“I’ve just opened a new file,” said Mr. Rush. “Application for pension from a Mr.—” he consulted the file “—Edgar Folsom. From Wampanoack.”
“Don’t matter where from,” said his superior. “What’s his timeage?”
“Timeage is seventeen years, seven days.”
“He doesn’t qualify for full payment, Rush.”
“I know that.”
“Minimum pension of, hm, let me calculate a second, um, two hundred and twenty dollars a month. Write him. Application denied. Subject named above may appeal. You know the routine.”
“I know the routine.”
“Then we’ll hold up the appeal for five years, and of course he draws no interest.”
“Of course.”
But Mr. Merton Rush did not move back into his own office and Ros Sawell asked, in some surprise, “What are you waiting for, then?”
Mert reminded his boss that it was CFA policy to grant three such applications without delay monthly, that so far they had granted only two, and that it was the last day of the month.
“Oh. Um. Yes, so it is. Shoot. Oh, well, grant it. He’ll soon enough try to collect the pension in a foreign country with a subversively lower cost of living. Then we’ll jump him.”
Mert said, “Oh, boy, yes! Estopped. Suspended pending investigation. That’s right!”
“We got to think of the taxpayers.”
* * *
ETTA HAD A very nice room with her own foyer facing the granite statue of The Intrepid Bothnian on the lawn. Constant hot tap water for making instant coffee. “Well, have you made up your mind yet, Edgar, what you’re going to do? Your lease runs out this month and your rent will be raised.”
Mr. Folsom straightened his bowtie. (He always had a little trouble with it.) “Well, I certainly hope and trust the President will do something about it.”
Etta was very patriotic, but. “Why should he do something about it?” she asked, for once a bit surprised.
“Well, I wrote and asked him to.”
“Oh, you—Edgar. What’s that sticking out of your pocket instead of a nice clean hankie? A letter. What would you do if I weren’t here to remind you.” Deftly, she opened and read. “Well, I never. You are going to get a Civil Functionary Partial Pension of two hundred and twenty dollars a month. Oh, for goodness sake.”
Edgar, however, wasn’t surprised. Not at all. “There, you see. I guess an American citizen can write to his President if he wants results. Guess that Good Old Days Retirement Company, he fixed their little red wagon sure enough.”
For once Etta had not much to say, but she said it. “You can’t retire on two hundred and twenty dollars a month. Have you seen the prices lately? Where do you shop?”
“Tut,” said Edgar. “I’ll go live in some country with a lower cost of living. Few can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Huh?”
* * *
THE YOUNG PERSON in the travel agency repeated his question. “Where can you go for eleven hundred dollars? Well, the pitcheresque Republic of La Banana has just been opened for tourism and foreign migration. We got this bunch of literature in just today. ‘The picturesque Republic of La Banana, which gave its name to the familiar succulent yellow fruit, contains one hundred and fifty-two species of edible wild slugs, also many colorful parrots.’ Here, you can read it while I make out your package.”
In the newly opened consulate and travel office of the Republic of La Banana, Bombo Duzbuz Jambatch looked at Mr. Folsom listlessly. “You wish to go to our country? Fine. So go. One moment. Health precaution. Stick out tongue, please. Thirty-seven dollar, you pay me. Okay, now I make out your Permission.”
Mr. Folsom had never traveled very much. “You’re put?” Mamie used to ask. “Stay put.”
He now inquired, “Permission for what?”
Bombo Duzbuz Jambatch looked up, surprised. “Everything,” he replied. “Enter. Exit. Transit. Operate steamroller. Even, you may to run for elective office. Save that no more we have elections. Kay. All finish. Here.”
Mr. Folsom took the large and colorful paper, folded it. “When does it have to be renewed?”
The bombo suddenly seemed bored. “How I know? I am not prophet. Do not push fates. Perhaps never. You think we are tyranty? Go.”
Edgar went.
* * *
IN THE CAPITAL hamlet of Gunk Up High, several gorges away from the non-capital hamlet of Gunk Not So High, Mr. Folsom found there was something of a housing shortage. The best he could obtain for himself was an eight-room poppick at a rental of one dollar per room per month, the landlord insisting on renting the poppick as a single unit. The other natives rolled their eyes at such cupidity and murmured a local proverb loosely translated as, “Foreigners and their welcome money often make the rich richer.” It was, of course, far more room than Edgar needed, but he found that the space gradually filled with the picturesque native furniture, artwork, and bric-a-brac which he found it amusing to buy at the Weeny Bazaar (the Great Big Bazaar dealt mostly in milch-sheep and rhinoceros legs). Sometimes he spent as much as two or three dollars a month on such items.
Goro-goro luntch-potch, as they say in the pawkey idiom of La Banana. Meaning, So the time does pass, even so.
* * *
“WELL, WHAT DID I tell you?” said Mr. Roswell Sawell. “Didn’t he run true to form? Here’s a change of address for his Civil Functionary Partial Pension check, just as I predicted.”
“You certainly can pick ’em, Chief.”
“Now, theoretically—” Ros pushed the compliment aside “—any American citizen may elect to receive his pension anywhere in the world—Andorra, Oz, Borrioboola-gha, anywhere. But we don’t like um to! We know that nobody can live on that kind of money! Where’s the cost of his car? Where’s his gas money? You know what a TV set costs in some a these countries with subversively low standards of living? Dishwashers? As for, say, the price of beef, well, you just price it yourself! If we can’t make it, they can’t make it! No, Mert: less a fellow’s getting a full career pension of, well, say at least two thousand dollars a month, there’s no way he can live on his pension. Which means—well, you know what it means!”
Merton nodded his birdy head. “Il-lic-it en-ter-prise.” He rolled out the syllables with relish. Relish, and unction.
“Absolutely. Smuggling Scotch whiskey. Promoting ox-races. And, increasingly, the notorious bush-wax trade.”
His assistant agreed with him. “That’s terrible stuff, that bush-wax.”
Terrible? said his superior. Terrible was hardly the word for it. It was diuretic, euphoric, and non-addictive! No wonder the Pensions Office of the Civil Functionaries Administration worked hand in glove with the Illegal Ear Substances Division of the Crack-Down Department. “So let’s put a Stop on his pension, and he can swim back, if he likes, and file an appeal. There’s a good ten years he won’t be robbing the taxpayers.—Why are you just standing there, Mert?”
Merton said because they had already put Stops on eight hundred and thirty-five pensions that month already, which was tops according to policy, and so they’d better wait till next month.
“Don’t rock the boat, in other words?”
“You said it, Chief!”
“Well, you may be right. I have a sort of nose for these things. But, next month we drop the Himalayan Mountains on him!”
He and his assistant laughed soundlessly.
* * *
MR. EDGAR FOLSOM never drank Scotch whiskey, thought the ox-races were smelly, and would have been bored by TV had there been any. (The mountain ranges made it impracticable. As for washing his dishes, he threw them all into the gorge behind his house and got new ones.) He was spending so little money he was obliged to buy quite a number of boxes to store the money he didn’t spend. He was by now probably the richest man in Gunk Up High, and the lower caste of natives never came near his house at night lest the gods, who obviously love rich men (else why are they rich—answer that one, would you?), eat thei
r kidney-fat. They may not know much, those innocent, childlike, very dirty natives, but they know that without kidney-fat you just ain’t got it.
One day Mr. Edgar Folsom was strolling along a road (path, the very particular might call it) which had yet to receive the biannual attentions of the steamroller. (The fact is that the dictator was very fond of operating it himself and paid no attention to any of the schedules the Department of Public Works submitted to him—very, very occasionally.) Rather incuriously, he observed someone he rather thought was a foreigner. In fact, this one admitted as much to him, saying, “I am a foreigner.”
“What brings you here? Not that it isn’t a nice little place.”
The man said he was allowing vortices of energy to carry him along as he observed the Way and the Eternal Snows.
“Oh.”
The foreigner took him by the arm and slightly turned him. He gestured. “Just cast your gaze through the, like, mists of illusion and tell me if there are three energy-forms in uniform standing at the crossroads.”
Mr. Folsom slightly squinted. “Well,” he said, “usually there are two policemen standing there, I don’t know why—I mean, there’s never that much traffic—but today I guess there are three.”
The foreigner said that that which was not an enigma was an illusion. “Just point out your house—I mean the compass-point where the non-real you is dwelling, as it were, man. There? Good. Now, would you do me one big favor? My arm hurts today—a mere illusion to be sure, but would you just let me put this in your case and I’ll meet you later. Right now it’s my, um, time of withdrawal and meditation.”
* * *
OF THE THREE at the crossroads, only one spoke sufficient English to be more than merely amusing. This was Bombo Yimyam Hutchkutch. “Ah, Meestair Edgar Folsom, you are out to ramble, as often, eh?”
Mr. Folsom acknowledged it. “I was taking some snapshots with my little old Kodak brownie camera and the people there started yelling, so I stopped and gave ’em some pennies—anyway I call ’em pennies. So then they all kissed my coat lapels and gave me what they said is the stuffed head of a yeti. I put it in my briefcase. No, that’s not it. I dunno what this is—some other foreigner asked me to take it down the hill for him, I guess because it will help his hurt arm.” And he gazed round the mountain-circled universe with his candid eyes.
From the policemen meanwhile had come noises of suspicion, irritation, and something which another might have taken for dismay. Said the bombo, “We will take it down the hill for you, Meestair. We will take care to find him and alleviate his hurt arm. What, to think he can move about with this stash and pay us nothing? Proceed upon your ramble, Meestair Folsom, and may you live in our nation for a hundred thousand eons.”
* * *
“WELL, CHIEF,” SAID Merton, “guess what just came in?”
“Some more appeals against estoppment of pensions, I suppose,” suggested Mr. Sawell indifferently. The Pacific Ocean and the entirety of the Indoo Sea might have been filled with swimming appellants, much cared he.
Nay, not so, Merton told him. “It’s the monthly exchange list from the Illegal Ear Substances Division of the Crack-Down Department, and guess what? Folsom, Edgar, in La Banana has been instrumental in catching a cache of illegal bush-wax!”
They gazed at each other with a wild surmise. Then, slowly but with admiration, Mr. Sawell said, “I guess he is one of the IED’s men. This pension thing, it’s just his cover. Of course he doesn’t have to live on it. Get the big red rubber stamp and stamp his file NTBTW. Get going, now, Mert.” And Merton, bowing his head respectfully, proceeded to affix the indication that Edgar Folsom’s pension was Never To Be Tampered With.
A civil functionary has many, many duties. The public scarcely knows.
* * *
AS FOR MR. Edgar Folsom, he has grown tired of hoarding his money. For one thing, he sends contributions to the worthy causes he finds mentioned in the worn, worn copies of Reader’s Digest that come his distant way as padding in the ox-caravans. And for another, he has bought a choice and select herd of jet-black milch-sheep, plus three dancing bears.
He feels just fine.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES
WHEN “THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES” appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 1969) the editors diverged from their normal policy of “blurbing” each story with a brief paragraph. Instead, they published a full page of comments, setting the tale in its historical context and praising it and its author. This unusual attention was well justified.
As early as December of 1958 Avram Davidson had written to Frederic Dannay (one half of “Ellery Queen”) about a proposed series of stories and asking for advice on his research. The series was to be “set in the days when Mordecai Manuel Noah was Sherrif (or Sheriff) of New York and Jacob Hays was High Constable.” The stories would involve “the New York criminal scene, @ 1830, give or take a decade or so.” Later in the same letter Avram added, “I am fond of the Jacksonian Era and rather believe that I can do some good stories on the Noah/Hays teeter-totter; certainly I shall enjoy doing them.”
It was a decade before “The Importance of Trifles” saw print, and it seems to have been the only story actually written in the planned series. It is a splendid piece of work, a fine police procedural complete with crime, clues, suspects, deduction, and action. It deals also with the social issues of its day—which are not so different from the social issues of ours—and with the seemingly perpetual struggle (Avram’s “teeter-totter”) between political appointees and law-enforcement professionals. It is that rare story that truly merits the too-often awarded designation of tour de force.
—RAL
Jacob Hays, high constable of the City of New-York, had eaten his usual breakfast of fried eggs and beefsteak, broiled fish (shad, this time), a heap of pan-cakes, a pair of chickens’ wings, hot buttered rolls, and tea. More and more people were drinking coffee, as the nineteenth century rolled into its fourth decade, but Jacob Hays still imbibed hyson rather than java.
“Promise me, Mr. Hays,” his wife demanded, as he rose to leave, “that if it commences rain you’ll take the Broad-way caravan.”
“Mrs. Hays, good morning,” said her husband briefly. And walked out of the house with brisk strides.
The day was dark, but it would be darker than it had ever been before he would spend eight cents to ride a mile. Many a mickle makes a muckle, his mother used to say; and his father’s advice had been: Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of you. Besides, did it befit the holder of his office to cram into a crowded caravan like a commission-merchant or a law-clerk? Would the people not think he was doddering if they saw him in an omnibus? He, who patrolled the city afoot by day and by night? Just so.
Presumably, it had been a quiet night, for no message had come to pull him out from his featherbed. No riots or major fires—a mercy.
It had been twenty-six years since old Governor De Witt Clinton, then Mayor of New-York, had appointed him High Constable, and in all that time the City had never ceased to grow—nor had crime ever ceased to keep pace with commerce and culture. Jacob Hays had come to relish quiet nights, though scarcely even one of these passed in which he did not awaken, straining his ears for some sound—near or far—betokening a conflagration in South-street or a murderous “hooley” in the Five-Points. And yet there were citizens who still expected him to undertake the functions of a hog-warden!
The very thought of it made him snort. He looked around challengingly—then smiled. There was no trouble in the Broad-way at this time of morning, or, indeed, at any other time of day. The wide, clean street, lined with fashionable hotels and shops and busy office buildings, stretched along for almost three miles, the wonder of the country—proud New-Yorkers said, of the world. And all along it, from the Battery to Twentieth-street, looked upon from wooden shacks and towering five-storey brick buildings alike, a press of carts, drays, wagons, carriages, cabs, and omnibuses filled the eight
y-foot width of the road with a ceaseless rumbling.
“Good-morning, High Constable,” said a dry-goods merchant, setting out open boxes of new percales and nankeens for passers-by to examine at pleasure. “Good-morning, Mr. Hays,” said an admiralty-lawyer, on his way to visit the forest of masts along the lower East-River. “Good-morning, Jacob,” said old Alderman Ter Williger.
And two young bloods, of the sort which had begun to infest the Bowery-road, hats cocked as sharply over carefully-soaped locks of hair as gravity would allow, nudged one the other sharply, and hissed, “Old Hays!”
Their expression, as they met his cold, knowledgeable eye, changed from one of studied insolence to a mixture of uneasiness and would-be defiance. He gave his high-constabular staff, which he always carried with him, a slight shake in their direction, and they lowered their gaze and slunk by. No, they were just strutting, and would make no trouble in the Broad-way.
The unpaven, narrow, pig-ridden, and stinking side-streets of the lower city, ill-lit and under-patrolled (but try to obtain additional money for more constables from the Board of Aldermen!)—these were the places they would choose for crime. And it was in the Bowery, with its popular theatres and pleasure gardens, that they would seek their amusement: jostling citizens, insulting ladies, and causing commotions in general.
Once in his office Hays ignored the view of the City Hall Park, and dealt rapidly with that portion of the day’s new business which responded to rapid treatment. Then he looked over his correspondence—runaway daughters and fugitive sons; complaints of bogus lotteries and similar frauds which seemed to go on forever—like “The Spanish Prisoner” swindle, the “English-Estate-in-Chancery-to-which-you-are-heir” swindle.
“Any new ‘cards’?” he asked his assistant. There were—there always were. Bank robbery in Portland, green-goods merchant hastily departed from Philadelphia, murder in Albany, funds embezzled from London, cargo of rum stolen in Boston, shipment of cotton made off with in Georgia, eleven absconded apprentices, two fugitive slaves, piracy in the Gulph of Mexico.
The Investigations of Avram Davidson Page 20