William Tenn - The Tenants

When Miss Kerstenberg, his secretary, informed Sydney Blake over the interoffice communicator that two gentlemen had just entered and expressed a desire to rent space in the building, Blake’s “Well, show them in, Esther, show them right in,” was bland enough to have loosened the cap on a jar of Vaseline. It had been only two days since Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate, had appointed him resident agent in the McGowan Building, and the prospect of unloading an office or two in Old Unrentable this early in his assignment was mightily pleasing.

Once, however, he had seen the tenants-to-be, he felt much less certain. About practically everything.

They were exactly alike in every respect but one: size. The first was tall, very, very tall—close to seven feet, Blake estimated as he rose to welcome them. The man was bent in two places: forward at the hips and backward at the shoulders, giving the impression of being hinged instead of jointed. Behind him rolled a tiny button of a man, a midget’s midget, but except for that the tall man’s twin. They both wore starched, white shirts and black hats, black coats, black ties, black suits, black socks, and shoes of such incredible blackness as almost to drown the light waves that blundered into them.

They took seats and smiled at Blake—in unison.

“Uh, Miss Kerstenberg,” he said to his secretary, who still stood in the doorway.

“Yes, Mr. Blake?” she asked briskly.

“Uh, nothing, Miss Kerstenberg. Nothing at all.” Regretfully, he watched her shut the door and heard her swivel chair squeak as she went back to work in the outer office. It was distinctly unfortunate that, not being telepathic, she had been unable to receive his urgent thought message to stay and lend some useful moral support.

Oh, well. You couldn’t expect Dun Bradstreet’s best to be renting offices in the McGowan. He sat down and offered them cigarettes from his brand-new humidor. They declined.

“We would like,” the tall man said in a voice composed of many heavy breaths, “to rent a floor in your building.”

“The thirteenth floor,” said the tiny man in exactly the same voice.

Sydney Blake lit a cigarette and drew on it carefully. A whole floor! You certainly couldn’t judge by appearances.

“I’m sorry,” he told them. “You can’t have the thirteenth floor. But—”

“Why not?” the tall man breathed. He looked angry.

“Chiefly because there isn’t any thirteenth floor. Many buildings don’t have one. Since tenants consider them unlucky, we call the floor above the twelfth the fourteenth. If you gentlemen will look at our directory, you will see that there are no offices listed beginning with the number 13. However, if you’re interested in that much space, I believe we can accommodate you on the sixth—”

“It seems to me,” the tall man said very mournfully, “that if someone wants to rent a particular floor, the least a renting agent can do is let him have it.”

“The very least,” the tiny man agreed. “Especially since no complicated mathematical questions are being asked in the first place.”

Blake held on to his temper with difficulty and let out a friendly chuckle instead. “I would be very happy to rent the thirteenth floor to you—if we had one. But I can’t very well rent something to you that doesn’t exist, now can I?” He held his hands out, palms up, and gave them another we-are-three-intelligent-gentlemen-who-are-quite-close-in-spirit chuckle. “The twelfth and fourteenth floors both have very little unoccupied space, I am happy to say. But I’m certain that another part of the McGowan Building will do you very nicely.” Abruptly he remembered that protocol had almost been violated. “ My name,” he told them, touching the desk plate lightly with a manicured forefinger, “is Sydney Blake. And who, might I—”

“Tohu and Bohu,” the tall man said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Tohu, I said, and Bohu. I’m Tohu.” He pointed at his minuscule twin. “He’s Bohu. Or, as a matter of occasional fact, vice versa.”

Sydney Blake considered that until some ash broke off his cigarette and splattered grayly on his well-pressed pants. Foreigners. He should have known from their olive skins and slight, unfamiliar accents. Not that it made any difference in the McGowan. Or in any building managed by Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate. But he couldn’t help wondering where in the world people had such names and such disparate sizes.

“Very well, Mr. Tohu. And—er, Mr. Bohu. Now, the problem as I see it—”

“There really isn’t any problem,” the tall man told him, slowly, emphatically, reasonably, “except for the fuss you keep kicking up, young man. You have a building with floors from one to twenty-four. We want to rent the thirteenth, which is apparently vacant. Now if you were as businesslike as you should be and rented this floor to us without further argument—”

“Or logical hairsplitting,” the tiny man inserted.

“—why then, we could be happy, your employers would be happy, and you should be happy. It’s really a very simple transaction and one which a man in your position should be able to manage with ease.”

“How the hell can I—” Blake began yelling before he remembered Professor Scoggins in Advanced Realty Seminar II (“Remember, gentlemen, a lost temper means a lost tenant. If the retailer’s customer is always right, the realtor’s client is never wrong. Somehow, somewhere, you must find a cure for their little commercial illnesses, no matter how imaginary. The realtor must take his professional place beside the doctor, the dentist, and the pharmacist and make his motto, like theirs, unselfish service, always available, forever dependable. ” ) Blake bent his head to get a renewed grip on professional responsibility before going on.

“Look here,” he said at last, with a smile he desperately hoped was winning. “I’ll put it is the terms that you just did. You, for reasons best known to yourselves, want to rent a thirteenth floor. This building, for reasons best known to its architect—who, I am certain, was a foolish, eccentric man whom none of us would respect at all —this building has no thirteenth floor. Therefore, I can’t rent it to you. Now, superficially, I’ll admit, this might seem like a difficulty, it might seem as if you can’t get exactly what you want here in the McGowan Building. But what happens if we examine the situation carefully? First of all, we find that there are several other truly magnificent floors—”

He broke off as he realized he was alone. His visitors had risen in the same incredibly rapid movement and gone out the door.

“Most unfortunate,” he heard the tall man say as they walked through the outer office. “The location would have been perfect. So far from the center of things.”

“Not to mention,” the tiny man added, “the building’s appearance. So very unpresentable. Too bad.”

He raced after them, catching up in the corridor that opened into the lobby. Two things brought him to a dead stop. One was the strong feeling that it was beneath a newly appointed resident agent’s dignity to haul prospective customers back into an office which they had just quit so abruptly. After all, this was no cut-rate clothing shop—it was the McGowan Building.

The other was the sudden realization that the tall man was alone. There was no sign of the tiny man. Except—possibly—for the substantial bulge in the right-hand pocket of the tall man’s overcoat…

“A pair of cranks,” he told himself as he swung around and walked back to the office. “Not legitimate clients at all.”