The Dream Merchants

by Harold Robbins

  When I had finished, he struck a match on the heel of his shoe and held it to the cigar that still dangled from his lips. The flame of the match rose and fell with his breath as he drew on the cigar. At last it was going satisfactorily and he carefully shook the match until the flame went out and then threw it on the floor of the wagon. He didn’t speak. Just sat there and looked at me with bright searching eyes.

  We sat there so long that the atmosphere seemed to charge with tension. I felt a movement against my hand. I looked down. Doris’s hand had found a way to mine. I looked up at her and smiled slowly.

  Al saw it too; his sharp, bright eyes missed nothing that went on in front of them. At last he spoke, his voice very quiet. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  I thought a moment before I spoke. “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “Nothing you can do, I guess. You were my last hope and I had to talk to you.”

  He looked at me closely. “You want that company, don’t you?” His voice was very soft.

  I looked at him. I remembered what Peter had said yesterday. He had been right. “Yes,” I answered simply. “I put thirty years of my life into that company and it’s not just a business any more. It’s a part of me that I don’t want to lose.” I hesitated a second, then laughed, a little bitterly, I guess. “It’s like the leg I lost in France. I can probably live without it. Maybe in time I will find something just as good, but it will always seem like this.” I tapped my artificial leg. “You get along with it. It serves the purpose and gets you around. But you always know, deep inside you, that you’re never the same. And you aren’t.”

  His voice was still soft. “You could be wrong, Johnny. When I was your age I left the only business I ever liked. And I became a very rich man as a result. Maybe it’s time for you to quit.”

  I took a deep breath and looked slowly around the wagon and then back at him. The words seemed to come out of me by themselves, my gaze was pointed. “If I did that,” I said slowly, “I couldn’t buy a studio and put it in my back yard.”

  He sat very still, only the glow on the tip of his cigar kept him from looking like a graven image. After a while he took his cigar from his lips and looked at it carefully; then he let out a long, deep breath. He stood up and opened the door of the wagon. He looked back at us. “Come into the house with me,” he said.

  The sun outside was still hot and bright. The men were still intent upon their game as we walked past them following Al to the ranch house. We went in through a back door into the kitchen.

  A fat dark woman was rolling dough on a large wooden table. She looked at us as we came into the room. She spoke a few words in Italian to Al. He answered her in the same tongue and led us through the kitchen into the front of the house.

  We stopped in the large old-fashioned parlor. Al told us to sit down and walked on into the hall and out of view. Doris and I looked at each other. We both were wondering what he was going to do.

  “Vittorio!” I heard his voice calling in the hall. “Vittorio!” A muffled answer came from somewhere upstairs, followed by a short remark in Italian from Al, and then he came back into the room. He looked down at us. “Vittorio will be here in a minute,” he said, and sat down in a chair opposite us and looked at us.

  I wondered what good Vittorio could do. Al’s voice cut into my thoughts.

  “When are you two getting married?” he asked suddenly. “I’m tired of waiting for you to make up your minds.”

  We blushed like a pair of kids and looked at each other, smiling. Doris answered for me. “We’ve been so upset since Papa got sick,” she explained, “we haven’t had time to talk about it.”

  “Talk? What’s there to talk about?” Al exploded, his cigar throwing off heavy gray fumes of smoke. “Don’t you know your own minds yet?”

  I started to answer, when I saw the grin on his face and realized he had been teasing us. I shut my mouth, stopping the reply just as Vic came into the room.

  He ignored us. “What do you want, Al?” he asked him.

  Al looked up at him. “Get Constantin Konstantinov on the phone in Boston.”

  Vic looked quickly at me, then turned back to his boss. A flood of protesting words in Italian poured out of him.

  Al held up his hand and Vic shut up like a clam, for all his size. “I said get him on the phone,” he told Vic. “I want to talk to him. And after this remember your manners. When there are people around who don’t understand our language, speak in English. Don’t be rude.” His voice was very soft, but there was a thread of steel that ran through it. “I brought Johnny up when he was a kid. And I know I can trust him not to reveal anything he might learn here.”

  Vic’s face looked balefully at me, but he went to the phone and sat down.

  I looked at Al. I didn’t know he knew Konstantinov. I wondered what he was going to do. What could he do? This was Sunday and Konstantinov was in Boston. Besides, Konstantinov was supposed to be a very important guy who listened to no one in connection with his business affairs. He was rumored to be of the richest men in the country even though nobody had heard much about him before the Greater Boston Investment Corporation began to lend money to the picture business back in ’27.

  “What good will it do to talk to him, Al?” I asked. “He won’t listen to you.”

  Al smiled back at me confidently. “He’ll listen to me,” he said quietly. There was something in the tone of his voice that suddenly made me feel he knew what he was talking about.

  Vic turned from the phone. “Constantin is on, Al,” he said.

  Al got out of his seat and took the phone from Vic’s hand. He smiled a moment at us before he began to speak into it. “Hello, Constantin,” he said. “How are you?”

  I could hear the crackle of a voice in the receiver he held loosely against his ear.

  “I’m pretty good for an old man,” Al said easily in reply to a question. Again the crackle of the voice in the receiver. When it stopped, Al began to speak again.

  “I wanted to talk to you on that situation over at Magnum,” he said quietly. “I’m a little disturbed over what’s going on there.” He waited a moment while the voice buzzed again. “I think we ought to clarity our position in connection with that affair. My own feeling is that Farber will only bring confusion and be a highly annoying element in the company.”

  The voice in the phone crackled excitedly into Al’s ear. He listened patiently. At last he spoke again. His voice was quiet, with authority. “I don’t care what Ronsen told you,” he said flatly. “Farber will only create a conflict within the company and perhaps even stop its progress back to a sound position. I want you to inform Ronsen that the loan will not be renegotiated if Farber is allowed to come into Magnum.”

  The voice spoke again in the phone, only this time it sounded quiet and subdued. “That’s right,” Al said when the voice had stopped. “Tell him that under no circumstances will we agree to allow the operating management of the company to be interfered with.”

  The voice spoke quietly again. “Right, Constantin,” Al said into the mouthpiece. “I’ll talk to you again, later in the week maybe.” He looked over at me and smiled, then turned back to the phone. “Good-by, Constantin.”

  He put down the phone and walked back to me and looked down at us. He stood there quietly for a second before he spoke. “That’s settled now, Johnny,” he said slowly. “I guess you won’t have any further trouble from them.”

  I looked up at him, my mouth almost open. “How could you tell him what to do?” I almost gasped.

  Al smiled at me. I could see he was laughing at my amazement. “Very simple.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You see, I own the Greater Boston Investment Corporation.”

  Then he told me something else that surprised me even more.

  I was very quiet in the car going back. The little brown-faced, wrinkled old man in the faded blue denim shirt and the shiny blue overalls that I had left back there on a ranch was actually the most powerful man
in the picture business. He controlled its money, no matter where it came from, East or West.

  Now that I knew, I could see how simple it really was. Again I marveled at the brilliance of the little man who always thought of himself as a carny guy. He was smart enough to see there would come a time when the industry would outgrow its picture-by-picture method of financing, so back in ’25, when the companies started making calf eyes at Wall Street, he opened a little office in the East. On the plate-glass door were painted the words: “Greater Boston Investment Corp.”

  Inside this office were two rooms: a reception room and a private office. The lettering on the door of this inner office read simply: “Constantin Konstantinov, Executive Vice-President—Loan and Collateral Department.” Until that time Konstantinov had been a clerk in Vic’s office.

  In two short and hectic years as picture company after picture company turned Eastward for their financing, the office grew, and in 1927 it occupied a whole floor in a staid office building in the heart of Boston’s conservative business section.

  I smiled to myself as I thought about it. Loans, wholesale or retail. Finance one picture at a time? See the Bank of Independence in Los Angeles. Finance a whole picture company for forty pictures at a time? See the Greater Boston Investment Corporation. I smiled again as I thought of many of the men in the other companies that I knew who had prided themselves on getting out of Santos’s clutches and never knew or would know that they were only doing business with him under another name.

  I began to wonder how much Al was really worth. Fifty million? More? Suddenly it didn’t matter. I was satisfied. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  ***

  It was near ten o’clock when we got back to the house. We went into the library and Doris got some cubes from the kitchen and we made a couple of highballs. We were just toasting each other when the nurse came into the room.

  “Mr. Kessler would like to see me right away,” I asked.

  She nodded. “He wouldn’t go to sleep until he saw you,” she said disapprovingly. “So be as brief as you can. He’s had a pretty uncomfortable day and he must get some rest.” We put down our drinks untouched and hurried up the stairs to his room. Esther was sitting by the bed holding his hand as we came in. “Hello, kinder,” she said to us.

  Doris went over to her and kissed her, then she kissed her father. “How are you feeling?” she asked them.

  Maybe it was the light in the room—there was only one small lamp turned on—but I thought he looked rather wan and drawn. “All right,” he said to her; then he raised his head and looked at me. “Nu?” he asked.

  I smiled at him. “You were right, boss,” I said. “He did help us. Everything is going to be all right now.”

  His head sank back against the pillow weakly and he closed his eyes. For a moment he lay there quietly, then he opened them. Again I thought it might be the light in the room, but his eyes seemed dull and shadowed to me. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing them. But his voice was strong enough and there was a note of satisfaction in it. “Now you’ll be getting married soon?”

  I started. It was the second time that day I had heard that. Again it was Doris who answered. She leaned over her father and kissed him lightly. I could see her mother squeeze her hand. “As soon as you’re well enough to give the bride away, Papa,” she said.

  He smiled up at her. I thought I saw the tears come to his eyes, but he shut them quickly. “Don’t wait too long, kinder,” he said slowly. “I want to see yet grandchildren on my knee.”

  Doris looked at me and smiled. I came close to the edge of the bed and looked down at him. “Don’t worry about that, Peter,” I said, taking Doris’s hand. “You will.”

  He smiled again, but didn’t answer, just turned his head wearily on the pillow.

  The nurse shooed us from the room then. “Good night, Peter,” I said.

  His voice was light and faint. “Good night, Johnny.”

  Doris kissed him again and turned to her mother. “Coming, Mamma?” she asked.

  Esther shook her head. “I’ll stay here until he falls asleep.”

  I remember looking back as we left the room. Esther was still sitting in the chair next to the bed. Peter’s hand lay outstretched along the cover and, while I was looking, Esther covered it with hers. She smiled after us as I closed the door behind me.

  Silently we went downstairs, back into the library. Once inside the room, Doris turned to me. Her eyes were wide and suddenly frightened. She shivered as if a sudden chill had come over her. “Johnny,” she said in a small voice, “Johnny, I’m afraid.”

  I took her in my arms. “Afraid of what, sweetheart?” I asked gently.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said vaguely, “I don’t know, but I’ve a feeling something is wrong. Something terrible is going to happen.” Her eyes began to fill with helpless, frightened tears.

  I put a hand under her chin and raised her face toward me. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” I reassured her confidently, “it’s only your reaction to everything that has happened in the past week. And don’t forget you’ve had a tough day today, too. You’ve been driving almost twelve hours. Everything will be all right.”

  She looked up at me, her face luminous, her eyes wide and trusting. “Do you really think so, Johnny?” she asked hopefully.

  I smiled down at her. “I know so,” I said positively.

  But I was wrong. This had been the last time I saw Peter alive.

  ***

  I got down to the office early. I wanted to be there when the boys got the sad news. It was a bright, cheerful day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was whistling as I walked past the studio gates.

  The gateman came out of his little cubbyhole and stood there looking at me. “Beautiful day, isn’t it, Mr. Edge?” He smiled.

  I stopped and smiled back at him. “Swell day, fella,” I said. It was too.

  He grinned again at me and I walked on. My heels echoed on the concrete walk. Crowds of people were coming through the gate. They were going to work. All kinds of people: actors, actresses, extras; directors and their assistants, producers and their assistants, cameramen and their assistants; prop men, grips men, electricians; bookkeepers, secretaries, typists, and clerks; messenger boys and the cute little girls just out of high school who worked in the steno pool. They were going to work. All kinds of people. My kind of people. Picture people.

  I walked into my office briskly. Gordon was there already. He looked up at me questioningly. “What you so chipper about, Papa?” he asked.

  I smiled as I threw my hat on the couch and went to my chair. I waved my hand expansively. “It’s a beautiful day outside,” I said to him, “so what have I got to feel blue about?” I looked at him. “Good morning, Robert.” I grinned. “You’re mighty dapper this a.m. in that sky-blue pink tie.”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. Maybe I was a little tetched that morning, but I didn’t care. If this was being nuts, I never wanted to be sane again. It felt too good.

  I sat there looking at him owlishly until he began to smile. He got out of his chair and came over to me sheepishly. “You’re plastered!” he said accusingly.

  I raised my right hand. “S’ help me,” I swore, “I didn’t touch a drop!”

  He looked at me skeptically for a moment. Then he grinned again. “Well then,” he said, “let me in on the secret. Where did you bury the son of a bitch?”

  I laughed aloud. “Why, Bob, how can you talk like that about our eminent chairman of the board?” I asked reproachfully.

  He put his hands in his pockets and stared down at me. “When I spoke to you Friday night, you sounded as if you had been hit over the head with a sledge hammer. Yet when I see you this morning, you’re as bright and cheerful as a pup. That leaves me with only one conclusion. If you’re not drunk, then you’ve murdered him.” He smiled down at me gently. “Now come on, Johnny, let me in on it. Maybe we can bury the body
together.”

  I looked up at him. “I told you I had a plan,” I said.

  “That you did.” He nodded.

  “Well, it’s really very simple,” I said. I made snake-dance motions with my hands and gave him a fast sample of fancy double talk. “You franisan the sanifran an’ the first thing you know the old boy gets a call from his bankers in New York and phfft! Farber flies out the window with his bright little nephew along with him!”

  “Honest, Johnny?” he asked, smiling suddenly.

  I stood up at my desk and looked him right in the eye. “Do you doubt the word of Honest John Edge, the fairest dealer this side of Las Vegas?” I asked in a mock-heavy voice.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said wonderingly. “How did you pull it off, Johnny?”

  “Trade secret, son,” I said to him, still in that heavy voice. “Some day when you’re old enough, Papa John will tell you about the birds and bees. But right now—” I paused impressively and pointed to his door. “To work! Your duty calls you, Robert, and I will not have you shirk it!”

  He walked smiling to his door and opened it. He bowed low in the doorway to me, his hands extended before him. “Your slave, O master,” he said.

  I laughed and he closed the door behind him. I wheeled around in the chair and looked out the window. What a day! It was the kind of day you saw on those vacation posters. A pretty girl in make-up walked in front of my window. It fitted right into the picture. There was always a pretty girl somewhere on those posters that read: “Come to California.” I got out of my chair and went to the window sill and sat down on it. I whistled after the girl.

  She turned and looked back at me. She saw who I was and smiled prettily and waved her hand to me. I waved back at her. I could hear her voice floating back to me on the morning breeze. “Hello, Johnny.” I watched her practiced walk until she was out of sight. She was cute. One of the kids who had beat her way up from the extra class. She had guts. She was one of my kind of people. Picture people.