Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “Oh, to hell with that! And never mind the cracks about advertisers. I just want to see everybody get a square deal.”

  “They will,” Pete said with forbidding calm. “Including me.” Then he became injured. “Here I try to do my best, and all I keep getting is snide remarks. I never asked to be trailed and checked up on. All I ask is to be left alone. But no, that’s our society. Once you’re marked as a moral leopard—”

  “I never called you that.”

  “Keep up the good work. But business is business. Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan both own railroads and have a cutthroat price war on freight rates. So Morgan buys a ranch, raises cattle out west, and ships them east on Vanderbilt’s railroad at freight rates ruinous to the latter.”

  “Where is the Agony? Where’s Lammermoor now? Who’s advising you in all this?”

  “Fasties are an important part of American finance.”

  “Just what fastie do you have in mind for Louis Humdinger, Pete?”

  Pete reached for his hat and walked to the door. “Wouldn’t you say that’s between him and me?”

  “I thought I was your friend.”

  “Yar, I did too. But friends don’t call one another on the carpet. Anyhow, I’ll report this to you: that I’m taking that new job you got me with the Jolly Fisherman restaurant—a little bit of everything, to learn the business. Well, auf wienerschnitzel. Give me a clang sometime.”

  I gave him a clang the very next day after getting one myself from Humdinger, who called in tears to say he couldn’t “hond dot guy Cheshire up anywhere,” and that he’d been told I was the man to get in touch with, to unravel this. I arranged for the two of them to meet in my office at eight o’clock sharp the following evening.

  I stayed down for a bite of supper and then, back at my desk with a few minutes before my visitors were expected, wrote a note to Mrs. Thicknesse:

  Well, our fox is about to show his hand. Shall tell you the instant I know any more—and do my best to mediate the nuisance intelligently. Always remembering—as one, I suppose, alas, must—that you can’t coddle a hard-boiled egg.

  How you do continue to worry about curing the tobacco habit. My dear, I have a suggestion. Smoke exploding cigars.

  Your De La Mare’s “twin-born cherries shaken on a stem” keeps running through my head. I think no lips deserve the metaphor more than those which recalled it to me.

  I hear the first of our foolish mortals on the stairs now, and have time only to end and address this before donning my umpire’s uniform. Fair woman, Vale!

  It was Cheshire who arrived first, and I finished pasting down the flap of the addressed envelope as he took his hat off and hung it on a wall peg. He was spiffy as ever in a mélange of hues best ignored, except to note that he had on the tie with the rod lures on it—his lucky piece.

  Pete drifted past the desk and glanced down at the letter. I put it out of sight in a desk drawer. Humdinger arrived as I was kicking the drawer shut, for it stuck like everything else in my office.

  I had never seen Humdinger before and was now not entirely sure I wasn’t looking at Gustav Von Seyffertitz, the character actor whom you may remember. Humdinger lacked about three feet of being a ten-foot pole, with a cleaver of a face and eyes like an umlaut. Next we must talk about a man with a martial bearing who cried. The military air was furthered by short-cropped hair, a black triangle of it that came to a point at the front between deepening bald wedges. It looked like half a slice of burnt toast.

  He led off with a sentimental preface about how he loved this country for the economic opportunities it had afforded him. “I have what you call great squash on America.” (I figured out after a moment that he meant he had a crush on it.) “I have only ordinary restaurants in my chain till now—good but not ze real fine place I’ve dreamed of. Real German cooking and ze best wines. Finally I find ze spot I have my heart set on and bingo—no liquor license. Can’t open wizout it. All my money sunk in it. Ruin.” He brushed a tear from his eye and sat in the attitude of one who truly sees despair before him, vanity behind.

  Now it was time to hear from our next contestant, and so I turned with a smile to him. “Well, Pete, what have you to say?”

  Cheshire rose and circled the room, drawing on a Between-the-Acts.

  “Never have I too wanted anything so bad as a good restaurant,” he began, choosing his words carefully. “It’s been my life’s dream. Night falling, people—” We had the nocturne again, a rival ode which fairness obliged Humdinger to hear out as fully as his had been; but when Pete came to a new part in it, how he had all along had this neighborhood spotted as the coming thing, skepticism was in order. Humdinger knew he was lying in his teeth. We could only wait to hear his price. It wasn’t long in being stated.

  “I know you’re on the hook,” he said, standing over Humdinger, “O.K., I’ll get you off. Give up my spot. For a consideration, of course.”

  “Natürlich.”

  I got a firm grip on the arms of my swivel chair.

  “What would you consider fair, Pete?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Five thousand.”

  Humdinger uttered a protest that can’t be phonetically rendered beyond suggesting a sustained animal cry rich in German gutturals. He got out of his chair. “Five hundred. Not a penny more.”

  “Then I’m afraid there’s no point in our wasting one another’s time.”

  “You—swinehound!”

  “Call me Pete,” Cheshire said, strolling to the wall where his hat hung.

  Humdinger launched another appeal to his sympathies, but Pete’s receiver was off the hook. Humdinger looked helplessly to me. I went over and laid a hand on Pete’s shoulder.

  “Wait. Maybe we can compromise—or find an alternate solution. What about a job of some sort with Mr. Humdinger?” I said, grasping at a straw. “On top of the five hundred maybe. The training would be invaluable to you, till you got squared away yourself.”

  Pete turned a brightened eye on Humdinger, in whose face a ray of hope had also been kindled. “Well, now, why not?” Humdinger said. “I have lots of jobs in my chain. Driving trocks, maintenance—”

  “I was thinking of something more at the top,” Pete said. “You’ll need somebody to take charge of the new Cobbett one. Greet the guests, see that—”

  “A maître de!” Humdinger gasped. He drank in with fresh horror the two-inch chalk-stripes, the tie with the insects on it which might even possibly be changing positions, the tab-collar shirt. All that was hard enough on the layman; to someone steeped in the Bemelmans tradition it must have been a nightmare. Humdinger turned away with another stricken look and stood dabbing at the umlaut with his handkerchief.

  “That’s the way it reads,” Pete said, and now really got his hat.

  Humdinger whirled around. “You hoof!”

  “If you mean heel,” said Pete, who was quickest this time, “don’t stand on ceremony. I’m easier than that to know. Thank you, gentlemen, and good night.”

  I detained him forcibly at the door. “Now hold on,” I said, just a little sicker of his crafty double-talk than I was of the Prussian’s sniveling. “Let’s cut out the weasel words. You know you rigged this from the start. Now be fair. Mr. Humdinger is—because—well, damn it, he could probably pull the rug from under you easily enough, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Oh, don’t be a rummy. Considering how quick the state liquor commissions are to crack down on people with any record. Any sign of irregularity and your license would be revoked like that. When they see how long it’ll be before you can raise the money for your place—Oh, don’t be a fool. Take the five hundred and put it in your savings.”

  “That’s right, kibitz for him. Feed him gimmicks,” Pete said, pointing to Humdinger whose expression had taken an optimistic turn. “Is this what you call being neutral?”

  “Now just a minute, friend. I’m only tipping you off to possible embarrassment.”

  “I
t’s like I say,” Pete observed after a moment, like a man who finds repose in a conclusion to which he has come, “about a person who’s marked as a moral leopard. He’s got no chance against the forces of respectability. There’s a higherarchy that runs every town—”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Pete.”

  “I will. I’ll say it again and again. There’s a higherarchy that runs every town, and they’re hand in glove. Sitting around in their snug complacency, pulling wires for one another, keeping society the way they want it—their way. Well, if you think I’m going to cut off my nose despite my face …” Feeling us now to be so swimming in nuance that I hardly knew where to begin, I stood staring at the rug. “I wouldn’t say you’re such a shiny example yourself,” Pete went on, “and if you think you’ve got me over a barrel you’ve got another think coming. There’s enough gimmicks in the world for everybody,” he said, looking me in the eye, “so don’t count me out yet. Good evening, gents.”

  “You haven’t said anything about my suggestion for curing the tobacco habit,” I chatted from a pond of pillows on which I lay watching Mrs. Thicknesse pour us tea in her sun room. One foot was flung up on an arm of the divan on which I was thus disposed, and a cigarette burned in an indolent hand. “Either in your letter or now.”

  “What was that?”

  “Smoke exploding cigars.”

  She laughed, holding her finger on the lid of the teapot as the Oolong flowed in a tawny spout into the cups. “That’s marvelous. You’re growing more a wag by the hour. I shan’t try it though, thanks just the same. When did you write me that?”

  “Week before last.”

  “I got no letter from you then or last week. I wondered why. I thought you liked our little notes as much as I have come to.”

  I swung my foot to the floor and sat up. I watched her set the teapot on the trivet.

  “Your mailbox is pretty far from the house. Things could easily be taken out of it without anybody noticing, couldn’t they?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hope not what I think I do. Pete Cheshire may have seen the address on one letter in my office. I finished it as he arrived.”

  Mrs. Thicknesse sat down and leaned back with her hands in her lap. “He’s really hopping mad with you?”

  “Worse than that, by now.” The higherarchy (not including me) had indeed cracked down on him since the evening when I had heard the term coined. A few influential citizens had got the liquor commission to look into the situation, analyze it for what it was, and revoke Pete’s license. “Well, if you didn’t get either of the letters, he helped himself at the mailbox and is about to graduate to blackmail.”

  “Good God.” Mrs. Thicknesse rose and walked the floor as our tea cooled in its Limoges cups. “There are of course two alternatives. Get the police after him is one. Do you know anybody on the force?”

  “Only too well!” I exclaimed, feeling danger blowing like a cold wind from a fresh quarter. “What’s the other alternative?” I asked her quickly.

  “Why, pay him what he wants. I don’t know what you wrote,” she said, her dark lashes sweeping downward as she cast her eyes to the floor, “but if there were—things in them …” My own expression told her there were. “Oh, well,” she said, collecting herself with a determined sigh, “money will be his object, which needn’t worry us as it won’t be ours.”

  A tour of my eye about the sun room and on into the living room, from whose brocaded depths De Falla’s notion of Iberian gardens blew across our leisure like a tonal scent, assured me how true that was; and rejecting, as resolutely as my friend, any tarnish on this golden afternoon, I was able to pick up my tea and, strolling to the mantel, drink it with at least a measure of the aplomb with which I had watched it poured.

  “Well, you know, my dear Clara,” I observed, standing there, “conquering a woman is like climbing a mountain. Getting back is half the danger.”

  “That’s marvelous. It really is, you know…. Darling, you’re stirring your tea with the handle of the spoon.”

  Nine

  Pete Cheshire was wearing the bait-flecked tie. Everything else was wearing him. The tie floated an anchor on a blue bay of shirt, which in turn lay between the lapels of a jacket the color of tomato soup, from whose buttonhole sprang a pink carnation. He was drawing on one of those cigarillos of his, and walking around my office.

  “Get it through your medulla obligato that you’re over a barrel.”

  “How much do you want for the letters?” I asked, fingering a stiletto used hitherto only for slicing open mail, now possibly adaptable to cutting out somebody’s tripe.

  “Not a red cent. I just want a little favor.”

  I laid the letter knife aside, along with my dreams of mayhem, and did something in a more practical vein. I got a firm grip on my knees and asked: “Just what kind of favor did you have in mind?”

  Pete took another turn around the room before replying, then did so abruptly. “Just say that I was here last Thursday night, between eight and ten, in case anybody asks.”

  Watching my spiffy friend out of the tail of my eye, I recalled certain thieveries which had occurred in the city of late, whose enactor always left a calling card signed “The Smoothie” at the scene of the crime. On the Thursday night for which my cooperation was requested a hardware store not far from where we were now matching wits had been entered and robbed of three hundred and some dollars. Now I guessed I was expected to rise out of my seat and exclaim, “Then you’re—the Smoothie!” I was damned if I would. I would tell the other principal in this gathering dream to go soak his fat … Steady, I warned myself, taking in his two fingers of brow: you’re in the clutches of a shrewd moron. A smart dumbbell. Don’t lose your head. Stall for time.

  Shooting my sleeves back, I laced my hands behind my head and said with an understanding smile, “Pete, the game isn’t worth the candle. This will be what they call a Pyrrhic victory. A success that’s really a setback. One thing like this leads to another, because habit is a cable. We add a thread every day, and at last we cannot break it.”

  “Blow the spit out of your valves and try another chorus.”

  “This is a mighty strong thread you’re adding—blackmail, Pete—and, Pete, let me put it this way. He who rides a tiger finds it difficult to dismount.”

  “Who’s riding one?”

  I brought both palms down on the desk as I rose.

  “I won’t stand for this—goddam it!” I added, to show that the Lamplighter could get along with the common people. “You were going so fine. Going straight.”

  “We both know why I changed. You’re such a shiny example. And I know you’ll cooperate to the fullest to keep your respectable standing in the community from getting any blot on it.”

  Before he could give his spiel about the “higherarchy,” no doubt augmented this time with cynical inclusions about their private lives, I went on, “You’re going straight now all right—straight to hell! This operation is so full of bugs I hardly know where to begin, but I’ll do my best. In the first place, Pete, this Raffles act. Aren’t you aiming a little high?”

  “Hitch your wagon to a star says you to me.”

  “Let alone that a Raffles would be a man of honor. Gallant.” He would never take advantage of a lady who once befriended him.”

  “You’ll notice it’s not her I’m putting the squeeze on, though I could get all I needed in one lump out of her. Because my goal is ten thou’. I figure that’s what I need to make a fresh start in a restaurant business in some other town. It’ll take quite a while unless I make a strike, say with some member of the local nobility’s jewels.”

  “In a tuxedo?” I asked him dryly.

  “Meanwhile it’s nice to know I have a standing alibi. Or rather a pacing one”—and he laughed heartily.

  “You mean you expect me to cover for you every time? Never!”

  “We’ll see,” said Pete inclemently. Then he seemed to relent; afte
r drawing on his cigar with a savoir-faire that made my teeth ache, he smilingly went on, “Of course I’ll do the same for you, any time you need an alibi. See, the Smoothie always fares forth on Thursday nights, which I believe you have a standing date. You probably give out the story you’re working late at the office, so it works out nice for both of us.”

  “And what if I tell you you can go to the devil?”

  “Guess.”

  I looked straight at his numskull. “If I can ever get it through that thick—”

  “Watch it.” In a dead calm, Pete bent to twist out the cigarillo in an ashtray. “You know I could put the bite on you direct for a few thou’, but I’m not. I figure you probably haven’t got that kind of money lying around. All I ask is that you back me up any time I need it.”

  “Of course you may not need it,” I said, wishing aloud.

  Pete frowned. “That’s hard to say. I have an idea I’m being followed. So I thought I’d better brief you and put you on a round-the-clock alert.”

  “Who’s been following you?”

  “Somebody who’s vaguely familar but I can’t place. I will though, when I can get in a little tailing of my own. Not my old probation officer. Maybe it’s just my imagination. I hope so.”

  Pete strolled toward the door.

  “So-o, that’s the way it reads. I was here last Thursday night, having one of our heart-to-heart talks. Next Thursday the Smoothie will strike again. There’s a pattern in these crimes,” he said with a grueling smile, and was gone.

  I stood looking at the closed door for some moments after his footsteps vanished down the hall. Then I charged my desk and snatched up objects from it and hurled them in all directions. While most of me did that, part of me went tsk, tsk. This was so unlike me—like everything else I did. Where was it all leading?

  It was here the Lamplighter had his first intimation that he was marked for martyrdom. That he had preached no cliché so homely that it would not be found, at last, incarnate in himself. That he must be thrown to the wolves in order that moralities grown stale, virtues long withered into phrases, might live again, and blossom in purple and gold. The seed packet of dried bromides which he must water with his blood were ones he had inherited against his will, but that was beside the point, if it was not the heart of the matter. For a day of propitiation had been ordained, and he was the designated bullock.