From that day on, Sydney Blake had a hobby. Trying to work out a good reason for visiting the thirteenth floor. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t any good reason so long as the tenants created no nuisances and paid their rent regularly.
Month in, month out, the tenants paid their rent regularly. And they created no nuisances. Window washers went up to wash windows. Painters, plasterers, and carpenters went up to decorate the offices on the thirteenth floor. Delivery boys staggered up under huge loads of stationery. Even what were obviously customers went up to the thirteenth floor, a group of people curiously lacking characteristics in common: they ranged from poor backwoods folk in their brogans to flashily dressed bookmakers; an occasional group of dark-suited, well-tailored gentlemen discussing interest rates and new bond issues in low well-bred voices would ask the elevator operator for Tohu Bohu. Many, many people went to the thirteenth floor.
Everyone, Sydney Blake began to think, but Sydney Blake. He’d tried sneaking up on the thirteenth floor by way of the stairs. He had always arrived on the fourteenth floor or the twelfth completely winded. Once or twice, he’d tried stowing away on the elevator with G. Tohu and K. Bohu themselves. But the car had not been able to find their floor while he was in the elevator. And they had both turned around and smiled at the spot where he was trying to stay hidden in the crowd so that he had gone out, red-faced, at the earliest floor he could.
Once he’d even tried—vainly—to disguise himself as a building inspector in search of a fire hazard…
Nothing worked. He just had no business on the thirteenth floor.
He thought about the problem day and night. His belly lost its slight plumpness, his nails their manicure, his very trousers their crease.
And nobody else showed the slightest interest in the tenants of the thirteenth floor.
Well, there was the day that Miss Kerstenberg looked up from her typewriter. “Is that how they spell their names?” she asked. “T-O-H-U and B-O-H-U? Funny.”
“What’s funny?” He pounced on her.
“Those names come from the Hebrew. I know because,” she blushed well below the neckline of her dress, “I teach in a Hebrew School Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. And my family is very religious so I had a real orthodox education. I think religion is a good thing, especially for a girl—”