The Delicate Operation

Doctor Clifton Wefel, pillar of his community, bedrock of his church, generous giver to charity, physician and wife hater, jimmied the bedroom window of another pillar of the community, a richer one, Judge Snide, and climbed through.

He closed the window, drew the curtains and, dropping the jimmy into his bag, tiptoed to Snide's night table.

"Soon," Clifton thought, taking his own pulse, "will come the dubious reward of my crime, the throb of my adrenal glands that will allow me to touch my castrating wife."

He laid his bag on the table, selected a vial of chloroform from a tiny compartment, poured a small amount on the sheet and, dexterously lifting Snide's head by the right cheek and the left ear, placed his nose in the middle of the stain.

Clifton switched on the night light and regarded the heaving, gently rolling curve that was Snide.

"A great man," intoned Clifton, in his best consulting Viennese psychiatrist voice, "a great man with virtue, dedication, a face like a pickle, and singleness of purpose. He daydreams in court, dozes in church and snores at home. His Honor, the learned Benjamin Snide."

"No thrill in taking only his money," Clifton thought, thumbing through Snide's billfold. "Perhaps that big diamond ring on his fat finger?"

"No," he decided, "just cash. The safest method to get rid of that woman and to live (continued on page 102)Delicate Operation(continued from page 87) my own life is to keep adding to my bank account."

"But," he thought, peeling off a rubber operating glove, "I should make sure of how I feel." He placed his hand on his heart and measured its beat. On impulse he recited, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the common law, the Hippocratic oath and the institution of marriage." checked his pulse again, and pulled on the rubber glove, judging that he'd better do the wall safe also.

He withdrew another vial, this one tightly rolled in rubber and packed in dry ice, a syringe, a needle and a small drill, arranged them neatly on the night table and studied Snide's blue-veined nose.

"Nitroglycerin," he speculated, fitting the needle onto the syringe, "one could kill so easily with nitroglycerin. Inject some into a man's vein and listen with a stedioscope as each beat of his heart became a minute explosion, one in a series of deadly shocks to his system. How very Alfred Hitchcock!"

Clifton aspirated the colorless liquid from the vial into the syringe, laid the syringe gently on the night table, then removed a painting from the wall and casually deposited it on Snide's stomach.

He widened the hole in the lock of the lock-and-combination safe with the drill, inserted the needle into the hole, depressed the plunger and extracted the empty syringe.

Then, very deliberately, he slid two wires into the lock, moved back several feet, and touched the other ends of the wires to the poles of a tiny radio battery.

The circuit then completed, current streaked through the wire, jumped the gap in the nitro, setting off an explosion.

The safe burst open, as the distended stomach of a dead man pops during cremation, showing its intestines, green and bound in tidy packages.

"That, Doctor Casey," Clifton smirked, "was a successful operation."

He quickly broke down his tools, vials, syringe, needle, battery, wires and drill, and replaced them, each in its compartment. Then he stacked the bundles of bills inside and zipped up the black leather bag.

He climbed through the rear window and, glancing back before he left, surveyed the room: the safe, with its door hanging open foolishly like a moron's lower lip, Snide peacefully snoring, the painting on his stomach rising and falling like the tide; the entire scene lighted delicately, chiaroscuro, by the night light near Snide's bed.

Clifton, poised by the window sill, drank it all in, chuckled to himself and felt his heart pounding with the thrill of the theft.

"At last," Clifton sighed at the familiar ecstasy of his throbbing glands, "now I can face my wife."

Clifton lowered himself down to the street, all three buttons of his dark-blue Ivy League suit buttoned, the handle of the black leather bag looped around his left wrist. He pressed against the wall of Snide's house, stepped out of the shadows, walked the two blocks to his car and drove home.

"Home to my wife, lovely Margaret," Clifton said, "the disturber of my glands, the potion for my Jekyll and Hyde."

He parked the car, walked up the driveway swinging his bag and, putting his house key in the lock, thought, "Behind every great man, they say, there is a woman. Nagging him."

He heard Margaret thrashing in bed.

Margaret also was a doctor, a surgeon, and lately had become a nutritionist. She was a special advisor to actors, putting them on special diets, particularly organic foods, so they'd be healthy and beautiful forever. Margaret had thin, stringy hair, skin like cottage cheese and a large, red, cruel mouth.

"Clifton, is that you?" she called from the bedroom.

"Yes, dear. It is."

"Well come to bed!"

"Yes, dear, right away."

Clifton prowled through the house, washed his hands, brushed his teeth, raided the icebox, eating a pear and a piece of organic carob cake.

"Clifton," Margaret shouted, "what are you doing?"

"I'm in the bathroom, dear," Clifton replied.

He walked to the bathroom, locked the door and, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, read an old issue of MD. He hummed a few bars of Celery Stalks at Midnight and leafed through an article on the history of aphrodisiacs. He passed one half hour reading the article, scanned the advertisements for surgical instruments and checked obituaries. Then, thinking there was an outside chance that Margaret had fallen asleep, tiptoed upstairs to the bedroom.

Margaret rolled over on her side as he walked through the door.

"Darling," she moaned, "take me."

Clifton sat at the edge of the bed, removed his watch and ring, placed them on the night table and set the clock for seven.

"Clifton," Margaret said insistently, clutching his arm, "I said take me."

Clifton allowed himself to be dragged against Margaret.

He remembered as a child, waiting too long before eating his porridge, and having to push the skin against the side of the bowl, then gagging when his mother said, Clifton, eat that up!

And now into Margaret with his stomach churning.

Like stock footage from a motion picture, scenes from his life passed through the screen of his mind. Medical school: the first sickening encounter with bottled livers, hearts and embryos, films on venereal diseases, the bloated bellies of frogs, dissected sharks, and sperm on glass specimen slides. His internship: stomach pumps, Negro youths with neat beer-bottle and pool-cue depressions in their heads, auto accidents with brains decorating the streets like some macabre Mardi gras. His practice: pushy wife nagging him into chasing dollars, the basic research that he always had wanted to specialize in, gonads, cushy behinds that complained of pains, apple-hard breasts and minds infirm, congeries of glands, souls, bones, twisted with desire.

Margaret rolled him off, and lay back sighing a monstrously airy all, like an 11th Century belch. She turned her back to him, pulled the bedclothes around her and, after a few twitches of her thigh, passed into a mindless, undreaming sleep – a sleep garnished with the most satisfied of snores. Clifton moved away from her and lay on his back, disgusted and slightly nauseous.

"That's all I can take," he said firmly to himself. "Tomorrow I instigate the final phase of the operation."

Doctor Clifton Wefel, general practitioner in Union Square, New Jersey, always dressed and left the house before Margaret, nutritionist and pseudo-psychiatrist, awoke. On mornings following a robbery, he arose especially early to attend to the exigencies of the theft.

At six-thirty he awoke to the sounds of Margaret's labored breathing, dressed quickly and quietly, slipped on his watch and ring, then went out.

He detoured from the usual route to his office, caught the Hudson Tube train to Manhattan, transferred trains and got off in Grand Central Station.

In the huge station toilet, the sanctuary of the city's homeless, the anus of the vast intestine of a subway system, Clifton washed his face carefully, wiped away any possible vestige of grease with a paper towel and took a small vial from his medicine bag.

He unscrewed the top of the vial and daubed some of the faintly yellow liquid on his forefinger, quickly applied it to his upper lip, then took a mustache from his medicine bag and, with a speed born of constant practice, pasted it to his lip.

Clifton studied the face staring back at him from the mirror seriously and appreciatively. A little bit of Hitler smiled back at him. He beetled his brow and curled his lip determinedly. "Today, Brooklyn," he snarled, "tomorrow the world." As he thought of the long day and night ahead of him, his brow furrowed (continued on page 134)Delicate Operation(continued from page 102) and his eyes lighted with a strange gleam, his thought disturbed only by the loud whooshing suck of a nearby urinal.

Clifton strolled out of the bathroom, up the stairs and into the street. As he walked, he practiced different faces to suit his mustache. He scowled like Brando, bugged his eyes and sneered like Yul Brynner. A fine Boris Karloff face was interrupted by a policeman's stare. He smiled disarmingly at the policeman with his best Captain Kangaroo face, then zipped through the double doors of a large bank.

He went up to a cashier who was cleaning his nails with a paper clip, nodded importantly, unzipped his bag and handed two neat bundles of bills and a small charge plate through the window.

The clerk smiled at Clifton. He enjoyed this weekly meeting with account 7-134. The man always had a pleasant word, always made a substantial deposit. Forty thousand dollars in a Swiss bank didn't make him one of the big boys, but did make him someone to cultivate. You could never tell when you would need some help. It paid to be nice to the depositors.

Clifton watched the insipid clerk, hating his unctuous, conspiratorial manner, and waited patiently while the clerk dawdled over his deposit. He responded to another of the clerk's Dickensian smiles. "And God bless you, Tiny Tim," he thought, and said, "Goodbye, have a nice weekend." He always told the clerk to have a nice weekend on any day he came into the bank. A little eccentricity, he had discovered, was a good cover for wealth. Clerks and bank presidents understood a marriage between madness and money.

Clifton walked back to Grand Central Station, to the bathroom, removed his mustache and returned to Union Square.

He arrived at his office to discover a full waiting room of minor aches and pains, and worked through the morning, deliberately, efficiently and bored.

At 12, he buzzed the receptionist on the intercom and told her to clear the waiting room. Doctor Clifton Wefel, friend of the friendless, tracer of lost persons, was taking the remainder of the day off. To think.

Clifton wandered through a public park. He passed nurses wheeling perambulators, old men playing chess, statues, and a pond with geese. He lilted a thirsty little girl up to a fountain, saw the tinsel in her eyes, the honey in her hair. He strolled through the botanical gardens, breathing in Eve's perfume. Then he rested on a bench, sun-bathed and waited.

That night, Clifton climbed a telephone pole in an alley behind a row of substantial shops. He found the electrical circuitry for a beauty shop and for the camera store next door. With a coil inductor he drew the power for the beauty shop's burglar alarm into the lead for the camera store's neon sign.

"There, that's done as easily as a laparectomy," Clifton thought, climbing down the pole, "that is, if nobody decides to burgle the camera store tonight."

He twisted a piece of isinglass in the police lock on the rear door of the beauty shop, stepped in and shut the door behind him. And locked it.

He prowled and stumbled in the menagerie of mascara, lipsticks and peroxides until he found what he had come for.

On a row of sterile, smiling papier-mâché heads, sexless and with wire for brains, were displayed wigs, in every hue and possible design. Clifton stood and gazed at them in wonder. Then he selected six – three bouffante, three French twist – by price. He picked the colors he thought a woman would like, smoke blue, champagne beige and titian red. He removed the wigs from the owners, loosened his belt and stuffed them, as snugly as possible, into his pants. He apologized to the six denuded heads, for the theft and for loosening his trousers; buttoned his fly, his jacket; and left the way that he'd come: by the back door, silently in the night, but appreciably paunchier.

Two days later, while the police were still giggling over modus operandi, the phantom wigpicker struck again.

And a week later, a jewelry store in Newark had its icebox swiped clean of diamonds, with no clues but a long pink hair inside the safe.

One month from the time of that jewel robbery an invitation came for Margaret and Clifton to attend a charity ball. The benefit was sponsored by the American Medical Association to conscribe funds for mental health.

One month and two weeks from that date Clifton gave Margaret a diamond necklace.

One month and three weeks later, Doctors Margaret and Clifton Wefel attended the benefit. Clifton made sure that they circulated. During the evening a smooth-faced young man whose toes turned out approached Clifton and asked for a light. They chatted, parted friends and Clifton enjoyed the remainder of the ball immensely.

Two months, exactly, from that portentous robbery, on a Saturday morning, Clifton answered a knock on the door.

He smiled a hello to the smooth-faced young man and his burly companion and invited them in. They were detectives and had some questions to ask, if Doctor Wefel would be so kind. They chatted and asked if they might look around the house, if Doctor Wefel had no objections. Clifton had none, but asked that they did not disturb his wife or her room, as she had a notoriously bad temper, if they knew what he meant. The detectives, both being married men, knew what he meant.

The detectives listlessly pulled out drawers, inspected the silver, kicked the rug and searched Clifton's desk. Clifton rushed ahead of them, opening doors and being generally helpful. The detectives searched, but their hearts weren't in it.

They were standing on the first landing, Clifton in front, the younger detective close behind, his companion lagging, ready to inspect the second floor, when Margaret appeared looking her worst.

Her lumpy skin, frumpy dressing gown and stringy hair up in curlers – Clifton secretly called the curlers her FM receiver – had more effect than Clifton could have wished for.

Clifton, his face immobile and expressionless, watched the reaction of the younger detective. The older detective had seen it all, but the younger was newly married and had been on the force four months, which explained his eagerness, his ambition and his response to a wife on an ugly morning. His hand involuntarily went to his gun.

The rest was drill.

The inspecting of Margaret's room, the discovery of the diamonds, the incriminating wigs in her closet stuffed in a hatbox under a pile of old shoes, the hysteria, the accusations, the arrest, the screaming and the threats, proceeded as surely as the denouement of a British comedy.

There would be a trial, of course, and Margaret would be convicted for at least two of Clifton's crimes: the jewel theft and the wig robbery.

Clifton could hardly wait for the trial. After it was over he planned to shut down his practice and to spend some years on a world cruise. And to start cultivating a mustache.