by Ed McBain
“It’s not to left, snotnose,” Hengman said. “Wait. Soon you’ll be selling epples on the stritt. Den you’ll see how fonny it is.”
“I like apples,” Griff said.
“End I dun’t like westing time. Good-by, Griffie.”
Hengman hung up, and Griff put his phone back into the cradle, looking up to find McQuade standing near his desk. He did not know how long McQuade had been standing there, and his lack of knowledge brought this queasy sort of panic to his stomach again. But McQuade smiled down at him easily, and the panic disappeared, to be replaced by a sort of wariness generated by Hengman’s warning. Could McQuade really be a hatchet man? He would have to be careful.
“Sorry as hell to bother you, Griff,” McQuade said, “but I was wondering if any of those summaries had come in yet.”
Marge looked up. “I put them on your desk, Mr. McQuade,” she said. “We had a regular stampede with those things earlier today. You should have been here to see it.”
“Oh, thanks a lot, Marge.” He paused embarrassedly. “Say, is it all right for me to call you ‘Marge’?”
“Sure,” Marge said. “That is my name.”
McQuade smiled and walked over to his desk, but Griff noticed he had not returned the courtesy and asked Marge to call him “Mac.”
“Well,” McQuade said, “we’ve certainly had a good response, haven’t we?”
Griff nodded abstractly, and went back to pricing orders, struggling with Manelli’s code. McQuade picked up the sheaf of summaries on his desk and began leafing through them. Griff glanced up at him once, and then threw himself into the job wholeheartedly.
Black suede pump, 68—3125, $12.65, that’s GRHW.
Wht emb linen pump, 982—421, $12.00 that’s GR, now what the hell do I do for zeros? Oh, there it is: N. All light, GRNN.
Alabaster/blk pat pump, 714—768, OT, wht leather binding … figure fifty for the binding, open toe cancels out, more labor but less material, so add … what was the basic price? $13.35, plus …
“Here’s a good one,” McQuade said, laughing.
“Huh?” Griff looked up.
“From this fellow in Payroll. Quite a sense of humor. He writes: ‘I spend most of my time doing the following things. I go to the Men’s Room once every ten minutes. I smoke a cigarette once every fifteen minutes, a total of four cigarettes an hour, or approximately a pack and a half a day. I visit one of the girls in the IBM Room at least three times a morning; sometimes, I make airplanes out of paper and throw them around the room, laughing with glee when they land in the department head’s inkwell. It is also good clean fun to shoot paper clips, so I do that occasionally, when I am not hiding the shoes of our typist who takes them off because they are too tight. (Note: They are not Julien Kahn shoes.) I sometimes fill paper bags with water and drop them out of the windows, and sometimes I set fire to wastepaper baskets. Yesterday I had a lot of fun putting a barracuda in the water cooler. But when I am not occupied with these delightful pastimes, I can be found …’ and then he goes right on to tell what he really does. Very clever, don’t you think?” McQuade said.
“Yes,” Griff answered. “Who wrote that?”
“Oh …” McQuade glanced at the signature on the bottom of the summary. “Well, it’s not important. I thought you’d get a kick out of it; though.”
“Yes,” Griff said, having enjoyed the summary, and wishing now that he had jokingly submitted Marge’s “I Type.” He caught Marge’s eye, and she apparently was thinking the same thing, because she gave him a highly superior look. He turned back to the orders again.
Alabaster/blk pat pump … what did I figure for that binding? Forty, was it, no, fifty … total of … $13.35 and fifty … that’s thirteen eight.…
The phone rang. Marge picked it up and said, “Cost.” She paused a moment and then said, “Oh, just a moment, Aaron, he’s right here.” She turned to Griff. “It’s Aaron, Griff, on four.”
Griff pressed the extension button and lifted the phone.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi, stupid,” Aaron asked. “You miss me?”
“Not very. What the hell are you doing, anyway?”
“Costing, costing,” Aaron said. “What’s this I hear about an ogre from Joe-juh invading our cave?”
“Uh, yes, that’s right,” Griff said, glancing apprehensively in McQuade’s direction.
“He there now?” Aaron asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” Griff said.
“You can’t talk?”
“No,” Griff said.
“If you keep answering in monosyllables, he’ll know damn well you’re talking about him,” Aaron said.
“Yes, I guess so,” Griff answered. “In that case, why don’t you get back to what you were doing?”
“Now there’s a fancy bit of subterfuge,” Aaron said, chuckling. “Has he got you doing some work for a change?”
“I’m pricing some orders,” Griff said.
“And I’m costing some samples, which makes us blood brothers, sort of. Brother, wait until you see the fall line! I know you saw the style sheets, but the shoes themselves, man! You’ve never seen such beautiful stuff!”
“No kidding?” Griff asked, leaning closer to the phone.
“It’s wonderful, really wonderful. Griff, if Guild Week isn’t a success this year, the industry can’t blame Julien Kahn. We’ve got some stuff that makes Paris look like Wichita. You remember the style sheet for ‘Naked Flesh’? Jesus, what a shoe!”
“What’s it made of? Old chorus girls?”
“It’s that lizard pump, Griff, but in a natural tan, and the smoothest goddam job you ever want to see. Griff, there’s not a bit of crap on it, not a bit. No bows, no stripping, no trim, just a plain shell pump, but with these lines that make you want to eat the goddam shoe. It’s out of this world, I’m telling you.”
“When do I see it?” Griff asked, visualizing the shoe.
“Come on down. I’ll show it to you now.”
“I’m busy as hell, Aaron.”
“Can’t you break for five minutes? I want your ideas on what we should price this baby at, anyway. It’s like nothing we’ve ever done, Griff, I mean it, and you’ve got to hand it to Chrysler for coming up with a tag like Naked Flesh. If that doesn’t sell a shoe, nothing will.”
“It sounds like an ad for a whore house,” Griff said.
“And it looks like what a whore would wear,” Aaron added, “but a very high-priced whore. Griff, let’s face it. Every woman in the world thinks of herself as a whore.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Griff said, smiling.
“There’s a certain glamour attached to the profession of prostitution,” Aaron expanded. “Every woman recognizes that glamour, so every woman wears low-cut blouses that reveal her breasts, dresses that hug her ass, shoes that accentuate the curve of her leg. Every woman—”
“Now you sound like a morality play,” Griff said.
“And you sound too goddam smart for your own good. Are you coming down to look at this shoe?”
“No.”
“All right, screw you,” Aaron said playfully.
“And thee, dad,” Griff answered.
“And tell the Georgia boy that my grandfather was one of the few Jews in Sherman’s army. See how that sits with him.”
Griff burst out laughing. “I’ll do that,” he promised.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. So long, chicken.”
“So long, hero.”
He put the phone back into its cradle, the smile still on his face. He shook his head and went back to the orders.
“Was that Aaron?” McQuade asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t see a summary here from him.”
“No, he hasn’t been in the office since Friday. We didn’t get a chance to pass the word to him.”
“Pretty busy, is he?” McQuade asked.
“He’s costing our fall line,” Griff said. “I usually handle that myself, but this ti
me I was jammed up and couldn’t.… Aaron knows as much about costing as I do, anyway, and we had to get a man on it right away. Guild Week is coming up in a little over a month, you know, and Chrysler is beginning to put on a little pressure.”
“I see,” McQuade said. “Pretty important, is it? Guild Week?”
“Guild Week?” Griff asked, surprised. “Oh sure, Guild Week is … well, don’t you know about Guild Week?”
“I’m afraid not,” McQuade said. He ducked his head. “Here comes my abysmal ignorance to the surface again.”
“Oh, Guild Week is a lot of work,” Griff said. “Hell of a lot of work, but it’s fun, too. It’s a showing for the entire fashion shoe industry, you see. We usually take over a hotel somewhere; this year it’s in New York, last year it was in Chicago; it varies. Kahn will have one floor, or room, like the Empire Room, for example, and I. Miller will have another, and De Liso, all of them will be represented, as well as the allied leather trades, handbags, belts, stuff like that. Our salesmen are all called in, and most of our accounts show up, and we give them a preview of our complete line for the following season, either spring or fall. There are models, and a sales pitch, and a dinner sometimes, and drinks, and, well, it’s something like a convention, I suppose, and really pretty exciting because we do a bang-up job on the presentation of our line. Guild Week is something, all right.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” McQuade said.
“It isn’t until the middle of April,” Griff said probingly.
McQuade only nodded in answer, and Griff looked at him for a moment before he went back to his pricing.
“I’m really glad I asked for these summaries,” McQuade said at length. “It really makes things a whole lot easier, do you know?”
“I imagine so,” Griff said.
“And I’m glad no one took them really seriously. They’ve told me just what I want to know, with no attempt at making their jobs more important, no attempt to deceive me. Hell, I’m not an inquisitor.” He smiled happily. “Yes, I’m very, very pleased with these summaries. Very pleased.”
4
The entire IBM Room was fired on Friday of that week. The firing came as something of a shock, because Julien Kahn usually let people go on Wednesdays, when the payroll was tallied. Titanic apparently preferred the last day of the week, a preference which would lead to a good deal of anxiety on that day for many weeks to come.
Everyone, of course, knew that the IBM Room was not worth a damn the way it was being run. Frank Fazio was a hell of a nice guy, but he didn’t know the IBM from the BMT. Ever since the machines had been installed last August, the department had been in a constant state of harried bewilderment. The machines, which would have simplified the department’s job if properly utilized, had become separate, quietly calculating monsters, and each employee in the department approached them with a mental illusion of being devoured, punched, and filed under D for Digested. Fazio had, of course, taken the required IBM course of study, but Fazio was an old dog, and these new tricks were a little too much for him to absorb. He had tried passing on his partially learned tricks to the people who worked under him, and the result was a confused mass of uninformed people playing around with a very well-informed mass of machines machines which assumed the characteristics of master brains by comparison. But even so, even knowing the department was something of a beheaded chicken, everyone in the factory had sort of grown accustomed to its aimless meanderings. It was something like having a drunken husband lying on the living-room couch all day long. You certainly didn’t call the ASPCA to come take him away, did you? No one in the factory would have dreamed of taking the IBM Room away.
Except Joseph Manelli, it seemed.
Joseph Manelli, it seemed, had no particular fondness for drunken spouses cluttering up the living room of his factory. Joseph Manelli called International Business Machines and told them to have their infernal monsters out of the building by Friday of next week, at which time most of the members of the department would officially leave the employ of Julien Kahn. There were seven people in the IBM Room: five girls, Fazio (who was supervisor), and an assistant supervisor. Manelli’s one-week notice applied only to the five girls. Fazio and his assistant were expected to stay on for an additional sixty days while they cleaned up shop, after which time the Accounting Department would take over its duties. Or so the memo from Manelli decreed.
Griff was not at all pleased with the memo, a carbon copy of which had reached his desk, since the IBM operation tied in with his own. He liked Frank Fazio, and he had also liked Joseph Manelli to some extent. But Manelli exhibited all the signs of becoming a worse son of a bitch than Kurz had ever been, and this was very disturbing to Griff.
He voiced his opinions in the seeming privacy of the Cost Department, and Marge listened to him quietly and attentively. When his tirade was completed, he was surprised to find McQuade standing in the open doorway, and he felt this strange panic again, and he cursed McQuade mentally, certain the man’s forefathers had all been Indian scouts.
McQuade smiled. “You shouldn’t condemn Joe, Griff,” he said. “He’s stepped into a difficult job. And, after all, you know as well as I do that the IBM Room was operating at a loss. Or at least that’s what Joe told me.”
“Well,” Griff said warily, “I suppose so.”
McQuade shrugged. “I’ve got a bad habit, I guess, of always trying to see the other man’s viewpoint. Griff, we’re all being paid to do a job, aren’t we? If we’re not doing our job, we’re accepting money under false pretenses. I think Joe did the right thing in letting the entire department go. And I think the big boys at Titanic will be pleased with what he’s done.”
Griff imagined they would, but he did not voice any comment. Throughout the past week, he had come to accept McQuade as a permanent fixture in the department. The tight formality of their earlier thrusts at friendship had dissolved into a smoothly functioning working relationship. Griff took to calling him “Mac” without feeling silly about it, and McQuade went about his getting-acquainted job effortlessly and quietly, asking nothing more than desk space from the department. He visited other departments, and he talked to people, and he spent a lot of time with Manelli and a lot of time with Hengman and a lot of time in the factory, and as much time in Chrysler Building across the river. He really seemed determined to learn the Kahn operation. He was always courteous and always pleasant, and there was no real reason to distrust him.
But, at the same time, Griff very rarely voiced any opinions about Titanic while McQuade was present. He was sensible enough to realize that McQuade was indeed a representative of the now-mother company, and he was in no hurry to vilify Mom’s name while McQuade was around. Lurking in the corner of his mind was Hengman’s declaration that McQuade was a “hetchet men.” Griff wasn’t sure that McQuade was, but he was not anxious to find out. He considered McQuade’s unfortunate entrance during his tirade a serious mishap, and he warned himself to be more careful in the future.
The firing of the IBM Room precipitated a flow of memos from every department in the factory and Sales Offices, as if the firing were a slap in the face which had suddenly brought the entire company to its collective feet. The week after the firing would long be remembered as Memo Week.
Manelli started the ball rolling with his upper-case memos, a sign of affectation no doubt, but certainly boldly impressive in their own quietly screaming way. The memos came from his office like ominously falling stones, and they probably started the avalanche which followed. The first memo was a short one. It said:
RE LABOR BUDGET. AS WE ALL KNOW, THERE ARE BOTH PIECEWORKERS AND TIME WORKERS IN THIS FACTORY. OUR PREDETERMINED BUDGET FOR EACH MONTH FIGURES APPROXIMATELY THE COST IN LABOR FOR EACH DEPARTMENT. IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION THAT MANY DEPARTMENTS HAVE A LARGE PERCENTAGE OF PIECEWORKERS WHO ARE COLLECTING MONIES FOR TIME WORK. THIS MUST STOP AT ONCE.
SIGNED:
J. MANELLI, COMPTROLLER
It was
true, of course, that floor foremen had pets on their floors, or friends, or relatives, or even mistresses. It was also true that these assorted pets, friends, relatives, and mistresses did a lot of piecework, and that sometimes the piecework on a particular shoe ran out, and there was nothing left to do but go home. Being a pet, friend, etc. of the foreman came in handy at such times. The foreman found work for these idle pieceworkers, putting them on straight time for the remainder of the day. The work was usually of a non-laborious nature, and was generally a waste of time and—more important—company money. So Manelli’s first memo was not a silly one. It was, in fact, a pretty shrewd one, and Griff wondered how in hell he had ever found out about the delinquency or how he’d ever mustered up the courage to call a halt to it.
His second memo was an attempt at spilling a little oil on the troubled waters. It read:
I AM DELIGHTED TO REPORT THAT A NEW BONUS SYSTEM WILL GO INTO EFFECT COMMENCING THIS DATE. IT IS A KNOWN FACT THAT A LOT OF OVERTIME WORK IS BEING DONE IN EVERY DEPARTMENT OF THIS BUILDING. UNFORTUNATELY, MUCH OF THIS OVERTIME IS A NEEDLESS WASTE. DEPARTMENT SUPERVISORS WILL BE PLEASED TO LEARN THAT BONUSES WILL BE DECLARED FOR SUPERVISORS WHO CUT DOWN ON OVERTIME IN THEIR DEPARTMENTS.
SIGNED:
J. MANELLI, COMPTROLLER
Well, this was definitely soothing to the department heads, especially after being called down about favors to special friends. This meant that the denial of favors was to be accompanied by a little extra cash for the denial of those favors. For overtime was definitely a favor. If a man goofed all day long, he could stay at his machine to the wee hours of the morn, drawing time and a half, and goofing even more. It was an accepted means of pulling down a little extra dough that week, and the foremen casually overlooked it, even though everyone knew that four hours of overtime work amounted to about one hour of honest-to-God straight-time work. So the supervisors were happy, but the workers weren’t particularly overjoyed. Overtime, to many of them, meant the difference between a new TV set or last year’s paltry seventeen-inch model. The workers were not happy at all.