The Great Wash Page 7

  “—Who was your talker? Johnny Hopkins?”

  “No, another one, Charley Brooks; you wouldn’t know him. Charley gave them the old business—twenty dollars to any man woman or child if Nemo Memo fails to name any date in history which he she or it sees fit to ask! Twenty dollars in cash money to any man woman or child who can put to Nemo Memo the Human Calculating Machine any problem in arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, or algebra which he cannot solve without the aid of pencil and paper in thirty seconds! Four brand-new five-dollar notes. . . . You know, you remember . . .”

  “Sure I remember, Professor, and I still don’t know how the hell you do it.”

  “Neither do I, son. I was born that way. I could do it when I was twelve years old. . . . To proceed: up pops the regular bunch of marks that have been waiting all year, ransacking the public library for difficult questions, including that same old crackpot who always comes out with squaring the circle. But then there stands up a mark, the like of which I have never encountered in all my professional experience, and he floored me. I didn’t think anybody could have done it, son; in the line of business—you’ve got to be prepared for anything, and twenty dollars is a lot of money—I’ve even memorized Einstein, not that I understand a word he says. But this mark was something extra special, I assure you. Charley tried to cut it short and laugh him off, but I gave him the sign to pay the man off after the rest had gone. We sold eighteen books. I wanted to talk to this stranger alone, because I had an idea. The long and the short of it was, I paid him his twenty and suggested that he take over the act on a fifty-fifty basis. He was to use my professional name, my props, my talker, my stock of books which are my copyright—everything. In return, weekly, he was to forward me one-half of the net take after Charley and the overhead had been paid.”

  “Go on,” said Monty Cello, very tense.

  “Of course, as you know, I have a reputation as Nemo Memo, of which I have some right to be proud,” said the old man, “so I started to give him a test. He ended by testing me. Oh, it was the finger of Fate all right, son—he demoralised me; I knew I had met my master. So we went with Charley to Quarto’s Bar and made the deal.”

  Monty Cello asked: “What did you say the guy’s name was?”

  “When I asked him in Quarto’s, he said: ‘John Pabst.’ I should add that we were drinking beer at the time: I suspect he adopted the name on the spur of the moment. But that’s all one to me, son. He fulfils his obligation like an honourable gentleman. I trust him implicitly, and I can trust Charley to keep an eye on him. In due course, human nature being what it is, they will combine to double-cross me. Meanwhile, the money comes in like clockwork. Last week he sent one hundred dollars, in cash, by registered mail. He must be taking in well over three hundred dollars a week. . . . But you’re not eating.”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m not hungry, Professor,” said Monty Cello. “This guy Pabst: would he happen to be a little fellow, kind of small-boned, with a big head, little eyes, little ears, forehead like a monkey? About this much between his eyebrows and his front hair?”—Monty Cello measured an inch and a half between a thumb and a forefinger. “—With a chin like one of these Boston bulldogs?”

  “Exactly. Why, do you know him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Monty Cello. “I might. Where would he be now?”

  “Wherever the show is, of course. My last remittance was postmarked Atlanta, Georgia. My next—the last until next spring—should come from Tampa. Why? Are you going down that way? If so——”

  “—No, I’ve got business in St. Louis. Better take that fifty just for luck, Professor.”

  The old man put the note in his pocket. “Well, since you are so pressing—many thanks. . . . And how do you happen to know this man Pabst, son?”

  “I think I ran across him in Philadelphia. He used to work in a bank, or something,” said Monte Cello, carelessly.

  “What a perfect set-up!” the Professor murmured. “He simply wraps himself in my garment, assumes my identity, and has the run of the country, perfectly safe as Nemo Memo who has been nationally famous for forty years. . . . I wonder how much he embezzled. Do you know, son, I fancy I’ve been a little too generous with that man?”

  “Well,” said Monty Cello, cursing himself for having talked too much, “I should say it’s a perfect set-up for a shake-down, like you say——”

  “—Nothing of the sort entered my mind. How could you think that of me, son?”

  “But if I were you, I’d let him get good and settled before I put the bite on him. Otherwise, the guy gets scared, takes a powder, and then where are you?”

  “True . . . Still . . .”

  “Well, I better get going. It’s a long way from here to Saint Lou—— So long, Professor.”

  He drove like a cold demon and, much as he hated driving by night, stopped in St. Louis only to eat and stretch his legs. In McCarthy’s place, back of a cigar store, he idly dropped a quarter into a slot machine and won the jackpot—there was no doubt about it, his luck was in. But a certain glint he had seen brightening the Professor’s protuberant black eyes had made him uneasy. He rushed on through the darkness, following the route of Sultan Watson and King Alfonso Johnson’s Combined Shows—a route which he knew almost by instinct. He did not rest until the following evening in Nashville, Tennessee, where he slept four hours, starting out again before dawn. His purpose was to get to Tampa ahead of the carnival, and wait there for his man to come to him, while he spied out the land, figured angles, made a plan. He took a room in the Tampa Terrace because he liked their charming practice of sending newly arrived guests a pretty little basket of kumquats, tangerines, and oranges, free of charge with the manager’s compliments; looked up some friends in the Cuban quarter of the town and won three thousand dollars in a crap game. No use talking, he could do no wrong; it was scarcely necessary even to talk to the dice.

  And when the Sultan Watson and King Alfonso Johnson’s Combined Shows came into town, his heart beat strong and high. But when he sought out Nemo Memo, he was directed to a big, happy-looking young man playing blackjack with two midgets and a human skeleton, and drinking rum and Coca Cola. This young man was the talker, Cheerful Charley Brooks.

  “Where’s the Professor?” asked Monty Cello.

  “Oh, he went right on to pick up a part-time job for the winter. I got me one, too, on a snake farm, showing the marks around, you know, and picking up the rattlers, cottonmouths, moccasins, and all that. The pay is good, the pickings are easy—what more can a man want?”

  “You’re a Worm Man?” asked Monty Cello, speaking casually but chewing his lips with impatience.

  “Me? I don’t know. I never handled a snake in my life, but there’s no harm trying. What did you want to see the Professor about?”

  “I got a message for him from the other Professor—you know, MacNabb, in Kansas City. He knew I’d be passing through here, so he asked me to give Mr. Pabst this personal message, see?”

  “How is the old man? I wish I had half his money.”

  “He’s got arthritis, but he’s all right. Where can I find Pabst?”

  “You’ve been in Carny yourself, haven’t you?”

  “I used to be talker for Barney Bull; before your time, I guess. I know the old man from then. About this Pabst . . .”

  “Crazy as a coot, a bundle of nerves. You’ll find him at the Pompano Hotel on Narragut Key, seventy-eighty miles south from here in Pompano County, on the Gulf. The old man used to rest up there and paid his expenses keeping the books. I saw no reason why Pabst shouldn’t take over. My God, I thought the old man had a head for figures until this one came along; but compared to Pabst, old MacNabb was still in the first grade. He’s okay, though. Where’d he come from? He was never in Carny before.”

  “He was a college professor. He got into trouble on acco
unt of some frill. Pompano Hotel, Narragut Key, you say? Thanks a lot, Charley.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a drink; coke isn’t too bad if you dilute it with rum. Pompano Hotel, you can’t miss it—it’s the only hotel on the key. A crummy place—lives off its trailer camp and grocery store, mostly. Bar trade, mainly beer. Customers, mostly farmers from up north; they come south on a shoestring to get away from the snow, and spend a fortune in nickels playing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ on the juke-box. Or ‘Jingle Bells’. I’m here to tell you, it’s a lot of hooey—it’s no fun at all to ride in a one-horse open sleigh, especially in New Hampshire——”

  “—Well, thanks a lot, Charley,” said Monty Cello again.

  “You bet!” said Cheerful Charley, and went back to his game singing “The Song of the Wild Goose”. Monty Cello told us that he had never in all his life met such a happy man: he hoped Charley made out all right with the snakes . . . to some people snakes were lucky.

  He drove slowly, now, to Narragut Key. It seemed to him that things could not be better. If he had found Kurt Brevis in Tampa he would have been faced with the problem of getting him to some out-of-the-way place like Narragut Key. Everything was going his way.

  He curbed his impatience, reasoning with himself as he had reasoned with the Professor in Kansas City: that Kurt Brevis, confident that he had thoroughly covered his tracks, would relax a little; settle down to restore himself in peace and quiet, hatching fresh schemes. In the last analysis, it came down again to money. Kurt Brevis would lie still until he had the wherewithal to leave the country: this much was evident. Let him feel safe and comfortable; then spring your trap: so Monty Cello advised himself. Therefore, he spent a quiet day in Sarasota, where the Ringling and Barnum & Bailey Shows rest for the winter; then he crawled on at twenty-five miles an hour through Manatee, where the traffic policemen are supposed always to be on the look-out for marks travelling at a speed exceeding forty miles an hour. Thus, supremely confident in his luck, he pulled up at the Pompano Hotel and booked a room for a week. And there he met Kurt Brevis, who kept the accounts for his keep, and slept in a kind of closet behind the store-room.

  Monty Cello watched him for several days. Kurt Brevis rose at six o’clock, and, comfortable in sandals, slacks, and one of those little shirts that hang over the trousers, walked meditatively on the beach, pausing occasionally to pick up a curious shell or a bit of stone licked into some strange shape by the water. One morning Monty Cello made it his business to be up and about by five o’clock. He walked half a mile up the key to Narragut Point, and strolled back over the sand towards the hotel. As usual, the quiet little book-keeper was there, trying to match coquina shells, and toying with the empty carapace of a horse-shoe crab which the tide had washed up.

  “Kind of ugly-looking thing, isn’t it?” said Monty Cello.

  The little man shrugged, and said: “Do you think so? I wonder why. It could not hurt you one-tenth as much as the lobster for which you pay through the nose A La Newburg or Thermidor. No doubt, sir, you read the pulp magazines, and have studied the illustrations which are supposed to represent the horrors out of this world. No?”

  Monty Cello admitted that, while he had little time for reading, he did occasionally curl up with a copy of Astounding Stories.

  “Yes,” said the little man, idly throwing away his handful of coquina shells. “Yes. They are people of limited imagination, these illustrators in black-and-white of these stories, what? To them, the ultima thule of the Terrible is, an over-blown crab, or some exaggeration of a jellyfish. Even if they knew, poor fellows, that the most terrible things—if destruction, as such, is terrible—must be forces that cannot be seen, felt, or foreseen. Fools!” And he spurned the crab-shell with a scornful foot: it turned over on its back, rocking like a cradle, whereupon a swarm of green iridescent flies came out of nowhere and settled in the noisome crevices of its joints.

  Monty Cello said: “Well, after all, how do you expect a fellow to draw something he never saw?” The other man laughed, and with the tip of one sandal described a circle in the loose sand.

  He said: “O, for example: that is the symbol by which we are enabled to visualise Oxygen, without which life as you know it would cease to exist on this planet. O: a line, which actually has no dimensions, enclosing an empty space. In other words, Nothing; and, as Zero, symbolic of nothing . . . and two Nothings, conjoined, as in a pretzel, in mathematics symbolise Infinity. . . . Crabs? Bah!” He smiled.

  Now this smile, Monty Cello saw, was the smile of a man with an ace in the hole—the indefinable, uncontrollable smirk of a bad poker player. Such smiles cannot be simulated; they come, as it were, from the roots of one’s being seemingly through the skin. Evidently, Kurt Brevis too felt that everything was going his way. Therefore, this was the time to shake him. Monty Cello said: “Well, I’m glad to know you, Dr. Kurt Brevis.”

  Now you must imagine a sack of rice suddenly slashed open. All that the skin of Kurt Brevis enclosed appeared to rush away in a gasp; he seemed to fold, buckle, and crumple as he went down in a sitting position on the sand. Monty Cello sat, too, saying: “Better take it easy, Doc. Have a cigarette.”

  At least a minute passed before Kurt Brevis spoke. He said: “My name is not Kurt Brevis. My name——”

  “—I know. I know! Your name’s John Pabst. That’s the name you picked off a beer ad to give Old Man MacNabb. The name Major Chatterton gave you is Rheingold. You want me to give you the social security number tattooed on the upper part of your right arm? Mind if I feel your chin where they built it up around that plastic stuff? Your real name’s Kurt Brevis. Why argue?”

  “You are out of your mind!”

  “Haven’t you got it the wrong way around, Doc? No? You know best who you are, but for my money you’re Kurt Brevis. And if you don’t believe me I’ll call the F.B.I. to prove it. You escaped from the looney bin, Doc, not me.”

  “. . . Who are you? What do you want of me?” asked Kurt Brevis. “Why are you talking to me like this?” His voice was bewildered, but his eyes were watchful.

  “Chatterton sent me to bring you home,” said Monty Cello. “Doc, you haven’t got a chance.”

  Monty Cello told us that, in talking like this, he was playing a hunch, a tremendous hunch and a dangerous one, for upon this hunch he was staking his life. He had decided on his plan of action: having located Kurt Brevis, he had intended simply to send that cable to Barbados, and keep the little man in sight until Chatterton acted on it. He had no doubt that Chatterton would move swiftly, decisively, and with deadly precision: he guessed that within forty-eight hours, two men, faultlessly disguised as federal officers and armed with perfect forgeries of the requisite papers, backed by a hoodwinked local sheriff, would come to the hotel in a big black car and carry the bookkeeper away to a destination unknown. (This, he said, was how he would have done it, given Chatterton’s set-up.) Then Monty Cello would have nothing to do but collect twenty thousand dollars and go to the devil his own way. Monty Cello, you see, was trying to put himself in Major Chatterton’s shoes. It may be, therefore, that he said to himself: If I was this Major Chatterton I’d ask myself: “This Monty Cello—doesn’t he know a little bit too much? He won’t call copper, because he’s got nothing to gain that way. But if he was smart enough and lucky enough to trail this Kurt Brevis from Kansas City to Narragut Key, he might be smart and lucky enough to trail him back from Narragut Key to wherever-it-is, and put the bite on me good. Better rub Monty out.” And I’d rub Monty out. . . . Be this as it may, it is certain that Monty Cello found himself in the grip of a passion that is stronger than the fear of death—curiosity. If it cost him his life, he would get a little nearer to the dark heart of this affair.

  He dealt with Kurt Brevis as George Oaks, later, was to deal with Monty Cello, saying something like this: “. . . Now listen, Doc, why not be reasonable? Take w
hichever side you like, you’re in the middle. This Major Chatterton wants you, but bad. The F.B.I. wants you too. You don’t want to go back to that looney bin, do you? No. And you don’t want to go back to this Major Chatterton either—otherwise, why make a break like you did? The F.B.I. couldn’t find you. The Chatterton set-up, with all its connections, couldn’t find you because you fell into the most perfect layout in the world when you took over the Professor’s pitch in Kansas City. All the same, I caught up with you in two-three days. See? You can duck the F.B.I., you can even duck this Major Chatterton—but me you can’t duck. Now wait a minute, Doc, take it easy; listen. I don’t like the F.B.I., and I don’t like Chatterton, I don’t like anybody. As a general rule I operate strictly alone. I’m not one of Chatterton’s mob—I was called in to locate you for the simple reason nobody else could find you. You haven’t got a hope but one in hell of getting loose again. But one; that is, cut me in on whatever it is you’re trying to do. What your game is I don’t know, but I want to know; and believe me, Doc, I’ll find out. Listen: all I’ve got to do is pick up that hotel telephone and send a ten-word telegram to get twenty grand. Then why am I wasting time talking to you? Because you and me might make a deal.”

  Kurt Brevis smoked a cigarette in silence, then said: “I have no alternative but to confide in you. You want money?”

  “I got dough, Doc, but I could use a whole lot more.”

  “You are shrewd, yes? You are of the underworld, is that so? You could help me, hide me, protect me? You have your friends; you could find me passports, papers? . . . Then listen to me. If you will do this for me I promise you, I swear to you, that you shall have one million dollars, and freedom to spend them as you please.”

  Monty Cello smiled with half a mouth as he told us all this. He said: “It looks like history repeats itself. The Doc offers me a million bucks because I’ve got him in a corner, and I offer you guys a million bucks because you’ve got me out on a limb. Well, what comes, comes; that’s life. . . . All right. So I tell the Doc to sing—just like you told me to sing—because if we’re going to work together he’s got to trust me, there mustn’t be any holding out on either side. I tell him, we can’t double-cross each other, because his life is in my hands, and my life is in his hands. We’re both of us bucking the F.B.I. on one side, and Chatterton’s mob on the other. So he sings. He tells me he’s made a terrific discovery. This Dr. Kurt Brevis has worked out the secret of something that makes the atom-bomb plant at Oak Ridge in Tennessee look like two cents. And anybody who’s got this secret, and enough dough to go to work on it, can be boss of the whole world.”