“Oh, I don’t, eh?” The bulky man seemed to be amused.
The waiter was not amused. He was very grim, and there was a curious strained look about his eyes. He came a little nearer now, and though, when he spoke, he was quieter than he had been before, there was a very unpleasant quality in his voice. “You know very well I’m running straight now, Dobby. You’re not going to try anything on here, and that’s flat.”
“Going back on your old friends, eh, Joe? Do you think that’s wise?”
“I’ve told you,” said the waiter. “I’m running straight now.”
“A nice respectable waiter in a nice respectable hotel. That’s the line, is it, Joe?”
Dobby looked at his cigar, put it down, then finished his whisky in one big gulp. He looked up. “It’s no good coming the high and mighty with me, Joe, and you know it. How did you get this job? Never mind. I don’t want to know. But I’ll bet they don’t know here that you’re an old lag.”
The waiter tried to moisten his lips. “They don’t,” he admitted.
“Of course they don’t. Nice respectable, gentlemanly hotel like this. What! — have an old lag as a waiter? Dear me, couldn’t be done! A convicted—”
“All right, all right,” the waiter interrupted hastily.
“A word from me to the management and where’s the nice job then?”
“You wouldn’t do that, Dobby,” the waiter cried.
“I don’t want to do it, Joe, but if an old friend won’t do a little job for me, quite a safe job, safe as houses, well, then, I might have to make trouble. And that would be very, very easy.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone? I’m not interfering with you. I’ve finished with your lot. I’ve had my medicine — and that’s a damn’ sight more than you’ve had yet, Dobby, don’t forget that.”
“Ah, you see, Joe, I’m not only lucky but I’m clever,” Mr. Dobby protested airily. “I don’t look it, I know. But I’m clever.”
“I’m going straight. I earn what I make, and I’m interfering with nobody. For God’s sake, leave me alone, Dobby.”
“Can’t do that, Joe. Sorry, but it can’t be done. You can’t go back on your old friends like that. If you help me with this little idea of mine, there’s no trouble coming to you, nothing but a little present from an old friend. But if you’re going to be awkward, Joe, you’re not going to get away with it. We can’t have you pretending to be respectable any longer. You’re losing this job, see? And you won’t get another in a hurry, will you? And then there’s this daughter of yours who’s just had the baby.”
“You’ve got hold of that, too, have you?” said the waiter, bitterly. “Not much you miss, is there, Dobby?”
“Got it all from Maggie tonight. I tell you, Joe, when women are angry, they spill it all. You don’t know how to manage ’em, Joe, and that’s where you get yourself into trouble. Now what’s it going to be? Are you going to be awkward or am I?”
The waiter came nearer still, very close indeed, leaning on the little table and gradually lowering his head. He looked monstrously unlike any possible waiter; a dangerous man. “Now you’ve got to listen to me a minute, Dobby,” he began, in a tone that was hardly above a whisper. “It’s taken me some time to get going. I’m all right here. But if you shop me, I’ll have to go.”
“Yes, and then — what?”
“I know. You needn’t tell me. I’m telling you now. If you shop me, and they turn me off here, I’ve finished. It’s taken me years to get as far as this, but it won’t take five minutes to push me back again. I’m through then. But what about you, Dobby, what about you?”
“What d’you mean?” Mr. Dobby must have been feeling rather uneasy, for he was blustering a little now. “You can’t shop me, Joe, and you needn’t think it. Cleverer men than you have tried to do that, and they missed the bus all right.”
The waiter produced what must have been the shortest and most unpleasant laugh ever heard in that room. He put out a hand, resting all his weight on the other, and though it was a waiter’s hand, it was very large and powerful. “I sha’n’t bother about that, Dobby,” he whispered. “I’ll do it all myself. I’ll put you where you won’t make any trouble again. I sha’n’t have any work to do, and I sha’n’t want any. I’ll spend all my time looking for you, Dobby, and when I’ve found you, I’ll make a good job of it.”
Mr. Dobby was no longer as florid-looking as he had been before, but he tried to carry off the situation. “And that’s been said before, and tried before, and it hasn’t come off.”
“It will this time,” said the waiter. “I sha’n’t do it myself, either. There’ll be two of us. I know where Raspy is. Raspy’s out, y’know, Dobby.”
“Raspy’s out,” the other admitted, uneasily. “But he’s dead.”
“He’s not dead. I saw him, spoke to him, not two months since, and I know where he is now. He wants to meet you again, Dobby, but he thinks you’re a long way off, in South America. You should hear what he says about you, Dobby, and what he’d like to do to you. And the minute I’m turned off here I’m going to Raspy, and then we’ll come looking for you, Dobby. And I mean that. Leave me here and I’ll interfere with nobody, but get me turned out into the street again and I’m a desperate man, see?”
“I see, Joe.”
The waiter drew back from the table. “So just take your little schemes somewhere else, Dobby. You’re not trying anything on here.”
Mr. Dobby rose from his chair and made for the door. “All right, Joe. Keep on being a good boy. So long.” He carried it off with his customary swagger, but there could be no denying that he had lost the rubber.
The waiter did not follow him out. He stood motionless for several minutes, breathing deeply, like a man who had just saved his skin only by the fraction of an inch. Then something seemed to happen to him; he shrank a little; the light died out of his eyes; certain lines vanished from his face; and, in fact, he turned into a middle-aged waiter again. There were a glass and an empty soda-water bottle to remove. He removed them.
“Well, here we are again,” said the first young man.
“I’ll push off in a minute, old man,” said the second young man, seating himself on the arm of a chair. “I’ve a busy day tomorrow.”
“You’ve time for a quick one.”
And he rang the bell. The same old waiter appeared. “Two whiskies, please.”
“Two whiskies, sir,” the waiter replied, in a colorless voice. “Yes, sir.”
The second young man yawned and then glanced round the room. “Don’t: stay in this hole again.”
“Wait a minute,” cried the first young man. “This room has actually had a customer or guest or visitor in it since we left. I smell cigar smoke and I see here the stump of a cigar. You know my methods, Watson.”
“I can’t believe it. I think the waiter must have come in and smoked it on the sly.”
The waiter returned. “I’m going off duty now, sir, but if you want anything else, the night porter’ll get it.”
“Thanks, but I sha’n’t. Here you are.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Still very quiet here, waiter.”
“Very quiet just now, sir,” And the waiter picked up his tray and departed.
“Not a bad chap, that waiter, but — my hat! — what a life!”
“What a life! Well — cheerio!”
“Cheerio!”
As Simple as ABC
by Ellery Queen
This is a very old story as Queen stories go. It happened in Ellery’s salad days, when he was tossing his talents about like a Sunday chef, and a redheaded girl named Nikki Porter had just attached herself to his typewriter. But it has not staled, this story; it has an unwithering flavor which those who partook of it relish to this day. There are gourmets in America whose taste-buds leap at any concoction dated 1861–1865. To such, the mere recitation of ingredients like Bloody Angle, Minié balls, Little Mac, Tenting Tonight, the brand of General Grant’s whiskey, not to mention Father Abraham, is sufficient to start the passionate flow of juices. These are the misty-hearted to whom the Civil War is “the War” and the blue-gray armies rather more than men. Romantics, if you will; garnishers of history. But it is they who pace the lonely sentrypost by the night Potomac, they who hear the creaking of the ammunition wagons, the snap of campfires, the scream of the thin gray line and the long groan of the battlefield. They personally flee the burning hell of the Wilderness as the dead rise and twist in the flames; under lanterns, in the flickering mud, they stoop compassionately with the surgeons over quivering heaps. It is they who keep the little flags flying and the ivy ever green on the graves of the old men.