Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Then m’sieu must make what trouble he desires,” the waiter said. His eyes were slits.

  “OK,” Cordle said. And just then, fortuitously, an elderly couple came into the restaurant. The man wore a double-breasted slate-blue suit with a half-inch white pinstripe. The woman wore a flowered organdy dress. Cordle called to them, “Excuse me, are you folks English?”

  A bit startled, the man inclined his head in the barest intimation of a nod.

  “Then I would advise you not to eat here. I am a health inspector for UNESCO. The chef apparently has not washed his hands since D-day. We haven’t made a definitive test for typhoid yet, but we have our suspicions. As soon as my assistant arrives with the litmus paper . . .”

  A deathly hush had fallen over the restaurant.

  “I suppose a boiled egg would be safe enough,” Cordle said.

  The elderly man probably didn’t believe him. But it didn’t matter, Cordle was obviously trouble.

  “Come, Mildred,” he said, and they hurried out.

  “There goes sixty francs plus five percent tip,” Cordle said, coolly.

  “Leave here at once!” the waiter snarled.

  “I like it here,” Cordle said, folding his arms. “I like the ambiance, the sense of intimacy—”

  “You are not permitted to stay without eating.”

  “I shall eat. From the ten-franc menu.”

  The waiters looked at one another, nodded in unison, and began to advance in a threatening phalanx. Cordle called to the other diners, “I ask you all to bear witness! These men are going to attack me, four against one, contrary to French law and universal human ethics, simply because I want to order from the ten-franc menu, which they have falsely advertised.”

  It was a long speech, but this was clearly the time for grandiloquence. Cordle repeated it in English.

  The English girls gasped. The old Frenchman went on eating his soup. The Scandinavians nodded grimly and began to take off their jackets.

  The waiters held another conference. The one who looked like Belmondo said, “M’sieu, you are forcing us to call the police.”

  “That will save me the trouble,” Cordle said, “of calling them myself.”

  “Surely m’sieu does not want to spend his holiday in court?”

  “That is how m’sieu spends most of his holidays,” Cordle said.

  The waiters conferred again. Then Belmondo stalked over with the thirty-franc menu. “The cost of the prix fixe will be ten francs, since evidently that is all m’sieu can afford.”

  Cordle let that pass. “Bring me onion soup, green salad, and the boeuf bourguignon.”

  The waiter went to put in the order. While he was waiting, Cordle sang “Waltzing Matilda” in a moderately loud voice. He suspected it might speed up the service. He got his food by the time he reached “You’ll never catch me alive, said he for the second time. Cordle pulled the tureen of stew toward him and lifted a spoon.

  It was a breathless moment. Not one diner had left the restaurant. And Cordle was prepared. He leaned forward, soup spoon in shoveling position, and sniffed delicately. A hush fell over the room.

  “It lacks a certain something,” Cordle said aloud. Frowning, he poured the onion soup into the boeuf bourguignon. He sniffed, shook his head and added a half loaf of bread, in slices. He sniffed again and added the salad and the contents of a saltcellar.

  Cordle pursed his lips. “No,” he said, “it simply will not do.”

  He overturned the entire contents of the tureen onto the table. It was an act comparable, perhaps, to throwing gentian violet on the Mona Lisa. All of France and most of western Switzerland went into a state of shock.

  Unhurriedly, but keeping the frozen waiters under surveillance, Cordle rose and dropped ten francs into the mess. He walked to the door, turned, and said, “My compliments to the chef, who might better be employed as a cement mixer. And this, mon vieux, is for you.”

  He threw his crumpled linen napkin onto the floor.

  As the matador, after a fine series of passes, turns his back contemptuously on the bull and strolls away, so went Cordle. For some unknown reason, the waiters did not rush out after him, shoot him dead, and hang his corpse from the nearest lamppost. So Cordle walked for ten or fifteen blocks, taking rights and lefts at random. He came to the Promenade des Anglais and sat down on a bench. He was trembling and his shirt was drenched with perspiration.

  “But I did it,” he said. “I did it! I! I was unspeakably vile and I got away with it!”

  Now he really knew why carrots acted that way. Dear God in heaven, what joy, what delectable bliss!

  Cordle then reverted to his mild-mannered self, smoothly and without regrets. He stayed that way until his second day in Rome.

  He was in his rented car. He and seven other drivers were lined up at a traffic light on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. There were perhaps twenty cars behind them. All of the drivers were revving their engines, hunched over their steering wheels with slitted eyes, dreaming of Le Mans. All except Cordle, who was drinking in the cyclopean architecture of downtown Rome.

  The checkered flag came down! The drivers floored their accelerators, trying to spin the wheels of their under-powered Fiats, wearing out their clutches and their nerves, but doing so with éclat and brio. All except Cordle, who seemed to be the only man in Rome who didn’t have to win a race or keep an appointment.

  Without undue haste or particular delay, Cordle depressed the clutch and engaged the gear. Already he had lost nearly two seconds—unthinkable at Monza or Monte Carlo.

  The driver behind him blew his horn frantically.

  Cordle smiled to himself, a secret, ugly expression. He put the gearshift into neutral, engaged the hand brake, and stepped out of his car. He ambled over to the horn blower, who had turned pasty white and was fumbling under his seat, hoping to find a tire iron.

  “Yes?” said Cordle, in French, “is something wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing,” the driver replied in French—his first mistake. “I merely wanted you to go, to move.”

  “But I was just doing that,” Cordle pointed out.

  “Well, then! It is all right!”

  “No, it is not all right,” Cordle told him. “I think I deserve a better explanation of why you blew your horn at me.”

  The horn blower—a Milanese businessman on holiday with his wife and four children—rashly replied, “My dear sir, you were slow, you were delaying us all.”

  “Slow?” said Cordle. “You blew your horn two seconds after the light changed. Do you call two seconds slow?”

  “It was much longer than that,” the man riposted feebly.

  Traffic was now backed up as far south as Naples. A crowd of ten thousand had gathered. Carabinieri units in Viterbo and Genoa had been called into a state of alert.

  “That is untrue,” Cordle said. “I have witnesses.” He gestured at the crowd, which gestured back. “I shall call my witnesses before the courts. You must know that you broke the law by blowing your horn within the city limits of Rome in what was clearly not an emergency.”

  The Milanese businessman looked at the crowd, now swollen to perhaps fifty thousand. Dear God, he thought, if only the Goths would descend again and exterminate these leering Romans! If only the ground would open up and swallow this insane Frenchman! If only he, Giancarlo Morelli, had a dull spoon with which to open up the veins of his wrist!

  Jets from the Sixth Fleet thundered overhead, hoping to avert the long-expected coup d’état.

  The Milanese businessman’s own wife was shouting abuse at him: Tonight he would cut out her faithless heart and mail it back to her mother.

  What was there to do? In Milan, he would have had this Frenchman’s head on a platter. But this was Rome, a southern city, an unpredictable and dangerous place. And legalistically, he was possibly in the wrong, which left him at a further disadvantage in the argument.

  “Very well,” he said. “The blowing of the horn was perhaps t
ruly unnecessary, despite the provocation.”

  “I insist on a genuine apology,” insisted Cordle.

  There was a thundering sound to the east: Thousands of Soviet tanks were moving into battle formation across the plains of Hungary, ready to resist the long-expected NATO thrust into Transylvania. The water supply was cut off in Foggia, Brindisi, Bari. The Swiss closed their frontiers and stood ready to dynamite the passes.

  “All right, I apologize!” the Milanese businessman screamed. “I am sorry I provoked you and even sorrier that I was born! Again, I apologize! Now will you go away and let me have a heart attack in peace?”

  “I accept your apology,” Cordle said. “No hard feelings, eh?” He strolled back to his car, humming “Blow the Man Down,” and drove away as millions cheered.

  War was once again averted by a hairbreadth.

  Cordle drove to the Arch of Titus, parked his car, and—to the sound of a thousand trumpets—passed through it. He deserved this triumph as well as any Caesar.

  God, he gloated, I was loathsome!

  In England, Cordle stepped on a young lady’s toe just inside the Traitors’ Gate of the Tower of London. This should have served as an intimation of something. The young lady was named Mavis. She came from Short Hills, New Jersey, and she had long straight dark hair. She was slender, pretty, intelligent, energetic, and she had a sense of humor. She had minor faults, as well, but they play no part in this story. She let Cordle buy her a cup of coffee. They were together constantly for the rest of the week.

  “I think I am infatuated,” Cordle said to himself on the seventh day. He realized at once that he had made a slight understatement. He was violently and hopelessly in love.

  But what did Mavis feel? She seemed not unfond of him. It was even possible that she might, conceivably, reciprocate.

  At that moment, Cordle had a flash of prescience. He realized that one week ago, he had stepped on the toe of his future wife and mother of his two children, both of whom would be born and brought up in a split-level house with inflatable furniture in Summit, New Jersey, or possibly Millburn.

  This may sound unattractive and provincial when stated baldly; but it was desirable to Cordle, who had no pretensions to cosmopolitanism. After all, not all of us can live at Cap Ferrat. Strangely enough, not all of us even want to.

  That day, Cordle and Mavis went to the Marshall Gordon Residence in Belgravia to see the Byzantine miniatures. Mavis had a passion for Byzantine miniatures that seemed harmless enough at the time. The collection was private, but Mavis had secured invitations through a local Avis manager, who was trying very hard, indeed.

  They came to the Gordon Residence, an awesome Regency building in Huddlestone Mews. They rang. A butler in full evening dress answered the door. They showed the invitations. The butler’s glance and lifted eyebrow showed that they were carrying second-class invitations of the sort given to importunate art poseurs on seventeen-day all-expense economy flights, rather than the engraved first-class invitations given to Picasso, Jackie Onassis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Norman Mailer, Charles Goren, and other movers and shakers of the world.

  The butler said, “Oh, yes . . .” Two words that spoke black volumes. His face twitched, he looked like a man who has received an unexpected visit from Tamerlane and a regiment of his Golden Horde.

  “The miniatures,” Cordle reminded him.

  “Yes, of course . . . But I am afraid, sir, that no one is allowed into the Gordon Residence without a coat and necktie.”

  It was an oppressive August day. Cordle was wearing a sport shirt. He said, “Did I hear you correctly? Coat and necktie?”

  The butler said, “That is the rule, sir.”

  Mavis asked, “Couldn’t you make an exception this once?”

  The butler shook his head. “We really must stick by the rules, miss. Otherwise . . .” He left the fear of vulgarity unsaid, but it hung in the air like a chrome-plated fart.

  “Of course,” Cordle said, pleasantly. “Otherwise. So it’s a coat and tie, is it? I think we can arrange that.”

  Mavis put a hand on his arm and said, “Howard, let’s go. We can come back some other time.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. If I may borrow your coat . . .”

  He lifted the white raincoat from her shoulders and put it on, ripping a seam. “There we go, mate!” he said briskly to the butler. “That should do it, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I think not,” the butler said, in a voice bleak enough to wither artichokes. “In any event, there is the matter of the necktie.”

  Cordle had been waiting for that. He whipped out his sweaty handkerchief and knotted it around his neck.

  “Suiting you?” he leered, in an imitation of Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, which only he appreciated.

  “Howard! Let’s go!”

  Cordle waited, smiling steadily at the butler, who was sweating for the first time in living memory.

  “I’m afraid, sir, that that is not—”

  “Not what?”

  “Not precisely what was meant by coat and tie.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Cordle said in a loud, unpleasant voice, “that you are an arbiter of men’s clothing as well as a door opener?”

  “Of course not! But this impromptu attire—”

  “What has ‘impromptu’ got to do with it? Are people supposed to prepare three days in advance just to pass your inspection?”

  “You are wearing a woman’s waterproof and a soiled handkerchief,” the butler stated stiffly. “I think there is no more to say.”

  He began to close the door. Cordle said, “You do that, sweetheart, and I’ll have you up for slander and defamation of character. Those are serious charges over here, buddy, and I’ve got witnesses.”

  Aside from Mavis, Cordle had collected a small, diffident, but interested crowd.

  “This is becoming entirely too ridiculous,” the butler said, temporizing, the door half closed.

  “You’ll find a stretch at Wormwood Scrubs even more ridiculous,” Cordle told him. “I intend to persecute—I mean prosecute.”

  “Howard!” cried Mavis.

  He shook off her hand and fixed the butler with a piercing glance. He said, “I am Mexican, though perhaps my excellent grasp of the English has deceived you. In my country, a man would cut his own throat before letting such an insult pass unavenged. A woman’s coat, you say? Hombre, when I wear a coat, it becomes a man’s coat. Or do you imply that I am a maricón, a—how do you say it?—homosexual?”

  The crowd—becoming less modest—growled approval. Nobody except a lord loves a butler.

  “I meant no such implication,” the butler said weakly.

  “Then is it a man’s coat?”

  “Just as you wish, sir.”

  “Unsatisfactory! The innuendo still exists. I go now to find an officer of the law.”

  “Wait, let’s not be hasty,” the butler said. His face was bloodless and his hands were shaking. “Your coat is a man’s coat, sir.”

  “And what about my necktie?”

  The butler made a final attempt at stopping Zapata and his blood-crazed peons.

  “Well, sir, a handkerchief is demonstrably—”

  “What I wear around my neck,” Cordle said coldly, “becomes what it is intended to be. If I wore a piece of figured silk around my throat, would you call it ladies’ underwear? Linen is a suitable material for a tie, verdad? Function defines terminology, don’t you agree? If I ride to work on a cow, no one says that I am mounted on a steak. Or do you detect a flaw in my argument?”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t fully understand it . . .”

  “Then how can you presume to stand in judgment over it?”

  The crowd, which had been growing restless, now murmured approval.

  “Sir,” cried the wretched butler, “I beg of you . . .”

  “Otherwise,” Cordle said with satisfaction, “I have a coat, a necktie, and an invitation. Perhaps you would be good enough to show us the Byzantin
e miniatures?”

  The butler opened wide the door to Pancho Villa and his tattered hordes. The last bastion of civilization had been captured in less than an hour. Wolves howled along the banks of the Thames, Morelos’s barefoot army stabled its horses in the British Museum, and Europe’s long night had begun.

  Cordle and Mavis viewed the collection in silence. They didn’t exchange a word until they were alone and strolling through Regent’s Park.

  “Look, Mavis,” Cordle began.

  “No, you look,” she said. “You were horrible! You were unbelievable! You were—I can’t find a word rotten enough for what you were! I never dreamed that you were one of those sadistic bastards who get their kicks out of humiliating people!”

  “But, Mavis, you heard what he said to me, you heard the way—”

  “He was a stupid, bigoted old man,” Mavis said. “I thought you were not.”

  “But he said—”

  “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, you were enjoying yourself!”

  “Well, yes, maybe you’re right,” Cordle said. “Look, I can explain.”

  “Not to me, you can’t. Ever. Please stay away from me, Howard. Permanently. I mean that.”

  The future mother of his two children began to walk away, out of his life. Cordle hurried after her.

  “Mavis!”

  “I’ll call a cop, Howard, so help me, I will! Just leave me alone!”

  “Mavis, I love you!”

  She must have heard him, but she kept on walking. She was a sweet and beautiful girl and definitely, unchangeably, an onion.

  Cordle was never able to explain to Mavis about The Stew and about the necessity for experiencing behavior before condemning it. Moments of mystical illumination are seldom explicable. He was able to make her believe that he had undergone a brief psychotic episode, unique and unprecedented and—with her—never to be repeated.

  They are married now, have one girl and one boy, live in a split-level house in Plainfield, New Jersey, and are quite content. Cordle is visibly pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, headwaiters, and other imposing figures of authority. But there is a difference.