Write me a Letter

out of Fats, or at least I hope I can get it out of his obese hide. It might cost you a bowl of moose stew somewhere, but that’s all.” He peered at me suspiciously through his steel-rimmed specs, while I tried to look like the honest, upright, and well-meaning citizen I was. Then he took out a large red handkerchief and wiped both his face and his glasses. Then he crushed his empty paper cup with one foot. Finally he said, ”They’re with you, right?” indicating Marlon and Curly with a jerk of one thumb.
    ”Right. Their names are Marlon and Curly. Me, I’m Vic. They’re just along for the ride, really, I do all the work.” Sara gave me a dig in the ribs I could have done without. ”How many you got staking out the house?”
    ”Well,” I said, ”just that snowman, actually.”
    He gave me a small grin. ”I figured,” he said. ”Give me a minute, will ya?”
    ”Take two, they’re small,” I said. Willing Boy leaned over to ask me how it was going. I gave him the thumbs up sign. William furrowed what there was of his brow and thought. Down on the ice the Capitals scored two goals in under a minute. The crowd was not pleased. The game was stopped briefly as a team of slaves with miniature snow plows cleared debris off the ice. The loudspeaker said something in a foreign language again.
    Then William turned to me and said, ”OK. You like good pastrami or would you rather go for the stew?”
    ”I’d kill for good pastrami,” I said, ”but I don’t think the Stage Delicatessen in New York City delivers this far north.”
    ”You got a surprise comin’, bud,” he said. ”Now is it OK if we watch the rest of the game?”
    ”Vic,” I said. ”Not ‘bud.’ Or ‘Prof.’”
    ”Will,” he said. ”Not ‘William’ or ‘Willy.’”
    ”Sara,” the twerp said. ”Not ‘Curly.’”
    ”George,” Willing Boy chimed in. ”Not ‘Marlon,’ please!”
    ”Shut up, you two, will you?” I said. ”Some of us are trying to watch the game.”
    We watched.
    We all had a beer, on me, but Sara, who had a hot dog and a Pepsi and then some potato chips and then began working her way through a pack of Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum. Les Habitants won it in the end, 6-4, and we all trouped out with the happy and only moderately rowdy fans into the chilly night air. Twenty minutes later we were installed at a table in a crowded eatery known as the New Ben’s and ten minutes after that I was eating the best pastrami sandwich of my life, and I’m here to tell you a lot of pastrami has in my life passed under my expensive bridgework. The pickle was only the second best I’d ever eaten, my accountant Harry had a Polish cleaning lady whose dill pickles were beyond the stuff o’ dreams.
    Willing Boy was working away diligently at a huge plate of boiled beef ’n’ cabbage, with a stack of potato pancakes on the side. Curly was daintily attacking a bowl of chicken soup that had little raviolis in it, and Will, like me, was well into the first of his two pastramis on rye.
    ”Why do they call pastrami smoked meat up here?” I inquired idly between large mouthfuls.
    ”They don’t,” Will said.
    ”Oh.”
    ”They are two different things. Different things usually have different names, which is how you tell them apart.”
    ”Oh. Marlon, don’t hog the pickles.”
    After the cheesecake, when we were finally replete and had put in our order for three coffees and one tea, which came in a glass, for Sara, who always had to be different, I turned to Will and said, ”Monsieur, I thank you, that was indescribably sensational. My associates thank you. Thank the monsieur, children.” They thanked the monsieur profusely. ”Now it’s story time, kids, so gather round. Will, take it from the top. Take your time. Remember, we are your friends, and those that have broke rye bread together have broke rye bread together.”
    ”That almost makes sense,” Will said. ”OK. So what did Fats tell you?”
    I told him what little Fats had told me, that there was this guy who couldn’t come up with five big ones plus the vig who had taken off somewhere, and that the whole thing sounded fishy as hell to me, there had to be something else going on even if that much was true.
    ”That much is true,” Will said, sipping at his coffee. ”I couldn’t even come up with the vig. I went to ask him to give me another week. I’m sitting in that posh office of his begging when some drunken dame bursts into the front