"Quickly, the field-glasses....Now, what in blazes have we here?" The [airship] in the distance was distinguished by an envelope with the onion-like shape--and nearly the dimensions too--of a dome of an Eastern Orthodox church, against whose brilliant red surface was represented, in black, the Romanoff crest, and above it, in gold Cyrillic lettering, the legend BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or "The Great Game." It was readily recognized by all as the flagship of Randolph's mysterious Russian counterpart--and, far too often, nemesis--Captain Igor Padzhitnoff, with whom previous "run-ins" (see particularly The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates, The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin) evoked in the boys lively though anxious memories.
"What's up with Padzhy, I wonder?" murmured Randolph. "They're sure closing awfully rapidly."
The parallel organization at Saint Petersburg, known as the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, was notorious for promoting wherever in the world they chose a program of mischief, much of its motivation opaque to the boys. Padzhitnoff's own specialty being to arrange for bricks and masonry, always in the four-block fragments which had become his "signature," to fall on and damage targets designated by his superiors. This lethal debris was generally harvested from the load-bearing walls of previous targets of opportunity.
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 2006. Pages 137-38 of Vinatge version.
Okay: Russian dude dropping "bricks and masonry" from airship in signature "four-block fragments." That's a Tetris reference, right? Right?
No comments:
Post a Comment