Vital Parts Read Free

descents which would have ruined a weaker spirit.
    Gino’s office was full of cold from a whirring window air-conditioner. Gino was shorter than Reinhart but as wide and not fat at all where it counted. He stood very close, breathing cigar fumes and a piquant memory of his famed spaghetti sauce.
    He said: “It isn’t easy to get good waitresses nowadays and they don’t come no better than June. If you was not in the company of that gentleman I would kick your stinking teeth out, you lousy slob. I don’t want to never see you in my place again.”
    Reinhart held his temper manfully. “There’s been a misunderstanding, Gino. The young lady didn’t catch what I said. There’s a lot of noise out there—”
    Gino’s eyes closed slowly and did not open until he had finished saying: “Any man who talks dirty to a woman is a filthy skunk, period.” Then his lids rolled swiftly up with an almost audible clangor. “Now you getchurass out of here.”
    â€œTell you what I’ll do,” Reinhart persisted. “I’ll write a nice tip on the bill.”
    Gino, who had seen Reinhart on countless noontimes, had greeted him on entrance and detained his parting with an oily expression of trust that he had enjoyed the meal, now professed to be dumbfounded. “You sign here? I never seen you before in my life, you bum.” He seized the chest of Reinhart’s wash-and-wear suit and forced him into a chair. “Don’t make a move, you.” He fisted one of his two telephones and shook it at Reinhart’s face, then snarled his pegteeth into the mouthpiece.
    â€œName’s Carl Reinhart, for God’s sake,” cried the man who had put a signature to that effect on scores of lunch checks.
    Gino slammed the instrument home. “ Reinhart! So you are Reinhart, the biggest deadbeat on the list.” He laughed in a savage scream. “Reinhart, Jesus Christ, Reinhart.” Wonderingly he addressed a glossy leather-bound photograph on his desk—Reinhart was behind it, so could not see its subject—“He owes me a hunnert and eighty-three dollars. The collection agents can’t find him. Where is he? In my fucking restaurant, eating my fucking food, signing more of my fucking checks! ” Gino’s face was a mélange of several colors and his voice that of a machine which wanted grease.
    â€œYou’ll get every penny of it,” said Reinhart. “My guest is Mr. Robert Sweet, the well-known tycoon. We are discussing a deal that will be very profitable to me in the near future.”
    Gino’s breathing obscured the racket of the air-conditioner. He grasped a bronze paperweight, done in the form of an alligator or crocodile, and broke it into two more or less equal portions. At length he said, as if to himself: “So I kill him and go up for murder. Am I really better off?” Again he closed his eyes, and he whispered hoarsely: “You don’t take another bite, see? You don’t take a sip of ice water or wipe your hands on my napkin. You don’t grab a toothpick or after-dinner mint on the way out. And you leave in five minutes flat.”
    Reinhart gathered himself together. “All right, Gino,” he said. “If you want to be that way, I’ll spare mysef a lot of heartburn.” As he passed through the doorway, one half of the bronze crocodile or alligator dented the frame, very near his right shoulder, with the force of a bullet.
    Back at the table he said to Sweet, who he saw with relief had finished the meal, “I’m terribly sorry, but a call just came in reminding me of a one forty-five appointment and it is past that already.”
    While Sweet, as promised, took care of the bill, Reinhart revisited the toilet and, choosing one urinal to the right of “Chuck’s,” inscribed upon the clean wall above: GINO IS A CROOKED GUINEA . The phraseology, somewhat out of