“Well, I came into work one day last week. I put on my apron and put the glue on the hot plate to warm up. Mr. Zendke was very pleased that day. He was humming and bustling. He’d got a couple of really good pipes to work on. I told you before that he likes pipes better than people. His entire social life consists of playing with pipes and talking to them. If he gets a cheap pipe in he tsks and groans as though it were a criminal. If it’s cheap and also smells of rum and maple, he snubs it completely. But this day we had two real aristocrats. Well-educated, high-principled, wise old pipes. He was fantastic. When he stuck the pipe cleaner in you could almost hear him say, ‘Excuse me.’ And he wiggles it around, intent on what he’s doing, and then pulls out the cleaner and pats the pipe and actually says, ‘There now, it’s over. Isn’t that better?’ I was amazed. I’d never seen him with a really fine pipe before. But we’d been getting on very well. He told me all about his wife, who died twenty years ago, and I told him about going to college. He’d never studied and he has this superstitious reverence for anyone who has. He couldn’t believe all the politics and talk that are really what counts in any school. So anyway, he’s holding this pipe as though it were the Star of Kuala Lumpur or something, and he gives me a wink and says, ‘Would you like to clean the bit?’ He was giving me a treat, you know? So I say, ‘I sure would,’ and I take it from him and the phone rings and he says, ‘Be very, very careful,’ and off he goes to answer it. Well! By that time I was really nervous. I was scared I’d drop the thing, so I put it in a little vise on the workbench. Then I take this little tool for scraping the sludge out of the bit and I go at it very carefully. But my hands are shaking. It was like I was a brain surgeon working on Einstein. You can’t help but wonder if you’re up to it. Then there was a little snap. Just a faint little sound, but the pipe split in two, right up the stem. I don’t know exactly what I did. And I don’t know why it never occurred to me to take the bit out of the pipe. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you clean it. I wanted to hide it all, throw it in the garbage and tell Mr. Zendke that a masked man had taken it from me at gunpoint. But he came in and saw me standing there with the pieces in my hands. It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if he’d yelled and jumped up and down. But he just came up to me and took the pieces out of my hands very tenderly. Then he kind of moaned. Then tears came out of his eyes. I felt really bad. We stood there for a while and I wished I could disappear. Then he says, in a very soft voice, ‘Oh, boy, I guess you’d better go away. I’ll send your check.’ So I took off my apron and left. It’s one of the worst things I ever did in my life. It was murder, as far as he was concerned.”