Comfort Station

9:00 A.M

The man who stepped down from Fred Dingbat’s bus in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station at seven minutes past nine that Tuesday morning, turning his coat collar up against the rain drenching an already-drenched city, his other hand clutched tightly around the handle of the black satchel in his other hand, was late for work. Seven minutes late, in fact. Unlike Mo Mowgli, however, who had also been late for work this morning, this man was going to be a lot later before he was done, because this man was not going to work.

His name was Herbert Q. Luminous, and his history was almost a cliché of what can happen to a mild-mannered bookkeeper who meets a young blonde woman in a bar and finds in her companionship the kind of self-fulfillment and excitement that had never been his at home with his aging mother or at the office with his aging NCR computer or even down in the cellar of his house on Long Island with his aging issues of CPA Journal and the model train set which was his pride and also his joy.

And now, he reflected bitterly as he stepped down to the sidewalk from the bus, he would never see that model train set again. No, nor the carefully retained issues of CPA Journal, nor his aging mother, nor the NCR computer at the office. They were all in the past now, and it was time to forget the past and start to think about the future.

It was almost a cliché the way it had happened. At forty-two years of age, Herbert Q. Luminous had taken it for granted his chances for romance and adventure had passed him by, and if truth be told he didn’t really mind all that much. He liked his life, or at least he thought he did, with its regular hours, aging along with everything else that surrounded him.

Until the night, last winter, of the big snowstorm. Herbert was driving home (his reminiscences, like Arbogast Smith’s, tended to do without the pluperfect) from the Long Island Railroad station and his car got stuck in a snowdrift. Seeing red lights not far away, he fought his way through the snow and discovered a bar, and in it — her.

She said her name was Floozey. She was young and blonde and desirable, and he found himself buying her drinks, telling her his life story (it didn’t take long), and trying to impress her with his ability at shuffleboard bowling. It was almost a cliché, but it seemed to him he knew from the instant he had seen her that they were going to be very important to one another.

After that first meeting, there had been others. He went to her apartment in the city. He went again. He went some more. He had gone again and again.

And she was expensive. She liked the finer things in life: nightclubs, dancing, expensive restaurants. And gifts: perfumes, clothing, false eyelashes. Whatever she wanted, Herbert got it for her, because she was what he wanted. It was almost a cliché, really, his falling for her like that. But he did.

She went through his savings fast, and when he had no more money he was afraid to tell her. He knew it was almost a cliché to think a thing like this, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid that if she knew he had no more money she would leave him. And he couldn’t stand that, to lose her.

That was when the embezzling started. Herbert was a good bookkeeper; he knew how to manipulate figures without leaving any trace of his handiwork. And his embezzling was modest, never very much at one time, only enough to cover the checks he wrote for the things Floozey wanted.

The general public, of course, is unaware of just how common this sort of thing is in the world we live in. It’s almost a cliché to say so, but white-collar crime like that perpetrated by Herbert Q. Luminous costs the taxpayer every bit as much as the much more publicized and dramatic sort of crime performed by the Mafia, or what is known as grimy-collar crime. The white-collar criminal, more often than not, doesn’t even belong to the Mafia, as, for instance, Herbert Q. Luminous didn’t belong to the Mafia.

And there are other differences.

Law enforcement officials and others struggle daily with the effort to get across to the general public the dangers of white-collar crime, the soaring costs, the difficulty of apprehending the perpetrator — you can’t arrest a person just because they dress nice — but on the other hand, what if everybody who wanted to get something across to the general public did get it across? What then, eh? Never thought of that, did you?

It’s almost a cliché to say so, but very few people have.

Herbert’s embezzling followed the usual pattern, as did his relationship with Floozey. But the time came when his nervousness, his apprehension about his apprehension by the forces of the law, had grown in him to the point where he couldn’t keep silent any longer, and he finally confessed to Floozey the truth about his taking funds from his employer, imploring her not to think the less of him for his crimes, as he had done them for her.

Far from condemning him, Floozey congratulated him, and demonstrated her new respect for him in most convincing fashion. It’s almost a cliché of that sort of relationship: once Floozey saw that Herbert too was less than lily-white, her behavior toward him, particularly in the area of erotic relationship which had played such an important part in their affair, developed into a new phase which Herbert found highly gratifying, not to say exhausting.

However, his depredations upon his employer did bother his conscience, and he told Floozey it was now time for them both to scrimp and save so he could begin to return the money. But she, she said, had a better idea.

It’s almost a cliché of course, but her better idea was to place wagers on horse races. “We’ll win a bundle,” she promised Herbert. “Then we’ll pay off your bosses and hit out for Acapulco, whadaya say?”

And so Herbert was sucked deeper into the maelstrom, and in less than a lustrum he was not only much deeper into his boss’s pocket, but he was also deeply in debt to a certain bookmaker known as One-Eye Fishface.

Troubles, as the old cliché would have it, tend to come in bunches. And so they did for Herbert. On the very same day — yesterday it was, to be exact — that he received word at the office that a special audit was going to be made of the books, some glimmering of his malefactions having finally been noticed (though of course no one yet suspected good old Herbert Q. Luminous), on that very same day One-Eye Fishface phoned him at the office and gave him forty-eight hours to pay off the twenty grand he owed. Or else.

Herbert at once phoned Floozey. “The jig’s up!” she cried, when he explained the situation. Then, “I tell you whatcha do,” she went on. “You don’t come to see me tonight, too dangerous, One-Eye will be watching us both to make sure we don’t take a powder outa town.”

“How can One-Eye watch us both?”

“Never mind. He can. Here’s what you do. Today, before you leave the office, you hit your boss for every dime you can wangle. You got me?”

“What good will that do?” Herbert protested. “I’ll pay off One-Eye, but the firm will surely have me arrested.”

“You don’t pay off nobody,” Floozey told him, with the quaintness of language that he found so endearing. “You get cash, in a satchel, all you can get. You take it home with you tonight. You take it to the office with you tomorrow. But you don’t go to the office.”

“I don’t?”

“You don’t. You make sure you aren’t followed, and if you ain’t, what you do is, you go to the men’s room behind the public library on Forty-second Street. You know the place I mean?”

“I think I do, yes.”

“You go there tomorrow morning, and you wait till I get word to you.”

“Then what?” he asked.

“Then the two of us hit out for Acapulco,” she told him.

“Floozey,” he said, emotion welling up within him, “I know it’s a cliché thing to say, but I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, in her modest way, and hung up.

So here he was. In the satchel he was clutching tightly in his other hand was thirty-seven thousand nine hundred forty-two dollars and twenty-five cents, the absolute maximum amount he could embezzle in one day from his employer.

And in front of him, gray and grim in the pouring rain drenching an already-drenched city, was the Bryant Park Comfort Station.

“It’s almost a cliché to think it,” Herbert muttered to himself. “But here I am, a man on the run.”

He walked slowly into the Comfort Station.