Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Read online

  His happiness was unbroken—except by his melancholy relationship with his secretary. While his memory worked like a mousetrap, paralysis still gripped him whenever he thought of mentioning love to the serene brunette.

  Alfred sighed and picked up a sheaf of invoices. The first was addressed to the Davenport Spot-welding Company. He closed his eyes and a shimmering tableau appeared. He had composed it two days previous, when Mr. Thriller had given him special instructions. Two davenports faced each other. Lana Turner, sheathed in a tight-fitting leopard skin, lay on one. On the other was Jane Russell, in a sarong made of telegrams. Both of them blew kisses to Alfred, who contemplated them for a moment, then reluctantly let them fade.

  He scribbled a note to Ellen: Please make sure Davenport Spot-welding Company and Davenport Wire and Cable Company have not been confused in our billing. Six weeks before, the matter would certainly have slipped his mind. I love you, he added, and then carefully crossed it out with a long black rectangle of ink.

  In one way, his good memory was a curse. By freeing him from hours of searching through filing cabinets, it gave him that much more time to worry about Ellen. The richest moments in his life were and had been—even before the Memory Clinic—his daydreams. The most delicious of these featured Ellen. Were he to give her the opportunity to turn him down, and she almost certainly would, she could never appear in his fantasies again. Alfred couldn’t bring himself to risk that.

  The telephone rang. “It’s Mr. Thriller,” said Ellen.

  “Moorhead,” said Mr. Thriller, “I’ve got a lot of little stuff piled up on me. Could you take some of it over?”

  “Glad to, chief. Shoot.”

  “Got a pencil?”

  “Nonsense, chief,” said Alfred.

  “No, I mean it,” said Mr. Thriller grimly. “I’d feel better if you wrote this down. There’s an awful lot of stuff.”

  Alfred’s pen had gone dry, and he couldn’t lay his hands on a pencil without getting up, so he lied. “Okay, got one. Shoot.”

  “First of all, we’re getting a lot of subcontracts on big defense jobs, and a new series of code numbers is going to be used for these jobs. Any number beginning with Sixteen A will designate that it’s one of them. Better wire all our plants about it.”

  In Alfred’s mind, Ava Gardner executed a smart manual of arms with a rifle. Emblazoned on her sweater was a large 16A. “Right, chief.”

  “And I’ve got a memo here from …”

  Fifteen minutes later, Alfred, perspiring freely, said, “Right, chief,” for the forty-third time and hung up. Before his mind’s eye was a pageant to belittle the most flamboyant dreams of Cecil B. DeMille. Ranged about Alfred was every woman motion picture star he had ever seen, and each brandished or wore or carried or sat astride something Alfred could be fired for forgetting. The image was colossal, and the slightest disturbance might knock it to smithereens. He had to get to pencil and paper before tragedy struck. He crossed the room like a game-stalker, hunched, noiselessly.

  “Mr. Moorhead, are you all right?” said Ellen, alarmed.

  “Mmm. Mmm!” said Alfred, frowning.

  He reached the pencil and pad, and exhaled. The picture was fogging, but it was still there. Alfred considered the ladies one by one, wrote down their messages, and allowed them to dissolve.

  As their numbers decreased, he began to slow their exits in order to savor them. Now Ann Sheridan, the next-to-the-last in line, astride a western pony, tapped him on the forehead with a lightbulb to remind him of the name of an important contact at General Electric—Mr. Bronk. She blushed under his gaze, dismounted, and dissolved.

  The last stood before him, clutching a sheaf of papers. Alfred was stumped. The papers seemed to be the only clue, and they recalled nothing. He reached out and clasped her to him. “Now, baby,” he murmured, “what’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, Mr. Moorhead,” sighed Ellen.

  “Oh, gosh!” said Alfred, freeing her. “Ellen—I’m sorry, I forgot myself.”

  “Well, praise be, you finally remembered me.”

  Any Reasonable Offer

  A few days ago, just before I came up here to Newport on a vacation, in spite of being broke, it occurred to me there isn’t any profession—or racket, or whatever—that takes more of a beating from its clients than real estate. If you stand still, they club you. If you run, they shoot.

  Maybe dentists have rougher client relationships, but I doubt it. Give a man a choice between having his teeth or a real estate salesman’s commission extracted, and he’ll choose the pliers and novocaine every time.

  Consider Delahanty. Two weeks ago, Dennis Delahanty asked me to sell his house for him, said he wanted twenty thousand for it.

  That afternoon I took a prospect out to see the house. The prospect walked through it once, said that he liked it and he’d take it. That evening he closed the deal. With Delahanty. Behind my back.

  Then I sent Delahanty a bill for my commission—five percent of the sale price, one thousand dollars.

  “What the hell are you?” he wanted to know. “A busy movie star?”

  “You knew what my commission was going to be.”

  “Sure, I knew. But you only worked an hour. A thousand bucks an hour! Forty thousand a week, two million a year! I just figured it out.”

  “Some years I make ten million,” I said.

  “I work six days a week, fifty weeks a year, and then turn around and pay some young squirt like you a thousand for one hour of smiles and small talk and a pint of gas. I’m going to write my congressman. If it’s legal, it sure as hell shouldn’t be.”

  “He’s my congressman, too, and you signed a contract. You read it, didn’t you?”

  He hung up on me. He still hasn’t paid me.

  Old Mrs. Hellbrunner called right after Delahanty. Her house has been on the market for three years, and it represents about all that’s left of the Hellbrunner family’s fortune. Twenty-seven rooms, nine baths, ballroom, den, study, music room, solarium, turrets with slits for crossbowmen, simulated drawbridge and portcullis, and a dry moat. Somewhere in the basement, I suppose, are racks and gibbets for insubordinate domestics.

  “Something is very wrong,” said Mrs. Hellbrunner. “Mr. Delahanty sold that awful little cracker-box of his in one day, and for four thousand more than he paid for it. Good heavens, I’m asking only a quarter of the replacement price for my house.”

  “Well—it’s a very special sort of person who would want your place, Mrs. Hellbrunner,” I said, thinking of an escaped maniac. “But someday he’ll come along. They say there’s a house for every person, and a person for every house. It isn’t every day I get someone in here who’s looking for something in the hundred-thousand-dollar range. But sooner or later—”

  “When you accepted Mr. Delahanty as a client, you went right to work and earned your commission,” she said. “Why can’t you do the same for me?”

  “We’ll just have to be patient. It’s—”

  She, too, hung up, and then I saw the tall, gray-haired gentleman standing in the office doorway. Something about him—or maybe about me—made me want to jump to attention and suck in my sagging gut.

  “Yessir!” I said.

  “Is this yours?” he said, handing me an ad clipped from the morning paper. He held it as though he were returning a soiled handkerchief that had fallen from my pocket.

  “Yessir—the Hurty place. That’s mine, all right.”

  “This is the place, Pam,” he said, and a tall, somberly dressed woman joined him. She didn’t look directly at me, but at an imaginary horizon over my left shoulder, as though I were a headwaiter or some other minor functionary.

  “Perhaps you’d like to know what they’re asking for the place before we go out there,” I said.

  “The swimming pool is in order?” said the woman.

  “Yes, ma’am. Just two years old.”

  “And the stables are usable?” said the man.

  “Yessir. Mr. H
urty has his horses in them now. They’re all newly whitewashed, fireproof, everything. He’s asking eighty-five thousand for the place, and it’s a firm price. Is that within your price range, sir?”

  He curled his lip.

  “I said that about price range, because some people—”

  “Do we look like any of them?” said the woman.

  “No, you certainly don’t.” And they didn’t, either, and every second they were looking more like a four-thousand-two-hundred-fifty-dollar commission. “I’ll call Mr. Hurty right away.”

  “Tell him that Colonel and Mrs. Bradley Peckham are interested in his property.”

  The Peckhams had come by cab, so I drove them to the Hurty estate in my old two-door sedan, for which I apologized, and, to judge from their expression, rightly so.

  Their town car, they related, had developed an infuriating little squeak, and was in the hands of a local dealer, who had staked his reputation on getting the squeak out.

  “What is it you do, Colonel?” I asked, making small talk.

  His eyebrows went up. “Do? Why, whatever amuses me. Or in time of crisis, whatever my country needs most.”

  “Right now he’s straightening things out at National Steel Foundry,” said Mrs. Peckham.

  “Rum show, that,” said the Colonel, “but coming along, coming along.”

  At the Hurty threshold, Mr. Hurty himself came to the door, tweedy, booted, and spurred. His family was in Europe. The Colonel and his wife, once I had made the formal introductions, ignored me. The Peckhams had some distance to go, however, before offending four thousand dollars’ worth of my pride.

  I sat quietly, like a Seeing Eye dog or overnight bag, and listened to the banter of those who bought and sold eighty-five-thousand-dollar estates with urbane negligence.

  There were none of your shabby questions about how much the place cost to heat or keep up, or what the taxes were, or whether the cellar was dry. Not on your life.

  “I’m so glad there’s a greenhouse,” said Mrs. Peckham. “I had such high hopes for the place, but the ad didn’t mention a greenhouse, and I just prayed there was one.”

  “Never underestimate the power of prayer,” I said to myself.

  “Yes, I think you’ve done well with it,” the Colonel said to Hurty. “I’m glad to see you’ve got an honest-to-God swimming pool, and not one of these cement-lined puddles.”

  “One thing you may be interested in,” said Hurty, “is that the water isn’t chlorinated. It’s passed under ultraviolet light.”

  “I should hope so,” said the Colonel.

  “Um,” said Hurty.

  “Have you a labyrinth?” said Mrs. Peckham.

  “How’s that?” said Hurty.

  “A labyrinth made of box hedge. They’re awfully picturesque.”

  “No, sorry,” said Hurty, pulling on his mustache.

  “Well, no matter,” said the Colonel, making the best of it. “We can put one in.”

  “Yes,” said his wife. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, and placed her hand over her heart. Her eyes rolled, and she started to sink to the floor.

  “Darling!” The Colonel caught her about the waist.

  “Please—” she gasped.

  “A stimulant!” commanded the Colonel. “Brandy! Anything!”

  Hurty, unnerved, fetched a decanter and poured a shot.

  The Colonel’s wife forced some between her lips, and the roses returned to her cheeks.

  “More, darling?” the Colonel asked.

  “A sip,” she whispered.

  When she’d finished it off, the Colonel sniffed the glass. “By George, but that’s got a lovely bouquet!” He held out the glass to Hurty, and Hurty filled it.

  “Jove!” said the Colonel, savoring, sniffing. “First-rate. Mmm. You know, it’s a vanishing race that has the patience really to know the exquisite things in life. With most, it’s gulp, gulp, and they’re off on some mad chase again.”

  “Sure,” said Hurty.

  “Better, dear?” the Colonel asked his wife.

  “Much. You know how it is. It comes and goes.”

  I watched the Colonel take a book from the shelves. He looked in the front, possibly to make sure it was a first edition. “Well, Mr. Hurty,” he said, “I think it must show in our eyes how much we like the place. There are some things we’d change, of course, but by and large—”

  Hurty looked to me.

  I cleared my throat. “Well,” I lied, “there are a number of people very interested in this property, as you might expect. I think you’d better make your offer official as soon as possible, if it’s really to your liking.”

  “You aren’t going to sell it to just anybody, are you?” said the Colonel.

  “Certainly not!” lied Hurty, trying to recapture some of the élan he had lost during the labyrinth and brandy episodes.

  “Well,” said the Colonel, “the legal end can be handled quickly enough when the time comes. But first, if you don’t mind, we’d like to get the feel of the place—get the newness out of it.”

  “Yes, of course, certainly,” said Hurty, slightly puzzled.

  “Then you don’t mind if we sort of wander about a bit, as though it were already ours?”

  “No, I guess not. I mean, certainly not. Go right ahead.”

  And the Peckhams did, while I waited, fidgeting in the living room, and Hurty locked himself in his study. They made themselves at home all afternoon, feeding the horses carrots, loosening the earth about the roots of plants in the greenhouse, drowsing in the sun by the swimming pool.

  Once or twice I tried to join them, to point out this feature or that, but they received me as though I were an impertinent butler, so I gave it up.

  At four, they asked a maid for tea, and got it—with little cakes. At five, Hurty came out of his study, found them still there, covered his surprise admirably, and mixed us all cocktails.

  The Colonel said he always had his man rub the inside of martini glasses with garlic. He asked if there was a level spot for polo.

  Mrs. Peckham discussed the parking problems of large parties, and asked if there was anything in the local air that was damaging to oil paintings.

  At seven, Hurty, fighting yawns, excused himself, and telling the Peckhams to go on making themselves at home, he went to his supper. At eight, the Peckhams, having eddied about Hurty and his meal on their way to one place or another, announced that they were leaving.

  They asked me to drop them off at the town’s best restaurant.

  “I take it you’re interested?” I said.

  “We’ll want to talk a little,” said the Colonel. “The price is certainly no obstacle. We’ll let you know.”

  “How can I reach you, Colonel, sir?”

  “I’m here for a rest. I prefer not to have anyone know my whereabouts, if you don’t mind. I’ll call you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Tell me,” said Mrs. Peckham. “How did Mr. Hurty make his money?”

  “He’s the biggest used-car salesman in this part of the state.”

  “Aha!” said the Colonel. “I knew it! The whole place had the air of new money about it.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want it after all?” I asked.

  “No, not exactly. We’ll simply have to live with it a little while to see what can be done about it, if anything.”

  “Could you tell me specifically what it was you didn’t like?” I asked.

  “If you can’t see it,” said Mrs. Peckham, “no one could possibly point it out to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll let you know,” said the Colonel.

  Three days passed, with their normal complement of calls from Delahanty and Mrs. Hellbrunner, but without a sign from Colonel Peckham and his lady.

  As I was closing my office on the afternoon of the fourth day, Hurty called me.

  “When the hell,” he said, “are those Peckham people going to come to a boil?”

  “Lord knows,” I sa
id. “There’s no way I can get in touch with them. He said he’d call me.”

  “You can get in touch with them anytime of night or day.”

  “How?”

  “Just call my place. They’ve been out here for the past three days, taking the newness out of it. They’ve damn well taken something out of me, too. Do the liquor and cigars and food come out of your commission?”

  “If there is a commission.”

  “You mean there’s some question about it? He goes around here as though he has the money in his pocket and is just waiting for the right time to give it to me.”

  “Well, since he won’t talk with me, you might as well do the pressuring. Tell him I’ve just told you a retired brewer from Toledo has offered seventy-five thousand. That ought to get action.”

  “All right. I’ll have to wait until they come in from swimming, for cocktails.”

  “Call me back when you’ve got a reaction, and I’ll toot out with an offer form all ready to go.”

  Ten minutes later he did. “Guess what, brain-box?”

  “He bit?”

  “I’m getting a brand-new real estate agent.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes indeedy. I took the advice of the last one I had, and a red-hot prospect and his wife walked out with their noses in the air.”

  “No! Why?”

  “Colonel and Mrs. Peckham wish you to know that they couldn’t possibly be interested in anything that would appeal to a retired brewer from Toledo.”

  It was a lousy estate anyhow, so I gaily laughed and gave my attention to more substantial matters, such as the Hellbrunner mansion. I ran a boldface advertisement describing the joys of life in a fortified castle.

  The next morning, I looked up from my work to see the ad, torn from the paper, in the long, clean fingers of Colonel Peckham.

  “Is this yours?”

  “Good morning, Colonel. Yessir, it is.”

  “It sounds like our kind of place,” said the voice of Mrs. Peckham.

  We crossed the simulated drawbridge and passed under the rusty portcullis of their kind of place.