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  When we finally went to bed and the light was out, I could still hear George giving hell to Pantaloon on the telephone.

  The next morning we were both woken up by the church clock on the corner striking nine. George got up and went to the door to get the papers and when he came back he was holding a letter in his hand.

  ‘Open it!’ I said.

  He opened it and carefully he unfolded a single sheet of thin notepaper.

  ‘Read it!’ I shouted.

  He began to read it aloud, his voice low and serious at first but rising gradually to a high, almost hysterical shout of triumph as the full meaning of the letter was revealed to him. It said:

  ‘Your methods appear curiously unorthodox. At the same time anything you do to that scoundrel has my approval. So go ahead. Start with Item 1, and if you are successful I’ll be only too glad to give you an order to work right on through the list. Send the bill to me. William S. Womberg.’

  I recollect that in the excitement of the moment we did a kind of dance around the room in our pyjamas, praising Mr Womberg in loud voices and singing that we were rich. George turned somesaults on his bed and it is possible that I did the same.

  ‘When shall we do it?’ he said. ‘Tonight?’

  I paused before replying. I refused to be rushed. The pages of history are filled with the names of great men who have come to grief by permitting themselves to make hasty decisions in the excitement of a moment. I put on my dressing-gown, lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down the room. ‘There is no hurry,’ I said. ‘Womberg’s order can be dealt with in due course. But first of all we must send out today’s cards.’

  I dressed quickly, went out to the newsstand across the street, bought one copy of every daily paper there was and returned to our room. The next two hours was spent is reading the columnists’ columns, and in the end we had a list of eleven people – eight men and three women – all of whom had been insulted in one way or another by one of the columnists that morning. Things were going well. We were working smoothly. It took us only another half hour to look up the addresses of the insulted ones – two we couldn’t find – and to address the envelopes.

  In the afternoon we delivered them, and at about six in the evening we got back to our room, tired but triumphant. We made coffee and we fried hamburgers and we had supper in bed. Then we re-read Womberg’s letter aloud to each other many many times.

  ‘What he’s doing he’s giving us an order for six thousand one hundred dollars,’ George said. ‘Items 1 to 5 inclusive.’

  ‘It’s not a bad beginning. Not bad for the first day. Six thousand a day works out at… let me see… it’s nearly two million dollars a year, not counting Sundays. A million each. It’s more than Betty Grable.’

  ‘We are very wealthy people,’ George said. He smiled, a slow and wondrous smile of pure contentment.

  ‘In a day or two we will move to a suite of rooms at the St Regis.’

  ‘I think the Waldorf,’ George said.

  ‘All right, the Waldorf. And later on we might as well take a house.’

  ‘One like Womberg’s?’

  ‘All right. One like Womberg’s. But first,’ I said, ‘we have work to do. Tomorrow we shall deal with Pantaloon. We will catch him as he comes out of the Penguin Club. At two-thirty a.m. we will be waiting for him, and when he comes out into the street you will step forward and you will punch him once, hard, right upon the point of the nose as per contract.’

  ‘It will be a pleasure,’ George said. ‘It will be a real pleasure. But how do we get away? Do we run?’

  ‘We shall hire a car for an hour. We have just enough money left for that, and I shall be sitting at the wheel with the engine running, not ten yards away, and the door will be open and when you’ve punched him you’ll just jump back into the car and we’ll be gone.’

  ‘It is perfect. I shall punch him very hard.’ George paused. He clenched his right fist and examined his knuckles. Then he smiled again and he said slowly. ‘This nose of his, is it not possible that it will afterwards be so much blunted that it will no longer poke well into other peoples’ business?’

  ‘It is quite possible.’ I answered, and with that happy thought in our minds we switched out the light and went early to sleep.

  The next morning I was woken by a shout and I sat up and saw George standing at the foot of my bed in his pyjamas, waving his arms. ‘Look!’ he shouted, ‘there are four! There are four!’ I looked, and indeed there were four letters in his hand.

  ‘Open them. Quickly, open them.’

  The first one he read aloud: ‘ “Dear Vengeance Is Mine Inc., That’s the best proposition I’ve had in years. Go right ahead and give Mr Jacob Swinski the rattlesnake treatment (Item 4). But I’ll be glad to pay double if you’ll forget to extract the poison from its fangs. Yours Gertrude Porter-Van-dervelt. P.S. You’d better insure the snake. That guy’s bite carries more poison than any rattler’s.” ’

  George read the second one aloud: ‘ “My cheque for $500 is made out and lies before me on my desk. The moment I receive proof that you have punched Lionel Pantaloon hard on the nose, it will be posted to you. I should prefer a fracture, if possible. Yours etc. Wilbur H. Gollogly.” ’

  George read the third one aloud: ‘ “In my present frame of mind and against my better judgement, I am tempted to reply to your card and to request that you deposit that scoundrel Walter Kennedy upon Fifth Avenue dressed only in his underwear. I make the proviso that there shall be snow upon the ground at the time and that the temperature shall be subzero. H. Gresham.” ’

  The fourth one also he read aloud: ‘ “A good hard sock on the nose for Pantaloon is worth five hundred of mine or anyone else’s money. I should like to watch. Yours sincerely, Claudia Calthorpe Hines.” ’

  George laid the letters down gently, carefully upon the bed. For a while there was silence. We stared at each other, too astonished, too happy to speak. I began to calculate the value of those four orders in terms of money.

  ‘That’s five thousand dollars worth,’ I said softly.

  Upon George’s face there was a huge bright grin. ‘Claude, he said, ‘should we not move now to the Waldorf?’

  ‘Soon,’ I answered, ‘but at the moment we have no time for moving. We have not even time to send out any fresh cards today. We must start to execute the orders we have in hand. We are overwhelmed with work.’

  ‘Should we not engage extra staff and enlarge our organization?’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘Even for that there is no time today. Just think what we have to do. We have to put a rattlesnake in Jacob Swinski’s car… we have to dump Walter Kennedy on Fifth Avenue in his underpants… we have to punch Pantaloon on the nose… let me see… yes, for three different people we have to punch Pantaloon…’

  I stopped. I closed my eyes. I sat still. Again I became conscious of a small clear stream of inspiration flowing into the tissues of my brain. ‘I have it!’ I shouted. ‘I have it! I have it! Three birds with one stone! Three customers with one punch!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t you see? We only need to punch Pantaloon once and each of the three customers… Womberg, Gollogly and Claudia Hines… will think it’s being done specially for him or her.’

  ‘Say it again.’ I said it again.

  ‘It’s brilliant.’

  ‘It’s common-sense. And the same principle will apply to the others. The rattlesnake treatment and the other one can wait until we have more orders. Perhaps in a few days we shall have ten orders for rattlesnakes in Swinski’s car. Then we will do them all in one go.’

  ‘It’s wonderful.’

  ‘This evening then,’ I said, ‘we will handle Pantaloon. But first we must hire a car. Also we must send telegrams, one to Womberg, one to Gollogly and one to Claudia Hines, telling them where and when the punching will take place.’

  We dressed rapidly and went out.

  In a dirty silent little garage down on East 9th Street w