Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  FREE-RANGE CHICKENS

  “Well, it’s another beautiful day in paradise.”

  “How’d we get so lucky?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  “I think I’ll go walk over there for a while. Then I’ll walk back over here.”

  “That sounds like a good time. Maybe I’ll do the same.”

  “Hey, someone refilled the grain bucket!” “Is it the same stuff as yesterday?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, man, it’s the same stuff, all right.”

  “It’s so good.”

  “I can’t stop eating it.”

  “Hey, you know what would go perfectly with this grain? Water.”

  “Dude. Look inside the other bucket.”

  “This … is the greatest day of my life.”

  “Drink up, pal.”

  “Cheers!”

  (Laughs.)

  (Laughs.)

  “Hey, look, the farmer’s coming.”

  “Huh. Guess it’s my turn to go into the thing.”

  “Cool. See you later, buddy.”

  “See ya.”

  2008

  NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS

  S. J. PERELMAN

  FAREWELL, MY LOVELY APPETIZER

  Add Smorgasbits to your ought-to-know department, the newest of the three Betty Lee products. What in the world! Just small mouth-size pieces of herring and of pinkish tones. We crossed our heart and promised not to tell the secret of their tinting.

  —Clementine Paddleford’s food column in the

  Herald Tribune

  The “Hush-Hush” Blouse. We’re very hush-hush about his name, but the celebrated shirtmaker who did it for us is famous on two continents for blouses with details like those deep yoke folds, the wonderful shoulder pads, the shirtband bow! —Russeks advertisement in the Times

  I CAME down the sixth-floor corridor of the Arbogast Building, past the World Wide Noodle Corporation, Zwinger & Rumsey, Accountants, and the Ace Secretarial Service, Mimeographing Our Specialty. The legend on the ground-glass panel next door said, “Atlas Detective Agency, Noonan & Driscoll,” but Snapper Driscoll had retired two years before with a .38 slug between the shoulders, donated by a snowbird in Tacoma, and I owned what good will the firm had. I let myself into the crummy anteroom we kept to impress clients, growled good morning at Birdie Claflin.

  “Well, you certainly look like something the cat dragged in,” she said. She had a quick tongue. She also had eyes like dusty lapis lazuli, taffy hair, and a figure that did things to me. I kicked open the bottom drawer of her desk, let two inches of rye trickle down my craw, kissed Birdie square on her lush, red mouth, and set fire to a cigarette.

  “I could go for you, sugar,” I said slowly. Her face was veiled, watchful. I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps. When you’re a private eye, you want things to stay put.

  “Any customers?”

  “A woman by the name of Sigrid Bjornsterne said she’d be back. A looker.”

  “Swede?”

  “She’d like you to think so.”

  I nodded toward the inner office to indicate that I was going in there, and went in there. I lay down on the davenport, took off my shoes, and bought myself a shot from the bottle I kept underneath. Four minutes later, an ash blonde with eyes the color of unset opals, in a Nettie Rosenstein basic black dress and a baum-marten stole, burst in. Her bosom was heaving and it looked even better that way. With a gasp she circled the desk, hunting for some place to hide, and then, spotting the wardrobe where I keep a change of bourbon, ran into it. I got up and wandered out into the anteroom. Birdie was deep in a crossword puzzle.

  “See anyone come in here?”

  “Nope.” There was a thoughtful line between her brows. “Say, what’s a five-letter word meaning ‘trouble’?”

  “Swede,” I told her, and went back inside. I waited the length of time it would take a small, not very bright boy to recite “Ozymandias,” and, inching carefully along the wall, took a quick gander out the window. A thin galoot with stooping shoulders was being very busy reading a paper outside the Gristede store two blocks away. He hadn’t been there an hour ago, but then, of course, neither had I. He wore a size-seven dove-colored hat from Browning King, a tan Wilson Brothers shirt with pale-blue stripes, a J. Press foulard with a mixed-red-and-white figure, dark blue Interwoven socks, and an unshined pair of ox-blood London Character shoes. I let a cigarette burn down between my fingers until it made a small red mark, and then I opened the wardrobe.

  “Hi,” the blonde said lazily. “You Mike Noonan?” I made a noise that could have been “Yes,” and waited. She yawned. I thought things over, decided to play it safe. I yawned. She yawned back, then, settling into a corner of the wardrobe, went to sleep. I let another cigarette burn down until it made a second red mark beside the first one, and then I woke her up. She sank into a chair, crossing a pair of gams that tightened my throat as I peered under the desk at them.

  “Mr. Noonan,” she said, “you—you’ve got to help me.”

  “My few friends call me Mike,” I said pleasantly.

  “Mike.” She rolled the syllable on her tongue. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. Irish?”

  “Enough to know the difference between a gossoon and a bassoon.”

  “What is the difference?” she asked. I dummied up; I figured I wasn’t giving anything away for free. Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down. I could see she was admiring the interplay of muscles in my shoulders. There wasn’t any extra fat on Mike Noonan, but I wasn’t telling her that. I was playing it safe until I knew where we stood.

  When she spoke again, it came with a rush. “Mr. Noonan, he thinks I’m trying to poison him. But I swear the herring was pink—I took it out of the jar myself. If I could only find out how they tinted it. I offered them money, but they wouldn’t tell.”

  “Suppose you take it from the beginning,” I suggested.

  She drew a deep breath. “You’ve heard of the golden spintria of Hadrian?” I shook my head. “It’s a tremendously valuable coin believed to have been given by the Emperor Hadrian to one of his proconsuls, Caius Vitellius. It disappeared about 150 A.D., and eventually passed into the possession of Hucbald the Fat. After the sack of Adrianople by the Turks, it was loaned by a man named Shapiro to the court physician, or hakim, of Abdul Mahmoud. Then it dropped out of sight for nearly five hundred years, until last August, when a dealer in secondhand books named Lloyd Thursday sold it to my husband.”

  “And now it’s gone again,” I finished.

  “No,” she said. “At least, it was lying on the dresser when I left, an hour ago.” I leaned back, pretending to fumble a carbon out of the desk, and studied her legs again. This was going to be a lot more intricate than I had thought. Her voice got huskier. “Last night I brought home a jar of Smorgasbits for Walter’s dinner. You know them?”

  “Small mouth-size pieces of herring and of pinkish tones, aren’t they?”

  Her eyes darkened, lightened, got darker again. “How did you know?”

  “I haven’t been a private op nine years for nothing, sister. Go on.”

  “I—I knew right away something was wrong when Walter screamed and upset his plate. I tried to tell him the herring was supposed to be pink, but he carried on like a madman. He’s been suspicious of me since—well, ever since I made him take out that life insurance.”

  “What was the face amount of the policy?”

  “A hundred thousand. But it carried a triple-indemnity clause in case he died by sea food. Mr. Noonan—Mike”—her tone caressed me—“I’ve got to win back his confidence. You could find out how they tinted that herring.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Anything you want.” The words were a whisper. I leaned over,
poked open her handbag, counted off five grand.

  “This’ll hold me for a while,” I said. “If I need any more, I’ll beat my spoon on the high chair.” She got up. “Oh, while I think of it, how does this golden spintria of yours tie in with the herring?”

  “It doesn’t,” she said calmly. “I just threw it in for glamour.” She trailed past me in a cloud of scent that retailed at ninety rugs the ounce. I caught her wrist, pulled her up to me.

  “I go for girls named Sigrid with opal eyes,” I said.

  “Where’d you learn my name?”

  “I haven’t been a private snoop twelve years for nothing, sister.”

  “It was nine last time.”

  “It seemed like twelve till you came along.” I held the clinch until a faint wisp of smoke curled out of her ears, pushed her through the door. Then I slipped a pint of rye into my stomach and a heater into my kick and went looking for a bookdealer named Lloyd Thursday. I knew he had no connection with the herring caper, but in my business you don’t overlook anything.

  THE thin galoot outside Gristede’s had taken a powder when I got there; that meant we were no longer playing girls’ rules. I hired a hack to Wanamaker’s, cut over to Third, walked up toward Fourteenth. At Twelfth a mink-faced jasper made up as a street cleaner tailed me for a block, drifted into a dairy restaurant. At Thirteenth somebody dropped a sour tomato out of a third-story window, missing me by inches. I doubled back to Wanamaker’s, hopped a bus up Fifth to Madison Square, and switched to a cab down Fourth, where the second-hand bookshops elbow each other like dirty urchins.

  A flabby hombre in a Joe Carbondale rope-knit sweater, whose jowl could have used a shave, quit giggling over the Heptameron long enough to tell me he was Lloyd Thursday. His shoe-button eyes became opaque when I asked to see any first editions or incunabula relative to the Clupea harengus, or common herring.

  “You got the wrong pitch, copper,” he snarled. “That stuff is hotter than Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet.”

  “Maybe a sawbuck’ll smarten you up,” I said. I folded one to the size of a postage stamp, scratched my chin with it. “There’s five yards around for anyone who knows why those Smorgasbits of Sigrid Bjornsterne’s happened to be pink.” His eyes got crafty.

  “I might talk for a grand.”

  “Start dealing.” He motioned toward the back. I took a step forward. A second later a Roman candle exploded inside my head and I went away from there. When I came to, I was on the floor with a lump on my sconce the size of a lapwing’s egg and big Terry Tremaine of Homicide was bending over me.

  “Someone sapped me,” I said thickly. “His name was—”

  “Webster,” grunted Terry. He held up a dog-eared copy of Merriam’s Unabridged. “You tripped on a loose board and this fell off a shelf on your think tank.”

  “Yeah?” I said skeptically. “Then where’s Thursday?” He pointed to the fat man lying across a pile of erotica. “He passed out cold when he saw you cave.” I covered up, let Terry figure it any way he wanted. I wasn’t telling him what cards I held. I was playing it safe until I knew all the angles.

  In a seedy pharmacy off Astor Place, a stale Armenian, whose name might have been Vulgarian but wasn’t, dressed my head and started asking questions. I put my knee in his groin and he lost interest. Jerking my head toward the coffee urn, I spent a nickel and the next forty minutes doing some heavy thinking. Then I holed up in a phone booth and dialed a clerk I knew called Little Farvel, in a delicatessen store on Amsterdam Avenue. It took a while to get the dope I wanted because the connection was bad and Little Farvel had been dead two years, but we Noonans don’t let go easily.

  BY the time I worked back to the Arbogast Building, via the Weehawken ferry and the George Washington Bridge to cover my tracks, all the pieces were in place. Or so I thought up to the point she came out of the wardrobe holding me between the sights of her ice-blue automatic.

  “Reach for the stratosphere, gumshoe.” Sigrid Bjornsterne’s voice was colder than Horace Greeley and Little Farvel put together, but her clothes were plenty calorific. She wore a forest-green suit of Hockanum woollens, a Knox Wayfarer, and baby crocodile pumps. It was her blouse, though, that made tiny red hairs stand up on my knuckles. Its deep yoke folds, shoulder pads, and shirtband bow could only have been designed by some master craftsman, some Cézanne of the shears.

  “Well, Nosy Parker,” she sneered, “so you found out how they tinted the herring.”

  “Sure—grenadine,” I said easily. “You knew it all along. And you planned to add a few grains of oxylbutane-cheriphosphate, which turns the same shade of pink in solution, to your husband’s portion, knowing it wouldn’t show in the post-mortem. Then you’d collect the three hundred G’s and join Harry Pestalozzi in Nogales till the heat died down. But you didn’t count on me.”

  “You?” Mockery nicked her full-throated laugh. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “This.” I snaked the rug out from under her and she went down in a swirl of silken ankles. The bullet whined by me into the ceiling as I vaulted over the desk, pinioned her against the wardrobe.

  “Mike.” Suddenly all the hatred had drained away and her body yielded to mine. “Don’t turn me in. You cared for me—once.”

  “It’s no good, Sigrid. You’d only double-time me again.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. The shirtmaker who designed your blouse—what’s his name?” A shudder of fear went over her; she averted her head. “He’s famous on two continents. Come on, Sigrid, they’re your dice.”

  “I won’t tell you. I can’t. It’s a secret between this—this department store and me.”

  “They wouldn’t be loyal to you. They’d sell you out fast enough.”

  “Oh, Mike, you mustn’t. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “For the last time.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, don’t you see?” Her eyes were tragic pools, a cenotaph to lost illusions. “I’ve got so little. Don’t take that away from me. I—I’d never be able to hold up my head in Russeks again.”

  “Well, if that’s the way you want to play it …” There was silence in the room, broken only by Sigrid’s choked sob. Then, with a strangely empty feeling, I uncradled the phone and dialed Spring 7-3100.

  For an hour after they took her away, I sat alone in the taupe-colored dusk, watching lights come on and a woman in the hotel opposite adjusting a garter. Then I treated my tonsils to five fingers of firewater, jammed on my hat, and made for the anteroom. Birdie was still scowling over her crossword puzzle. She looked up crookedly at me.

  “Need me any more tonight?”

  “No.” I dropped a grand or two in her lap. “Here, buy yourself some stardust.”

  “Thanks, I’ve got my quota.” For the first time I caught a shadow of pain behind her eyes. “Mike, would—would you tell me something?”

  “As long as it isn’t clean,” I flipped to conceal my bitterness.

  “What’s an eight-letter word meaning ‘sentimental’?”

  “Flatfoot, darling,” I said, and went out into the rain.

  1944

  THOMAS MEEHAN

  EARLY MORNING OF A MOTION PICTURE EXECUTIVE

  One of the smallest minorities in Hollywood nowadays is the group that believes James Joyce’s Ulysses will be made into a superior movie … behind the entire hoopla is Jerry Wald, the producer … he prepared a memorandum … that included the following: “The way I would like to see this story on the screen is to oversimplify it. It has three levels: Stephen Dedalus, the intellectual; Leopold Bloom, the passive, ill-informed victim of habitual feelings; and Mrs. Bloom, sensual, carnal, wholly natural. Thus, the three leading characters represent Pride, Love, and The Flesh. My feeling is that this project is really in its purest form: father searching for his son and son searching for his father. It is a highly controversial book and out of it could be created a motion picture as exciting as Peyton Place but on a higher level.” —The Timesr />
  … YES a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose they’re just getting out on the lot at Fox now Marilyn Monroe combing out her hair for the day let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 where was it in Jerrys memorandum yes oversimplify O I love great books Id love to have the whole of Hollywood filming nothing but great books God in heaven theres nothing like literature pre sold to the public the treatment and the working script by Dalton Trumbo and the finished picture in color and Todd A O as for them saying theres no audience interest in pictures based on great books I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their motivational research indie exhibs whatever they call themselves why dont they go out and make a picture I ask them and do a socko 21 Gs in Philly and a wow 41 in Chi ah that they cant answer yes in its purest form father searching for his son and son searching for his father chance for myriad boffolas there old man staggers out one door of pub where the beer and the boffola foam while kid goes in other O I love a good laugh Stephen Dedalus the intellectual we might try to get Paul Newman for the part hes a strong BO draw in Exodus certainly hed do very nicely too better soft pedal the egghead bit though make him a newspaper reporter have to shoot a lot of location stuff in Dublin by the waters of the Liffey by the rivering waters of we might fake it on the back lot and bring it in under three million or else knock up the budget and spot celebs the way Columbia did with Pepe it coined a huge forty five thou in its first week on Bway gives the property a touch of class I wonder could we get Bobby Darin on a percentage deal to sing Galway Bay I better have Sammy check in the morning where the hell Galway Bay is its somewhere around Dublin surely long color process shot of the bay at dusk cut to faces of old women in black shawls and the women in the uplands making hay speak a language that the strangers do not know a scene which it will knock them out of the back of the house in Terre Haute

  the alarmclock in the maids room clattering the brains out of itself better take another seconal and try to sleep again so as I can get up early Ill call a title conference at ten wait now who was it yes Kirk Douglas already made Ulysses the old story though this ones on three levels we might call it Pride Love and The Flesh that has a nice sound to it Ill have Sammy get ahold of Central Registry and see if the titles reserved Leopold Bloom the passive ill informed victim of habitual feelings problem on the religion bit though dont want Bnai Brith down on our necks well give him an Irish name in any case Leopold Malone and his loving wife Molly sensual carnal wholly natural she wheels her wheelbarrow through streets wide and narrow personally Id like to build the script around Molly and get MM for the role so why am I after worrying we cant go wrong with Maureen OHara flashback to Gibraltar where she was a girl a flower of the mountain yes so are those bimbos all flowers of the mountain lap dissolve he kisses her under the Moorish wall we might send down a second unit to get some outdoor Gibraltar stuff cut in a flamenco dream sequence shoot it there and dub it on the soundtrack later yes chance too for widescreen color background O the sea the sea there crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes well have Louella bawling like a goddam baby baaaawwaaaaaww at the world preem