by William Tenn
Bernie the Faust
William Tenn
Bernie the Faust
by William Tenn
That’s what Ricardo calls me. I don’t know what I am.
Here I am, I’m sitting in my little nine-by-six office. I’m reading notices of government surplus sales. I’m trying to decide where lies a possible buck and where lies nothing but more headaches.
So the office door opens. This little guy with a dirty face, wearing a very dirty, very wrinkled Palm Beach suit, he walks into my office, and he coughs a bit and he says:
“Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?”
That was it. I mean, that’s all I had to go on.
I looked him over and I said, “Wha-at?”
He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. “A twenty,” he mumbled. “A twenty for a five.”
I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. “I give you twenty,” he explained to his shoes, “and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with five, you wind up with twenty.”
“How did you get into the building?”
“I just came in,” he said, a little mixed up.
“You just came in,” I put a nasty, mimicking note in my voice. “Now you just go right back downstairs and come the hell out. There’s a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED.”
“I’m not begging.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket. It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pajamas. “I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you …”
“You want me to call a cop?”
He looked very scared. “No. Why should you call a cop? I haven’t done anything to make you call a cop!”
“I’ll call a cop in just a second. I’m giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they’ll have a cop up here fast. They don’t want beggars in this building. This is a building for business.”
He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. “No deal?” he asked. “A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What’s the matter with my deal?”
I picked up the phone.
“All right,” he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. “I’ll go. I’ll go.”
“You better. And shut the door behind you.”
“Just in case you change your mind.” He reached into his dirty, wrinkled pants pocket and pulled out a card. “You can get in touch with me here. Almost any time during the day.”
“Blow,” I told him.
He reached over, dropped the card on my desk, on top of all the surplus notices, coughed once or twice, looked at me to see if maybe I was biting. No? No. He trudged out.
I picked the card up between the nails of my thumb and forefinger and started to drop it into the wastebasket.
Then I stopped. A card. It was just so damned out of the ordinary—a slob like that with a card. A card, yet.
For that matter, the whole play was out of the ordinary. I began to be a little sorry I hadn’t let him run through the whole thing. Listening to a panhandler isn’t going to kill me. After all, what was he trying to do but give me an off-beat sales pitch? I can always use an off-beat sales pitch. I work out of a small office, I buy and sell, but half my stock is good ideas. I’ll use ideas, even from a bum.
The card was clean and white, except where the smudge from his fingers made a brown blot. Written across it in a kind of ornate handwriting were the words Mr. Ogo Eksar. Under that was the name and the telephone number of a hotel in the Times Square area, not far from my office. I knew that hotel: not expensive, but not a fleabag either—somewhere just under the middle line.
There was a room number in one corner of the card. I stared at it and I felt kind of funny. I really didn’t know.
Although come to think of it, why couldn’t a panhandler be registered at a hotel? “Don’t be a snob, Bernie,” I told myself.
A twenty for a five, he’d offered. Man, I’d love to have seen his face if I’d said: Okay, give me the twenty, you take the five, and now get the hell out of here.
The government surplus notices caught my eye. I flipped the card into the wastebasket and tried to go back to business.
Twenty for five. What kind of panhandling pitch would follow it? I couldn’t get it out of my mind!
There was only one thing to do. Ask somebody about it. Ricardo? A big college professor, after all. One of my best contacts.
He’d thrown a lot my way—a tip on the college building program that was worth a painless fifteen hundred, an office equipment disposal from the United Nations, stuff like that. And any time I had any questions that needed a college education, he was on tap. All for the couple, three hundred, he got out of me in commissions.
I looked at my watch. Ricardo would be in his office now, marking papers or whatever it is he does there. I dialed his number.
“Ogo Eksar?” he repeated after me. “Sounds like a Finnish name. Or maybe Estonian. From the eastern Baltic, I’d say.”
“Forget that part,” I said. “This is all I care about.” And I told him about the twenty-for-five offer.
He laughed. “That thing again!”
“Some old hustle that the Greeks pulled on the Egyptians?”
“No. Something the Americans pulled. And not a con game. During the depression, a New York newspaper sent a reporter around the city with a twenty-dollar bill which he offered to sell for exactly one dollar. There were no takers. The point being, that even with people out of work and on the verge of starvation, they were so intent on not being suckers that they turned down an easy profit of nineteen hundred percent.”
“Twenty for one? This was twenty for five.”
“Oh, well, you know, Bernie, inflation,” he said, laughing again. “And these days it’s more likely to be a television show.”
“Television? You should have seen the way the guy was dressed!”
“Just an extra, logical touch to make people refuse to take the offer seriously. University research people operate much the same way. A few years back, a group of sociologists began an investigation of the public’s reaction to sidewalk solicitors in charity drives. You know, those people who jingle little boxes on street corners: Help the Two-Headed Children, Relief for Flood-Ravaged Atlantis? Well, they dressed up some of their students …”
“You think he was on the level, then, this guy?”
“I think there is a good chance that he was. I don’t see why he would have left his card with you, though.”
“That I can figure—now. If it’s a TV stunt, there must be a lot of other angles wrapped up in it. A giveaway show with cars, refrigerators, a castle in Scotland, all kinds of loot.”
“A giveaway show? Well, yes—it could be.”
I hung up, took a deep breath, and called Eksar’s hotel. He was registered there all right. And he’d just come in.
I went downstairs fast and took a cab. Who knew what other connections he’d made by now?
Going up in the elevator, I kept wondering. How did I go from the twenty-dollar bill to the real big stuff, the TV giveaway stuff, without letting Eksar know that I was on to what it was all about? Well, maybe I’d be lucky. Maybe he’d give me an opening.
I knocked on the door. When he said, “Come in,” I came in. But for a second or two I couldn’t see a thing.
It was a little room, like all the rooms in that hotel, little and smelly and stuffy. But he didn’t have the lights on, any electric lights. The window shade was pulled all the way down.
When my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to
pick out this Ogo Eksar character. He was sitting on the bed, on the side nearest me. He was still wearing that crazy rumpled Palm Beach suit.
And you know what? He was watching a program on a funny little portable TV set that he had on the bureau. Color TV. Only it wasn’t working right. There were no faces, no pictures, nothing but colors chasing around. A big blob of red, a big blob of orange, and a wiggly border of blue and green and black. A voice was talking from it, but all the words were fouled up. “Wah-wah, de-wah, de-wah.”
Just as I came in, he turned it off. “Times Square is a bad neighborhood for TV,” I told him. “Too much interference.”
“Yes,” he said. “Too much interference.” He closed up the set and put it away. I wished I’d seen it when it was working right.
Funny thing, you know? I would have expected a smell of liquor in the room, I would have expected to see a couple of empties in the tin trash basket near the bureau. Not a sign.
The only smell in the room was a smell I couldn’t recognize. I guess it was the smell of Eksar himself, concentrated.
“Hi,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable because of the way I’d been with him back in the office. So rough I’d been.
He stayed on the bed. “I’ve got the twenty,” he said. “You’ve got the five?”
“Oh, I guess I’ve got the five, all right,” I said, looking in my wallet hard and trying to be funny. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even invite me to sit down. I pulled out a bill. “Okay?”
He leaned forward and stared, as if he could see—in all that dimness—what kind of a bill it was. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll want a receipt. A notarized receipt.”
Well, what the hell, I thought, a notarized receipt. “Then we’ll have to go down. There’s a druggist on Forty-fifth.”
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet with a couple of small coughs that came one, two, three, four, right after one another. “The bathroom’s out in the hall. Let me wash up and we’ll go down.”
I waited for him outside the bathroom, thinking that he’d grown a whole hell of a lot more sanitary all of a sudden.
I could have saved my worries. I don’t know what he did in the bathroom, but one thing I knew for sure when he came out: soap and water had nothing to do with it. His face, his neck, his clothes, his hands—they were all as dirty as ever. He still looked like he’d been crawling over a garbage dump all night long.
On the way to the druggist, I stopped in a stationery store and bought a book of blank receipts. I filled out most of it right there. New York, N.Y. and the date. Received from Mr. Ogo Eksar the sum of twenty dollars for a five-dollar bill bearing the serial number … … … “That okay?” I asked him. “I’m putting in the serial number to make it look as if you want that particular bill, you know, what the lawyers call the value-received angle.”
He screwed his head around and read the receipt. Then he checked the serial number of the bill I was holding. He nodded.
We had to wait for the druggist to get through with a couple of customers. When I signed the receipt, he read it to himself, shrugged and went ahead and stamped it with his seal.
I paid him the two bits: I was the one making the profit.
Eksar slid a crisp new twenty to me along the glass of the counter. He watched while I held it up to the light, first one side, then the other.
“Good bill?” he asked.
“Yes. You understand: I don’t know you, I don’t know your money.”
“Sure. I’d do it myself with a stranger.” He put the receipt and my five-dollar bill in his pocket and started to walk away.
“Hey,” I said. “You in a hurry?”
“No.” He stopped, looking puzzled. “No hurry. But you’ve got the twenty for a five. We made the deal. It’s all over.”
“All right, so we made the deal. How about a cup of coffee?”
He hesitated.
“It’s on me,” I told him. “I’ll be a big shot for a dime. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee.”
Now he looked worried. “You don’t want to back out? I’ve got the receipt. It’s all notarized. I gave you a twenty, you gave me a five. We made a deal.”
“It’s a deal, it’s a deal,” I said, shoving him into an empty booth. “It’s a deal, it’s all signed, sealed and delivered. Nobody’s backing out. I just want to buy you a cup of coffee.”
His face cleared up, all the way through that dirt. “No coffee. Soup. I’ll have some mushroom soup.”
“Fine, fine. Soup, coffee, I don’t care. I’ll have coffee.”
I sat there and studied him. He hunched over the soup and dragged it into his mouth, spoonful after spoonful, the living picture of a bum who hadn’t eaten all day. But pure essence of bum, triple-distilled, the label of a fine old firm.
A guy like this should be lying in a doorway trying to say no to a cop’s nightstick, he should be coughing his alcoholic guts out. He shouldn’t be living in a real honest-to-God hotel, or giving me a twenty for a five, or swallowing anything as respectable as mushroom soup.
But it made sense. A TV giveaway show, they want to do this, they hire a damn good actor, the best money can buy, to toss their dough away. A guy who’ll be so good a bum that people’ll just laugh in his face when he tries to give them a deal with a profit.
“You don’t want to buy anything else?” I asked him.
He held the spoon halfway to his mouth and stared at me suspiciously. “Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like maybe you want to buy a ten for a fifty. Or a twenty for a hundred dollars?”
He thought about it, Eksar did. Then he went back to his soup, shoveling away. “That’s no deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal is that?”
“Excuse me for living. I just thought I’d ask. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you.” I lit a cigarette and waited.
My friend with the dirty face finished the soup and reached for a paper napkin. He wiped his lips. I watched him: he didn’t smudge a spot of the grime around his mouth. He just blotted the drops of soup up. He was dainty in his own special way.
“Nothing else you want to buy? I’m here, I’ve got time right now. Anything else on your mind, we might as well look into it.”
He balled up the paper napkin and dropped it into the soup plate. It got wet. He’d eaten all the mushrooms and left the soup.
“The Golden Gate Bridge,” he said all of a sudden.
I dropped the cigarette. “What?”
“The Golden Gate Bridge. The one in San Francisco. I’ll buy that. I’ll buy it for …” he lifted his eyes to the fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and thought for a couple of seconds “… say a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Cash on the barrel.”
“Why the Golden Gate Bridge?” I asked him like an idiot.
“That’s the one I want. You asked me what else I want to buy—well, that’s what else. The Golden Gate Bridge.”
“What’s the matter with the George Washington Bridge? It’s right here in New York, it’s across the Hudson River. It’s a newer bridge. Why buy something all the way out on the coast?”
He grinned at me as if he admired my cleverness. “Oh, no,” he said, twitching his left shoulder hard. Up, down, up, down. “I know what I want. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. A hundred and a quarter. Take it or leave it.”
“The George Washington Bridge,” I argued, talking my head off just so I’d have a chance to think, “has a nice toll set-up, fifty cents a throw, and lots of traffic, plenty of traffic. I don’t know what the tolls are on the Golden Gate, but I’m damn sure you don’t have anywhere near the kind of traffic that New York can draw. And then there’s maintenance. The Golden Gate’s one of the longest bridges in the world, you’ll go broke trying to keep it in shape. Dollar for dollar, location for location, I’d say the George Washington’s a better deal for a man who’s buying a bridge.”
“The Golden Gate,” he said, slamming the table with his open hand and l
etting a whole series of tics tumble through his face. “I want the Golden Gate and nothing but the Golden Gate. Don’t give me a hard time again. Do you want to sell or don’t you?”
I’d had a chance to think it through. And I knew that Ricardo’s angle had been the angle. I was in.
“Sure I’ll sell. If that’s what you want, you’re the doctor. But look—all I can sell you is my share of the Golden Gate Bridge, whatever equity in it I may happen to own.”
He nodded. “I want a receipt. Put that down on the receipt.”
I put it down on the receipt. And back we went. The druggist notarized the receipt, shoved the stamping outfit in the drawer under the counter and turned his back on us. Eksar counted out six twenties and one five from a big roll of bills, all of them starchy new. He put the roll back into his pants pocket and started away again.
“More coffee?” I said, catching up. “A refill on the soup?”
He turned a very puzzled look at me and kind of twitched all over. “Why? What do you want to sell now?”
I shrugged. “What do you want to buy? You name it. Let’s see what other deals we can work out.”
This was all taking one hell of a lot of time, but I had no complaints. I’d made a hundred and forty dollars in fifteen minutes. Say a hundred and thirty-eight fifty, if you deducted expenses like notary fees, coffee, soup—all legitimate expenses, all low. I had no complaints.
But I was waiting for the big one. There had to be a big one.
Of course, it could maybe wait until the TV program itself. They’d be asking me what was on my mind when I was selling Eksar all that crap, and I’d be explaining, and they’d start handing out refrigerators and gift certificates at Tiffany’s and …
Eksar had said something while I was away in cloud-land. Something damn unfamiliar. I asked him to say it again.
“The Sea of Azov,” he told me. “In Russia. I’ll give you three hundred and eighty dollars for it.”
I’d never heard of the place. I pursed my lips and thought for a second. A funny amount—three hundred and eighty. And for a whole damn sea. I tried an angle.