philip_k_dick_-_the_man_in_the_high_castle

Mr. Baynes got out his wallet. The Japanese seated himself with the wallet and began inspecting
the contents. He halted at a photo of a girl. 'Very pretty.'
'My daughter. Martha.'
'I, too, have a daughter named Martha,' the Japanese said. 'She at present is in Chicago studying
piano.'
'My daughter,' Mr. Baynes said, 'is about to be married.'
The Japanese returned the wallet and waited expectantly.
Mr. Baynes said, 'I have been here two weeks and Mr. Yatabe has not shown up. I want to find
out if he is still coming. And if not, what I should do.'
'Return tomorrow afternoon,' the Japanese said. He rose, and Mr. Baynes also rose. 'Good day.'
'Good day,' Mr. Baynes said. He left the dressing room, hung the pair of slacks back up on the
rack, and left the Fuga Department Store.
That did not take very long, he thought as he moved along the busy downtown sidewalk with the
other pedestrians. Can he actually get the information by then? Contact Berlin, relay my questions,
do all the coding and decoding — every step involved?
Apparently so.
Now I wish I had approached the agent sooner. I would have saved myself much worry and
distress. And evidently no major risk was involved; it all appeared to go off smoothly. It took in
fact only five or six minutes.
Mr. Baynes wandered on, looking into store windows. He felt much better now. Presently he
found himself viewing display photos of honky-tonk cabarets, grimy flyspecked utterly white nudes
whose breasts hung like half-inflated volleyballs. That sight amused him and he loitered, people
pushing past him on their various errands up and down Market Street.
At least he had done something, at last.
What a relief!
Propped comfortably against the car door, Juliana read. Beside her, his elbow out the window,
Joe drove with one hand lightly on the wheel, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip; he was a good
driver, and they had covered a good deal of the distance from Canon City already.
The car radio played mushy beer-garden folk music, an accordion band doing one of the
countless polkas or schottishes; she had never been able to tell them one from another.
'Kitsch,' Joe said, when the music ended. 'Listen, I know a lot about music; I'll tell you who a
great conductor was. You probably don't remember him. Arturo Toscanini.'
'No,' she said, still reading.
'He was Italian. But the Nazis wouldn't let him conduct after the war, because of his politics. He's
dead, now. I don't like that von Karajan, permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic. We
had to go to concerts by him, our work dorm. What I like, being a wop — you can guess.' He
glanced at her. 'You like that book?' he said.
'It's engrossing.''
'I like Verdi and Puccini. All we get in New York is heavy German bombastic Wagner and Orff,
and we have to go every week to one of those corny U.S. Nazi Party dramatic spectacles at
Madison Square Garden, with the flags and drums and trumpets and the flickering flame. History of
the Gothic tribes or other educational crap, chanted instead of spoken, so as to be called 'art.' Did
you ever see New York before the war?'
'Yes,' she said, trying to read.