Month in, month out, the tenants paid their rent regularly. And they created no nuisances. Window washers went up to wash windows. Painters, plasterers, and carpenters went up to decorate the offices on the thirteenth floor. Delivery boys staggered up under huge loads of stationery. Even what were obviously customers went up to the thirteenth floor, a group of people curiously lacking characteristics in common: they ranged from poor backwoods folk in their brogans to flashily dressed bookmakers; an occasional group of dark-suited, well-tailored gentlemen discussing interest rates and new bond issues in low well-bred voices would ask the elevator operator for Tohu Bohu. Many, many people went to the thirteenth floor.
Everyone, Sydney Blake began to think, but Sydney Blake. He’d tried sneaking up on the thirteenth floor by way of the stairs. He had always arrived on the fourteenth floor or the twelfth completely winded. Once or twice, he’d tried stowing away on the elevator with G. Tohu and K. Bohu themselves. But the car had not been able to find their floor while he was in the elevator. And they had both turned around and smiled at the spot where he was trying to stay hidden in the crowd so that he had gone out, red-faced, at the earliest floor he could.
Once he’d even tried—vainly—to disguise himself as a building inspector in search of a fire hazard…
Nothing worked. He just had no business on the thirteenth floor.
He thought about the problem day and night. His belly lost its slight plumpness, his nails their manicure, his very trousers their crease.
And nobody else showed the slightest interest in the tenants of the thirteenth floor.
Well, there was the day that Miss Kerstenberg looked up from her typewriter. “Is that how they spell their names?” she asked. “T-O-H-U and B-O-H-U? Funny.”
“What’s funny?” He pounced on her.
“Those names come from the Hebrew. I know because,” she blushed well below the neckline of her dress, “I teach in a Hebrew School Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. And my family is very religious so I had a real orthodox education. I think religion is a good thing, especially for a girl—”
“What about those names?” He was almost dancing around her.
“Well, in the Hebrew Bible, before God created the Earth, the Earth was tohu oobohu. The oo means and. And tohu and bohu—gee, it’s hard to translate.”
“Try,” he implored her. “Try.”
“Oh, for example, the usual English translation of tohu oobohu is without form and void. But bohu really means empty in a lot of—”
“Foreigners,” he chortled. “I knew they were foreigners. And up to no good. With names like that.”
“I don’t agree with you, Mr. Blake,” she said very stiffly. “I don’t agree with you at all about those names being no good. Not when they come from the Hebrew.” And she never showed him any friendliness again.
Two weeks later, Blake got a message from the home office of Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate, that almost shoved his reason off the corner of the slippery throne it still occupied. Tohu Bohu had given notice. They were quitting the premises at the end of the month.
For a day or so, he walked around talking to himself. The elevator operators reported hearing him say things like: “They’re the most complete foreigners there could be—they don’t even belong in the physical universe!” The scrubwomen shivered in their locker room as they told each other of the mad, mad light in his eyes as he’d muttered, with enormous gestures: “Of course—thirteenth floor. Where else do you think they could stay, the nonexistent so-and-so’s? Hah!” And once when Miss Kerstenberg had caught him glaring at the water cooler and saying, They’re trying to turn the clock back a couple of billion years and start all over, I bet. Filthy fifth columnists!” she thought tremulously of notifying the F.B.I., but decided against it. After all, she reasoned, once the police start snooping around a place, you never can tell who they’ll send to jail.
And, besides, after a little while, Sydney Blake straightened out. He began shaving every morning once more and the darkness left his nails. But he was definitely not the crisp young realtor of yore. There was a strange, skirling air of triumph about him almost all the time.
Came the last day of the month. All morning, load after load of furniture had been carried downstairs and trucked away. As the last few packages came down, Sydney Blake, a fresh flower in his buttonhole, walked up to the elevator nearest his office and stepped inside.
“Thirteenth floor, if you please,” he said clearly and resonantly.
The door slid shut. The elevator rose. It stopped on the thirteenth floor.
“Well, Mr. Blake,” said the tall man. “This is a surprise. And what can we do for you?”
“How do you do, Mr. Tohu?” Blake said to him. “Or is it Bohu?” He turned to his tiny companion. “And you, Mr. Bohu—or, as the case may be, Tohu—I hope you are well? Good.”
He walked around the empty, airy offices for a little while and just looked. Even the partitions had been taken down. The three of them were alone, on the thirteenth floor.
“You have some business with us?” the tall man inquired.
“Of course he has business with us,” the tiny man told him crossly. “He has to have some sort of business with us. Only I wish he’d hurry up and get it over, whatever it is.”
Blake bowed. “Paragraph ten, Section three of your lease:…the tenant further agrees that such notice being duly given to the landlord, an authorized representative of the landlord, such as the resident agent if there is one on the property, shall have the privilege of examining the premises before they are vacated by the tenant for the purpose of making certain that they have been left in good order and condition by the tenant…”
“So that’s your business,” said the tall man thoughtfully.
“It had to be something like that,” said the tiny man. “Well, young fellow, you will please be quick about it.”
Sydney Blake strolled about leisurely. Though he felt a prodigious excitement, he had to admit that there was no apparent difference between the thirteenth and any other floor. Except—Yes, except—
He ran to a window and looked down. He counted. Twelve floors. He looked up and counted. Twelve floors. And with the floor he was on, that made twenty-five. Yet the McGowan was a twenty-four-story building. Where did that extra floor come from? And how did the building look from the outside at this precise moment when his head was sticking out of a window on the thirteenth floor?
He walked back in, staring shrewdly at G. Tohu and K. Bohu. They would know.
They were standing near the elevator door that was open. An operator, almost as impatient as the two men in black, said, “Down? Down?”
“Well, Mr. Blake,” said the tall man. “Are the premises in good condition, or are they not?”
“Oh, they’re in good condition, all right,” Blake told him. “But that’s not the point.”
“Well, we don’t care what the point is,” said the tiny man to the tall man. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Quite,” said the tall man. He bent down and picked up his companion. He folded him once backward and once forward. Then he rolled him up tightly and shoved him in his right-hand overcoat pocket. He stepped backward into the elevator. “Coming, Mr. Blake?”
“No, thank you,” Blake said. “I’ve spent far too much time trying to get up here to leave it this fast.”