“My dear sir!” he gasped, putting both hands on my shoulders for support. “My dear, dear sir! It’s a miracle! It’s a wonder pill! It’s . . . it’s the greatest invention of all time!”
“Hang on,” I said. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Of course I am all right,” he gasped. “I am a little bit jiggered, that’s all.” He started to giggle, and there he stood, this tiny Oriental person dressed in a top-hat and tails, clinging to my shoulders and giggling quite uncontrollably now. He was so small that the top of his top-hat came no higher than my lowest rib. “I am a little bit jiggered and a little bit pokered,” he said, “but who would not be, my dear boy, who would not be?”
“What happened, sir?” I asked him.
“I molested seven women!” he cried. “And these were not our dinky-tinky little Japanese women! No, no, no! They were enormous strong French wenchies! I took them in rotation, bang bang bang! And every one of them was screaming out camarade camarade camarade! I was a giant among these women, do you understand that, my dear young sir? I was a giant and I swung my giant club and I sent them all squiggling in every direction!”
I led him inside and sat him down in Madame Boisvain’s parlour. I found him a glass of brandy. He gulped it down and a faint yellowish colour began returning to his white cheeks. I noticed that there was a leather satchel suspended by a cord around his right wrist, and when he took it off and dumped it on the table, there was the clinking of coins inside it.
“You must be careful, sir,” I said to him. “You are a small man and these are large pills. I think it would be safer if you took only half the normal dose each time. Just half a pill instead of one.”
“Bunkum, sir!” he cried. “Bunkum and horseradish sauce, as we say in Japan! Tonight I propose to take not one pill but three!”
“Have you read what it says on the label?” I asked him anxiously. The last thing I wanted was a dead Jap around the place. Think of the outcry, the autopsy, the enquiries, and the pill-boxes with my name on them in his house.
“I examine the label,” he said, holding his glass out for more of Madame Boisvain’s brandy. “And I ignore it. We Japanese, we may be small in body but our organs are of gigantic size. That is why we walk bow-legged.”
I decided I would try to discourage him by doubling the price. “I’m afraid they are terrifically expensive, these pills,” I said.
“Money no object,” he said, pointing to the leather satchel on the table. “I pay in gold coins.”
“But Mr. Mitsouko,” I said, “each pill is going to cost you two thousand francs! They are very difficult to manufacture. That’s an awful lot of money for one pill.”
“I take twenty,” he said without even blinking.
My God, I thought, he is going to kill himself. “I cannot allow you to have them,” I told him, “unless you give me your word you will never take more than one at a time.”
“Do not lecture me, young buckeroo,” he said. “Just get me the pills.”
I went upstairs and counted out twenty pills and put them in a plain bottle. I wasn’t going to risk having my name and address on this lot.
“Ten I shall send to the Emperor in Tokyo,” Mr. Mitsouko said when I handed them to him. “It will put me in a very hot position with His Royal Highness.”
“It’ll put the Empress in some pretty hot positions, too,” I said.
He grinned and took up the leather satchel and emptied a vast pile of gold coins onto the table. They were all onehundred-franc pieces. “Twenty coins for each pill,” he said, starting to count them out. “That is four hundred coins altogether. And well worth it, you young magician.” When he had gone, I scooped up the coins and carried them up to my room.
My God, I thought. I am rich already.
But before the day was done, I was a lot richer. One by one, the messengers started trickling back from their respective embassies and ministries. They all carried precise orders and exact amounts of money, most of it in gold twenty-franc pieces. This is how it went:
Sir Charles Makepiece, 4 pills = 4,000 francs
The German ambassador, 8 pills = 8,000 francs
The Russian ambassador, 10 pills = 10,000 francs
The Hungarian ambassador, 3 pills = 3,000 francs
The Peruvian ambassador, 2 pills = 2,000 francs
The Mexican ambassador, 6 pills = 6,000 francs
The Italian ambassador, 4 pills 4,000 francs
The French foreign minister, 6 pills = 6,000 francs
The Army general, 3 pills = 3,000 francs
46,000 francs
Mr. Mitsouko, 20 pills (double price) 40,000 francs
Grand Total 86,000 francs
Eighty-six thousand francs! At the exchange rate of one hundred francs to five pounds, I was all of a sudden worth four thousand three hundred English pounds! It was incredible. One could buy a good house for money like that, with a carriage and a pair of horses thrown in, as well as one of those dashing newfangled automobiles!
For supper that night, Madame Boisvain served oxtail stew, and it wasn’t at all bad except that the sloshiness of it all encouraged Monsieur B to suck and swig and gulp in the most disgusting fashion. At one point, he picked up his plate and tipped the gravy straight into his mouth, together with a couple of carrots and a large onion. “My wife tells me that you had a lot of peculiar visitors today,” he said. His face was plastered with brown fluid and strands of meat were hanging from his moustache. “Who were these men?”
“They were friends of the British ambassador,” I answered. “I am doing a little business for Sir Charles Makepiece.”
“I cannot have my house turned into a market-place,” Monsieur B said, speaking with his mouth full of fat. “These activities must cease.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Tomorrow I am finding alternative accommodation.”
“You mean you’re leaving?” he cried.
“I’m afraid I must. But you may keep the advance rent my father has paid you.”
There was a bit of an uproar around the table about all this, much of it from Mademoiselle Nicole, but I stuck to my guns. And the next morning I went out and found myself a quite grand ground-floor apartment with three large rooms and a kitchen. It was on the avenue Jena. I packed all my possessions and loaded them into a hackney coach. Madame Boisvain was at the front door to see me off. “Madame,” I said, “I have a small favour to ask of you.”
“Yes?”
“And in return I want you to take this.” I held out five gold twenty-franc pieces. She nearly fell over. “From time to time,” I said, “people will call at your house asking for me. All you have to do is tell them I have moved and redirect them to this address.” I gave her a piece of paper with my new address written on it.
“But that is too much money, Monsieur Oswald!”
“Take it,” I said, pushing the coins into her hand. “Keep it for yourself. Don’t tell your husband. But it is very important that you inform everyone who calls where I am living.”
She promised to do this, and I drove away to my new quarters.
6
MY BUSINESS FLOURISHED. My ten original clients all whispered the great news to their own friends and those friends whispered it to other friends and in a month or so a large snowball had been created. I spent half of each day making pills. I thanked heaven I had had the foresight to bring such a large quantity of powder from the Sudan in the first place. But I did have to reduce my price. Not everyone was an ambassador or a foreign minister, and I found early on that a lot of people simply couldn’t afford to pay my absurd original fee of one thousand francs per pill. So I made it two hundred and fifty instead.