George was coming out of the service, with his vial of heat liquid, smoking in his hand, when a silent Mr. Winningoes reappeared.
My friend seemed embarrassed to be caught with his urine in the hands.
" Lay it on the table" the man told him in nonchalant tone. " You have compiled them all?" he continued in the same tone looking at the sheets we had placed on the table after filling them.
"I ‘m really satisfied of you! Very satisfied" he added while examining the sheets. His bare little eyes shone slightly, betraying an internal emotion never noticed before then.
After inserting the sheets in the capable pockets of the white uniform he asked to follow him.
He drove us with rapid footstep, back through the long corridor and finally we reemerged in the office of the agency.
" Take a sit, please" he said bending on the drawers, after he had taken a sit at the desk.
Soon after he delivered to both of us, one envelope of beige color.
" Here there are 100 pounds for your trouble of today. If definitive analyses will confirm the first picked data, we will sign the contract and will fix the correct remuneration for your performances. Now please excuse me: I have to conclude the preparations for Monday. I will accompany you through the staircases."
While he was leading through the staircases I stroke a furtive look in the envelope. The effigy of the Queen of England Elizabeth the Second, printed on five 20 pounds notes, smiled at me more times in the faint light.
That man was beginning to become nice at me.
He led us to the threshold, opening the front door immediately after.
Out, the sky was still covered with dark clouds.
The poster of the agency was still beating, nervously, on the wood of the front door and the wind seemed to pull it away out of the door.
Our mysterious friend provided by his own hand to detach it and putting it under his arm he said: "It‘s not useful anymore. Everything is ready for Monday. Everything is ready, now."
I seemed to perceive a twinkling of folly in his eyes, while pronouncing those mysterious words.
But it was only an almost imperceptible flicker.
"Recommend boys to me! Go easy with the vices, this week end. If everything goes well, I will pass to pick you up, at 7:00 o’clock! Good-bye to Monday."
And so saying, he disappeared behind the heavy front door he closed quickly on his shoulders.
The following Monday, the 12th November 1979, it was very early when Mr. Winningoes came to pick us up at home, meaning that the results of the analyses had fully satisfied him in that week end.
George and I had spoken of the events of the preceding Friday for a long time.
We tried particularly to guess what kind of job would eventually have to begin, since Mr. Winningoes had not mentioned it at all. For how much we spoke of it, however, we didn't succeed in finding a satisfactory explanation.
The most probable prognostications seemed to lead us at jobs like: cook, waiter, butcher or grocer generally; and either assistant of infancy or geriatric. But the most probable reasons were also met with some element of illogical meanings.
George, briefly, suggested that the strange man had to be either crazy or, at least, a sort of an eccentric and sclerotic subject. Between parenthesis he made me observing, to retry his own theory, that Mr Winningoes had not even mentioned the job related with Mr Joking and though he had told us that his agency was entrusted for getting manpower to the enterprise.
I returned that it would have been up to us to tell him we were sent by Mr Joking and if had not done it, for distrust or for our own comfort, could not complain of it. I didn't really complain of it because I was sure that I could never get an advance of 100 pounds from any other employer in the world.
He returned beating me point by point. With particular respect to the money got as advance, he sustained that those banknotes must have been either false or fruit of sinister business and, swerve the hypothesis to go to the police, he coherently didn't want to spend not even a penny of them. Neither I could change his mind on the point, the fact that I easily succeeded on changing all my banknotes, in five different occasions.
According to him, my characteristics would reach, sooner or later, the police and therefore, after polishing up very well from every trace of digital imprint his five banknotes, he put them again in the original envelope, endorsing on it the inscription “at disposal of the enquirers”, by his own hand. I knew that his stubbornness would prevent him from changing his mind.
On the other hand, I was sure of my opinion. I had already had on my hands some false banknotes and I knew well, more than one way, to identify them.
The notes that nice fellow of Winningoes had given to us were good. They were fresh of bank, because I had realized that they had never circulated before, and rustled and played to gold as they say.
If that man was so eccentric (and so rich) to be amused by paying advances to poor, foreign, jobless men, well, good for me that, by the way, I was enumerated between those poor chaps.
And, finally, if George, had also to be right and that man was crazy, in that case, he would not be certain the first one, in London.
to be continued...
