“Did you work any days last week or receive a salary or payment of any kind for any type of labor?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you make an effort the last week to look for work in your field?”
“Yes, sir.”
“See you tonight, then,” the woman said from the side, twiddling her fingers goodbye as David signed the form. “And don’t worry about any fancy dressing for our cozy dinner. We’re informal people—very informal, though we’re not exactly beggars, by any means.”
That evening, David shaved himself twice with his electric razor, as the rotary blades were in serious need of a sharpening, and trimmed his full mustache so that none of the hairs hung over the upper lip. Then he dressed in his only suit and tie, brushed down his curly hair with hair oil till his skull was flat and shiny, and patted after-shave lotion on his face and neck and then at the underarms of his jacket, which needed a dry-cleaning. But then, he thought, it wasn’t every day of the week a lonely, sort of homely-looking guy like himself was invited to sit down at an elegant table with five beautiful young sisters.
The house he drove up to turned out to be in the seediest part of town. It was small and boxlike, sticking out of a garden of tall weeds like an ancient, run-down mausoleum. He rang the bell, much less hopeful of any grand time tonight, but, surprisingly, the girl who opened the door was as beautiful as her mother had said. She was about twenty, black-eyed and as well built as the famous Venus statue in Paris, whom she also resembled above the neck a great deal, he now noticed, except for the long blonde hair. “Come right in,” she said in a sweet voice, and David, feeling his neck knot up with excitement, managed to squeak out that he was the man his mother had met this morning and invited to dinner.
“You’re Sylvia,” he said. “I’d know you anywhere by your mother’s glowing description.” He stuck out his hand, but instead of having his fingers squeezed seductively as he had imagined, he was jerked past the door and thrown halfway across the room. When he got up a few seconds later, a bit dizzy and his pants ripped at the knee and all set to ask what kind of silly practical joke she was playing on him, he saw her locking the front door with a key, which she promptly dropped down her bra.
“Now, how’s that for a quick-change routine?” Sylvia said with a voice much tougher and throatier now, though that smile of unwavering sweetness remained. “Years back, I was in show business, so I know what’s what with costumes and makeup and things.”
David tried to stay composed by examining the rip in his pants. “It’s a damn good thing this is my oldest suit,” he said, and looked up to see what reaction his remark had made and saw her peeling off her face skin from the forehead down and then her gorgeous blonde hair.
“A voluptuous goddess of love I can only pretend to be for minutes,” the woman he’d met at the unemployment office said, “but a svelte water nymph I could play for you for hours. Not much padding then to bother my tush and ribs and hamper my walk, you know what I mean?” She placed the wig and Venus mask in a hatbox—neatly, as if she were preserving them to wear again—and unzipped her dress, removed the socks from her bra and bandages wrapped around her buttocks and, from her waist, a tight black-satin cummerbund. When she finished rezippering and hitching, and patting her gray hair back into place, she said “Well, now, Davy boy, what do you say we get down to business.”
“Why you big fraud,” he said. “I mean…why you big incredible fraud.”
“Sure, I’m a fraud. What then? You saying you would’ve come all the way out here just to see an old bag like me? But look who’s talking about frauds. We’re on to you, you know, the way you take unemployment-insurance money from our Government under somebody else’s name and Social Security number—a good pal of yours in Paris who you send a hundred bucks to every other week. We checked, so don’t think you’ve been invited here just for your good looks, you weasel. At least I worked for my unemployment money—twenty miserable weeks I worked, which isn’t one day over the minimum and which I don’t ever expect to do again. But sit down.” She motioned him to a chair. “A sense of decency I at least still got for your likes. You want a drink? Some good gin? Oh, stop shaking your head like a clod. You’re not getting out of here till we’ve had our say, so you might as well sit back comfortably with a drink.”
“About that unemployment insurance,” David said uneasily. “Well, that’s my business—my worry. And if you’ve brought me here to extort hush money out of me, forget it. I’m broke, flat, rien—comprenez-vous français? So I’ll be leaving,” and he stood up and confidently stuck out his hand for the key. She laughed and slapped at his fingers and yelled in the direction of the stairs “Georgie? Little Davy’s here and he’s getting impatient. You want to come down?”
From upstairs, a man answered in a soft, lilting voice: “I’ll be down in a sec, sweet.”
“You’ll be down in a sec, nothing. Get your skinny ass here this instant.”
A thin, sickly-looking man in his fifties came hurrying downstairs. He was panting, still full of sleep, a few days past his last shave and scratching his undershirt nervously when he gave David a limp, wet hand to shake.
“Pleased to meet you, son. Sylvia’s told me some very encouraging things about you. Very.”
“You see,” Sylvia said, edging David back into a couch beside Georgie, “my husband and I have decided you’re just the man we need for our work.”
That’s right,” Georgie said. “We need a smart boy with brains.”
“What Mr. Peartree means is that simply the idea of you carrying through your plans to finagle the Government is a good sign to us. Besides which, of course, we can always use it against you if you don’t go along with what we ask.”
“Sylvia told me all about it,” Georgie said. “Amazing. Just terrific. No, really, pal, because not many guys can get away with conning the Federal Government anymore.”
David said “Not that I’m committing myself to anything, but I still don’t know what you have in mind or even what the wages are for your mysterious work.”
“Twenty dollars a day,” she said, as if it were two hundred, “and judging from what we have on you, consider it philanthropy.”
“You’re getting a bargain,” Georgie said. “Take it quick before she lowers the offer.”
“Offer for what, goddamnit?” David said, and Sylvia, telling him to control himself for a minute, went into a long detailed account of what they had in mind. She and Georgie were basically uneducated people, she said, and as he could see by just looking around their home, these weren’t the best of times for them, either. So what they needed now was an educated person to write bright convincing letters to all sorts of big American companies, complaining about the products some woman they’d made up had bought and how much trouble and even serious harm these defective goods had caused this woman and her family.
“We give you the names of the products,” she went on, “and what you do, and which we know you’re capable of because of your strong English-literature background, is think up something wrong with these goods, type up a nice neat letter telling about it and then sign our Mrs. O’Connell’s name and our address. From these letters we expect all kinds of small and semi-large cash settlements, and if not that, then tremendous supplies of these same products Mrs. O’Connell’s complaining about, which should keep us in most of our home goodies for a solid year.”
“A friend of mine,” Georgie said, “once wrote a letter to a cigarette company, telling the truth about how the cig paper had pinholes in it, which made the things unsmokable. In a week he got back a hand-signed letter from the sales manager himself, saying how sorry they were and he should know how untypical his experience was and for his trouble they were sending along two cartons of the same brand he made a stink about. Two cartons—can you imagine? Just think if he was a brainy guy like yourself and wrote an intelligent letter telling how he found some chemically tested rat hairs in his smokes.”
“Letters
like that,” Sylvia said, “which shouldn’t take you more than two days. Then you get your forty dollars and our sincerest promises that we won’t leak a word to the Government about your little insurance embezzlement. Is it a deal?”
David had nineteen more weeks to go on his friend’s unemployment insurance, which came to—after he’d subtracted the biweekly hundred dollars he sent to Paris—around two thousand dollars, tax free and clear. He really had no choice but to go along with them, so he said he agreed, though reluctantly, he wanted them to understand, and promised he’d be at their house for work bright and early the next day.
“Listen,” Sylvia said sharply as she unlocked the door, “bright and early it better be. Or around nine a.m. tomorrow, the U.S. Government gets an anonymous tip concerning one David O. Knopps, you know what I mean?”
David returned to their home the next morning and got right down to writing the letters. The Peartrees already had a long list of the names and addresses of the companies he was to write to, so what he had to do was think up something wrong with the company’s product, begin the letter with a brief, courteous description of what the difficulty was, mention that she (Mrs. O’Connell) had never written a letter like this before, make no monetary demands or threats about possible law suits but just say that she wanted to “bring this oversight to the attention of your organization, as I’m quite sure you’d want me to do.” Then he was to sign her best wishes and name, and in a postscript, assure the company that “although my five daughters and I are slightly less confident of your product these days, we bear no grudges against you, realize that big institutions as well as small individuals can make mistakes, and that we’ve no plans to stop using your product in the future.”
Working an eight-to-five shift, it took David three days to complete these letters, all typed on personally engraved stationery, with Mrs. O’Connell’s name and the Peartrees’ address, that Georgie had a printer friend run off. The first letter, to a big soap company in Chicago, took him more than two hours to compose and type. The letter suggested that one of its employees—“perhaps an anarchist or somebody, though with jobs being as hard to get now as they are, I’m hardly the one to place a person’s work in jeopardy—had substituted sand for soap powder in your jumbo-size box of Flashy which, if you must know, ruined my almost-new washing machine and an estimated value of $296 worth of clothes.”
After the first few letters, he became more adept at grinding out these lies and was able to knock off a new one every fifteen minutes. One went to the president of the country’s largest canned-soup company: “Unbelievable as this may sound, sir—and because of its importance, I’m directing this letter to you—the bottom half of a white mouse was found in a can of your cream-of-chicken soup, which, when dumped into the pot, gave my aging mother such a fright that she’s been under heavy sedation ever since.” Another letter went to a chocolate company in Georgia that, in its magazine ads, prided, itself on its cleanliness: “You can imagine our shock, gentlemen, when we discovered, after removing the wrapper of our family’s favorite candy for more than thirty years, that your milk-chocolate bar had teeth marks in it and a tiny end square bitten off.” And about a hundred other letters, all quite civil and somewhat squeamish, all initially self-critical for even thinking of writing this giant reputable company in the first place, all very crafty and subtle, David thought, in getting his main message across: that in one ugly or harmful way or another, the product had caused considerable psychic or physical damage and Mrs. O’Connell wanted some kind of indemnification.
When the letters had been read, edited and approved by the Peartrees, and a number of them retyped by David, they thanked him for a job well done, gave him his wages and a ten dollar bonus for the quick efficient way he had handled his chores and, like his closest uncle and aunt always did, waved goodbye to him from their front steps as his car pulled away. He drove home, merrily humming a peppy tune along with the car radio and convinced that he’d done the only right thing for himself in going along with their scheme. Now, with a clear mind and seventy extra dollars, he could resume collecting his friend’s unemployment checks without fear of being caught, with that money complete his master’s thesis on Henry James, whose work he disliked but at least understood, and begin applying to English departments of the better universities for a teaching assistantship as he went on for his Ph.D. He had a good life ahead of him—the academic life, which was the only one he could contend with and still be financially secure.
A month later, Sylvia called, asking in the most gentle of motherly voices if he’d care to drop by one afternoon that week for homemade peanut-butter cookies and tea. When he refused, saying how much he appreciated the offer but was too tied down in completing his thesis to even go out for the more essential groceries, she said “Lookit, you jerk. You drag that fat butt of yours right over here, or my next call’s going to be to the state unemployment commissioner himself.”
“Call him,” David said. “And the head of the F.B.I., while you’re at it. But remember; Whatever you have on me goes double for you and Georgie-boy with your mail scheme.”
“What mail scheme? That was your scheme, Davy, if you don’t know it by now. We got two God-fearing respectable witnesses, me and Mr. Peartree, who’ll swear under oath that you threatened us with force to use our home to accept your goodies from all those companies and then to even buy them from you, which is why they’re in our house. Those were your signatures, your words that went into those letters, because we sure don’t have the brains and education for that kind of prose. You couldn’t pin a thing on us without going to prison for twenty years yourself, which doesn’t even account for how much time you’d get for your unemployment insurance theft. So, how about it? You going to take down our new address and zip the hell out here, or do I make my next call to that state commissioner, police or F.B.I.?”
The Peartrees lived in a much better neighborhood now, David observed as he drove along their street. And entering their home, Sylvia bowing him in with a wily grin as if she never had any doubts about him rushing over, he was surprised by the number of boxes and cartons in the living room of so many of the products he’d written about in his letters for them. Flour, sugar, fruit juice, canned soup, cellophane tape that wouldn’t stick, alkalizers that wouldn’t fizz, ballpoint pens that leaked onto eighty-dollar blouses with the first stroke, linens that tore apart in the first wash—enough food staples and home supplies to keep them going for a good year, as Sylvia had said.
“But no money to speak of, those misers,” she said after conducting a tour of the four other rooms, each of them almost furnitureless but with enough boxes and cartons of linens and food and cleaning products to make them look like the storage room of a small neighborhood grocery store.
Though what we got we owe all to you,” Georgie said. “Some smart boy you are, Davy, And my Sylvia’s some great judge of people, in choosing you.”
David told them to stop buttering him up with such ridiculous bull jive and level with him straight off why they summoned him here.
“So, feeling a bit ballsier than before, eh?” Sylvia said. “Okay. We’ve another deal you might be interested in.” When he flapped his hands at her to forget it, she said “Only one more; we’re not gluttons. Now take a load off your feet and let me speak.” While Georgie prepared him a Scotch sour, Sylvia explained that with all this food around, they still hadn’t a good stove to cook it on or even a decent bed to put their new linens on, so all they were asking of him was to steal the day’s receipts of a movie theater they had in mind, which would be enough money to buy the big-ticket items they need and keep them going for a while.
“Oh, just a small theater,” she quickly said when he jumped up from the couch and headed for the door. “And not the box office itself, which would be too risky. All you do is approach this little squirt of a manager from behind, ask him into an alley, take his money satchel, which he’s on his way to night-deposit, and bring it here. The wa
y we planned it, he’ll never even see your face; and then you get a hundred for your labor and we say our final goodbyes.”
“It’d be impossible,” he said. “I’d be petrified, too scared out of my wits to say a word,” and he turned away from them and, unable to control himself any longer, started to cry into his sleeve. But they saw right through his ruse, he thought, glancing up, even though he was weeping real tears. When he was finished, had wiped his eyes, having made sure to irritate them, and after Sylvia had restated what they had on him, he said he might go through with it if they didn’t insist he use a gun. “I’d rather go to prison than terrify some innocent guy with a weapon. I’m sorry, but that’s how I am.”
Around one that evening, Georgie drove him to a bar in a nearby suburban town, bought a couple of beers and, from the bar window, pointed across the street to a very short fat man leaving a darkened movie theater. The man was holding a black bag, which Georgie said contained about six thousand in ones, fives, tens and twenties—“None of it traceable. And no heavy change, either, which he leaves in the theater. We also understand this idiot refuses to call the local police station for an escort, since he doesn’t like shelling out the customary twenty bucks tip they expect for the four-block ride. Now watch him, Davy. At the end of the street, he went left, though if he wasn’t in such a hurry, he’d continue along the better-lit avenues to reach the bank. Halfway up that shortcut is an alley, which we’ll want you to suddenly pop out of, say a few standard, words about his money or his life, take the bag, order him to lie on his belly and then impress upon him to stay put and silent for five minutes maximum or by the time he gets home he’ll have found that an accomplice of yours had done some terrible things to his family. It’s all very simple. And once you get back with the bag and we see you haven’t opened it—we have ways—we promise, and you have my solemn oath for both Syl and myself, to leave you in peace for the rest of your life.”
What Is All This? Page 22