin lips came a noise: "Wait."
    "What?"
    "A last request. Let me sign off." He howled insanely, then continued: "Just let me finish this last word. It's my masterpiece."
    "No tricks. Nothing fancy, like 'Tchernichovsky' or 'Bophuthatswana.' Make it fast, bub."
    "Oh, yeah. Fast it will be." And then he howled again. He went to the far wall and unveiled a little round sign.
    Delaney gasped in horror. It was the prototype of a new speed-limit sign. Dead-center was the figure "100." Now it made sense. This was the operation: sanctioned slaughter. Everything else was an elaborate ruse. Legs had put him on the right track with the stealthiest of white lies. And the worst of puns: the rushin' government. Delaney opened fire and the gaunt man dropped. It was the Zionist thing to do, he thought, as he slipped out a back door and onto the safe streets.