Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [113]
“What?” Ignatius thundered. “Do you mean that he is impersonating a member of the armed forces of this country?”
“That’s not all he impersonates.”
“This is extremely serious.” Ignatius frowned and the red sateen scarf rode down on his hunting cap. “Every soldier and sailor that we see could simply be some mad decadent in disguise. My God! We may all be trapped in some horrible conspiracy. I knew that something like this was going to happen. The United States is probably totally defenseless!”
The young man and the sailor waved at each other familiarly, and the sailor drifted out of sight around the front of the Cathedral. Following a few steps behind the sailor, Patrolman Mancuso appeared at the end of Pirate’s Alley wearing a beret and goatee.
“Oh!” the young man shrieked gaily, watching Patrolman Mancuso stalking the sailor. “It’s that marvelous policeman. Don’t they know that everyone in the Quarter knows who he is?”
“Do you know him, too?” Ignatius asked guardedly. “He’s a very dangerous man!”
“Everyone knows him. Thank goodness he’s back again. We were beginning to wonder what had happened to him. We love him dearly. Oh, I simply wait to see what new disguise they put on him. You should have seen him a few weeks ago before he had disappeared, he was just too much in that cowboy outfit.” The young man exploded in wild laughter. “He could hardly walk in these boots, his ankles kept giving way. Once he stopped me on Chartres when I was going truly mad with your mother’s W.P.A. hat. Then he stopped me again on Dumaine and tried to start a conversation. That day he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a crew sweater, and he told me that he was a Princeton student down here on a vacation. He’s just fabulous. I’m so glad the police have returned him to the people who truly appreciate him. I’m sure he was being wasted wherever he was recently. Oh, that accent of his. Some people like him best as the British tourist. That is choice. But I’ve always preferred his southern colonel. It’s really a matter of taste, I guess. We’ve had him arrested twice for making indecent proposals. That’s always wonderfully confusing to the police. I do hope that we haven’t gotten him in too much trouble, for he’s close to our hearts.”
“He is thoroughly evil,” Ignatius observed. Then he said, “I wonder how many of our ‘military’ are simply people like your friend, disguised tarts.”
“Who knows? I wish they all were.”
“Of course,” Ignatius said in a thoughtful, serious voice, “this could be a worldwide deception.” The red sateen scarf rode up and down. “The next war could turn out to be one massive orgy. Good grief. How many of the military leaders of the world may simply be deranged old sodomites acting out some fake fantasy role? Actually, this might be quite beneficial to the world. It could mean an end to war forever. This could be the key to lasting peace.”
“It certainly could,” the young man said pleasantly. “Peace at any price.”
Two nerve ends in Ignatius’s mind met and formed an immediate association. Perhaps he had found a means of assaulting the effrontery of M. Minkoff.
“The power-crazed leaders of the world would certainly be surprised to find that their military leaders and troops were only masquerading sodomites who were only too eager to meet the masquerading sodomite armies of other nations in order to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps.”
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The government would pay us to travel. How divine. We would bring an end to world strife and renew people’s hope and faith.”
“Perhaps you are the hope for the future,” Ignatius said, dramatically pounding one paw into the other. “There certainly doesn’t seem to be anything else very promising on the horizon.”
“We would also help to end the population explosion.”
“Oh, my God!” The blue and yellow eyes flashed wildly. “Your method would probably be more satisfying and acceptable than the rather stringent birth control tactics which I have always advocated. I must dedicate some space to this in my writings. This subject