The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl Volume 2 Read online

  I kept quite calm. I reached out and got myself 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 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 of 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 the 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, 'i. Punch him on 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 it 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."

  "OK," 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 skin appeared upon George's rather low sloping forehead. He began to scratch his scalp, slowly but very strongly. I looked away and tried to think of all the terrible things which people had done to other people. Finally, I got one, and with George watching the point of my pencil moving over the paper, I wrote: '4. Put a rattlesnake (with venom extracted) on the floor of his car, by the pedals, when he parks it.'

  "Jesus Christ!" George whispered. "You want to kill him with fright!"

  "Sure," I said.

  "And where'd you get a rattlesnake, anyway?"

  "Buy it. You can always buy them. How much shall we charge for that one?"

  "Fifteen hundred dollars," George said firmly. I wrote it down.

  "Now we need one more."

  "Here it is," George said. "Kidnap him in a car, take all his clothes away except his underpants and his shoes and socks, then dump him out on Fifth Avenue in the rush hour." He smiled, a broad triumphant smile.

  "We can't do that."

  "Write it down. And charge two thousand five hundred bucks. You'd do it all right if old Womberg were to offer you that much."

  "Yes," I said. "I suppose I would." And I wrote it down. "That's enough now," I added. "That gives them a wide choice."

  "And where will we get the cards printed?" George asked.

  "George Karnoffsky," I said. "Another George. He's a friend of mine. Runs a small printing shop down on Third Avenue . Does wedding invitations and things like that for all the big stores. He'll do it. I know he will."

  "Then what are we waiting for?"

  We both leapt out of bed and began to dress. "It's twelve o'clock," I said. "If we hurry we'll catch him before he goes to lunch."

  It was still snowing when we went out into the street and the snow was four or five inches thick on the sidewalk, but we covered the fourteen blocks to Karnoffsky's shop at a tremendous pace and we arrived there just as he was putting his coat on to go out. "Claude!" he shouted. "Hi boy! How you been keeping," and he pumped my hand. He had a fat friendly face and a terrible nose with great wide-open nose-wings which overlapped his cheeks by at least an inch on either side. I greeted him and told him that we had come to discuss some most urgent business. He took off his coat and led us back into the office, then I began to tell him our plans and what we wanted him to do.

  When I'd got about quarter way through my story, he started to roar with laughter and it was impossible for me to continue; so I cut it short and handed him the piece of paper with the stuff on it that we wanted him to print. And now, as he read it, his whole body began to shake with laughter and he kept slapping the desk with his hand and coughing and choking and roaring like someone crazy. We sat watching hi