And you know what? He was watching a program on a funny little portable TV set that he had on the bureau. Color TV. Only it wasn’t working right. There were no faces, no pictures, nothing but colors chasing around. A big blob of red, a big blob of orange, and a wiggly border of blue and green and black. A voice was talking from it, but all the words were fouled up. “Wah-wah, de-wah, de-wah.”
Just as I came in, he turned it off. “Times Square is a bad neighborhood for TV,” I told him. “Too much interference.”
“Yes,” he said. “Too much interference.” He closed up the set and put it away. I wished I’d seen it when it was working right.
Funny thing, you know? I would have expected a smell of liquor in the room, I would have expected to see a couple of empties in the tin trash basket near the bureau. Not a sign.
The only smell in the room was a smell I couldn’t recognize. I guess it was the smell of Eksar himself, concentrated.
“Hi,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable because of the way I’d been with him back in the office. So rough I’d been.
He stayed on the bed. “I’ve got the twenty,” he said. “You’ve got the five?”
“Oh, I guess I’ve got the five, all right,” I said, looking in my wallet hard and trying to be funny. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even invite me to sit down. I pulled out a bill. “Okay?”
He leaned forward and stared, as if he could see—in all that dimness—what kind of a bill it was. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll want a receipt. A notarized receipt.”
Well, what the hell, I thought, a notarized receipt. “Then we’ll have to go down. There’s a druggist on Forty-fifth.”
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet with a couple of small coughs that came one, two, three, four, right after one another. “The bathroom’s out in the hall. Let me wash up and we’ll go down.”
I waited for him outside the bathroom, thinking that he’d grown a whole hell of a lot more sanitary all of a sudden.
I could have saved my worries. I don’t know what he did in the bathroom, but one thing I knew for sure when he came out: soap and water had nothing to do with it. His face, his neck, his clothes, his hands—they were all as dirty as ever. He still looked like he’d been crawling over a garbage dump all night long.
On the way to the druggist, I stopped in a stationery store and bought a book of blank receipts. I filled out most of it right there. New York, N.Y. and the date. Received from Mr. Ogo Eksar the sum of twenty dollars for a five-dollar bill bearing the serial number … … … “That okay?” I asked him. “I’m putting in the serial number to make it look as if you want that particular bill, you know, what the lawyers call the value-received angle.”
He screwed his head around and read the receipt. Then he checked the serial number of the bill I was holding. He nodded.
We had to wait for the druggist to get through with a couple of customers. When I signed the receipt, he read it to himself, shrugged and went ahead and stamped it with his seal.
I paid him the two bits: I was the one making the profit.
Eksar slid a crisp new twenty to me along the glass of the counter. He watched while I held it up to the light, first one side, then the other.
“Good bill?” he asked.
“Yes. You understand: I don’t know you, I don’t know your money.”
“Sure. I’d do it myself with a stranger.” He put the receipt and my five-dollar bill in his pocket and started to walk away.
“Hey,” I said. “You in a hurry?”
“No.” He stopped, looking puzzled. “No hurry. But you’ve got the twenty for a five. We made the deal. It’s all over.”
“All right, so we made the deal. How about a cup of coffee?”
He hesitated.
“It’s on me,” I told him. “I’ll be a big shot for a dime. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee.”
Now he looked worried. “You don’t want to back out? I’ve got the receipt. It’s all notarized. I gave you a twenty, you gave me a five. We made a deal.”
“It’s a deal, it’s a deal,” I said, shoving him into an empty booth. “It’s a deal, it’s all signed, sealed and delivered. Nobody’s backing out. I just want to buy you a cup of coffee.”
His face cleared up, all the way through that dirt. “No coffee. Soup. I’ll have some mushroom soup.”
“Fine, fine. Soup, coffee, I don’t care. I’ll have coffee.”
I sat there and studied him. He hunched over the soup and dragged it into his mouth, spoonful after spoonful, the living picture of a bum who hadn’t eaten all day. But pure essence of bum, triple-distilled, the label of a fine old firm.
A guy like this should be lying in a doorway trying to say no to a cop’s nightstick, he should be coughing his alcoholic guts out. He shouldn’t be living in a real honest-to-God hotel, or giving me a twenty for a five, or swallowing anything as respectable as mushroom soup.
But it made sense. A TV giveaway show, they want to do this, they hire a damn good actor, the best money can buy, to toss their dough away. A guy who’ll be so good a bum that people’ll just laugh in his face when he tries to give them a deal with a profit.
“You don’t want to buy anything else?” I asked him.
He held the spoon halfway to his mouth and stared at me suspiciously. “Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like maybe you want to buy a ten for a fifty. Or a twenty for a hundred dollars?”
He thought about it, Eksar did. Then he went back to his soup, shoveling away. “That’s no deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal is that?”
“Excuse me for living. I just thought I’d ask. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you.” I lit a cigarette and waited.
My friend with the dirty face finished the soup and reached for a paper napkin. He wiped his lips. I watched him: he didn’t smudge a spot of the grime around his mouth. He just blotted the drops of soup up. He was dainty in his own special way.
“Nothing else you want to buy? I’m here, I’ve got time right now. Anything else on your mind, we might as well look into it.”
He balled up the paper napkin and dropped it into the soup plate. It got wet. He’d eaten all the mushrooms and left the soup.
“The Golden Gate Bridge,” he said all of a sudden.
I dropped the cigarette. “What?”
“The Golden Gate Bridge. The one in San Francisco. I’ll buy that. I’ll buy it for …” he lifted his eyes to the fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and thought for a couple of seconds “… say a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Cash on the barrel.”
“Why the Golden Gate Bridge?” I asked him like an idiot.
“That’s the one I want. You asked me what else I want to buy—well, that’s what else. The Golden Gate Bridge.”
“What’s the matter with the George Washington Bridge? It’s right here in New York, it’s across the Hudson River. It’s a newer bridge. Why buy something all the way out on the coast?”
He grinned at me as if he admired my cleverness. “Oh, no,” he said, twitching his left shoulder hard. Up, down, up, down. “I know what I want. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A hundred and a quarter. Take it or leave it.”
“The George Washington Bridge,” I argued, talking my head off just so I’d have a chance to think, “has a nice toll set-up, fifty cents a throw, and lots of traffic, plenty of traffic. I don’t know what the tolls are on the Golden Gate, but I’m damn sure you don’t have anywhere near the kind of traffic that New York can draw. And then there’s maintenance. The Golden Gate’s one of the longest bridges in the world, you’ll go broke trying to keep it in shape. Dollar for dollar, location for location, I’d say the George Washington’s a better deal for a man who’s buying a bridge.”