Angels in Heaven

someone
called Germaine Greer, probably one of those regency romances, also a large
coffee cup with a picture of a cat drinking milk on it. I was surprised she
didn’t pull out a picture of Willing Boy too, talking about personal touches.
    And we had, also slightly damp,
correctly headed company stationery in the drawers of all our desks, and the
top drawer of one of the green filing cabinets was impressively stuffed with
cardboard folders, which were themselves impressively stuffed with blank paper.
Doris applied a few finishing touches here and there: she crumpled up some
scraps of paper and chucked them into the wastepaper baskets; she tangled up
her telephone line to make it look used; she creased up the covers of the new
telephone books that Benny had scored along with the phones—and so on.
    We were taking a last look around to
admire our handiwork when Benny said, “Samples. We should have samples around
in case we get a visit from Don Rafael. Or his neighbor’s sister.”
    “Damn,” I said.
    “A desk lamp for me,” Doris said. “Otherwise it looks pretty good.”
    “It sure does, gang,” I said, making
sure the suitcase I was going to leave behind was locked. “It looks like we’re
in business.”
    “I thought that was the plan,” said Doris.
    “Speaking of which,” Benny said,
“what is the plan for mañana?”
    “Mañana,” I said, “after picking up
some samples, I figured you and me’d go straight to jail, without stopping to
collect anything else.”
    “What about your wits?” said Doris.
    “Those we might need,” I said.
    “Rotsa ruck, Melvin,” said Doris.
     
     
     

CHAPTER
TEN
     
    “The hammock you have just purchased
was handwoven in the State of Yucatán, in southern Mexico. The hammock is a
very important part of Yucatán life. 99% of the population in the State of Yucatán owns and uses the hammock. 87% of them have been born, sleep, and probably will die
in a hammock. For 53% of the Yucatán people, the hammock is the only piece of
furniture in the house, being used as a chair in the day and a bed at night.”
    “And who penned this foray into
literature?” I inquired, holding up the tag I was reading.
    “I did,” Benny called down.
    There was more: “The hammock consists
of two parts: the Body (or Bed), and the Connecting Ends (or Arms). They are
woven on a vertical loom consisting of two posts planted in the ground and two
horizontal pieces of wood connecting them at top and bottom. It takes 19 hours
to make the smallest hammock, giving you an idea of the work that is required
to weave a hammock.”
    “Shakespeare it ain’t,” I said. “And
I suppose you made up the figures too.”
    “There you’re wrong,” he said. “I
translated them from something Jorge wrote.”
    It was the following morning after a
late breakfast, and Benny and I were at his friend Jorge Bazu’s hammock
emporium down on 56th and I was learning far more about hammocks than I cared
to. Doris had toddled off to the office to hold the fort and maintain our
presence there and also, in between writing in the diary she was keeping, to do
such chores as dropping off in Don Rafael’s office a handful of our new
business cards, with our new telephone number neatly written in. She was also
to man—or is it woman?— the phone in case he called, and also to tell Freddy or
Don Rafael, if either stopped by to see how we were settling in, that the
bosses were out on a purchasing expedition, which, as it turned out, is exactly
what we were doing.
    Or rather what Benny was doing. Benny
was up a ladder selecting hammocks from the shelves full of them that ran all
down one side of Jorge’s long, narrow shop. The shelves on the other side of
the store held skeins of cotton string out of which the hammocks were woven.
When Benny found a hammock he liked, he tossed it down to Jorge’s number two
son, Carlos, who stacked it along with all the others, which were piling up
five-deep on the counter.
    In twenty minutes Benny had selected
205, mostly the larger sizes, the 10s and 12s. When I asked him out of idle
curiosity what his criterion for selection was—was it mayhap their color?—he
said no, it was closeness of weave, as in Persian carpets. I must say I
thoroughly enjoyed the sight of Benny teetering atop a rickety ladder—and for a
strictly legitimate cause. It was surely a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, like
me eating in that Ethiopian restaurant out on Sunset.
    How the weavers of the