Next came the furnishings. George and I took the Ford and went to Watertown, where there was more variety and so more chance to find what we were looking for. An office-furniture dealer in Watertown supplied us with an ancient wooden railing, to use as a partition, plus three wooden desks with chairs and two wooden filing cabinets, all second-hand. The other two desks we found in a store in Wittburg.
We placed the furniture so as to hide what we hadn’t been able to improve. The store was twelve feet wide and thirty feet deep. Eight feet in from the door we put the railing across. It was too wide, and George sawed it down to fit. In front of the railing, on the right, was Alice’s desk, with a telephone. Directly opposite her, beyond the entrance, was a sagging green sofa we’d found in a used-furniture store and which made that area our waiting room. The sofa also hid one set of water pipes and some of the green tile. An outsize four-colour union poster—a brawny worker of the socialist mural type, clutching tools in his mighty hands and gazing resolutely forward, while smaller people representing Family, Neighbours, Government, and Industry stood behind him, watching him respectfully, with appropriately crude slogans above and below—filled a lot of wall behind Alice, hiding some more of the green tile.
Beyond the railing, the other four desks stood under the four fluorescent lights, the desks on the left placed so as to hide the other water pipes. Tan drapery material stretched across the width of the store behind the desks cut the length to twenty-two feet and hid the rear wall, which had resisted our efforts to prettify it.
The four desks were like so: Left front, Phil Katz. Right front (closest to Alice), me. Left rear, Mr Clement. Right rear, Walter. George didn’t have a desk. He found a cot somewhere and put it behind the drapery, and spent most of his time back there on it, not quite asleep and not quite awake. Mr Fletcher, having found us a local lawyer to handle whatever problems might come up, had gone back to Washington.
Walter rented the store the same Friday that Fleisch capitulated, and we worked that weekend and Monday getting it fixed up and furnished. Tuesday, it opened. The plate-glass windows were full of posters, more posters were scattered around the walls inside, and a banner over the store front announced: HEADQUARTERS, WORKERS FOR AAMST.
On Tuesday, Walter gave me a new job. I was to hire schoolboys to distribute pamphlets and put up posters. I was to keep them supplied, see they did their job, and keep the books on how much they were paid. It was undemanding work, leaving me plenty of time to enjoy my new return to calm and peace of mind, and I enjoyed it.
On Thursday, Edward Petersen, head of the bookkeeping department at Mclntyre, was arrested for embezzlement and murder. I read about it in that afternoon’s Beacon, under Sondra Fleisch’s byline. They had caught him in a simple and undramatic manner. He had been trapped by cancelled checks. A comprehensive audit of the entire financial system at Mclntyre had revealed that a number of cancelled checks were missing. These, of course, were the ones Petersen had made out for himself, the fake overtime checks. He had destroyed them as they had come back, cancelled, because an investigation, if begun, could use these checks to trace the banks where Petersen had been cashing the money. But the audit had come too suddenly, with no warning. The investigators had simply waited, watching every day’s mail, and Thursday morning three of the false checks had come back, cancelled by three widely separated banks along the Eastern Seaboard, one in New York City, one in Columbia, South Carolina, and one in New Haven, Connecticut. A quick check of the three banks had revealed that in one of them, the one in New York, a new account had just been opened by Edward Petersen, using a check against the embezzler’s account. Petersen, it was thought, had suspected that the end was near, and had started moving his funds to where he could get at them more quickly. Ironically, the three checks that had caught him had been prepared the day before Alice and I had stolen the books.
The three accounts had proved disappointing from a money point of view. Among them, they accounted for less than fifteen hundred of the over forty-five thousand dollars stolen in the last year and a half. But the police, Sondra assured us, were confident of tracing the rest of the money shortly. Petersen had been taken into custody.
That day, Thursday, I was out of the office most of the day, checking up on the high-schoolers who were doing the distributing for me. It hadn’t been so long since I was a high-schooler myself, and I understood the temptation to drop a wad of pamphlets down a sewer, announce that the distribution had been made, collect the pay, and go to a movie. So I spent most of the day prowling around town, making sure the boys were doing the job.
When I got back to the store, at twenty to five, Alice had already gone on home. That surprised me doubly. In the first place, she was supposed to work till five. In the second place, I’d been going home with her after work all week. She’d been cooking dinner for me, and then we’d spend the evening together.
Phil was out somewhere, as usual, and so was Walter. Mr Clement sat birdlike at his desk, writing. It seemed he wrote minute mysteries for crossword-puzzle magazines, in his spare time, and since Fleisch’s capitulation Mr Clement had had nothing but spare time. He used the nom de plume Felix Lane, which was supposed to mean something to mystery fans, and his minute mysteries, while diabolically clever, struck me as totally unreadable. He wrote a precise barren English, any sentence of which could have been used as an example in a grammar book, and the total effect of which was utter tedium. He wrote his little vignettes in pencil, printing rather than writing, and sent them off when finished to some woman in Washington who typed them for him.
I interrupted him to ask where Alice was, and he told me she’d left about twenty minutes before, and that Walter had driven her home. Since she should be home by now, I went back to her desk and used her phone to call. As I was dialling, George came lumbering out from behind the drapery and stood watching me, not saying anything.
She answered on the second ring. ‘I’ve got a terrible headache, Paul,’ she said. ‘It’s been drilling into me all day, so Walter finally drove me home.’
‘I’ll come on out,’ I said.
‘No, not tonight. I’m sorry, Paul, but I just feel miserable. I’m going straight to bed.’
‘Oh. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then.’
‘All right.’
‘I hope you feel better tomorrow.’
‘I’m sure I will.’
‘Did you see where they got Petersen?’
‘Yes, I saw it in the paper. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It sure is. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘All right, Paul.’
I hung up and looked back toward the drapery, but George had retired again. I wondered what he’d been thinking just then, watching me. He had some kind of idea or theory about me, and he was watching me to see if he was right. I wished I knew what the idea was.
I left the office and went back to the motel. Walter wasn’t there. I hadn’t been spending my evenings in the motel myself, so I had no idea what Walter did with his free time. I grabbed a paperback book and read awhile, but felt at loose ends. I went out after a while and had dinner, and then went to a bar and drank beer and got into a discussion about unions with some of the other people there. They knew I was one of the men from the Machinists, and they were full of questions, most of which I couldn’t answer. When I got back to the motel at midnight, about half in the bag, Walter was still out. I went to bed and fell into uneasy sleep, and heard Walter when he came in around two o’clock.
I was very tired and slightly hung over Friday morning. I had to be at the office at nine o’clock, to hand out the day’s quota of pamphlets, but after that I didn’t really have to be there till late afternoon, when the boys would report back for their day’s pay, so by quarter to ten I was back at the motel and sound asleep again. I’d managed to ask Alice if her headache was gone, and understand her when she said yes it was, but that was about the extent of the conversation I was capable of.
I slept four mo
re hours, getting up just before two in the afternoon. The room was hot and stuffy, and so was my head, this time from too much sleep, particularly in bad air and at the wrong time of day. I took a cold shower, and went to the City Line Diner, where I finished off steak and salad and French fries and coffee and ice cream and coffee. Feeling more sensible, I went back to the office.
Once again, only Mr Clement was there, printing away laboriously with a number 2 pencil. When I got his attention, he told me Walter had gone off to confer with officials of the MWA, in re details of the election and of the change-over should the Machinists win, and had taken Alice with him to take notes. I sat around feeling glum, took care of my boys as they straggled in, and listened to Phil Katz complain, when he came back from an irritating interview with a television station manager in a town some distance away. It wasn’t Watertown, it was some place else, thirty-some miles from Wittburg, but the station was a principal supplier of Wittburg’s television viewing, and Phil had wanted to arrange time for speech-making by both MWA officials and Machinists. The station manager had contended that Wittburg was merely a village on the fringe of their area, containing something like seven per cent of their total audience, and he could hardly see any justification for turning over valuable air time under the circumstances. Phil was irritated beyond measure, and his ill humour perversely improved my own disposition somewhat.
George came wandering out from behind the draperies just after five o’clock, and he and Phil suggested I have dinner with them. Mr Clement intended to stay awhile; he was still working on his latest minute mystery. I said I would stay, too; I was waiting for Alice.
They looked at each other, and Phil said, ‘Forget it, Paul. Those conferences with the party in power, they last for ever. They’re liable to be at it till nine, ten o’clock.’
‘Oh. Okay, then, I’ll come along.’
There are two Chinamen in every city and town in the United States, at least two. If a town has a population of at least a thousand, two of that thousand will be Chinese. One of the Chinamen will run a laundry, and the other Chinaman will run a restaurant.
In Wittburg, it was called the Lotus Leaf. It was a small place, only eight or ten tables, occupying a second-floor over a men’s clothing store on Harpur Boulevard. I assume the employees of the place were the family of the man who owned it. The owner sat behind the cash register next to the door, a small round sprightly man with practically no hair, just wispy white eyebrows and a fringe of mist around his ears. Two young men were the waiters—apparently the owner’s sons—and through the kitchen door I caught a glimpse of the cook, a stout elderly woman who was probably the owner’s wife.
I have always found the popular superstition that Chinese food leaves one hungry again an hour after eating to be false. It isn’t the food that disappears shortly after the meal, it’s the names. Except for egg drop soup and egg rolls, I have no idea what anything I ate was called. It was good, but anonymous, at least for me.
After dinner, Phil suggested we all repair to a bar nearby, where there were dart boards, and where George would drink orange soda, but I said, ‘Not for me, thanks. Maybe Alice is home by now.’
They looked at each other again, and Phil said, ‘You going out to her place?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Listen, she probably isn’t back yet. I tell you about these conferences. Come on along for a while, and you can go up there later.’
‘No, I’d rather go now.’
‘What if she isn’t home?’
‘I’ll wait for her.’
‘Go ahead, Phil,’ said George. He was watching me again, in that interested way.
Phil took a deep breath, and looked past my ear, and said, ‘I wouldn’t go out there if I was you, Paul.’
‘Why not?’
He stalled long enough to light a cigarette, and then inhaled deeply again and said, ‘Ah, what the hell. It’s not up to me to cover. Walter’s with her, that’s what I mean.’
By then, of course, I should have guessed half a dozen times. But I hadn’t. The idea hadn’t even entered my mind. Not about either of them. My only fear with Alice was that she might want to cling too close. And Walter—Walter was married.
I still refused to believe it. I had to hear it all, the hard way. I said, ‘So what? They went to the conference, so what?’
‘I don’t mean the conference,’ Phil said. ‘I mean Walter’s got her now. I mean he took her away from you.’
‘Yesterday,’ said George. ‘While you was out of the office.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Forget it,’ Phil told me. ‘She’s just a piece of tail.’
‘But she—’
‘I could of had her, too,’ Phil told me. He was being purposefully brutal, in a medicinal sort of way. ‘I probably still could. But I keep away from that kind.’
‘That kind?’ Was I so dense? I’d met tramps before—there’s always a few on any college campus, and my years in military uniform had been conducive to a study of the type—and I’d simply assumed that I could recognize one when I saw her. Was Alice like that? Was I only one in an endless string?
I remembered what she’d told me about going to the plant with Hamilton, those nights she was going over the books, how she’d justified their presence to the night watchman by making believe they were having an illicit affair. And I remembered that the watchman hadn’t bothered to come down and see who was with her the time she’d taken me to the plant, though Hamilton was dead then. But the watchman had assumed that I was just another of Alice MacCann’s boy friends. I wondered how often she’d used the leather sofa in that office. She couldn’t be serviced at home, not while her grandfather was alive.
All the emotion had been within my own head. I had seen her the way I wanted to see her, excusing and ignoring and justifying all the signs. And that headache yesterday. ‘It’s been driving into me all day,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going straight to bed.’ I could visualize Walter, cracking up on the other side of the room, trying to keep from laughing out loud.
Oh, the dirty bitch!
Phil said, ‘Don’t go up there, Paul. Take my advice. You take a swing at Walter and he’ll tromp you. I’m telling you for your own good.’
He was right. I wasn’t even to have the satisfaction of beating up my successor. Not that there would be much satisfaction in it, anyway. She was the tramp. She was the one who deserved the beating.
‘Come on along with us,’ Phil said again. ‘We’ll get stinko, and George can carry us home.’
‘All right,’ I said.
We left the restaurant and went around the corner to the side-street bar with the dartboards. I didn’t feel like getting stinko. I nursed my beer, and while George and Phil talked together I tried to plot my revenge.
I had to do something. Alice couldn’t be allowed to get away with it. She had made a fool of me—worse, she had allowed me to make a fool of myself-and it would gnaw at me until I evened the score.
George was watching me again, in his patient interested way, as though he expected me to do something very enlightening any minute. I’d noticed it before, and it had been bothering me—as his cryptic comments about Walter in the diner that time had been bothering me—and now, in my nervous angry state, it irritated me beyond standing. When Phil finally went away to the head, I said, ‘All right, George. What is it?’
He looked mildly surprised. ‘What’s what, little friend?’
‘What are you waiting for?’
He shrugged, and drank some of his orange soda. ‘Nothing special,’ he said.
‘You’ve been staring at me, George. What do you want? What are you waiting to see?’
He seemed to think it over, fiddling with the half-empty glass of orange soda, and finally nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. He turned to face me, and said, ‘Like I told you once before, you’re one of the bright boys. You figure to stick with the union and make vice-president some day. You’re a lot like Killy, but younger.’
‘Like Walter?
‘Well, sure,’ he said, as though it should have been obvious. ‘All you bright boys are the same. Everybody figures what you really want, all you bright boys, is to get ahead, but that ain’t it. You want to get even, that’s what you want.’
‘You aren’t making any sense, George.’
‘Like with that girl reporter,’ he said. ‘She was one up on you, so you got even. And like when Walter swiped your idea about the books. You’d got him in dutch with Fletcher, being away all that time and everything, and he was just getting even. A lot of people would figure he swiped the credit so he’d be a big man with the union, but that isn’t why. He did it to get even.’
‘No, you’re wrong. I don’t like Walter any more than you do, but—’
‘Who says I don’t like Walter?’ He seemed genuinely shocked. ‘I like all you bright boys,’ he said. ‘I like you fine.’
‘The point is,’ I said grimly, ‘Walter let Fletcher think it was his idea because he knew Fletcher was mad at me and wouldn’t pay any attention to any idea that came from me.’
‘Fletcher?’ George grinned and shook his head. ‘Fletcher’s mad at everybody,’ he said. ‘All the time. He don’t care where the ideas come from. If they’re any good, he’ll use them. You know that yourself.’
He was right. Fletcher might consider me the worst cretin alive, but if I came up with a useful idea, he’d accept it without a second thought. He was a perfectionist, and perfectionists don’t care about people, only about results.
‘And like when Killy wanted to go along with Fletcher when he called Washington,’ George said. ‘Killy was afraid Fletcher’d steal the credit from him, so he was getting even right away, keeping Fletcher in line. Fletcher don’t care about credit.’ He drained the rest of the orange soda, and signalled for another. ‘All you bright boys,’ he said. ‘You keep pushing, you keep on going up, you stab each other in the back, and people say, ‘That guy, he’ll do anything to get ahead.” But that isn’t it, is it, little friend? You people, you’ll do anything to get even. And that’s what keeps you pushing on up.’
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