The Bialy Pimps (47 page)

“Did you watch the fliers?”

“How is that important?”

Philip rubbed his chin. “Roger, then. Maybe Roger has been helping us.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Kato? I haven’t seen Kato in a while.”

“Maybe it was fate. Maybe we were fated to ride this out for a while, to have our moment in the sun. Why does there have to be a mysterious force protecting us – one that has now slipped up?”

“I don’t know. Just give me a minute to think.”

Beckie sighed and slouched against the wall. She allowed herself to slide down until she was sitting on the floor across from Philip’s office doorway, her knees up and tight against her chest. Jason’s plaster portrait leered from above her head. She said nothing.

“Hey, Beck – maybe Ted was right about the CIA. Accidentally, of course, since he’s a nutcase. But...”

“Will you listen to yourself?” she snapped. “It’s over. And maybe it’s for the best. The customers are getting stranger and stranger – masochists, really, who like being mistreated – and I’m getting tired of working so hard all the time. Maybe we should just let it happen.”

“We have a choice?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s easy for you to say ‘let it happen,’” Philip told the floor, “because you’re going to get off easy. I’m going to be crucified.”

“Isn’t Bingham’s incorporated?”

He looked down at her, curious. “The company is, sure. Why?”

“Because I think employees of an incorporated company – even the managers – aren’t responsible for lawsuits against the company.”

Philip shook his head. “Even if that’s true, this isn’t a complaint about something accidental, some dumb slip-and-fall bullshit. Someone could sue Bingham’s for
that,
and we’d be safe. This is assault. This is
us
. This is about
us
– as individual people – assaulting other people. The fact that we’re doing it inside of this deli doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

Beckie realized that she should have cared, but couldn’t summon the will. It was all too much. The new customers. Her malaise. The rapid-fire changes. And Ted, who wasn’t at all mysterious.
 

“I am so fucked,” said Philip.
 

“Yeah,” she replied, but she was just mouthing the word. It meant nothing. She couldn’t process the situation. Not long ago, Rich had honestly forgotten that it was inappropriate to press his butt against the glass front door and yell at waiting customers to fuck off, and a lot had changed since even that time. In the world Bingham’s had become, things like lawsuits felt distant and unreal, the kinds of things that happened in sci-fi movies.

Maybe there was still hope, she thought. Maybe Ted would save them.

Beckie put her head between her raised knees and began to breathe deeply.

When the lawyer came back the next day, Beckie was almost surprised. She had hoped that it was a dream, a bluff, a joke, or even a hallucination. It was not.

“Hey there,” he said.
 

Beckie said nothing.

“I’ve always meant to ask this and the timing is probably terrible, but what the hell. Would you like to have lunch with me before we get down to business?”

“No thanks,” she said icily.

Philip walked out from the back room and stood beside Beckie. The Anarchist followed.

“Suit yourself,” said Ray, nodding at the newcomers. “I’m still hungry, though. I’ll have ham and Swiss on onion.” He strolled over to the leftmost stool in front of the counter and laid his briefcase on one of the chairs. He seated himself on the one next to it.
 

The Anarchist had an idea while watching Philip make Ray’s sandwich.
 

“Spit in it,” he suggested.

The lunch rush progressed in its usual tumult, and the lawyer vanished into the background. He ate slowly, as if to heighten the drama.

“Spit on him,” the Anarchist suggested.

Nobody noticed the four men in dark suits and sunglasses until one of them walked up to Philip and flashed his badge.

“Are you in charge here?” the man asked Philip.

Philip said that he was.

“Secret Service,” the man said. “We have to take somebody out of here, but don’t worry; none of your customers will notice a thing.” He gestured toward the bathrooms. Three other tall men in identical dark suits had somebody cornered in the little hallway. It was Super Ass, esquire.

Philip couldn’t suppress a smile. “Can I ask what he’s done?”

“I’m sorry sir. That’s classified.”

The Anarchist and Beckie were watching, too. The agents worked with eerie efficiency. Despite the crowds and despite a small struggle, the three men whisked the lawyer and his briefcase away without a soul taking notice. They even cleaned off the table and threw away the rest of his sandwich. Then the lead agent nodded to Philip, tucked his badge away, and followed them out the door.
 

Beckie, Philip, and the Anarchist scampered after them, out the door, and around the corner. The agents were standing around a large black Cadillac that was parked in the alley. The lawyer was standing with his hands on its hood and his legs spread. He was being frisked. The lead agent was pressing on an earpiece and talking to his lapel.

The employees watched in wonder until the lawyer was shoved into the car, which then sped off.

Philip was the first to speak.
 

“See?” he said.

“He must have been counterfeiting,” said Beckie. “Or maybe he threatened the President.”

“Whatever you say,” said Philip, who had his own thoughts on the matter.

“This doesn’t mean we’re free and clear,” said the Anarchist. “His client will sue us. Super Ass was just a clerk – a delivery boy.”

And that sounded true, so everyone treaded carefully for a few days following the Gestapo-style arrest, but nothing happened. Mike even tempted fate by calling Philip’s law firm and impersonating a lawyer, inquiring about pending lawsuits against Bingham’s Bagel Deli on campus. If the man he spoke with was to believed, there were none.

Word got around that the arrest was directly related to the case against Bingham’s, and that Ted had masterminded it all. Rumors blossomed. It wasn’t long before the entire crew was ready to credit Ted with keeping all of the lawyers and policemen away, just as he had claimed. Beckie even looked on him with renewed respect.

Despite the impending danger that by all rights should still be there and despite the sense of a crisis barely avoided, business was back to its uproarious state of abnormal within a week. Ray Sapperstein’s paper trail – and apparently his outraged client – seemed to have vanished just as surely as had Ray himself. But that wasn’t the reason for the return to the new-old ways. The bigger feeling that surrounded the place was the sense that the incident seemed to be a sign from above. Bingham’s was blessed. Bingham’s had a guardian angel. Bingham’s could survive anything.

But just in case, Philip started to give Army Ted his Diet Cokes for free.

Tony arrived on Friday to clean the bathrooms. He was friendly, catching the spirit of joviality that had been in the air since the Super Ass arrest and taking it for himself, like a thief.

“Hey there young lady,” he said to Darcy, who had just finished subduing a not-entirely-reluctant customer with ropes and a ball gag. She was dressed as her dominatrix alter-ego, Mistress Hugetits, and wore black latex pants, a silver-spiked brassiere, and six-inch heels.

“You will pay,” she snarled at him.
 

“Now, now,” said Tony.

“You will clean the toilets with your bare hands,” she commanded.

“Oh, I don’t know...”

Darcy moved in a flash, spinning on him and whipping him severely with her leather cat o’ nine tails. “Silence!” she shouted. “Submit to Mistress Hugetits!”

“Yes ma’am!” said Tony, running toward the bathrooms.

But a few minutes later, Tony waddled out of the women’s room, his dominatrix-related excitement seemingly gone. He looked at Philip with an unreadable expression on his face.

“Did you happen to notice that the air freshener in the women’s room is broken?” he asked.

“No.”

Tony furrowed his brow. It looked as if he didn’t believe Philip.

“You know nothing about the air freshener in there?” he said.

“I know it smells UltraClean-y fresh,” said the Anarchist, who was sitting on the counter behind Philip.

“Well, it’s broken,” said Tony. “Did anyone see a piece of it that may have gotten kicked out here or anything? Because a... a sensor for the fan in the deodorizer seems to be missing.”

“What did it look like?”

In the background, Darcy could be heard whipping another supplicant.

“Uh, just... did anyone find anything at all?”

“No,” said Philip. “Nobody found anything. Can’t you just install a new air freshener?”

“Um... sure,” said Tony, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He pulled off his thick glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. “I’ll just... um... need to order one from the supplier.”

That was when Army Ted got hit by the COTA bus.

Jenny saw it all. She almost giggled in spite of herself.

Ted had been jaywalking as usual, walking jauntily from the undergraduate library and crossing High in front of Bingham’s, when a huge white bus appeared out of nowhere and hit him full-on with its flat face. Jenny was sitting at the counter along the front window at the time and saw it take place as if in slow motion. It was just like her own Ted-gets-hit-by-bus fantasy. She coughed a small laugh before something clicked, and she began to realize that it wasn’t at all funny.
 

She played it back in her mind in the minutes before the alarm began to screech: Ted, walking gaily across the street with his knobby knees exposed to the brisk December air beneath his trademark tan shorts. Ted, with his blue bag slung over his right shoulder like a purse, his baseball cap too high on his head, swaggering in a happy cadence across the street. A large bus rounding the corner from 15th at what has to be an illegal speed. Herself seeing it well before Ted but not thinking to warn him, even though it wouldn’t have done a bit of good. Ted and bus contacting brutally, as if with malice. Ted collapsing like a rag doll, clinging at first to the front of the bus and then dropping under its wheels, which run him over noisily, causing the entire bus to bounce and shake.

Before Jenny could form words but after she managed to turn to Philip, the Anarchist, Darcy, and the pervert who cleaned the bathroom, the alarm went off.
 

Philip ran to a panel and hit a few keys, silencing the noise. He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“A fire?” he asked the phone. “Our alarm is a door alarm! And it’s not even armed!”

“It’s a dual alarm,” a dry voice told him. “It’s all explained in the owner’s manual.”

Philip sniffed the air. “I don’t think we have a fire. I certainly didn’t pull an alarm, and there’s no smoke.”

“You don’t have to pull anything,” the dry voice replied. “We monitor the fire department radio bands. If there is a fire reported at one of our clients’ addresses, we set off your alarm for you.”

“We didn’t report a fire!”

The other line was ringing. The Anarchist answered it. Philip told the dry man at the security company to hang on and asked the Anarchist who it was.

“Columbus Fire Department,” he said. “They say a fire was reported at our address.”

“Who reported a fire?”

“Nobody reported a fire. There is no fire.”

Jenny was gasping for air. “Ted!” she managed to squeal.

The fire department was asking the Anarchist to check the dumpsters.
Someone
had reported a fire.

“The doors are locked!” Jenny was yelling. She looked like she was out of her mind. Across the street, an ambulance had pulled up and several EMTs were attending to the shorts-clad figure sprawled in the middle of the street. Pedestrians were beginning to gather as well, and were being held back by a policeman. She could see him mouthing:
Stand back. Stand back.

“Push!” Philip snapped at her.

Jenny was pushing, to no avail. “The light is red!” she shouted.

Philip turned his impatience to the phone. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that something had happened on the street out front. Lots of flashing lights. He asked the phone, “Why are our locks on? One of the people here says that the lock light is on, and that we are therefore stuck here.”

The dry voice cleared its throat. When it continued, it sounded as if it were reading from a procedure manual. “In the event of an emergency, the alarm activates, sealing the doors.”

Philip could feel his skin growing hot with anger. “What is this, a fucking museum heist? Are you really telling me that when there is a fire, you lock us
in?”

“In the event of an emergency, the alarm activates, sealing the doors.”

“Don’t you see a problem with that idea?” he hissed. “You’d be sealing us in
with the fire.”

The Anarchist had finished talking to the fire department and was listening in on Philip’s conversation. “There’s no fire,” he said, shaking his head.

Jenny was pressed against the front door. She kept jiggling the handle, but it was useless. If the alarm really had been tripped and if it had (as ridiculous as it seemed) locked the doors, then Bingham’s was as tight as a drum.
 

Ted had been loaded onto a stretcher. One of the EMTs was trotting up to the cab of the ambulance with Ted’s bag and hat, both of which had spun off in the collision. Jenny saw them again in her mind, the hat rolling away like a missed Frisbee as the bus contacted Ted with a muffled
Fwump!
The bag had been yanked from his arm by a skidding tire.

She
had
to get out there.

The Anarchist jogged out from the back room, having looked through the rear peephole to see if the dumpsters were on fire. He was shaking his head at Philip:
No fire.
He turned and craned his head at Jenny, past Jenny. Then Philip was yelling into the phone again, something about asking for a general alarm system rather than Fort Motherfucking Knox. The Anarchist was saying something to him.