“You are not alone,” Petkoff said. Malone took another try at a getaway, and failed. “We take precedence,” a lumpy man said. “We can talk later. Arrest comes first.” “But who?” the civilian snapped. “I insist—” “There shall be no arrest!” Petkoff screamed. “No one is to be arrested at all!” “I swear by the bones of Stalin that my orders state—” the tall man began. “The bones of Stalin are with us!” a lumpy man said. “Go and die in a kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center of the great desert!” Inspired, the other lumpy man screamed “Charge!” and came for Petkoff and the civilian. Petkoff whirled, letting go of Malone in order to beat back this wave of maddened attackers, and Malone took the advantage. He ducked free under Petkoff’s left arm and started around the gesticulating, screaming, fighting group for the door at the back of the restaurant. He took exactly four steps. Then he stopped. The Mongol, his eyes red with a combination of vodka and bull-roaring rage, was charging toward him, his hands outflung and his fingers grasping at the air. “Warmonger!” he was shouting. “Capitalist slave-owner! Leprous and ancient cannibal without culture! You have begun a war you can not finish!” “Ha!” Malone said, feeling inadequate to the occasion. As the Mongol charged, he felt a wave of intense pragmatism come over him. He reached back toward the bar, grabbed a bottle of vodka and tossed several glassfuls into the giant’s face. The Mongol, deluged and screaming, clawed wildly at his eyes and spun round several times, cursing Malone and all his kin for the next twenty-seven generations, and grabbing thin air in his attempt to reach the _Amerikanski_. All of the customers appeared to have discovered urgent engagements elsewhere. There was little for the Mongol to collide with except empty tables and chairs. But he did manage to swipe one of the lumpy-faced men on the side of the head with one flail of his arms. The lumpy-faced man said “Yoop!” and went staggering away into Petkoff, who spun him around and threw him away in the general direction of the bandstand. The diversion provided Malone with just enough time to start moving again. Four uniformed men were making their way toward the ladies’ room from the opposite side of the restaurant. They were carrying a stretcher, which seemed pitifully inadequate for the carnage Malone had just left. He blocked their path. “Where are you going?” he said. “You are American?” one of them said. “I speak English good, no?” Behind him, Malone heard a yowl and a crunch, as of a body striking wood. It sounded as if somebody had fetched up against the bar. “You speak English fine,” he said, feeling wildly out of place. “Have you been taking lessons?” “Me?” the man said. “It is no time for talk. We got to get lady for hospital.”