My Uncle Oswald

5

THAT NIGHT I slept well. I was still fast asleep at eleven o’clock the next morning when the sound of Madame Boisvain’s fists hammering at my door jerked me awake. “Get up, Monsieur Cornelius!” she was shouting. “You must come down at once! People have been ringing my bell and demanding to see you since before breakfast!”

I was dressed and downstairs in two minutes flat. I went to the front door and there, standing on the cobblestones of the sidewalk, were no fewer than seven men, none of whom I had ever seen before. They made a picturesque little group in their many-coloured fancy uniforms with all manner of gilt and silver buttons on their jackets.

They turned out to be embassy messengers, and they came from the British, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian, the Italian, the Mexican, and the Peruvian embassies. Each man carried a letter addressed to me. I accepted the letters and opened them on the spot. All of them said roughly the same thing: They wanted more pills. They begged for more pills. They instructed me to give the pills to the bearer of the letter, etc. etc.

I told the messengers to wait on the street and I went back up to my room. Then, I wrote the following message on each of the letters: Honoured Sir, these pills are extremely expensive to manufacture. I regret that in future the cost of each pill will be one thousand francs. In those days there were twenty francs to the pound, which meant that I was asking exactly fifty pounds sterling per pill. And fifty pounds sterling in 1912 was worth maybe ten times as much as it is today. By today’s standards, I was probably asking about five hundred pounds per pill. It was a ridiculous price, but these were wealthy men. They were also sex-crazy men, and as any sensible woman will tell you, a man who is very wealthy and grossly sex-crazy both at the same time is the easiest touch in the world. I trotted downstairs again and handed the letters back to their respective carriers and told them to deliver them to their masters. As I was doing this, two more messengers arrived, one from the Quai d’Orsay (the foreign minister) and one from the general at the Ministry of War or whatever it is called. And while I was scribbling the same statement about the price on these last two letters, who should turn up in a very fine hansom cab but Mr. Mitsouko himself. His appearance shocked me. The previous night he had been a bouncy, dapper, bright-eyed little Jap. This morning he hardly had the strength to get out of his cab, and as he came tottering toward me, his legs began to buckle. I grabbed hold of him just in time.

“My dear sir!” he gasped, putting both hands on my shoulders for support. “My dear, dear sir! It’s a miracle! It’s a wonder pill! It’s . . . it’s the greatest invention of all time!”

“Hang on,” I said. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Of course I am all right,” he gasped. “I am a little bit jiggered, that’s all.” He started to giggle, and there he stood, this tiny Oriental person dressed in a top-hat and tails, clinging to my shoulders and giggling quite uncontrollably now. He was so small that the top of his top-hat came no higher than my lowest rib. “I am a little bit jiggered and a little bit pokered,” he said, “but who would not be, my dear boy, who would not be?”

“What happened, sir?” I asked him.

“I molested seven women!” he cried. “And these were not our dinky-tinky little Japanese women! No, no, no! They were enormous strong French wenchies! I took them in rotation, bang bang bang! And every one of them was screaming out camarade camarade camarade! I was a giant among these women, do you understand that, my dear young sir? I was a giant and I swung my giant club and I sent them all squiggling in every direction!”

I led him inside and sat him down in Madame Boisvain’s parlour. I found him a glass of brandy. He gulped it down and a faint yellowish colour began returning to his white cheeks. I noticed that there was a leather satchel suspended by a cord around his right wrist, and when he took it off and dumped it on the table, there was the clinking of coins inside it.

“You must be careful, sir,” I said to him. “You are a small man and these are large pills. I think it would be safer if you took only half the normal dose each time. Just half a pill instead of one.”

“Bunkum, sir!” he cried. “Bunkum and horseradish sauce, as we say in Japan! Tonight I propose to take not one pill but three!”

“Have you read what it says on the label?” I asked him anxiously. The last thing I wanted was a dead Jap around the place. Think of the outcry, the autopsy, the enquiries, and the pill-boxes with my name on them in his house.

“I examine the label,” he said, holding his glass out for more of Madame Boisvain’s brandy. “And I ignore it. We Japanese, we may be small in body but our organs are of gigantic size. That is why we walk bow-legged.”

I decided I would try to discourage him by doubling the price. “I’m afraid they are terrifically expensive, these pills,” I said.

“Money no object,” he said, pointing to the leather satchel on the table. “I pay in gold coins.”

“But Mr. Mitsouko,” I said, “each pill is going to cost you two thousand francs! They are very difficult to manufacture. That’s an awful lot of money for one pill.”

“I take twenty,” he said without even blinking.

My God, I thought, he is going to kill himself. “I cannot allow you to have them,” I told him, “unless you give me your word you will never take more than one at a time.”

“Do not lecture me, young buckeroo,” he said. “Just get me the pills.”

I went upstairs and counted out twenty pills and put them in a plain bottle. I wasn’t going to risk having my name and address on this lot.

“Ten I shall send to the Emperor in Tokyo,” Mr. Mitsouko said when I handed them to him. “It will put me in a very hot position with His Royal Highness.”

“It’ll put the Empress in some pretty hot positions, too,” I said.

He grinned and took up the leather satchel and emptied a vast pile of gold coins onto the table. They were all onehundred-franc pieces. “Twenty coins for each pill,” he said, starting to count them out. “That is four hundred coins altogether. And well worth it, you young magician.” When he had gone, I scooped up the coins and carried them up to my room.

My God, I thought. I am rich already.

But before the day was done, I was a lot richer. One by one, the messengers started trickling back from their respective embassies and ministries. They all carried precise orders and exact amounts of money, most of it in gold twenty-franc pieces. This is how it went:

Eighty-six thousand francs! At the exchange rate of one hundred francs to five pounds, I was all of a sudden worth four thousand three hundred English pounds! It was incredible. One could buy a good house for money like that, with a carriage and a pair of horses thrown in, as well as one of those dashing newfangled automobiles!

For supper that night, Madame Boisvain served oxtail stew, and it wasn’t at all bad except that the sloshiness of it all encouraged Monsieur B to suck and swig and gulp in the most disgusting fashion. At one point, he picked up his plate and tipped the gravy straight into his mouth, together with a couple of carrots and a large onion. “My wife tells me that you had a lot of peculiar visitors today,” he said. His face was plastered with brown fluid and strands of meat were hanging from his moustache. “Who were these men?”

“They were friends of the British ambassador,” I answered. “I am doing a little business for Sir Charles Makepiece.”

“I cannot have my house turned into a market-place,” Monsieur B said, speaking with his mouth full of fat. “These activities must cease.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Tomorrow I am finding alternative accommodation.”

“You mean you’re leaving?” he cried.

“I’m afraid I must. But you may keep the advance rent my father has paid you.”

There was a bit of an uproar around the table about all this, much of it from Mademoiselle Nicole, but I stuck to my guns. And the next morning I went out and found myself a quite grand ground-floor apartment with three large rooms and a kitchen. It was on the avenue Jena. I packed all my possessions and loaded them into a hackney coach. Madame Boisvain was at the front door to see me off. “Madame,” I said, “I have a small favour to ask of you.”

“Yes?”

“And in return I want you to take this.” I held out five gold twenty-franc pieces. She nearly fell over. “From time to time,” I said, “people will call at your house asking for me. All you have to do is tell them I have moved and redirect them to this address.” I gave her a piece of paper with my new address written on it.

“But that is too much money, Monsieur Oswald!”

“Take it,” I said, pushing the coins into her hand. “Keep it for yourself. Don’t tell your husband. But it is very important that you inform everyone who calls where I am living.”

She promised to do this, and I drove away to my new quarters.