“M’sieu is a lawyer?” the waiter inquired, his hands perched insolently on his hips.
“No. M’sieu is a troublemaker,” Cordle said, giving what he considered to be fair warning.
“Then m’sieu must make what trouble he desires,” the waiter said. His eyes were slits.
“Okay,” Cordle said. And just then, fortuitously, an elderly couple came into the restaurant. The man wore a double-breasted slate-blue suit with a half-inch white pin stripe. The woman wore a flowered organdy dress. Cordle called to them, “Excuse me, are you folks English?”
A bit startled, the man inclined his head in the barest intimation of a nod.
“Then I would advise you not to eat here. I am a health inspector for UNESCO. The chef has apparently not washed his hands since D-Day. We haven’t made a definitive test for typhoid yet, but we have our suspicions. As soon as my assistant arrives with the litmus paper...”
A deathly hush had fallen over the restaurant.
“I suppose a boiled egg would be safe enough,” Cordle said.
The elderly man probably didn’t believe him. But it didn’t matter, Cordle was obviously trouble.
“Come, Mildred,” he said, and they hurried out.
“There goes sixty francs plus five percent tip,” Cordle said, coolly.
“Leave here at once!” the waiter snarled.
“I like it here,” Cordle said, folding his arms. “I like the ambiance, the sense of intimacy—”
“You are not permitted to stay without eating.”
“I shall eat. From the ten-franc menu.”
The waiters looked at one another, nodded in unison and began to advance in a threatening phalanx. Cordle called to the other diners, “I ask you all to bear witness! These men are going to attack me, four against one, contrary to French law and universal human ethics, simply because I want to order from the ten-franc menu, which they have falsely advertised.”
It was a long speech, but this was clearly the time for grandiloquence. Cordle repeated it in English.
The English girls gasped. The old Frenchman went on eating his soup. The Scandinavians nodded grimly and began to take off their jackets.
The waiters held another conference. The one who looked like Belmondo said, “M’sieu, you are forcing us to call the police.”
“That will save me the trouble,” Cordle said, “of calling them myself.”
“Surely, m’sieu does not want to spend his holiday in court?”
“That is how m’sieu spends most of his holidays,” Cordle said.
The waiters conferred again. Then Belmondo stalked over with the 30-franc menu. “The cost of the prix fixe will be ten francs, since evidently that is all m’sieu can afford.”
Cordle let that pass. “Bring me onion soup, green salad and the boeuf bourguignon.”
The waiter went to put in the order. While he was waiting, Cordle sang “Waltzing Matilda” in a moderately loud voice. He suspected it might speed up the service. He got his food by the time he reached “You’ll never catch me alive, said he” for the second time. Cordle pulled the tureen of stew toward him and lifted a spoon.
It was a breathless moment. Not one diner had left the restaurant. And Cordle was prepared. He leaned forward, soupspoon in shoveling position, and sniffed delicately. A hush fell over the room.
“It lacks a certain something,” Cordle said aloud. Frowning, he poured the onion soup into the boeuf bourguignon. He sniffed, shook his head and added a half loaf of bread, in slices. He sniffed again and added the salad and the contents of a saltcellar.
Cordle pursed his lips. “No,” he said, “it simply will not do.”
He overturned the entire contents of the tureen onto the table. It was an act comparable, perhaps, to throwing gentian violet on the Mona Lisa. All of France and most of western Switzerland went into a state of shock.
Unhurriedly, but keeping the frozen waiters under surveillance, Cordle rose and dropped ten francs into the mess. He walked to the door, turned and said, “My compliments to the chef, who might better be employed as a cement mixer. And this, mon vieux, is for you.”
He threw his crumpled linen napkin onto the floor.
As the matador, after a fine series of passes, turns his back contemptuously on the bull and strolls away, so went Cordle. For some unknown reason, the waiters did not rush out after him, shoot him dead and hang his corpse from the nearest lamppost. So Cordle walked for ten or fifteen blocks, taking rights and lefts at random. He came to the Promenade des Anglais and sat down on a bench. He was trembling and his shirt was drenched with perspiration.
“But I did it,” he said. “I did it! I was unspeakably vile and I got away with it!”
Now he really knew why carrots acted that way. Dear God in heaven, what joy, what delectable bliss!
Cordle then reverted to his mild-mannered self, smoothly and without regrets. He stayed that way until his second day in Rome.
He was in his rented car. He and seven other drivers were lined up at a traffic light on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. There were perhaps twenty cars behind them. All of the drivers were revving their engines, hunched over their steering wheels with slitted eyes, dreaming of Le Mans. All except Cordle, who was drinking in the cyclopean architecture of downtown Rome.
The checkered flag came down! The drivers floored their accelerators, trying to spin the wheels of their underpowered Fiats, wearing out their clutches and their nerves, but doing so with eclat and brio. All except Cordle, who seemed to be the only man in Rome who didn’t have to win a race or keep an appointment.
Without undue haste or particular delay, Cordle depressed the clutch and engaged the gear. Already he had lost nearly two seconds—unthinkable at Monza or Monte Carlo.
The driver behind him blew his horn frantically.
Cordle smiled to himself, a secret, ugly expression. He put the gearshift into neutral, engaged the hand brake and stepped out of his car. He ambled over to the hornblower, who had turned pasty white and was fumbling under his seat, hoping to find a tire iron.
“Yes?” said Cordle, in French, “is something wrong?”
“No, no, nothing,” the driver replied in French—his first mistake. “I merely wanted you to go, to move.”
“But I was just doing that,” Cordle pointed out.
“Well, then! It is all right!”
“No, it is not all right,” Cordle told him. “I think I deserve a better explanation of why you blew your horn at me.”
The hornblower—a Milanese businessman on holiday with his wife and four children—rashly replied, “My dear sir, you were slow, you were delaying us all.”
“Slow?” said Cordle. “You blew your horn two seconds after the light changed. Do you call two seconds slow?”
“It was much longer than that,” the man riposted feebly.
Traffic was now backed up as far south as Naples. A crowd of ten thousand had gathered. Carabinieri units in Viterbo and Genoa had been called into a state of alert.
“That is untrue,” Cordle said. “I have witnesses.” He gestured at the crowd, which gestured back. “I shall call my witnesses before the courts. You must know that you broke the law by blowing your horn within the city limits of Rome in what was clearly not an emergency.”
The Milanese businessman looked at the crowd, now swollen to perhaps fifty thousand. Dear God, he thought, if only the Goths would descend again and exterminate these leering Romans! If only the ground would open up and swallow this insane Frenchman! If only he, Giancarlo Morelli, had a dull spoon with which to open up the veins of his wrist!
Jets from the Sixth Fleet thundered overhead, hoping to avert the long-expected coup d’etat.