I left that teetering middle-aged dame to get what she could out of Benny. I reckon her mind never rose higher than getting brochures out of any man, anyway. Which, maybe, is why she looked turned forty.
I went into the elevator, which again shows how distraught I was. After a couple of minutes I came out and climbed the stairs, and said vicious things with every stride I took. That old man who should have operated the elevator must have been having a session with a chambermaid somewhere,
I passed my room and thumped on the door next to mine. That’s where B.G. was hibernating. And B.G., I might tell you, is my boss.
Strictly speaking, B.G. is the boss’s son. The old man, back in Detroit, doesn’t get around much now, because he’ll never see seventy again. So he’s put his little boy in circulation, and B.G. goes around the world where they have contracts and in general gums up the works.
He’s what Europe fondly conceives to be a typical American businessman, and he knows it and tries to live up to the part. He’s big and he’s shaped like an egg and he’s got about as much brain as an egg—one that’s thirty days addled. He wears rimless, octagonal-edged glasses perched on a stub of a nose set into a big flat pancake of a face. And he’s got a stomach that’s no concern of anybody else except himself. In fact, B.G. is mighty concerned about that stomach of his.
I forget now whether at that moment, standing outside his door, I was on his payroll or fired. He changes his mind so quickly. He won’t get drunk, and sometimes we do, and then we get to forgetting that he’s the boss, and instead we think he’s the sap he really is, and we treat him like that. He’s got an unforgiving nature, and when we come out of the oil, we generally find ourselves with a month’s paycheck in our hand.
Yet somehow we always get back on the payroll.
This time we’d thought it funny to give B.G. a leg-up with his linguistic aspirations. B.G.’s the humourless, earnest, persevering type of man who tries to learn a few words of every language of the countries he visits. He trumpets that it makes the foreigner pleased to hear someone who’s taken the trouble to learn at least a few words.
So we helped him. When he touched down at the airport he wanted to know what the Turkish equivalent was for “Thank you.” We tried to help him.
After that he kept using the word and the Turks looked surprised but would politely take him and leave him outside the door in question. This happened about six times before he rumbled it. He didn’t accept our explanation easily, either—that we’d made some awful mistake and instead of giving him the word for “thank you” we’d given the word which is seen mostly on that door where the ladies go in to powder their noses.
Call it rude humour if you like, but when the boys get together, that’s how they behave.
So we were all in the doghouse, and, as I say, I didn’t even know whether I was on his payroll after that incident, or available to look for another job.
I thumped on the door. To hell with B.G.; he’s only the boss, anyway.
I heard the rattle of metal inside, and pricked up my ears. It sounded like—chains.
And then I heard B.G. call out to me: “Who’s there?” and I had a feeling he was in trouble even as he called out.
I shouted back: “The hell, it’s Heggy. What’ve you got in there—a dame at last?” And that was sarcasm, because B.G.’s got more inhibitions concerning the female sex than any man I’ve ever met.
He didn’t rise to it this time, but his voice took on a note of quick concern, and he shouted: “For God’s sake, get the pass key and come in to me. My God, Heggy, I need you right now!”
So I found the floor servant with his tarbosh and I got him to open up. He wanted to come in and there was a big grin on that Turk’s brown face, but I didn’t see that it was any business of his, so I politely kept him out in the corridor.
I went into B.G.’s bedroom and B.G. was there.
He was lying on his back, spread-eagled, and fastened by wrists and ankles with shining chains to the four corner-posts of his bed.
CHAPTER TWO
THE POLICE
I was so startled I had to sit down on the edge of his bed and smoke a Camel. I looked at him, the big slob.
He was wearing little trunks and a singlet such as athletes wear. Only, no athlete ever tried to shove a stomach as big as his into such a vest. He was without his glasses, but he could see me all right. Sometimes I used to think he didn’t need glasses at all, but wore them to impress people. There was a lot of chicken around the heart of that big man.
B.G. got mad. That’s what I wanted. I like to get him mad. It’s a hobby of mine, getting bosses mad, and I’m expert at it, and perhaps that’s why I’ve had more bosses than most men.
He shouted for me to get him out of those things, but I just looked dumb and went on smoking.
I could see what it was. There were springs round those chains and it was one of these physical culture fads that grip men at times. That big stomach of B.G. had got him physical-culture conscious, and it seemed I had discovered his secret. He did exercises to reduce it, here in his bedroom.
The idea was that you slipped your hands through a kind of handcuff, which was attached by springs and little chains round your bedposts. Your feet were thrust through similar footcuffs. And then you did exercises, like trying to sit up against the tension of those springs and trying to draw your knees up against the even more powerful springs, which fixed your ankles to those bedposts.
Me, I don’t see any use in this sort of nonsense. Keep-fit is a pastime for adolescents. I stopped being an adolescent quite a few years back, and I just enjoy feeling out of condition. Maybe I’m not much out of condition, at that, and I don’t have any bothers about a belly like the boss.
I looked at him coldly when he shouted at me, and in time he got around to it that I didn’t like being shouted at. So he became persuasive, and I like bosses better that way,
After a time I said: “How do you get out of those things?”
He was exasperated but tried not to show it. He had also a confession to make, and he didn’t like making it and he mumbled over it. He was a man, in any event, feeling the indignity of his position. It seemed that you simply slid your hands through the cuffs but B.G. had thick wrists and big fleshy paws, and the exercising had caused them to swell and he couldn’t get the cuffs over his hand. I felt inclined to leave the slob there, but that isn’t the Heggy way. Joe P. Heggy is always a guy to give a man a hand in trouble, even if it is the boss.
Anyway, this was a good time to make profit out of the situation.
I said to him quite nicely: “I don’t know whether I can help you. I mean, I’m not working for you any longer, why should I dig you out of those damn bracelets?”
B.G. spoke earnestly. He said: “Joe, what are you talking about? Who says you’re not working for me? You get this into your mind, Joe, that you’ll always be working for me. Only, doggone it, dig me out of these bracelets, can’t you!”
Well, that was good enough for me. I was still on the payroll. I dug him out. It took a lot of hair oil over his fat wrists, and he lost some of the skin in the process, but I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t smell like a nice boy afterwards.
He was ashamed of himself, as fat men always are ashamed when they’ve been caught out. I said: “It’s a good thing I came when I did.”
He stopped washing himself under a tap labelled: ‘Chaud’ but it wasn’t. Like the elevator, the hot water system never worked in this hotel, either. He looked at me and said, suspiciously: “What did you want of me at this time of night, anyway?”
I said: “If