He walked along Beaufort St., feeling proud of himself. He thought of the great criminal masterminds of song and story, and of how the basic idea, that a man must be remarkable to be a phenomenon, had been plugged. Why, you don’t need brains to break the laws of statute and custom; all you need is protective coloration. He was absolutely invulnerable, and the idea was intoxicating. He could do anything—absolutely anything, and get away with it. That redhead over there, for instance; a luscious creation. Motivated not entirely by scientific curiosity, he overtook her, spun her around, put his arms about her and kissed her lingeringly. He held her long enough for a sizable crowd to gather, which took about forty-five seconds, and then released her, breathless and choleric. She said, “You—you—” and then hauled off and swung at him. He laughed at her and ducked back into the crowd. She lost sight of him for a moment—which was, of course, forever. She peered angrily about, looking for her “attacker,” and her eyes finally rested on Gabe.
Now there were a lot of people laughing in that crowd, but none more heartily than Gabe Jarret. He was having the time of his life. The redhead took note of this, and spat out at him,
“What are you laughing at? What’s supposed to be so funny? If you had the guts God gave a goose, you’d have stopped that—that beast from doing that to me instead of standing there laughing!”
“Lady,” gasped Gabe, “I could no more have stopped him than I could have stopped myself!” And, still joyful, he threaded his way through the crowd and on down the street, leaving the girl to give furious and vain descriptions of her assailant to a tardy policeman.
“This,” said Gabe, “certainly has possibilities.”
He strolled on up the street, casually stepping on people’s feet and watching them glare past him for the guilty party; boldly pulling handkerchiefs out of dignified old gentlemen’s breast pockets; having himself a hell of a time. He stole a revolver out of a policeman’s holster, ran around a bystander and handed it back to the cop, saying, “Lucky for you I snatched this out of that crook’s hand, officer.” The cop positively blushed. It was altogether too fast for him. And he saw a face he didn’t like and knocked some teeth out of it for that reason, then disappeared completely by moving ten feet. He stopped at a bar and moved along the mahogany a few inches after each of four drinks, and they were all on the house. Ultimately, then, he wound up at the fountain and restaurant where he had been used to lunching with Chloe.
And she was there. He was thrilled at the sight of her, and went over and sat at her table. She looked up at him, deadpan, and went back to her food. He hugged himself.
“Chlo—”
She started and looked around her. He said it again. She looked straight at him, sniffed coldly and did something with one shoulder which said, “Don’t annoy me.”
“Chloe—don’t you recognize me?”
“I do not! Leave me alone!”
“Chloe—it’s Gabe!”
She narrowed her eyes and stared. “Don’t look at my face,” he said. “Look at my hands. See that ring? Remember it—the signet I always wore?”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled. “It’s Gabe’s, but—” and her eyes went back to his face.
“This scar on my wrist,” he said. “This necktie—you chose it. Remember the red pin-stripe suit?”
She pushed her chair back, appalled. “Gabe! What’s—happened to you?”
“Something you won’t believe—but it happened anyway. Remember last night in Romany Joe’s? Well—you can think what you like about it, but when that old gypsy said you could make a wish and have it come true, she was right. You made a wish, and—here I am!”
“I made a—what are you talking about?”
“You did. You were sore at me, I guess, and you wished I had the most ordinary face on earth. Well—this is it! It’s so ordinary that nobody I’ve met so far can remember it for two consecutive seconds!”
“Gabe—that’s—that’s childish. Wishes, indeed! Come on, now—tell me what’s changed you so!”
“I tell you, that’s it! Darling, isn’t that what was bothering you so? Didn’t you tell me that the main thing wrong with me was my looks?” He leaned eagerly across the table to her. “Well, that’s been taken care of! I’ll guarantee, there’ll never be another woman cooing over me again!”
She looked at him. “I can well believe that,” she said nastily.
“Chloe—I’ve changed my clothes and my mind and my habits for you, and it wasn’t enough. Now I’ve changed my face—isn’t that all you can ask?”
Chloe rose, her head whirling. What colossal joke was this? What was she doing even talking to this nondescript character? How could she listen to this drivel he was pouring out, about an engagement and love and—and marriage? Had she come as low as this, that she must marry such an unassuming creature? Certainly she could catch a man who looked like somebody, not like just—anybody.
She twisted the diamond from her finger. “Gabe—I can’t for the life of me think why I took this at all, or why I didn’t give it back to you weeks ago. Do I have to say anything more?” And she tossed it on the table in front of the now speechless Gabe, and ran from him. As she left the restaurant she turned and looked back. There was a man sitting at the table—a man whom, as far as she knew, she had never seen before. He was looking at something clutched in his hands and he was apparently crying into them. Chloe wondered vaguely where Gabe had gone so quickly, and then went back to her office, where she sat in front of a typewriter all afternoon doing nothing and silently shrieking out at the injustice of the monstrous fate that had taken her beautiful, beautiful Gabe away.
It was a little more than Gabe could stand, that jilting. He sat there for a long time, watching the diamond wink and glitter crazily through his tears; and then he got up and walked unnoticed out of the restaurant. He walked without purpose, through the teeming streets, back and back through the city until he brought up in the marketing district, where fat women in shawls and squalling brats dodged great refrigerator trucks. He stood there for an hour or so, seeing nothing, smoking constantly and without enjoyment, staring blindly into his empty heart. Resentment grew redly as he stood there, and when he took his last cigarette and hurled it into the gutter, straightened his shoulders and said, “Damn her!”, he was a changed and bitter man. He looked up and down the cluttered street, got his bearings and strode rapidly off. “I’m this way, by God, and she don’t like it. Well, I do, and I’m going to make it pay off.”
The late afternoon and evening papers were filled with an amazing series of robberies. It was a one-man crime wave, but the papers didn’t know that.
A pawn-shop was the first. An unidentified man had walked into the store, stepped behind the counter, scooped up a handful of large bills and a revolver, and had casually walked out again. He was chased, but had vanished into the crowd.
A man with a gun had held up a gas station a block away from the pawn shop. He had cleared out the till and disappeared under the very nose of the policeman on the beat.
Two patrol cars had responded to a call that a bank was being robbed. Technically, it was only the patrons who were held up, and forced at gunpoint to deliver up their larger bills. When the police arrived, they bumped into a “bystander” on his way out of the bank. He cried, “There’s a robbery going on in there!” and as the police rushed in with drawn revolvers, he leaped into one of the patrol cars and roared off up the avenue, his siren going full blast. The police could find no one who could describe either the bank-robber or the man who had stolen the bandit-chaser, or who could determine whether or not they were the same man. The car was found abandoned two miles up the street; several people had seen a man in plain clothes get out quietly and walk away, but no one knew what he looked like. While the two patrolmen were dusting their repossessed car for fingerprints, the jewelry store across the sidewalk from them was robbed—cash only. They both saw him leave and duck into a side street. They were greatly helped by a man who said he
saw the robber go into a certain house. Search of the house revealed—nothing; and no sign was found of their informant.
Oh, Gabe had a wonderful afternoon.
Chloe left the office early, pleading sickness. All during the long afternoon she had worried and fretted about Gabe. Perhaps she had been hasty, she thought. Maybe it was his idea of a joke—a lesson for her, perchance. Could he have achieved that amazing, subtle change in his face by makeup? She doubted it. It was too good.
She thought of his new face, frightened by the idea. Much careful thinking had yielded the fact that the man she saw sitting at her table as she left must have been Gabe, since only he would have been sitting there, staring at the ring. Yet at the time she could have sworn it was a total stranger! And now, she couldn’t think of how he differed from the Gabe she had sat at lunch with, nor how that Gabe differed from the one who took her to Romany Joe’s the night before. Chloe was one of those unimaginative girls whose philosophy is strictly on a Q.E.D. basis. That is, if a certain action produced a certain reaction, she was so guided from then on, and did not care how or why it had happened. The operation of the little convertible coupe she drove on weekends was as much a mystery to her as was the gypsy woman’s irregular pentagon. She could believe the automobile’s operation without understanding it—why not the spell? She could start her car, and she could stop it. She had inadvertently started a spell. She would go to Romany Joe’s tonight.
She arrived fairly early, looking worried but very lovely; and by luck she managed to get exactly the same booth she had had the night before. She was grimly determined to undo last night’s weird work, no matter what the cost. As soon as she was settled with a cup of wine, she called the waiter back.
“Meess?”
“I’m looking for a fortune teller,” said Chloe.
“Immediately, meess,” said the waiter, bowing and backing away.
“Wait a minute! I want one particular fortune teller—no other.”
“Vat ees her name?”
“I don’t know. She’s a very old woman, and she carries a bag with her.”
“Vairy old? I am sorry, meess, but ve have no such a one here.”
“But she—” Chloe paused, and then wearily waved the man away. What was the use? She might have known it would be like this. The whole thing made no sense at all. She was sick through and through. She would—
“You were looking for me, modom?”
Chloe started violently. There, beside the booth, was her old fortune-teller.
“I—that is—the waiter said—”
“He is a fool. If you want me, I will come. I come the first time, and the second time, and then I come no more. Now what is it?”
Chloe almost cried with relief. Now to make an end to this crazy business. She spilled out the whole story, while the old woman stood quietly, missing not a word, watching each passing expression of Chloe’s petulant face with her brilliant little eyes. When Chloe had finished, she said,
“You have made one wish, and it is true; it can not be un-made. What do you want me to do?”
“What can you do? Oh please—I’ll give you anything if you’ll make my Gabe as he was. I’ve got to have him back—I’ve got to!”
“You want his nize face, no? Nothing more of him?”
“Oh yes—yes! But I can’t stand him now; what woman wants a husband that can’t be found in a crowd? I’d have to—” she giggled hysterically—“Make him sign a register before I would dare let him in the house at night! Oh please—”
“Yes, I can give you one more wish, if you like. But you must be careful. You must remember that you wished before and now you are unhappy. If you wish again you may not be happy too, more.”
“I don’t care! If I had Gabe back, loving me the way he did, I’d have to be happy. You will help me? You will?”
In answer, the gypsy brought out her charms and began to lay them out. Chloe watched breathlessly. There was a slight commotion at the door which she didn’t begin to notice. She watched the strange invisible pentagon take shape over the table, her eyes caught and held by the marvellous dexterity of the old fingers.
In just a few hours Gabe, in his half-crazed, desperate attempt to make his affliction amuse him, had become much sought after—more so, he reflected wryly, than he had ever been before he became so superbly homely. Probably because he was richer now, he grinned as he walked out of a downtown factory with the payroll in his inside pocket and half the police in the city running around him, bumping into him, shoving him out the way in their earnest effort to find him.
He was a little tired of helping himself to other people’s valuables, particularly since he didn’t need money. However, he’d buy himself a famous automobile or two and take it easy for a while without getting in anyone’s hair.
He strolled around downtown with a good, unpaid-for dinner under his belt and thousands of dollars crammed into his pockets. He didn’t know quite what to do with himself until he saw a brilliant neon display halfway down what had been a side street before said display had been installed. ROMANY JOE’S.
“Now,” said Gabe with great glee, “By all that’s unholy, Joe’s place is the one place in the world that deserves to be robbed by me! I’ll get even with the gypsies for doing this to me—may they prosper!”
He hitched up his trousers, got his hand on the revolver in his right coat pocket, and sauntered in.
“Table for one, sir?” asked Romany Joe, rubbing his hands.
“C’mere,” ordered Gabe coldly, and without even looking at Joe, walked over to the cashier. Joe followed.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
“Your belly,” said Gabe in his best movie-gangster style, “Reminds me of a great, big balloon. Now I’m a funny feller. I like to pop balloons. I like to pump bullets into them. I’m going to bust that one of yours unless you get back of that counter and shell out all the twenties and everything else bigger than a twenty. I ain’t greedy—you can keep the rest. Now—move!” and he prodded Joe with the concealed gun. Joe moved. The cashier squeaked and then subsided, and it was her squeak that caused the rustle that Chloe couldn’t hear, so engrossed was she in the gypsy’s work.
The gypsy steadied the structure carefully, and then carefully withdrew her hand. “Now!” she said hoarsely. “Make your wish!”
Chloe’s mind raced. She would restore Gabe’s looks, if there was anything in this mumbo jumbo. And he would be all hers—all hers. She’d see to that! “I wish,” she said, “that Gabe will be handsome again—and that he will never be able to make love to another woman besides me!”
The weird flame leaped up, blinding her. She was shocked into silence—her whole mind was silenced, not even able to exult. And through that silence knifed the gypsy’s voice—frightened now; “You wish too much! Ah, it is not good.…”
Romany Joe, trembling, pushed the pile of bills across the counter. Gabe smiled, reached for it, and then stiffened. In the mirror behind Romany Joe, he saw the reflection of a man—
A tall, handsome man. His features, his teeth, his hair, breathtakingly beautiful. It was—
Himself! Gabe Jarret!
Gabe backed away, gun in hand, stripped of his cloak of anonymity. His eyes darted to right and left, seeking a way out, trying subconsciously to merge himself into the crowd, utterly failing.
Romany Joe ducked down, came up with a blue automatic. Gabe’s revolver coughed twice, twice again—Gabe stared at it, his hand clamped tight on the trigger, wondering hysterically why it had gone off. Romany Joe folded slowly down over the counter, slid behind it, his clawed fingernails shrieking on the marble. Gabe ran towards the door, found his way blocked by three waiters. He fired wildly, missed, and the gun was knocked out of his hand as he was tackled from two sides at once. He went down, and just before his head struck the floor and knocked him unconscious, he saw Chloe’s drawn face, and heard her shriek, “Gabe! Oh God, Gabe!”
He had a fractured skull. It was ver
y bad, and it took him a long time—more than a year—to get well enough to stand trial for the murder of Josef Blebenau, known as Romany Joe. And during all that time, and during the trial, and after, in the days in the death house when appeal after appeal was being fought, Chloe visited him constantly. He loved her, and she loved him, and, being where he was, he had no chance at all to make love to any other woman. No chance at all, for the rest of his life. He died on the chair.
Chloe got her wish, you see. He was handsome, and saw only her for the rest of his days. It was not what she wanted, but it was her wish. But then, of course, wants and wishes are not the same thing.
Two Sidecars
HENLEY REACHED OUT to push it back under those hills, out of his eyes; but it was eight and a half million miles away and busy making the dawn a pretty one. His quarrel wasn’t with the sun anyway, he reflected, staring at it through meshed eyelashes. His quarrel was with a man whose name he didn’t know yet, but he’d find out. Oh yes he would, and then there was going to be a party. Henley was going to have fun at the party, and the other guy was not. The other guy was going to get pushed around.… Henley gazed for a long moment at the great, straight band canted across the sky before he identified it as the top of his windshield. He lay staring complacently at it until he shivered, and then he realized that he was soaking wet. He could tell without trying that if he moved at all his head would begin to detonate blindingly. He weighed this knowledge against a growing curiosity as to his whereabouts, and it was some time before the curiosity was intense enough to justify the pain of sitting up. He moved himself gently, both hands to his face, pulling himself upright by his cheeks. The two-day stubble offended him.
He gritted his teeth and fumbled in the side pocket of the car for the large rag that was cached there. Shaking it out, he flung it over the windshield to shade his eyes. There are two of me now, he thought. One has a honey of a hangover and wants to lie down and die, and the other is worried about Caroline and wants to move. The part of him that wanted to lie still and pass out watched the other part passively, watched it gaze about the flats back of the city, at the back road, at the way the car was tilted off it into the ditch. The car was a convertible and the top was down and it must have rained hard while he slumped back of the wheel. He searched fumblingly for reasons for his being here, being drunk. The only thing he could find to base it all on was Caroline’s leaving him, and while that was reason enough, it was no excuse. He couldn’t bring her back by getting drunk. He couldn’t find her or the man she was leaving with. He couldn’t do anything until he could think clearly, and he wouldn’t be able to think clearly until he had another sidecar.
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