Tales From Gavagan's Bar (42 page)

             
So I fixed some roast beef. I thought I couldn't possibly go wrong with that, and it was simple, too, and I'd slip a lemon pie into the oven when the beef came out, and then we could maybe get together. Tom's mother is one of those tall, thin women who wear a lot of frills and insist on being so feminine you can hardly stand it, and I could see when she came in that she was ready to drop the axe if I got one bit out of line. She looked around the place as though I were keeping Tom in a jail, and offering cocktails didn't help much, because she would only take one, and then she asked for the napkin I'd forgotten to give her. She said something about being old-fashioned and believing a woman should devote herself to her home.

             
So it was up to the roast. The moment I took the lid off the roasting pan, I knew something was wrong because it didn't smell the way it should, and when I cut into it I was sure. It was much darker than it should have been, and the texture wasn't right either. They stopped talking when I served it, and Tom and his father each cut off a little piece and ate it and then began on the potatoes. Tom's mother, who had never taken her eyes off them for a minute, said: "I'm afraid none of our family care much for game meat, even though it is venison, especially when it's been hung so long it's a little bit high." I could have burst into tears right there, and I was so nervous I couldn't eat a bite myself, and I did something wrong with the lemon pie and it fell, and the only good thing about the meal was the coffee. After we finished it Tom said he thought he'd see them home, and I came over here to figure out what was wrong.

             
I think I know now; I've got it arranged. My fingers have virtue; too much virtue. Every time I cook something in a pot or a casserole or under a lid, it turns into the most elaborate French dish, and Tom won't eat it. The only cooking I can do is in a frying pan.

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"Very interesting," said Willison. "Very interesting. With a talent like that you could easily be a
cordon bleu."

             
"But I don't want to be a
cordon bleu,"
wailed Dotty. "I just want Tom. And now I think of it, I want another Alexander."

             
"If you'll
shake it yourself, I'll have one with you," said Willison. "You ought to be able to make something special of it."

             
"Okay," said Dotty. "Did you hear what he said, Mr. Cohan? Load the shaker and bring it over here."

             
She stood up, grasped the container in firm mechanic's hands, and agitated vigorously. The liquid that foamed into the glass was a whitish blue. Keating said: "An Angel's Kiss, by God!"

             
"Mr. Keating," said Mr. Cohan, "swearing in the presence of ladies is not allowed in Gavagan's, or I'd do it myself. That day man is always putting the Creme de Violette where the Creme de Cacao belongs, and I must of grabbed the wrong bottle."

-

             
Mr. Witherwax, in a state that might be described as a low dudgeon, brandished his Martini in one hand. "I hope they send him up for a million years!" he said.

             
"Who?" said Mr. Gross, shaking raindrops from his hat and motioning to the bartender for his usual Boilermaker.

             
"Finley. The real estate agent. Wait till you hear what he did. I told you I was moving, didn't I? Well, I took the day off to see to it, and got to the new place with the moving van about noon, and we were just beginning to get the stuff inside, when up comes another moving van with a lot of stuff belonging to a family named Schultz, from somewhere over on the East Side, and they want to get in the same place. They had keys, too. What do you think I found out?"

             
Mr. Cohan, who had finished serving a thin, sad-looking man farther down the bar, sidled over. "Don't be telling me, Mr. Witherwax, that Finley rented it to the both of you?"

             
"That's right," said Witherwax. "It's an awful mess; making us pay six months in advance because apartments are so hard to find. It'll be all right for me, because my lease is good on account of it's dated first, but we had to get this Schultz from his office and then the owner, and the moving men standing around on the sidewalk picking up overtime, and the stuff wasn't all in yet when I came away. I don't know what Schultz is going to do."

             
"What happened to Finley?" asked Gross.

             
"Skipped out. When they went to his office, they found he hadn't been there for two days. He's probably got half a dozen other suckers the same way. They're going over the books now."

             
Gross said: "That reminds me of my wife's uncle Cicero. He bought a lot of bronze for junk once, and then found it was part of the statue of Abraham Lincoln—"

             
"If they ever find him—" said Witherwax.

             
"They will," said the thin man in a surprisingly penetrating voice. Three heads turned to look at a hatchet-faced man with black hair and a thin black moustache sweeping back from his beak of a nose, not unlike Robert Louis Stevenson in his later, more tubercular years. "It's the seller they always find in these fraud cases. I only wish I could find the buyer."

             
"Why?" asked Witherwax.

             
The thin man smiled a wan smile. "Well, because it was I who committed the fraud—or tried to. I have reason to believe that it was committed on me instead. I think it was legitimate. I tried to defraud the
Devil."

             
Mr. Cohan shrank back against the bar and hurriedly crossed himself. Gross exhibited a bovine placidity. Witherwax said: "The Devil, eh? How do you know it was the Devil?"

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I don't [said the thin man]. It was only
a
devil of some kind. A
nd I didn't even see him—or it. I'm just sure. Mr. Bartender, I don't know your name, but please give these gentlemen a drink and put it on my check. I have to tell somebody about this, or—well, I have to tell somebody about this.

             
It started when my friend, Cal Haugen—that is, he used to be my friend—became interested in medieval sorcery. I thought it was a lot of nonsense. Especially the books, which he said were grimoires, manuals of diabolism and magic. They claimed to be medieval, but he admitted to me once that most of them were printed during the eighteenth century and pre-dated to bring higher prices. All the same, he treated them seriously and used to try out the formulas, drawing pentacles on the floor and making incantations. Used to say
that the books were
imperfect
guides, but the only way to discover something was to follow what leads you had, then find out where they had taken you, like Henry Hudson trying to reach the Northwest Passage and finding the Hudson River.

             
None of the formulas worked—at that time, anyway. I remember the night when we laid off experimenting to have a couple of drinks, and Cal remarked that it was a damn shame the infernal powers were so slow on the uptake; if one of them appeared, he'd be glad to sell off his soul, which was likely to be lost anyway, whereas he certainly could use some money.

             
He was kidding, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness about it that made me think he might really be hard up, and when I asked, he said, yes, he was. I could let him have a hundred and I told him so, but with the mood of our experiments still on us and, in a way, because we were both a little embarrassed, I said I'd have to have an option on the purchase of his soul.

             
By that time we were down to the fourth or fifth drink. Cal pretended to treat the whole project with deadly seriousness; wrote out a memo all full of whereases and all the other legal-sounding hocus-pocus we could think of. In it, he agreed to sell me, Albert Conrad, one soul for five thousand dollars at any time within a month from date. We each signed it with a drop of blood. Then we had some coffee.

             
I hadn't drunk enough to make the coffee ineffective in keeping me awake, so I borrowed one of Cal's grimoires to read myself to sleep on. When I gave my attention to it, I thought I could see why the Devil, if there were a personage who could be summoned up to appear to fleshly eyes, took a dim view of the methods set forth in the grimoires. They were full of formulas for the sale of souls, but every one had an enormous joker in it somewhere, so the sorcerer who conducted the sale could escape at the last moment. You'd think that even a half-witted devil would spot it every time, but apparently the people who wrote the grimoires didn't
believe that a demon would be one unless he were less than half-witted.

             
That didn't seem logical to me, and at first I thought of calling up Cal and telling him I'd discovered where he made his mistake. But it was late; the drinks and coffee had left me comfortable and little bit tired, and it was too much trouble to move. And as I sat there thinking about it, it occurred to me that I had in my pocket an option for a perfectly genuine soul-sale, with no trickery or intention of trickery about it. If I could somehow call up a devil, I could offer him a soul in all sincerity; not my soul, but I didn't suppose the Devil would be particular about that. The keynote of the whole business would be the one thing the grimoires missed, the genuineness of the offer. And after I collected from the Devil, I could pay Cal his five thousand.

             
The whole thing was fantastic, so I laughed and went to bed. Next day I did call Cal and tell him why I thought the incantations were a failure. He was disposed to argue about it at first, but after a while said I might be right; if sincerity of purpose were a requirement for getting into the Church, or Heaven, it probably would be desired in the other department, too, and there wouldn't be much more use invoking the Devil without it than invoking the Holy Spirit.

             
[Mr. Cohan, who had moved as far away as he could without getting out of earshot, crossed himself again.]

             
The more I thought of it, the better my chances looked to achieve a position perhaps unique in human history—thanks to the agreement Cal had signed. Now I know perfectly well that the medieval alchemists and magicians were self-deluded even when they thoroughly believed in what they were doing, and their experiments were a tissue of absurdities. But it seemed to me that in the course of all the centuries they worked on it, they could hardly miss arriving at some few clues to the real thing. After all, the astrologers did found the science of astronomy. Besides, as Cal put it, the formulas in the grimoires were the only guideposts there were; I had to follow them as far as they would lead.

             
You see, by this time I had already made up my mind to
try it. It was a lot of trouble. The formula called for a magic sword, and I didn't have a sword of any kind, but I got a poker and worked away on it with a file and a sharpening stone until I achieved a fairly respectable point, and I thought maybe that would do. A sulphur fumigating candle supplied the brimstone; it smelled terrible and nearly choked me. I found I had to practice for hours with a brush before I could make even fairly good copies of the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton.