Comfort Station

1

The three men who entered the Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past eight that windy, cold, rainy night brought with them somehow a windy, cold, rainy aura of menace. Perhaps it was their cold unblinking eyes, perhaps the way their shoulders were set within their raincoats, perhaps the hands they kept in their coat pockets. Whatever it was, it hung around them like dark music, an aura of danger, of ... death.

One of the three was old, heavy, bald-headed, with the faint touch of an aristocratic sneer about his lips. A second was tall, elegant, with the wittily insouciant manner often attributed to Satan. And the third, a pugnacious stocky individual with thick curly black hair, had the style and expression of a fairly good club welterweight.

They strolled across the tile floor to Mo Mowgli’s office and stood looking in at him until, feeling perhaps the cold penetration of their eyes upon the back of his head, he turned and said, “Yes, gentlemen? What can I do for you?”

“I,” said the tall elegant one, “would like a copy of Swann’s Way.”

“That wouldn’t be here,” said Mo. “You want the library, around the corner.”

“In that case,” said the stocky one, “give us a copy of A Farewell to Arms.”

“That would be in the library, too,” Mo said. “Just around the corner.”

“Then,” said the bald-headed one, “you will give us Boris Godunov in a recent translation.”

“You’d have to go to the library for that,” Mo said. “You go out and around the corner.”

The stocky one said, “Everything we want’s in the library, is that it?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Mo.

“That’s a cute system you got,” the stocky one said. He seemed both violently amused and in some remote way angry.

“That’s all right, Norman,” the elegant one said. “He can’t help it, he just works here.” Looking at Mo he said, “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” Mo said. Something was wrong here. He knew something was wrong here. But he didn’t know what it was.

“Sure, Gore,” said the stocky one. “It don’t matter to you that everything we want he don’t have. What do you say, V?”

The bald-headed one said, to Mo, “I want you to be certain it is a recent translation of Boris Godunov. The older translations are not good enough.”

“But I don’t have any of that,” Mo said. “It’s all around to the library, that’s where you want to go.”

“Tell us,” said the stocky one, “what time does the Greek come in?”

“No, no,” said the bald-headed one. “You’re thinking of something else.”

Arbogast Smith, having heard the last question and thinking that perhaps at last something was about to happen over which he had jurisdiction, came over at that juncture to say, “What’s this about Greeks?”

The elegant one took a pearl-handled pistol from his coat pocket and pointed it at Arbogast Smith. “You’ll go into the closet with your friend there.”

“Say,” said Arbogast Smith. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“We don’t want to know,” Mo said quickly. “It’s something that happened somewhere else, maybe a long time ago. We got nothing to do with it.”

“Now you’re being smart,” the stocky one said, and took from his coat pocket a Smith & Wesson Police Special.38 caliber revolver. “Real smart,” he said.

The bald-headed one, taking from his pocket a nine-millimeter Luger, said, “You will both enter the closet. You will entertain one another with conundrums for seventeen minutes, a number I assure you has no particular significance, and then you may, if you wish, contact the authorities.”

Arbogast Smith and Mo Mowgli entered the closet. The stocky one shut the door. “Now what?” he said.

The bald-headed one bent over and peered at the shoes to be seen under the doors of stalls 1, 2, and 8. He pointed the Luger at Stall 8, saying, “Patent leather. That will be our man, I wager.”

The three walked down to Stall Number 8. The stocky one pushed open the door. “You’re right. There he is.”

Within, Fingers Fogelheimer stood cowering against the back wall. “Don’t!” he cried, clutching the attaché case containing his manuscript to his chest. “I tried to explain to the mob, I tried—”

“We are not from the mob, as you phrase it,” the bald-headed one said coldly.

Fingers Fogelheimer blinked. “You’re not?”

“We are from Literature,” the elegant one said.

The three guns roared.

2

When the guns roared, Herbert Q. Luminous heard a scream from the next stall, and at first he didn’t stop to realize that the scream had come from the throat of a woman.

He had been deep in despairing doubt, wondering what on earth was keeping Floozey from keeping their appointment and joining him here so the two of them could hit out for Acapulco and the good life together. Of course, he had no way of knowing that Floozey, who also bore a passing resemblance to Milton “Mad Dog” Mendelsohn, had also passed through Merrick, Long Island, this morning, and was now, as a result, in the cell next to Roland Redwing, her fingerprints having been established as belonging to Ruth Helen Deutscher, wanted for the mass murder of twenty-seven Doberman pinschers in Plattsburgh, New York, on January 17, 1946. (It was in all the true detective magazines.)

However, when the scream from next door was repeated, Herbert did at last come awake to the fact that it was a female screaming, and he wondered: Floozey? In the next stall?

Leaping to his feet, he rushed out of the stall only to see Carolina Weiss rushing out of the stall next door. Not Floozey after all, but someone else, a woman he’d never seen before. “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“I’ve been so terrified,” Carolina said. She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. “Sitting in there all day, and then those shots—”

“Say,” Herbert said. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know anymore!” Carolina wailed. “I came here this morning, and ...” And she found herself telling this calm-eyed stranger everything that had happened to her, from the day she fell on the mattresses up to this very moment.

What was there about self-revelation that was so contagious? Herbert found that he too wanted to Tell All, to get this secret life off his chest at last, and as soon as Carolina was done with her story he rapidly sketched in his.

Carolina, watching him as she listened, thought, He’s a man. He’s all man. And when Herbert was done talking she said, “Your friend hasn’t showed up. My friend hasn’t showed up. But here I am with all this money in my valpack.”

“And here I am,” Herbert said, “with all this money in my satchel.”

“Plus,” Carolina said, “I’ve got some oddball mothballs I’ll show you later.”

“You know what we could do,” Herbert said.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly.

“Yes,” he said breathlessly.

“Acapulco,” she said breathlessly.

“You bet your bird,” he said breathlessly.

In the meantime, Arbogast Smith and Mo Mowgli had rushed from the storage closet to survey the carnage in Stall Number 8. Paper was everywhere. “It’s been written on,” Mo said, “but I think we could still use it here. Waste not, want not.”

Arbogast Smith turned to the couple just leaving, carrying a valpack and a satchel. “You two better stick around to be witnesses,” he said.

“We don’t have time to be witnesses!” cried Herbert. “We’re about to become participants!” And they raced off heedlessly into the rain drenching an already-drenched city.