The best thing might well be to ditch the whole crowd at the first possibility, make for the Barclay Street Ferry, and head West. He could, after all, just as easily take tourists on guided tours of North Beach, Telegraph Hill, and Fishermen’s Wharf.
The more he thought of this, the more it appealed to him. He hummed a few bars of “Which Side Are You On?” and gave the throttle several more knots.
At which point the Earth opened (or so it seemed) and swallowed him up.
Or down. Amidst the groans and shrieks of the affrighted passengers none was louder than that of The Kerry Pig, who found himself spread all over the progressive matron in harlequins, whose too-tight bermudas under stress and strain had popped seams, gores, and gussets all to Hell and gone. A close second, however, in the Terrified Scream Department was the matron herself, who was not only badly hung-up by the sudden come-down, but did not realize that The Pig was as pure in mind, word, and contemplated deed as the Snowe before the Soote hath Smutch’t it; and feared grievously that he would do her a mischief.
And whilst the lot of them writhed and roared like Fiends in the Pit, a work crew from the office of the Borough President, which had dug clear across Wooster Street a trench worthy of Flanders’ Field, mud and all, but had neglected to barricade it properly, gathered round the rim and shook their fists, threatening the abruptly disembogued with dark deeds if they did not instantly quit the excavation and cease interfering with the work. “Dig we must!” one of the drudge roustabouts chittered, half in frenzy, half by rote. At first the language of the navvies was sulphurous in the extreme, but on observing that the fosse contained numerous women, none of whom were old, and all of whom were distressed, they became gallantly solicitous and reached down large hairy hands to help the ladies out.
The men were allowed to emerge as best they might.
Red Fred surveyed, aghast, the splintered wreckage of his equipage.
And, having seen it all from her place across the street, Aunt Annie De Kalb, a wee wisp of a woman, but with the tensile strength of beryllium steel, hurried across with band-aids, germicides, words of comfort, and buckets of hot nourishing lentil soup. In this mission of mercy she was ably assisted by her barmaids, Ruby and Gladys, both graduates of the Municipal Female Seminary on Eighth and Greenwich, where they had majored in handling obstreperous bull dykes; and Aunt Annie’s bouncer, Homer, a quiet sullen homunculus whose every lineament bespoke, not gratified desire, but a refutation of the charge that Piltdown Man was a hoax. In a trice they had jostled away the lewd excavators (eye-intent on garter belts, pudenda and puffies) and were busy with the Florence Nightingale bit.
Fred tottered to a telephone in the Ale House to call a garage. He found the instrument pre-empted by Doc Lem Architrave, an unfrocked osteopath, who was vainly trying to impress Bellevue with the urgent need for an ambulance.
“—fractures, dislocations, and hemorrhages,” the ex-bone-popper was shouting: “Cheyne-Stokes breathing, cyanosis, and prolapses of the uteri!”
“Yeah, well, like I say,” a bored voice on the other end of the line said, “when a machine comes in, which we can spare it, we’ll, like, send it out presently. How do you, like, spell ‘Wooster’? Is it W-u or W-o-u?”
Fred tottered out again.
He found that all the victims, their own wounds forgotten, were now gathered six and seven deep in a circle around Wallace Fish, who was lying on the ground, flat on his back, and drumming his heels. His collar had been ripped open, revealing a throat as reddish-purple, congested, and studded with bumps as his face. Big Patsy was trying, so far successfully, to ward off a boss-ditchdigger who, convinced that the afflicted had suffered a crushed trachea, proposed to open a fresh respiratory passage with a knife the approximate size of a petty officer’s cutlass.
“He’s been poisoned!” cried a voice in the crowd.
“Flesh, probably,” insisted another yet, a jackhammer operator whose numerous tattoos peeped coyly through a thicket of hair as black and springy as the contents of an Edwardian sofa. “I hope this will be a lesson to you, fellows, about eating flesh. Now we vegetarians—”
Big Patsy turned control of the putative performer of tracheotomies over to Homer, who held him a la Lascoon, and bent solicitiously over his stricken liege-man, who gurgled wordlessly.
“It might be something he eat,” he admitted. “Wallace has what I mean a very sensitive stomach and—” A sudden idea transfixed him visibly. He turned his head. “Aunt Annie,” he demanded, “what, besides lentils, was in that now hot soup which we all, including Wallace, partook of so heartily to soothe our jangled nerves?”
Fred tried to indicate to him, by winks, shrugs, twitches, and manual semaphore, that he and his two genossen were supposed to be beatniks, names unknown; and that such revelatory references were dangerous and uncalled for, and, in all probability, ultra vires and sub judice. But to no avail.
“Why,” said Aunt Annie, a shade vexed that her cuisine be called into question: “it was a nice fresh chowder, the speciality for today, with some lovely sweet plum tomatoes, lentils to be sure, a few leeks which I scrubbed them thoroughly, and a mere sprinkling of marjoram, fennel, and dill—”
“Chowder? What kind of chowder?”
“Why, codfish,” said Aunt Annie.
Big Patsy groaned. The Kerry Pig whimpered, and knelt in prayer. Wallace turned up his eyes, gagged, and drummed his heels once again. 6/8 time.
“Codfish. A salt-water fish. And Wallace with his elegy—Get a ambulance!” the words broke from his chest in an articulate roar.
Once again Red Fred trotted for the phone, and once again he was beaten to it by Doc Lem Architrave, whose appearance on the streets so early in the day must be attributed to his having been hauled from his bed at the Mills Hotel peremptorily to do his deft (though alas! illicit) best to relieve the population explosion on behalf of some warm-hearted Village girl who had probably breezed in from New Liverpool, Ohio, only a few months previously; for, had she been around the Village longer, she had known better than to—
But enough.
Once again the Doc dialed Bellevue, but this time he was answered by a voice as sharply New England as the edge of a halibut knife.
“Aiyyuh?” asked the voice.
“Ambulance!” yelled Doc Architrave. “Corner Wooster and Bleecker! Emergency case of codfish allergy!”
“Codfish allergy?” The voice was electrified. “Well. I snum! Sufferin’ much? I presume likely! Ambulance Number Twenty-Three! Corner of Wooster and Bleecker! codfish anergy. Terrible thing!” And, over the phone, the sound of Number Twenty-Three’s siren was heard to rise in an hysterical whine and then die off in the distance.
In what seemed like a matter of seconds the same sound began to increase (this is called the Doppler effect) and Old 23 came tearing up to the side of the stricken Wallace. Treatment was prompt and efficacious and involved the use of no sesquipedalian wonderomyacin: a certain number of minims of adrenalin, administered hypodermically (the public interest—to say nothing of the AMA—forbids our saying exactly how many minims) soon had him right as rain again. He was standing on his feet when Red Fred, alerted by the almost osmotic disappearance of Doc Lem Architrave, observed that the fuzz had made the scene after all.
The carabinieri consisted of, reading them left to right, Captain Cozenage, Patrolman Ottolenghi, Police-Surgeon Anthony Gansevoort, and Sergeants G. C. and V. D. O’Sullivan: the latter being identical twins built along the lines of Sumo wrestlers, commonly, if quizzically, referred to (though never in their presence) as The Cherry Sisters.