The Carpetbaggers (59 page)

He turned, swinging wildly at David, the blow catching him on the side of the head, slamming him back against the side of the truck. David could feel his forehead beginning to swell. It had to be a quick fight or the man would kill him. He shook his head to clear it and looked up to see the platform boss coming at him again. He braced his feet against the side of the truck and using the added leverage this gave him, lashed out at the man's face.

The blow never reached its target. The platform boss caught it on his raised arm but it spun him backward toward the edge of the platform. Again David lashed out at him. He sidestepped the blow but stumbled and fell from the platform to the ground.

David leaned over the big hydraulic jack and looked down at him. He was getting to his hands and knees. He turned his face up to David, the blood running down his cheeks, his lips drawn savagely back across his teeth. "I'll kill yuh for this, yuh Jew bastard!"

David stared down at him. The man was up on one knee. "You wanted it like this, mister," David said as he reached for the handle of the jack.

The platform boss screamed once as the heavy jack came down on him. Then he lay quietly, face on the ground, the jack straddling his back like a primeval monster.

Slowly David straightened up, his chest heaving. He stared at the crowd. Already they were beginning to melt away, their faces white and frightened. Needlenose climbed up on the truck. He looked down at the platform boss. "Yuh think yuh croaked him?"

David shrugged. He slipped the brass knuckles into his friend's pocket. "You better get the truck out of here."

Needlenose nodded and climbed behind the wheel as David stepped across onto the loading platform. The truck pulled out into the street just as Wagner came up with a policeman. The policeman looked at David. "What happened?"

"There's been an accident," David answered.

The policeman looked down at the platform boss. "Call an ambulance," he said quickly. "Somebody help me get this thing off him."

David turned and went up in the freight elevator. He heard the clanging of the ambulance while he was in the bathroom, washing up. The door behind him opened and he turned around.

The Sheriff was standing there, a towel in his hand. "I thought you could use this."

"Thanks." David took the towel and soaked it in hot water, then held it to his face. The heat felt soothing. He closed his eyes. The sound of the ambulance grew fainter. "You all right?" the old man asked.

"I'm O.K.," David answered.

He heard the old man's footsteps. The door closed behind him and David took the towel from his face. He stared at himself in the mirror. Except for a slight lump on his temple, he looked all right. He rinsed his face with cold water and dried it. Leaving the towel hanging over the edge of the sink, he walked out.

A girl was standing near the staircase, wearing the blue smock with Henri France lettered on the pocket. He stopped and looked at her. She looked vaguely familiar. She must have been one of the girls he had seen downstairs.

She smiled at him boldly, revealing not too pretty teeth. "Is it true you're old man Norman's nephew?"

He nodded.

"Freddie Jones, who runs your still lab, says I ought to be in pictures. He had me pose for him."

"Yeah?"

"I got them here," she said. "Want to see 'em?"

"Sure."

She smiled and took some photographs out of her pocket. He took the pictures and looked at them. This Freddie, whoever he was, knew how to take pictures. She looked much better without a smile. And without her clothes.

"Like 'em?"

"Yeah."

"You can keep 'em," she said.

"Thanks."

"If you get a chance, show 'em to your uncle sometime," she said quickly. "Lots of girls get started in pictures that way."

He nodded.

"I seen what happened downstairs. It was sure time that Tony got his lumps."

"You didn't like him?"

"Nobody liked him," she said. "But they were all afraid of him. The cop asked me what happened. I told him it was an accident. The jack fell on him."

He looked into her eyes. They were hard and shining.

"You're nice," she said. "I like you." She took something out of her pocket and gave it to him. It looked like a small tin of aspirin but the lettering read:
Henri France De Luxe
.

"You don't have to worry about those," she said. "They're the best we make. You can read a newspaper through 'em. I inspected and rolled them myself."

"Thanks."

"Got to get back to work," she said. She walked back to the stairway. "See yuh."

"See yuh." He looked down at the small tin in his hand and opened it. She was right. You could read right through them. There was a slip of paper in the bottom. Written on it in black pencil was the name Betty and a telephone number.

Wagner was sitting at his desk when David walked by. "You were pretty lucky," he said. "The doctor said that all Tony has is a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. He'll need twelve stitches in his cheek, though."

"He was lucky," David said. "It was an accident."

The supervisor's gaze fell before his. "The garage across the street wants ten bucks to fix the jack."

"I'll give it to them tomorrow."

"You don't have to," Wagner said quickly. "I already did."

"Thanks."

The foreman looked up from his desk. His eyes met David's squarely. "I wish we could pretend this morning never happened," he said in a low voice. "I’d like to start all over again."

David stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled and held out his hand. "My name is David Woolf," he said. "I’m supposed to see the foreman about a job."

The foreman looked at David's hand and got to his feet. "I’m Jack Wagner, the foreman," he said, and his grip was firm. "Let me introduce you to the boys."

When David turned toward the packaging tables, all the men were grinning at him. Suddenly, they weren't strangers any more. They were friends.

Bernard Norman walked into his New York office. It was ten o'clock in the morning and his eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks pink from the winter air, after his brisk walk down from the hotel.

"Good morning, Mr. Norman," his secretary said. "Have a nice trip?"

He smiled back at her as he walked on into his private office and opened the window. He stood there breathing in the cold fresh air. Ah, this was
geshmach
. Not like the day-in, day-out sameness of California.

Norman went over to his desk and took a large cigar from the humidor. He lit it slowly, relishing the heavy aromatic Havana fragrance. Even the cigars tasted better in New York. Maybe, if he had time, he'd run down to Ratner's on Delancey Street and have blintzes for lunch.

He sat down and began to go over the reports lying on his desk. He nodded to himself with satisfaction. The billings from the exchanges were up over last year. He turned to the New Yorker theater reports. The Norman Theater, his première house on Broadway, had picked up since they started having stage shows along with the picture. It was holding its own with Loew's State and the Palace. He leafed through the next few reports, then stopped and studied the report from the Park Theater. An average gross of forty-two hundred dollars a week over the past two months. It must be a mistake. The Park had never grossed more than three thousand tops. It was nothing but a third-run house on the wrong side of Fourteenth Street.

Norman looked further down the report and his eyes came to rest on an item labeled Employee Bonuses. They were averaging three hundred a week. He reached for the telephone. Somebody must be crazy. He'd never O.K.'d bonuses like that. The whole report must be wrong.

"Yes, Mr. Norman?" his secretary's voice came through.

"Tell Ernie to get his ass in here," Norman said. "Right away." He put down the telephone. Ernie Hawley was his treasurer. He'd be able to straighten this out.

Hawley came in, his eyes shadowed by his thick glasses. "How are you, Bernie?" he asked. "Have a good trip?"

Norman tapped the report on his desk. "What's with this on the Park Theater?" he said. "Can't you bastards get anything right?"

Hawley looked confused. "The Park? Let's see it."

Norman gave him the report, then leaned back in his chair, savagely puffing at his cigar. Hawley looked up. "I can't see anything wrong with this."

"You can't?" Norman said sarcastically. "You think I don't know the Park never grossed more than three thousand a week since it was built? I'm not a dope altogether."

"The gross on the report is correct, Bernie. Our auditors check it every week."

Bernie scowled at him. "What about those employee bonuses? Twenty-four hundred dollars in the last two months! You think I'm crazy? I never O.K.'d anything like that."

"Sure you did, Bernie," Hawley replied. "That's the twenty-five-per cent manager's bonus we set up to help us over the slump after Christmas."

"But we set the top gross for the theaters as a quota," Norman snapped. "We figured out it would cost us next to nothing. What figure did we use for the Park?"

"Three thousand."

Bernie looked down at the report. "It's a trick," he said. "Taubman's been stealing us blind. If he wasn't, how come all of a sudden he's grossing forty-two hundred?"

"Taubman isn't managing the theater now. He's been out with appendicitis since right after Christmas."

"His signature's on the report."

"That's just a rubber stamp. All the managers have them."

"So who's managing the theater?" Norman asked. "Who's the wise guy beating us out of three hundred a week?"

Hawley looked uncomfortable. "We were in a spot, Bernie. Taubman caught us at a bad time; we didn't have anybody else to send in."

"So stop beating around the bush and tell me already," Norman snapped.

"Your nephew, David Woolf," the treasurer said reluctantly.

Norman clapped his hand to his head dramatically. "Oy! I might have known."

"There wasn't anything else we could do." Hawley reached for a cigarette nervously. "But the kid did a good job, Bernie. He made tie-ins with all the neighborhood stores, pulled in some give-aways and he swamps the neighborhood with heralds twice a week. He even started what he calls family night, for Monday and Tuesday, the slow nights. A whole family gets in for seventy-five cents. And it's working. His candy and popcorn sales are four times what they were."

"So what's the extra business costing us?"

Again the treasurer looked uncomfortable. "It added a little to operating expenses but we figure it's worth it."

"So?" Norman said. "Exactly how much?"

Hawley picked up the report. He cleared his throat. "Somewhere between eight and eight fifty a week."

"Somewhere between eight and eight fifty a week," Bernie repeated sarcastically. He got to his feet and glared at the treasurer. "A bunch of
shmucks
I got working for me," he shouted suddenly. "The whole increase does nothing for us. But for him it's fine. Three hundred a week extra he puts in his pocket."

He turned and stormed over to the window and looked out. The cold air came in through the open frame. Angrily he slammed down the window. The weather was miserable here, not warm and sunny like it was in California.

"I wouldn't say that," Hawley said. "When you figure the over-all, including the concession sales, we're netting a hundred and fifty a week more."

Norman turned around. "Nine hundred a week of our money he spends to make himself three hundred. We should maybe give him a vote of thanks that he lets us keep the hundred and fifty?" His voice rose to a shrill shriek. "Or maybe it's because he ain't yet figured out a way to beat us out of that!"

He stamped back to his desk angrily. "I don't know what it is, but every time I come to New York, I got to find
tsoris
!" He threw the cigar into the wastebasket and took a new one from the humidor. He put it between his lips and began to chew it.

"A year and a half ago, I come to New York and what do I find? He's working by the warehouse a little over a year and already he's making more on it than we do. A thousand a year he's making selling junked heralds, two thousand selling dirty pictures he's printing by the hundreds on our photo paper in our own still laboratory. A concession he's developed in all our offices around the country selling condoms wholesale. It's a lucky thing I stopped him, or we all would have wound up in jail."

"But you got to admit, Bernie, the warehouse never ran more smoothly," Hawley said. "That rotating perpetual inventory saved us a fortune in reorders."

"Hah," Norman exclaimed. "You think he thought about us when he did it? Don't be a fool! Seventeen dollars a week his salary was and every day he drives to work in a twenty-three-hundred-dollar Buick."

Bernie struck a match and held it to his cigar, puffing rapidly until it was lit. Then he blew out a gust of smoke and threw the match into the ash tray. "So I put him into the Norman as an assistant manager. Everything will be quiet now, I think. I can sleep in peace, I think. What trouble can he make for me in a big house like that?

"Trouble, hah!" He laughed bitterly. "Six months later, when I come back, I find he's turned the theater into a whorehouse and bookie joint! All the vaudeville acts in the country suddenly want to play the Norman. And why shouldn't they? Does Loew's State or the Palace have the prettiest usherettes on Broadway, ready to hump from ten o'clock in the morning until one o'clock at night? Does Loew's or the Palace have an assistant manager who'll take your bet on any track in the country, you shouldn't ever have to leave your dressing room?"

"But Gallagher and Shean, Weber and Fields, and all the other big acts played the house, didn't they?" Hawley asked. "And they're still playing it. It made the theater for us."

"It's a lucky thing I got him out of there and sent him to the Hopkins in Brooklyn before the vice squad got wise," Norman said. "Now I don't have a worry, I think. He can stay there as assistant manager the rest of his life. What can he do to us in Brooklyn, I think. I go back to the Coast, my mind at ease. I can forget about him."