“TEN THOU—”
“Hush! Hush!”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“Miss Kerner is investing in Those Wonderful Folks.”
“She’s off her tree.”
“Be that as it may, that check is as good as the girl atop the unicorn. Now, we’re gonna close up shop right now, you’ll deposit this check on your way home, by Friday the account will be full and green and beautiful, and you can cash these other two checks.
“Wait a minute. I don’t come back after lunch?”
“No. And we’re not opening tomorrow or Friday either. We’ll take a long Labor Day vacation. I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Well, that’s fine with me.”
“Gloria.”
“What’s up? You’re up to something.”
“You don’t want to know about it.”
“Agreed.”
“But you do want to know what to say if anybody asks you where my twin brother Bart is.”
“Are you still playing that game?”
“I’m getting out from under right now. If it should happen that you are asked, if anybody wants to know where Bart Dodge is, it is your understanding that the brothers quarreled, and that Bart Dodge has severed his connection with this office and is unlikely to return.”
“Amen.”
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel, Gloria.”
“Pray it isn’t a flamethrower.”
“What a kidder.”
37
Less than three minutes after Gloria left, while I was still battening down the office hatches for an extended separation, the hall door opened and two guys walked in, strangers to me. They were wearing identical short-sleeved white shirts open at the neck, and they seemed larger than most people. “Sorry, gents,” I said, “I’m just closing up.”
“That’s okay,” one of them said, coming in the rest of the way, and shut the hall door behind himself.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m in something of a hurry. I’m going away and—”
“That’s right,” the other one agreed, and extended a white envelope toward me. “Here’s your ticket.”
“Ticket?” Frowning at them, trying to connect the idea of a ticket with Liz having told me earlier that she’d send a car for me, thinking confusedly that these people must be from Liz or how would they know I was going away, I now saw that they were really very large indeed, thicknecked and broad-shouldered and heavy-armed. They looked like football players arriving at the stadium.
I took the envelope. They watched me with their heavy faces, neither of them saying anything, so I opened the envelope and took out what was obviously an airline ticket. Opening that, I saw my own name, plus those ranks of letters and numbers by means of which airline employees manage to communicate with one another without being overheard by the customer. It took a few seconds to sort out: the “JFK” after “From” would be Kennedy airport, where Bart had soared off for California. And the destination? “To: St. Martin.”
“St. Martin?”
“That’s right,” one of them said. “It’s an island.”
“In the Caribbean,” the other one said. “You’ll love it.”
“Wait a minute, now,” I said. “Miss Kerner sent you here with this?”
They both chuckled, which sounded like the bass fiddle section tuning up. “It don’t matter where the ticket come from,” one of them said. “What matters is that you use it.”
“I don’t get this.” Maybe I was slow, but I actually didn’t get it. Tell me a joke and I’ll get it; lean on me and you’ll just confuse me.
“You’re gonna take a trip,” one of them said. “You’re gonna lie around on the sand and enjoy yourself.”
“And every day,” the other one said, “you’ll go to the post office at Marigot, on the French side of the island, and you’ll ask is there a letter for you.”
“And some day,” the first one said, “there will be a letter. And in it will be a ticket to come back again.”
“And,” the second one said, “you won’t come back until you get that letter.”
“Are you two crazy?”
“Not likely, friend.”
“What — what — who’s idea is this?” I was trying to think: a joke? Some confusion with Liz? It made no sense to me.
“You don’t need to know who it is,” the first one said. “Just think of him as a benefactor.”
“A secret admirer,” the second one said, and they both nodded and smiled at me.
“Volpinex!” I said, and I suddenly saw the whole thing.
Their smiles turned to frowns. The first one said, “Throwing names around, that’s not a nice thing to do.”
“He’s not getting away with it.” Angry, I tossed the ticket on Gloria’s desk and said, “You can give him that, and tell him I’m staying here and getting married.”
“You’re a very dumb fella,” the first one told me.
“He needs an explanation,” the second one suggested.
“Maybe so.” The first one frowned — his manner was a bit impatient, a bit pedantic, but mostly disappointed in my denseness — and he said, “See, what our job is, my friend here and me, we send people away. This fella doesn’t want that fella around any more, so we send him away.”
“That’s right,” the second one said.
“Now, we got two different ways,” the first one said, holding up two meaty fingers, “to send people away. The first is we take a fella to the bus station or the airport or whatever, and put him on board, and wish him like a bon voyage.”
“That’s right,” the second one said.
“Now, the second way,” the first one said, “is we take people to the hospital after some bones have been broken. Like leg bones, or maybe a back, maybe a shoulder. All depends how long the fella’s supposed to be away.”
“That’s right,” the second one said.
I stared at them. They were talking like the heavies in a B movie, they were talking melodrama. Therefore I laughed at them, right? Wrong. I looked at them, and I saw that if they wanted to pretend I was a beachball and toss me back and forth, then that’s what they would do, and no way would I stop them. And I noticed that I was alone in this office with these two guys, and I further noticed that they seemed to be very conscientious workmen, dedicated to their job. I backed a step away from them, wondering if I could make it into my inner office, lock the door, phone the police (no, they’d break the door down before I finished dialing), and I said, “Now, look.”
“What our job is this time,” the first one said, going on placidly with his explanation, “is to take you to your apartment and help you pack, and then take you to the airport and put you on the plane.”
“Unless you argue with us,” the second one said.
The first one nodded. “That’s right.”
“In that case,” the second one said, “our job is to take you to the hospital.”
Comedy: The Coward’s Response to Aggression. Inside I was raging, a death-red glow of fury and hate. I said, “Well, I’ll go away with you, but I just know you won’t respect me in the morning.”
38
When i saw the Alfa, I knew I couldn’t do it.
Coming interminably down in the freight elevator, my two new friends standing on either side of me like temple columns (“my name, dear, is Simpson, not Samson,”), I had given myself any number of reasons why what was happening to me was not really a defeat after all, but might even be considered in some ways a victory. Art Dodge, driven out of town by Ernest Volpinex, would disappear from the scene. Tomorrow, Bart Dodge would sneak back from St. Martin, have a wonderful reconciliation with Betty, and live happily for the foreseeable future. With any luck, I might even get to keep Liz’s ten thousand dollars; if it cleared before she put a stop payment on it. I’d known all along I should stop playing this twin game, should settle into one persona and begin to harvest my crops, so now circumstances were forcing me to take the road I had already acknowledged to be the path of wisdom. And if the taste in my mouth was partly bile, if the lump in my throat was partly rage, if the fact of my exile was mostly Volpinex’s victory rather than mine, so what? Bart could get even with him for me later.