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There’s a luncheonette I go to once or twice a month on Amsterdam Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth. The owner is a Turk with an intimidating moustache and the food he serves is every bit as Turkish, if less intimidating. I was sitting at the counter two days after my first meeting with my new-found friend. I’d just finished polishing off an exceptional bowl of lentil soup, and while I waited for my stuffed grape leaves I glanced at a selection of meerschaum pipes in a glass case on the wall. The man with the moustache goes home to Turkey every spring and returns with a satchel full of pipes, which he insists are better than anything you can buy over the counter at Dunhill’s. I don’t smoke a pipe so I’m not really tempted, but whenever I eat there I look at the pipes and try to figure out if there’s a pipe smoker on earth I’m a close enough friend to so that I can buy him one of these beauties. There never is.
“My old man used to smoke a meerschaum,” said a familiar voice beside me. “Only pipe he owned and he musta smoked it five, six times a day. Over the years the thing turned as black as the deuce of spades. He had this special glove he always wore when he smoked it. Just on the one hand, the hand he held the pipe in. He’d always sit in the same chair and just smoke that pipe real slow and easy. Had a special fitted case he kept it in when he wasn’t smoking it. Case was lined in blue velvet.”
“You do turn up at odd times.”
“Then one day it broke,” he went on. “I don’t know whether he dropped it or set it down hard or it just got too old or whatever the hell happened. My memory, you know.”
“Like a sieve.”
“The worst. What’s fu
“There’s a reason you’re telling me this story.”
“No reason at all. Just that it came to mind looking at those pipes there. I don’t want to interrupt your meal, Rhodenbarr.”
“One might say you’ve already done that.”
“So I’ll be on the corner gettin’ my shoes shined. I don’t guess you’ll be too long, will you?”
“I guess not.”
He left. I ate my grape leaves. I hadn’t intended to have dessert but I decided the hell with it and ate a small piece of too-sweet baklava and sipped a thick cup of inky Turkish coffee. I thought about having a second cup but figured it would keep me awake for four years and I didn’t want that. So I paid the man with the moustache and walked to the shoeshine stand on the corner.
My friend told me everything I’d always wanted to know about J. Francis Flaxford and his blue leather box. If anything, he told me more than I wanted to know without answering any of my more important questions.
At one point I asked him his own name. He slid his soft brown eyes across my forehead and treated me to a look of infinite disappointment.
“Now I could tell you a name,” he said, “but then what would you know that you don’t know now? Not too much chance that it would be a real name, is there?”
“Not too much, no.”
“So why should we make complications for ourselves? All you got to know is where and when to get the box, which we just went over, and how and where to give it to me so you can get the other four grand.”
“You mean we’ll plan that in advance? I thought I’d just go about my business and one of these days you’d turn up breathing over my shoulder at the delicatessen. Or maybe you’d be in the basement laundry room when I went down to throw my socks in the dryer.”
He sighed. “You’ll be inside Flaxford’s place nine, nine-thirty. You’ll be outta there by eleven, eleven-thirty the latest. Can’t take too long to take a box out of a desk. You’ll want to go home, have a drink, take a shower, change your clothes, that kind of thing.” And drop off burglar tools and such, along with whatever sundry swag I might happen to acquire. “So you take yourself some time, and then what you do, you go to a place nice and convenient to your apartment. There’s a bar on Broadway and I think it’s Sixty-fourth Street, called Pandora’s. You know it?”
“I’ve passed it.”
“Nice quiet place. Get there, say, twelve-thirty and take a booth at the back. There’s no waitress so what you do is you get your drink at the bar and carry it back to your table.”
“Sounds as though I’d better wear a suit.”
“It’s private and it’s quiet and they leave you alone. You’ll get there at twelve-thirty and you might have to sit there half an hour.”
“And then you’ll turn up around one?”
“Right. Any problem, you wait until half past one and then you take the box and go home. But there won’t be no problems.”
“Of course not,” I agreed. “But suppose someone tries to take the box away from me?”
“Well, take cabs, for Chrissake. You don’t want to walk around at that hour. Oh, wait a minute.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You think I’d knock you over for a lousy four thousand dollars? Why would I do that?”
“Because it might be cheaper than paying me.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Then how could I use you some other time? Look, carry some heat if it’s go
“Gees,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Thou, kay, gees. Grand.”
“Huh?”
“Four big ones.”
“What’s the point?”
“You’ve got so many nicknames for money, that’s all. You’re like a thesaurus of slang.”
“Something wrong with the way I talk, Rhodenbarr?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing. It’s just me. My nerves, I guess. I get all keyed up.”
“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I just bet you do.”
And now I sat up on Rod’s couch and looked at my watch. It was getting on for midnight. I’d gotten out of the Flaxford apartment with plenty of time to spare, but all the same it didn’t look as though I’d be in Pandora’s by twelve-thirty. My thousand dollars in front money was but a memory and the remaining four big ones were never to be mine, and at one o’clock my nameless friend would be sipping his Scotch and wondering why I’d decided to stand him up.
Oh, sure he would.
Chapter Five
I don’t know just when I got to sleep. A little after midnight a wave of exhaustion hit me and I got out of my clothes and into Rod’s bed. I was just on the verge of sleep when I sensed an alien presence hovering at the bedside. I told myself I was being silly, and you know how well that sort of thing works, and I opened my eyes and saw that the alien presence was a split-leaf philodendron on a small stand by the side of the bed. It had as much right to be there as I did, if not more, but by the time we’d taken each other’s measure I was awake again, my mind spi
I switched on the radio part of Rod’s stereo, set the volume low, and perched in a chair waiting for the music to end and the news to come on. You know how when you want music there’s a newscast every fifteen minutes? Well, the reverse is just as true. Cops, taxis, newscasts, nothing’s ever there when you want it.
Ultimately there was a newscast, of course, and I listened intently to any number of items in which I had no interest whatsoever, and the round-voiced a
I switched to another station but of course I had half an hour to wait for their newscast, having just missed it, and they were playing a bland sort of folk-rock. When the singer started telling me that his girl’s voice was a stick of chalk drawn across the blackboard of his soul (I swear I’m not making this up) I remembered I was hungry. I went to the kitchen and opened drawers and cabinets and peered inside the fridge, and you’d have thought Old Mother Hubbard lived there. I managed to turn up half a box of Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice (formerly Buddhist and now Presbyterian, I suppose), a discouraging-looking can of Norwegian sardines in mustard sauce, and a lot of little jars and tins of herbs and spices and sauces which could have perked up food if there had been any around. I decided I’d make myself some rice, but a look into the box showed me that I was not the first uninvited guest to take note of it, and Uncle Ben had been further converted, this time from rice to roach shit.