They Walked Like Men

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Well, I did. This morning. Column after column of ads by people who want a place to live—any place to live. Some of them sound desperate.”

  “Jensen’s piece this morning …”

  “You mean about the housing boom?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “It doesn’t add up, Dow. Not that piece and what this man was telling you.”

  “Maybe not. I’m sure it doesn’t. But, look, I have to go out to the airport and meet a big wheel who is coming in. It’s the only way I can get an interview in time for the first edition. If this guy who phoned me comes in about the house and I’m not here, will you talk to him?”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  “Thanks,” said Dow, and walked off to his desk.

  Lightning showed up, carrying the coffee orders in the battered, stained wire service paper box that he kept, when not in use, beneath the picture desk. All hell broke loose immediately. He’d gotten one coffee with cream and no one wanted cream. He’d gotten three with sugar and there were only two men who could drink the stuff with sugar. He’d fouled up on the doughnuts.

  I turned back to my machine and got to work again.

  The place had hit its normal stride.

  Once the daily coffee battle between Lightning and the copydesk had taken place, one knew the place was grooved, that the newsroom at last had slipped into high gear.

  I didn’t work for long.

  A hand fell on my shoulder.

  I looked up and it was Gavin.

  “Park, old boy,” he said.

  “No,” I told him sternly.

  “You’re the only man in the place who can handle this,” he told me. “It’s Franklin’s.”

  “Don’t tell me there’s a fire and a million shoppers—”

  “No, not that,” he said. “Bruce Montgomery just phoned. He’s calling a press conference for nine o’clock.”

  Bruce Montgomery was the president of Franklin’s.

  “That is Dow’s department.”

  “Dow left for the airport.”

  I gave up. There was nothing else to do. The guy was practically in tears. I hate city editors who cry.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll be there. What’s it all about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gavin. “I asked Bruce and he wouldn’t say. It’s bound to be important. Last time they called a press conference was fifteen years ago, when they announced that Bruce was taking over. First time an outsider ever held a top office in the store. It had been all family up till then.”

  “OK,” I said. ‘Til take care of it.”

  He turned around and trotted back to the city desk.

  I yelled for a boy and, when one finally showed up, sent him out the library to get me the clips on Franklin’s for the last five years or so.

  I took the clips out of the envelopes and thumbed through them. There wasn’t much in them that I didn’t know. Nothing of importance. There were stories about style shows at Franklin’s and about art exhibits at Franklin’s and about Franklin’s personnel taking part in a host of civic endeavors.

  Franklin’s was an ancient place and tradition-ridden. It had, just the year before, celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It had been a household word almost since the day the city had been founded. It had been (and still was) a family institution, with its precepts fostered as carefully as is possible only in a family institution. Generation after generation had grown up with Franklin’s, shopping there almost from the cradle to the grave, and it was a byword for fairness in its dealings and in the quality of its merchandise.

  Joy Kane came walking past the desk.

  “Hi, beautiful,” I said. “What’s the deal this morning?”

  “Skunks,” she said.

  “Mink is more your style.”

  She stopped and stood close beside me. I could smell just the faintest hint of some perfume that she was wearing and, more than that, I could feel the presence of her beauty.

  She put out a hand and ruffled my hair, just a quick, impulsive move, and then she was proper once again.

  “Tame skunks,” she said. “Pet skunks. They are the newest thing. Deodorized, of course.”

  “Naturally,” I said. And I was thinking—cute and hydrophobia.

  “I was sore at Gavin when he chased me out there.”

  “Out into the woods?”

  “No. Out to this skunk farm.”

  “You mean they raise them just like pigs and chickens?”

  “Certainly they do. I was telling you these skunks are pets. This man says they make the swellest pets. Clean and cuddly and a lot of fun. He’s getting stacks of orders for them. Pet dealers in New York and Chicago and a lot of other places.”

  “I suppose that you have pictures.”

  “Ben went out with me. He took a lot of them.”

  “Where does this man get his skunks?”

  “I told you. He raises them.”

  “To start with, I mean.”

  “Trappers. Farm boys. He pays good prices for the wild ones. He’s building up his business. He needs wild breeding stock. He’ll buy all that he can get.”

  “Which reminds me,” I told her. “Payday today. You’re going to help me spend the check?”

  She said, “Certainly I am. Don’t you remember that you asked me?”

  “There’s a new joint opening out on Pinecrest Drive.”

  “That sound like fun,” she said.

  “Seven?”

  “Not a minute later. I get hungry early.”

  She went on to her desk and I went back to the clips. But even on a second look there was nothing in them. I shuffled them together and put them back into the envelopes.

  I sat back in my chair and thought about skunks and hydrophobia and the crazy things that some people do.

  V

  The man who sat at the head of the table beside Bruce Montgomery was bald—aggressively bald, as if he took a pride, in baldness, so completely bald that I found myself wondering if he’d ever grown hair. There was a fly crawling on his head and he paid no attention to it. It made me cringe just to watch that fly, walking jauntily and unconcerned across the pinkness of the naked scalp. I could almost feel the slow and maddening prickliness as it pranced along its way.

  But the man sat there, unconcerned, not looking at us but staring out above our heads, as if there were something on the rear wall -of the conference room that fascinated him. So far as he seemed to be concerned, we weren’t even there. He was impersonal and had a touch of coldness, and he never moved. If you hadn’t noticed he was breathing, you would have been convinced that Bruce had hauled one of the window mannequins into the room and set it at the table.

  The fly walked over the dome of baldness and disappeared from view, crawling out of sight down the rear exposure of that shining skull.

  The television boys still were fiddling around with their equipment, getting it set up, and Bruce glanced at them with some impatience.

  The room was fairly well filled up. There were the television and the radio people and the AP and UPI reporters and the man who was a stringer for the Wall Street Journal.

  Bruce looked over at the TV setups once again.

  “Everybody set?” he asked.

  “Just a minute, Bruce,” said one of the TV crowd.

  So we waited while the cameras were adjusted and the cords were strung and the technicians messed around. That’s the way it goes with these TV jerks. They insist on being in on everything and scream if you leave them out, but let them in and they bollix up the detail beyond all imagination. They have the place all cluttered up and you have to wait for them and they take a lot of time.

  I sat there and, for some reason, got to thinking about all the fun Joy and I had had the last few months. We’d gone on picnics and we’d gone fishing and she was one of the finest gals I had ever known. She was a good newspaperwoman, but in becoming a newspaperwoman she had stayed a woman, and that’s not always true. Too many of them th
ink they have to get rough and tough to uphold tradition, and that, of course, is a total canard. Newspapermen never were as rough and tough as the movies tried to make them. They are just a bunch of hardworking specialists who do the best they can.

  The fly came crawling back over the horizon of the gleaming skull. It stood on the skyline for a moment, then tipped up on its head and brushed its wings with its rearward pair of feet. It stayed there for a while, looking the situation over, then wheeled around and went back out of sight.

  Bruce tapped the table with his pencil.

  “Gentlemen,” he said.

  The room became so quiet that I could hear the breathing of the man who was sitting next to me.

  And in that moment while we waited I sensed again the depth of that dignity and decorum which was implicit in this room, with its thick carpeting and its richly paneled walls, the heavy draperies and the pair of paintings on the wall behind the table.

  Here, I thought, was the epitome of the Franklin family and the store that it had built, the position that it held and what it meant to this certain city. Here was the dignity and the foursquare virtue, here the civic spirit and the cultural standard.

  “Gentlemen,” said Bruce, “there is no use employing a lot of preliminaries. Something has happened that, a month ago, I would have said never could have happened. I’ll tell you and then you can ask your questions .. .”

  He stopped talking for a moment, as if he might be searching for the proper words. He halted in the middle of his sentence and he did not drop his voice. His face was bleak and white.

  Then he said it slowly and concisely: “Franklin’s has been sold.”

  We sat silent for a moment, every man of us, not stunned, not stricken, but completely unbelieving. For of all the things that one might have conjured up in his imagining, this was the last thing that any of us would have hit upon. For Frankin’s, and the Franklin family, was a tradition in the town, t, and the family, had been there almost as long as the town md been. To sell Franklin’s was like selling the courthouse or a church.

  Bruce’s face was hard and expressionless and I wondered low he could have said the words, for Bruce Montgomery was as much a part of Franklin’s as the Franklin family—probably n these later years more a part of it, for he’d managed it and coddled it and worried over it for more years than most of us could readily recall.

  Then the silence broke and the questions came, all of them at once.

  Bruce waved us all to silence.

  “Not me,” he told us. “Mr. Bennett will answer all your questions.”

  The bald man for the first time now took notice of us. He lowered his eyes from the spot on the back wall of the room. He nodded slightly at us.

  “One at a time, if you please,” he said.

  “Mr. Bennett,” asked someone from the back of the room, “are you the new owner?”

  “No. I simply represent the owner.”

  “Who is the owner, then?”

  “That is something I can’t tell you,” Bennett said.

  “You mean that you don’t know who the owner is, or—”

  “It means that I can’t tell you.”

  “Could you tell us the consideration?”

  “You mean, of course, how much was paid for it.”

  “Yes, that is—”

  “That, too,” said Bennett, “is not for publication.”

  “Bruce,” said a disgusted voice.

  Montgomery shook his head. “Mr. Bennett, please,” he said. “He will answer all your questions.”

  “Can you tell us,” I asked Bennett, “what the new owner’s policy may be? Will the store continue as it has before? Will the same policies as to quality and credit and civic—”

  “The store,” said Bennett flatly, “will be closed.”

  “You mean for reorganization …”

  “Young man,” said Bennett, clipping off his words, “I don’t mean that at all. The store will be closed. It will not reopen. There will be no Franklin’s. Not any more, there won’t.”

  I caught a glimpse of Bruce Montgomery’s face. If I live to be a million, I’ll never erase from memory the shock and surprise and anguish that was on his face.

  VI

  I was finishing the last page of the story, with Gavin hovering over me, breathing down my neck, and the copydesk a-howl that it was way past deadline, when the publisher’s secretary phoned.

  “Mr. Maynard would like to talk with you,” she told me, “as soon as you are free.”

  “Almost immediately,” I said, hanging up the phone. I finished the final paragraph and whipped out the sheet. Gavin-grabbed it and rushed it to the copydesk.

  He came back to me again. He nodded at the phone. “The Old Man?” he asked.

  I said it had been. “He wants to ask me all about it, I suppose. Another third degree.”

  It was a way the Old Man had. Not that he didn’t trust us. Not that he thought we were goofing off or holding back on anything or distorting anything. It was the newspaperman in him, I’d guess—the screaming need for detail, hoping that by talking with us he might discover some angle we had missed, a raking over of the gravel of raw facts in a maddening look for gold. I suppose it made him feel he was keeping his hand in.

  “It’s a terrible blow,” said Gavin. “There goes a fat contract The boy down in advertising who was handling the account probably is off in some dark corner cutting his throat.” “Not only tough for us,” I said. “Tough for the entire town.” For Franklin’s was not a shopping center only; it was likewise an unofficial social center. Old ladies, with their neatly tailored suits and their prim and careful coiffures, made a quiet and regular celebration in the tearoom on the seventh floor. Housewives out for a day of shopping invariably would meet old friends at Franklin’s—likewise on a shopping mission —and would block the aisles with impromptu reunions. People were always meeting other people there by prearranged appointment. And there were the art shows and the uplift lectures and all the other trappings that are the hallmark of genteel America. Franklin’s was a marketplace and a rendezvous and a sort of club for the people of all classes and all walks of life.

  I got up from my desk and went down the corridor to the boss’s office.

  His name is William Woodruff Maynard and he is not a bad guy. Not nearly so bad as the name would make you think.

  Charlie Gunderson, who headed up retail advertising, was in the office with him, and the both of them looked worried.

  The Old Man offered me a cigar out of the big box that stood on the corner of his desk, but I refused it and sat down in a chair alongside Charlie, facing the Old Man, who sat behind the desk.

  “I phoned Bruce,” the Old Man said, “and he was noncommittal. I might even say evasive. He doesn’t want to talk.”

  “I don’t imagine that he does,” I said. “I think it was as great a shock to him as to the rest of us.”

  “I don’t understand you, Parker. Why should it be a shock? He must have been the one who negotiated and arranged the sale.”

  “The closing of the store,” I explained. “That’s what we are talking about, I take it. I don’t think Bruce knew the new owner planned to close the store. I think if he’d suspected that, there would have been no sale.”

  “What makes you think that, Parker?”

  “The look on Bruce’s face,” I told him. “When Bennett said they’d close down the store. Surprised and shocked and angry and, perhaps, a little sick. Like a man whose four kings bump up against four aces.”

  “But he said nothing.”

  “What was there for him to say? He had closed the deal and the store was sold. I don’t imagine it ever crossed his mind that someone would buy a prosperous business and then simply close it down.”

  “No,” said the Old Man thoughtfully, “it doesn’t make much sense.”

  “It might be just a publicity gag,” said Charlie Gunderson. “Just a public come-on. You’ll have to admit that never in its hi
story has Franklin’s ever gotten the publicity it is getting now.”

  “Franklin’s,” said the Old Man stiffly, “never sought publicity. They didn’t need publicity.”

  “In just a day or two,” persisted Charlie, “there’ll be a big announcement the store is opening up again. The new management will say they’re giving in to the public clamor that Franklin’s should go on.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and realized immediately that I should have kept my mouth shut. For I didn’t have a thing to go on, just a sort of hunch. The whole deal smelled. There was more to it, I could have sworn, than just a gag some publicity man had thought up in an idle moment.

  But they didn’t ask me, either one of them, why I thought it was no gag.

  “Parker,” said the Old Man, “you have no inkling at all as to who’s behind this deal?”

  I shook my head. “Bennett wasn’t saying. The store had been purchased—building, stock, goodwill, everything—by the man, or men, he was representing, and it is being closed. No reason for its being closed. No plans to use the building for something else.”

  “I imagine he was questioned rather closely.” I nodded.

  “And he wasn’t talking?” “Not a word,” I said.

  “Strange,” the Old Man said. “It’s most devilish strange.”

  “This Bennett?” asked Charlie. “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. He refused to identify himself except as the agent of the buyer.”

  “You tried, of course,” the Old Man said.

  “Not me. I had to write the story to catch the first edition and there was only twenty minutes. Gavin has a couple of

  people checking the hotels.”

  “I’ll lay you twenty dollars,” the Old Man offered, “they’ll find no trace of him.”

  I suppose I looked surprised. “It’s a funny business,” the Old Man said, “from the first to last. A negotiation such as this is most difficult to keep entirely under cover. And yet there was no leak, no rumor, not a breath of it.”

  “If there had been,” I pointed out. “Dow would have known about it. And if he’d known about it, he’d been working on it, instead of going to the airport… .”