IT was snowing when I woke up.
I could tell that it was snowing because there was a kind of brightness in the room and it was quiet outside with no footstep-noises coming up from the street and no tyre-noises but only the engines of the cars. I looked up and I saw George over by the window in his green dressing-gown, bending over the paraffin-stove, making the coffee.
“Snowing,” I said.
“It’s cold,” George answered. “It’s really cold.”
I got out of bed and fetched the morning paper from outside the door. It was cold all right and I ran back quickly and jumped into bed and lay still for a while under the bedclothes, holding my hands tight between my legs for warmth.
“No letters?” George said.
“No. No letters.”
“Doesn’t look as if the old man’s going to cough up.”
“Maybe he thinks four hundred and fifty is enough for one month,” I said.
“He’s never been to New York . He doesn’t know the cost of living here.”
“You shouldn’t have spent it all in one week.”
George stood up and looked at me. “We shouldn’t have spent it, you mean.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We.” I began reading the paper.
The coffee was ready now and George brought the pot over and put it on the table between our beds. “A person can’t live without money,” he said. “The old man ought to know that.” He got back into his bed without taking off his green dressing-gown. I went on reading. I finished the racing page and the football page and then I started on Lionel Pantaloon, the great political and society columnist. I always read Pantaloon—same as the other twenty or thirty million other people in the country. He’s a habit with me; he’s more than a habit; he’s part of my morning, like three cups of coffee, or shaving.
“This fellow’s got a nerve,” I said.
“Who?”
“This Lionel Pantaloon.”
“What’s he saying now?”
“Same sort of thing he’s always saying. Same sort of scandal. Always about the rich. Listen to this: ‘… seen at the Penguin Club… banker William S. Womberg with beauteous starlet Theresa Williams… three nights running… Mrs Womberg at home with a headache… which is something anyone’s wife would have if hubby was out squiring Miss Williams of an evening… “That fixes Womberg,” George said.
“I think it’s a shame,” I said. “That sort of thing could cause a divorce. How can this Pantaloon get away with stuff like that?”
“He always does, they’re all scared of him. But if I was William S. Womberg,” George said, “you know what I’d do? I’d go right out and punch this Lionel Pantaloon right on the nose. Why, that’s the only way to handle those guys.”
“Mr Womberg couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s an old man,” I said. “Mr Womberg is a dignified and respectable old man. He’s a very prominent banker in the town. He couldn’t possibly… “
And then it happened. Suddenly, from nowhere, the idea came. It came to me in the middle of what I was saying to George and I stopped short and I could feel the idea itself kind of flowing into my brain and I kept very quiet and let it come and it kept on coming and almost before I knew what had happened I had it all, the whole plan, the whole brilliant magnificent plan worked out clearly in my head; and right then I knew it was a beauty.
I turned and I saw George staring at me with a look of wonder on his face. “What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
I kept quite calm. I reached out and got myself some more coffee before I allowed myself to speak.
“George,” I said, and I still kept calm. “I have an idea. Now listen very carefully because I have an idea which will make us both very rich. We are broke, are we not?”
“We are.”
“And this William S. Womberg,” I said, “would you consider that he is angry with Lionel Pantaloon this morning?”
“Angry!” George shouted. “Angry! Why, he’ll be madder than hell!”
“Quite so. And do you think that he would like to see Lionel Pantaloon receive a good hard punch on the nose?”
“Damn right he would!”
“And now tell me, is it not possible that Mr Womberg would be prepared to pay a sum of money to someone who would undertake to perform this nose-punching operation efficiently and discreetly on his behalf?”
George turned and looked at me, and gently, carefully, he put down his coffee-cup on the table. A slowly widening smile began to spread across his face. “I get you,” he said. “I get the idea.”
“That’s just a little part of the idea. If you read Pantaloon’s column here you will see that there is another person who has been insulted today.” I picked up the paper. “There is a Mrs Ella Gimple, a prominent socialite who has perhaps a million dollars in the bank..
“What does Pantaloon say about her?”
I looked at the paper again. “He hints,” I answered, “at how she makes a stack of money out of her own friends by throwing roulette parties and acting as the bank.”
“That fixes Gimple,” George said. “And Womberg. Gimple and Womberg.” He was sitting up straight in bed waiting for me to go on.
“Now,” I said, “we have two different people both loathing Lionel Pantaloon’s guts this morning, both wanting desperately to go out and punch him on the nose, and neither of them daring to do it. You understand that?”
“Absolutely.”
“So much then,” I said, “for Lionel Pantaloon. But don’t forget that there are others like him. There are dozens of other columnists who spend their time insulting wealthy and important people. There’s Harry Weyman, Claude Taylor, Jacob Swinski, Walter Kennedy, and the rest of them.”
“That’s right,” George said. “That’s absolutely right.”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing that makes the rich so furious as being mocked and insulted in the newspapers.”
“Go on,” George said. “Go on.”
“All right. Now this is the plan.” I was getting rather excited myself. I was leaning over the side of the bed, resting one hand on the little table, waving the other about in the air as I spoke. “We will set up immediately an organization and we will call it… what shall we call it we will call it… let me see… we will call it ‘Vengeance Is Mine Inc.’… How about that?”
“Peculiar name.”
“It’s biblical. It’s good. I like it. ‘Vengeance Is Mine Inc.’ It sounds fine. And we will have little cards printed which we will send to all our clients reminding them that they have been insulted and mortified in public and offering to punish the offender in consideration of a sum of money. We will buy all the newspapers and read all the columnists and every day we will send out a dozen or more of our cards to prospective clients.”
“It’s marvellous!” George shouted. “It’s terrific!”
“We shall be rich,” I told him. “We shall be exceedingly wealthy in no time at all.”
“We must start at once!”
I jumped out of bed, fetched a writing-pad and a pencil and ran back to bed again. “Now,” I said, pulling my knees under the blankets and propping the writing-pad against them, “the first thing is to decide what we’re going to say on the printed cards which we’ll be sending to our clients,” and I wrote, ‘VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.’ as a heading on the top of the sheet of paper. Then, with much care, I composed a finely phrased letter explaining the functions of the organization. It finished up with the following sentence: ‘Therefore VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer suitable punishment to columnist and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration.”
“What do you mean, ‘a choice of methods’?” George said.
“We must give them a choice. We must think up a number of things… a number of different punishments. Number one will be… ” and I wrote down, ‘i. Punch him on the nose, once, hard.’ “What shall we charge for that?”
“Five hundred dollars,” George said instantly.
I wrote it down. “What’s the next one?”
“Black his eye,” George said.
I wrote it down, ‘2. Black his eye… $500.’
“No!” George said. “I disagree with the price. It definitely requires more skill and timing to black an eye nicely than to punch a nose. It is a skilled job. It should be six hundred.”
“OK,” I said. “Six hundred. And what’s the next one?”
“Both together, of course. The old one two.” We were in George’s territory now. This was right up his street.
“Both together?”
“Absolutely. Punch his nose and black his eye. Eleven hundred dollars.”
“There should be a reduction for taking the two,” I said. “We’ll make it a thousand.”
“It’s dirt cheap,” George said. “They’ll snap it up.”
“What’s next?”
We were both silent now, concentrating fiercely. Three deep parallel grooves of skin appeared upon George’s rather low sloping forehead. He began to scratch his scalp, slowly but very strongly. I looked away and tried to think of all the terrible things which people had done to other people. Finally, I got one, and with George watching the point of my pencil moving over the paper, I wrote: ‘4. Put a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) on the floor of his car, by the pedals, when he parks it.’
“Jesus Christ!” George whispered. “You want to kill him with fright!”
“Sure,” I said.
“And where’d you get a rattlesnake, anyway?”
“Buy it. You can always buy them. How much shall we charge for that one?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” George said firmly. I wrote it down.
“Now we need one more.”
“Here it is,” George said. “Kidnap him in a car, take all his clothes away except his underpants and his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Avenue in the rush hour.” He smiled, a broad triumphant smile.
“We can’t do that.”
“Write it down. And charge two thousand five hundred bucks. You’d do it all right if old Womberg were to offer you that much.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I would.” And I wrote it down. “That’s enough now,” I added. “That gives them a wide choice.”
“And where will we get the cards printed?” George asked.
“George Karnoffsky,” I said. “Another George. He’s a friend of mine. Runs a small printing shop down on Third Avenue . Does wedding invitations and things like that for all the big stores. He’ll do it. I know he will.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
We both leapt out of bed and began to dress. “It’s twelve o’clock,” I said. “If we hurry we’ll catch him before he goes to lunch.”
It was still snowing when we went out into the street and the snow was four or five inches thick on the sidewalk, but we covered the fourteen blocks to Karnoffsky’s shop at a tremendous pace and we arrived there just as he was putting his coat on to go out. “Claude!” he shouted. “Hi boy! How you been keeping,” and he pumped my hand. He had a fat friendly face and a terrible nose with great wide-open nose-wings which overlapped his cheeks by at least an inch on either side. I greeted him and told him that we had come to discuss some most urgent business. He took off his coat and led us back into the office, then I began to tell him our plans and what we wanted him to do.
When I’d got about quarter way through my story, he started to roar with laughter and it was impossible for me to continue; so I cut it short and handed him the piece of paper with the stuff on it that we wanted him to print. And now, as he read it, his whole body began to shake with laughter and he kept slapping the desk with his hand and coughing and choking and roaring like someone crazy. We sat watching him. We didn’t see anything particular to laugh about.
Finally he quietened down and he took out a handkerchief and made a great business about wiping his eyes. “Never laughed so much,” he said weakly. “That’s a great joke, that is. It’s worth a lunch. Come on out and I’ll give you lunch.”
“Look,” I said severely, “this isn’t any joke. There is nothing to laugh at. You are witnessing the birth of a new and powerful organization…
“Come on,” he said and he began to laugh again. “Come on and have lunch.”
“When can you get those cards printed?” I said. My voice was stern and businesslike. He paused and stared at us. “You mean… you really mean… you’re serious about this thing?”
“Absolutely. You are witnessing the birth…
“All right,” he said, “all right,” he stood up. “I think you’re crazy and you’ll get in trouble. Those boys like messing other people about, but they don’t much fancy being messed about themselves.”
“When can you get them printed, and without any of your workers reading them?”
“For this,” he answered gravely, “I will give up my lunch. I will set the type myself. It is the least I can do.” He laughed again and the rims of his huge nostrils twitched with pleasure. “How many do you want?”
“A thousand—to start with, and envelopes.”
“Come back at two o’clock,” he said and I thanked him very much and as we went out we could hear his laughter rumbling down the passage into the back of the shop.
At exactly two o’clock we were back. George Karnoffsky was in his office and the first thing I saw as we went in was the high stack of printed cards on his desk in front of him. They were large cards, about twice the size of ordinary wedding or cocktail invitation-cards. “There you are,” he said. “All ready for you.” The fool was still laughing.
He handed us each a card and I examined mine carefully. It was a beautiful thing. He had obviously taken much trouble over it. The card itself was thick and stiff with narrow gold edging all the way around, and the letters of the heading were exceedingly elegant. I cannot reproduce it here in all its splendour, but I can at least show you how it read: VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.
Dear…………………
You have probably seen columnist ‘s slanderous and unprovoked attack upon your character in today’s paper. It is an outrageous insinuation, a deliberate distortion of the truth.
Are you yourself prepared to allow this miserable malice-monger to insult you in this manner?
The whole world knows that it is foreign to the nature of the American people to permit themselves to be insulted either in public or in private without rising up in righteous indignation and demanding—nay, exacting—a just measure of retribution.
On the other hand, it is only natural that a citizen of your standing and reputation will not wish personally to become further involved in this sordid petty affair, or indeed to have any direct contact whatsoever with this vile person.
How then are you to obtain satisfaction?
The answer is simple, VENGEANCE IS MINE
INC. Will obtain it for you. We will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer individual punishment to columnist, and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration: 1. Punch him on the nose, once, hard $500 2. Black his eye $600 3. Punch him on the nose and black his eye $1000 4. Introduce a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) into his car, on the floor by his pedals, when he parks it $1500 5. Kidnap him, take all his clothes away except his underpants, his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Ave. in the rush hour $2500 This work executed by a professional.
If you desire to avail yourself of any of these offers, kindly reply to VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. at the address indicated upon the enclosed slip of paper. If it is practicable, you will be notified in advance of the place where the action will occur and of the time, so that you may, if you wish, watch the proceedings in person from a safe and anonymous distance.
No payment need be made until after your order has been satisfactorily executed, when an account will be rendered in the usual manner.
George Karnoffsky had done a beautiful job of printing.
“Claude,” he said, “you like?”
“It’s marvellous.”
“It’s the best I could do for you. It’s like in the war when I would see soldiers going off perhaps to get killed and all the time I would want to be giving them things and doing things for them.” He was beginning to laugh again, so I said, “We’d better be going now. Have you got large envelopes for these cards?”
“Everything is here. And you can pay me when the money starts coming in.” That seemed to set him off worse than ever and he collapsed into his chair, giggling like a fool. George and I hurried out of the shop into the street, into the cold snow-falling afternoon.
We almost ran the distance back to our room and on the way up I borrowed a Manhattan telephone directory from the public telephone in the hall. We found ‘Womberg, William S,’ without any trouble and while I read out the address—somewhere up in the East Nineties—George wrote it on one of the envelopes.
‘Gimple, Mrs Ella H,’ was also in the book and we addressed an envelope to her as well. “We’ll just send to Womberg and Gimple today,” I said. “We haven’t really got started yet. Tomorrow we’ll send a dozen.”
“We’d better catch the next post,” George said.
“We’ll deliver them by hand,” I said. “Now, at once. The sooner they get them the better. Tomorrow might be too late. They won’t be half so angry tomorrow as they are today. People are apt to cool off through the night. See here,” I said, “you go ahead and deliver those two cards right away. While you’re doing that I’m going to snoop around the town and try to find out something about the habits of Lionel Pantaloon. See you back here later in the evening… At about nine o’clock that evening I returned and found George lying on his bed smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
“I delivered them both; he said. “Just slipped them through the letter-boxes and rang the bells and beat it up the street. Womberg had a huge house, a huge white house. How did you get on?”
“I went to see a man I know who works in the sports section of the Daily Mirror. He told me all.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said Pantaloon’s movements are more or less routine. He operates at night, but wherever he goes earlier in the evening, he always—and this is the important point—he always finishes up at the Penguin Club. He gets there round about midnight and stays until two or twothirty. That’s when his legmen bring him all the dope.”
“That’s all we want to know,” George said happily.
“It’s too easy.”
“Money for old rope.”
There was a full bottle of blended whisky in the cupboard and George fetched it out. For the next two hours we sat upon our beds drinking the whisky and making wonderful and complicated plans for the development of our organization. By eleven o’clock we were employing a staff of fifty, including twelve famous pugilists, and our offices were in Rockefeller Center . Towards midnight we had obtained control over all columnists and were dictating their daily columns to them by telephone from our headquarters, taking care to insult and infuriate at least twenty rich persons in one part of the country or another every day. We were immensely wealthy and George had a British Bentley, I had five Cadillacs. George kept practising telephone talks with Lionel Pantaloon. “That you, Pantaloon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, listen here. I think your column stinks today. It’s lousy.”
“I’m very sorry, sir. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.”
“Damn right you’ll do better, Pantaloon. Matter of fact we’ve been thinking about getting someone else to take over.”
“But please, please sir, just give me another chance.”
“OK, Pantaloon, but this is the last. And by the way, the boys are putting a rattlesnake in your car tonight, on behalf of Mr Hiram C. King, the soap manufacturer. Mr King will be watching from across the street so don’t forget to act scared when you see it.”
“Yes, sir, of course, sir. I won’t forget, sir..
When we finally went to bed and the light was out, I could still hear George giving hell to Pantaloon on the telephone.
The next morning we were both woken up by the church clock on the corner striking nine. George got up and went to the door to get the papers and when he came back he was holding a letter in his hand.
“Open it!” I said.
He opened it and carefully unfolded a single sheet of thin notepaper.
“Read it!” I shouted.
He began to read it aloud, his voice low and serious at first but rising gradually to a high, almost hysterical shout of triumph as the full meaning of the letter was revealed to him. It said: ‘Your methods appear curiously unorthodox. At the same time anything you do to that scoundrel has my approval. So go ahead. Start with Item 1, and if you are successful IT be only too glad to give you an order to work right on through the list. Send the bill to me. William S. Womberg.’
I recollect that in the excitement of the moment we did a kind of dance around the room in our pyjamas, praising Mr Womberg in loud voices and shouting that we were rich. George turned somersaults on his bed and it is possible that I did the same.
“When shall we do it?” he said. “Tonight?”
I paused before replying. I refused to be rushed. The pages of history are filled with the names of great men who have come to grief by permitting themselves to make hasty decisions in the excitement of a moment. I put on my dressing-gown, lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down the room. “There is no hurry,” I said. “Womberg’s order can be dealt with in due course. But first of all we must send out today’s cards.”
I dressed quickly, we went out to the newsstand across the street, bought one copy of every daily paper there was and returned to our room. The next two hours was spent in reading the columnists’ columns, and in the end we had a list of eleven people—eight men and three women—all of whom had been insulted in one way or another by one of the columnists that morning. Things were going well. We were working smoothly. It took us only another half hour to look up the addresses of the insulted ones—two we couldn’t find—and to address the envelopes.
In the afternoon we delivered them, and at about six in the evening we got back to our room, tired but triumphant. We made coffee and we fried hamburgers and we had supper in bed. Then we re-read Womberg’s letter aloud to each other many many times.
“What’s he doing he’s giving us an order for six thousand one hundred dollars,” George said. “Items 1 to 5 inclusive.”
“It’s not a bad beginning. Not bad for the first day. Six thousand a day works out at… let me see… it’s nearly two million dollars a year, not counting Sundays. A million each. It’s more than Betty Grable.”
“We are very wealthy people,” George said. He smiled, a slow and wondrous smile of pure contentment.
“In a day or two we will move to a suite of rooms at the St Regis.”
“I think the Waldorf,” George said.
“All right, the Waldorf. And later on we might as well take a house.”
“One like Womberg’s?”
“All right. One like Womberg’s. But first,” I said, “we have work to do. Tomorrow we shall deal with Pantaloon. We will catch him as he comes out of the Penguin Club. At two-thirty a. m. we will be waiting for him, and when he comes out into the street you will step forward and punch him once, hard, right upon the point of the nose as per contract.”
“It will be a pleasure,” George said. “It will be a real pleasure. But how do we get away? Do we run?”
“We shall hire a car for an hour. We have just enough money left for that, and I shall be sitting at the wheel with the engine running, not ten yards away, and the door will be open and when you’ve punched him you’ll just jump back into the car and we’ll be gone.”
“It is perfect. I shall punch him very hard.” George paused. He clenched his right fist and examined his knuckles. Then he smiled again and he said slowly, “This nose of his, is it not possible that it will afterwards be so much blunted that it will no longer poke well into other people’s business?”
“It is quite possible,” I answered, and with that happy thought in our minds we switched out the lights and went early to sleep.
The next morning I was woken by a shout and I sat up and saw George standing at the foot of my bed in his pyjamas, waving his arms. “Look!” he shouted, “there are four! There are four!” I looked, and indeed there were four letters in his hand.
“Open them. Quickly, open them.”
The first one he read aloud: “Dear Vengeance Is Mine Inc., That’s the best proposition I’ve had in years. Go right ahead and give Mr Jacob Swinski the rattlesnake treatment (Item 4). But I’ll be glad to pay double if you’ll forget to extract the poison from its fangs. Yours Gertrude Porter Van dervelt. PS You’d better insure the snake. That guy’s bite carries more poison than the rattler’s.”
George read the second one aloud: “My cheque for $500 is made out and lies before me on my desk. The moment I receive proof that you have punched Lionel Pantaloon hard on the nose, it will be posted to you, I should prefer a fracture, if possible. Yours etc. Wilbur H. Gollogly.”
George read the third one aloud: “In my present frame of mind and against my better judgement, I am tempted to reply to your card and to request that you deposit that scoundrel Walter Kennedy upon Fifth Avenue dressed only in his underwear. I make the proviso that there shall be snow on the ground at the time and that the temperature shall be sub-zero. H. Gresham.”
The fourth one he also read aloud: “A good hard sock on the nose for Pantaloon is worth five hundred of mine or anybody else’s money. I should like to watch. Yours sincerely, Claudia Calthorpe Hines.”
George laid the letters down gently, carefully upon the bed. For a while there was silence. We stared at each other, too astonished, too happy to speak. I began to calculate the value of those four orders in terms of money.
“That’s five thousand dollars worth,” I said softly.
Upon George’s face there was a huge bright grin. “Claude,” he said, “should we not move now to the Waldorf?”
“Soon,” I answered, “but at the moment we have no time for moving. We have not even time to send out fresh cards today. We must start to execute the orders we have in hand. We are overwhelmed with work.”
“Should we not engage extra staff and enlarge our organization?”
“Later,” I said. “Even for that there is no time today. Just think what we have to do. We have to put a rattlesnake in Jacob Swinski’s car… we have to dump Walter Kennedy on Fifth Avenue in his underpants… we have to punch Pantaloon on the nose… let me see… yes, for three different people we have to punch Pantaloon. Ґ I stopped. I closed my eyes. I sat still. Again I became conscious of a small clear stream of inspiration flowing into the tissues of my brain. “I have it!” I shouted. “I have it! I have it! Three birds with one stone! Three customers with one punch!”
“How?”
“Don’t you see? We only need to punch Pantaloon once and each of the three customers… Womberg, Gollogly and Claudia Hines… will think it’s being done specially for him or her.”
“Say it again.” I said it again.
“It’s brilliant.”
“It’s common-sense. And the same principle will apply to the others. The rattlesnake treatment and the others can wait until we have more orders. Perhaps in a few days we will have ten orders for rattlesnakes in Swinski’s car. Then we will do them all in one go.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“This evening then,” I said, “we will handle Pantaloon. But first we must hire a car. Also we must send telegrams, one to Womberg, one to Gollogly and one to Claudia Hines, telling them where and when the punching will take place.”
We dressed rapidly and went out.
In a dirty silent little garage down on East 9th Street we managed to hire a car, a 1934 Chevrolet, eight dollars for the evening. We then sent three telegrams, each one identical and cunningly worded to conceal its true meaning from inquisitive people: ‘Hope to see you outside Penguin Club two-thirty a.m. Regards V. I. Mine.”
“There is one thing more,” I said. “It is essential that you should be disguised. Pantaloon, or the doorman, for example, must not be able to identify you afterwards. You must wear a false moustache.”
“What about you?”
“Not necessary. I’ll be sitting in the car. They won’t see me.”
We went to a children’s toy-shop and we bought for George a magnificent black moustache, a thing with long pointed ends, waxed and stiff and shining, and when he held it up against his face he looked exactly like the Kaiser of Germany. The man in the shop also sold us a tube of glue and he showed us how the moustache should be attached to the upper lip. “Going to have fun with the kids?” he asked, and George said, “Absolutely.”
All was now ready, but there was a long time to wait. We had three dollars left between us and with this we bought a sandwich each and went to a movie. Then, at eleven o’clock that evening, we collected our car and in it we began to cruise slowly through the streets of New York waiting for the time to pass.
“You’d better put on your moustache so as you get used to it.”
We pulled up under a street lamp and I squeezed some glue on to George’s upper lip and fixed on the huge black hairy thing with its pointed ends. Then we drove on. It was cold in the car and outside it was beginning to snow again. I could see a few small snowflakes falling through the beams of the car-lights. George kept saying, “How hard shall I hit him?” and I kept answering, “Hit him as hard as you can, and on the nose. It must be on the nose because that is a part of the contract. Everything must be done right. Our clients may be watching.”
At two in the morning we drove slowly past the entrance to the Penguin Club in order to survey the situation. “I will park there,” I said, “just past the entrance in that patch of dark. But I will leave the door open for you.”
We drove on. Then George said, “What does he look like? How do I know it’s him?”
“Don’t worry,” I answered. “I’ve thought of that,” and I took from my pocket a piece of paper and handed it to’ him. “You take this and fold it up small and give it to the doorman and tell him to see it gets to Pantaloon quickly. Act as though you are scared to death and in an awful hurry. It’s a hundred to one that Pantaloon will come out. No columnist could resist that message.”
On the paper I had written: ‘I am a worker in Soviet Consulate. Come to the door very quickly please I have something to tell but come quickly as I am in danger, I cannot come in to you.’
“You see,” I said, “your moustache will make you look like a Russian. All Russians have big moustaches.”
George took the paper and folded it up very small and held it in his fingers. It was nearly half past two in the morning now and we began to drive towards the Penguin Club.
“You all set?” I said.
“Yes.”
“We’re going in now. Here we come. I’ll park just past the entrance… here. Hit him hard,” I said, and George opened the door and got out of the car. I closed the door behind him but I leant over and kept my hand on the handle so I could open it again quick, and I let down the window so I could watch. I kept the engine ticking over.
I saw George walk swiftly up to the doorman who stood under the red and white canopy which stretched out over the sidewalk. I saw the doorman turn and look down at George and I didn’t like the way he did it. He was a tall proud man dressed in a magenta-coloured uniform with gold buttons and gold shoulders and a broad white stripe down each magenta trouser-leg. Also he wore white gloves and he stood there looking proudly down at George, frowning, pressing his lips together hard. He was looking at George’s moustache and I thought Oh my God we have overdone it. We have over-disguised him. He’s going to know it’s false and he’s going to take one of the long pointed ends in his fingers and he’ll give it a tweak and it’ll come off. But he didn’t. He was distracted by George’s acting, for George was acting well. I could see him hopping about, clasping and unclasping his hands, swaying his body and shaking his head, and I could hear him saying, “Plees plees plees you must hurry. It is life and teth. Plees plees take it kvick to Mr Pantaloon.” His Russian accent was not like any accent I had heard before, but all the same there was a quality of real despair in his voice.
Finally, gravely, proudly, the doorman said, “Give me the note.” George gave it to him and said, “Tank you, tank you, but say it is urgent,” and the doorman disappeared inside. In a few moments he returned and said, “It’s being delivered now.” George paced nervously up and down. I waited, watching the door. Three or four minutes elapsed. George wrung his hands and said, “Vere is he? Vere is he? Plees to go and see if he is not coming!”
“What’s the matter with you?” the doorman said. Now he was looking at George’s moustache again.
“It is life and teth! Mr Pantaloon can help! He must come!”
“Why don’t you shut up,” the doorman said, but he opened the door again and he poked his head inside and I heard him saying something to someone.
To George he said, “They say he’s coming now.’, A moment later the door opened and Pantaloon himself, small and dapper, stepped out. He paused by the door, looking quickly from side to side like an inquisitive ferret. The doorman touched his cap and pointed at George. I heard Pantaloon say, “Yes, what did you want?”
George said, “plees, dis vay a leetle so as novone can hear,” and he led Pantaloon along the pavement, away from the doorman and towards the car.
“Come on, now,” Pantaloon said. “What is it you want?”
Suddenly George shouted “Look!” and he pointed up the street. Pantaloon turned his head and as he did so George swung his right arm and he hit pantaloon plumb on the point of the nose. I saw George leaning forward on the punch, all his weight behind it, and the whole of Pantaloon appeared somehow to lift slightly off the ground and to float backwards for two or three feet until the faade of the Penguin Club stopped him. All this happened very quickly, and then George was in the car beside me and we were off and I could hear the doorman blowing a whistle behind us.
“We’ve done it!” George gasped. He was excited and out of breath. “I hit him good! Did you see how good I hit him!”
It was snowing hard now and I drove fast and made many sudden turnings and I knew no one would catch us in this snowstorm.
“Son of a bitch almost went through the wall I hit him so hard.”
“Well done, George,” I said. “Nice work, George.”
“And did you see him lift? Did you see him lift right up off the ground?”
“Womberg will be pleased,” I said.
“And Gollogly, and the Hines woman.”
“They’ll all be pleased,” I said. “Watch the money coming in.”
“There’s a car behind us!” George shouted. “It’s following us! It’s right on our tail! Drive like mad!”
“Impossible,” I said. “They couldn’t have picked us up already. It’s just another car going somewhere.” I turned sharply to the right.
“He’s still with us,” George said. “Keep turning. We’ll lose him soon.”
“How the hell can we lose a police-car in a nineteen thirty-four Chev,” I said. “I’m going to stop.”
“Keep going!” George shouted. “You’re doing fine.”
“I’m going to stop,” I said. “It’ll only make them mad if we go on.”
George protested fiercely but I knew it was no good and I pulled in to the side of the road. The other car swerved out and went past us and skidded to a standstill in front of us.
“Quick,” George said. “Let’s beat it.” He had the door open and he was ready to run.
“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “Stay where you are. You can’t get away now.”
A voice from outside said, “All right boys, what’s the hurry?”
“No hurry,” I answered. “We’re just going home.”
“Yea?”
“Oh yes, we’re just on our way home now.”
The man poked his head in through the window on my side, and he looked at me, then at George, then at me again.
“It’s a nasty night,” George said. “We’re just trying to reach home before the streets get all snowed up.”
“Well,” the man said, “you can take it easy. I just thought I’d like to give you this right away.” He dropped a wad of banknotes on to my lap. “I’m Gollogly,” he added, “Wilbur H. Gollogly,” and he stood out there in the snow grinning at us, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands to keep them warm. “I got your wire and I watched the whole thing from across the street. You did a fine job. I’m paying you boys double. It was worth it. Funniest thing I ever seen. Goodbye boys. Watch your steps. They’ll be after you now. Get out of town if I were you. Goodbye.” And before we could say anything, he was gone.
When finally we got back to our room I started packing at once.
“You crazy?” George said. “We’ve only got to wait a few hours and we receive five hundred dollars each from Womberg and the Hines woman. Then we’ll have two thousand altogether and we can go anywhere we want.”
So we spent the next day waiting in our room and reading the papers, one of which had a whole column on the front page headed, ‘Brutal assault on famous columnist’. But sure enough the late afternoon post brought us two letters and there was five hundred dollars in each.
And right now, at this moment, we are sitting in a Pullman car, drinking Scotch whisky and heading south for a place where there is always sunshine and where the horses are running every day. We are immensely wealthy and George keeps saying that if we put the whole of our two thousand dollars on a horse at ten to one we shall make another twenty thousand and we will be able to retire. ‘We will have a house at Palm Beach ,’ he says, ‘and we will entertain upon a lavish scale. Beautiful socialites will loll around the edge of our swimming pool sipping cool drinks, and after a while we will perhaps put another large sum of money upon another horse and we shall become wealthier still. Possibly we will become tired of Palm Beach and then we will move around in a leisurely manner among the playgrounds of the rich. Monte Carlo and places like that. Like the Au Khan and the Duke of Windsor . We will become prominent members of the international set and film stars will smile at us and head-waiters will bow to us and perhaps, in time to come, perhaps we might even get ourselves mentioned in Lionel Pantaloon’s column.’
“That would be something,” I said.
“Wouldn’t it just,” he answered happily. “Wouldn’t that just be something.”