THE SIGHT OF HER ALMOST CAUSED ME TO DRIP BARBECUE sauce on my doeskin jacket. She was just a dumpy little woman in an old blue coat, but the fact that she had somehow turned up in a CIA barbecue joint in Falls Church, Virginia, struck me as unnerving.
Boog immediately popped out of the booth and went over to talk to her. Bessie Lump didn’t greet him warmly, but on the other hand she didn’t seem to mind that he had come over to talk to her. She shuffled up the line and received a modest brown bag, presumably full of barbecued goat.
To my surprise, Boog brought her over and introduced us. “Isn’t he tall?” she said, when I stood up. Her eyes were disconcertingly colorless, like Levis that have been washed too many times.
“She followed me,” I said, when she was gone.
Boog just laughed. “She never follert you,” he said. “Old Cyrus used to run the CIA, back when it was a respectable organization. He picked up a taste for goat, that’s all.”
“She doesn’t seem very friendly,” I said, not reassured.
“Well, the Folmsbees ain’t exactly just folks,” Boog said. “The Shiptons neither. Bessie’s a Shipton.”
“What’s a Shipton?” I asked.
Boog looked amused. “Yore ignorance is so appalling I can’t thank where to start,” he said, between munchings. “Bessie married beneath her. Husband’s name is Northrup Lump. Of course, she would have had to marry beneath her, if she married at all, since the Shiptons got here back in the days of the primordial slime. The Shiptons even beat the Folmsbees, but the Folmsbees hung onto their money and the Shiptons didn’t. The Shiptons was shabby genteel.”
That I could follow. The shabby genteel are familiar ground to me. I had bought many a second-rate heirloom from meek, shabby genteel ladies in decorous apartments about the land. I could always get the heirlooms for reasonable prices, since the meek ladies could seldom bring themselves to discuss money at all. They would take whatever I offered, and in turn give me tea. If they had lives, it was not apparent.
“Anyway,” Boog went on, “having married a Lump the only way Bessie could redeem herself was by shacking up with a Folmsbee. It’s been going on for forty years.”
“What happened to Mr. Lump?” I asked.
“Why nothin’,” Boog said. “I thank he spends his time playin’ checkers with the butler.”
“It’s hard to believe the Smithsonian is really for sale,” I said.
“You got the Waxahachie outlook,” Boog said. “Thank of it. Seventeen museums in the Smithsonian, not to mention all them warehouses they got strung around in places like Anacostia and Silver Spring. For fifty, sixty years we been sucking stuff out of every country in the world and cramming it into warehouses an’ museums—seventy-eight million items, they say.
“Hail, we got more African masks than you could find in Africa, and more Persian doodads than the pore old Shah.”
“But that stuff is worth billions and billions,” I said. “Who’s gonna buy it?”
“That’s the fun part,” Boog said. “Emergent nations is gonna buy it. What them pore bastards in the Third World don’t realize yet is that we bought up most of their heritage years ago, before they even started thanking about emerging. We got it right here. Now, what’s the first thang an emergent nation needs when it emerges?”
“Schools and hospitals?” I ventured. “Tractors. Freeways.”
Boog shook his head. “What they need is fancy new museums, filt with the native crafts that are their heritage,” he said. “Something to remind them of how it was before they shook off their colonial shackles.”
“Oh,” I said.
Boog grinned. “Cy’s got a little brother named Peck, short for Peckham. The Folmsbees kind of look down on Peck because he actually went in business. What he does is build museums. Right this minute he’s off building national museums in twenty or thirty little new countries. Naturally the countries ain’t got nothing to put in the new museums, since we carted off all their goodies long ago.”
“So we’ll sell it all back to them,” I said.
“Bingo,” Boog said, with a grin.