Original subtitles

I think you're just pooping and

snooping. Just pooping and snooping, Mr. Looper. Mr. Looper.

With a pair of first class. Quality class binoculars.

Made in Germany. Made in Germany.

Good morning, Mr. Luper. Good morning, Mr. Luper.

Luper. Luper. Luper. Mr. Luper. Open your mouth.

I am the station dentist.

Open your mouth. The dentist de la gare. Open your mouth.

When I blow the whistle, you must run and climb the barrier.

Imagine it's a garden wall.

There is treasure on the other side.

Are you ready?

Watch for the dog.

Hip, hip, hip, hooray, the sun has got its hat on, and it's coming out today.

Can you truly, Mr. Luper, can you truly, Mr. Luper, put a book that says, put a

book that says you truly, Mr. Luper, put a book that says man evolved from the

eggs in a little hot sheep's suitcase along with the Holy Bible?

Good morning, Mr. Luper. I am the station master. Good morning, Mr. Luper.

I am the station master. Good morning, Mr. Luper.

I am the station master. Good morning.

I am the station. Good morning, Mr. Looper.

I am the station master.

Good morning, Mr. Looper. I am the station master. Good morning, Mr.

Looper. I am the station master.

Teddy?

Teddy?

If we wanted to see the Tulsa-Luca story as fiction, it could be told as an

episodic narrative of a man and his prison.

The story starts in 1921 when Looper was 10, and perhaps it is still not

finished. Looper was last seen and heard of, we believe, in 1989.

If he were to be alive now, he would be 92.

Get a pair of knickers off the line.

Take them to Parkingdale. It's even hard to do.

Don't touch me, Mrs. Warwick.

I'm Florence. Nice and girl. Picking flowers for the dead.

They're not poppies, Missy Bridgestone.

The corn blowers.

It's to remember them. It's to remember them. We will remember them. We will

remember them. In the evening.

In the evening.

When the sun goes down. When the sun goes down.

When the sun sets.

In the west.

We will remember them.

Always. They were trotting, Mrs. Warren. A trotting.

Taking back home. To England.

Count Luther said, so there won't be another war ever, ever again.

Let's go to Dippy's farm.

Let's leave him for the Red Cross.

He'll be along shortly.

We can't leave him. He'll get captured and taken to Berlin. They'll make him

eat black forsythia. And he'll get fat still.

How do you know about black forsythia? See my father, he's going to get it.

Leave me, Charles.

I want to be dead.

Whatever for?

I want to be a martyr.

Only a grown-up cat needs to be a martyr.

It's martyr.

So you can't leave it to Jewish.

Leave it to Welsh.

You're Jewish, David, but you've lost a piece of your willy. Pass the Red Cross

to find it. They'll be along shortly.

I'm Welsh!

Shut up, David. Who could be Welsh-Jewish?

Can't he tell?

We're nearly there.

I'm Dover! I'm Dover!

Hop stand!

Hop star!

And the Brandenburg Gate.

And the Badenburg Cake.

I'm going to sign your name.

Every episode recorded in Looper's life history is associated with a prison.

And perhaps the first significant imprisonment Looper would have

remembered happened on a Sunday afternoon in August 1921 in Tulse

Looper's birthplace, Newport, on the River Usk in South Wales.

The events leading up to that imprisonment started when Looper and his

close friend, Martino Nocivelli, ran the gauntlet of the back gardens to write

their names on a red brick wall at the end of their street. You shouldn't have

such a long name, Toss.

You'll be pricking so across before you're finished.

You've got to do it properly, or all the world will see.

And now I'm going to make the return run.

Tossie! Tossie!

Watch out or you'll get us caught, Marshall. Ready, steady, go. Cut low.

I'm in.

Pull.

That bloody boy's in the bloody war again.

Come away from the window, either.

Showing all he's got to Mrs Warren.

She's athletic, she'll likely choke.

It's a bloody garden wall.

It's a bloody garden wall. It's a bloody garden wall. It's a bloody garden wall.

It's a bloody garden wall. It's a bloody garden

wall.

You know, I'm pretty dumb. I don't agree with you either, but let me put him up

again. And forget about the bloody war, child.

It's bloody over.

I want to bloody forget it.

We all want to bloody forget it.

Misery, longing, sacrifice, grief, and

evil.

I'll dump out the evil.

Dump out the evil.

Never let it happen again.

Dump out the evil. Gone and bloody forgotten. Dump out the evil.

Bloody glory.

Dump out the evil. Bloody Sunday.

Dump out the evil. Bloody afternoon.

Dump out the evil. Dump out the evil.

Bloody afternoon.

As an adult, Tuls Looper was to become almost by default a writer.

Maybe he was always to see himself primarily as a naturalist. He was

trained as an archaeologist.

Perhaps it is important that he is primarily seen as a collector.

He said of himself that he was a kind of clerk.

He reserved a special admiration for collectors, dictionary makers,

encyclopedists, and those who tried very hard to put all the things of the world

in one place.

under one system.

He enjoyed making lists.

He collected and collated and classified names, images, events, experiences,

characters, people, prisons, suitcases, lumps of coal.

We could say that there were 92 lumps of Welsh black gold in Lupo's first bag

suitcase. Each lump of coal, representing by its silhouette, surface,

or texture, a hill or mountain, to be experienced later in Lupo's life.

What are you doing in there, Kelty?

Go away, bloody busy.

Lupo was not a mountaineer, and we probably exaggerate the mountain aspect.

Let us just say...

that each lump of coal, substance of his father's earnings, his parental

community, his childhood mythology, was a symbolic landscape he was later to

find as a traveler somewhere in the world.

His collection of landscapes start with the hills he climbed when he was a boy

along the River Usk, and they progress in his first trip abroad to the desert

mesas of Moab, Utah, U.S. of A.

You weigh a bloody ton, Fatty Arbuckle.

I brought my sweetheart.

Find me Tiger Lily.

Mine's got no clothes on.

Only because he's going for a swim.

Too cold to swim in Denmark.

You live so far away, you'll never meet her.

Tiger Lily is the daughter of a magician.

She wears shoes on stealth. She smiles a lot. That's because she's Chinese and

inscrutable. The reason mine doesn't wear a bathing suit is because she's

half fish.

She looks like your mother.

I quite like your mother.

She's got big breasts.

What are you going to be later on, Loopy, if you grow up?

Not a coal miner.

Not a soldier.

I'll go abroad.

I'll stay at home and eat ice creams.

And watch you do things from a distance.

You can send me postcards.

I want to find things.

What sort of things?

Things people have lost.

Like what?

Suitcases. You want to work in a lost property office? Lost cities.

People. Men. Women.

Women.

I want to kiss lots of girls. So do I.

So do I. Plump girls who eat lots of ice cream.

You'll end up in jail.

Like this one.

Is this a jail?

I expect there'll be lots of jails.

Do you like being a prisoner, then?

My father's a prisoner. No, he's not.

The things he remembers.

The bad things.

You mean the gas?

And being in love?

With your mother?

Is that being a prisoner?

Sort of.

What sort of chin have you got, Luppy?

Average.

What sort of eyes have you got, Luppy?

Pretty hell, Marty.

The normal sort.

I need to get it right.

I need to remember.

I'll make sure you grow broad and kiss lots of girls.

Like your mother.

And as a course, you don't have to kiss, but I might kiss you.

Who are you bloody talking to in there, Tuckery?

And find things, of course.

And be a prisoner.

If you really want to.

Thank you, Marty.

No problem.

Think nothing of it.

I owe it to you.

Consider him.

If you're talking to yourself, that's the first sign of trench fever.

Bloody Nockevelly.

The eye dyes a fair weather allies.

The eye dyes a fair weather allies. Get out, Martino.

Get out, Pat.

Tell him. He's in solitary.

He's in solitary.

And you boys can both forget the bloody war.

It's bloody over.

I want to bloody forget it. We all want to bloody forget it.

Gone and bloody forgotten.

On a bloody glorious, bloody Sunday, bloody afternoon.

Go on.

Get out of here.

I'm in prison.

And I'm bloody busy.

I'm in prison.

And I'm bloody busy.

What's friendship for, Martino?

You wanted to share the punishment?

You feeling guilty too, Martino Nocabelli?

Okay.

Just eat the ice cream.

Go on, lick it.

What are we supposed to be doing?

Is this character building?

No, it's nothing.

Lick, lick, lick.

Come on, lick, damn it. Stick your little tongues out and lick the stuff

off, you assholes.

Hey, what's your language?

Is this provocation so necessary?

No! Your cock is creak. Who are you calling a creep, jerk?

Shut up!

Rip the stuff up. Stick the cone on your prick.

Tulse Looper, with his friend and associate Martina Nockevelli, went to

Utah to look for lost Mormon cities in the deserts around Salt Lake City.

Looper was fascinated by the newest and most successful religion of the West and

how the Mormon settlers had grafted new mythologies onto the old.

His experiences in the Moab Desert influenced his concerns for landscape

exploitation. He began to consider two projects.

The first had the very simple idea of recording verticals in a landscape in a

way that showed the grid systems they suggested and demonstrated the

intervention of man on the natural environment.

He called the project Vertical Features.

The photographic and filmic evidence he collected and edited back in Europe on

the project was damaged or lost in the 1950s, only to be remade in the 1970s by

admirers as a contentiously argued set of films called Vertical Features Remake

The second project influenced by Looper's stay in Moab concerned a fake

anthropological fiction, a saga that documented the gradual invasion of a

section of peaceful riverside landscape by ferocious predatory colonists.

Perhaps Looper saw his friend Nakaveli as the natural inhabitant

of peaceful water, some sort of...

indigenous minor river deity.

And the threat of the predatory bacillus to his person could be compared to the

aggression of a conquering army of dangerous enemies on a peaceful

community. The substance of the film, later made from Looper's research in the

1960s, called Water Rackets. It's quite unselected about which body you're

supposed to choose from.

Machiavelli, indeed, on his own admission, is supposed to have bathed in

a Moab desert stream and contacted a form of permanent history.

though it's difficult to find any such stream whatsoever in the Moab Desert,

and the effects of the dysentery were often auspiciously timed to offer an

excuse for Nocabelli's sudden absence in situations that he found inconvenient,

unsympathetic, embarrassing, or simply hostile.

The year of Looper's visit to the Moab Desert was 1934, and maybe both

projects, Vertical Features and Water Rackets, suggested a presage of what was

to come in Europe, and also of what was to come in Looper's own life.

The day that this 16mm footage was filmed was to be a Looper day of

reckoning.

Looper prized a collection of love letters written by his father to his

mother from the battlefields of Flanders in the First World War.

These letters soon became a collective item. They changed hands at ever

-increasing prices.

The first sale was made illicitly in Oslo.

What's your name?

What's your name? Mr. Peeper. Mr.

Peeper. Peeper.

Toth Looper.

Where are you from, Mr. Toth Henry Purcell Looper?

Where are you from, Mr. Toth Henry Purcell Looper?

England. England?

England?

So, Mr.

Toth Purcell Looper, you don't wear makeup, do you?

What the hell are you doing so far, far, far from home? What the hell are you

doing so far, far, far from home in our happy community?

God-fearing, God-loving, God-happy community.

This is the Hockmeister Ranch House in the desert outside Moab in the summer of

2002. It was here in May 1934, some 60 years earlier, that Looper began his

series of adventures with the Hockmeister family.

Much of what we know about Lupus' adventures in Moab comes from Martino

Nocavelli. And Martino's idea of the desert, any desert, was literary.

It started with Egypt, and therefore meant pyramids, palm trees, and the

fringes of the Sahara.

And he had certainly seen pictures of Mexico, and dreamed of Spanish-style

haciendas, surrounded by flowering cactus and olive trees.

Martino pieced together his accumulated desert knowledge and came up with a

mixture of Luxor and Mexico, influenced by reproductions of the

characteristically over-colored Maxfield parish calendar illustrations on his

grandmother's bathroom wall.

Don't you have women of your own at home?

Well, there are some, it's true.

So what would you be looking at here on private property?

I could have a friend who tries to keep himself very clean, and I could be doing

some research about the bathing habits of the indigenous peoples of Utah.

Leupold, therefore, walked out of the desert, leading his white horse down a

dry gulch, fringed by date bombs.

Not exactly a Salt Lake City image, but so what?

Joseph Smith himself could have been happy with such accumulated imagery.

It was, after all, not so very far from the melange of biblical dreams that he

had invented for his newly minted religion.

You wouldn't be looking for a child bride, would you?

Apple tit, hidey plant, a dimple pink fanny for a private bedroom spanking.

Shut up, you dirty mouth.

Why's that, Delky?

Can't you remember those hurdy-gurdy Nicolette days? Oh, my God, he is

larking up for a showdown.

Tell him, Julian, tell him to douse his head, preferably in broken glass.

Naughty, naughty, naughty.

I'd be looking for lost cities.

We haven't lost any. How come you want to find what we haven't lost?

You see, I think you're just pooping and snooping. With a pair of first-class

quality glass binoculars.

Made in Germany. I bought a map in Salt Lake City, which marks out several lost

Mormon outpost towns between Moab and Salt Lake.

God-awful places.

Hostile Indians.

No water.

Scorpions.

Metallic rocks.

Hot as hell.

They were, after several years, abandoned.

You a claim jumper?

Hell, he's just a peeping Tom snake, wanting to exercise his prick, looking

at other men's women washing their pretty bodies.

You're from England, yes?

You got trouble brewing there in England.

I'd like to know, you see, because our people are from Germany.

And I think your people and my people aren't seeing eye to eye at the moment.

Isn't that true?

Could be. I think it sure is true.

If you should have real trouble, would England win, Mr. Loopy?

Well, it'd be one last time. We could do it again. You think so?

And what would your position be, Mr. Loopy?

I'd fight.

You would.

Why is that?

Why?

To stamp out evil, of course.

Stamp out evil.

Stamp out.

That sounds aggressive, Mr. Roper.

As a God-fearing community, I'm sure you would understand very easily what I

mean.

I doubt you'd fight.

I doubt you'd fight at all.

See you, uh...

You look and sound really, really, really green to me, Mr.

Tulsi Looper.

So green, I don't know why you're exercising your prick time looking at

women washing themselves in private in our beautiful American Mormon desert of

Salt Lake City, Utah, America, USA,

the universe.

You know what?

I doubt you even have a prick to exercise.

Let's take a look.

For God's sake, Percy.

I told you, do it.

We're having our breakfast.

Jesus Christ, Percy.

Don't you worry that there are here ladies present. This seems plenty.

We're all here, I got the necessary. How could you possibly interest us?

You got one, Mr. Luther?

An English prick, isn't that sweet?

We could make it sweeter.

A nice, sticky deck for the flies,

the bees, the bugs, the ticks, and the mosquitoes of the American

Colorado desert, Utah, USA.

At the Ventimiglia railway station on the French-Italian border, 23rd of

August 1941, an incident occurred that was scarcely reported but of

significance in a bizarre statistical event.

The station was an important border crossing for international political

activity and the clandestine illegal movement of refugees and deserters.

Amidst the busy activity between the Rome-bound 1515 Express and the Venice

-bound 1537 slow train, a young man and a young woman, both without passports,

were arrested.

They were told to strip.

There were gunshots.

The body of the young woman was abused.

The clothing of the lover was later collected in two matching suitcases.

Can it be entirely coincidental?

that 17 people who witnessed the shooting died violently within three

months of the event, an incident totally unassociated with the station execution.

Well, Mr. English Looper.

How do you like American?

Enough.

How do you like German-Americans?

I haven't met too many.

They would have to open their mouths for me to recognize them by their accent.

Well, you seem to like German-American women.

When you said you were looking for ghost towns, were you telling the truth?

You weren't looking for anything else, were you, Mr. Looper?

You said you were interested in Sodom and Gomorrah.

That wouldn't be a coded interest in Finn, would it, Mr. Looper?

You know, women, luxury, greed,

minerals, gold. You weren't interested in gold or anything

like that, were you, Mr. Looper?

In these hills.

this desert.

No.

Have you heard, Mr. Looper,

of the uranium?

Yes.

You weren't looking for uranium, were you, Mr. Looper?

Were you?

Mr. the looper.

Around here.

Around Moab.

Uranium.

Atomic number 92.

Unobtainable in pure form, but a geologist knows where to look.

Symbol the big U.

U for useful.

Utah, United States of America, and

utopia.

Uranium smells nicely dirty, like

semen. Tastes nicely greasy, like blood.

Powerful metaphors, eh?

Have you seen any?

Smelled any?

Tasted any?

If you were to be interested, I could patronize you. I could patronize you.

I'm the way to subsidize your searching. I'm the way to subsidize your searching.

We could buy you a decent hat.

Feed you up. We could buy you a decent hat.

I'd like to see a decent belly on the man.

You know, like he's just three months pregnant.

Centers him.

Gives him gravity.

Sets off what could hang beneath.

How would you like that?

You're not a great talker, are you, Mr. Looper?

The sun is in my eyes.

The insects are biting. I am not a geologist, and my trousers are around my

ankles.

Yes, you're right.

We're bad hosts.

It's not a characteristic among Mormons.

kept you long enough from your important investigations into the ghost towns

of Mormon inheritance.

Feel free to go, Mr. Looper.

Feel free.

It's a long way and almost any direction from here.

I could give you a lift.

Suit yourself, but I don't think you're going to get anywhere special much

before it gets really black, dark night.

Heathstroke.

Many foreigners suffer from Heathstroke.

No hat.

They say there are animals still up there with bad teeth, bad breath,

and bad manners.

You can tread on some curly creature warming itself angry under the hot sun.

It can get cold at midnight.

Snowy cold, you know.

Shivery cold.

We're not wearing much.

As we all know this.

You've caused me more than enough trouble already.

You think so?

You smell kind of sugary.

What does it feel to have all that sticking between your legs?

You better not mark my father's car seat with your sweetness.

Father?

I'll leave you guessing.

You'd better sit on something.

How about your shirt?

Good morning, Miss Hartmeister.

Get out of the car, sir. We're arresting you for sexually consorting with a

minor. That is not true at all. What? That you are not sexually consorting or

that she is not a minor?

We have evidence.

Or are these yours, sir?

Then I presume this belongs to you, Batchanar Meister? Yes, indeed.

I think they may be mad.

Oh, mister, I would rather be walking on the moon than be in your shoes.

Perhaps he's already been walking on the moon, Tartar Stringley.

At the time of Hitler's visit to Rome in May 1938,

A postcard correspondence reconstructed in 1987 revealed the existence of a

Vatican archive of censored material in the cellars of the Victor Emmanuel

building. Three German officers in charge of security discovered a suitcase

of pornographic items over which, apparently, there was an argument in

which an Italian soldier was killed.

An inquiry was ordered, but the suitcase with its contents disappeared to be

rediscovered in the Victor Emmanuel building in the mid-1980s.

During the making of a film called The Belly of an Architect, whose original

scenario about architectural fascism had been written by Luper in 1945, at the

time of his imprisonment in Rome.

Perhaps Luper was, and could be still, a natural prisoner.

He once said so himself.

He suggested that there might be something in his makeup that always

predisposed him to be a prisoner.

But then he said, was that so unusual?

Luper got to know and recognize a great many people who were all prisoners of

one thing or another. Memory, time, nostalgia, place.

A relationship, an obsession,

money, sex.

He suggested that everyone has a jailer. It was not a boast or a criticism or a

compensatory remark by a man whose prison was for the most part very self

-evidently physical.

It was a given.

For Looper, it was so self-evident, it was hardly even a fact.

Facts become fixed because they are noted.

Being a prisoner is such an everyday state of affairs.

It's not even noted.

We're trespassing your fine one dollar.

Looper once said that if being a prisoner was the human condition, then

he had better get used to it.

Use it.

Make something of it.

Looper was interested in making being a prisoner an art.

And now for the serious charge.

What's that?

Warriorism.

Is that a special Mormon crime?

Could be.

It's like theft with the eyes heated up by sex.

And is your passport in order?

No bail.

No bail?

No bail.

Just think, where would you eat and sleep tonight?

It's okay.

We might live in the desert, but God gave us water.

We are always liberal with water.

Is there anything else in there?

A fish.

What sort of fish?

For tonight's supper.

No, they're not drowning, just taking a bath.

A white, smoky trout with scouse.

What's that?

Peas mash with... Red peppers, a little dewy cabbage, and a splinch of gut-rot

whiskey to make it tart.

Moth Fender had a way with fish, not so common 1,000 miles from the sea in a

riverless desert.

In her youth, Moth Fender had had a reputation as the insect woman, the

devout Mormon lady with the bugs.

She was no frightened victim of the seventh plague of Egypt.

Now she had a reputation to pit.

The Mormon elders came across the Atlantic in a submarine from Palestine.

Joseph Smith set them up in Kentucky.

Then eventually Brigham Young brought them west, leaving the sea far behind

them.

And they arrived at Salt Lake City.

Because the lake was so big and so salty, they believed they'd hit the sea

again.

It always wanted to remake Palestine in the Holy Land.

You know, a new Judea by the sea, U.S. of A.

They believed that they had the right sort of landscape here to do it in.

Sense of landscape is very important to Mormons.

So they built some handsome cities in the desert.

Most of them have vanished now.

For a long time ago.

Where did he get that from?

From my mother.

And her mother before her.

You know, none of us fenders and hollises have ever seen the sea.

What's it like?

You seen it?

If I had something to draw with, I could show you.

With Looper's arrival, Ma Fender came up with three ideas in one.

Certainly, learn about the world's water. That was a straightforward

desire.

Pleased a foreigner who looked like the angel Moroni, and who knows, pleased the

angel Moroni himself.

And delight in her long-lost, much-maligned prodigy, Ruby Hockmeister.

Ma Fender took a suitcase out from under her bed and made a grand presentation.

Looper was certainly up to the task of making a homage to Ma Fender's three

ideas all at the same time. They belonged to Ruby.

She was a drawer.

Never stopped.

Percy burnt all her drawings.

Seven-tenths of the Earth's surface is sea.

Nine-tenths of the human body is water.

We're all born in amniotic fluid.

To accompany our highest emotions when we laugh and we cry our eyes water

You would have thought the most intelligent animal on the planet ought

to be a fish There's a theory that apes learn to swim and since you don't need

body hair in water too much drag Early man came up out of the water a million

years later having lost its body hair Joseph Smith said much the same

The original baptism.

There was a time when Luper compared himself to the snail.

Snails are remarkably self-reliant.

Luper studied snails.

The snail is hermaphrodite, carrying its own house, its own suitcase, its own

prison. It was prepared to live anywhere, almost.

The environment has to be just a little damp.

Not too bright, not too much sunlight.

Snail-like moonlight.

Ideal prison condition.

Looper dreamt up a project where the snail was acknowledged as the catalyst

of the world, breaking down the world's unwanted material, making itself

responsible for cleaning up the planet. This material was later incorporated in

the 1980s in a film called A Zed and Two Morts.

But Looper also had to concede that the snail was the ultimate bourgeois.

Always living at home, but living at home anywhere.

Since he did not have a home for any great length of time, Looper's home and

shell were his suitcase.

Particulars, height.

Six foot.

Weight? Twelve and a half stone.

What are stones?

175 pounds. Give me your clothes. They need a wash in iron.

Hair color?

Fair.

Religion?

No religion.

Come on, I'll give you a second chance.

Religion?

No religion.

No religion? A heathen, pagan monkey man?

Not necessarily.

I once was a Methodist till I could see their method. And then I gave up.

What have you done to yourself?

We scared you?

Honey.

Honey? Do the English piss honey?

I've seen worse. When Tom and Joe went bare- Shut up, Ma.

Take them off.

I just won't ask why you waste the honey, honey on your John Thomas.

So, trespasser, womanizer, peeping Tom, scribbler, defacer of Moab, Joe,

property honey-pisser, and a pagan...

Heathen Monkey Man.

I'll see if I can find you a pair of towels. No, Heathen Monkey Man's wearing

my pants.

Your crimes, Looper, get worser and worser.

Stand up against the wall so we'll all be able to recognize you in hell because

unlike you, I'm a religious man.

But I like being evil too much to even want to go to heaven. And I want to

recognize you so I can whip you for having no religion and being a pagan

Heathen Monkey Man.

Give him a W for weekend prisoner, PT for peeping Tom, and

initials, TL.

As in, I have only one T.

Well, use V for voyeur.

What's that mean?

Someone who watches when he shouldn't.

Which is a good definition of a photographer.

And the number?

Add a few knots so it won't look as though we're underemployed.

That looks dangerous.

A real felony.

A bit much for a kid with such a baby face.

Pagans are dangerous. They push forward all manner of unwanted freedoms, free

thinking, free love, free politics, free milk.

Free milk?

And don't go taking advantage. Don't you go thinking you're so important. We've

had a real shooting gallery of hoodlums in here. Make mincemeat out of your

puny...

We're not so short of some real good sinners.

Too much foreigners is not comparable scene.

Why are you gripping that suitcase full like that?

What you got inside, it's full of holes.

Mrs. Fender says that you're interested in the lost gold of the Mormons, the

suitcase for the lost gold.

You'll lose it through those holes.

Do you believe in all that stuff?

Could do.

All right, Mr. Fender.

I want to see the man you arrested.

No way. We have orders from Mr. Percy.

I can deal with Mr.

Percy.

Can you deal with me?

my photograph taken too, Joe, Mr. Master Singer.

You can do that.

Now you are beginning to really look like young lovers.

Now you are beginning to really look like young lovers.

And I've photographed them all.

Special rate for loving couples.

You could, you could just in some case, call them marriage photos.

Guarantees of assault to show two people having taken the vows.

Though many don't work out so well.

I have photographed all.

Major,

sheriff,

counselor,

mistress, wife, proper wives, improper wives, secondary

wives, polygamists, bigamists, alopels,

adulterers, and their children. Many, many children.

Sick and well and dead. Not so pretty.

Middling pretty and so pretty they are. Unbelievable.

Little angels.

Take your sister along, Ruby.

Careful now, Joe.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

Beautiful. Careful, Joe.

That child, that child was accused of profanity. Impossible.

Impossible. I took so many photos of that child.

The lens became fixed with their image.

Now, I'd like to see those photos very smartly, Mr. Mastersinger.

And while we wait... Please, you're dead, Mr. Fender.

I guess it'll still be warm.

Why the hell did you do all this?

Isn't it obvious?

I wanted to get you safe somewhere where we wouldn't be deserved.

We're better than the sheriff's nest.

I'm falling in deeply. I have to explain.

It's okay.

There is no explanation.

And you don't have to get excited about screwing a child's bride because I was

18 last April.

April 1st? I'm an April Fool birthday girl.

Ha!

Now you know what this means.

It means my daddy was very, very patriotic. A truly patriotic man.

A true American making me a true American girl.

I was conceived on the 4th of July.

You still don't believe me, do you?

Don't fret yourself.

Mormon women are minors to outsiders till they say otherwise.

You English grow up slowly.

Mormons live in the present tense.

Joseph Smith was a present tense man.

You gotta live that way because...

Tomorrow's hell, which will be as boring as sitting in the hot desert with the

snakes and the drunken Indians.

You've got a mighty taste of that already.

And heaven, well, heaven's gonna be hell, too.

Sitting about at a man's world, sharing his unwashed needs with the otherwise.

Okay, now kiss my ass, Englishman.

Ah, now that's something you can't put into your suitcase.

I was washing.

That water supply runs on to Creeley. It is their drinking water.

I doubt it. It's full of stomach worms.

The Creeleys have drunk that water for 30 years. Their eldest is now 93.

As an ignorant alien... You have gone and pissed in their drink. I was

washing.

Oh, my, oh, my.

Out of the desert cometh the Savior, leading a white horse and extended with

honey. Is your name Moroni?

You ever been to Europe, Mrs. Fender? There's plenty of sea in Europe.

Are you planning to go there?

Okay, I could take a few hours off. Is it far?

We could take the Cameron Highway.

I must be back for supper. I've got a broth on a slow boil.

Get dressed.

I'll let you out the porch.

I'll lock Tommy and the John, but you've only got five minutes. He's learned how

to pick the lock. He's learned how to pick the lock.

Is this stupid?

What are you doing?

He'll be seen as hostage. Fender won't shoot.

Just even know where Europe is?

You're a geography snob.

She's my mother's cousin.

Mormon women have great sisterly love. It surpasses all male understanding.

And geography.

Martin, for God's sake, stop the truck. What are you doing?

Eloping with a foreigner.

Who's he?

Martino Nocovelli, son of an Italian ice cream seller.

Drive slowly.

I often get carsick. Don't worry, so does he. Move this thing faster. Martin,

for God's sake, stop the truck. What are you doing?

She'll be back before eight. She's got a brothel.

What the hell are you stopping for? They got my wife.

I can't meet them.

I have to snap at the petrol fire for six months.

Jesus, a break out of kidnapping and you're watching fires.

A fire is greater on the Richter's Gate than any old woman kidnapped.

Any old woman you watch at Tongue Master Singer or you'll be any old

photographer. Martin, for God's sake, start the truck. What are you doing?

Eloping with a foreigner.

Who's he?

Martino Nocovelli, son of an Italian ice cream.

Drive slowly. I often get carsick. Don't worry. Stop and see.

It's okay, sweetheart. This is fine. Stop the car. I can stop a truck back.

My mother's cousin lives on the corner. I could pick up some Wurzels and corn

jollet for Tommy's breakfast.

You and yours were a jolt to the system passion. You made him. And up no end. I

thank you kindly.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Never before were mine so strangely willing.

Yeah, but now I see what one in break can do. Look at me.

It's got me loving you madly. That little kiss you took.

Jesus!

What's the matter?

My stomach?

Too many cherries.

I've got to run. No, I won't. I told you.

Percy! Well, well, well.

It isn't all this personal.

Let him go.

I'll punch him!

Percy!

I could make you a bargain.

This man is a professional mad dog.

They all believe he killed his sister because he caught her rubbing herself

against the hitching post they tied you to in the yard.

Sex?

Any hint or smell or talk or mention of sex to this man?

is the quick fuse to madness.

He's a little jealous.

You may recall his reasons.

You are screwing his wife.

His wife?

Crazy, isn't it?

As if you didn't know.

But forget Percy.

The real evil is that man in the car.

Remember his name.

Lefranic. Julius Lefranic.

He's going to Europe.

Holland.

Belgium. Germany.

You watch him for me, and I'll protect you.

Then and now.

All right.

That looks like an easy bargain.

I may never see you again.

Or him.

I should make it your business to see me again.

Or else the mad dog goes loose.

If I make a bargain with you, how do you know I'll honor it?

I don't.

But you know.

It seems like you're buying up my future.

Well, if I just now have to take a beating for the present, then my future

belongs to no one.

Suit yourself.

Face the future with a broken neck.

I'm going to make sure no part of your miserable body touches a woman again.

Get in the car.

Get in!

The only little pleasure I get and you can't provide and you've got to have a

threshold over it.

Who the hell do you think you are? Shut up!

If you're not intimidated by the stick, perhaps you'll be interested in the

carrot.

This is a present for you.

Mormons are very physical.

They take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

They also believe in visions.

They all saw you coming out of the desert leading a white horse and wearing

bucket-top boots.

Joseph Smith wore bucket-top boots.

And Brigham Young was the only one allowed to ride a white horse.

And for me, I was so impressed I took you for the angel Moroni himself.

If you want to stamp out evil, then you're in my pay. Remember that. Joseph

Smith was keen to stamp out evil.

Stamp out the evil! Stamp out the evil!

Stamp out the evil! That's hard-core money.

should be going home.

Don't you?

Now?

We'll all grow to love you in the end. We'll all grow to love you in the end.

Sinistone people should take it slowly.

Sexual activity adds digestion.

Faire l'amour, c'est bon pour la digestion.

And I promise, we have to make it last an hour.

Oh, it's a challenge, I doubt I'm up to.

Or is this some financial requirement?

For you, I'll strike off the first candidate.

The ink on task, the waiting time, the extra.

I wonder what the extra should be.

This breakfast might be more expensive than I am. Not if you charge according

to party weight.

Don't tempt me, huh? You might not be able to afford a tea. Eat.

Luper was writing for a living.

as unofficial Belgian correspondent on natural history for two English

newspapers, The Times and the Manchester Guardian.

It was undoubtedly a cover.

Belgian natural history be neither exotic or especially different from

English natural history.

He was really collecting material on the rapidly gathering brutality in Europe.

It is not absolutely certain who came to arrest Looper in Antwerp.

But of the company, three and possibly four of them had auditioned to become

his permanent jailers.

They were to haunt his life.

I'm going to get the papers. Do you want anything?

He was an angry young man. No, no, no, no, no, no. Wrong time, wrong place. I

am 56 and I could be Irish.

My mother slept with Isaac Singer. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Wrong time, wrong place, wrong writer.

Singer wasn't even a playwright.

He was a singer.

That's a joke.

Captain never told jokes.

He could never be a writer.

He looked like a butler.

Meg's brother wouldn't recognize any of them.

I have been to China and I've seen the Great Wall.

That's got to be a lie.

It's a good try.

It's a little desperate.

Can you speak German with a Czech accent? I speak only Gaelic. Hey, my

part's taken.

Shit, I've never liked Beckett anyway. The Irish are too much for the awkward

squad. I'm a Romanian, a nation that understands all the anxieties of the

Czech soul. Bucharest is a thousand miles from Prague.

And probably 2,000 miles from Dublin.

Like Kafka.

I had to learn German to be understood by the world. The world?

I wish it was easy to be understood.

I'd learn German.

My part's taken.

That was Kafka. We are looking for a Becker. I can do Becker too.

Nothing happens.

Nobody comes. Nobody goes.

It's awful.

Tell him to think.

Give him his hat. His hat?

He can't think without his hat. Give him his hat. Me. After what he did to me.

Never. I'll give it. Tell him to go and fetch it. It's better to give it to him.

I'll give it to him. You must put it on his hand. Tell him to take it. It's

better to put it on his hand. I'll put it on his hand.

What's he waiting for?

Shut up!

The old Beckett lived in Paris.

Which figure would you most like to work with, Mr. Pinch?

Well, you know, I couldn't care less.

It's up to you.

I mean, do I have to eat and sleep with him?

Does he snore?

Do you have stinking feet?

Do you wash your hands frequently?

You like women?

You have 11 children.

All from one woman.

Beckett didn't have 11 children.

We are departing a little from the original.

Beckett is just a guy.

No new teeth.

I could be an out-of-work undertaker in a previous role.

There's a little side interest in selling guns.

The Irish like guns.

I could be a retired butler.

Gentleman's butler. On hard time. Undertakers are never our word.

Nowadays, more people are dying than being born.

If you can have 11 children, you should know. We could dress you up as an

undertaker. Do the right of horse.

Beckett never rode a horse in his life. That was Joyce on the Dublin Sounds.

Beckett was an Irish fairy.

That was Wyatt.

I saw Esau sitting on a seesaw. How many S's in that?

I'm not fussy.

Now they could take turns.

Where's Luper gone?

Got to get me croissant, pretzels, hot chocolate.

Where's she sleep?

Next door.

They're like dogs. They're like dogs.

That great staying power.

What do you mean great?

You can see what they eat. You can see what they eat. You can see what they

eat. It's the depression.

The depression. The depression.

Nationalist. Nationalist. Spy. Spy.

Nationalist. Spy.

Nationalist. Spy.

Imports aliens.

Rabid. Imports aliens.

Rabid. Imports aliens.

Rabid. Now, I am that.

I speak almost the same language as you do.

My mother was a concessionaire. He may speak a little English, but his father

was an Italian ice cream seller.

Mussolini is an ally.

With such a sweet, poofed background, we are compatible.

We are compatible, physically and politically, both ways. In both ways? It

is a perfect fit, which you have interrupted.

Oh, God.

I recognize you. I recognize you. Behind your new short... Fascist haircut.

Fascist haircut.

Stefan Figura, how's your mother? Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Shut up.

Shut up.

Shut up.

Stefan Figura, how is your mother?

Shut up.

Listen, when will he be back?

When it feels like it. When it feels like it. When it feels like it. When it

feels like it. When it feels like it. When it feels like it.

I've hit

Martino Nocaveli was sometime literary critic for the London News Chronicle,

and his eccentric, spinetic reviews frequently castigated two particular

literary discoveries of his.

Kafka, who he had read in German, and Beckett, whom he had read in French.

He hated and was frightened by their reductionism.

He had been stood up without a hint of apology by Max Brod, Kafka's publisher

in Prague, and insulted by Beckett.

whom he had met at a literary luncheon in Dublin.

Beckett had urinated over his shoes in the gentleman's toilet. Oh, my goodness!

Snake man!

I want a bed of my own, so I don't have to sleep with my two sisters.

Bloody bastard.

Idiot. They're four and two and filling nappies.

I want to eat off a plate and not a metal table.

I don't want to wear goddamn underpants on my balls and scratch the pieces by

canvas trousers.

Hear, hear.

Good morning fastidio. Good morning fastidio. Good morning. Mr. Luper Good

morning fastidio. Good morning. Mr. Luper Good morning fastidio. Good

morning. Mr. Luper Clean money for dirty newspapers

newspapers lie.

Including the ones you write for.

You think so?

I like their lies. They're harmless, which I'm afraid is not the case of some

of the others.

Mr.

Luper, excuse me.

Not at all personal, but I'm forced to have new allegiances.

I beg your pardon?

Perth Looper was a prolific scribbler.

Proposals. Agendas.

Plans. Scenarios.

Projects. Propositions. Schemes.

Astrologically, he was an Aryan.

Astrologically, he was an Aryan. So little of the plethora of handwritten

and typed texts ever reached completion, leave alone publication.

Others much later were to do that.

Many, so many texts. So many texts.

Were dropped into the lost property file of Looper's myriad of hiding places.

Under his bed.

On the proverbial top of his wardrobe.

Under the stairs.

In the attic.

Even in deliberately rented book depositories.

Looper rarely threw anything away, but filed it. If you can call it filing.

Certainly after his first trip to Holland and Belgium.

In suitcases.

In suitcases.

He had bought. Very cheaply. From the lost property offices of the Grand

Central Antwerp Railway Terminal.

Suitcases. put aside for him by Factor Dure. By Factor Dure, the proprietor of

the Antworth Station newspaper kiosk.

Looper, without any consciousness of what he was doing, had prepared a

mountain of raw material for an army of patient typists, paid by the hour from

nine till five, to weary their fingers and damage their eyes, deciphering his

ephemera.

Van Huyten insisted everything should be prepared for inspection on typescript.

That way, he supposed, looper secrets would be exposed.

But Van Huyten ignored a problem, because the busy eyes of 50 Belgian

stenographers searching the manuscripts of a potential English spy was not what

was required at all.

Van Huyten narrowed his field to one woman he believed he could trust,

because she was his niece's adopted daughter.

This woman's name was Sissy Colton.

It's more of your English scribbles, Frau Kopitz. Frau Kopitz, we sympathize

with you. Your delicate fingers should have to waste their energies on this

alien filth.

Why, thank you, Esau.

And give my regards to your wife and to all the little Esaus, however many there

now may be.

What do you want to know?

Everything. What do you want to start? Genesis?

This is a little excessive, isn't it? Just so I tell you the story of

creation. And then there was night.

And then he separated the land from the sea. All this and we haven't got to the

flood yet. All aliens are detained.

All English are detained.

A journalist. An alien. An English. He perfectly fit all three categories.

Owls. Owls? Owls. Owls.

Name? South Looper. Age? 26. What do you want to know? Genesis.

This is a little excessive, isn't it? Just so I tell you the story of

creation. And then there was night.

And then he separated the land from the sea. All this and we haven't got to the

flood yet. All aliens are detained. All English are detained. A journalist. And

English. Good morning, Mr. Looper.

Morning.

For you.

I am the station master. I am the station master. And also chief

commissioner of the Antwerp National Socialist Confederation. Good morning,

Mr. Looper. This is my adjutant, John Palmerian. He's the station doctor.

And dentist.

Good morning, Mr. Looper. The dentist. Open your mouth.

Why am I arrested?

Not arrested.

Merely detained. I am the station master. Temporary arrangement. Temporary

arrangement. We can see how.

We just need a few days.

We just need a few days. To investigate your friends, your contacts, your

manuscripts. What do you eat? How do you breathe?

What do you look at out of your bedroom window? That sort of thing.

When the English write about natural history, it's always a...

Open your mouth. Are you sending signals?

Please, come again.

Are you sending ghosts, Mr. Looper? Are you making observations for the enemy?

What enemy?

But how can I conduct a serious interview if you fill his mouth with

medical instruments all the time? You were seen swimming naked in the North

Sea in November.

Good morning, Mr. Looper. In Belgium, this is not normally seen as the

activity of a sane man.

But perhaps the activity of a spy.

Charles Luper was getting used to the introductory characteristics of arrest,

detention and imprisonment. He endeavoured to be truthful, ordered and

consistent. He, after all, regarded himself as a master clerk.

But there were limits.

And irony, if not outright sarcasm, crept in.

Arrest, detention and imprisonment could be a game for him if it was a game for

his jailers.

I'll tell you what I was doing.

I was searching for uranium.

Off the coast of Belgium.

As you can

see at this time, I have many duties in running this happy, sun-killed termite.

We'll meet the 2031 Express from Berlin, platform 8, carriage 5.

Dismissed. Capital of this evening.

The heck, the heart, the body, rocks with excitement to be alive at this

time.

I have 24 passenger trains a day running due east. 18

trains exactly on time into Germany.

Six trains to Berlin straight into the rising sun.

Thank you.

What is that all?

I thought we confiscated over a ton and a half of the stuff.

It's what we have translated so far.

It will take time.

26 trains a day running south.

The story of an architect pushed from the roof of the building he just has

completed is not uncommon.

18 of them passing Paris.

Welshmen are supposed to confirm to five characteristics.

It was a timetable of good strains, gold wagons, and cattle

trucks.

Philistinism. Self-education.

Great penny kettle trucks.

Up to 196 a day. It's a curious fact that even left-handed

people wipe their backside with a right hand.

My station is at luck.

Everything on time.

Every day.

I am the hour hand.

Palmyra is the minute hand.

God could time his universe by my station clock.

We know, Mr. Looper, that that is clearly a subject that you don't have a

written opinion on.

How could you write off time and travel and transportation for me?

Think of it, Looper. A pale bee and horse takes and cannot bear.

It's not bad for a third-class prisoner under bathroom arrest.

Luther agreed.

He was amused.

He enjoyed order, numbers, playing with time.

He wrote the stationmaster of Antwerp railway terminus 100 stories about time

travel and transportation.

The stories often received information about torture, aggression and the

problems of hiding a facial scar with a moustache.

Oh, good idea, Limbaugh.

Consider the publicity.

Right indigenous men run to art.

That's all the newspaper at school you want to be hearing.

Most Belgians want to live in Paris.

And those that don't would like to live in London.

Don't spoil it. That's why I don't want you to wear a uniform.

Look, Belgian, you have just the body for a uniform.

Like a column.

Undifferentiated. And you should grow a moustache.

Like all our cadets.

A red one.

Stop! Hey!

Hey, what the hell are you doing? You shouldn't try to engage us, you stupid

idiot!

Go on, go on, find a bandage, get a cloth, stop the blood.

Jesus!

Jesus!

Jesus! Jesus!

Jesus!

What the hell?

I'm sorry.

I'm a regular traveler.

I never expected to find your guards here. My guards? Are you your guards to

take this man into my office at once?

I take the names of all these witnesses.

It's true, sir.

The Hogmeister Mormon family from Mohab, Utah, newly affiliated representative

members of the American Fascist Party, arrived as an honored delegation in

Antwerp, wealthy Belgian city of diamonds and jewels.

It did not go unnoticed that of all the many fracturings of Protestant Christian

religious sects, the Mormons were curiously exempt from the antagonisms of

European fascism.

for more than five minutes.

You are a dead dentist.

I've got to wake up completely pain-free. You hear that?

Jesus.

I don't like the smell of gas.

Or dead pus, for that matter.

Gatter some of this about.

I am completely terrified of the smell of gas.

That's a very small...

An expensive bottom.

I can do better.

French contraband.

Imported.

Requisitioned from illegal travelers.

Passable. Now chuck it about before you turn that stuff on.

Now give me one.

Now I'm watching that clock.

Two ticks over the five minutes and you're a corpse in a messy white gown.

Papers. Trousers.

Trousers, trousers, trousers.

What the hell is Belgium to get your trousers down? There is no such language

as Belgium.

Get your smelly trousers down, you wop. Yeah, Passion was brought up in the Utah

desert.

But she has the sweetest kernel.

She has the sweetest kernel.

Clean. Move on. She was not brown.

Quite the same.

Small, but, uh, clean.

Move on.

It's roses, peaches, apricots in the desert. All imported.

Who are? Really? These are all illegal immigrants?

No, the fruit of the desert.

Papers.

And your trousers.

Come on, I can't wait all day whilst you fiddle with yourself.

Yeah, I'm a lucky man. Yeah.

Mormon woman, I got the key to the world.

Aren't Mormons allowed more than one wife?

You see, men, we died early in the desert.

Too many women, not enough men.

Come on, you know how to undo your button. What about you?

Second wife?

Third wife?

Negotiating, negotiating, negotiating.

Hey! Hey!

Hey, you come back here, you Belgian bastard!

Shit! Our men are at the, uh...

After school, guy?

It was a waste of time trying to do a school book. Hey, you!

Come here.

Okay, let's see the monkey.

With pleasure, let's see yours.

You dirty sod.

It's a fair request.

Hey, whose side are you on? I'm doing the asking. No, you're doing the

shouting. This is my cousin.

Cousin or no cousin.

All right, get moving, get moving, get moving.

Hey.

Yes? Women wearing trousers is an offense.

Let me see your papers.

Paul Marion, as a favor, I will show you my wife.

As a favor?

Spanish descent. I'll show you my wife.

I thought you said you had a German father.

Yeah, I did, I did, I did.

You see, the unmarried are the underprivileged.

Fox and Fox and Fox again. You'll see. Are you a man?

You see, if you're not a man, prove it.

Because, you know, your passport could be fake.

I see. I think you've taken this one far enough. Come on, Palmieri. What are

these uniforms for?

They wouldn't touch it.

I want more proof.

Nice.

Thank you.

You see, I think that there's only one conclusive proof, don't you, Paul Mary?

And that means off with the trousers and let's see the entrance to hell.

No. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on!

Get back! This is a police checkpoint.

Get your papers out.

Well, I can't see a thing.

Come on, we can't see what you got to show us.

Come on, Flemish bitch, I want the only proof that'll convince me, convince us

all. No!

all they've taken.

I've been waiting here for four days.

I need a clean shirt and a bath.

I have a wife.

Two children.

Let me phone her.

She'll be going frantic.

Let me send her a telegram.

Home for dinner, darling. Home for dinner.

Home for dinner, darling. I've been waiting here for five days.

I need a clean shirt and a bath.

I have a wife and two children.

Let me phone her.

She'll be going frantic. Let me send her a telegram.

Home for dinner, darling. That's all I need to say.

I've been waiting here for six days.

I need a clean shirt and a bath.

I have a wife.

Two children.

Let me phone her. Let me... She'll be going frantic.

Let me send her a telegram.

Home. Home.

Dinner.

Done.

I've been waiting here for... For seven days.

I need a clean shirt and a bath.

I have a wife and two children.

Let me phone her.

She'll be going frantic.

Let me send her a telegram.

Home or dinner.

Done. I've been here for eight days.

I need a clean shirt and a bath.

I have a wife.

And two children.

Let me phone her. She'll be frantic.

What the hell? What the hell? What the hell? What the hell?

What the hell?

What the hell?

Bloody hell, Percy. What the fuck are you doing?

And who the hell's your friend?

In uniform.

Smiling his socks off with his...

Gun held up so tightly.

This is Paul Marion.

He's a friend.

He's an admirer.

And he is a fellow officer.

Fellow officer?

He's a dentist.

Well, of course he's a dentist.

How do you know he's a dentist? I have intruded.

That's right, you have.

But what the hell?

You've seen the inside of my mouth, so what the hell have I got to hide?

Lying on your dentist's... Slab for half an hour in a room full of slow clocks.

Time ticks so swiftly when you're amused.

What does that mean? It means that this is the second time that sleep in the

dentist with bedfellas.

What?

What is that smell?

Don't you like it?

I can't stand it, but I'm covered in it.

Must be a hotel specialty, mustn't it, Paul Marion?

A cover for all the bad little smells of the Belgian National Socialist Party.

Have you been buying my wife perfume, Paul Marion?

That? That is the same as adultery in my country, Paul Marion. Oh, showing off.

Utah again, Percy.

Now, Percy is a patriot.

Well, I think we all should be patriots.

Standing there in his U.S. of A. dressing gown on inside.

I buy your perfume.

You do not buy my wife's fucking scent. Jesus, the master perfumer speaks in

line. Don't fucking tell me I'm alive.

The scent is very, very personal.

I bet it is. Try sniffing Percy's armpits when he's been drinking.

I buy the smells. Oh, leave him alone, Percy. He's only the dentist.

But guess who I've seen today?

I've been watching you, Paul Marion.

We all will.

I like being watched.

I've just seen the man from the desert.

The guy with the honey, honey prick.

Paul Marion, you better go.

My wife's dreaming. Dreaming?

Yes, I'm dreaming. You brought a bloody Belgian dentist in my room to watch me

sleeping. I'd better be dreaming. Shut up!

Get out, Paul Marion.

Yep. Get on the scent, dentist man. Thank you, Percy, for the...

Excitement. You damn coward!

He got me into an ambush with his Jew boy cousin. I doubt it.

But he's a man who knows his death smells.

Ether, ammonia chloride, xylone B.

I can't stand gas.

Can you stand gas, Percy?

Gives me nightmares.

I'm interested in becoming the ideal jailer. And what's that when he's at

home? He's never at home. He's always at the jailhouse. Jailhouse is his home.

And the jailer's as much a prisoner as the prisoner.

The ideal prisoner and the ideal jailer are interchangeable.

Am I the ideal prisoner? You're a spy and an enemy of Belgium.

Nothing takes improving.

Now here's an imperfect jailer.

I would like to word with the prisoner.

I know him.

I'd like to speak to him in private.

You see, it's a domestic matter.

Go on, get out!

I see you still have your little suitcase.

What's in it this time?

And that?

If I've typed it, you said it. What the hell are you doing that for?

Order. I'm trying to incriminate Mr. Looper.

It seems to me you're trying to incriminate us.

And you should try to be more careful.

How come you got all these little sand bottles in your little suitcase?

I never put them there.

How come you got all these bottles of my wife covered in the damn...

How come?

You bastard!

How come, Percy, you and I always conduct our affairs like gentlemen?

How is it you have the energy for all this pent-up friendship?

Is it the uniform?

Oh, the hell of kicking a bound man.

Look

at

the mall.

How the hell am I going to keep this beautiful station in order with foreign

lout like you let it loose?

I am not a foreign lout.

You just watch your tongue, Frenchie. But it's better and better.

Me, Belgian, France, always around the country.

But a considerable sight more civilized than you come from, Yankee.

I am not a Yankee, you stuck shirt.

Just why do you want to defound this dog?

This English spy and his Jewish friends?

Start. He's got more manners.

Prove to me you're not a Jew, Mr. Station Master.

How are you going to defend your fascist honor?

You cunts. You little Americans.

Shit!

You're a ghast in a foreign country, Percy.

You cannot go around beating people up like you can in Utah, USA.

You're lucky, sir.

Your wife knows a good dish.

We found him!

Found who?

Remember him?

That pearly-teeth English boy with the smiling eyes and the bulging pocket?

Pocket?

He's here!

They got him for upsetting the Belgian Coast Guard.

Who's that?

Just some homework.

What's he been doing to upset the Coast Guard? Making sandcastles?

A Dutch fat whore.

Mind of a sewer, body of a baby, ego like a tank.

She thinks she's from Soviet Mata Hari.

Her body smells of carp.

She has so much backside and frontside, she doesn't know which side she's on.

But she knows this hotel like a postman.

I bet she delivered a French letter in every room.

She's obviously made a big impression.

On the bed springs.

She eats like a sperm whale.

Mouth all gaping white.

She's a monstrous vulva. But a nice little rectum for an orifice that's used

to excess from within.

I knew you'd find something to like. I sometimes wonder, Passion, how you think

you got born.

Mother probably wondered that too, too, too.

Get him moved.

Got who moved? The Englishman.

In a room next to mine.

Drive the guard.

Ming the guard. Kill the guard.

Jesus,

what has he got?

You know what he got. You know what he got.

And what about Percy?

He's out talking to you like a center dentist.

Who is this?

My daughter.

Your daughter?

How did she get here?

You see?

They all ask the same question.

I'm sure she's not being anatomical.

Pleased to meet you, senora.

Senora. Jesus, she's not royalty, Gretchen. And she's not Spanish.

She's German-American.

It's a new patriotic breed.

So patriotic they lust after the enemy.

Thank you. My father has a proposition.

He stops you to the station, master, for illegally soliciting on his station.

Or... You get me the keys to... Or... You get me the keys to... Or... You get

me the keys to... That doesn't sound like a very... You get me the keys to

his prime prisoner. Mr. Looper, no contest.

How do you want me to do it?

Can I wear a disguise?

Je peux porter un déguisement?

How do you know Looper is Van Huyten's prime prisoner?

Like most people? I read newspaper.

Mr. Looper writes in the London newspaper.

And appears in a Belgian newspaper?

What? Belgian newspaper?

What?

A famous English journalist helps the Belgians in their investigations.

So, I can get to wear a disguise.

You'd sure to be recognized.

You could derail a train or seduce the jailers. Derail a train is simple.

But I can't stand those two idiots.

One is so itchy, and besides, I believe he slept with my mother.

The other one, so polished.

Sophie

was

the source of information for this incident, and Martino was her greatest

current interest.

Martino always had a predilection for plump women in light underwear wearing

guns. Oh, that...

Don't bother.

Bound to make it worse.

Guilty!

Okay, Marty.

What have you learned to mop floors?

Sophie's got the bathroom key.

Isn't she clever?

There surely is. We have a plan to get you out of here.

But first, you've got to tell me everything that's happened.

Well, first you get me out and then I tell.

No, first tell, then escape.

Bloody El Marti.

Oh, bloody.

It seems Martino got his way.

But Martino Nocivelli was a great inventor of tales.

He might well have embroidered the stories about the retrieval of the keys

to find a way to equal the sensational details of Luper's imprisonment.

If he wanted to be the Martino Nocivelli Boswell to Pulse Looper's Dr. Johnson,

he was not averse to inventing some back-up, long, tall storytelling of his

own. What are you doing? Taking notes.

Oh, excuse me. The Moab worm.

It would appear... The Danforth railway station was a stamping ground of

ambiguities, and although we might wish it otherwise,

Luper might not have been the centre of them, considering the big events about

to affect Belgium from across the German border.

But consider that there were two Luper lookalikes, one trapped in a bathroom

and one trapped in a lost property office.

Luper had always told Martino that looking for that which was lost was to

be his lifetime ambition.

Here, he had perhaps almost found himself.

It must be said that in the station records, it was sometimes difficult to

distinguish which looper look-alike was which, and this confusion, of course,

was to certain people's advantage.

I've been here for seven days.

It's Sunday, for God's sake!

What have I done but jumped off a moving train? What have I done but jumped off a

moving train? You're right.

You're right, my folks.

Now, let me go.

I'm hungry.

Feed me.

A sausage.

An antwerp onion.

The station seemed to be a stage for all manner of mysteries, imaginary journeys,

ambiguous incidents, and open-ended conspiracies.

To provide a background to capture an ideal, elusive likeness of Luperon

Celluloid, a photographic representation of this man for various purposes, some

of them political, some of them sexual, some of them symbolic, to aid and abet

these conspiracies.

There always seemed to be an excess of willing women, slapped faces, cleaning

fluids and dubious dentistry.

But some characters were beginning to outlive their usefulness, though we do

not know whether there was a series of conspiracies or one big conspiracy to

get rid of these undesirables.

The man is a liability.

He's the wolf.

Not the fox.

He has too long to live.

He dribbles when he's excited.

He's subtle, but an avalanche in name.

He's a monster.

A monster.

And we just don't need such monsters, Eric.

They belong in the sea.

Or... the morgue.

Or...

in an American war.

We put him in a Russian novel, a railway novel about impotence.