I Served the King of England Read Online Free Page B

he went back to the fat man’s table and said, Just out of
     curiosity, sir . . . of course you’re entitled to throw away as much money as you
     like, but I don’t see what that has to do with my ten crowns. The fat man stood up
     and said, Allow me to explain. May I go into your kitchen? And the boss bowed and
     motioned him toward the kitchen door. When the salesman came into the kitchen, I heard
     him introduce himself: My name is Walden and I represent the firm of van Berkel. Now,
     would you mind slicing me a hundred grams of Hungarian salami? So the boss’s wife
     sliced the salami, weighed it, and put it on a plate. Suddenly we were all afraid he
     might be an inspector, but the salesman clapped and his helper came into the kitchen
     carrying the thing with a cover over it, which now looked like a spinning wheel, and set
     it on the table. The salesman swept off the cover, and there stood a beautiful red
     device—a thin, round, shiny circular blade that turned on a shaft, at the end of
     which was a crank and a handle and a dial. The fat man beamed at the machine and said,
     Now, the largest firm in the world is the Catholic church, and it trades in something
     that no man has ever seen, no man has ever touched, and no man has ever encountered
     since the world began, and that something is called God. The second-largest firm in the
     world is International, and you’ve got that represented here too, by adevice now in use all around the world called a cash register. If
     you press the right buttons throughout the day, then instead of having to figure out the
     daily receipts yourself in the evening, the cash register will do it for you. The
     third-largest is the firm I represent, van Berkel, which manufactures scales used to
     weigh things with equal precision the world over, whether you’re at the Equator or
     the North Pole, and in addition we manufacture a full range of meat-and-salami slicers.
     The beauty of our machine is this, if you’ll allow me to demonstrate. And, after
     asking permission, he stripped the skin off a roll of Hungarian salami, put the skin on
     the scales, and then, turning the crank with one hand, pushed the salami against the
     circular blade with the other. The slices of salami piled up on the little platform till
     it seemed that he had sliced the entire piece, though not much of it had disappeared.
     The salesman stopped and asked how much salami we thought he’d sliced. The boss
     said a hundred and fifty grams, the maître d’ a hundred and ten. How about
     you, squirt? the man asked me. I said eighty grams, and the boss grabbed me by the ear
     and twisted it and apologized to the salesman saying, His mother dropped him on his head
     on a tile floor when he was an infant. But the salesman patted my head and smiled at me
     nicely and said, The boy came closest. He threw the sliced salami on the scales, and the
     scales showed seventy grams. We all looked at one another, and then gathered around the
     miraculous little machine, because everyone could see there was profit in it. When we
     stood back, the salesman took a handful of coins and tossed them into the coal box and
     clapped, and his porter brought another package, and in its wrapping it looked like the
     glass bell mygrandmother used to keep the Virgin Mary under, but
     when he unwrapped it, there stood a set of scales, like the kind you see in
     chemist’s shops, with a slender needle that only showed up to a kilogram. The
     salesman said, Now, this scale is so precise that when I breathe on it, it will measure
     the weight of my breath. And he breathed and, sure enough, the needle moved, and then he
     took the sliced salami from our scale and threw it onto his, and the scale showed that
     the salami weighed exactly sixty-seven and a half grams. It was obvious that our scales
     had robbed the boss of two point five grams and the salesman worked it out on the table.
     That gives us . . . and then he drew a line under