Algren at Sea (2 page)

“I needed them to keep my feet dry,” I explained, “in event it rained on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Last time it snowed and I got a gash on my forehead.”

Rapietta's admiration gleamed in her eyes but there was no time for
that.
Wasting no time in useless indignation, she handed me a document prepared for the contingency we now faced.

I read it swiftly and had to protest.

Passing ownership of the house to herself was a shrewd legal stroke—but what was to become of my stamp collection? Even now it might be endangered by another motorbike posse. I demanded that Rapietta assume guardianship of it lest it be seized as I slept. My clever demand put her on the defensive.

“I can only assume guardianship in perpetuity,” she dickered. I snatched the papers and signed them before she could change her mind, and once more we had eluded my pursuers.

“What does ‘in perpetuity' mean, Rapietta?” I inquired later.

“It means that your stamp collection is now protected forever by a little somebody,” she assured me modestly.

“Then that was a neat ruse,” I boasted.

“It certainly was,” Rapietta agreed generously, “and half the credit belongs to
you.”
She emphasized this by tapping the top button of my weskit with her forefinger.

The honor of the thing fired my ambition. “What do I do
next?”
I asked eagerly, jumping in and out of my sneakers. “How am I to get
full
credit for something?”

Rapietta put her hands on my shoulders to calm me.

“Bring five hundred in small bills to my apartment after twelve,” she advised me; “we are facing a
new
contingency.”

“Then we will have our first lunch together!” I realized.

“Twelve
midnight,
you wild thing,” she taunted me gently while shoving me with her powerful forearms into the spick-and-span corridor of Doubledge Deadsinch & O'Lovingly, Selfless Solicitors—“and bring your toothbrush so we can
both
get some sleep.”

Rapietta slammed the door softly in my face. Little did the innocent creature fancy that at that very moment my G.I. toothbrush was hanging about my neck cleverly concealed by my collar. For, since suffering the theft of my Dr. West's in the 178th Field Artillery I have never been able to bring myself to hang it up in a civilian bathroom. Needless to say I was honorably discharged. So much for World War I.

Shortly after midnight the contingency Rapietta was facing came to a head.

“What do I do now?” I asked sleepily, for it had been a trying day.

“Hit the road by the backstair,” she explained, “and write me
par avion.”
And slipping into sleep as easily as she had slipped into French, the dear girl began snoring noisily.

Swiftly translating her message into my mother tongue, I hurried down the stair and picked my way through Central Park in search of a friendly drugstore where I might purchase a
par avion
stamp. A friendly officer interceded, inquiring why I might be walking barefooty in New York after the sun had set. Although I had noticed that the streetlamps were lit, I hadn't noticed that I'd forgotten my shoes. Thanking the officer courteously, I hurried back to Rapietta's to recover them.

She did not answer my knock. But when one of my Ked Gavilans came through the transom I concluded she must therefore be half awake, and knocked again.

The second shoe caused me to wonder whether it were Rapietta throwing, as the shoe that came through this time was a size 13 British walker. It made a snug fit.

I peered through the keyhole in order to see why Rapietta was getting her footwear confused with mine, and sure enough, she
was
wide-awake. Never a man to spoil somebody else's good time, I withdrew tippytoe.

Returning across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, however, I didn't make as good time as I had in coming because the walker has a higher heel than a sneaker, which has no heel at all.

My spirits picked up on the Indiana Tollway, and I began striding along while humming contentedly

I was first in line at the General Delivery window in Chicago the following morning. My reward was a night wire from New York.

Had something gone wrong in the week I'd been gone? I opened the wire with apprehension. Sure enough, it was from Rapietta:

Western Union had italicized a telegram for me! It was my first time.

I wired back:

By taking a shortcut through Grant Park I reached the monument to Stephen A. Douglas on Twenty-ninth and the lake by noon. Bundling my clothes neatly, with my oddly matched shoes inside to keep them dry, I struck out into the lake at Thirty-first and came up, dripping but happy, on a sand-bar only a quarter-mile offshore just as day was breaking the following morning. Now all I had to do was find the Indiana Tollway in order to make the Pennsylvania Turnpike so I could again negotiate the Holland Tunnel. I
so
much wanted to see Doubledge Deadsinch and O'Lovingly once again.

A motorist driving a Bentley with a Nassau, Bahamas, license, picked me up at Harrisburg and made me get out in front of the Shredded Wheat plant at Niagara Falls. After admiring the colored lights on the falls while eating a Shredded Wheat biscuit somebody had discarded on the grass, I was once again on my way. In no time at all I was striding cheerfully along the Palisades, humming:
until I reached the offices I loved so well.

“Tie a rubber band around it and toss it through the transom, Needlenose,” Rapietta's voice instructed me from within.

Nobody had ever called me Needlenose before.

It was my first time again.

“I don't have a rubber band,” I explained through the door. After looking carefully about to see whether I'd brought somebody along.

“Use your shoelace!” she instructed me.

“Which shoe?” I countered.

“The longest!”

I had a problem: my laces were of equal length. Quickly solving this puzzler by cutting one short and using the other, I called—“Ready!—What I do wrap it
around?”

“The
bankroll,
Melonhead.”

“I don't have a bankroll, Rapietta.”

“Oh,” I heard her mutter, “it's him,” and she opened the door. “I was expecting a Britisher named Walker,” she explained. “What the hell do
you
want?”

“I felt we should be together while the tide was turning, dear,” I explained.

“The tide ebbed yesterday,” she explained crisply. “Now
they're
suing
us.”

Rapietta handed me a morocco-bound sheaf of 399 pages of single-spaced figures. Adding them up to see if they came out right was interesting work. I had never done addition before. It was one more first time.

“Get up off the floor,” she reproached me.

“But what does it
mean,
dear?” I asked.

“It's your bill as of the fiscal year ending today at 1200 hours. Four researchers, five shysters, Morris Ernst and an alley-fink have been working night and day in your interest, compiling your account.”

“Why, I thought Doubledge Deadsinch & O'Lovingly took my case on
contingency,”
I protested.

“Where is your compassion?” Rapietta reproached me, “Are Doubledge Deadsinch and Pyrhana to be pauperized by a legal technicality? Is a layman to impoverish men of good family? Is that their reward for giving of themselves selflessly in your interest?”

“When did Pyrhana join us?” I inquired.

“When O'Lovingly retired,” she informed me, and turned her back to me. I felt
awful.

“I didn't mean to hurt you, Rapietta,” I tried to explain, approaching her. But she kept her back to me. It was a swivel chair.

“I'm putting it up to you,” was all she would say.

She was putting it up to me.

“Not to mention a C.P.A.,” she reminded me over her shoulder. I heard the catch in my counselor's voice. When I put my hands on her shoulders they were quaking.

“You are a brave girl,” I told her; “you haven't mentioned yourself.”

Rapietta captured my hand and clasped it between her own. When she turned her eyes to mine they were shining.

“I
am yours on contingency,” the self-sacrificing girl confessed. And, taking me by the hand, led me into her inner office, opened a drawer, and from it withdrew a document which she handed me.

It was a one-way passage on the SS
Meyer Davis,
departing from Pier 86, Tuesday, at 1600 hours.

“What does it all
mean?”
I wanted to know.

Rapietta's face grew stem. “It means that our opponents have discovered that you marched in a demonstration protesting the bombing of Ethiopia in 1936, or somewhere along in there, and you have to get out of the country before you are subpoenaed. If this evidence comes to light they will be able to establish that if you had a mind you'd be dangerous! Our defense will go sky-high.”

“But I have never been at sea before,” I protested.

“You've been at sea for some time,” Rapietta told me.

I wondered what she meant by
that.

“Can I
afford
an ocean voyage?” was my next poser.

“Candidly, you can't afford a trip to the drugstore for an airmail stamp,” she told me candidly.

“I already made that trip.” I revealed that my memory, at any rate, was still functioning. “Now I'd like to go somewhere else. But I'd like to return someday.”

“We can't chance that,” she informed me. “You'll have to stay abroad until things blow over.”

“How will I know when they have blown?”

“You will receive a message
par avion
—that means ‘Welcome to Paris,' dear boy.”

And wasting no time in useless indignation, she drew a document from her desk she had already prepared, in order to avoid losing even more time in useless indignation.

“I have completed arrangements for you with my trustworthy cousin, Trustworthy Ex-Naval-Eye Roger Blueblade of Blueblade, Suckingwise, Scalpel & Tourniquet, Trustworthy Publishers, whom I deeply admire, as he comes from the venal branch of our family.”

“I admire Venal Roger Blueblade, Ex-Naval Eye, too, Rapietta!” I assured her with an eager cry.

“You preposterous
nut”
—Rapietta was suddenly put out with me—“you don't even know the sneaky little usurer and you're
admiring
him—for
what?”

“Keep your voice down, darling,” I felt forced to reprove her; “there is no need of getting rowdy simply because I happen to know that, as Mr. Blueblade has published some of the most trustworthy volumes in circulation, hence his name of Trustworthy Roger is not unearned.”

This speech, delivered with an aloof take-it-or-leave-it air, raised me in Rapietta's eyes at the same moment that it reduced her to sitting down heavily. The judicial burden she was carrying on my account was almost too heavy for her childish shoulders, I perceived.

“Let us look at it this way.” I took a kindlier tone. “People who really matter hardly ever enter a Chicago hallway. But there is no telling whom a first-class passenger may meet. I might even meet Abraham Ribicoff.”

While Rapietta had her back turned to me, I signed the papers swiftly to make certain she would not change her mind. When she turned about and handed the papers to me to sign, I shook my head stubbornly.

Rapietta paled.

“What is the
meaning
of this?” she asked sternly.

“Oh, I just don't
want
to,” I teased her.

Rapietta sneered.

“Look at yourself,” she told me, “standing there in one British walker and a button-down sneaker and no socks,
presuming
to impose a layman's judgment upon legal counsel.”

Though shaken, I held my ground. I did not make PFC by happenstance. I just happened to be inducted when the army needed cowards in that classification.

“If you don't sign you can't have a
Bon Voyage
party,” she informed me with finality.

“I don't
care.
” This was turning out to be a real fun day.

“You won't get to meet Abe,” she threatened me.

I gave ground.

“Say
please,”
I demanded.

She refused. It was a test of strength between two strong souls.

“A
Bon Voyage
party!” I suddenly caught the picture. “For
me?”
I asked, and began jumping in and out, as both shoes happened to be unlaced.

“What
does
it all mean?” I cried.

“It means you will soon be rubbing elbows with ‘
celebs
,'” she informed me quietly.

“‘
Celebs
'? Such as people seen wecently in Bwoadway pwoductions by Tennessee Rilliams?” I inquired, getting myself under contwol.

“Such as Chinless Kilgallen, Hedda Eczema, and Norman Manlifellow, Boyish Author.”