Free Tiffany Street by Jerome Weidman Page B

“I’m Mr. Roon in person.” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s have it, shall we?”
    I handed over the envelope. He tore it open, pulled out the M.S.&Co. letterhead, and read Mr. Bern’s scrawled words, moving his lips as he did so. This gave me a chance to sneak a swift survey of the room. It was just about the same size as the outer room, and with a few exceptions much the same in atmosphere and furnishings. The same black-framed line drawings of rolling farmland. The same worn green carpet. The same brown furniture. Fewer but still the same kind of sagging green filing cabinets. There were no stand-up desks, however, and there was no picture of Queen Victoria. Oddly, I missed her. Where she should have been, behind the young man, there was a window that looked out on 21st Street, and his desk was an ordinary office flat top. I was paying so much attention to my surroundings because I sensed something was wrong with what was happening. This feeling was underscored when the young man started to laugh.
    “Well,” he said, “that explains it.”
    The fact that he was laughing did not sound as though he intended to fire Maurice Saltzman & Company as his auditors, which meant my job was safe. As safe, at any rate, as it had been half an hour ago, before Mr. Bern had started screaming on the telephone. This knowledge encouraged me to take a stab at erasing my feeling that something was wrong.
    “Explains what?” I said.
    I had almost added “sir.” But I couldn’t. Not to a kid who looked, even if he did not sound, as though he could have been in my graduating class at Thomas Jefferson High.
    “Why, what happened on the phone just a bit ago,” Mr. Roon said. Then he looked at me with suddenly aroused curiosity. “I take it you work for Mr. Bern?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Then it’s possible you were there when it happened,” Mr. Roon said. “Were you?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean I don’t know to what you’re referring.”
    This was a lie, of course, but it was the only way I felt I could inch my way to the core of this puzzling experience. Besides, Mr. Roon seemed surprisingly amiable and chatty.
    “Well, it was damned funny,” Mr. Roon said. He plopped down into his chair behind his desk and pointed to another chair beside the desk. “Do sit,” he said. “I want—”
    The laughter overtook him again. While it had him tied up I noticed several things: his hair was blond; he needed a haircut; his teeth, at least the ones I was able to see, could have done with some attention from a dentist; and he was wearing a suit made of a material my father admired. My father, being in the pants business, although not very far in, actually, after twenty-five years of making pockets had picked up some knowledge of fabrics. The shaggy herringbone out of which Mr. Roon’s suit had been cut, while identified by the rest of the world as tweed, was known to my father as tveet. This piece of tveet had been cut in an odd way. The lapels of Mr. Roon’s single-breasted suit peaked upward, like the ears of a rabbit, and the three buttons down the front were set close together, like the keys of a cornet. He stopped laughing and waved Mr. Bern’s letter in front of his face as though the laughter had made him feel warm and he was fanning himself.
    “I rang up your office and asked for him,” Mr. Roon said. “The girl who answered put me through at once, without asking my name, and before I had a chance to explain why I was calling, Mr. Bern—Mr. Bern—he—he—”
    Mr. Roon dropped the letter on the desk and covered his face with both hands, as though he was ashamed of the new attack of laughter that was shaking him. When he came out of it his eyes were actually wet at the corners.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. He wiped away the tears with his knuckles, though he continued to heave gently up and down in his chair. “But it was the damndest bloody thing. As I said, I didn’t even get a chance to say