Up Christopher to Madness

Gladys, both graduates of the Municipal Female Seminary on Eighth and Greenwich, where they had majored in handling obstreperous bull dykes; and Aunt Annie’s bouncer, Homer, a quiet sullen homunculus whose every lineament bespoke, not gratified desire, but a refutation of the charge that Piltdown Man was a hoax. In a trice they had jostled away the lewd excavators (eye-intent on garter belts, pudenda and puffies) and were busy with the Florence Nightingale bit.

Fred tottered to a telephone in the Ale House to call a garage. He found the instrument pre-empted by Doc Lem Architrave, an unfrocked osteopath, who was vainly trying to impress Bellevue with the urgent need for an ambulance.

“—fractures, dislocations, and hemorrhages,” the ex-bone-popper was shouting: “Cheyne-Stokes breathing, cyanosis, and prolapses of the uteri!”

“Yeah, well, like I say,” a bored voice on the other end of the line said, “when a machine comes in, which we can spare it, we’ll, like, send it out presently. How do you, like, spell ‘Wooster’? Is it W-u or W-o- u?”

Fred tottered out again.

He found that all the victims, their own wounds forgotten, were now gathered six and seven deep in a circle around Wallace Fish, who was lying on the ground, flat on his back, and drumming his heels. His collar had been ripped open, revealing a throat as reddish-purple, congested, and studded with bumps as his face. Big Patsy was trying, so far successfully, to ward off a boss-ditchdigger who, convinced that the afflicted had suffered a crushed trachea, proposed to open a fresh respiratory passage with a knife the approximate size of a petty officer’s cutlass.

“He’s been poisoned!” cried a voice in the crowd.

“Flesh, probably,” insisted another yet, a jackhammer operator whose numerous tattoos peeped coyly through a thicket of hair as black and springy as the contents of an Edwardian sofa. “I hope this will be a lesson to you, fellows, about eating flesh. Now we vegetarians—”

Big Patsy turned control of the putative performer of tracheotomies over to Homer, who held him a la Lascoon, and bent solicitiously over his stricken liege-man, who gurgled wordlessly.

“It might be something he eat,” he admitted. “Wallace has what I mean a very sensitive stomach and—” A sudden idea transfixed him visibly. He turned his head. “Aunt Annie,” he demanded, “what, besides lentils, was in that now hot soup which we all, including Wallace, partook of so heartily to soothe our jangled nerves?”

Fred tried to indicate to him, by winks, shrugs, twitches, and manual semaphore, that he and his two genossen were supposed to be beatniks, names unknown; and that such revelatory references were dangerous and uncalled for, and, in all probability, ultra vires and sub judice. But to no avail.

“Why,” said Aunt Annie, a shade vexed that her cuisine be called into question: “it was a nice fresh chowder, the speciality for today, with some lovely sweet plum tomatoes, lentils to be sure, a few leeks which I scrubbed them thoroughly, and a mere sprinkling of marjoram, fennel, and dill—”

“Chowder? What kind of chowder?”

“Why, codfish,” said Aunt Annie.

Big Patsy groaned. The Kerry Pig whimpered, and knelt in prayer. Wallace turned up his eyes, gagged, and drummed his heels once again. 6/8 time.

“Codfish. A salt-water fish. And Wallace with his elegy—Get a ambulance!” the words broke from his chest in an articulate roar.

Once again Red Fred trotted for the phone, and once again he was beaten to it by Doc Lem Architrave, whose appearance on the streets so early in the day must be attributed to his having been hauled from his bed at the Mills Hotel peremptorily to do his deft (though alas! illicit) best to relieve the population explosion on behalf of some warm-hearted Village girl who had probably breezed in from New Liverpool, Ohio, only a few months previously; for, had she been around the Village longer, she had known better than to—

But enough.

Once again the Doc dialed Bellevue, but this time he was answered by a voice as sharply New England as the edge of a halibut knife.

“Aiyyuh?” asked the voice.

“Ambulance!” yelled Doc Architrave. “Corner Wooster and Bleecker! Emergency case of codfish allergy!”

“Codfish allergy?” The voice was electrified. “Well. I snum! Sufferin’ much? I presume likely! Ambulance Number Twenty-Three! Corner of Wooster and Bleecker! codfish anergy. Terrible thing!” And, over the phone, the sound of Number Twenty-Three’s siren was heard to rise in an hysterical whine and then die off in the distance.

In what seemed like a matter of seconds the same sound began to increase (this is called the Doppler effect) and Old 23 came tearing up to the side of the stricken Wallace. Treatment was prompt and efficacious and involved the use of no sesquipedalian wonderomyacin: a certain number of minims of adrenalin, administered hypodermically (the public interest—to say nothing of the AMA—forbids our saying exactly how many minims) soon had him right as rain again. He was standing on his feet when Red Fred, alerted by the almost osmotic disappearance of Doc Lem Architrave, observed that the fuzz had made the scene after all.

The carabinieri consisted of, reading them left to right, Captain Cozenage, Patrolman Ottolenghi, Police-Surgeon Anthony Gansevoort, and Sergeants G. C. and V. D. O’Sullivan: the latter being identical twins built along the lines of Sumo wrestlers, commonly, if quizzically, referred to (though never in their presence) as The Cherry Sisters.

Red Fred, Big Patsy, Wallace “Gefilte” Fish, and The Kerry Pig, swallowed. He swallowed, we swallowed, they swallowed all four.

After a short and pregnant pause, the next voice heard was that of Ottolenghi, “‘The wicked fleeth,’” he observed, more in sorrow than in wrath, “‘when no man pursueth.’”

The Kerry Pig, Wallace “Gelfilte” Fish, Big Patsy, and Red Fred hung their heads.

“Well, you have led us a merry chase,” commented Dr. Gansevoort, “haven’t they boys?” Cozenage said, “Ha.” Or—to be more precise—”Ha!” Ottolenghi sighed softly. The twins O’Sunivan made, as one man, a deep, disgruntled-sounding noise which started somewhere near the sphincter pylorus and thence spread outward and upward; not unlike that made by the Great Barren Land Grizzly when disturbed untimely during the mating season. Eskimo legend to the effect that this creature’s love-spasms last nine days is, in all likelihood, grossly exaggerated.

“We had heard that you had heard that we were looking for you in connection with the sudden death of Angie the Rat,” continued the police-surgeon. “But—for some reason—we have been unable to make contact with you to confirm what doubtless reached your ears as a rumor. Namely that, acting on information received from the personal physician of the late Rat, an autopsy was performed upon him in addition to the routine excavations required by law. Which revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that he dropped dead of a heart condition of long- standing, aggravated by the consumption of one dozen veal-stuffed peppers, two bowls of minestrone, and a pint of malaga, just before he stepped out of the restaurant to the scene of his death.”

Again a silence, broken only by the burly jackhammerman’s warning his compeers yet again to avoid the fatal lure of flesh-eating.

“Then—” began Big Patsy. “You mean—We didn’t—Theyaren’t—”

“Yes?”

“That is—uh—nobody is what you might call guilty? Of having murdered the Rat, I mean?”

The police-surgeon smiled. “Nobody at all,” he said. “Oh, those bullets you put into him would have caused him a more than merely momentary inconvenience had he been alive at the time of their entry. But as he had died about a second before, why—”

Big Patsy guffawed. Wallace chuckled. The Kerry Pig tittered. Red Fred sighed happily. “In that case,” said Big Patsy, “we three are as free as birds, are we not? The minions of the law have nothing on us.”

But, oh, he was so very, very wrong. See now Captain Cozenage begin a smile like that of a Congo crocodile making ready for the dental attentions of the dik-dik bird.

“Inasmuch as the late deceased was dead at the time the bullets struck his inert flesh, the utterers of said