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‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘We.’ I began reading the paper.

  The coffee was ready now and George brought the pot over and put it on the table between our beds. ‘A person can’t live without money,’ he said. ‘The old man ought to know that.’ He got back into his bed without taking off his green dressing-gown. I went on reading. I finished the racing page and the football page and then I started on Lionel Pantaloon, the great political and society columnist. I always read Pantaloon – same as the other twenty or thirty million people in the country. He’s a habit with me; he’s more than a habit; he’s a part of my morning, like three cups of coffee, or shaving.

  ‘This fellow’s got a nerve,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Lionel Pantaloon.’

  ‘What’s he saying now?’

  ‘Same sort of thing he’s always saying. Same sort of scandal. Always about the rich. Listen to this: “…seen at the Penguin Club… banker William S. Womberg with beauteous starlet Theresa Williams… three nights running… Mrs Womberg at home with a headache… which is something anyone’s wife would have if hubby was out squiring Miss Williams of an evening…’

  ‘That fixes Womberg,’ George said.

  ‘I think it’s a shame,’ I said. ‘That sort of thing could cause a divorce. How can this Pantaloon get away with stuff like that?’

  ‘He always does, they’re all scared of him. But if I was William S. Womberg,’ George said, ‘you know what I’d do? I’d go right out and punch this Lionel Pantaloon right on the nose. Why, that’s the only way to handle those guys.’

  ‘Mr Womberg could do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s an old man,’ I said. ‘Mr Womberg is a dignified and respectable old man. He’s a very prominent banker in the town. He couldn’t possibly…’

  And then it happened. Suddenly, from nowhere, the idea came. It came to me right in the middle of what I was saying to George and I stopped short and I could feel the idea itself kind of flowing into my brain and I kept very quiet and let it come and it kept on coming and almost before I knew what had happened I had it all, the whole plan, the whole brilliant magnificent plan worked out clearly in my head; and right then I knew it was a beauty.

  I turned and I saw George staring at me with a look of wonder on his face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I kept quite calm. I reached out and got some more coffee before I allowed myself to speak.

  ‘George,’ I said, and I still kept calm. ‘I have an idea. Now listen very carefully because I have an idea which will make us both very rich. We are broke, are we not?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘And this William S. Womberg,’ I said, ‘would you consider that he is angry with Lionel Pantaloon this morning?’

  ‘Angry!’ George shouted. ‘Angry! Why, he’ll be madder than hell!’

  ‘Quite so. And do you think that he would like to see Lionel Pantaloon receive a good hard punch on the nose?’

  ‘Damn right he would!’

  ‘And now tell me, is it not possible that Mr Womberg would be prepared to pay a sum of money to someone who would undertake to perform this nose-punching operation efficiently and discreetly on his behalf?’

  George turned and looked at me, and gently, carefully, he put down his coffee-cup on the table. A slowly widening smile began to spread across his face. ‘I get you,’ he said. ‘I get the idea.’

  ‘That’s just a little part of the idea. If you read Pantaloon’s column here you will see that there is another person who has been insulted today.’ I picked up the paper. ‘There is a Mrs Ella Gimple, a prominent socialite who has perhaps a million dollars in the bank…’

  ‘What does Pantaloon say about her?’

  I looked at the paper again. ‘He hints,’ I answered, ‘at how she makes a stack of money out of her own friends by throwing roulette parties and acting as the bank.’

  ‘That fixes Gimple,’ George said. ‘And Womberg. Gimple and Womberg.’ He was sitting up straight in bed waiting for me to go on.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘we have two different people both loathing Lionel Pantaloon’s guts this morning, both wanting desperately to go out and punch him on the nose, and neither of them daring to do it. You understand that?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘So much then,’ I said, ‘for Lionel Pantaloon. But don’t forget that there are others like him. There are dozens of other columnists who spend their time insulting wealthy and important people. There’s Harry Weyman, Claude Taylor, Jacob Swinski, Walter Kennedy, and all the rest of them.’

  ‘That’s right,’ George said. ‘That’s absolutely right.’

  ‘I’m telling you, there’s nothing that makes the rich so furious as being mocked and insulted in the newspapers.’

  ‘Go on,’ George said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘All right. Now this is the plan.’ I was getting rather excited myself. I was leaning over the side of the bed, resting one hand on the little table, waving the other about in the air as I spoke. ‘We will set up immediately an organization and we will call it… what shall we call it… we will call it… let me see… we will call it “Vengeance Is Mine Inc.”… How about that?’

  ‘Peculiar name.’

  ‘It’s biblical. It’s good. I like it. “Vengeance Is Mine Inc.” It sounds fine. And we will have little cards printed which we will send to all our clients reminding them that they have been insulted and mortified in public and offering to punish the offender in consideration of a sum of money. We will buy all the newspapers and read all the columnists and every day we will send out a dozen or more or our cards to prospective clients.’

  ‘It’s marvellous!’ George shouted. ‘It’s terrific!’

  ‘We shall be rich,’ I told him. ‘We shall be exceedingly wealthy in no time at all.’

  ‘We must start at once!’

  I jumped out of bed, fetched a writing-pad and a pencil and ran back to bed again. ‘Now,’ I said, pulling my knees under the blankets and propping the writing-pad against them, ‘the first thing is to decide what we’re going to say on the printed cards which we’ll be sending to our clients,’ and I wrote, ‘VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.’ as a heading on top of the sheet of paper. Then, with much care, I composed a finely phrased letter explaining the functions of the organization. It finished up with the following sentence: ‘Therefore VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer suitable punishment to columnist ..................... and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration.’

  ‘What do you mean, “a choice of methods”?’ George said.

  ‘We must give them a choice. We must think up a number of things… a number of different punishments. Number one will be…’ and I wrote down, ‘1. Punch him one the nose, once, hard.’ ‘What shall we charge for that?’

  ‘Five hundred dollars,’ George said instantly.

  I wrote it down. ‘What’s the next one?’

  ‘Black his eye,’ George said.

  I wrote down, ‘2. Black his eye… $500.’

  ‘No!’ George said. ‘I disagree with the price. It definitely requires more skill and timing to black an eye nicely than to punch a nose. It is a skilled job. It should be six hundred.’

  ‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘Six hundred. And what’s the next one?’

  ‘Both together, of course. The old one two.’ We were in George’s territory now. This was right up his street.

  ‘Both together?’

  ‘Absolutely. Punch his nose and black his eye. Eleven hundred dollars.’

  ‘There should be a reduction for taking the two,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it a thousand.’

  ‘It’s dirt cheap,’ George said. ‘They’ll snap it up.’

  ‘What’s next?’

  We were both silent now, concentrating fiercely. Three deep parallel grooves of wrinkled skin appeared upon George