Comfort Station

6:15 P.M

Fingers Fogelheimer looked at his watch: it was five minutes to six. Taking advantage of the rush-hour confusion all around him, Fingers hurried across the sidewalk, carrying his attaché case, and ducked into the Bryant Park Comfort Station. Had he been seen by any of the boys? He didn’t think so.

In the attaché case, filling it so the sides of the case bulged like the body of a hippopotamus, was a manuscript. Fingers Fogelheimer had written it, evenings and weekends over the last three years, whenever he had a moment or two away from his regular job, which was one-of-the-boys in the Flatbush-Canarsie mob. Now the manuscript was done, a publisher was eagerly waiting to publish it, a paperback house was eagerly waiting to reprint it, and a motion-picture company was eagerly waiting to make a movie reminiscent of it. And they would all pay, pay through the nose. Fingers Fogelheimer had finally hit it big.

If he wasn’t caught first by the boys.

Eustace “Fingers” Fogelheimer had grown up with your usual disadvantaged background leading so often to crime, as it had done in this particular instance as well. That his father was a drunk was Fingers’ first clue to his probable future, and his mother’s improbable sweetness, endless patience, and voluminous bromides served as a strong confirmation. Still, Fingers hoped he might yet be the exception that proved the rule — as his mother might have put it — until that fateful day when’ he’d come home to discover his brother had become a priest. From that moment, Fingers Fogelheimer knew his doom was sealed: the very next day, he went and joined the Flatbush-Canarsie mob.

Through the years, being one of the boys had been a generally okay way to make a living, and if it hadn’t been for this manuscript now bursting the bonds of this attaché case, no doubt Fingers would have gone on with the mob right up till retirement. Unfortunately, however, Fingers tended to be a brooder, and one of the things he tended to brood about was the bad press that organized crime kept getting from the newspapers.

“If the general public understood the situation,” he used to brood, “they wouldn’t bad-mouth us like this all the time.” But of course the general public didn’t really understand the situation, and how could they? Who had ever explained to the general public just what the situation was?

Then one day, Fingers thought: “Why not me?”

Why not indeed? Pursuing the thought, Fingers realized he could write a book, a big fat book that would explain the situation to the general public. But how to get the general public to read this big fat book? That was the problem. The general public usually tended to shy away from big fat books that explained the situation. Any situation.

Then one day, Fingers had an inspiration: “I’ll make believe it’s a novel!”

And thus it came about. The novel, titled Underworld, ran seven million words and completely explained the situation. And never stopped pretending it was a novel.

What Fingers did was, he took all the different kinds of problems and crises that could possibly arise in the different facets of the mob’s operation, and he pretended that all of these crises had occurred at the exact same time, over the same three-day period. Watching the different facets of the mob react to all of these crisis situations, the book demonstrated just how the mob was organized and what its operations were like.

As to the characters in the book, Fingers decided to give them all problems at home, very middle-class middle-aged problems so that the middle-class middle-aged people who would read the book would be able to identify with the characters, which saved a lot of trouble in developing characterization. Switching back and forth from character to character, and within each character’s section switching back and forth between the mob crisis and the personal problem, Fingers gradually developed a panorama of the modern world a hundred miles wide and a silly millimeter deep.

Unfortunately, just as he was about to deliver the final draft of the manuscript, some of the mob bigwigs found out about the book — publishers and mob bigwigs play bridge together all the time, that’s how they found out — and got it into their heads it was an exposé. Fingers tried to explain it wasn’t an exposé, it was simply a matter of trying to demonstrate to the general public some of the problems and difficulties being faced by their men in organized crime, but the mob bigwigs couldn’t see it that way, and Fingers had just narrowly escaped with his life and his manuscript.

And now he was on the run. If he could get to his publisher’s office, he knew he’d be safe. In the meantime, he had taken cover here in the Bryant Park Comfort Station, where he would lie low for an hour or two until the boys drifted away to look for him in some other part of the city.

Looking around, Fingers saw nothing very interesting. Through a door, he could see one bozo sitting on a chair in a closet, counting paper towels. Another bozo was standing at the sinks, his hands in warm water, his expression glazed as he mumbled at his reflection in the mirror.

What about the stalls? He could see feet under the doors of numbers 1, 2, and 5. Down at the far end was Number 8: he went down there, toting the attaché case, and locked himself inside.