Then I heard him say:
“The young man was right. There were deadly disease germs on that letter, but fortunately, he didn’t become infected. You really can’t blame him for trying to steal it — he was only protecting the mailman.”
“You see?” I said ecstatically. “You see?”
Jake grunted. “What do we do, give him a medal?”
“Gee, you don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I’ve burned the letter as instructed,” Fusco said, looking at me with a funny kind of twinkle. “So you can forget the whole thing.”
“What kind of germs were they, Doc?” Cochran asked.
“One of the deadliest,” Fusco smiled. “I’m not sure of the exact name, but I think it’s something like zelus excessus. But everything’s fine now.”
“Then can I go?” I said eagerly. “Will you let me go?”
Jakes rubbed his jaw, and then looked at his buddy.
“I guess so. If the doctor says it’s okay.”
I made the door so fast that I think I broke Nurmi’s record. But something stopped me before I turned the knob. I looked back at the doctor, and said:
“Say, you sure I didn’t get infected? I’ve got an awful weak constitution. I mean, I can catch anything.”
“You’re absolutely fine,” the doctor said.
But I wasn’t so fine by the time I met Ruby Martinson at Hector’s Cafeteria that night. I was seeing spots before my eyes, my head was feverish, and my tongue felt two inches thick.
“Ruby,” I said, trembling. “Ruby I’m feeling sick. Why didn’t you tell me it was the truth?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
“Ruby, you heard about what the doctor said. I think I’m coming down with this zelus excessus. Do I look blue to you?”
He laughed happily. “You dope! Don’t you see what happened? This Fusco must be an all right guy; he read the letter and figured out what had happened. So he just played along with the gag, and pretended that there were deadly germs on the letter.”
“He did?”
“Of course! You know what zelus excessus means in Latin? Too much jealousy!”
Ruby was feeling so good that he bought me a slab of lemon meringue pie. But I was too sick to enjoy it.
The Lipstick Explosion
by James Holding
What would we do without science? It both saves and destroys lives — and you could hardly ask more of it than that. Be that as it may, there are those backward folk who have been requesting that it go away.
It has been said that a drowning person, in the brief moments between his last desperate struggles to stay afloat and his death by liquid suffocation, sees passing before his eyes, like a speeded-up motion picture, the chief events and crises of his life.
To Gaston Beaujolais, sitting in his favorite armchair in the flag-stoned parlor of Henriette’s house, with Henriette herself on his knee, a similar phenomenon occurred one wet spring night in the mountain village of St. Paul de Vence.
There was, however, one important difference: Gaston was in no danger of drowning — unless it was in the deep hazel pools of Henriette’s eyes. He was, in fact, demonstrating his affection for Henriette when the first scene of his personal cinema flashed without warning onto the screen of his consciousness.
Curiously, this flash-back, the lightning-fast recapitulation of his past, did not begin with his childhood or early youth as such manifestations are commonly expected to do. Instead, Gaston’s mental movie began only after he had attained mature manhood, married Yvonne, and become preeminent in his profession...
Gaston Beaujolais was a chemist. Not the kind of chemist, he was fond of saying, that messes about with nauseous batches of umbelliferone, phthalic anhydride or paradichlorobenzene. Oh, no. He had put his undoubted chemical talents to far better use, placing them at the service of Art and Beauty (with capital letters). He devoted his working hours entirely to the compounding of perfumes, face powders, soothing salves, wrinkle removers, astringents, cleansing unguents and sensuous shades of lipstick and nail polish. Anything, in short, that could conceivably help the French female to look and smell more attractive was grist to Beaujolais’ chemical mill. He was, in his words, a cosmetic chemist. And a good one, too. Indeed, he occupied the post of Chief Chemist at Rousseau Frères, the well-known firm of cosmetic manufacturers whose laboratories were located on the Boulevard Gambetta in Nice, just off the Promenade des Anglais.
It was a mental picture of that laboratory of his that occurred to him first, in that run-through of his past.
He saw himself, quite clearly, standing in his laboratory, a man of middle height with sensitive hands and a purely Gallic ebullience. He was dressed in his white working smock and was watching intently a concoction of some sort that simmered in a test tube over a burner.
He knew, instantly, exactly what the concoction was. It was the new lipstick ingredient he had discovered how to synthesize only that day. It had given him a great deal of trouble, the development of this particular ingredient. For it was not a substance usually included in lipsticks. Yet it was an ingredient that Beaujolais felt sure would inevitably enable Rousseau Frères to corner the world lipstick market, if he should ever divulge its secret to his superiors.
He had not the slightest intention of doing so, however. It was his exclusive formula, privately arrived at and now destined for use in one lipstick only: the lipstick with which he intended to murder his wife.
And the truly Gallic touch that distinguished Gaston’s planning was this: he could contemplate with equanimity the murder of his wife, and incidentally, of his best friend as well, but he felt very strongly indeed that when Yvonne died, he couldn’t bear it if she didn’t die quickly and happily. She had not, for some years now, of course, been a wife in the true sense of the word. Beautiful, yes, and gracious, convenable, affectionate she still was — but in matters of love, what had started as an attractive timidity on her part during their honeymoon had since become what he could only term outright indifference to him. This, Gaston Beaujolais felt, was certainly unsuitable, nay unacceptable, in the wife of an eminent cosmetic chemist.
His first attempt to solve his problem had taken, the form of Henriette Deschamps, a lovely mannequin he had met at a fashion show in Cannes, where he had been present as a representative of Rousseau Frères’ Commercial Make-up Service. Henriette was lonely, being only recently transplanted from Paris to the Cote d’Azur; she was basically fond of men; she found Gaston appealing in a chemical way. And she had no objections when he found a charming cottage for her in St. Paul de Vence, a village in the hills with the geographical advantage of being readily accessible to him when he motored from Nice to Grasse and back on his regular visits to secure certain flower fragrances for his work.
Henriette was a joy — a gay, intelligent girl who very soon supplanted Gaston’s wife, Yvonne, in his affection. This was made all the easier by Yvonne’s obvious and growing distaste for any expression of Gaston’s feelings. Even a hurried kiss from him upon his return from the laboratory made her wince a little, uncontrollably. Gaston, who was blessed with a normally healthy ego, realized that Yvonne’s was not a revulsion reserved only for him, but encompassed all men alike. Even Alfred, his long time friend, who had also courted Yvonne and bowed gracefully to defeat when Gaston came off with the prize, could nowadays scarcely touch Yvonne’s hand to pass her into a taxi, without the same shrinking becoming painfully apparent in her.