I had an idea. “You don’t fit ’em in,” I said smugly. “You take ’em off. Look.”
I unbuttoned my coat and shirt, undid my tie, and pulled everything off at once. “See,” I said; “sleeves in sleeves.” I unzipped and stepped out of trousers and shorts. “See; pants in pants.”
Inspector Abrahams was whistling the refrain of Strip Polka. “You missed your career, Lamb,” he said. “Only now you’ve got to put your shirt tails between the outer pants and the inner ones and still keep everything smooth. And look in here.” He lifted up one shoe and took out a pocket flash and shot a beam inside. “The sock’s caught on a little snag in one of the metal eyelets. That’s kept it from collapsing, and you can still see the faint impress of toes in there. Try slipping your foot out of a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result.”
I was getting dressed again and feeling like a damned fool.
“Got any other inspirations?” Abrahams grinned.
“The only inspiration I’ve got is as to where to go now.”
“Some day,” the Inspector grunted, “I’ll learn where you go for your extra-bright ideas.”
“As the old lady said to the elephant keeper,” I muttered, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The Montgomery Block (Monkey Block to natives) is an antic and reboantic warren of offices and studios on the fringe of Grant Avenue’s Chinatown and Columbus Avenue’s Italian-Mexican-French-Basque quarter. The studio I wanted was down a long corridor, beyond that all-American bend where the Italian newspaper Corriere delPopolo sits cater-corner from the office of Tinn Hugh Yu, Ph.D. and Notary Public.
Things were relatively quiet today in Dr. Verner’s studio. Slavko Catenich was still hammering away at his block of marble, apparently on the theory that the natural form inherent in the stone would emerge if you hit it often enough. Irma Borigian was running over vocal exercises and occasionally checking herself by striking a note on the piano, which seemed to bring her more reassurance than it did me. Those two, plus a couple of lads industriously fencing whom I’d never seen before, were the only members of Verner’s Varieties on hand today.
Irma ah-ah-ahed and pinked, the fencers clicked, Slavko crashed, and in the midst of the decibels the Old Man stood at his five-foot lectern-desk, resolutely proceeding in quill-pen longhand with the resounding periods of The Anatomy of Nonscience, that never-concluded compendium of curiosities which was half Robert Burton and half Charles Fort.
He gave me the medium look. Not the hasty “Just this sentence” or the forbidding “Dear boy, this page must be finished”; but the in-between “One more deathless paragraph” look. I grabbed a chair and tried to watch Irma’s singing and listen to Slavko’s sculpting.
There’s no describing Dr. Verner. You can say his age is somewhere between seventy and a hundred. You can say he has a mane of hair like an albino lion and a little goatee like a Kentucky Colonel who never heard of cigars. (“When a man’s hair is white,” I’ve heard him say, “tobacco and a beard are mutually exclusive vices.”) You can mention the towering figure and the un-English mobility of the white old hands and the disconcerting twinkle of those impossibly blue eyes. And you’d still have about as satisfactory a description as when you say the Taj Mahal is a domed, square, white marble building.
The twinkle was in the eyes and the mobility was in the hands when he finally came to tower over me. They were both gone by the time I’d finished the story of the Stambaugh apartment and the empty man. He stood for a moment frowning, the eyes lusterless, the hands limp at his sides. Then, still standing like that, he relaxed the frown and opened his mouth in a resonant bellow.
“You sticks!” he roared. (Irma stopped and looked hurt.) “You stones!” (The fencers stopped and looked expectant.) “You worse than worst of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts” (Slavko stopped and looked resigned.) “imagine howling,” Dr. Verner concluded in a columbine coo, having shifted in mid-quotation from one Shakespearean play to another so deftly that I was still looking for the joint.
Verner’s Varieties waited for the next number on the bill. In majestic silence Dr. Verner stalked to his record player. Stambaugh’s had been a fancy enough custommade job, but nothing like this.
If you think things are confusing now, with records revolving at 78, 45, and 332 rpm, you should see the records of the early part of the century. There were cylinders, of course (Verner had a separate machine for them). Disc records, instead of our present standard sizes, ranged anywhere from seven to fourteen inches in diameter, with curious fractional stops in between. Even the center holes came in assorted sizes. Many discs were lateral-cut, like modern ones; but quite a few were hill-anddale, with the needle riding up and down instead of sideways—which actually gave better reproduction but somehow never became overwhelmingly popular. The grooving varied too, so that even if two companies both used hill-and-dale cutting you couldn’t play the records of one on a machine for the other. And just to make things trickier, some records started from the inside instead of the outer edge. It was Free Enterprise gone hogwild.
Dr. Verner had explained all this while demonstrating to me how his player could cope with any disc record ever manufactured. And I had heard him play everything on it from smuggled dubbings of Crosby blow-ups to a recording by the original Floradora Sextet—which was, he was always careful to point out, a double sextet or, as he preferred, a duodecimet.
“You are,” he announced ponderously, “about to hear the greatest dramatic soprano of this century. Rosa Ponselle and Elisabeth Rethberg were passable. There was something to be said for Lillian Nordica and Lena Geyer. But listen!” And he
