That evening, David shaved himself twice with his electric razor, as the rotary blades were in serious need of a sharpening, and trimmed his full mustache so that none of the hairs hung over the upper lip. Then he dressed in his only suit and tie, brushed down his curly hair with hair oil till his skull was flat and shiny, and patted after-shave lotion on his face and neck and then at the underarms of his jacket, which needed a dry-cleaning. But then, he thought, it wasn’t every day of the week a lonely, sort of homely-looking guy like himself was invited to sit down at an elegant table with five beautiful young sisters.
The house he drove up to turned out to be in the seediest part of town. It was small and boxlike, sticking out of a garden of tall weeds like an ancient, run-down mausoleum. He rang the bell, much less hopeful of any grand time tonight, but, surprisingly, the girl who opened the door was as beautiful as her mother had said. She was about twenty, black-eyed and as well built as the famous Venus statue in Paris, whom she also resembled above the neck a great deal, he now noticed, except for the long blonde hair. “Come right in,” she said in a sweet voice, and David, feeling his neck knot up with excitement, managed to squeak out that he was the man his mother had met this morning and invited to dinner.
“You’re Sylvia,” he said. “I’d know you anywhere by your mother’s glowing description.” He stuck out his hand, but instead of having his fingers squeezed seductively as he had imagined, he was jerked past the door and thrown halfway across the room. When he got up a few seconds later, a bit dizzy and his pants ripped at the knee and all set to ask what kind of silly practical joke she was playing on him, he saw her locking the front door with a key, which she promptly dropped down her bra.
“Now, how’s that for a quick-change routine?” Sylvia said with a voice much tougher and throatier now, though that smile of unwavering sweetness remained. “Years back, I was in show business, so I know what’s what with costumes and makeup and things.”
David tried to stay composed by examining the rip in his pants. “It’s a damn good thing this is my oldest suit,” he said, and looked up to see what reaction his remark had made and saw her peeling off her face skin from the forehead down and then her gorgeous blonde hair.
“A voluptuous goddess of love I can only pretend to be for minutes,” the woman he’d met at the unemployment office said, “but a svelte water nymph I could play for you for hours. Not much padding then to bother my tush and ribs and hamper my walk, you know what I mean?” She placed the wig and Venus mask in a hatbox — neatly, as if she were preserving them to wear again — and unzipped her dress, removed the socks from her bra and bandages wrapped around her buttocks and, from her waist, a tight black-satin cummerbund. When she finished rezippering and hitching, and patting her gray hair back into place, she said “Well, now, Davy boy, what do you say we get down to business.”
“Why you big fraud,” he said. “I mean…why you big incredible fraud.”
“Sure, I’m a fraud. What then? You saying you would’ve come all the way out here just to see an old bag like me? But look who’s talking about frauds. We’re on to you, you know, the way you take unemployment-insurance money from our Government under somebody else’s name and Social Security number — a good pal of yours in Paris who you send a hundred bucks to every other week. We checked, so don’t think you’ve been invited here just for your good looks, you weasel. At least I worked for my unemployment money — twenty miserable weeks I worked, which isn’t one day over the minimum and which I don’t ever expect to do again. But sit down.” She motioned him to a chair. “A sense of decency I at least still got for your likes. You want a drink? Some good gin? Oh, stop shaking your head like a clod. You’re not getting out of here till we’ve had our say, so you might as well sit back comfortably with a drink.”
“About that unemployment insurance,” David said uneasily. “Well, that’s my business — my worry. And if you’ve brought me here to extort hush money out of me, forget it. I’m broke, flat, rien — comprenez-vous français ? So I’ll be leaving,” and he stood up and confidently stuck out his hand for the key. She laughed and slapped at his fingers and yelled in the direction of the stairs “Georgie? Little Davy’s here and he’s getting impatient. You want to come down?”
From upstairs, a man answered in a soft, lilting voice: “I’ll be down in a sec, sweet.”
“You’ll be down in a sec, nothing. Get your skinny ass here this instant.”
A thin, sickly-looking man in his fifties came hurrying downstairs. He was panting, still full of sleep, a few days past his last shave and scratching his undershirt nervously when he gave David a limp, wet hand to shake.
“Pleased to meet you, son. Sylvia’s told me some very encouraging things about you. Very.”
“You see,” Sylvia said, edging David back into a couch beside Georgie, “my husband and I have decided you’re just the man we need for our work.”
That’s right,” Georgie said. “We need a smart boy with brains.”
“What Mr. Peartree means is that simply the idea of you carrying through your plans to finagle the Government is a good sign to us. Besides which, of course, we can always use it against you if you don’t go along with what we ask.”
“Sylvia told me all about it,” Georgie said. “Amazing. Just terrific. No, really, pal, because not many guys can get away with conning the Federal Government anymore.”
David said “Not that I’m committing myself to anything, but I still don’t know what you have in mind or even what the wages are for your mysterious work.”
“Twenty dollars a day,” she said, as if it were two hundred, “and judging from what we have on you, consider it philanthropy.”
“You’re getting a bargain,” Georgie said. “Take it quick before she lowers the offer.”
“Offer for what, goddamnit?” David said, and Sylvia, telling him to control himself for a minute, went into a long detailed account of what they had in mind. She and Georgie were basically uneducated people, she said, and as he could see by just looking around their home, these weren’t the best of times for them, either. So what they needed now was an educated person to write bright convincing letters to all sorts of big American companies, complaining about the products some woman they’d made up had bought and how much trouble and even serious harm these defective goods had caused this woman and her family.
“We give you the names of the products,” she went on, “and what you do, and which we know you’re capable of because of your strong English-literature background, is think up something wrong with these goods, type up a nice neat letter telling about it and then sign our Mrs. O’Connell’s name and our address. From these letters we expect all kinds of small and semi-large cash settlements, and if not that, then tremendous supplies of these same products Mrs. O’Connell’s complaining about, which should keep us in most of our home goodies for a solid year.”
“A friend of mine,” Georgie said, “once wrote a letter to a cigarette company, telling the truth about how the cig paper had pinholes in it, which made the things unsmokable. In a week he got back a hand-signed letter from the sales manager himself, saying how sorry they were and he should know how untypical his experience was and for his trouble they were sending along two cartons of the same brand he made a stink about. Two cartons — can you imagine? Just think if he was a brainy guy like yourself and wrote an intelligent letter telling how he found some chemically tested rat hairs in his smokes.”
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