'Gone, gone,' the old woman replied with a crabby shrug, irritated by his persistence, her low wail growing louder. 'Chased away with the rest, chased away into the street. They would not even let her take her coat.'
'Where did she go?'
'I don't know. I don't know.'
'Who will take care of her?'
'Who will take care of me?'
'She doesn't know anybody else, does she?'
'Who will take care of me?' Yossarian left money in the old woman's lap--it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right--and strode out of the apartment, cursing Catch-22 vehemently as he descended the stairs, even though he knew there was no such thing. Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.
It was cold outside, and dark, and a leaky, insipid mist lay swollen in the air and trickled down the large, unpolished stone blocks of the houses and the pedestals of monuments. Yossarian hurried back to Milo and recanted. He said he was sorry and, knowing he was lying, promised to fly as many more missions as Colonel Cathcart wanted if Milo would only use all his influence in Rome to help him locate Nately's whore's kid sister.
'She's just a twelve-year-old virgin, Milo,' he explained anxiously, 'and I want to find her before it's too late.' Milo responded to his request with a benign smile. 'I've got just the twelve-year-old virgin you're looking for,' he announced jubilantly. 'This twelve-year-old virgin is really only thirty-four, but she was brought up on a low-protein diet by very strict parents and didn't start sleeping with men until--'
' Milo, I'm talking about a little girl!' Yossarian interrupted him with desperate impatience. 'Don't you understand? I don't want to sleep with her. I want to help her. You've got daughters. She's just a little kid, and she's all alone in this city with no one to take care of her. I want to protect her from harm. Don't you know what I'm talking about?' Milo did understand and was deeply touched. 'Yossarian, I'm proud of you,' he exclaimed with profound emotion. 'I really am. You don't know how glad I am to see that everything isn't always just sex with you. You've got principles. Certainly I've got daughters, and I know exactly what you're talking about. We'll find that girl if we have to turn this whole city upside down. Come along.' Yossarian went along in Milo Minderbinder's speeding M & M staff car to police headquarters to meet a swarthy, untidy police commissioner with a narrow black mustache and unbuttoned tunic who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins when they entered his office and who greeted Milo with warm surprise and bowed and scraped in obscene servility as though Milo were some elegant marquis.
'Ah, Marchese Milo,' he declared with effusive pleasure, pushing the fat, disgruntled woman out the door without even looking toward her. 'Why didn't you tell me you were coming? I would have a big party for you. Come in, come in, Marchese. You almost never visit us any more.' Milo knew that there was not one moment to waste. 'Hello, Luigi,' he said, nodding so briskly that he almost seemed rude. 'Luigi, I need your help. My friend here wants to find a girl.'
'A girl, Marchese?' said Luigi, scratching his face pensively. 'There are lots of girls in Rome. For an American officer, a girl should not be too difficult.'
'No, Luigi, you don't understand. This is a twelve-year-old virgin that he has to find right away.'
'Ah, yes, now I understand,' Luigi said sagaciously. 'A virgin might take a little time. But if he waits at the bus terminal where the young farm girls looking for work arrive, I--'
'Luigi, you still don't understand,' Milo snapped with such brusque impatience that the police commissioner's face flushed and he jumped to attention and began buttoning his uniform in confusion. 'This girl is a friend, an old friend of the family, and we want to help her. She's only a child. She's all alone in this city somewhere, and we have to find her before somebody harms her. Now do you understand? Luigi, this is very important to me. I have a daughter the same age as that little girl, and nothing in the world means more to me right now than saving that poor child before it's too late. Will you help?'
'Si, Marchese, now I understand,' said Luigi. 'And I will do everything in my power to find her. But tonight I have almost no men. Tonight all my men are busy trying to break up the traffic in illegal tobacco.'
'Illegal tobacco?' asked Milo.
' Milo,' Yossarian bleated faintly with a sinking heart, sensing at once that all was lost.
'Si, Marchese,' said Luigi. 'The profit in illegal tobacco is so high that the smuggling is almost impossible to control.'
'Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?' Milo inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored eyebrows arching avidly and his nostrils sniffing.
' Milo,' Yossarian called to him. 'Pay attention to me, will you?'
'Si, Marchese,' Luigi answered. 'The profit in illegal tobacco is very high. The smuggling is a national scandal, Marchese, truly a national disgrace.'
'Is that a fact?' Milo observed with a preoccupied smile and started toward the door as though in a spell.
' Milo!' Yossarian yelled, and bounded forward impulsively to intercept him. ' Milo, you've got to help me.'
'Illegal tobacco,' Milo explained to him with a look of epileptic lust, struggling doggedly to get by. 'Let me go. I've got to smuggle illegal tobacco.'
'Stay here and help me find her,' pleaded Yossarian. 'You can smuggle illegal tobacco tomorrow.' But Milo was deaf and kept pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly, sweating, his eyes, as though he were in the grip of a blind fixation, burning feverishly, and his twitching mouth slavering. He moaned calmly as though in remote, instinctive distress and kept repeating, 'Illegal tobacco, illegal tobacco.' Yossarian stepped out of the way with resignation finally when he saw it was hopeless to try to reason with him. Milo was gone like a shot. The commissioner of police unbuttoned his tunic again and looked at Yossarian with contempt.
'What do you want here?' he asked coldly. 'Do you want me to arrest you?' Yossarian walked out of the office and down the stairs into the dark, tomblike street, passing in the hall the stout woman with warts and two chins, who was already on her way back in. There was no sign of Milo outside. There were no lights in any of the windows. The deserted sidewalk rose steeply and continuously for several blocks. He could see the glare of a broad avenue at the top of the long cobblestone incline. The police station was almost at the bottom; the yellow bulbs at the entrance sizzled in the dampness like wet torches. A frigid, fine rain was falling. He began walking slowly, pushing uphill. Soon he came to a quiet, cozy, inviting restaurant with red velvet drapes in the windows and a blue neon sign near the door that said: TONY'S RESTAURANT FINE FOOD AND DRINK. KEEP OUT. The words on the blue neon sign surprised him mildly for only an instant. Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings. The tops of the sheer buildings slanted in weird, surrealistic perspective, and the street seemed tilted. He raised the collar of his warm woolen coat and hugged it around him. The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catatonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled animal udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows. Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere. Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his mind the excruciating image of the barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner into the avenue finally and came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a small, pale, boyish face. Six other soldiers from different countries wrestled with different parts of him, striving to help him and hold him still. He yelped and groaned unintelligibly through clenched teeth, his eyes rolled up into his head. 'Don't let him bite his tongue off,' a short sergeant near Yossarian advised shrewdly, and a seventh man threw himself into the fray to wrestle with the ill lieutenant's face. All at once the wrestlers won and turned to each other undecidedly, for now that they held the young lieutenant rigid they did not know what to do with him. A quiver of moronic panic spread from one straining brute face to another. 'Why don't you lift him up and put him on the hood of that car?' a corporal standing in back of Yossarian drawled. That seemed to make sense, so the seven men lifted the young lieutenant up and stretched him out carefully on the hood of a parked car, still pinning each struggling part of him down. Once they had him stretched out on the hood of the parked car, they stared at each other uneasily again, for they had no idea what to do with him next. 'Why don't you lift him up off the hood of that car and lay him down on the ground?' drawled the same corporal behind Yossarian. That seemed like a good idea, too, and they began to move him back to the sidewalk, but before they could finish, a jeep raced up with a flashing red spotlight at the side and two military policemen in the front seat.
'What's going on?' the driver yelled.
'He's having convulsions,' one of the men grappling with one of the young lieutenant's limbs answered. 'We're holding him still.'
'That's good. He's under arrest.'