Time Bum
Time Bum
HARRY TWENTY-THIRD STREET suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.
“I just thought of a new con,” Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.
Farmer Brown shook his head positively. “There’s no such thing, my man,” he said. “There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?” He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Fanner needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.
Harry said, “Sorry, old boy. No details. It’s too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It’s beautiful and it’s mine. I will see you around, my friend.”
Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safeblower here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout. Naturally he didn’t nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope peddlers. Harry had his pride.
The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra and pants on the cover.
“A furnished . . .bungalow?” the man said hesitantly, as though he knew what he wanted but wasn’t quite sure of the word.
“Certainly, Mr. Clurg,” Walter Lacblan said. “I’m sure we can suit you. Wife and family?”
“No,” said Clurg. “They are … far away.” He seemed to get some secret amusement from the thought And then, to Walter’s horror, he sat down calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor looking ludicrous and astonished.
Walter gaped and helped him up, sputtering apologies and wondering privately what was wrong with the man. There wasn’t a chair there. There was a chair on the other side of the desk and a chair against the wall. But there just wasn’t a chair where Clurg had sat down.
Clurg apparently was unhurt; he protested against Walter’s apologies, saying: “I should have known, Master Lachlan. It’s quite all right; it was all my fault What about the bang—the bungalow?”
Business sense triumphed over Walter’s bewilderment. He pulled out his listings and they conferred on the merits of several furnished bungalows. When Walter mentioned that the Curran place was especially nice, in an especially nice neighborhood—he lived up the street himself—Clurg was impressed. ‘Til take that one,” he said. “What is the… feoff?” Walter had learned a certain amount of law for his real-estate license examination; he recognized the word. “The rent is seventy-five dollars,” he said. “You speak English very well, Mr. Clurg.” He hadn’t been certain that the man was a foreigner until the dictionary word came out “You have hardly any accent.”
“Thank you,” Clurg said, pleased. “I worked hard at it Let me see—seventy-five is six twelves and three.” He opened one of his shiny-new leather suitcases and calmly laid six heavy little paper rolls on Walter’s desk. He broke open a seventh and laid down three mint-new silver dollars. “There I am,” he said. “I mean, there you are.”
Walter didn’t know what to say. It had never happened before. People paid by check or in bills. They just didn’t pay in silver dollars. But it was money—why shouldn’t Mr. Clurg pay in silver dollars if he wanted to? He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer and said: “111 drive you out there if you like. It’s nearly quitting time anyway.”
Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: “We ought to have him in some evening. I can’t imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said, ‘Oh, yes—electricity!’ and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he’s some kind of a political refugee.”