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1281 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
The Sorcerer was dressed in the shapeless trousers and ankle-length rumpled green overcoat of an East German worker. The tips of a wide and flowery Italian tie were tucked, military style, between two buttons of his shirt. His thin hair was sweat-pasted onto his glistening skull. Eying his apprentice across the room, he began to wonder how Jack would perform in a crunch; he himself had barely made it through a small Midwestern community college and then had clawed his way up through the ranks to finish the war with the fool’s gold oak leaves of a major pinned to the frayed collar of his faded khaki shirt, which left him with a low threshold of tolerance for the Harvard-Princeton-Yale crowd…Nobody in the Company bothered consulting the folks on the firing line when they press-ganged the Ivy League for recruits and came up with jokers like Jack McAuliffe, a Yalie so green behind the ears he’d forgotten to get his ashes hauled when he was sent to debrief Torriti’s hookers the week the Sorcerer came down with the clap…Clutching a bottle of PX whiskey by the throat, closing one eye and squinting through the other, the Sorcerer painstakingly filled the kitchen tumbler to the brim. “Not the same without ice,” he mumbled, belching as he carefully maneuvered his thick lips over the glass. He felt the alcohol scald the back of his throat. “No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht!"
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.--- ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Lewis Carroll
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat:
"we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad,"
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."