Angels in Heaven

two telephones. What you do is lay one phone one way
and the other the other way, as close together as possible, so the speaking end
of one is talking into the listening end of the other. Ethel, say, gets a call
from a certain lieutenant, say. She immediately rings me up on her second
phone. She puts the two receivers in their little cradles and there we are, me
and the Louie, chatting away merrily to each other.”
    Doris looked disappointed.
    “Oh, is that all?” she said.
“Although when you set it up with Ethel beats me.”
    “I never said I did set anything up
with Ethel,” I said. “Did you hear me say anything like that, Benjamin?”
    “Not in so many words,” Benny said.
    “I merely said it could have been
done that way,” I said, getting to my flat feet. “Now, anyone hungry? I must
admit to feeling a bit peckish. I don’t know why, but that iguana fricassee I
had on the plane didn’t fill me up.”
    “Those six beers you had might’ve,” Doris muttered.
    So we locked up, we departed, we
elevatored, we said adios to Fred, we strolled to a café, we snacked, we drank
moderately, and then Benny and I, hoping to give the locals a thrill, went off
to search for a pool hall whose location he vaguely remembered, while Doris
went back to the hotel and the pool without a hall. In fact, it was so small it
was almost a pool without a pool.
    We found the pool hall eventually, a
large, windowless abode open to the street, with a good twenty battered and
cigarette-burned tables in it, most of them in use. The cost per table was
forty-five cents an hour. All the youths seemed to be playing Chicago, a
bizarre variant of pool wherein, to start the game, half the balls are lined up
with gaps between them against one long cushion and the other half along the
other, with one ball, the four, I think, against the middle of the cushion at
the far end. I soon got the hang of it, though, and whipped poor Benny two
games out of four and then thrashed a wall-eyed, drunken local who tried to
hustle me one game out of five, at fifty cents a game. I’m not one for making
excuses, but you try shooting decent pool on felt that’s been repaired with
Johnson’s Band-Aids. It also had channels in it you could have sailed shrimp
boats in.
    On the way back to the hotel I bought
us ice cream cones; next to the ice cream stand was a busy laundromat, and
Benny remarked, “Those things kept me alive for six months once.”
    “What things?” I tasted my strawberry
cone, which was fair.
    “Washing machines,” he said, licking
his double chocolate.
    “How did washing machines help you
stay alive?” I reflected. “Maybe it was cold and you slept in a dryer. I saw a
TV program once where a guy showed how you could cook all these things in an
automatic dishwasher.”
    “Must have made the macaroni soggy,”
Benny said. “What I did was borrow this official collector’s key for an
hour—cost me a hundred bucks and another fifty to get the key copied. It was
one of those complicated brass cylindrical ones, and what it did was open all
Bendix machines cash boxes. I’d put on a white cap and white jacket and hit the
laundromats about noon, because the real collectors do it last thing at night.
I never took enough out of any one machine so anyone would notice a few
quarters less, but I heard now they got a sealed counter in them like juke
boxes so the operator can tell how many times each song is played or each
machine is used, but I don’t know for sure, I just heard it.” When we arrived
back at the hotel it was, by happy coincidence, aperitif time, so we sat in the
café out front and apéritifed, me on a cold, cold Corona and Benny on a gin and
tonic with a squirt of fresh lime juice in it. After a while he said, “What
kind of shape are we in for tomorrow?”
    “Pretty good,” I said. “We got a few
things to do but they won’t take long.”
    “We better fill Sara in,” he said,
“somewhere along the line.”
    “Yeah, I guess,” I said, waving off a
kid about a foot high who was trying to sell me a packet of Cheez-its.
    “She’s something else, she is,” he
said. “She’ll go anywhere, she’ll do anything, she’s got all the guts in the
world, and she’s bright.”
    “She’s coming along,” I said. “I’ve
always prided myself on my ability to see the hidden potential in people, and was
hers ever hidden.”
    “She looks kind of cute, too, in her
new duds.”
    “Really?” I said. “Can’t say