William Tenn - Bernie the Faust

That’s what Ricardo calls me. I don’t know what I am.

Here I am, I’m sitting in my little nine-by-six office. I’m reading notices of government surplus sales. I’m trying to decide where lies a possible buck and where lies nothing but more headaches.

So the office door opens. This little guy with a dirty face, wearing a very dirty, very wrinkled Palm Beach suit, he walks into my office, and he coughs a bit and he says:

“Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?”

That was it. I mean, that’s all I had to go on.

I looked him over and I said, “ Wha-at?”

He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. “A twenty,” he mumbled. “A twenty for a five.”

I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. “I give you twenty,” he explained to his shoes, “and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with five, you wind up with twenty.”

“How did you get into the building?”

“I just came in,” he said, a little mixed up.

“You just came in,” I put a nasty, mimicking note in my voice. “Now you just go right back downstairs and come the hell out. There’s a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED.”

“I’m not begging.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket. It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pajamas. “I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you …”

“You want me to call a cop?”

He looked very scared. “No. Why should you call a cop? I haven’t done anything to make you call a cop!”

“I’ll call a cop in just a second. I’m giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they’ll have a cop up here fast. They don’t want beggars in this building. This is a building for business.”

He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. “No deal?” he asked. “A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What’s the matter with my deal?”

I picked up the phone.

“All right,” he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. “I’ll go. I’ll go.”

“You better. And shut the door behind you.”

“Just in case you change your mind.” He reached into his dirty, wrinkled pants pocket and pulled out a card. “You can get in touch with me here. Almost any time during the day.”

“Blow,” I told him.

He reached over, dropped the card on my desk, on top of all the surplus notices, coughed once or twice, looked at me to see if maybe I was biting. No? No. He trudged out.

I picked the card up between the nails of my thumb and forefinger and started to drop it into the wastebasket.

Then I stopped. A card. It was just so damned out of the ordinary—a slob like that with a card. A card, yet.

For that matter, the whole play was out of the ordinary. I began to be a little sorry I hadn’t let him run through the whole thing. Listening to a panhandler isn’t going to kill me. After all, what was he trying to do but give me an off-beat sales pitch? I can always use an off-beat sales pitch. I work out of a small office, I buy and sell, but half my stock is good ideas. I’ll use ideas, even from a bum.

The card was clean and white, except where the smudge from his fingers made a brown blot. Written across it in a kind of ornate handwriting were the words Mr. Ogo Eksar. Under that was the name and the telephone number of a hotel in the Times Square area, not far from my office. I knew that hotel: not expensive, but not a fleabag either—somewhere just under the middle line.

There was a room number in one corner of the card. I stared at it and I felt kind of funny. I really didn’t know.

Although come to think of it, why couldn’t a panhandler be registered at a hotel? “Don’t be a snob, Bernie,” I told myself.

A twenty for a five, he’d offered. Man, I’d love to have seen his face if I’d said: Okay, give me the twenty, you take the five, and now get the hell out of here.

The government surplus notices caught my eye. I flipped the card into the wastebasket and tried to go back to business.

Twenty for five. What kind of panhandling pitch would follow it? I couldn’t get it out of my mind!

There was only one thing to do. Ask somebody about it. Ricardo? A big college professor, after all. One of my best contacts.

He’d thrown a lot my way—a tip on the college building program that was worth a painless fifteen hundred, an office equipment disposal from the United Nations, stuff like that. And any time I had any questions that needed a college education, he was on tap. All for the couple, three hundred, he got out of me in commissions.

I looked at my watch. Ricardo would be in his office now, marking papers or whatever it is he does there. I dialed his number.

“Ogo Eksar?” he repeated after me. “Sounds like a Finnish name. Or maybe Estonian. From the eastern Baltic, I’d say.”

“Forget that part,” I said. “This is all I care about.” And I told him about the twenty-for-five offer.

He laughed. “That thing again!”

“Some old hustle that the Greeks pulled on the Egyptians?”

“No. Something the Americans pulled. And not a con game. During the depression, a New York newspaper sent a reporter around the city with a twenty-dollar bill which he offered to sell for exactly one dollar. There were no takers. The point being, that even with people out of work and on the verge of starvation, they were so intent on not being suckers that they turned down an easy profit of nineteen hundred percent.”

“Twenty for one? This was twenty for five.”

“Oh, well, you know, Bernie, inflation,” he said, laughing again. “And these days it’s more likely to be a television show.”

“Television? You should have seen the way the guy was dressed!”

“Just an extra, logical touch to make people refuse to take the offer seriously. University research people operate much the same way. A few years back, a group of sociologists began an investigation of the public’s reaction to sidewalk solicitors in charity drives. You know, those people who jingle little boxes on street corners: Help the Two-Headed Children, Relief for Flood-Ravaged Atlantis? Well, they dressed up some of their students …”

“You think he was on the level, then, this guy?”

“I think there is a good chance that he was. I don’t see why he would have left his card with you, though.”

“That I can figure—now. If it’s a TV stunt, there must be a lot of other angles wrapped up in it. A giveaway show with cars, refrigerators, a castle in Scotland, all kinds of loot.”

“A giveaway show? Well, yes—it could be.”

I hung up, took a deep breath, and called Eksar’s hotel. He was registered there all right. And he’d just come in.

I went downstairs fast and took a cab. Who knew what other connections he’d made by now?

Going up in the elevator, I kept wondering. How did I go from the twenty-dollar bill to the real big stuff, the TV giveaway stuff, without letting Eksar know that I was on to what it was all about? Well, maybe I’d be lucky. Maybe he’d give me an opening.

I knocked on the door. When he said, “Come in,” I came in. But for a second or two I couldn’t see a thing.

It was a little room, like all the rooms in that hotel, little and smelly and stuffy. But he didn’t have the lights on, any electric lights. The window shade was pulled all the way down.

When my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to pick out this Ogo Eksar character. He was sitting on the bed, on the side nearest me. He was still wearing that crazy rumpled Palm Beach suit.