Miracle Monday by Elliot S. Maggin

Author:Elliot S. Maggin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-29T11:03:32+00:00

Chapter 11

THE AUCTION

The arrival of the dignitaries at the Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries that afternoon in early March was the most impressive show that that end of Seventy-Second Street had seen all day. Seventy-Second Street was accustomed to good shows.

That morning at a little past three, a turbaned Iraqi diplomat attached to the consulate on Third Avenue ran out of a hotel on the corner of Seventy-Second and Fifth, ordered a cab to a halt and demanded to be taken to his consulate. He threw a hundred-dollar bill at the cabbie and told him not to stop for anything. The diplomat railed in two languages and four dialects about a female agent of the Pakistani government who had lured him into the hotel and planned to extort secret information from him. He sputtered this way for no more than half a minute before the cab screamed into a stationary oil truck and was totaled like a fallen angel food cake. The Iraqi leaped out without a thought for the driver, who was thrown clear and, except for his dignity, was uninjured. The diplomat scurried around the wreckage and ordered the driver of the oil truck to finish the trip to the consulate. The truck driver would have done it, since the diplomat had stuffed several fifty-dollar bills into his fist, if a pair of policemen had not gotten there first. Both doubled over with laughter at the scene.

Later, during the morning rush hour, a well-known actress led a procession of people clustered around a horse-drawn wagon from the park to a brownstone on Seventy-Second Street where the president of a large seafood distribution company lived. The wagon carried a plain wooden coffin. When the group reached the businessman's house, the actress proclaimed a boycott of canned tuna in order to protest the slaughter of dolphins caught by fishermen employed by the company. Then the group of people cheered and turned over the coffin, which cracked open against the steps leading to the executive's door, spilling hundreds of cans of tuna into the middle of the morning rush. The seafood mogul was, at that moment, sunning himself on a beach in Florida.

Around lunchtime a well-dressed man with an attaché case walked toward the corner of Seventy-Second and Lexington where another well-dressed man with a zip-up leather folder was waiting for him. As the one man exchanged his attaché case for the other man's leather folder, a freakish bolt of wind somehow threw both containers open. Out of the leather folder flew thirty loose sheets of photocopied diagrams and records, and out of the attaché case flew three hundred wrinkly, laundered twenty-dollar bills. Both well-dressed men panicked and tried to fly after all three hundred thirty slips of paper, but they slipped on the ice at the curb. Before either of them hit the ground, Superman swooped out of the sky, caught all the money and records, as well as the two men. He whisked the whole bundle off to the police station at

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