ROBBINS Harold - The Carpetbaggers

Wagner was sitting at his desk when David walked by. "You were pretty lucky," he said. "The doctor said that all Tony has is a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. He'll need twelve stitches in his cheek, though."

"He was lucky," David said. "It was an accident."

The supervisor's gaze fell before his. "The garage across the street wants ten bucks to fix the jack."

"I'll give it to them tomorrow."

"You don't have to," Wagner said quickly. "I already did."

"Thanks."

The foreman looked up from his desk. His eyes met David's squarely. "I wish we could pretend this morning never happened," he said in a low voice. "I’d like to start all over again."

David stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled and held out his hand. "My name is David Woolf," he said. "I’m supposed to see the foreman about a job."

The foreman looked at David's hand and got to his feet. "I’m Jack Wagner, the foreman," he said, and his grip was firm. "Let me introduce you to the boys."

When David turned toward the packaging tables, all the men were grinning at him. Suddenly, they weren't strangers any more. They were friends.

Bernard Norman walked into his New York office. It was ten o'clock in the morning and his eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks pink from the winter air, after his brisk walk down from the hotel.

"Good morning, Mr. Norman," his secretary said. "Have a nice trip?"

He smiled back at her as he walked on into his private office and opened the window. He stood there breathing in the cold fresh air. Ah, this was geshmach . Not like the day-in, day-out sameness of California.

Norman went over to his desk and took a large cigar from the humidor. He lit it slowly, relishing the heavy aromatic Havana fragrance. Even the cigars tasted better in New York. Maybe, if he had time, he'd run down to Ratner's on Delancey Street and have blintzes for lunch.

He sat down and began to go over the reports lying on his desk. He nodded to himself with satisfaction. The billings from the exchanges were up over last year. He turned to the New Yorker theater reports. The Norman Theater, his premiere house on Broadway, had picked up since they started having stage shows along with the picture. It was holding its own with Loew's State and the Palace. He leafed through the next few reports, then stopped and studied the report from the Park Theater. An average gross of forty-two hundred dollars a week over the past two months. It must be a mistake. The Park had never grossed more than three thousand tops. It was nothing but a third-run house on the wrong side of Fourteenth Street.

Norman looked further down the report and his eyes came to rest on an item labeled Employee Bonuses. They were averaging three hundred a week. He reached for the telephone. Somebody must be crazy. He'd never O.K.'d bonuses like that. The whole report must be wrong.

"Yes, Mr. Norman?" his secretary's voice came through.

"Tell Ernie to get his ass in here," Norman said. "Right away." He put down the telephone. Ernie Hawley was his treasurer. He'd be able to straighten this out.

Hawley came in, his eyes shadowed by his thick glasses. "How are you, Bernie?" he asked. "Have a good trip?"

Norman tapped the report on his desk. "What's with this on the Park Theater?" he said. "Can't you bastards get anything right?"

Hawley looked confused. "The Park? Let's see it."

Norman gave him the report, then leaned back in his chair, savagely puffing at his cigar. Hawley looked up. "I can't see anything wrong with this."

"You can't?" Norman said sarcastically. "You think I don't know the Park never grossed more than three thousand a week since it was built? I'm not a dope altogether."

"The gross on the report is correct, Bernie. Our auditors check it every week."

Bernie scowled at him. "What about those employee bonuses? Twenty-four hundred dollars in the last two months! You think I'm crazy? I never O.K.'d anything like that."

"Sure you did, Bernie," Hawley replied. "That's the twenty-five-per cent manager's bonus we set up to help us over the slump after Christmas."

"But we set the top gross for the theaters as a quota," Norman snapped. "We figured out it would cost us next to nothing. What figure did we use for the Park?"

"Three thousand."

Bernie looked down at the report. "It's a trick," he said. "Taubman's been stealing us blind. If he wasn't, how come all of a sudden he's grossing forty-two hundred?"

"Taubman isn't managing the theater now. He's been out with appendicitis since right after Christmas."

"His signature's on the report."

"That's just a rubber stamp. All the managers have them."

"So who's managing the theater?" Norman asked. "Who's the wise guy beating us out of three hundred a week?"

Hawley looked uncomfortable. "We were in a spot, Bernie. Taubman caught us at a bad time; we didn't have anybody else to send in."

"So stop beating around the bush and tell me already," Norman snapped.

"Your nephew, David Woolf," the treasurer said reluctantly.

Norman clapped his hand to his head dramatically. "Oy! I might have known."

"There wasn't anything else we could do." Hawley reached for a cigarette nervously. "But the kid did a good job, Bernie. He made tie-ins with all the neighborhood stores, pulled in some give-aways and he swamps the neighborhood with heralds twice a week. He even started what he calls family night, for Monday and Tuesday, the slow nights. A whole family gets in for seventy-five cents. And it's working. His candy and popcorn sales are four times what they were."

"So what's the extra business costing us?"

Again the treasurer looked uncomfortable. "It added a little to operating expenses but we figure it's worth it."

"So?" Norman said. "Exactly how much?"

Hawley picked up the report. He cleared his throat. "Somewhere between eight and eight fifty a week."

"Somewhere between eight and eight fifty a week," Bernie repeated sarcastically. He got to his feet and glared at the treasurer. "A bunch of shmucks I got working for me," he shouted suddenly. "The whole increase does nothing for us. But for him it's fine. Three hundred a week extra he puts in his pocket."

He turned and stormed over to the window and looked out. The cold air came in through the open frame. Angrily he slammed down the window. The weather was miserable here, not warm and sunny like it was in California.

"I wouldn't say that," Hawley said. "When you figure the over-all, including the concession sales, we're netting a hundred and fifty a week more."

Norman turned around. "Nine hundred a week of our money he spends to make himself three hundred. We should maybe give him a vote of thanks that he lets us keep the hundred and fifty?" His voice rose to a shrill shriek. "Or maybe it's because he ain't yet figured out a way to beat us out of that!"

He stamped back to his desk angrily. "I don't know what it is, but every time I come to New York, I got to find tsoris !" He threw the cigar into the wastebasket and took a new one from the humidor. He put it between his lips and began to chew it.

"A year and a half ago, I come to New York and what do I find? He's working by the warehouse a little over a year and already he's making more on it than we do. A thousand a year he's making selling junked heralds, two thousand selling dirty pictures he's printing by the hundreds on our photo paper in our own still laboratory. A concession he's developed in all our offices around the country selling condoms wholesale. It's a lucky thing I stopped him, or we all would have wound up in jail."

"But you got to admit, Bernie, the warehouse never ran more smoothly," Hawley said. "That rotating perpetual inventory saved us a fortune in reorders."