“Do you suggest there is something illegitimate in this operation?”
“Not illegitimate exactly. But shoddy. Definitely shoddy.”
“Oh go back to your Island before it falls! We knew you when you were peddling your purple ass in the Plaza pissoirs for five pesetas.”
“And not many takers either,” Leif put in. He pronounced it ither. This reference to his Island origin was more than the Expeditor could stand. . . . He was drawing himself up, mobilizing his most frigid impersonation of an English aristocrat, preparing to deliver an icy, clipped “crusher,” but instead, a whining, whimpering, kicked dog snarl broke from his mouth. His presurgery face emerged in an arc-light of incandescent hate. . . .
He began to spit curses in the hideous, strangled gutturals of the Island dialect.
The Islanders all profess ignorance of the dialect or flatly deny its existence. “We are Breetish,” they say. “We don’t got no bloody dealect.”
Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the
airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm.
‘He’s gone m ad,” Marvie gasped. “Let’s get out of here.” Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish Bath.