Comfort Station

by Donald E. Westlake

  Perhaps if he lived closer to midtown it would be easier to get to work on time, but somehow Mo couldn’t bring himself to move out of the little apartment uptown, the meagerly furnished three rooms in which he lived alone, except for his correspondence courses and a cat called Bitsy, who occasionally came in from her usual haunt on the fire escape to eat roaches and condescend to join Mo in a saucer of milk. So it was that every morning he took a bus down Ninth Avenue to West 42nd Street, where he transferred to the Crosstown bus for the straight run to the Comfort Station. Usually arriving late.

  It didn’t always matter if he was late. Most of the time there was no one around at seven in the morning anyway, no one to care if the Comfort Station was open or closed. But every once in a while Mo would alight late from the Crosstown bus to find some poor wayfarer hopping up and down on the sidewalk out front, his agony mirrored in his expression, which was agonized. At those moments of emergency and crisis, Mo always acted with instinctive speed and precision, unlocking the door, switching on the lights, assuring himself there was sufficient paper in the stalls, and at the same time feeling deep inside the gnawing knowledge of his own failure, his own inattention. He should have been here on time; it was his fault and no one else’s that the poor wayfarer had been reduced to hopping up and down on the sidewalk for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or even twenty minutes. At such times, Mo promised himself never to be late again, but his resolution never seemed to last very long: the next day, or the day after that, he would be late again.

  As he was this morning. It was already past seven, and he was still at Ninth Avenue, blocks from his assigned post. But here, in any event, was the bus. It pulled to a stop, the bifurcated door opened, and Mo stepped aboard, grateful to be out of the pouring rain, drenching an already-drenched city.

  “Hello, Mo.” It was Fred Dingbat, a driver Mo knew well.

  “Hello, Fred,” Mo riposted, dropping a token into the box. Looking down the long length of the interior of the bus, Mo saw that there were no other passengers, a not infrequent occurrence at this hour of a Tuesday morning—or even a Wednesday morning, actually—particularly when it was raining, which it was doing now.

  Mo sat in the first seat on the right side, where he faced the driver and could talk to him even while the vehicle was in motion. Against the rules, of course, but the bus company generally blinked at such bending of the regulations. Bus drivers were human, as the company understood, and liked to have some company while driving the bus. A little harmless fraternization with the passengers was considered all right, so long as it didn’t become too blatant or interfere with the driver’s performance of his function. He was, after all (the driver), in command of two point four tons of green machinery, rolling through the mighty city, surrounded by cars, cabs, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mounted policemen, wheelchairs, and the Cattleman Restaurant’s stagecoach: he had to be cool and calm at all times, in control of both himself and the juggernaut he was driving.

  As though divining Mo’s thoughts, Fred commented, “The drive for more flexible bus routes is among the more significant advances in the theory of omnibus operation in the megalopolis patterns of latter twentieth century life.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” Mo countered. “The overlapping radii of responsibility in, say, your field and mine is going to prove increasingly important in the years to come, a fact the general public is still very much not aware of.”

  Fred chuckled appreciatively. “You’re so right,” he urged. “But try to get the politicians to see it that way.”

  “Well, they have problems of their own,” Mo designated, and once again the old suspicion reared its ugly head. Was that why he hadn’t found responsibility in life? Was that why the Bryant Park Comfort Station was, thus far, the apex of his career?

  The fact of the matter was, Mo Mowgli had no problems at home. He wasn’t married, which meant he couldn’t commit adultery, nor could his wife. Nor could he have generation-gap problems with his children. Beyond all this, he wasn’t haunted by anything from his past, not even in the war. Any war.

  It seemed so unfair. Just because he didn’t have personal problems at home, just because he wasn’t haunted by a grim reminder from his past, was that reason enough to keep him forever on the fringes of executive responsibility? He was willing, God knew, he wanted to do a good job.

  Mo subsided into a morose silence. Fred, understanding something of the situation, returned his attention to the task of driving the big green bus and allowed Mo his moment of introspection. It must be a terrible thing, Fred thought, to be haunted by the lack of a past.

  His bald pate covered by a bushy mass of brown hair, Mo Mowgli was perfectly ordinary looking in every way.

  8:00 A.M.

  THE UNOBTRUSIVE BLACK AUTOMOBILE which rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the Bryant Park Comfort Station at four minutes to eight on that unobtrusive Tuesday morning—the rain continuing to drench an already-drenched city—was an unobtrusive black Checker Marathon, the car for unobtrusive people. Manufactured with painstaking care by the artisans of Kalamazoo, Michigan, this particular unobtrusive black Checker Marathon—like so many others of its kind—had a one-hundred-twenty-inch wheelbase, an overall length of one hundred ninety-nine inches, and a width (at its widest width) of seventy-six inches. Powered by a powerful two-hundred-thirty-six-cubic-inch Perkins diesel engine, the noise of the motor while idling was not as unobtrusive as it might have been, but the savings in fuel could be counted in pennies. And however unobtrusive its black coloration, modest grille, and seemly quartet of headlights, the Marathon of which we speak stood a proud five feet three inches high, towering over all those pinched-down creatures from Detroit, and towering as well over most people’s girl friends.

  Of the two individuals inside this particular Checker Marathon, the one sitting at the steering wheel, his hands on the wheel and his feet on the pedals jutting out of the floor, could most properly be termed the driver. He it was who had operated the nearly two ton vehicle in its travels through the now heavily trafficked city streets to this spot directly in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station, and it was undoubtedly the strain of commanding all this fine-honed machinery in such difficult conditions—lots of traffic, lots of rain—which had given him the morose and irritable expression which his countenance now demonstrated to whosoever might cop a glom through the windshield-wiper-wiped windshield, if anyone cared to. But what would be the explanation for the similar expression of unhappy gloom now to be seen upon the countenance of the other occupant of the vehicle already described, properly called the passenger?

  For that—the explanation •/•—one would have to search more deeply than minor current annoyances like rain or traffic; one would have to search—in fact—into the mentality and past of the individual concerned, by name Arbogast Smith, thirty-two years of age, a uniformed policeman by trade, currently on special plainclothes detail to Bryant Park Comfort Station, in Manhattan.

  At this moment—in fact—Arbogast Smith himself, seated in the front seat of the powerful though unobtrusive black Checker Marathon beside the driver, was reflecting on his own past, the curious turns and twists of which had landed him here at this most unusual spot in space and time. It was not peculiar for Arbogast Smith to go into periods of introspection concerning his own history; he did it whenever nothing much was happening. In one way, however, his periods of introspection did set him apart from much of humanity: he did not do his flashbacks in the pluperfect tense. Most introspections, in this grammatical day and age, occur in what is called the past perfect or pluperfect tense—that is, he had been, he had gone, he had went—but Arbogast Smith got along without a lot of extra “hads,” throwing one in every now and then for seasoning but generally permitting his past to remain as simple as his present.

  What Arbogast Smith was reflecting on was the three generations of cops he had come from and the pressure on him to live up to them in their field. This reflection was all worked
out in neat paragraphs in Arbogast Smith’s mind, even including a fully fleshed scene—dialogue and all—at a kitchen table, the whole reflection being long enough to run, if printed in a book, a good solid nine pages. He had, however, barely gotten into the first paragraph of the reminiscence (“It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call …”) when he was recalled to the present by the urgent honking of a bus horn directly behind the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon in which he was seated.

  “Darn!” Arbogast said, with his usual forcefulness. “I hate to keep being recalled to the present like that.”

  “It’s no fun for the rest of us either,” responded the driver, whose name I have in my voluminous research somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I’ll look again later.

  “Gosh, you’re morose and irritable today,” Arbogast said, his usual modest and amiable demeanor returning to him with the speed of light (one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second).

  “Ah, go fumigate yourself,” retorted the driver. “And get out of the car.”

  “Listen,” said Arbogast, his tone now demonstrating that no more nonsense was to be taken, “I understand you have personal problems, as haven’t we all, but we are both cops together, both ultimately concerned with the greater good above minor personal contretemps, both working together—”

  The driver reached across Arbogast, opened the passenger-side door, lifted his knee, pressed the sole of his black Thom McAn shoe against Arbogast’s hip, and kicked him into the gutter, where he landed, all unnoticing, on a suicide note.

  Before Arbogast could counter with a stinging denunciation of violence in interpersonal affairs, the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon had growled away in the rain, becoming instantly invisible in the stream of traffic.

  Arbogast sat there, on the suicide note, and watched the traffic go by in the rain. It was funny, he reflected, how things happened in this old world. It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call …

  He was recalled to the present by the honking of the selfsame bus horn that had rousted him the last time. Looking up, his annoyance now reaching the point of spilling over, he saw directly to his left the right double headlight of a 42nd Street Crosstown bus. Looking up, he saw the windshield, with the big wipers going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And through the windshield he saw the angry face of Fred Dingbat.

  See how the threads are beginning to cross?

  Of course, Arbogast didn’t yet know it was Fred Dingbat he was seeing up there through the windshield, but he was about to find out. Getting to his feet, both angered and saddened by the necessity of what he was now going to have to do, Arbogast went around to the side of the bus and knocked forcefully on the door. “Open up,” he said. “Police.”

  Fred Dingbat opened the door. “Don’t you know you were obstructing me?” he demanded. “I have miles to go before I sleep. I have—”

  “Don’t you know—?”

  “Just a minute, will you?” Fred insisted peevishly. “I’m not done. I have miles to go before I sleep.”

  “You already said that,” Arbogast pointed out.

  “I have to say it twice,” Fred explained.

  “Oh. Well, in any event, I am a police officer of the law, and here is my rain-soaked badge. See?”

  “It’s rusting.”

  “Being a cop isn’t all apples and kickbacks, you know. In any event, in blowing your horn in the New York City limits you have violated Municipal Ordinance 147, Part C, Subparagraph 12a. Now I don’t know how often your business brings you into New York City, but around here—”

  “I’m here all the time! I drive this bus!”

  “Around here,” Arbogast persisted, knowing how the public in general tried to avoid hearing the truth about these situations, “we have a municipal ordinance against blowing horns. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of these by-the-book boys, but if we don’t follow the letter of the law, how do you suppose we’ll ever manage to follow its spirit?”

  “I never thought of that,” Fred admitted.

  Arbogast nodded. “Most members of the general public never do,” he said. “So I’m afraid I’m just going to have to give you a summons.”

  “Well,” Fred said, “if you have to, I guess you have to.”

  “I have to.” Arbogast took his rain-soaked summons book from his pocket. “What’s your occupation?” he asked.

  “I drive this bus!”

  “I see.” Arbogast wrote out the summons, gave it to Fred, and stepped out again onto the rain-soaked curb. Looking back, he gave Fred a stern look and said, “Don’t let me see you around here anymore.” And then he turned toward the Bryant Park Comfort Station. The bus drove away. The rain rained.

  9:00 A.M.

  THE MAN WHO STEPPED down from Fred Dingbat’s bus in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past nine that Tuesday morning, turning his coat collar up against the rain drenching an already-drenched city, his other hand clutched tightly around the handle of the black satchel in his other hand, was late for work. Seven minutes late, in fact. Unlike Mo Mowgli, however, who had also been late for work this morning, this man was going to be a lot later before he was done, because this man was not going to work.

  His name was Herbert Q. Luminous, and his history was almost a cliché of what can happen to a mild-mannered bookkeeper who meets a young blonde woman in a bar and finds in her companionship the kind of self-fulfillment and excitement that had never been his at home with his aging mother or at the office with his aging NCR computer or even down in the cellar of his house on Long Island with his aging issues of CPA Journal and the model train set which was his pride and also his joy.

  And now, he reflected bitterly as he stepped down to the sidewalk from the bus, he would never see that model train set again. No, nor the carefully retained issues of CPA Journal, nor his aging mother, nor the NCR computer at the office. They were all in the past now, and it was time to forget the past and start to think about the future.

  It was almost a cliché the way it had happened. At forty-two years of age, Herbert Q. Luminous had taken it for granted his chances for romance and adventure had passed him by, and if truth be told he didn’t really mind all that much. He liked his life, or at least he thought he did, with its regular hours, aging along with everything else that surrounded him.

  Until the night, last winter, of the big snowstorm. Herbert was driving home (his reminiscences, like Arbogast Smith’s, tended to do without the pluperfect) from the Long Island Railroad station and his car got stuck in a snowdrift. Seeing red lights not far away, he fought his way through the snow and discovered a bar, and in it—her.

  She said her name was Floozey. She was young and blonde and desirable, and he found himself buying her drinks, telling her his life story (it didn’t take long), and trying to impress her with his ability at shuffleboard bowling. It was almost a cliché, but it seemed to him he knew from the instant he had seen her that they were going to be very important to one another.

  After that first meeting, there had been others. He went to her apartment in the city. He went again. He went some more. He had gone again and again.

  And she was expensive. She liked the finer things in life: nightclubs, dancing, expensive restaurants. And gifts: perfumes, clothing, false eyelashes. Whatever she wanted, Herbert got it for her, because she was what he wanted. It was almost a cliché, really, his falling for her like that. But he did.

  She went through his savings fast, and when he had no more money he was afraid to tell her. He knew it was almost a cliché to think a thing like this, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid that if she knew he had no more money she would leave him. And he couldn’t stand that, to lose her.

  That was when the embezzling started. Herbert was a good bookkeeper; he knew how to manipulate figures without leaving any trace of his handiwork. And his embezzling was modest, never very much at one time, onl
y enough to cover the checks he wrote for the things Floozey wanted.

  The general public, of course, is unaware of just how common this sort of thing is in the world we live in. It’s almost a cliché to say so, but white-collar crime like that perpetrated by Herbert Q. Luminous costs the taxpayer every bit as much as the much more publicized and dramatic sort of crime performed by the Mafia, or what is known as grimy-collar crime. The white-collar criminal, more often than not, doesn’t even belong to the Mafia, as, for instance, Herbert Q. Luminous didn’t belong to the Mafia.

  And there are other differences.

  Law enforcement officials and others struggle daily with the effort to get across to the general public the dangers of white-collar crime, the soaring costs, the difficulty of apprehending the perpetrator—you can’t arrest a person just because they dress nice—but on the other hand, what if everybody who wanted to get something across to the general public did get it across? What then, eh? Never thought of that, did you?

  It’s almost a cliché to say so, but very few people have.

  Herbert’s embezzling followed the usual pattern, as did his relationship with Floozey. But the time came when his nervousness, his apprehension about his apprehension by the forces of the law, had grown in him to the point where he couldn’t keep silent any longer, and he finally confessed to Floozey the truth about his taking funds from his employer, imploring her not to think the less of him for his crimes, as he had done them for her.

  Far from condemning him, Floozey congratulated him, and demonstrated her new respect for him in most convincing fashion. It’s almost a cliché of that sort of relationship: once Floozey saw that Herbert too was less than lily-white, her behavior toward him, particularly in the area of erotic relationship which had played such an important part in their affair, developed into a new phase which Herbert found highly gratifying, not to say exhausting.

  However, his depredations upon his employer did bother his conscience, and he told Floozey it was now time for them both to scrimp and save so he could begin to return the money. But she, she said, had a better idea.