Oyster Man

 Ms. Tari Tamborino, receptionist at the accounting offices of Marshall Pope & Company, was a lively and undeniably attractive young woman, but she was not noted within the firm for her mastery of the small niceties of business etiquette. Thus it was not surprising that when at ten minutes to five on a Friday afternoon the phone at the front desk began to ring, it was not immediately answered. While Line One blinked imploringly, Ms, Tamborino remained on Six, making plans for the latest weekend with her latest boyfriend.
 Blink…Blink…the annoying caller simply would not give up and go away. “Hold on, Babe,” said Tari, frowning, “Got to take a call.”
 Depressing the blinking button, she switched to her receptionist’s voice. “Good Afternoon,” she purred into the receiver, “Marshall Pope & Company.”
 A violent torrent of abuse crackled from the other end of the receiver, causing her to wince slightly, and pull her ear away. But after six months on the job, Tari was an old hand at this sort of thing. 
 “Oh, I’m so so sorry, Sir,” she interjected smoothly. “We’re a little short-handed at the front desk this afternoon. No, I’m afraid that Mr Pope has left for the weekend. Can I take a…”
 The abuse at the other end of the line grew even more torrential. “If you just wait a minute, Sir," Tari interrupted sharply, her silken tones now quite vanished, “I’ll try to find somebody to help you.”
Punching the red “Hold” button, she mumbled a quick obscenity under her breath, and considered whom to call. Which clueless unfortunate might still be around at this time on a Friday afternoon?   
As the intercom buzzed in his tiny cubicle, Harold Twilliby pushed down his spectacles, staring in annoyance at the offending instrument. It was (as he had been at some pain to inform the reception staff) his habit to employ this quiet hour at the close of business to keep up with the professional literature. At the moment, he was absorbed in a workmanlike, sturdily crafted editorial piece—The Dark Side of S-Elections: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You—in the September issue of Tax Talk Monthly.
“Yes?” he asked testily, and said nothing more for some moments, as he listened to the receptionist’s frantic entreaties. “I understand,” he said at last, crisply cutting her off. “Yes…in about ten minutes.”
 For a moment he sat staring out his window; or rather at the place where his window would have been, if the firm had chosen to give him one. Then he stirred himself to action. From a dusty corner of the cubicle, he extracted an enormous litigation case—not new, but clearly not despoiled by excessive usage—and proceeded, in his methodical way, to inventory the contents. A crisp yellow legal pad. A brace of razor -sharp pencils. A powerful portable calculator, in immaculate working order: to this he added a fresh paper cartridge, smacking it home into its plastic receptacle with a practiced thrust of the open palm. A modest selection of tax references, and topping it all off, a glossy green and white pamphlet: “Interviewing Clients the Marshall Pope Way,” with a droll, erudite foreword
by Marshall Pope himself,
 Preparations completed, he marched through the nearly deserted staff room, gazing severely over his spectacles at a group of juniors skylarking in the corner. As usual, they paid not the slightest attention. 
 “Good Luck, Mr. Twilliby,” said Ms. Tamborino from her elegant station at the front desk. He inclined his head graciously, but really, luck was not necessary: not when one was girded with a solid grounding in scientific accounting, and the immense resources of Marshall Pope & Co. Through the revolving doors he passed out onto the sidewalk, where he stood quietly, litigation case in hand, awaiting the arrival of this, the very first client with whom the firm had ever seen fit to trust him.
 Up to the curb thundered a cream Mercedes—not a sleek modern number, but a squarish, battered behemoth from the Seventies, built like a Soviet tan and belching great toxic clouds of diesel fumes. Through the suffocating blue haze, Harold could just make out a small plastic placard:

     Pride of Barataria Seafood
     Patel “Buster” Vilanovitch, Prop.

before the tinted window slid down, and a huge, hairy, bejewled-and-Rolexed hand motioned Harold frantically towards the passenger door.  Harold slipped in, and they rocked back into the stream of traffic, ignoring the blaring horns and colorful foreign invective from the cabbies cut off behind them. 
As they accelerated, Harold found himself slaloming down the slippery seat cover, so that he soon sprawled half on the floor, heels dug deep into the cream pile carpet, the heavy litigation case tottering precariously atop his chest.
“Bavarian!” shouted his client over the wild scream of the engine. 
“I beg your pardon?”
“Hand-tooled Black Forest leather. You can’t get this shit anymore.
A chick’ll get her ass on that seat cover, and she’ll slide up and down on it and go like ‘Ooh, is this leather, Baby?’, and I go ‘Leather, Shit, Baby, it’s Bavarian!”
He leered at Harold with a piratical grin, exposing a row of fierce white teeth between the raven tangles of his unkempt beard.  In lieu of standard business attire, he wore a vividly striped silk shirt, open to the third button. A spicy-sweet aroma of cologne wafted from his massive sunburnt chest, mixing pungently with traces of fresh seafood from somewhere in the back seat.
Harold said nothing, but rode for some blocks in a cowed silence. It was altogether disconcerting to keep a business appointment, only to find oneself flying through the evening traffic with Blackbeard. Finally, however, his innate sense of professional responsibility managed to reassert itself.
“Mr. Vilanovich…”
“Buster!”
“Er, Buster…Aren’t we heading in the wrong direction?”
“Well, if we are, cher,” Buster roared, neatly cutting off an audacious silver Lexus attempting to sneak by on the right, “We sure as shit got us a lot of company!”
 “No, no. What I mean is…isn’t City Hall over there?”
 “City Hall! Now who could you find at City Hall this time of day?  Them lazy sons-of-bitches all at home stuffing their faces!”
 “But…Don’t we have an appointment with a City Tax Inspector?”
 Buster shot him a crafty look. “Well, sure we do, cher, but we not meeting at City Hall! This is what you might call your Field Audit. Say!” he said, wrenching the wheel violently to the right and accelerating recklessly through a narrow, trash-strewn alley, “you like oysters, Harold?”
 They came to rest in a final glorious cloud of diesel smoke under a high brick archway in the trendily refurbished area known as the Warehouse District. Out of the blue haze a figure emerged: a leggy blonde in top hat and clinging gold lamé, looking unlikely in her industrial surroundings, like a hoofer who has absentmindedly misplaced her chorus line. She waved her arms wildly as Buster bounded from the car.
 “Well, Hello Baa-By!” she hooted.
 “Well, Hell-O, Baby!”
 “You brung us dem ersters, Baby?”
 “You know I brung you dem ersters, Baby! Hey, Lil Man,” he said to Harold, who was gingerly attempting to extricate himself from the front well of the Mercedes, “No time now to dilly-dally.  Gimme a hand with this shit.”
To his horror, Harold found his narrow shoulders suddenly encumbered with a wet, filth-encrusted burlap sack encasing fifty premium   
pounds of Pride of Barataria oysters. Staggering under the ungainly burden, clinging with his slippery fingertips to the leather handle of his litigation case, Harold followed Buster under the high brick archway.
“Baby,” said Buster. “This is Harold.”
The blonde gave him a dazzling smile. “Welcome, Harold,” she murmured seductively. “Welcome to ‘For Gentlemen Only’.”
The interior of the club was sparkling, all bright lights and marble and richly polished brass. The effect was almost…well, clinical…so much so that Harold felt guilty with his muddy sack of oysters, as if he had been caught importing noxious specimens into the sterile confines of a particularly well-appointed laboratory. Behind a slab-like granite bar stood a dour black man in tuxedo shirt and fancy embroidered vest. He grunted when he spotted Buster. 
“Bout time you brung us dem ersters, man.”
“They free, ain’t they? And when you gonna learn to talk? The
cor-rect pronunciation is ‘oysters’, asshole. Why don’t you shuck us a couple while you standing there?”
 “Go shuck yourself,” replied the black man.
 “Old oyster joke,” Buster said to Harold, who was sniffing at his suit jacket with an expression of disbelief. “Hey, don’t worry about it, Baby!” Buster crowed. “Now you smell like a man!”
Harold felt a twinge of annoyance  A bit of bluff male tomfoolery was acceptable, perhaps even desirable, but it must not be allowed to distract from the serious exchange of business information which lay at the heart of scientific accounting.
“Buster,” he said sternly, using the schoolmaster’s voice he ordinarily reserved for errant juniors. “Perhaps it would be best for us to get down to business.”
Buster assumed a look of mock contrition. “Yes,” he agreed humbly, “We must get down to business.”
 He grabbed the arm of a minimally clad young woman passing by with a tray. “Miss,” he asked, “Could you possibly show us to a quiet corner?”
 “Sure, Buster,” she replied. Holding the tray aloft, she led them through a maze of sturdy cylindrical tables, occupied for the most part by shirtsleeved, tie-loosened businessmen of the large and hearty variety.
 “Bring us a couple of Mambos, cher,” said Buster, “and a dozen on the half-shell if Burnell ever gets off his ass and shucks them. And we supposed to meet Eccles, so keep an eye out for him.”
 She wrinkled her nose. “That prick!”
 “Oh, Eccles is all right,” Buster said cryptically, “if you got you one of them concealed weapons permits.” 
 Harold did not, perhaps, devote sufficient attention to this interesting exchange. He was busy unpacking, arranging the contents of the huge litigation case as tidily as might be upon the sparse surface area of the little round table.
 “Now then, Buster,” he said at last, leaning back in contemplative posture, right hand on chin, “Suppose you tell me what it is that brings us here today.” 
 It was a considered (if somewhat garbled) version of that classic Marshall Pope gambit, the open-ended interview question. Never “push” the interview in a particular direction, Marshall Pope argued:

 This is the mark of the tyro. The skilled accountant does not
 indulge in theoretical calisthenics before absorbing all of the
 relevant factual background, just as a therapist does not
 impose his own intellectual.predilections—behaviorist,
 Freudian, what have you—upon his hapless patient, in advance
 of a thorough examination.

 By way of answer, Buster fished a grimy, fish-scented sheet of official correspondence out of the back pocket of his jeans, and handed it over.  Harold read it—and read it again. Theory doffed its cap and made a polite but hasty exit; Brutal Reality arrived, suitcase in hand, upon the threshold.
 “Buster,” he said slowly, “You haven’t filed a sales tax return in sixteen years?”
 “It do seem like it been a while,” Buster agreed cheerfully.   
 “Sixteen years, Buster!”
“It ain’t nothing, Baby.”
“Nothing?” Harold asked, shaken. “Buster, this is willful tax evasion!  These are potential criminal charges!”
 “It ain’t nothing, Baby. They just trawling—seein’ what they can pull in. And anyway,” he said, whacking Harold affectionately between the shoulder blades, “That’s why I brought along my Tax Man.”
 “Me?” gasped Harold, reeling from the violent force of his client’s affections. “What can I do?” Could the man be truly such an innocent? Could he not see that it was already too late—that, already, the matter had passed from the civilized charge of the accountants, and into the pitiless talons of the District Attorney?
“I got faith in you, Baby.” I knew the mo-ment I laid eyes on you that you got what you call your Inner Fortitude. Now let’s have us a little drink on it!”
The waitress had returned, bearing a pair of evil-looking black longnecks and a large platter of shucked oysters on a bed of cracked ice.
“Eccles is in the back with Johnny,” she said. “Say’s he’ll be out when he gets out.”
“We certainly lookin’ forward to that,” commented Buster. Graciously, he shoved the platter in Harold’s direction. Harold looked at the oysters, quivering in their half-shells like so many shots of runny gray Jello, and shuddered. But Buster persisted.
“Now don’t do me like that, cher,” he pleaded, black eyes pooling up with insincere pathos, “A man don’t like to dine alone in his hour of trial.”
Such was the force of the man’s outrageous bonhomie that, much to his own surprise, Harold found himself relenting. Under the present circumstances, he reasoned, a certain degree of fraternization might help to ease what was clearly developing as a sticky situation. Winching his eyes tightly shut, he nibbled at the puckered folds of one of the creatures, washing the salty slime from his tongue with a massive draught from the longneck. Surprisingly, he found it rather good. The salty tang of the oyster neutralized the bitterness of the thick black ale, giving it zest and flavor. Craning his head back, Harold drank deeper, experiencing as he did a pleasant, yeasty tingling that seemed to begin somewhere in the center of his stomach, and bubble all the way up to the glowing tips of his ears.
“And now,” floated out a rich, mellow, master-of-ceremonies voice, “a special revue meant For Gentlemen Only!”
“Allons! Allons! Bring ‘em on Baby!” bellowed Buster. But for once even his raucous tones were lost, submerged beneath a thundering wave of electric, pulsating rock which seemed to erupt form the very walls and ceiling. And from all directions swarmed the most beautiful girls—girls? No, no, women, goddesses, snaking their way through the crowded tables in stately procession, their naked, glistening upper bodies swaying voluptuously to the throbbing beat.
Here and there a deity broke out of the pantheon and made her way to a table, as one of the more seasoned patrons enticed her with a thick wad of currency. Buster’s, unsurprisingly, was the thickest of all. Harold jumped as he felt a warm softness pillowed against the back of his neck, and smelled a sweet, heady, utterly intoxicating fragrance. A slender hand rested lightly upon his shoulder, and then she was past, using him as a fulcrum to swing herself deftly atop the table.
The base line shook the walls…I wanna, I wanna, I wanna…Her spiked heels were making confetti of his neatly arranged spreadsheets. Harold gave a little cry as The Marshall Pope Interview went flying, and would have lunged to recover it.  But he was held in check by the hypnotic undulations of her unfettered bosoms, swaying back, forth, back, forth, only inches away from his astonished face. Did the accounting literature contemplate this particular set of circumstances? He thought not.
“TITS!” screamed Buster over the din.
“I beg your pardon?” shouted Harold, flushing.
“TIPS! TIPS! She waiting for her tip!”
It was true. The goddess was staring down at him as she danced, a hint of impatience in her expression. Flushing deeper, he fished a twenty out of his wallet, and hesitantly offered it to her. She looked at the money, looked back at him. He opened his wallet again—extracted the remaining cash on hand—and attempted to place it in her swaying palm.
“Not like that, L’il Man!” laughed Buster wildly. “Like this!”   Snatching Harold’s money, he stuffed bills down the front of her sequined G-string, plunging his meaty fingers in hard and deep.
“Ohh, ohh, Baby!” he moaned. “So GOOD, Baby!’ The goddess played along, giving a shiver of feigned ecstasy. Then she was gone, hopping off the table as deftly as she had hopped on. But as she rejoined the passing parade, Harold was surprised to received the favor of a wink, and an airy, almost imperceptible caress upon his left cheek.
The waitress appeared with a reinforcement of fresh Mambos. “He’s coming!” she shouted over the unholy thunder, peering back through the gloom as she bent down to pick up the empties. “Eccles..”
“Thank you, cher,” said Buster, suddenly foxy and alert. “Now, don’t worry about a thing, L’il Man,” he buzzed into Harold’s ear, draping a massive, conspiratorial forearm around the accountant’s slender shoulders. “We jus’ follow the plan, and it’s all copasetic.”
 Harold had not been listening. Adrift on a pleasant sea of fermentation, his only thoughts had been of pillows, and gossamer, and sweet scented bowers. Now he came down from Elysium with a bump.
 “Plan?” he started. “We have a plan?”
 Buster wagged his bushy black eyebrows piratically. 
 Out of the dimness came a nasty croak. “Saw ya with Miss October, Buster,” it said. “Ya gonna wash that hand or keep it for a souvenir?”
 Peeking gingerly over his scattered spreadsheets, Harold looked up to see what new horror was about to be visited upon him. It came in the form of a balding, mottled, immensely squat gentleman sporting baggy polyester pants, tinted aviator glasses and a short-sleeved Filipino dress shirt. He bore a truly uncanny resemblance to the Amazonian Pygmy Tree Toad (bolus maleveantus) which had so fascinated Harold and his sister Delphinia in their childhood visits to the Dayton Herpetarium.
“Have some oysters, Eccles,” Buster exclaimed genially. “That
o-fficial government business been keeping you busy, heh?”
“They’s a guy here thought he could fuck with me,” Eccles replied ominously. “They’s a guy thought wrong, too.” Lowering himself to the little table (or as close to the table as his immense frontal bulk would allow), he snatched greedily at the plate of oysters, devouring them in lightning succession. Harold and Buster watched in fascination as oyster-laden half shells were lifted to the mouth with conveyer efficiency—right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand—then tilted to the precise angle at which the gelatinous contents could best be suctioned suctioned between the fleshy mottled lips.
“Damn, Eccles,” commented Buster as the last empty half-shell clattered back atop the melting ice on the platter, “I guess you won’t have none of them im-potency problems tonight.”
“Never mind, Smart-Ass,” snarled Eccles. A silver string of mucus still trailed from the fleshy corner of his lips. Out shot his tongue, appallingly sticky and red; the mucus disappeared. Toilette completed, he turned to stare at Harold. “This is the guy?”
“This is the guy,” replied Buster. 
“All right,” said Eccles. “This is how it goes down, OK?”
Harold could not quite suppress a small drunken impulse to giggle. “With the plan!” he snarled back, getting into the Pulp Fiction spirit of the occasion.
Eccles peered at him with hard, glassy frog eyes.
“The plan! I’m the guy! The guy with the plan!”
“What the fuck is his problem, Buster?”
“Now don’t worry,” said Buster jovially, laying his huge hairy paw on Harold’s knee, and squeezing very hard. “My boy just havin’ a little fun, is all!”
“Looks like a fucking rummy to me,” grunted Eccles.  “It’s real simple, OK? You pass the nut; your boyfriend here signs off on the paperwork…” handing a small manila folder to Harold “…and I get out of this fucking hole before one of these bitches gives me some fucking disease, OK?”
“Sounds like a fucking plan to me,” said Buster conversationally.  “How dem doc-u-ments look to you, L’il Man?”
Harold struggled for clarity.  A thought was trying to surface, rising through the flood tide of bubbly black syrup that surged through his motor cells, clogging his synapses, coating his hitherto immaculate neurons.  Could this toadish buffoon be suggesting…dare he actually propose…No, surely not!
Time! Time was what he needed now, a moment of blessed solitude to gather his thoughts and allow the razor instincts of the trained accountant to reassert themselves. Unsteadily he rose. “Where’s the head, fellas?” he asked, priding himself, even in his current travails, in his sly ability to retain the vernacular.
“Now?” snarled Eccles.  “Now you to take a leak?”
“Don’t constipate yourself, Eccles,: said Buster, pointing Harold toward the same gilded archway through which the procession of goddesses had disappeared, “If nature call a man loud enough, he just gotta answer.”
Frantically, Harold beat a retreat through the maze of tables, bouncing off boisterous lawyers and businessmen, scattering profuse apologies as he went. At the corner of the bar two idle chaps—one sharp and wizened, one ruddy and enormous, like Mutt and Jeff—leaned against the slab-like granite and eyeballed him as he hastened past. “Good evening,” he said bobbing his head politely.
“How are ya?” replied Jeff. Mutt said nothing, but only stared coldly over the top rim of his untouched highball. Unnerved, Harold scurried towards the exit as if the very hellhounds of the Professional Ethics Committee were snapping at his heels.
No accountant is an island. It was high time, if ever, to call upon the vaunted resources of Marshall Pope and Company. In a dim nook adjacent to the Lounge he spotted—oh praise be!—a pay phone. Dear Lord in heaven, how would he explain this fiasco to his superiors in the Tax Department? But never mind that now. Quickly, man, quickly! With trembling fingers, he punched at the familiar numbers. The phone rang—rang again, and yet again. In the cool dimness of the little nook he leaned against the wall, listening to the mocking echo of the unanswered phone, and knew in his heart that Ms. Tamborino, that paragon of inefficiency, had forgotten yet again to transfer the line to the answering service.
 “Are you through?”
 Harold looked up, bewildered, and wiped awkwardly at his glasses. Against the strong light at the entrance to the nook a tall figure stood silhouetted.
 “With the phone?” she moved closer, clutching at a loose terry robe that coved her to the middle of her lanky thighs. “Because I really need to make a call.”
 “Don’t I know you?” She leaned towards him, and for the second time that evening he drank in that light, heady, intoxicating fragrance which lifted him up on his toes, then sent him bouncing back down like a slinky atop his rubbery knees.
 “Hey! I remember! You’re that guy that was sitting with Buster at Thirteen—the one that gave me that enormous tip.”
Harold nodded, thinking ruefully of his empty wallet. “Twilliby,” he replied, remembering his manners. “Harold Twilliby. Marshall Pope and Company.”
“No sh—I mean no kidding!” she exclaimed. “Hey! You must know my sister Tari! She works at Marshall Pope and Company!”
“Not Tari Tamborino?” he asked incredulously.
“Un-huh!” she enthused. “I’m Taffi Tamborino!”
Sure enough, under the cascading golden locks, the stiffly painted working mask of the professional goddess, he could discern the dark and lovely Tamborino features. “My,” he said, struggling for a non-committal observation. “Your sister. Imagine that.”
“She’s a sweet kid,” said Taffi quickly. “She can be a little, you know—unfocused—but she’s really very sweet.”
“Yes,” echoed Harold. “Very sweet.”
“Listen, Harold,” she whispered, clutching his arm confidentially and moving very close indeed. “Are you guys really here with that creep Eccles?”
Her loose robe had fallen open,  Inexorably his eyes wandered downward: blushing wildly, he wrenched them up again.  He could feel the heat from her sweaty, glistening body; in the close confines, a tide of fragrant warmth surged forth to envelope him. “Eccles,” he said, striving manfully for concentration. “Yes…with Eccles.”
“Harold, are you listening? Because this is truly, like, not a good night to be doing business.”
He was listening. The warm perfumed air suddenly turned frigid, congealing into tiny sharp crystals of paranoia that lingered for an instant, then drifted down, gently down, to settle atop the prickly little hairs on the back of his neck.
“Because the word is that Eccles has been seriously squeezing Johnny Santobellini for the last six months—you know Johnny? Albert Santobellini’s little fat cousin?”
 Yes, Harold nodded. Yes yes yes. (Who the devil was Johnny Santobellini?)
 “You know—Johnny! Johnny who runs the club! Well, the word is that Johnny is like seriously pissed, and I’m here to tell you that Johnny is not the kind of guy who lays there with his mouth open and waits for you to piss on him. Like that time that he caught. me using the phone in the dressing room to call my mom down in Lauderdale? And Johnny turns purple, I mean, like he’s having a freaking stroke, and he screams ‘I told you bitches a thousand times to leave this phone alone,’, and he takes the cord in his hands and he like rips it off the…”
“Eccles!” barked Harold. “What about Eccles?” Dear God, it must run in the family!
 “Oh, right! Well, word is that Johnny said he’s got a business to run, and he’s not putting up with this chickenshit for one more minute. And,” she whispered, looking around urgently, “the word is that Johnny called some people—some seriously influential people—and that these people have sent a couple of their people down to you know, rectify the situation.  And tonight there were these two spooky guys at the bar, I mean like real goons, and I…”
But Harold was gone. Down the little hallway he pounded, sprinting as if his very heart would burst. Behind him, Taffi trailed far in his wake, clutching futilely at the white terry sash of her flying bathrobe. Mutt and Jeff! How could he have been so stupid? Racing back into the exploding bacchanal that had become the showroom of For Gentlemen Only, he found the path blocked by a jostling, wildly exuberant cadre of Mambo-wielding businessmen. “Out of the way, oafs!” he gasped, his reedy voice hopelessly lost in the din. “A client’s integrity is at stake!”
 Through a crack between the chalk-striped bellies Harold could see, as across a unbridgeable chasm, the little round table where Buster and Eccles sat drinking, still deep in conversation. And he could see, in excruciating slow motion, the great shoulder of Jeff swinging to and fro as he pushed a path for himself and his loathsome companion through the swirling crowd, moving glacially, inexorably, towards that little round table. Beneath the swinging lapel of Jeff’s open jacket he caught a glint—of what? A—a piece? A heater? And then, to his infinite horror, he saw Buster extract a fat white envelope from the pocket of his jeans, and slide it across the table towards Eccles’s mottled, grasping fingers.
 Marshall Pope, as ever, put it best. “There are moments,” he wrote,

  …certain indelible moments in the life of a business when the tide of events flows in so strongly and so swiftly that the Accountant is not able to fall back upon the immense net of resources that is Marshall Pope & Company, nor even, strictly speaking, upon the long professional training that has been imparted to him by this firm. Rather, it is at these critical moments that he must rely upon himself alone—upon that basic deposit of character with which he is born, and which we, his mentors, can only hope in such moments as these to have honed and polished, with our own painstaking labor, until they sparkle with a brilliant diamond luster.

 Whipping his wallet out of his hip pocket, Harold extracted his cherished A.A.A. (American Association of Actuarial Accountants) Life Affiliate Card and waved it in the air, brandishing it high over his head like an avenging prophet. The gold embossing glittered and flamed under the hot spotlights.
 “TWILLIBY!” he thundered at the top of his lungs. “INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE! NOBODY MOVES TILL I SEE SOME VERIFICATION!”
 The effect of this simple, not to say pathetic, little rouse was nothing short of miraculous. Lawyers and businessmen bleated piteously; goddesses screamed, throwing their unclad bodies across great piles of ill-gotten (and unreported) cash. One elegant, rather swinging cardiologist, who regularly wrote off his offerings to the goddesses under the heading of “Continuing Medical Education”, levitated to the tips of his Gucci moccasins, wrenched his head around like a startled wildebeest, and then broke in great leaps for the exit, leaving musky little clouds of fear-saturated scent in his wake.
 The chalk-striped line in front of Harold quavered, showed sighs of fissure along the edges; then, as one man, they executed a sharp about-face and thundered towards the front door in a kind of flying wedge formation, sweeping up the panicked crowd before them. Behind them, in the “V” of the wedge, Harold ran easily, his right arm stiffly extended to ward off attackers. And behind him, at tailback, sprinted Taffi, who had given up as futile any attempt at reining in her cloud-like, floating white bathrobe.
The mighty formation rolled on. Jeff was taken out with a spine-crunching thud by a frenzied federal appellate judge, who in his salad days had played a mean defensive end for Tulane. Mutt simply vanished, sinking silently beneath a roiling sea of gray and navy serge. Harold feinted left; broke sharply right. Only a few yards separated now him from Eccles, who stood—Good Heavens!—immobile in the center of the pulsating mob, caressing the fat white envelope that he held between his sticky, oyster-stained paws. Garnering his last desperate reserves, Harold tensed, then launched himself like a Mambo-fueled missile directly at the solar plexus of his toadish nemesis.
“What the FUCCCC…!” shouted Eccles, but he would shout no more. The precise placement of Harold’s head butt had knocked the wind utterly out of him: with a sharp, malevolent hissing he seemed to deflate in front of their startled eyes, and collapse into a gasping puddle of mottled skin and Filipino clothing on the pristine marble floor.
Even over the roar of the panicked mob, Harold could hear a steadily increasing pulse of sirens which would indicate, to one rigorously trained in analytical processes, the imminent arrival of the authorities. Instantaneous action was indicated, but what? Plucking the envelope from the claws of the reptilian carcass before him, he looked around wildly for somewhere, anywhere, to dispose of it, and saw—Taffi. In her haste, she had overshot him by several feet; now, snatching the trailing edge of her flying bathrobe, he hauled her back hand over fist until she stood panting in front of him. Like the man of direct action that he was and always knew that he had been, he snapped back the elastic lining of her sequined G-string, plunged the envelope down deep out of sight, and even—for a brief, an infinitesimal moment, to Taffi’s utter astonishment—he even wriggled his fingers around waggishly before he pulled them back out again.
Straightening, he looked at Buster, who stood frozen, mouth agape beneath his pirate beard. “I think, Buster,” he said calmly, tugging at a misaligned shirt cuff, “that the plan should now include getting the hell out of here, don’t you?”
“Hot Damn!” crowed Buster. “I sure as shit can pick my Tax Man, can’t I?” And flinging aside a couple of flyweight pharmaceutical reps just for the pure hellacious joy of it, he led the way out from the shattered ruins of For Gentlemen Only just as the Riot Squad made its belated entrance,
***
On Monday morning, at his accustomed hour, Harold Twilliby strode through the familiar doors of Marshall Pope & Company. He nodded graciously at Ms. Tamborino, who sat behind her elegant teak reception station reading the morning paper. “POLICE INVESTIGATE BRIBERY SCANDAL,” cried the headlines, “SEEK CITY AUDITOR, MISSING SINCE FRIDAY.”
Spotting Harold, she put down the paper and accosted him excitedly. “Mr. Twilliby!” she exclaimed, handing him a single sheet of heavy crested stationary. “I have a personal note for you.”
“Thank you,” he responded, taking the note in hand.
“Mr. Twilliby,” she whispered, leaning across the desk. “It’s from Mr. Pope’s office!”
 “I understand,” he told her.  “I shall read it presently.”
 But Tari was not yet finished. “You also had a phone call from…from Taffi Tamborino!” she said, passing over a pink slip of paper.  “Taffi says she has suddenly come into, like, a considerable sum of money, and she wants to see you for some investment advice.” 
 “Taffi?” he asked. “I’ll certainly be glad to talk to her.”
 “Mr Twilliby,” she said slowly. “You know my sister Taffi?”
“Sure, I know Taffi,” he replied. “She’s a sweet kid.” And nodding once more he passed into the inner office, leaving Ms. Tamborino staring after him, an expression of wonderment upon her lovely features.
Through the staff room he marched, attache in hand, keeping a stern (but not unkindly) eye out for any malingering juniors. In his meticulous fashion, he unpacked the contents of the attache. Out came the pencils, the legal pads, the now-tattered accounting paper. Lovingly he disassembled the powerful portable calculator, detaching the crisp paper cartridge from its plastic receptacle, giving the keys a final gentle flourish before placing the mechanism carefully into its proper drawer. Only then did he turned his attention to the note that Ms. Tamborino had handled him.
“My dear Twilliby,” the salutation read in a precise, finely lettered hand.

I have been in communication with our client, Mr. Vilanovitch, who is fulsome in his praises of both your professional abilities and your considerable personal charm. Speaking for senior management, I am pleased to discern so strongly the stamp of Marshall Pope & Company upon a member of our younger generation of accountants. Would a luncheon at the Pickwick—shall we say Tuesday next—be of interest to you? Do let me know.
 As ever,
 Pope

Taking pen in hand, Harold scratched a brief reply across the bottom of the heavy crested sheet. Whistling an odd, rather chipper little melody, he spun his chair towards his window—or rather, towards the spot where his window should have been—and turned his attention to a most provocative manifesto entitled “I’ll Take My Stand: Six CPAs Speak Out Against the Double Declining Balance” in the Autumn issue of The Accountant’s Companion.