“I can’t have you here hounding me!” he shouted, picking up his ear trumpet.
“Certainly!” cried Latzarel, standing up.
Captain Pince Nez menaced him with the trumpet, giving him a sidewise look.
“Another twenty!” Latzarel hissed, sitting back down. “This is no time to be thrifty.”
Edward waved a second twenty. Pince Nez, momentarily placated, snatched it out of his hand. The telephone rang. The captain ignored it until Edward, unable to stand its ringing, pointed at and raised his eyebrows.
‘It’ll cost you another twenty,” said Pince Nez.
“Give it to him,” said Latzarel, not looking up from his book.
Edward handed over another twenty, his last. The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Captain Pince Nez reached into his pocket and came up with the other two bills. Hugely surprised, he chewed the corner of one as if checking to see if it was authentic. “Damnation,” he said, impressed. “Who are you boys with?”
“With?” asked Edward weakly.
“Are you for him of against him?” Pince Nez looked up sharply.
“Against him,” shouted Edward, wisely assuming that after ninety-two years Captain Pince Nez must be against almost everyone.
“The bastard,” said the captain, shaking his head tiredly. “But I’ve got this money.” He waved the three twenties. “Payola. He’s afraid of me. I know too much.” He grinned slyly, then looked across at Latzarel, who was turning the pages of his book, profound amazement crossing his brow in waves.
“Who is he?” shouted Edward, as casually and nonchalantly as the circumstances would allow.
“What do you know about him?” Pince Nez shouted back, squinting hard at Edward and draining his tumbler. He pinged his finger against a brass cylinder that sat in the corner of the room, an unidentifiable maritime remnant.
Edward shook his head darkly, trying to phrase a question with which to respond to the captain’s question. He couldn’t think of one, so he said, “Who?” hoping it wouldn’t sound suspicious to the old man.
“Ignatz,” said Pince Nez, “de Winter.”
“That’s the one!” Edward shouted, knowing nothing more than he had a moment before. “What do you know about him?” The conversation seemed to Edward to be growing oddly circular.
“Carp don’t die,” said Pince Nez. “I know that much. Yes-sir.”
Edward nodded, baffled. Then, almost without meaning to, he leaned toward Captain Pince Nez and cried, “What do you make of Ashbless?”
Latzarel jerked up from his reading at the sound of the name. Pince Nez sat back in his chair and waved his hand tiredly, as if to say that he was fed up with the likes of Ashbless — that he’d had enough of him. Edward widened his eyes at Latzarel and made a similar tired gesture at Pince Nez to encourage him.
“The old poet?” asked the captain, smiling vaguely as if reminiscing about some event in the distant past.
Latzarel closed his book. Edward blinked back his surprise. Pince Nez shook his head. “I met him and Blanding out in Pedro,” he said, pronouncing the word with a long “e.” “Blanding was good, but Ashbless, he was old. Tired I guess. Crazy as a loon is what I think.”
“Blanding?” asked Latzarel into the captain’s ear trumpet.
“The other poet.” Pince Nez gave Latzarel an appraising look, then raised himself out of his chair in order to have a better look at his pipe table. Edward was afraid that Latzarel would insist that Pince Nez be given more money, but the crisis passed and the captain relaxed. He looked momentarily puzzled, then tapped against the brass cylinder again, slowly shutting his eyes.
Edward, supposing that the old man was falling asleep, shouted, “Hello!” then grinned immediately as Knee Nez lurched awake. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the three crumpled bills, licked his fingers, and counted through them twice.
“How much do you figure I owe you?” he asked Edward, who said immediately, “Forty ought to do it,” but was drowned out halfway through by Latzarel who yelled, “Nothing. Nothing at all! What about Ashbless? The poet?”
“Hired me to sail him to the Berdoo Straits.”
“To San Bernardino?” Edward asked.
“Pretty much.”
“When?” Latzarel gave Edward a look, nodding and pointing to the book, as if implying that within it lay an explanation of the phenomenon of sailing to San Bernardino, which lay, of course, some fifty miles inland from the coast and utterly distant from any sizeable river.
Edward nodded at Pince Nez and shouted, “When?’
“Thirty-six,” said Pince Nez without hesitation. “Two years before the damned earthquake closed off the inland passage. Too damn bad, too.”
Edward nodded in commiseration. “That would have made you sixty-five or sixty-six.” Pince Nez squinted and counted the fingers of one hand laboriously, then left off and shrugged. “How old was Ashbless when you took him out to Berdoo?”
“Hard to say. He might’ve been a hundred. Easy that. Only I didn’t take him to Berdoo. Never got that far. I ferried him up toward Pasadena and some damn creature capsized us. I never seen the like. Ship went down. We both come out into the L. A. River and got drunk as lords off Los Feliz at a spot called Tommy’s Little Oasis. I remember that like yesterday.”
“Creature?” asked Latzarel.
Pince Nez stared at him.
“What creature?’
“Now I don’t know, do I?” said Pince Nez. “There was all sorts down there, wasn’t there?”
“Of course there were,” said Edward. “This was a big one though?”
The captain nodded. The telephone rang again, shooting Edward out of his chair like a comet. Pince Nez made no move to pick it up. Edward, finally, reached across and answered it. There was silence at the other end, perhaps breathing, then a long ululating laugh — the laugh of a complete and far-flung lunatic that sounded weirdly distant, as if the source were far from the phone, as if the caller had dialed the number, set the phone down, ran off down a long hallway and through a couple of closed-off rooms and laughed wildly. A click and a dial tone followed the laugh. The whole thing was a mystery to Edward, and, of course, was none of his business. But it was unsettling even so. In fact, he was suddenly struck with the certainty that it was his business, that the caller had expected him to answer the phone, would have understood the futility of calling to talk to Pince Nez.
“Wrong number,” said Edward, hanging up. Captain Pince Nez was asleep in his chair. Latzarel stood up, tiptoeing toward the door, carrying his precious book. Edward hesitated, fairly certain that Pince Nez had never understood that he was selling the volume. He was half tempted to wake the old man up and explain it through the ear trumpet until he saw, supporting the bottom shelf of a ruined bookcase, a half dozen more worn copies of the book stacked atop one another. More lay in a heap in a cardboard box, shoved half in behind the same bookcase. The top copy was missing a cover and had obviously been used for years as a coaster. Edward looked at the three twenties lying atop the table in front of Pince Nez and shook his head. He didn’t regret the captain’s keeping them; he regretted only that they had been his twenties and not Latzarel’s. His friend gestured at him from the open front door, and Edward hurried down the steps after him, filling him in on the strange phone call.
“Tomfoolery,” said Latzarel, waving his book. “Kids.”
“It didn’t sound like kids.”