“See, this noggin o’ mine goes down into history for the third time,” one professional thief announced triumphantly to the guard, after Eszterhazy had completed the reading of his remarkably unlovely head.
“The rest of yous has already gone down into history five or six times on the Bertillion System” the guard said.
“Ahah, yous is just jealous, har har, thanks Purfessor for the baccy chit!” And he swaggered off, prepared to spend three to five years under circumstances which no farmer would provide for his dogs or oxen. However, interventions on the part of Eszterhazy had already worked to the abolishment of the so-called Water Cure punishment and of the infamous Pig Pen.
So the Docket of Doctor Eszterhazy was rather full.
And so he made no much-about the tiny article, almost a filler, in the Evening Gazette of Bella:
The Honorable Police can give no substance to rumors about alleged thefts of certain antique jewelry, it was learned today by Our Correspondents.
And he passed on to the lead-feuilleton of the issue, entitled, by a most curious coincidence, The Romance of Old Jewelry. Liebfrow, the Editor of the Evening Gazette, was in many ways an old nannykins. But not in so many ways that he was unable to get a point across with a delicacy envied by other editors.
Skimming through the article, noticing references to the Iron Crown of the Lombards, the Cyprus Regalia, and the Crown of St. Stephen (the feuilleton seemed somewhat heavy on regalia), Eszterhazy noticed some word which triggered a small mechanism deep in his mind. He had not quite
registered it on the upper level and was about to go over the article, column by column, when his Tsigane Servant, Herrek silently set upon the table a dish of cheese dumplings. And although the master of the premises at Number 33, Turkling Street, could have endured it very well if cheese dumplings were to be abolished by joint resolution of both Houses of the Imperial Diet, he knew that his housekeeper, Frow Widow Or gats, prided herself on her cheese dumplings — indeed, she regarded it as though an article of faith established by the Council of Trent that her master was delirious-fond of her cheese dumplings — speaking of them in high praise to the Faculties of Law and Medicine — and praising their remarkable lightness and sweetness to the Gentry and Nobility: in fact
(Esterhazy knew damned well from experience) she was certainly even now behind the dining-room door, waiting expectantly.
So he performed.
“Ah, Herrek, Herrek!”
“Lord,” said Herrek, a Tsigane of few words.
“Ah, these cheese dumplings of Frow Widow Orgats!”
“Lord.”
“How delightfully sweet, how incredibly light!”
“Lord.” .
“Herrek, be sure and see she gives you some. Let me know, should she overlook doing so.”
“Lord.”
And next Eszterhazy made a series of sounds indicating his being reduced to wordless ecstasy by the mere mastication of the cheese dumplings. And then he felt free to continue the rest of his dinner. Should he overlook having done all this, Frow Widow Or gats, an, after all, truly first-rate Cook and Housekeeper, otherwise would clump down back into her kitchen a prey to Injury and Grudge, slam about the tinned-copper cookpots, and burn the coffee.
And, by the time this Comedy of Manners was completed, Eszterhazy had clean forgotten what it was that he wanted to do about the newspaper piece on the Romance of Jewels. So he set it aside to be boxed for later perusal.
It was over the coffee and the triple-distillation liqueur of plum that the message arrived at the hands of Emmerman the night- porter. The message consisted of some words scribbled over, as it happened, a copy of the same feuilleton.
“What’s this, Emmerman?”
“Someone give it me, Lord Doctor.”
“What someone?”
“Dunno Lord Doctor. He ran off.” Emmerman, bowing, departed to take up his post of duty
from Lemkotch, the day-porter.
“Well, Eszterhazy,” said himself to himself, “you train your servants to be brief, you must not complain if they are not prolix.”
See Sludge, said the message, in its entirety. The handwriting tended towards the script favored in the official Avar-language schools of Pannonia, which brought it down to only seven million or so possible people. Still, that was a start of sorts. As for Sludge. The word was an epithet for any of the three and one half to four million Slovatchko-speaking subjects of the Triune Monarchy and for their language. Its use was rather a delicate matter. “Who you shoving, Sludge?” was, for example, grounds for blows. Yet. Yet the same person who violently objected to the word might easily say, “Speak Sludge” — meaning, Talk sense. Or: “What, three beers ‘much to drink?” Who you talking to? You talking to a Sludge!” On reflection, and considering that the message had been scribbled on a newspaper....
There was always a kind of genteel pretense in the office of the Evening Gazette that the premises constituted a sort of extension of the College of Letters. No such notion had ever obtained in the raucous chambers of the Morning Report, where sometimes the spit hit the spittoon, and sometimes it did not, and nobody cared or commented, as long as the details of the interview with the Bereaveds of the latest butcher-shop brawl got set down in full, rich, descriptions. Whereas the Gazette (if it mentioned the distasteful matter at all) might say, The deceased was almost decapitated by the fatal blow. One of his employees was taken into custody: the Report would be giving its readers something to the effect that, Blood was all over the bedroom of the Masterbutcher Helmuth Oberschlager whose head was pretty nearly all chopped off by the frenzied blows supposedly delivered in an enraged lovequarrel over the affections of Frow Masterbutcher Helga Oberschlager, third wife of the elderly Masterbutcher Helmuth Oberschlager. The corpse lay almost upside-down propped against the bloodstained bed and the scant undergarment of Journeyman- butcher, etc.
That was the way they did things at the Report.
As the editor of the Report had been born in the Glagolitic Alps, the very heart-land of the Slovatchko, he was not eligible to become President of the United States. So, instead, he had accomplished something almost as difficult namely, becoming editor of the largest circulation Gothic- language newspaper in the Imperial (and, officially Gothic-speaking) Capital. Where he disarmed all insults in advance by using the nickname of “Sludge” almost to the entire exclusion of his real name.
There would be little point in making references to someone’s illegitimacy if he chose to answer his telephone with, “Bastard speaking, yeah?”
So.
“Hello, Sludge.”
“Hel-lo Hel-lo! Doctor Eszterhazy! What an honor! Clear out of that chair, you illiterate son of a vixen” — this, to his star reporter, who had in fact already stood up and was offering the chair — “and let the learned doctor sit down. “Thank you, Swarts.”