Bad for Business

Chapter 9

Piles of literature were stacked high in all available spaces of the medium-sized room which housed the administrative, editorial, business and distribution departments of Womon. The furniture — two desks, five chairs, a typewriter, a mimeograph, cabinets and shelves — was unassuming but adequate. Standing beside one of the desks was a worried-looking man, dipping bicarbonate of soda from a package and stirring it into a glass of water. Seated at the other, sticking stamps on envelopes, was a young woman whose plain tan woolen dress conformed to her curves, with a face that might have been thought attractive for customary purposes but for the formidable intellectual power suggested by the capacity of her brow. They looked at Fox and he said how do you do.

“Good evening,” said the man. “Pardon me.” He swallowed the mixture in the glass and made a face. “I eat too fast.”

“Lots of people do.” Fox smiled at him. “Nice place you have here. Compact.”

“Nice? It’s a dump. I used to have an office—” The man waved that away. “What can I do for you?”

Fox opened his mouth to start the approach to the query he had come to make, but the young woman got a word in first. She had finished stamping the envelopes and arisen to put on her coat and hat, and spoke to the man:

“What shall I do if the stuff from Wynkoop comes before you get here in the morning?”

“Take it and pay for it. I’ll sign a blank check.”

“Oh.” She was getting her coat on. “I keep forgetting that Phil — I mean I can’t get used to being rich. He’s later than usual, but I suppose under the circumstances...”

Fox, instantly abandoning the modest minnow he had come for at this splash hinting at a bigger and better fish, transferred his smile to the young woman and barred her way to the door.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but may I make a suggestion?” He pulled from his pocket the Womon Statement of the Basic Requirements of a World Economy. “A friend gave this to me, and I think it’s fascinating, but I don’t understand it very well. I want to ask some questions about it, but I’m hungry. You’re just leaving and I suppose you eat, so why don’t you eat with me and I can ask you the questions? My name is William Sherman.”

“Good idea,” the man declared. “She can answer more questions than the rest of us put together.”

“I always read while I eat,” said the young woman without enthusiasm, and in fact she had a heavy volume under her arm. She shrugged. “All right, come along.”

“Here,” said the man. “Application for membership in the Womon League. Take it with you.”

Fox took it, and his dinner companion, to the Red Herring on 44th Street, having decided that there was less oxygen there than any other place he could think of. In the bar she accepted a cocktail as a matter of fact, and a second one with no special reluctance. After they had been conducted to a booth for two in the back room, it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he asked for it and got it: Grace Adams.

By the time they had finished with the mixed grill and were being served with salad, Fox was confronted with the fact that though his calculations had been sound, nevertheless his expectation had not been realized. The two cocktails, joined with the insufficiency of oxygen in the crowded and noisy room, and reinforced by a bottle of Burgundy of which she had tossed off her share without looking at it, had indeed loosened her tongue; but the looser it got the deeper she dived into the profound abstrusities of economic theory. She derided Keynes, pilloried Marx, excoriated Veblen, and consigned the gold standard to the crucible of hell. Unquestionably, Fox admitted, she got brilliant and even eloquent, but he was not buying a dinner at the Red Herring, which was expensive, for the sake of eloquence.

Patiently and obdurately and deviously, time and again he spoke of his eagerness to contribute substantially to the cause of Womon, but she ignored it and went on with her fireworks. He tried other subtle and crafty approaches to the subject of the Womon exchequer and its present condition permitting nonchalant drawing of checks to meet obligations on the dot, but either she didn’t hear them or she evaded them with a devilish cunning, he couldn’t tell which. By the time the coffee was served he was beginning to get a sinking feeling that he was doomed to utter defeat at the hands, or rather the tongue, of this female pyrotechnic geyser.

Then, lifting her demitasse, she spilled a little on the cloth and giggled, and Fox understood. She was simply soaring, and had been ever since the cocktails. He could have kicked himself. He looked her in the eye and demanded:

“About Phil’s big contribution. How much was it?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“When did he make it?”

“Today is—” She frowned in concentration.

“Wednesday,” said Fox.

“Yes. Wednesday. Yesterday was—”

“Tuesday.”

“Yes. Tuesday. Monday. He made it Monday.”

“Was it a check, or cash?”

“Cash. It was all in—” She stopped abruptly. “Now wait a minute. Don’t ask me about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not supposed to — I mean I’m not supposed to—”

“All right, forget it.” Fox turned and caught an eye. “Waiter! My check, please.”

It was in fact desirable that Miss Adams should forget it, so he tried to get her spouting again, but she was silent. She said nothing until, out on the sidewalk, he attempted to get her into a taxi and she refused point-blank. With her heavy volume under her arm, she marched off in the direction of Grand Central. Fox watched her for ten paces, then turned and made for Sixth Avenue.

But he didn’t find Philip Tingley at the Womon office. The man who ate too fast was there, and two others fussing around with literature, but no Phil. Fox stated that he would like to meet Mr. Tingley because he had been informed by Miss Adams that Tingley could polish off his understanding of Womon, but was told that Tingley hadn’t been there and nothing had been heard from him. Fox left, found a phone booth, called the residence of Arthur Tingley, deceased, and was told by the housekeeper that Philip Tingley wasn’t there and she knew nothing of his whereabouts. He walked to 41st Street, maneuvered his car out of its niche, and drove to Nine-fourteen East 29th Street.

That dreary edifice was enough to convince anyone that a new world economy was needed there, even if nowhere else. Four flights up in the rear, Phil had said, and Fox climbed the smelly shaft, having found the vestibule door unlatched. The door in the rear on the fifth floor had no bell push, so he knocked, but got no response. After a couple of minutes he gave it up and returned to the street, sat in his car a moment considering alternatives, voted for home, and headed for the West Side Highway. At 10:20 he was winding along his private lane and crossing the little bridge he had built over the brook, toward the white house among trees on the knoll which was known in the neighboring countryside as The Zoo. In the house, he blew a kiss at Mrs. Trimble, asked Sam about the spraying, settled a bet for Pokorny and Al Crocker regarding the body temperature of a hibernating woodchuck, went to the cellar to see if Cassandra’s kittens had opened their eyes, played guitar duets with Joe Sorrento for an hour, and went upstairs and to bed.

At 9:30 the next morning, Thursday, he was back in New York, in a phone booth in a barber shop on 42nd Street. He had already made four calls. To Nat Collins at his office: nothing new. To Amy Duncan at her apartment: the same. To the Tingley residence: the funeral would be at ten o’clock as scheduled, therefore Philip Tingley would not be available for conversation until afternoon. To the P. & B. Corporation: Mr. Cliff was in conference and could not be seen until later in the morning. Fox was now, his notebook open in his hand, talking to someone whom he had called Ray.

“I call that real service. All right, I’ll hold the wire.” He did so for a wait of several minutes. Finally, he spoke again, listened a while, and then said, “Let me call them back to make sure. GJ11, GJ22, GJ33, GJ44, GJ55, GJ66, GJ77, and GJ88 are all Guthrie Judd. Eight cars, huh? Must save him a lot of shoe leather. Much obliged, Ray. Come up and look at my new tractor some time.”

He left the booth and shop, walked to the Grand Central subway station, and took an express to Wall Street.

The Metropolitan Trust Building was a microcosm, a fortress, a battlefield, a pirate’s corvette — depending on the point of view. The building had forty elevators and the company had thirty-eight vice-presidents, almost a tie. Fox, however, was aiming even higher than the highest vice-president. He got out at the elevator’s zenith and opened his attack on the Maginot Line that defended the approaches to his prey, his only artillery being a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope was one of his business cards on which he had written, “Urgent. Regarding Mr. Brown’s visit to Mr. T. at ten o’clock Tuesday morning.”

The difficulty was hitting the target with the envelope. A receptionist condescended to phone someone. A suave young man appeared and wanted the envelope but didn’t get it, and vanished. An older and tougher man arrived and conducted Fox along a wide carpeted corridor to a room where a skinny middle-aged man sat at a desk with a stenographer on each side of him. To him Fox surrendered the envelope and he departed with it, the tough man standing by. In five minutes the skinny man reappeared, beckoned to Fox, and escorted him through a door, a room, and another door, into a spacious chamber of authentic, though a bit spectacular, elegance.

A man of threescore, seated stiff-backed behind an enormous flat-topped desk of amargoso wood with nothing on it but a newspaper, said, “All right, Aiken, thanks.”

The skinny man went. Fox moved toward the desk. “Mr. Judd?”

“Yes.” The voice struck Fox as a new and remarkable synthesis, an amalgam of silk and steel: “Tell me what you want, please.”