Hazards Read Free Page A

asked.
    “It was a lifetime job for the last 35 presidents.”
    “Yeah, well, when you put it that way, I can see where we might move the schedule up a mite,” I said. “In the meantime, I suppose we got to change the name of the town again.”
    “To Lucifer?”
    I was about to agree, but then it occurred to me that calling it Lucifer would tell anyone aspiring to high office just who stood between them and their goal, and suddenly slapping my name on all them signs didn’t seem like such a good idea to me.
    Which is how the capital of San Palmero came to be called Bubbles La Tour.
    “Bubbles La Tour?” repeated Consuela, frowning. “What is a Bubbles La Tour?”
    “An entertainer whose skills and artistry I came to admire on Saturday nights back when I was growing up in Moline, Illinois,” I said.
    “An ecdysiast?” said Raquel.
    “Gesundheit,” I said. “Now, what’s on the presidential agenda for the rest of the day?”
    “We haven’t had electricity for the past 48 hours,” said Consuela. “I think getting the power on again is the first order of business.”
    “Yes,” added Maria. “It is especially bad on the west side of town, where they haven’t had any lights for weeks now.”
    “What’s on the west side of town?” I asked.
    “The worst and most dangerous slums in all of San Palmero,” she answered.
    This problem wasn’t quite as easy as the last one, but I mulled on it while I was puffing away at my cigar, and in about five minutes the answer came to me.
    “Okay,” I announced. “I got this here conundrum solved too.”
    “What are your orders, Presidente?” asked Consuela.
    “Set fire to the slums,” I said. “We’ll get rid of an eyesore and give the people something to read by, all at the same time.”
    “That will only last for one night,” she pointed out.
    “One night’s all it should take to get the power on again,” I said.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Find the richest folks what ain’t left town yet,” I told her, “and tomorrow morning spread the word that people can read their evening papers by the light of their blazing houses if someone don’t pony up enough money to get the electricity running again.”
    “You know,” said Maria, “it’s not a bad idea at that.”
    “And it would get rid of the slums,” agreed Raquel.
    Consuela stared long and hard at me. “I’m beginning to know how Baron von Frankenstein felt,” she said.
    “If he felt anything but hungry, I ain’t got much in common with him,” I said. “When do they serve dinner around here?”
    We moseyed over to the dining room, which wasn’t much smaller than the office and was set up to accommodate small intimate groups of two hundred or so, and Raquel went off to see if any servants were left or if they’d all high-tailed it to the hills. She came back a few minutes later and announced that the men were all dead or run off, but that we still had a passel of employees of the female persuasion, and she’d told some of ’em to put some grub on the fire.
    Well, truth to tell, I don’t know which looked more appetizing, the food or the young ladies what brung it out and served it. In fact, there was so much of it that I invited them all to join us, and after dinner I sent a couple of ’em off to the presidential wine cellar to bring back a few gallons of San Palmero’s finest drinkin’ stuff, and somewhere around midnight it occurred to me that Bubbles La Tour wasn’t actually a resident of the country, and that I had an even better notion for naming the city, depending on who I woke up with each morning.
    I stood up, waited for silence (which can be a long time coming when you’re keeping company with forty or fifty women) and then issued a Presidential Proclamation concerning the daily re-naming of the city.
    “But Presidente!” protested a particularly lovely young maiden with long black hair. “We are all married!”
    “Just so long as you ain’t fanatics about