The Spiked Heel

by Ed McBain

  So Manelli issued a third decree, designed to lift the spirits of the factory personnel, and the third decree read as follows:

  I KNOW EVERYONE CONCERNED WILL BE HAPPY TO LEARN THAT COKE MACHINES WILL BE INSTALLED ON EVERY FLOOR OF THE BUILDING LATER THIS MONTH, MAKING THE OLD EVERY-OTHER-FLOOR SYSTEM OBSOLETE. DRINK HEARTY.

  SIGNED:

  J. MANELLI, COMPTROLLER

  Not to be outdone by Joseph Manelli, the people in charge of various departments throughout the building began sending their own memos, carbon copies of which invariably reached Griff’s desk for one reason or another.

  TO: George Natalis

  FROM: Arthur Magruder

  It has been brought to my attention that invoices sent by Kahn to Fred Rakon, Sioux City, Iowa, have met with delinquent payment, and it was suggested to me by Mr. Manelli that perhaps the Credit Department was to blame in not properly checking the new account before accepting his order. This is to notify you that this account was checked thoroughly with D & B, from which it received an excellent credit rating, plus a bank balance in the high six figures. And …

  TO: Fred Purdy

  FROM: David Stiegman

  Concerning the memo which was addressed to Mr. George Natalis from Mr. Arthur Magruder concerning certain difficulties in payment we are experiencing with invoices sent by Kahn to Fred Rakon, Sioux City, Iowa. I have gone into this matter thoroughly, and the findings are as follows: There has been negligence in the shipping department where shoes already invoiced were not being shipped until a month, sometimes six weeks, afterwards and …

  TO: Mr. Harris

  FROM: Karl Vorhies

  Beginning with the shipments of March 17th, orders for Louisville, Elizabethtown, and Frankfort, Kentucky, will be credited to Mr. Carter Jacobs. They were formerly accounts covered in the territory of Bert Binick. And …

  TO: J. J. Carlson

  FROM: Boris Hengman

  Confirming our recent talk at lunch, we will accept special orders taken at special order showings wherever these special order showings occur in the Boston territory, and there will be no special order charge on these special orders taken, unless a special order charge is requested by you specifically, and …

  Memos and memos, and more memos, flowing through the factory like mercury. Memos from Payroll to Sales, from Credit to Cost, from Cost to Payroll, from Sales to Production, from Production to Sales, from Tom to Fred and Fred to Mike and Mike to George and George to Sam and Sam to Louie and Louie to Tom, memos scrawled on scratch paper or typed or dittoed or mimeographed or crayoned or inked, memos delivered by the messenger boys, or the clerks, or the department heads, memos, memos, memos, and then the Sales Division climbed aboard with:

  SALES NOTICE #587–B

  Toot and begorrah, if we’re not pickled tink!

  We’ve noticed a pickup in stock, and everyone knows that’s the first sign of a stimulated business activity. Women are crying for shoes, begging for shoes, so let’s get out there and talk “stock” with our accounts.

  Kahnettes are going to be the big thing, Kahnettes and more Kahnettes, new and exciting at a price to fit milady’s purse, and …

  SALES NOTICE #594–B

  We’ve just seen some of our Fall samples! If we are permitted to enthuse just a very little bit, they are positively terrific! We’ve got the freshest, newest, most complete line of women’s fashion shoes that have ever been offered, and we predict one of our best seasons to date. And what does all this mean to you? It means you’re getting new lasts, new silhouettes, new heels and trimmings. It means you’ve got a refreshing, terrific line to start pushing once Guild Week proves our prediction to be valid. It means …

  He got the idea during Memo Week, when everyone and his brother was memo-happy. He went to see Manelli often during that week, trying to work out an increased production plan with him, and each time he went to Manelli’s office he lingered longer to chat with Cara Knowles. There was something very appealing about the girl’s quiet good looks, and Griff finally decided he should get to know her a little better than Manelli’s office permitted.

  He went into the office on Wednesday of Memo Week and walked directly to Cara’s desk.

  “Hi,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Griff,” she answered. “Was Mr. Manelli expecting you?”

  “Nope,” he said. “But this memo got sent to me by error. It’s addressed to you.”

  “Oh?” Cara seemed confused. She bit her lip and said, “Who’d want to send me …”

  “Why don’t you open it?”

  “All right.” She hesitated a moment, and then lifted the flap of the OFFICE COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE envelope. The memo read:

  TO: Miss Cara Knowles

  FROM: Raymond Griffin

  Apropos of nothing, and not concerning any previous memo or telephone conversation, it has occurred to me that you and I might enjoy an evening of dancing and combined revelry this Saturday night, provided you do not have a previous engagement. What do you think of this suggestion?

  R. Griffin, Social Director

  Cara looked up, and for an instant he saw the same look he had first seen on her face the day he’d met her. And then she smiled, and her face softened.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “Fine. What time?”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Fine. Where?”

  “Here’s the address.” She scrawled it for him on a slip of paper. “This is the nicest memo I ever got,” she said. She paused and her smile widened and there was something coquettish in her eyes when she added, “In fact, it’s the only memo I ever got.”

  “At eight Saturday, and dancing it is.”

  He left her office feeling happy as hell, humming to himself all the way down the corridor. When he passed the open Credit Department doorway, he peeked in. Magruder and Danny were at the windows, wrangling over a pair of binoculars. He laughed aloud and then went to his own office.

  A shoe was waiting on his desk.

  Aaron Reis was standing alongside the desk, sniffing the air, his eyes sparkling.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked.

  Griff walked to the desk and studied the shoe. He backed away then, looking at it from a distance, and then he circled the desk, his eyes never once leaving the shoe. It was a simple shell pump in a tan reptile, cut extremely low in the vamp, starkly bare in its beauty. There was not a bit of trim or piping on the shoe. It carried a very high heel, at least a 24/8, and the arch of the shoe was a delicately scooped-out open area, giving the entire shoe a look of lightness and airiness. The lizard used had obviously been a damned good skin. The grain was uniform and small, and the lack of ornaments intensified the dignified bare beauty of the shoe.

  “Well?” Aaron asked.

  “Naked Flesh?”

  “Naked Flesh.”

  “I like it,” Griff said.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as being a little strange?”

  “The fact that it’s a shell pump, you mean?”

  “Yes. Now who the hell wants to invest in a reptile shoe and get a shell pump? The most important thing in a reptile shoe is the skin, am I right? So a woman is willing to plunk down fifty bucks if she can get that skin. But we’re giving her a shell pump with a damned narrow heel. Just look at that low throat, Griff! Where’s the reptile? Why does she have to pay fifty bucks for this job?”

  “Why indeed?” Griff asked.

  “She doesn’t,” Aaron said. “Look at that beautiful bitch, Griff, just look at her. What woman wouldn’t hock her eye-teeth to stick her feet into that shoe? That would flatter the foot of a washerwoman. And it’s reptile, and I’ll be Goddamned if I’m not going to ask you to sell it to milady for as low as thirty-seven fifty.”

  “Retail?” Griff said. “You’re joking.”

  “Forty-two dollars, tops,” Aaron said. “And why? Griff, we’re saving piles of dough on this shoe. It’s a she
ll pump, so we can cut smaller vamps and quarters, and with those small alligator lizard skins that’s important. It means we can get more shoes from a single skin than if this were a regular pump, and all because of that throat. The heel is slender and long, and if we cut this bitch right, we can get our heel coverings from the skin left over from the low-throat pattern. And look at it, Griff! Now, isn’t it a beautiful shoe? Oh, Jesus, isn’t it a honey?”

  “It’s something, Aaron,” Griff said, feeling more than he could express. “It’s really something, believe me.”

  “Where’s Marge? I want her to try this on. You’ll see then, Griff.”

  “I see now,” Griff said honestly. “Is it her size?”

  “Four-B,” Aaron said. “Hell, you know she’s got a model’s foot.” He looked toward the door. “Where the hell is she?”

  “Probably in the john.”

  “Look, Griff, would you buy this shoe? If you saw this shoe for thirty-seven fifty, alligator lizard, mind you, with those god-damn pure lines, would you buy it? Tell me the God’s honest truth, if you were a woman wouldn’t you sell your husband to buy this shoe?”

  “I’d sell my mother,” Griff said, smiling.

  Marge came in, putting her purse down on her desk, and then walking over to where the shoe caught the sunlight.

  “Do you like it?” Aaron asked, beaming.

  “Do I like it? Aaron, it’s beautiful!”

  “Thirty-seven fifty retail,” Aaron said.

  “No!”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Try it on, Marge,” Griff said.

  “Oh, could I?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “I’d be insulted if you didn’t,” Aaron answered.

  “To hear him talk,” Griff said, “you’d think he designed the damn thing.”

  “I love that shoe,” Aaron said. “Oh, I love that bitch.”

  Marge sat down and crossed her legs, pulling her skirt up over her knees, smoothing her nylon, and then taking off her shoe. Griff picked up the pump tenderly, cradling it in one hand.

  “Milady,” he said, bending down and taking Marge’s foot. Aaron handed him a shoehorn, and Griff slipped the shoe onto Marge’s foot and then backed away.

  “Can I stand on it?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to scuff the sole,” Aaron said. “Here, just a minute.” He spread his handkerchief on the floor. “All right, go ahead.”

  Marge stood, placing the sole of her foot on the handkerchief. Gracefully, she smoothed her skirts back against her right leg, in a shoe model’s pose, taking a short step backwards with the other foot, showing the full curve of her leg, the pump hugging her foot, the low throat scooping down to reveal the beginnings of her toes.

  “What a shoe!” Griff said.

  “What legs!” Aaron said, clucking appreciatively.

  “Oh, now hush,” Marge said. “Oh, isn’t it beautiful! I don’t think we’ve ever had a shoe like this one. I adore it.” Her eyes flared. “Griff, can we get a pair for me at cost?”

  “Well …”

  They heard the footsteps hurrying down the corridor, and then they heard the voice.

  “Griff!”

  Griff whirled instantly. Sven Jored, supervisor of the Cutting Room, rushed through the doorway, stared excitedly around the office for a moment, and then ran over to where they were standing. He was a big man with ash-blond hair and blue-eyes, his sleeves rolled up over bulging muscles, his shop apron stained with sweat.

  “Griff,” he said urgently.

  “What is it, Sven?”

  “Downstairs,” Jored said, and then stopped to catch his breath. “Charlie Fields … your friend … the kid …”

  “What about him?”

  “Griff, the whole floor is in an uproar. I swear to God, I don’t know what got into them, but he likes you, Griff, I thought you could …”

  “What the hell is it, Sven? Spit it out!”

  “Charlie and Steve … they’re both apprentice cutters, you know that … work side by side … Griff …” He gulped more air into his lungs. “I don’t know how it happened … first time anything like this on my floor … the runner says Steve got sore because Charlie was getting the stuff that paid more per piece, but how was the kid to know, he just got the fabrics and dumped them, didn’t he? But Steve got sore, that’s what they tell me, and he started riding Charlie, and you know Charlie, Griff, he’s got a bad temper, so he told Steve to shut the hell up and mind his own business. Griff, we’ve all been on edge, this crap about no more overtime, that hurts a man, Griff, they’re all trying to get the cream jobs now, the stuff that pays off.”

  “What happened, Sven?”

  “I don’t know how it happened, I swear it. But they’re on the floor now, Griff, circling around those goddam benches. Everything’s stopped, Griff, everything, the whole floor, Prefitting everything. They’re circling around, and Charlie’s got a cutting knife in his hand, and Steve is swinging that heavy mallet we use for stamping dies, I swear to Christ, Griff, one of those stupid bastards is going to get killed. I tried to talk to them, but they won’t listen, they just keep circling like two goddam tigers or something. Griff, I thought maybe you could talk to Charlie, he knows you and he likes you and maybe he’ll listen to reason, otherwise we’re gonna have a lot of goddam blood down there, I can promise you that. Griff, the girls in Prefitting are all screaming like a bunch of—”

  “Come on,” Griff said.

  5

  They didn’t wait for the elevator. They took the stairway down to the eighth floor, racing down the steps, passing the fire hose in the corridor, and then coming out into the Cutting Room. The floor was deathly silent. There were no screams and no sounds of machinery. The silence hung over the floor like a deep black mist, impenetrable and ominous.

  The cutting benches were hidden behind a wall of people, men from the Leather Room and the Cutting Room, women who had left Prefitting to join the ring of spectators, runners who had stopped their work to watch the fight. Everyone on the floor seemed to have crowded into the Cutting Room.

  “Where are they?” Griff asked.

  “Through there,” Jored said, sweating. “Come on, break it up, let us through here, let us through!”

  The workers parted silently. From somewhere on the other side of the ring, a voice shouted, “Slash the son of a bitch, Charlie!”

  Griff looked up quickly, trying to locate the voice. He saw a ring of sweating faces, and he was suddenly aware that he himself was sweating. He shouldered his way through the men, smelling the sweat on them, and smelling this other thing, this blood lust that was reflected in the shining eyes and drawn mouths. The blood lust gleamed in the eyes of the women, too. They may have been screaming a few moments before when Jored had left the floor, but they weren’t screaming now, not with their mouths and their throats. They were screaming in a different way, a scream that started somewhere deep in them and worked its way through their blood, rushing like a fever, hot and raging, putting the shine on their eyes, bringing the saliva to their lips. The scream was a black evil thing that cried for blood. The scream was the “Olé” of a bullfight, dark in intent, ravenous for blood. The fight was a flesh-and-blood explosion of petty hatred, and as they watched the fighters, their own hatreds, petty and large, rushed to their brains and their eyes, and they longed for the purging cleanser that was blood.

  He saw this in their eyes, and he was suddenly afraid, because he liked Charlie, and he knew what the goading of a crowd could do to a man with a knife in his hands.

  “Cut ’em off for him, Charlie!” one of the men shouted, and then a woman standing near one of the benches bellowed, “Get him, Steve. Crack in his skull!”

  He burst through the fringe of the ring, and he felt like a man who had swum underwater in an ocean of blood. He breathed deeply for an instant, and then his eyes focused against the sunlight glaring through the windows, and two images stood out starkly against the leering, hungry background of faces.
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  Charlie was wearing a T-shirt, soaked with sweat now, the shirt sticking to his muscular back and chest, the perspiration spreading in dark blots outward from his backbone, outward from his armpits, like devouring amoebae that nibbled at the whiteness of the shirt. His dark curling hair was matted to his brow. The sweat clung to his brow and rolled down the bridge of his nose, clung there in droplets until he shook them off, and then cascaded past the hard firmness of his set mouth, dotting the floor. He was tense and tight, the biceps of his arm bulging with the coiled-spring tautness of his body. He held the cutting knife in his right hand, his fingers firm on the handle, the moon-crescent blade glittering in the sunlight. He kept his left hand out in front of him, the fingers wide-spread, like a wrestler circling for a hold.

  Three feet from him, Steve Maiches stood, a heavy metal-based mallet tight in his hand. He wore a blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, crisp red hairs curling on his heavy arms. His eyes were green and slitted, his red crew cut bursting from the top of his skull like a rigid pictorial display of his anger. He crouched over, waiting for an opening, waiting to swing the mallet, waiting like a medieval knight with a mace in his hands. His lips were skinned back over his teeth, and his teeth were clenched tightly together, and Steve Maiches was not kidding, Steve Maiches was not kidding at all.

  “Hit the bastard, Steve!” someone shouted.

  “Come on, Steve, swing that thing!”

  “Get him, Charlie.”

  “Go, Charlie, go. In the gut, Charlie.”

  Steve backed off down the aisle. Charlie followed him, probing the air with the cutting knife, grasping the air with the wide-spread fingers of his left hand. Steve hissed a little, the hiss escaping his clenched teeth like an involuntary rumble of his seething hatred.

  “Come on, come on, let’s go! Go, go, go!”

  “Go, go,” the workers began to chant. “Go, go, go, go!”

  Steve swung the mallet at nothing, and Charlie backed away, skipping up the aisle again. Steve kept swinging the mallet, the air whispering behind it.

  “That’s the boy, Steve! Now, go, boy, go, go, go.”

  Charlie was close to Griff now. He could smell the sweat on him, and the greater smell of fear.