James Chase: You Find Him, I'll Fix Him

On a hot July afternoon I was dozing in my office, being offensive to no one and with nothing important to do, when the telephone bell brought me awake with a start.

I picked up the receiver.

“Yes, Gina?”

“It’s Mr. Sherwin Chalmers on the line,” Gina said breathlessly.

I became breathless too.

“Chalmers? For Pete’s sake! He’s not here in Rome?”

“He’s calling from New York.”

I got back some of my breath, but not all of it.

“Okay, put him through,” I said, and sat forward, no calmer than a spinster who has found a man under her bed.

For four years I had been in charge of the Rome office of the New York Western Telegram, and this was my first contact with Chalmers who owned the paper.

He was a multi-millionaire, a dictator in his own particular field and a brilliant newspaper man. To have Sherwin Chalmers call you on the telephone was like having the President ask you to tea at the White House.

I put the receiver to my ear and waited. There were the usual clicks and pops, then a cool female voice said, “Is that Mr. Dawson?”

I said it was.

“Will you hold on for Mr. Chalmers, please?”

I said I would, and wondered how she would have reacted if I had told her I wouldn’t.

There were more clicks and pops, then a voice that sounded like a hammer beating on an anvil barked, “Dawson?”

“Yes, Mr. Chalmers.”

There was a pause and I wondered what the kick was going to be. It had to be a kick. I couldn’t imagine that the great man would be calling unless something had displeased him.

What came next surprised me.

“Look, Dawson,” he said, “my daughter will be arriving in Rome to-morrow on the elevenfifty plane. I want you to meet her and take her to the Excelsior Hotel. My secretary has fixed a reservation for her. Will you do that?”

This was the first time I had heard he had a daughter. I knew he had been married four times, but a daughter was news to me, “She’ll be studying at the university,” he went on, words tumbling out of his mouth as if he were bored with the subject and wanted to get done with it as quickly as possible. “If she wants anything, I’ve told her to call on you. I don’t want you to give her any money. That is important- She’s getting sixty dollars a week from me, and that is quite enough for a young girt. She has a job of work to do, and if she does it the way I want her to do it, she won’t need much money. But I’d like to know someone is at hand in case she needs anything or gets ill or something.”

“She hasn’t anyone here then?” I asked, not liking the sound of this. As a nurse-maid, I don’t rate myself very high.

“I’ve given her some introductions, and she’ll be at the university, so she’ll get to know people,” Chalmers said. I could hear the impatience in his voice.

“Okay, Mr. Chalmers. I’ll meet her, and if she wants anything, I’ll fix it.”

“That’s what I want.” There was a pause, then he said, “Things all right at your end?” He didn’t sound particularly interested.

I said they were a little slow.

There was another long pause, and I could hear him breathing heavily. I had a vision of a short, fat man with a chin like Mussolini’s, eyes like the points of an ice-pick and a mouth like a bear-trap.

“Hammerstock was talking to me about you last week,” he said abruptly. “He seems to think he should get you back here.”

I drew in a long, slow breath. I had been aching to hear this news for the past ten months.

“Well, I’d certainly like that if it could be arranged.”

“I’ll think about it.”

The click in my ear told me he had hung up. I replaced the receiver, pushed back my chair to give me a little breathing, space and stared at the opposite wall while I thought how nice it would be to get home after four years in Italy. Not that I disliked Rome, but I knew, so long as I was holding down this job, I wouldn’t get an increase in pay nor a chance of promotion. If I were going to get somewhere I would only get there in New York.

After a few minutes of intensive brooding that got me nowhere, I went into Gina’s office.

Gina Valetti, dark, pretty, gay and twenty-three, had been my secretary and general factotum since I had taken over the Rome office. It had always baffled me that a girl with her looks and shape could have been so smart.

She paused in her typing and looked inquiringly at me.

I told her about Chalmers’s daughter.

“Sounds terrific, doesn’t it?” I said, sitting on the edge of her desk. “Some bouncing, fat undergrad needing my advice and attention: the things I do for Western Telegr am .”

“She could be beautiful,” Gina said, her voice cool. “Many American girls are beautiful and attractive. You could fail in love with her. If you married her you would be in a very happy position.”

“You’ve got marriage on the brain,” I said. “All you Italian girls are the same. You haven’t seen Chalmers - I have. She couldn’t possibly be beautiful coming from his stable. Besides, he wouldn’t want me for a son-in-law. He would have a lot bigger ideas for his daughter than me.”

She gave me a long, slow stare from under curled, black eyelashes, then lifted her pretty shoulders.

“Wait ’til you see her,” she said.

For once Gina was wrong, but then so was I. Helen Chalmers didn’t appear to be beautiful, but neither was she fat and bouncing. She seemed to me to be completely negative. She was blonde, and she wore horn-rimmed spectacles, sloppy clothes and flat-heeled shoes. Her hair was screwed back off her face. She seemed as dull as only a very serious-minded college girl can be dull.

I met her at the airport and took her to the Excelsior Hotel. I said the usual polite things one says to a stranger, and she answered as politely. By the time I had got her to the hotel I was so bored with her that I couldn’t get away last enough. I told her to call me at the office if she wanted anything, gave her my telephone number and bowed myself out. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t call me. There was a touch of efficiency about her that convinced me that she could handle any situation that might crop up without my help or advice.

Gina sent flowers to the hotel in my name. She also had composed a cable to Chalmer’s to say the girl had arrived safely. I felt there wasn’t much else for me to do, and, as a couple of good stories broke around this time, I put Miss Chalmers out of my mind and forgot about her.

About ten days later, Gina suggested that I should call the girl and find out how she was, getting on. This I did, but the hotel told me she had left six days ago, and they had no forwarding address.

Gina said I should find out where she was in case Chalmers wanted to know.

“Okay, you find out,” I said. “I’m busy.”

Gina, got her information from police headquarters. It seemed Miss Chalmers had taken a three-room furnished apartment off Via Cavour. Gina got the telephone number and I called her.

She sounded surprised when she came on the line, and I had to repeat my name twice before the nickle dropped. It seemed she had forgotten me as completely as I had forgotten her, and, oddly enough, this irritated me. She said everything was under control, and she was getting along fine, thank you. There was a hint of impatience in her voice that suggested she resented me inquiring about her, and also, she used that polite tone of voice that daughters of very rich men use when talking to their father’s employees, and that infuriated me.

I cut the conversation short, reminded her again that if there was anything I could do I would do it, and hung up.