Steel (16 page)

*   *   *

Talbert stood in an elevator rising to the tenth floor of the Gault Building.

The hour ride to New York had been most illuminating. Not only had he transcribed seven of the most horrendously vulgar jokes he had ever heard in his life but had exacted a promise from Harrison to take him to the various establishments where these jokes had been heard.

The hunt was on.

MAX AXE / DETECTIVE AGENCY
read the words on the frosty-glassed door. Talbert turned the knob and went in.

Announced by the beautiful receptionist, Talbert was ushered into a sparsely furnished office on whose walls were a hunting license, a machine gun, and framed photographs of the Seagram factory, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in color and Herbert J. Philbrick who had led three lives.

Mr. Axe shook Talbert's hand.

“What could I do for ya?” he asked.

“First of all,” said Talbert, “do you know any dirty jokes?”

Recovering, Mr. Axe told Talbert the one about the monkey and the elephant.

Talbert jotted it down. Then he hired the agency to investigate the men Uncle Lyman had phoned and uncover anything that was meaningful.

After he left the agency, Talbert began making the rounds with Harrison. He heard a joke the first place they went.

“There's this midget in a frankfurter suit, see?” it began.

It was a day of buoyant discovery. Talbert heard the joke about the cross-eyed plumber in the harem, the one about the preacher who won an eel at a raffle, the one about the fighter pilot who went down in flames and the one about the two Girl Scouts who lost their cookies in the laundromat.

Among others.

*   *   *

“I want,” said Talbert, “one round-trip airplane ticket to San Francisco and a reservation at the Hotel Millard Fillmore.”

“May I ask,” asked Uncle Lyman, “why?”

“While making the rounds with Harrison today,” explained Talbert, “a salesman of ladies' undergarments told me a veritable cornucopia of off-color jokes exists in the person of Harry Shuler, bellboy at the Millard Fillmore. This salesman said that, during a three-day convention at that hotel, he heard more new jokes from Shuler than he had heard in the first thirty-nine years of his life.”

“And you are going to—?” Uncle Lyman began.

“Exactly,” said Talbert. “We must follow where the spoor is strongest.”

“Talbert,” said Uncle Lyman, “why do you
do
these things?”

“I am searching,” said Talbert simply.

“For what, dammit!” cried Uncle Lyman.

“For
meaning
,” said Talbert.

Uncle Lyman covered his eyes. “You are the image of your mother,” he declared.

“Say nothing of her,” charged Talbert. “She was the finest woman who ever trod the earth.”

“Then how come she got trampled to death at the funeral of Rudolph Valentino?” Uncle Lyman charged back.

“That is a base canard,” said Talbert, “and you know it. Mother just happened to be passing the church on her way to bringing food to the Orphans of the Dissolute Seamen—one of her many charities—when she was accidentally caught up in the waves of hysterical women and swept to her awful end.”

A pregnant silence bellied the vast room. Talbert stood at a window looking down the hill at Lake Bean which his father had had poured in 1923.

“Think of it,” he said after a moment's reflection. “The nation alive with off-color jokes—the
world
alive! And the same jokes, Uncle,
the same jokes.
How?
How?
By what strange means do these jokes o'erleap oceans, span continents? By what incredible machinery are these jokes promulgated over mountain and dale?”

He turned and met Uncle Lyman's mesmeric stare.

“
I mean to know
,” he said.

At ten minutes before midnight Talbert boarded the plane for San Francisco and took a seat by the window. Fifteen minutes later the plane roared down the runway and nosed up into the black sky.

Talbert turned to the man beside him.

“Do you know any dirty jokes, sir?” he inquired, pencil poised.

The man stared at him. Talbert gulped.

“Oh, I
am
sorry,” he said, “Reverend.”

*   *   *

When they reached the room Talbert gave the bellboy a crisp five-dollar bill and asked to hear a joke.

Shuler told him the one about the man sitting by the burlesque runway eating an onion, see? Talbert listened, toes kneading inquisitively in his shoes. The joke concluded, he asked Shuler where this and similar jokes might be overheard. Shuler said at a wharf spot known as Davy Jones' Locker Room.

Early that evening, after drinking with one of the West Coast representatives of Bean Enterprises, Talbert took a taxi to Davy Jones' Locker Room. Entering its dim, smoke-fogged interior, he took a place at the bar, ordered a Screwdriver and began to listen.

Within an hour's time he had written down the joke about the old maid who caught her nose in the bathtub faucet, the one about the three traveling salesmen and the farmer's ambidextrous daughter, the one about the nurse who thought they were Spanish olives and the one about the midget in the frankfurter suit. Talbert wrote this last joke under his original transcription of it, underlining changes in context attributable to regional influence.

At 10:16, a man who had just told Talbert the one about the hillbilly twins and their two-headed sister said that Tony, the bartender, was a virtual faucet of off-color jokes, limericks, anecdotes, epigrams and proverbs.

Talbert went over to the bar and asked Tony for the major source of his lewdiana. After reciting the limerick about the sex of the asteroid vermin, the bartender referred Talbert to a Mr. Frank Bruin, salesman, of Oakland, who happened not to be there that night.

Talbert at once retired to a telephone directory where he discovered five Frank Bruins in Oakland. Entering a booth with a coat pocket sagging change, Talbert began dialing them.

Two of the five Frank Bruins were salesmen. One of them, however, was in Alcatraz at the moment. Talbert traced the remaining Frank Bruin to Hogan's Alleys in Oakland where his wife said that, as usual on Thursday nights, her husband was bowling with the Moonlight Mattress Company All-Stars.

Quitting the bar, Talbert chartered a taxi and started across the bay to Oakland, toes in ferment.

Veni, vidi, vici?

*   *   *

Bruin was not a needle in a haystack.

The moment Talbert entered Hogan's Alleys his eye was caught by a football huddle of men encircling a portly, rosy-domed speaker. Approaching, Talbert was just in time to hear the punch line followed by an explosion of composite laughter. It was the punch line that intrigued.

“‘My God!' cried the actress,” Mr. Bruin had uttered, “‘I thought you said a
banana split!
'”

This variation much excited Talbert who saw in it a verification of a new element—the interchangeable kicker.

When the group had broken up and drifted, Talbert accosted Mr. Bruin and, introducing himself, asked where Mr. Bruin had heard that joke.

“Why d'ya ask, boy?” asked Mr. Bruin.

“No reason,” said the crafty Talbert.

“I don't remember where I heard it, boy,” said Mr. Bruin finally. “Excuse me, will ya?”

Talbert trailed after him but received no satisfaction—unless it was in the most definite impression that Bruin was concealing something.

Later, riding back to the Millard Fillmore, Talbert decided to put an Oakland detective agency on Mr. Bruin's trail to see what could be seen.

When Talbert reached the hotel there was a telegram waiting for him at the desk.

Mr. Rodney Tassell received long distance call from Mr. George Bullock, Carthage Hotel, Chicago. Was told joke about midget in salami suit.
Meaningful?—Axe.

Talbert's eyes ignited.

“Tally,” he murmured, “
ho.
”

An hour later he had checked out of the Millard Fillmore, taxied to the airport and caught a plane for Chicago.

Twenty minutes after he had left the hotel, a man in a dark pin-stripe approached the desk clerk and asked for the room number of Talbert Bean III. When informed of Talbert's departure the man grew steely-eyed and immediately retired to a telephone booth. He emerged ashen.

*   *   *

“I'm sorry,” said the desk clerk, “Mr. Bullock checked out this morning.”

“Oh.” Talbert's shoulders sagged. All night on the plane he had been checking over his notes, hoping to discern a pattern to the jokes which would emcompass type, area of genesis and periodicity. He was weary with fruitless concentration. Now this.

“And he left no forwarding address?” he asked.

“Only Chicago, sir,” said the clerk.

“I see.”

Following a bath and luncheon in his room, a slightly refreshed Talbert settled down with the telephone and the directory. There were forty-seven George Bullocks in Chicago. Talbert checked them off as he phoned.

At three o'clock he slumped over the receiver in a dead slumber. At 4:21, he regained consciousness and completed the remaining eleven calls. The Mr. Bullock in question was not at home, said his housekeeper, but was expected in that evening.

“Thank you kindly,” said a bleary-eyed Talbert and, hanging up, thereupon collapsed on the bed—only to awake a few minutes past seven and dress quickly. Descending to the street, he gulped down a sandwich and a glass of milk, then hailed a cab and made the hour ride to the home of George Bullock.

The man himself answered the bell.

“Yes?” he asked.

Talbert introduced himself and said he had come to the Hotel Carthage early that afternoon to see him.

“Why?” asked Mr. Bullock.

“So you could tell me where you heard that joke about the midget in the salami suit,” said Talbert.

“
Sir?
”

“I said—”

“I heard what you said, sir,” said Mr. Bullock, “though I cannot say that your remark makes any noticeable sense.”

“I believe, sir,” challenged Talbert, “that you are hiding behind fustian.”

“Behind fustian, sir?” retorted Bullock. “I'm afraid—”

“The game is up, sir!” declared Talbert in a ringing voice. “Why don't you admit it and tell me where you got that joke from?”

“I have not the remotest conception of what you're talking about, sir!” snapped Bullock, his words belied by the pallor of his face.

Talbert flashed a Mona Lisa smile.

“Indeed?” he said.

And, turning lightly on his heel, he left Bullock trembling in the doorway. As he settled back against the taxicab seat again, he saw Bullock still standing there staring at him. Then Bullock whirled and was gone.

“Hotel Carthage,” said Talbert, satisfied with his bluff.

Riding back, he thought of Bullock's agitation and a thin smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. No doubt about it. The prey was being run to earth. Now if his surmise was valid there would likely be—

A lean man in a raincoat and a derby was sitting on the bed when Talbert entered his room. The man's mustache, like a muddy toothbrush, twitched.

“Talbert Bean?” he asked.

Talbert bowed.

“The same,” he said.

The man, a Colonel Bishop, retired, looked at Talbert with metal-blue eyes.

“What is your game, sir?” he asked tautly.

“I don't understand,” toyed Talbert.

“I think you do,” said the Colonel, “and you are to come with me.”

“Oh?” said Talbert.

To find himself looking down the barrel of a .45-caliber Webley-Fosbery.

“Shall we?” said the Colonel.

“But of course,” said Talbert coolly. “I have not come all this way to resist now.”

*   *   *

The ride in the private plane was a long one. The windows were blacked out and Talbert hadn't the faintest idea in which direction they were flying. Neither the pilot nor the Colonel spoke, and Talbert's attempts at conversation were discouraged by a chilly silence. The Colonel's pistol, still leveled at Talbert's chest, never wavered, but it did not bother Talbert. He was exultant. All he could think was that his search was ending; he was, at last, approaching the headwaters of the dirty joke. After a time, his head nodded and he dozed—to dream of midgets in frankfurter suits and actresses who seemed obsessed by sarsaparilla or banana splits or sometimes both. How long he slept, and what boundaries he may have crossed, Talbert never knew. He was awakened by a swift loss of altitude and the steely voice of Colonel Bishop: “We are landing, Mr. Bean.” The Colonel's grip tightened on the pistol.

Talbert offered no resistance when his eyes were blindfolded. Feeling the Webley-Fosbery in the small of his back, he stumbled out of the plane and crunched over the ground of a well-kept airstrip. There was a nip in the air and he felt a bit lightheaded. Talbert suspected they had landed in a mountainous region; but what mountains, and on what continent, he could not guess. His ears and nose conveyed nothing of help to his churning mind.

He was shoved—none too gently—into an automobile, and then driven swiftly along what felt like a dirt road. The tires crackled over pebbles and twigs.

Suddenly the blindfold was removed. Talbert blinked and looked out the windows. It was a black and cloudy night; he could see nothing but the limited vista afforded by the headlights.

“You are well isolated,” he said, appreciatively. Colonel Bishop remained tight-lipped and vigilant.

After a fifteen-minute ride along the dark road, the car pulled up in front of a tall, unlighted house. As the motor was cut Talbert could hear the pulsing rasp of crickets all around.

“Well,” he said.

“Emerge,” suggested Colonel Bishop.