Izzy looks pained and disgusted. He's got a serious mind, Izzy has, and if you could take a thumbprint of his brain, it would be all fractions and dollar signs.
"I have to meet my cousin Abie Moss," says he, edgin' away. "He has a bookkeeper's job with Tractions for a month now, and I promised his aunt I would ask how he's comin'."
"How touchin'!" says I as he moves off.
I gazes after him curious a minute, and then follows a sudden hunch. Why not see just how much of a bluff this was about Cousin Abie? So I slips around by the cigar stand, steps behind a pillar, and keeps him in range. Three or four minutes I watched Izzy waitin' at the elevator exit, without seein' him give anyone the fraternal grip. Then he seems to quit. He drifts back towards the Arcade with the lunch crowd, and I was about to turn away when I lamps him bein' slipped a piece of paper by a short, squatty-built guy who brushes by him casual. Izzy gathers it in with never a word and strolls over to the 'phone booths, where he lets on to be huntin' a number in the directory. All he does there, though, is spread out that paper, read it through hasty, and then tear it up and chuck it in the waste basket.
"Huh!" says I, seein' Izzy scuttle off towards Broadway. "Looks like there was a plot to the piece. I wonder?"
And just for the fun of the thing I collected them twenty-eight pieces of yellow paper, carried 'em over to my lunch place, and spent the best part of my noon-hour piecin' 'em together. What I got was this, scribbled in lead pencil:
Grebel out. Larkin melding. Teg morf rednu.
"Whiffo!" thinks I. "What kind of a Peruvian dialect is this?"
Course the names was plain enough. Everybody knows Grebel and Larkin, and that they're the big wheezes in that Philly crowd. But what then? Had Grebel gone out to lunch? And was Larkin playin' penuchle? Thrillin', if true. Then comes this "Teg morf rednu" stuff. Was that Russian, or Chinese?
"Heiney," says I, callin' the dough-faced food juggler. "Heiney," I repeats solemn, "Teg morf rednu."