Deception Read online

  Finally he quietened down and he took out a handkerchief and made a great business about wiping his eyes. ‘Never laughed so much,’ he said weakly. ‘That’s a great joke, that is. It’s worth a lunch. Come on out and I’ll give you lunch.’

  ‘Look,’ I said severely, ‘this isn’t any joke. There is nothing to laugh at. You are witnessing the birth of a new and powerful organization …’

  ‘Come on,’ he said and he began to laugh again. ‘Come on and have lunch.’

  ‘When can you get those cards printed?’ I said. My voice was stern and businesslike.

  He paused and stared at us. ‘You mean … you really mean … you’re serious about this thing?’

  ‘Absolutely. You are witnessing the birth …’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right.’ He stood up. ‘I think you’re crazy and you’ll get in trouble. Sure as hell you’ll get in trouble. Those boys like messing other people about, but they don’t much fancy being messed about themselves.’

  ‘When can you get them printed, and without any of your workers reading them?’

  ‘For this,’ he answered gravely, ‘I will give up my lunch. I will set the type myself. It is the least I can do.’ He laughed again and the rims of his huge nostrils twitched with pleasure. ‘How many do you want?’

  ‘A thousand – to start with, and envelopes.’

  ‘Come back at two o’clock,’ he said and I thanked him very much and as we went out we could hear his laughter rumbling down the passage into the back of the shop.

  At exactly two o’clock we were back. George Karnoffsky was in his office and the first thing I saw as we went in was the high stack of printed cards on his desk in front of him. They were large cards, about twice the size of ordinary wedding or cocktail invitation-cards. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘All ready for you.’ The fool was still laughing.

  He handed us each a card and I examined mine carefully. It was a beautiful thing. He had obviously taken much trouble over it. The card itself was thick and stiff with narrow gold edging all the way around, and the letters of the heading were exceedingly elegant. I cannot reproduce it here in all its splendour, but I can at least show you how it read:

  VENGEANCE IS MINE INC.

  Dear .............................

  You have probably seen columnist ..............................’s slanderous and unprovoked attack upon your character in today’s paper. It is an outrageous insinuation, a deliberate distortion of the truth.

  Are you yourself prepared to allow this miserable malice-monger to insult you in this manner without doing anything about it?

  The whole world knows that it is foreign to the nature of the American people to permit themselves to be insulted either in public or in private without rising up in righteous indignation and demanding – nay, exacting – a just measure of retribution.

  On the other hand, it is only natural that a citizen of your standing and reputation will not wish personally to become further involved in this sordid petty affair, or indeed to have any direct contact whatsoever with this vile person.

  How then are you to obtain satisfaction?

  The answer is simple. VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. will obtain it for you. We will undertake, on your behalf and in absolute confidence, to administer individual punishment to columnist .........., and in this regard we respectfully submit to you a choice of methods (together with prices) for your consideration:

  1. Punch him on the nose, once, hard $500

  2. Black his eye $600

  3. Punch him on the nose and black his eye $1000

  4. Introduce a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) into his car, on the floor by the pedals, when he parks it $1500

  5. Kidnap him, take all his clothes away except his underpants, his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Ave. in the rush hour $2500

  This work executed by a professional.

  If you desire to avail yourself of any of these offers, kindly reply to VENGEANCE IS MINE INC. at the address indicated upon the enclosed slip of paper. If it is practicable, you will be notified in advance of the place where the action will occur and of the time, so that you may, if you wish, watch the proceedings in person from a safe and anonymous distance.

  No payment need be made until after your order has been satisfactorily executed, when an account will be rendered in the usual manner.

  George Karnoffsky had done a beautiful job of printing.

  ‘Claude,’ he said, ‘you like?’

  ‘It’s marvellous.’

  ‘It’s the best I could do for you. It’s like in the war when I would see soldiers going off perhaps to get killed and all the time I would want to be giving them things and doing things for them.’ He was beginning to laugh again, so I said, ‘We’d better be going now. Have you got large envelopes for these cards?’

  ‘Everything is here. And you can pay me when the money starts coming in.’ That seemed to set him off worse than ever and he collapsed into his chair, giggling like a fool. George and I hurried out of the shop into the street, into the cold snow-falling afternoon.

  We almost ran the distance back to our room and on the way up I borrowed a Manhattan telephone directory from the public telephone in the hall. We found ‘Womberg, William S.’ without any trouble and while I read out the address – somewhere up in the East Nineties – George wrote it on one of the envelopes.

  ‘Gimple, Mrs Ella H.’ was also in the book and we addressed an envelope to her as well. ‘We’ll just send to Womberg and Gimple today,’ I said. ‘We haven’t really got started yet. Tomorrow we’ll send a dozen.’

  ‘We’d better catch the next post,’ George said.

  ‘We’ll deliver them by hand,’ I told him. ‘Now, at once. The sooner they get them the better. Tomorrow might be too late. They won’t be half so angry tomorrow as they are today. People are apt to cool off through the night. See here,’ I said, ‘you go ahead and deliver those two cards right away. While you’re doing that I’m going to snoop around the town and try to find out something about the habits of Lionel Pantaloon. See you back here later in the evening …’

  At about nine o’clock that evening I returned and found George lying on his bed smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

  ‘I delivered them both,’ he said. ‘Just slipped them through the letter-boxes and rang the bells and beat it up the street. Womberg had a huge house, a huge white house. How did you get on?’

  ‘I went to see a man I know who works in the sports section of the Daily Mirror. He told me all.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He said Pantaloon’s movements are more or less routine. He operates at night, but wherever he goes earlier in the evening, he always – and this is the important point – he always finishes up at the Penguin Club. He gets there round about midnight and stays until two or two thirty. That’s when his legmen bring him all the dope.’

  ‘That’s all we want to know,’ George said happily.

  ‘It’s too easy.’

  ‘Money for old rope.’

  There was a full bottle of blended whisky in the cupboard and George fetched it out. For the next two hours we sat upon our beds drinking the whisky and making wonderful and complicated plans for the development of our organization. By eleven o’clock we were employing a staff of fifty, including twelve famous pugilists, and our offices were in the Rockefeller Center. Towards midnight we had obtained control over all columnists and were dictating their daily columns to them by telephone from our headquarters, taking care to insult and infuriate at least twenty rich persons in one part of the country or another every day. We were immensely wealthy and George had a British Bentley, I had five Cadillacs. George kept practising telephone talks with Lionel Pantaloon. ‘That you, Pantaloon?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well, listen here. I think your column stinks today. It’s lousy.’ ‘I’m very sorry, sir. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.’ ‘Damn right you’ll do better, Pantaloon. Matter of fact we’ve been thinking abou