Warren Murphy: Funny Money

The bartender went under the bar. A black hand with a long champagne glass at the very end of its fingertips came up over the bar.

Boom went the .357 Magnum. Splat went the plywood backing where the mirror had been. The hand now held only a champagne stem.

"See, I don't need no help," said Moe Alstein, and raising his voice, he yelled, "you can come out now, Willie."

"I'm not Willie," said the voice, still beneath the bar. "Willie quit."

"When?" asked Alstein, his eyes squinting, personal hurt all over his face.

"When you had to order the last mirror. The one that's on the floor now."

"Why'd he quit?"

"Some people don't like to be shot at, Mr. Alstein."

"I never hit anybody I didn't plan to. Never fucking hit anybody. You anti-Semites are all alike," said Moe Alstein, and confided to Mr. Gordons that it was the same virulent anti-Semitism that had ruined his bar business.

"People might feel endangered even though you did not physically hurt them," suggested Mr. Gordons.

"Bullshit," said Moe Alstein. "An anti-Semite is an anti-Semite. You Jewish? You don't look Jewish."

"No," sad Mr. Gordons.

"You look WASP."

"WASP?"

"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant."

"No."

"Polish?"

"No."

"German?"

"No."

"Greek?"

"No."

"What are you?" asked Alstein.

"A human being."

"I know that. What kind?"

"Creative," said Mr. Gordons with what sounded like pride.

"Some of my best friends are creatives," said Moe Alstein and wondered if creatives had a history of anti-Semitism and how someone who spoke English without an accent and seemed so knowledgeable didn't know the term "WASP."

But as he left, Mr. Gordons knew the term and would never forget it, filing it under the ethnic divisions whereby American people told themselves apart, sometimes for purposes of social intercourse, and sometimes not. It was a high variable without any real constant, decided Mr. Gordons.

The next person to see him that day was a United States Marine sergeant at a recruiting booth in down town Chicago. Mr. Gordons had many questions for the sergeant in Marine dress blue with shirt and ribbons and a face that gleamed with the red puffiness of too many whiskeys and beers.

"Do you know how to use a flamethrower?" asked Mr. Gordons.

"And you will too if you're a Marine. How old are you?"

"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Gordons.

"When were you born?"

"Oh, I see what you mean. I guess I don't look one year old."

"You look twenty-nine. You're twenty-nine, right. That's a good age," said the sergeant who had a quota to fill and could not fill it with people who were forty years old.

"Yes, twenty-nine," said Mr. Gordons, and the sergeant, thinking this recruit might be a little light on the intelligence, insisted he take the standard mental test before the sergeant went any further.

What happened left the sergeant shaken and wide-eyed, which might have accounted for his susceptibility to the offer that ensued.

The sergeant saw the recruit fill in the question forms, click, click, click click, without a pause, without apparently even reading the questions while he continued to ask the sergeant about skills with flamethrowers. If that wasn't bad enough, when the sergeant looked at the answers, all were correct but for one requiring identification of some common tools. It was the highest score the sergeant had ever seen. No one had ever filled out the test that accurately and that quickly before.

"You only missed one," said the sergeant.

"Yes. I do not recognize those tools. I have never seen them before."

"Well, this one here is a common grease gun."

"Yes. Because of the very high tolerance of many machines like cars here on earth, grease would be used to make metal parts, let us say, slide without friction. The grease is anti-friction, correct," said Mr. Gordons.

"Yeah," said the sergeant. "You know everything but what a grease gun was."

"Yes. But I am more secure knowing that I could have figured out what a grease gun might be used for. I could not have done that just a week ago. But I can now. Have you ever thought of becoming wealthy and leaving the Pitulski Marines?" said Mr. Gordons.

"Pitulski's my name," said Sergeant Pitulski. "You're looking at my name. That's not my unit," he said, tapping the black plastic rectangle with white lettering that he wore over his right shirt pocket.

"Ah, yes. The name. Well, not everything is perfect. Would you like to be wealthy?" said Mr. Gordons, and before Sergeant Pitulski could gather his wits, he was agreeing to meet Mr. Gordons the next night at the Eldorado Spa owned by Moe Alstein and he was sure he could bring a flamethrower with him. Guaranteed. In fact he wished he had the flamethrower now so he could protect the "you-know-what" Mr. Gordons had just given him in two stacks and which Sergeant Pitulski had quickly shoved into his top desk drawer which he locked. In his stunned daze, he had only one sort of well, silly, question: Why did Mr. Gordons apologize for not offering a drink when he entered?

"Isn't that what you're supposed to do upon meeting?"

"No. Not necessarily," said Sergeant Pitulski.

"When is it appropriate?"

"When someone comes to your home or office if your office is allowed to serve alcohol."

"I see. What do you ordinarily say?"

"'Hello' is all right," said Sergeant Pitulski.

One hour and seven minutes later, Mr. Gordons entered a sports store near Chicago's Loop. Black rubber suits and yellow air tanks hung on the walls. Underwater spear guns were racked behind the counter. A glass case was filled with diving masks.

"Can I help you?" said the salesman.

"Hello is all right," said Mr. Gordons, and twenty minutes later the salesman took the one opportunity of his life to be rich. In fact, when he told the store-owner that the owner was a "stupid sonuvabitch who didn't know sales from his rectum," he was already a rich man. Before he showed up the next night at the Eldorado Spa on Chicago's South Side, he had deposited his riches in ten separate banks under ten different names, because he thought a hundred-thousand-dollar cash deposit might raise some questions.

His name was Robert Jellicoe and when he walked into the Eldorado the next night, he was staggering under his load of tanks and rubber suits and three spear guns. He had been unable to make up his mind as to which gun to take. He had only shot fish before. So he decided to take all three.

Mr. Gordons and two other men sat around a table. The only other sound in the empty bar was the light hum of an air conditioner. Jellicoe wondered why someone would spend so much money on furnishing the spa, as someone obviously had, and then use a long section of plywood across the whole back of the bar. Particularly when a mirror would have fit just perfectly.

"I got a question," said Sergeant Pitulski, wearing a green suit, white shirt, and blue tie. "How We gonna get this past customs at the airport?" He patted the khaki-colored double tanks of his flamethrower.

"And my gun," said Moe Alstein, patting his shoulder holster.

"My diving gear won't have any trouble," said Jellicoe. "Lots of people bring skin-diving gear on vacations. I have. Many times."

"You are bringing none of your equipment," said Mr. Gordons. "In its present form."

"I gotta have my special gun," said Alstein.

"My gear is broken in," said Jellicoe. "I can't use new gear."

"I can get along with any old shit," said Sergeant Pitulski. "I'm a Marine. The worse the equipment, the better I use it."

Mr. Gordons quieted all. He bade them wait outside. Alstein said he should stay because it was his place. Mr. Gordons took Alstein by the neck, turned him upside down, moved him easily to the door, righted the flailing man on his feet, then motioned for the others to follow. They did. He locked the door and thirty minutes later returned with a package for each.