Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, Et Al: A Compendium of Evils

by E.M. Rauch

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

A world-class hero confronts ancient "supernatural" evils in an adventure that spans entire planets and defies everyday notions of reality!

Still mourning the losses of his beloved Penny Priddy and his surrogate father Professor Hikita, Buckaroo Banzai must also contend with the constant threat of attack from his immortal nemesis Hanoi Xan, ruthless leader of the World Crime League. To make matters worse, Planet 10 warrior queen John Emdall has sent her Lectroid legions against Earth with a brutal ultimatum. Or is her true target Buckaroo Banzai? As the apocalyptic threats continue to mount, only Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers stand in the way of global destruction.

The long-awaited sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is finally here after more than 35 years! As told by the Reno Kid to Buckaroo Banzai chronicler E.M. Rauch, this tale follows everyone's favorite scientist-surgeon-entertainer-daredevil as he sets off on a brand-new hair-raising adventure!

Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: Dark Horse Books

Print pages: 624

Sample

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I am frequently challenged by critics, with tones of ironic superiority: “Why add to the legend of Buckaroo Banzai—scientist, medical doctor, adventurer, trick shot artist, and professional entertainer, inter alia—an exceptional man and soft-spoken do-gooder, yes, and not one to toot his own horn, but also no superhero with superpowers?”

My goodness, no, he is no Superman of the comics, but many account him to be the superman of Nietzsche, that perfect balance of East and West, Apollonian rationality and Dionysian appetite: not a superman to rule over others but to govern himself. “But,” continue the critics, “is he not also something of a theatrical cowboy given to fist fighting and street grappling and conspiracy theories, no? Not to mention such charming anachronisms as rhymed doggerel! How many men has the trigger-happy fellow killed? Does he not carry six-guns even when performing in public in front of audiences of all ages? And a celebrated medical doctor, no less! True, his face appears on cereal boxes, and his scientific discoveries and musical talents are undisputed; but what of his social influence on children? Certain of his recordings and stage gyrations are indelicate, to say the least . . .” So forth and so on go the familiar objections.

In the face of such self-righteous sanctimony, I offer the simplest of responses: this cowboy saved the world, not once but repeatedly. Regardless of your personal or political feelings about pistol-toting vigilantes and frontier notions of justice and fairness, scarcely a day passes without some media pasha or academic pundit inquiring if I was really there, at that phenomenal battle over the sleepy plains and thickets of New Jersey. Did I truly see with my own eyes the clash, barely above treetop level, that decided the fate of our Earth? Did I rejoice to see our own Buckaroo Banzai land by parachute while the alien John Whorfin’s Lectroid ship crashed in a blazing ball? The answer is a self-evident yes, although with the passage of time I occasionally find myself asking the same question. Was I really there? Fortunately, if I forget all that I remember, or when I pass from the scene, my recollections of that fateful day will outlive me—see The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension—because I once took the time to put pen to paper. In the intervening years, swelling ranks of partisan readers have lately petitioned me for information about supervening events in the case, particularly in light of that which is whispered as truth but based upon rumor.

While Hanoi Xan’s earlier attempt to ally himself with the unfortunate Dr. Lizardo was thankfully only a near thing, the voice of reason itself demands that the uncanny must not remain behind the black veil of legend and mystery. Like any thing in front of us, we wish to get a better sense of it through critical analysis and, if we are speaking of a historical figure, through as much biographical information as possible, so that the outline of the individual may be drawn with both a softer lead and a finer point and by this process come alive in our eyes.

But Xan is different, to put it mildly, and few subjects arouse such heated controversy as the scabrous contagion known for making the life of Buckaroo Banzai a living hell and killing anyone who crosses his shadow—the same man who among the masses is thought to be imaginary, a fictional being, and yet in parallel is known by another name as a trusted intimate of Queen Victoria and a banker to, among others, many of the principal royal houses of Europe, including the Hohenzollern and the last three czars . . . the same man who is mentioned also in French colonial reports from the 1940s as being in possession of no fewer than twenty princely domains in Xinjiang Province alone, as well as having a long string of criminal enterprises and a regular corps of bullies gathered from the pests of society in his employ. How to reconcile such competing claims? I regret this question cannot be answered authoritatively. The simple fact is that no satisfactory explanation exists for the phenomenon that is Hanoi Xan Anthropos.

In part this is due to his network of dezinformatsiya and the finest public relations money can buy, but bribery alone cannot account for why the true nature of the creature is shielded from discovery by the public and therefore the calumny he rightly deserves. Indeed, it flashes on the brain that perhaps there are things about the monster that our human minds cannot apprehend, an understanding not entrusted to us, that when we endeavor to speak of him, we lack even a fundamental idea of what we are talking about or even a way to render him visible. What else can be said of a “man” who claims to have been born a snake, hatched from the egg of a black swan, and whom no less a figure than Macaulay has called “a malefactor with no equal in the long record of human iniquity, a creature scarce seen in the light . . . the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man who engaged every lust, whose hands are alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”

Such words, while not inaccurate, evoke the archetype more than the man: a mysterious figure of epic scale and larger than life. As against such hyperbole, perhaps it is more helpful to characterize Xan rather in terms of what he is not, as the wise Maimonides taught with respect to the Creator: not anthropomorphic, not mortal, not corporeal, not bound by physical laws. Of course I am not saying that Xan is not material, only that even in the flesh he inspires disbelief.

Consider the fantastical travelogue The Khan of Kathmandu, a manuscript recently discovered in the British Museum, believed by experts of the Banzai Institute to be in Xan’s own hand and dating from the fifteenth century. Ascribed to Sir Edmund Shaa—goldsmith and engraver to the Royal Mint, moneylender to the king, and member of the Privy Council—the fanciful tale recounts the author’s travels in the Himalayan kingdoms and his impressions of a mysterious Mongol prince with supernatural powers whom he encounters along the way. At times the author’s language reminds us of a conflicted lover—“my legs did still lothe to lodge within his bed”—furthering our suspicion Xan even may have written the account himself. Indeed the khan offers magical cures for various maladies: “Float bloode on water, mix with pith wick and natural oils which exude, smoothe over maculae and by reason of euphony, repeat, ‘You handsome man rascal, you.’ ” If this concoction somehow fails to produce the desired results, he advises the author to “wash both Old Larry’s winged and subordinate phalluses to and fro, in this way to unbosom one’s vexations. Forthwith the mutation is wrought and the innermost penetralia of causes may be pressed.”

Make sure it’s done right, in other words! Erotic, yes, but exactly what happens between the two travelers is left unclear. In the volume’s final illustration, they simply go their separate ways, with the moon and the Himalayas rising behind the khan. Other woodcuts depict the same brooding fellow in traditional Nepali dress, holding a musket and standing over a downed mountain cat, while in another he gazes at the night sky through a telescope, surrounded by a harem of beauties. He is never named, identified only as “the Khan” or “the Wretched Khan.”

Was Shaa the man we know as Hanoi Xan? Writing in effect about his alter ego and a part of the world he himself had never visited but knew quite well as Xan? Again, our own forensic handwriting experts think so, but Sir Edmund would have been only one of Xan’s many identities down through the centuries. Where, then, to begin? Whence comes Hanoi Xan? What does he look like? How old is he?

I can answer only that he is ancient. From oral legends and pseudepigrapha, he is rumored variously to have arisen from Persia, the Euphrates Valley, or the lost Pacific continent of Mu around the time of the great comet swarm of 11,000 BCE—his face the model for the Easter Island statues, et cetera—but the first notice we have of the entity who has come to be known as Hanoi Xan in the historical age comes from a three-thousand-year-old clay tablet fragment, written in Babylonian, upon which is described a demon feathered snake of “circular form,” “birthed by a wicked swan” and possessing “a face which is no face” along with a list of other attributes, being both “large-boned and invisible . . . twixt man and monkey . . . of sable beauty . . . [who] affrights and affronts the great people of Nineveh . . .”

In Mesoamerica, too, we find legends of the feathered serpent—called Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, and other names—though I cannot attest to a direct connection to our villain.

 

THE MONGOLIAN CONNECTION

To speak briefly, there always seems to be a new Xan—one may as well use a name generator—which is not to say that he has changed for the better. In Mongol oral tradition, he is described not as Hulagu Khan or a khan of any kind, but variously as a shaman, a spider, a snake, a dream spirit, or the deceitful Talker (the Mongol devil) himself. A later narrative paints him as a “great dark bird of plunder” (black swan?) who leaves behind a bloody trail of outlawry, including grand pyramids of human heads. Captured and brought in chains to the court of the great Kublai Khan, he and his vaunted powers are put to the test. When the secrets of his magical tricks are exposed by the khan’s own conjurer—a purported metaphysician and direct antecedent of Buckaroo Banzai who “brought fire against fire,” as the story goes—Xan requests a noble death but instead is dipped in blazing naphtha until he reveals, amid the most terrible damnations, the location of his ill-gotten treasures. When his belly is sliced open, legend has it that enough precious jewels come pouring out to fill an entire tayal, or grain bag. What is more, in Xan’s single teardrop the khan’s conjurer lays eyes on the future: accursed Mongol invasion fleets storm tossed like kindling by a divine typhoon and sunk in the Sea of Japan.

What to say of such a lurid tale on the order of a movie plot, and the no-less-sensational accounts of Xan’s revenge on the Banzai bloodline down through the generations? The simplest solution, it might seem, would be to put the question directly to Hanoi Xan and Buckaroo. The former is not available to this author, however, and Buckaroo acknowledges his ancient Mongolian roots but laughs at every mention of a thousand-year-old curse from the Old Country. For all of that, however, he has never explicitly denied the feud, perhaps because its existence is obvious. Make of it what you will, dear reader, as we have other fish to fry.

 

EUROPEAN VIEWS

Turning to the West and closer to home, we have the famed Elizabethan spiritist and psychic investigator Dr. John Dee and his account of the angelic apparition Uriel, also known as Phanuel or Shanuel, who in the doctor’s scrying glass appears as wrinkled yet “smooth as glass, white as walrus ivory, sinister and shining . . . the prowdest vaine viper full of inchaunting tongues and musiques . . . a lewd and vile bastard, a gnawing vermin, damnable friend of violence and chief procurer for Old Larry himself . . . yet having a good contour of the nose . . . an atheist, alchymist, skryer and prackticer of pracktical kaballah . . . [who] doth loathe his awefull aged side . . . [and] disgorges his stomacke because his closen eies could not his sight abide . . . [and hence] bathes in the first menstrual bloode of young maidens and the bloode of women great with chyld.”

I will save for later Xan’s reported fondness for bathing in the menstrual blood of virgins and proceed to the famous case of the broad-hatted man in Vermeer’s View of Delft whom the painter later erased from the work for reasons that are unclear. Eyewitness accounts at the time identify the figure as Xan’s alter ego, the Dutch trader van Pfeffersack, the putative richest man in Europe who made millions in piracy and the slave trade, along with a financial killing in the famous tulip panic of 1636–37. Most scholars, Berenson among them, have noted the uncanny resemblance between van Pfeffersack and Vermeer himself—the reclusive so-called Sphinx of Delft of whom little is known—and speculate the erased image may have been in fact a self-portrait. Others, as I have mentioned, go even further, alleging that Vermeer, Pfeffersack, and Xan are the same man. At all events, without an actual image of the broad-hatted figure, the debate is moot; and I can contribute nothing further upon the subject.

The same period gives us Bunyan’s thinly disguised account of Xan/Pfeffersack which, while not naming names, tellingly alludes to the birth legend of “Mr. Badman”: “I will tell you, that from a child he was very bad; his very beginning was ominous, a malignity conceived by serpent and enchanted black swan, and presaged that no good end was, in likelihood, to follow thereupon. There were several sins that he was given to, when but a little one, that manifested him to be notoriously infected with original corruption; for I dare say he learned none of them of his father and mother who found him foreign to them; nor was he admitted to go much abroad among other children that were vile, to learn to sin of them: nay, contrariwise, if at any time he did get abroad amongst others, he would be as the inventor of bad words, and an example in bad actions . . . the ringleader, and master-sinner from a child.”

A century later we have P. Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773), in which the author mentions a fellow tourist who introduces himself as Henry Shannon, an Englishman. One need not imagine Brydone’s surprise—for he has written of it in a separate letter—upon recognizing Shannon as the Frenchman Charles-Henri Sanson, the latest in a long line of Sansons to hold the office of royal executioner to the court of Versailles. Perhaps because he is describing two men as the same man, Brydone describes him as “prodigious of length” but also “short round,” “gaunt” but “bulbous” and “frog-like.”

Carlyle, because he was Carlyle, gushes with zeal over the same bloodthirsty individual: “To fix gaze long onto him is to fling away one’s soul. He is a lamplighter, an illuminator, the type of the man to come.”

“The type of the man to come,” just possibly because he never seems to go away. To wit, the son of Charles-Henri, Henri Sanson, would follow in his father’s bloody footsteps and chop the head off Marie Antoinette, among others. Like the latter-day Xan, he preferred to call himself a disciplinaire rather than an executioner and—if we give credence to the infamous Marquis de Sade—was a “blood drunk” and an avid practitioner of “domestic discipline” as well.

Was either Charles-Henri or Henri Sanson, or even both, the same individual as Henry Shannon, thereby suggesting the possibility of bilocation? It is a neat theory, but keep in mind that we are still dealing with life in the olden days before photography, so there is no “smoking gun” evidence to prove or disprove the case. Brydone seems firm in this belief, however, and in the case of Xan, we have learned the impossible is itself a myth.

Yet for lack of corroborative evidence, I must leave the matter unsettled, likewise the oft-rumored proposition that Xan and the infamous alchemist and thaumaturge Cagliostro walked in one another’s shadow and may even have been the same man. While I give the theory some currency, I do not push it since I cannot confirm it—and chasing original sources is a tedious business. The jury therefore remains out while I continue working.

This theme of human quicksilver is echoed by Forbes in his monumental Oriental Memoirs (1813), in which the prolific author and draftsman records meeting a mysterious “khan” from parts unknown and in different guises, describing him in one breath as “dark and dense” and yet elsewhere as “a silvered blaze . . . an ominous glitter of something, dimly discerned.” An accompanying sketch shows a dark-haired man of about forty, resembling Charlie Chaplin down to his mustache, baggy trousers, and little frock coat.

In the twentieth century, no less an authority than the great heresiarch Jung speaks of Xan as the “Spirit Mercurius,” within whom are embodied all opposites, cosmic, physical, and psychic: male and female, light and dark, all mirror images within the nameless Oneness that predates the dawning of light. (It is less well known that during his time in London Jung became acquainted with Shannon, through introductions by Constance Long and both men’s mutual quixotic obsession to synthesize all mythologies into a single universal system.)

During approximately the same period, 1913–14, we have Lytton Strachey’s biographical treatment of someone who keenly resembles Shannon, an intimate of Queen Victoria and George V and a favorite of London high society for decades; or it is more accurate to say that we do not have such a document, since Shannon acquired the only manuscript for an unknown sum upon learning that Strachey planned to include him in his semisatirical biographical study Eminent Victorians alongside such notables as Florence Nightingale and General Gordon of Khartoum fame/infamy.

But the story does not end there, since we now know from evidence available through Strachey’s estate that Strachey contemplated returning to the project after Shannon’s death in 1922. From his notes in a 1924 letter to a prospective publisher (not Chatto & Windus) we find a proposal to relate the astounding odyssey of a central figure—who can only be the late Sir Henry Shannon—referred to variously as Hulagu Khan, Hanoi Xan, Hong X’an: “. . . a 6,000-year-old demigod . . . who until recently took in breath from the steppes of Mongolia to Belgravia and the steps of Whitehall . . . an English knight who from the comfort of his club chair at the Royal Geographical Society sat at the helm of the modern-day World Crime League.” To be included, he promises, are “many of his most fantastic schemes and murders and black rites.”

It is not known to me if any publishers ever saw the outline, which is skeletal and in the beginning stages, sparse on detail and likely intended only as promotional material, as I have suggested. In addition, let us be honest: any publisher presented the proposal almost certainly would have thought Strachey mad. The idea of a six-thousand-year-old living creature obviously cannot stand up under rational scrutiny in the twentieth century, so sensibly nowhere in the outline’s talking points does Strachey name Sir Henry as the extraordinary individual under discussion or reveal sources to authenticate his wild claims. His caution, moreover, is understandable, given that a certain risk assessment is at play here, and it is likely Strachey was being extraordinarily careful, even after Shannon’s “death,” not to toss around his name. His very life may have depended upon such discretion, a fact that also may help to explain why he decided to abandon the entire project.

Yet he is not too circumspect in his notes to toss around certain sensational elements of the mystery man Xan’s long and colorful history, promising an exotic concatenation of his experiences over several centuries and continents—from the Spanish Inquisition to Elizabethan court intrigues and Xan’s connection to Christopher Marlowe’s mysterious death; a banquet of sex in the busy boudoirs of Lady Penelope Rich, Catherine de’ Medici and Anne d’Aquavita et alia; details of his misadventures with the murderous Jacobins, and his early forays into modern organized crime among the likes of Indian stranglers, the Chinese tong, the Camorra, and other assorted rough customers . . .

This is all tantalizing stuff (the more so if true), but the proposal’s most astounding allegation is that Hanoi Xan was also none other than the notorious Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the nineteenth-century Chinese religious cult whose call to revolution against the Qing dynasty led to the bloodiest civil war in human history and the deaths of tens of millions. As befitting the younger brother of Jesus Christ—as Xiuquan liked to claim—he met an ignoble end, only to be “resurrected” in a sense when his corpse was exhumed by his enemies, beheaded, burned, and his ashes fired from a cannon!

Was Xiuquan, a.k.a. X’an, the figure we know as Hanoi Xan? More to the point, why did Strachey think so? Was Shannon himself the source for the sensational story? In a letter to his friend Clive Bell, Strachey paints a frightening and lurid picture of his erstwhile biographical subject: “He [Shannon] reeks of iodoform and writes in the hand of an ancient, asking me to believe that he has lived over several millennia and maintained his vital appearance by shedding his entire skin at intervals and submitting himself to profane sacraments . . .”

Even allowing for a degree of senility—or rumored opium habit—in the centenarian Shannon, one finds it difficult to fathom why he would share such a lurid confession, true or not, unless the ambitious younger man somehow had managed to wheedle his way into his good graces in a deeper way than we understand. Or perhaps the old man merely was joking, as he was wont to do. Jung, for example, mentions finding Shannon on more than one occasion dressed as the Easter bunny, which by all accounts was one of his milder masquerades. Even in the presence of royalty or other dignitaries, he was known to clown and wear odd costumes; but his political and religious beliefs were no laughing matter. Ardent British imperialist and friend of Cecil Rhodes though he was, it was nonetheless the German thinkers and romantics who truly tugged at his heart. Wagner and Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, and Herder were his ideological soulmates; and in his dry and rather tedious autobiography, published just before his “death” in 1922 at the age of at least 109, he explains his belief in reincarnation as analogous to Hegel’s dialectic, putting forth the theory that all the leading figures in history have been advanced souls who, by virtue of experience gained in prior lives, are a step closer than we ordinary mortals on the road to enlightened “all-knowingness.”

He also speaks extensively of his belief in spiritist religion, particularly the teachings of Allan Kardec (more of whom later), and includes a brief mention of an intriguing discussion of the subject with a young Herman Melville on the South Sea island of Nuku Hiva sometime in 1842. Both Shannon and Melville were seagoing young men with vital intellects and we may imagine a vigorous encounter between the two young sailors. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall, or in the native hut!

What I mean to convey is that Xan the impersonator and various of his aliases have been well known for centuries. And yet, the popular masses of the last hundred years remain largely ignorant that the master villain even exists outside the pages of fiction, where he has appeared as the model for more miscreants than I can name. To cite but two, he is said to be Moravagine in the Frenchman’s novel by the same name and the Russian nobleman Pechorin in Lermontov’s effort a century earlier. I am reminded as well of Conrad—“a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence”—and in the past century, outstanding stories by Philip José Farmer and the putative Harry Ashton-Wolfe. (The question of whether Xan himself wrote as Ashton-Wolfe is a fascinating one that has not been settled to my satisfaction; perhaps a dedicated reader with access to the British Museum might wish to investigate the case further.)

Since my publishing house does not allow for space to reproduce photographic images, I will also leave to one side a visual comparison of Henry Shannon and the Russian impresario known as Viktor Antropos, of whom I will have more to say in the main narrative. I am left, then, to describe the fiend with mere words; and others—as noted in these pages—have said it better. But let us admit I have a bias and invite another opinion, so that my publishers may not accuse me of editorializing and thereby exposing them to Xan’s unsurpassed battery of fancy-pants lawyers who buzz like flies over every mention of his name. To be blunt, I am asked by the company to empathize with the torturer, who has demanded publication of the following self-serving statement by the rascal himself. Sickened and surprised that a monster psychopath who has spent millions to deny his own existence writes to set the story straight, I nonetheless am compelled to comply. Will the real Hanoi Xan please step forward!

FOREWORD BY HANOI XAN

TO THE READER WITH GUARDED HOPE OF FAIRNESS

 

Yes, it is I, Hong Xiuquan, younger brother of Jesus and Fourth Person of the Holy Trinity, king of kings, the All-Destroyer Man of Sin. With more lofty names and a higher destiny than other men, not to say a meaning liberated from their understanding, I speak now in order “to address honestly my dishonesty,” so that the reader may grasp my views on the beauty of that which some men call evil. What I mean by the beautiful is better called artifice, and evil to a man of my condition is simply the reverse of one’s aims; that is to say, the shadow of failure. It follows by this calculus that evil is aligned with error and a want of creative and calculating faculties: a poor adaptation to the world in Darwinian terms. Mundus vult decipi: is this not the highest teaching of nature? Who is more beautiful than the conniving Hermes or the Cretan art form of deception? How much more artful than the taking of fair Helen was the Greeks’ glorious deceit in winning back the pretty prize, or Abraham’s cunning ruse to gift his own bride to the smitten Pharaoh!

Indeed, need I mention the Biblical tricksters? Did they not transcend good and evil? Is not “morality” itself a fluid concept derived from one’s relative position of power? It is said the true master transcends good and evil to see the perfection of the way things are and thus to adore the god of things as they are, whose only rule is adapt or die. How many arrive at the pinnacle by way of charitable deeds?

The reader may sense from me a certain tone of frustration, which I acknowledge as a man who in the grand scheme of things, in the life of humanity, has committed every crime but the worst, which is failing to live by the cosmic laws of symmetry and the harmony of parts in all of Nature. In the human realm, this symmetry may be translated as the law of “cause and effect” or “live and learn”—in other words, the sum of all laws, after which there is no need of any other, much less what is called “conscience” or guilt or scolding religion. Think on it: what crime did Maldoror (Mister Morningstar, Prince of Light, et al.) and his disciple Pythagoras ever do, compared to the war god’s reign of terror? Can you name one, besides the recognition of numinous numbers and their magical ratios which brought order into the world?

Law and order! Heh . . . that I should be accused as a lawbreaker, when none has followed the natural law more diligently than I, nor benefited to such a degree. In this way I remain an amateur criminal in comparison to the self-righteous do-gooders, politicians, and religious cultists of the world who will love you for a nickel and drop you for a dime. Heh! I am thinking of Buckaroo Banzai, who has disordered the natural harmonia of the world and is now paying the price. Having warped time and space, he wonders why his life is “warped” as well! Oh, how he hurts and cries to the tabloid magazines and television cameras, but he chose the dark path when he traveled through solid matter and compromised the precise balance that binds all dimensions!

Now his heart is broken and it breaks my heart! Whaa, whaa, weeping willow! That explains why I am howling with laughter as he attempts to sound as “cornpone” as his “fans,” so they will sympathize with this foolish genius—yes, I will give him that. But hopefully you are not a simpleton so simple minded as to fall for his act or be offended by my words. Yet, whereas Banzai’s predatory blood spilling is admired, even exalted, I am condemned and called worse than a cancer, a heathen barbarian, an abomination, an execrable villain (e.g., “terrible malefactor of blackest preeminence” and “depravity in its blackest shape”) by hack pulp writers who see me behind every curtain.

Was it Macaulay or was it Gibbon who said of me . . . ? Ha, ha! For that matter, why not ask Sima Qian or Herodotus?

But no vulgar novelist has invented more bilge than my various biographers, who design to give goose flesh but, even so, are alleged to be on my payroll. Here I echo my dear Miss Rand, in asking, “Should not the man of industry be called good for what he has, rather than for what he gives away? Should the rich man not be glorified for his art of making profit, as the painter puts his talent to use?” Why this unjust double standard? The reason is obvious and should be kept in view: I live without reverence, make no claim to brotherly love, invoke no higher being in the performance of my works.

Call me Xan, Shan, Shaytan, Waxaklahun Ubah Kan, the Great Khan of the Golden Horde, Prince of the Air who sees all with my soul eyes in light and shadow alike. Yes, it is I, Sir Henry Shannon, “the Face Who Is No Face,” the “human chameleon” and greatest stage actor of my generation—or, to my critics and assorted biographers, the Man behind the Curtain, the Puppet Master, Old Granddad, Max Thrax, the Scourge of Burma, Theophilus Krampus, Mr. Badman, the One Well-Pleasing Hadit, Anthropos Pentachrist, summum malum, l’homme invisible, the Archaic One and Author of Disorder, the New Weishaupt and Lord of Genius, Earl of Rochester, Own Brother of Mephistopheles and Rider of the Clouds, Equal of Heaven and Doctor of the Church and Living Martyr, Mother of All Heresies and Fornications, Hinge of Fate and Pivot of Mystery et tutti quanti—even the Aντίχριστος—appearing as myself in this realistic rollicking tale of action and intrigue by Buckaroo Banzai’s publicist and resident saxophonist “Reno of Memphis”: a crab louse hack somehow smushed between the pages of pulp literature, de sua pecunia! Unworthy even to lick the master Henty’s boots! And how many pages before he refers to me predictably, pro domo, as the “exponentially dangerous Hanoi Xan”? Yet if through the present pages the minor reader receives some accidental instruction in the pseudo profundities of life, so be it . . . mehr Licht!

So you will pardon me, curious reader, if I, the so-called worst leaf on the family tree of man, must club a spy to death like a seal or slither under a rock with my pitchfork . . . heh, heh . . . although everyone knows the best place to hide these days is in a boys’ adventure book or anything penned by the Reno Kid. “If you read only one book in your life, let it be this one” . . . ha, ha, blah, blah . . . I’ll be lurking in your prejudiced backwardness, on the dusty road to your death. Of course! Ignore your head and trust your feelings, for in the words of my dear Baudelaire, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve your soul as water does sugar! Run, fool! Yet fain you would grow up and become as successful as I, recalling friend Oscar’s panegyric: “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

QED. Happy trails!

[Signet ring seal]

Hanoi Xan Anthropos Pentachrist Invictus

 

IN REPLY TO XAN

Now, if I may respond to the devil, I’ll not mince words (have I ever?): Xan Anthropos is not a man who turned to evil, but is the very embodiment of evil, a supernatural being older than any human has ever been and likely not human at all.

That into the bargain, dear reader! In sum, then: a religious oracle and miraculous analog to Christ in the minds of his followers, a sadist and savage to civilized people, he is everywhere and nowhere, his very existence doubted by many—giving credence to the magician’s adage that the larger the illusion, the more difficult it is to detect. I mean to say, and this is the paradox, that Xan defies description, even as descriptive accounts of the beast abound. Rather, Xan is a thing, an “it” existing in both the spiritistic sense and the spacetime realm. Like Satan in the mythoi of the Mosaic religions, he is the Destroyer archetype, of whom it is said in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “Behold I am Set, the creator of confusion and king of lies.”

Accordingly, we go around and around. Not for nothing is he called the Face That Is No Face and the Light Beyond Sight, a man who, despite his reputation, can walk unnoticed down any street and seem to blend into the woodwork, yet whose name is a household word. One day the truth will out, however, and even the empty soul Xan will pay for his crimes at the appointed hour. In the meantime his game of deception is regularly investigated and exposed by that unique force of nature and emblem of moral truth that is Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, but not by him alone, for it is a day-in, day-out effort by his namesake institute, along with us Hong Kong Cavaliers and Blue Blaze field volunteers from around the world.

Such is our reality, less glamorous than is generally supposed and far from the sensationalized version in the popular media. When not making beautiful music together, we have scaled peaks from the Himalayas and Alaska in the north to the Andes and Queen Maud Land in the south, hiding in the weeds of Aksai Chin, huddling through freezing nights on the Eigerjoch and the Schreckhorn while discussing every subject under the sun. But I do not write to advertise his wonders, for Buckaroo Banzai needs no panegyrist nor wants publicity from any quarter, least of all in order to put bread on the table. His legions of fans instinctively understand that he is elevated by an uncommonly high intelligence and moral character; yet he lives simply with a sense of uprightness and gratitude and loves nothing better than laughing at himself—values inculcated by his parents, who set him on the straight and narrow, teaching him how to live off the land by the sweat of his brow.

A tabloid profile has described him thus: “Of mixed race, close to the things of the earth, he is equally at home in the solitary desert among the native boys, cacti and coyotes, or with a throng of admirers in magical places only dreamt of in the movies. Known to smile, grunt and roar simultaneously, he is contrarily phlegmatic, tight-lipped and good-natured in the modest manner of the American cowboy or the honorable samurai of old . . . his kokutai uncorrupted by greed.”

Think also of the precocious John Stuart Mill or the younger Pitt, keeping in mind Hume’s adage: “Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” Add to that William James’s description of a man “who sees the strange as familiar and the familiar as strange,” and you begin to understand Banzai; but perhaps it is the Cincinnatus analogy that fits best: the farmer-philosopher as warrior and peacemaker, Buckaroo as the reluctant citizen-soldier who deputizes himself only as a last resort, saying in effect, “Trouble has come to our neighborhood, knocked on other people’s doors, and now is coming up our walk. Where are my six-guns?”

But be careful and wise, dear reader; I am talking neither about Hollywood nor a Whig notion of history that imagines forces of progress at work against backwardness in each generation and age. Show me the science behind such utopian prattle! Think, rather, along the lines of your favorite shōnen series, wherein rivals tend to be characters in transition, forced to fight by fate and reasons beyond their control yet still capable of recognizing one another’s humanity in the way that iron sharpens iron, in the way that fire makes poor steel brittle and tempers steel of the first rank. Like few others, Buckaroo is fire tested. In other words, if you fix Buckaroo Banzai as a man who cuts the world into two parts—white-hatted hero in opposition to a black-hearted villain—your radius of human experience is too narrow. Do not be dazzled by fantastical supermen, since the distance between good and evil, friend and foe, comedy and tragedy, is only a short arc of the pendulum.

Suffice it to say I will do my best to amuse with the present yarn; but, to fall back upon a weak metaphor, I must also till the field of history, fighting back with the mighty pen against all falsifiers. The kiss of light upon dark corners remains my goal, since it is the youth, our future leaders in chrysalis, who must carry civilization forward. To captivate the young reader and play such an instructive role—yet without undue embellishment—would give me great satisfaction as an author of juvenile books. To that end, I will, as the poet put it, “paint the cot, as Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not.” Perhaps I shall fail; on the other hand, who has ever succeeded?

Fortunately, as I am given to telling the truth, so the words tend to write themselves. Nevertheless, credit my account or not, reader, keeping in mind your schoolboy Herodotus: “It is my duty to report all that is said, but I am not obliged to believe it all alike.” In that spirit, if I write what may be closer to Homeric legend than history, let us batten down the hatches and hope for a happy outcome to this latest Buckaroo Banzai adventure!

Non sibi sed toti.

Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2021

I. THE IMMORTAL CHEVALIER

 

Greatest of men; he held the key to the deepest mysteries . . .
Behold, what a full tide of misfortune swept over his head.
—Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Hours after presenting a free concert from our hotel rooftop, Sir Buckaroo Banzai, MD, GBE—a voice of moral conscience without parallel in our age and ranked among the top ten minds of all time—attended a dinner in his honor at the Institut de France, where he engaged in a freewheeling colloquy with a roomful of reporters whose long-winded questions inevitably touched upon the human angle: “How did you feel, Buckaroo, already a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, when you heard you were to receive the Grande Médaille from the Académie des sciences, joining the immortal ranks of the great savants like Pasteur, Lavoisier, and Benoit Mandelbrot? . . . What are your feelings at this moment? . . . Where does this rank among your many palmarès, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Franklin Medal and the Gruber Prize for genetics? . . . How badly do you wish your wife Penny could be here? . . . Or your unfortunate parents? . . . Or the man who practically raised you, your colleague and mentor, Professor Hikita?”

It is worth noting here that Buckaroo is in many ways the most private of men and well known to regard such questions as tiresome and bordering on intrusive; yet it was hard to fault the reporters, since their audience doubtless would be keen to know the full gamut of the great man’s emotions with regard to the sensational events in recent history—although these feelings easily could be guessed. Indeed, the term “peaks and valleys” can hardly do justice to the emotional roller coaster ridden by a man who, in short order, saved the world from John Whorfin and Red Lectroid aliens and experienced the heartbreak of losing the two people dearest to him. I refer of course to the Jet Car crash in Bhutan that killed his new bride, Penny Priddy—a tragedy compounded by the subsequent disappearance of her body from the remote mountain site while Buckaroo himself lay in a coma for days, on the knife’s edge between life and death—and the mysterious death of his surrogate father, Professor Hikita.

Finding such personal questions anathema, Buckaroo naturally preferred to change the subject; and perhaps owing to the hallowed surroundings of the French Academy and fortuitous questions put to him concerning the present state of science in the world, he began to ruminate aloud extemporaneously (a long, digressive dialogue that I have edited into a monograph): “First of all, I want to express my very sincere appreciation and gratitude to the Academy, particularly for the wonderful Festschrift given to me in memory of Professor Hikita, my intellectual mentor and sparring partner.”

Clearing his throat to remove a lump, he forced a smile and said, “Fellow scientists, distinguished academicians, waiters and food preparers, journalists, and various recognizable members of the World Crime League . . .”

Amid titters of nervous laughter, he pressed on, saying, “All my life, even from an early age, I always had the feeling that I was two people: an exile living in the ‘here and now’ and a stranger watching myself from another perspective, an inhabitant of another dimension no less real. For some years, thinking this an aberration of my mind alone, I immersed myself in the study of abnormal psychology, yet without finding the answers I sought; and gradually it dawned on me that, rather than attribute the phenomenon to my imagination, I would do well to investigate the actual existence of other dimensions: another way of saying the universal secret of all time, a unified theory encompassing all scientific knowledge. Little did I envision how controversial this field of inquiry would prove to be.

“Around the same time I was reading a lot of science fiction in those halcyon days of youth, and I could not help being struck by the dystopian view of scientific research as inherently dangerous—a byproduct of the post–World War II atomic age. The message in a real sense seemed to be that any semblance of faith in scientific progress as a power for good is overshadowed by the threat it poses to humanity’s soul or even our very existence. Since human curiosity inevitably leads to investigation, which may in turn lead to dangerous knowledge and eventually a doomsday scenario—so the argument goes—scientific research must be closely monitored, even curtailed; therefore it follows that human freedom itself must be closely monitored, even curtailed.”

With few listening to what had turned into a somewhat esoteric and tendentious discourse, there was a clamor for him to sing something instead. These requests he deflected gracefully, albeit hinting that he might change his mind and joking that once he started singing, people usually had to pull him away from the microphone. Watching him so charm the room, I could not help but be reminded of Freud’s phrase—”the light-suffused face of the young Persian god”—when a reporter brusquely buttonholed me to ask the following: “Why do you Hong Kong Cavaliers give yourselves permission to police the world? Explain to me again, Reno—why is it always your job to save the planet?”

As Buckaroo’s amanuensis and unofficial spokesman for our group, I had heard the question so many times that it struck a sore spot with me, and I answered as I always do: “It’s a valid concern and one I frequently bring up with world leaders, who, after all, grant us diplomatic immunity to do our work, so perhaps you should direct the question to them. And perhaps we should all put our heads together and come up with a better system to stop imminent threats; but if the world is in a very dark place at the moment or your neighbor is spewing trash onto your property, we can’t just sit back, particularly if we are the last resort. Rolling over and doing nothing is not in our DNA.”

“No worries,” he said, his mood changing rather dramatically from coolly professional to warm and intimate. “I loved your surprise show last night at the Olympia, especially the new single, ‘Time Bomb Ticking.’ Any chance we’ll see you in Chittagong this next leg of the tour? Or at least get the T-shirt concession?”

“I’ll put you in touch with Mrs. Johnson, head of our international fan club. She’s here in town, having a listening party tomorrow night, and knows where all the bodies are buried,” I said, and we exchanged contact information.

In return for the small gesture, the Chittagonian could not have been more effusive in his gratitude: “Thank whatever god in heaven for people like you, Reno! You, Tommy . . . Pecos . . . Buckaroo . . . the whole band and all your extended family.”

“Family owned and operated. The quality goes in before the name goes on,” I said, recalling an obsolete advertising slogan and turning my attention back to Buckaroo, who was still holding forth extemporaneously.

“But the world requires more than better science—it requires better people. Speaking more than seventy-five years ago, Carl Jung said, ‘Our technical skill has grown to be so dangerous that the most urgent question today is not what more can be done in this line, but how the man who is entrusted with the control of this skill should be constituted.’ I needn’t remind you how I used to be laughed at when I was the first to warn the world that spying eyes could be watching you through your TV set . . .”

Amid rueful chuckles he said, “Who’s laughing now? It was largely in recognition of this problem that I established the Banzai Institute, a place where scientists may develop not as inhuman cogs in the R&D machine, intent on dominating the natural world, but as intrepid adventurers seeking to gain insight into our broader nature as human beings in the grand scheme of the universe . . . or, to paraphrase Vladimir Lenin in a different light, to live with our hearts on fire and our brains on ice . . . but with humility and compassion for all.”

Our little band had blown through Paris, at least in part, to investigate a tip that Henry Shannon had set up shop in the city’s environs; and as I listened to Buckaroo’s keen insights from the back of the room, my eyes were ever watchful for physical threats. At the same time, I could not help noticing a certain ennui among many of the reporters, who seemed to prefer rolling their eyes or staring at their handheld devices to the act of listening to the noblest, most honorable man in the world. Of course their behavior was not surprising to me—it is after all the self-absorbed culture in which we live—and I confess to being distracted myself in the meantime by a certain well-known TV network personality and host of her own fashion and reality show. I am speaking, naturally, of Desdemona “Mona” Peeptoe, who sauntered up to me in her signature fetish stiletto pumps and shoulder pads.

“Way to go, Buckaroo. Get on your soapbox, tell off these elitist media types for their spoon-fed pap,” she urged, standing as always in her on-air pose, pushing her pelvis and one provocative foot slightly forward like the perennial talent show contestant she once was.

“How are you, Reno?” she began with an air kiss and a condescending tone and, after a round of awkward pleasantries that skipped over our tumultuous personal history together, started to press me in her best interview style: “And how are things at the Institute? Still sleeping in the bunkhouse, sixteen deep?”

“It’s a living,” I said, biting my lip so as not to return her incivility. “We believe in equality and family values, humility foremost among them.”

“I’m unbelievably impressed. Congratulations on your humility, Reno,” she jested . . . 

. . . as we were interrupted by Parisian friends of mine: a brilliant thinker and commander of the Legion of Honor, who, along with her celebrated novelist husband, peppered me with French cheek kisses in passing, prompting Mona to roll her eyes in pique.

“One of Buckaroo’s old flames,” I informed her by way of smoothing her feathers. “Blue Blazes Julia Joy and her husband June Bug. We met at the Institute years ago.”

“Never heard of them,” she replied while making it clear she was no longer listening to me, but to Buckaroo, who in response to overwhelming popular demand had begun to croon one of our group’s best-loved ballads . . . “I Need an Answer” . . . a tune so steeped in heartache, love, and loss that it ironically seemed to attain curative powers, allowing me to drape my arm around her.

“Getting a little misty in here,” Mona announced, dabbing at something in her eye. “What a sad thing. And what a terrible sense of survivor’s guilt he must feel. Her body could be anywhere by now . . . even in Hanoi Xan’s backyard toolshed.”

“Don’t, Mona, not today on this happy occasion,” I pleaded. “Don’t even mention that unholy animal . . .”

“And of course you’ve heard the worst,” she continued, “that Penny may have been a shady lady, a spy for Xan all along. Of course I hope the truth is not so ugly.”

“I’ll pass on your sensitive tip,” I told her with only a trace of sarcasm—not that she seemed to give a whit for my opinion.

“I’m just saying Buckaroo looks tired, sounds hoarse, doesn’t seem to radiate the old puissance,” she said. “His skin looks bad, his bed hair kind of oily . . . or maybe it’s just his horrible baby-shit-green suit in homage to les académiciens . . . but then the tacky silver boots and awful tangerine bolo tie . . . he almost looks incognito!”

“It’s my bolo,” I informed her. “I bought it just this morning when I went out pigeon hunting in the Bois.”

“Always covering for the boss,” she said with another roll of the eyes. “Even so, Buckaroo still needs to talk to a fashion person. He looks ill put together.”

“You might look ill put together, too,” I said without hesitation, “if you’d just gotten back from the Fifth Dimension and spent three sleepless days performing brain surgeries in a hyperbaric decompression suit.”

“The Fifth . . . ? I thought he went to the Eighth.”

“He’s been to both, plus a couple of others.”

“No wonder,” she said flippantly. “Probably wore himself out, to say the least . . . I heard him say interdimensional travel is like making love, times a hundred, but then there’s the dark side, the dark sectors as well. I just hope he didn’t get his cavities probed like some of those UFO people.”

“Jealous?” I said.

“Funny,” she replied, meaning the opposite. “And funny you should say that. I have to tell you I’m hearing rumors that Buckaroo is not just tired, but a little off these days.”

“Off? As in . . . ?”

“As in exponentially out of control with more than a few loose screws, a broken shell of a man on a morphine pump . . .”

“Let’s not exaggerate. The screws are in his skull and a fractured pelvis, plus six broken ribs,” I told her irritably and apparently without effect.

“I’ve even heard the neurologists are telling him not to operate a motor vehicle, much less the Jet Car, because of the concussion and possible cosmic-ray damage to his brain,” she said . . . another statement I refused to dignify with a response, mainly because I had some idea of what she was talking about.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, Mona,” I said, shaking my head. “You make it sound like he sits home all day, trembling in his house slippers . . .”

“What my sources are telling me,” she insisted—then, seeing me less than pleased with her line of questioning, moderated her tone: “Perfectly understandable after the Jet Car crash and his brain concussion, not to mention the emotional toll. His heart must be aching, pushed to the brink of madness by such a thing . . . after saving the world from space aliens, only to lose the woman, the young bride, he loved above all else . . . ! Like I said, I can’t even get my head around his loss.”

“He’s lost a lot,” I agreed. “But they can’t take away his fight against injustice. He consoles himself with work—”

She continued: “And on their honeymoon, with him at the controls. My God, how horrible. He would have given her the world wrapped in a bow, and now . . . look at him, successful in everything and yet all alone and hurting. And then Hikita, his surrogate father, committing ritual suicide. Does anyone really believe that? Who commits hara-kiri in a wheelchair, wearing Birkenstocks?”

I could only reply, “We all wish it could have turned out different.”

“So does Hikita,” she scoffed. “The whole world knows Xan had the professor done in, and so does Buckaroo. That’s why I’m not one to badmouth the poor guy’s fashion sense or kick him while he’s down . . .”

“Of course not,” I said, biting my tongue. “I know you too well.”

These words were a nod to our history together, but she proceeded as if she hadn’t heard: “. . . the genius domus of his eponymous Institute and best-selling author of Les pensées de Buckaroo Banzai . . . a man who, as they say, was born in a manger on the Fourth of July, rewrote Newton’s second law, and is now about to receive the Grande Médaille from the illustrious French Academy, not to mention guest conducting the Orchestre de Paris tomorrow night. And what about this scuttlebutt I’m hearing that President Monroe intends to appoint him American ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s . . . ?”

“Exactly that . . . scuttlebutt you can scuttle,” I answered her. “I can promise you that Buckaroo hasn’t the time or the inclination to sit and sip tea with diplomats, when he can accomplish so much more on his own . . . and with higher forms of life.”

Now she couldn’t resist a dig at him: “Oh, pardon us, ‘immortal one,’ too wise and all important to show us lesser mortals the way . . . !”

I interrupted to say, “Nice try, Mona, but nonsense . . . that’s not Buckaroo. He has never claimed to be a guru who can show anyone ‘the way,’ even if he wanted to. The idea is laughable at best. Even I know there is no ‘way’ to happiness. Happiness is the way . . .”

“Happiness,” she sighed, giving me a look of longing mixed with outright disgust. “My dear Reno, ever the homespun philosopher . . . and the best worst mistake I ever made. It kills me to my soul the way we left things between us.”

On hearing those words, I experienced a future memory of the two of us walking along the river, pausing to kiss in view of Haussmann’s façades and a watchful gargoyle or two. But of course this would not happen during this trip, if at all.

“Your high platform-wedge heels grinding me underfoot” was all I said.

“Like my stilettos. And you loving every minute, pouring your heart out!” She laughed and suggested I take her to the Jockey Club later that evening for martinis and some meaningful conversation, provided I could wangle her an interview with Buckaroo.

When I told her I would not be a go-between, she replied, “Very well, since you look sober and bathed, I’ll go with you anyway.”

A glance at my watch dispelled even that plan, however, obliging me to say, “Next time, Mona. I’m afraid the airport cocktail bar will have to do.”

“Oh,” she pouted. “Not even a macaron from Carette in the place du Trocadéro?”

“Something’s come up,” I explained. “I have to leave for Fukushima tonight on a special mission.”

“Zut alors. How convenient, and mysterious.”

“Tsunami science is that, indeed.”

“Last Year at Fukushima . . . the movie of our lives,” she sighed with exaggerated disappointment. “Then at least tell me something I don’t know already. For my millions of viewers, care to give us your most amazing Buckaroo factoid?”

“He has a birthmark in the shape of a guitar,” I answered without hesitation.

“His true-blue Mongolian spot? That’s old news. Everyone knows that,” she retorted. “Is this how you treat me, Reno? Your sweet, forgiving Mona . . .”

“Okay. Rumor has it he’s got two left feet,” I suggested.

“Seriously, Reno? Do I look brain dead to you?”

“If you don’t believe me, ask why you’ve never seen him dance,” I said. “Ever see him do a two-step, much less a suicide death drop like me?”

She cocked an eyebrow and cleared her throat, then resumed, “I thought it was because even after two years he must be slowly dying inside, though I guess he’ll keep marching on in search of Penny because that’s what he does. Where is our friend Xan, by the way?”

“Follow the flies,” I said with a shrug.

“In fact, I have it on good authority several of Hanoi Xan’s top lieutenants have been spotted in town lately, which would explain why you added a Paris tour stop at the last moment.”

I held my tongue, saying only, “The tour’s going great guns. Totally sold out the first leg in Scandinavia and the Baltics, cut a rollicking track for the new album with the Swedish Radio Orchestra . . . got detoured to the Gulf states, where we saved a local musician from the gallows.”

“Funny business, show. Oh my word . . . !” she cried out, causing me to whirl and look.

 

AN ATTACK FROM AN UNLIKELY FRENCH QUARTER

Distracted by this exchange, I may have neglected to mention that some unbridled French journalist, doubtless smelling fresh blood, had just interrupted Buckaroo about the monster Hanoi Xan, whereupon Buckaroo, to his credit, tried to reply in a civil way; but, alas, the feeding frenzy had already begun. More impertinent questions followed until, suddenly and in the space of an instant, a member of the Academy—Jean Lafitte, the noted Belgian experimental physicist—shoved his way through the crowd of reporters, waving the ceremonial sword bestowed upon all Immortals and screaming with a maniacal hatred in his eyes, “Pour Shang-Ti et la martyre! Naître, mourir, renaître encore . . . !”

At least that was the way my ears heard it . . . as Buckaroo deftly sidestepped the white-haired octogenarian’s épée thrust and Perfect Tommy did the rest, materializing seemingly out of thin air to disarm the old fool and drag him across the worn carpeting to a security official.

“Lafayette, we are here!” he shouted.

“Wow . . . Perfect Tommy . . . how’d he pull that off? Reno, why didn’t you tell me Tommy was here with you and Buckaroo?” Mona said accusingly.

“Jamais deux sans trois, tout de phawking suite,” I explained . . . as Tommy reappeared a moment later with a partial cigarette, drinking Coke from someone’s tossed bottle and moving his body in the slinky way a cat stalks, all without breaking a sweat.

“No matter where you go, there’s always a nut on the loose. That shitbird was jabbering about Blue Snow Cone and wanting to die, drunk as a skunk, and carrying a bag of weed,” he calmly informed us.

“It can only be for that reason no one was hurt,” Mona said.

“Almost a riot situation,” Tommy agreed.

“And credit your quick thinking, Tommy,” she added. “Nice work . . . although a sword fight would’ve been a bonus, or a shooting. Too bad . . . the Wild West angle. Or was it all part of the show? What the hell is Blue Snow Cone . . . ?”

Tommy and I traded looks; but where I hesitated, Tommy jumped in, blabbing to Mona like an excitable schoolboy. “Only the biggest blackmail plot in the history of Mother Earth, which Hanoi Xan threatened to turn into a ‘blue snow cone’ by sabotaging the hadron collider at CERN. It’s a long-ass story, but the idea was to cause an experimental mini black hole to release giant clouds of cold atom matter that could freeze Switzerland and the heart of Europe and perhaps even the entire planet. Jean Lafitte probably had a hand in it, but Buckaroo foiled their little game, so now they want his hide more than ever . . .”

“The World Crime League, you mean?” asked Mona.

Tommy nodded. “Along with his brain, his Jet Car, his oscillation overthruster, you name it. Last I heard, the reward on his head was ten million dollars, to be paid in this life or the next.”

“Just the icing on the cupcake I needed,” Mona said excitedly, already moving away. “Excuse me, Reno and Tommy, nice talking to you . . . but I have a deadline, gotta run. Always a pleasure. Keep your nose clean, Reno dearie. Je t’embrasse! Ta-ta . . .”

I watched her sashay away and muttered, “Tommy, you heroic jackass. You just spilled the butter beans.”

“Following your lead, old man. C’est comme ça,” he replied with a shrug.

Meanwhile, throughout the entire episode, Buckaroo scarcely interrupted his remarks to an audience that was by now paying rapt attention.

 

MORE WORTHY THOUGHTS

“I’m afraid that what has happened is that our well-founded fear of the atom has jaundiced not only our view of science, but our view of humanity as well,” he was saying, “and the dystopian, apocalyptic message so common in modern science fiction ignores that powerful capacity for good inside us and teaches instead that humanity is the great antagonist on the planet—Man as machine and insatiable destroyer of Nature—who must be rescued for our own good from science and therefore from ourselves, who can’t be trusted.”

“Spoken like a true greedy American,” griped a Frenchman in the crowd . . . 

. . . whom Buckaroo overheard and answered with a grin, “Yes, and you may thank the nonprofit Banzai Institute, not only for its consulting services, but for your mobile Go-Phone and several hundred other technical and pharmaceutical patents that finance our good works in ninety-three countries around the world. ...