Then he remembered about the onions and carrots. He saw The Stew. And suddenly, it occurred to Cordle that he could be whatever vegetable he wanted to be.
He turned to the clerk. He smiled winningly. He said, “You wish to know the use I will make of the typewriter?”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Cordle said, “quite frankly, I had planned to stuff it up my nose.”
The clerk gaped at him.
“It’s quite a successful method of smuggling,” Cordle went on. “I was also planning to give you a stolen passport and counterfeit pesetas. Once I got into Italy, I would have sold the typewriter for ten thousand dollars. Milan is undergoing a typewriter famine, you know; they’re desperate, they’ll buy anything.”
“Sir,” the clerk said, “you choose to be disagreeable.”
“Nasty is the word you were looking for. I’ve changed my mind about the typewriter. But let me compliment you on your command of English.”
“I have studied assiduously,” the clerk admitted, with a hint of pride.
“That is evident. And, despite a certain weakness in the Rs, you succeed in sounding like a Venetian gondolier with a cleft palate. My best wishes to your esteemed family. I leave you now to pick your pimples in peace.”
Reviewing the scene later, Cordle decided that he had performed quite well in his maiden appearance as a carrot. True, his closing lines had been a little forced and overintellectualized. But the undertone of viciousness had been convincing.
Most important was the simple resounding fact that he had done it. And now, in the quiet of his hotel room, instead of churning his guts in a frenzy of self-loathing, he had the tranquilizing knowledge of having put someone else in that position.
He had done it! Just like that, he had transformed himself from onion into carrot!
But was his position ethically defensible? Presumably, the clerk could not help being detestable; he was a product of his own genetic and social environment, a victim of his conditioning; he was naturally rather than intentionally hateful—
Cordle stopped himself. He saw that he was engaged in typical onionish thinking, which was an inability to conceive of carrots except as an aberration from oniondom.
But now he knew that both onions and carrots had to exist; otherwise, there would be no Stew.
And he also knew that a man was free and could choose whatever vegetable he wanted to be. He could even live as an amusing little green pea, or a gruff, forceful clove of garlic (though perhaps that was scratching at the metaphor). In any event, a man could take his pick between carrothood and oniondom.
There is much to think about here, Cordle thought. But he never got around to thinking about it. Instead, he went sightseeing, despite the rain, and then continued his travels.
The next incident occurred in Nice, in a cozy little restaurant on the Avenue des Diables Bleus, with red-checkered tablecloths and incomprehensible menus written in longhand with purple ink. There were four waiters, one of whom looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo, down to the cigarette drooping from his long lower lip. The others looked like run-of-the-mill muggers. There were several Scandinavian customers quietly eating a cassoulet, one old Frenchman in a beret, and three homely English girls.
Belmondo sauntered over. Cordle, who spoke a clear though idiomatic French, asked for the ten-franc menu he had seen hanging in the window.
The waiter gave him the sort of look one reserves for pretentious beggars. “Ah, that is all finished for today,” he said, and handed Cordle a thirty-franc menu.
In his previous incarnation, Cordle would have bit down on the bullet and ordered. Or possibly he would have risen, trembling with outrage, and left the restaurant, blundering into a chair on the way.
But now—
“Perhaps you did not understand me,” Cordle said. “It is a matter of French law that you must serve from all of the fixed-price menus that you show in the window.”
“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.
“OK,” 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 pinstripe. 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 apparently has 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 thirty-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, soup spoon 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.