The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [38]
The Count had a number of other disappointments. He saw a classified advertisement inserted in a newspaper by a man who said he wanted to buy cockroaches in quantity. The Count knew where he could buy some large tropical roaches which had been a feature of a recently raided speakeasy called La Cucaracha, where the customers could race roaches along the bar, instead of rolling dice, to see who would pay for their drinks. In his enthusiasm, the Count bought five hundred cucarachas, at a nickel apiece, from the prohibition agents who had raided the place. The Count knew some newspaper reporters from the days when he had exploited murderesses and boxing girls, so he called several of them up and told them of the big deal he had on the fire. They thought it was funny, and the story was published in the early editions of a couple of afternoon papers. The advertiser, however, did not want racing cockroaches. He wanted to feed the roaches to tropical birds, and the Count's acquisitions could have eaten the birds. Ordinary household roaches, obtainable from small boys in tenement neighborhoods at low cost, were better for the aviarist's purpose. The Count was stuck with five hundred hungry bugs. He turned them loose on the third floor of the Jollity Building and left for Florida with what remained of Boatrace Harry's money. Barney attributes the unusual size of the bugs in the Jollity Building today to the thoroughbred outcross.
Morty was naturally quite angry with the Count at first, but after a few weeks began to miss him. “You have to hand it to him. He had a good idea all the same,” Morty says now. “The story about the roaches was in all the papers, and with that kind of publicity he could have gone far. A week after he left, a guy called up and asked for Mr. Bimberg. I asked him what did he want, and he said he had read about Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., and he was in the market for some moths. So I told him, 'I haven't any moths, but if you'll come up here, I'll cut holes in your pants for nothing.' “
The Count de Pennies must have convinced himself that he was a publicity man. When he reappeared in the Jollity Building after he had lost Boatrace Harry's money at Tropical Park, he got a job with a new night club as press agent. The place had one of those stages which roll out from under the bandstand before the floor show starts. The Count decided he could get a story in the newspapers by sending for the police emergency squad on the pretext that one of the show girls had been caught under the sliding stage. The policemen arrived, axes in hand, and refused to be deterred by the Count's statement that there was no longer any need of them because he had personally rescued the girl. “You know very well that poor little girl is still under there!” the sergeant in charge roared reproachfully, and the coppers hilariously chopped the stage to bits. The Count lost his job.
What was perhaps the zenith of the Count's prosperity was reached during the brief life of the Lithaqua Mineral Water Company. Lithaqua was formed to exploit a spring on the land of a Lithuanian tobacco farmer in Connecticut. The water of the spring had a ghastly taste, and this induced the farmer to think it had therapeutic qualities. A druggist who was related to a murderess the Count had formerly managed organized a company to market the water. He gave the Count ten per cent of the common stock to act as director of publicity. The Count “sent out the wire,” as fellows in the Jollity Building sometimes say when they mean that a promoter has had a third party act as gobetween, to Johnny Attorney and Boatrace Harry. “Why be thick all your life?” he had his intermediary ask Johnny. “The Count has something big this time. If you will call it square for the few hundred he owes you, he will sell you ten per cent of the mineralwater company for exactly one grand.” The Count had the same offer made to Boatrace Harry, and he sold his ten per cent of the stock to each of