Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Send that girl of yours, that Polish girl, in here while you’re gone.” Joe could never understand that the Polack was her name, not her ethnic origin. She wasn’t Polish. I always thought of her as Kazakh. Something basically Russian, but more exotic.

“You got any more pickled eggs in back, Bobby?”

I kept pickled eggs in the fridge for Joe because he had once mentioned that no bars in the state of Texas kept pickled eggs on the counter any longer. I sent the Polack out to find a gallon jar of pickled eggs the same day. Turns out they are more available than you think.

“Send her in with a couple of eggs on a plate, would you, Bobby?”

When Ronnie went to prison, the store closed its doors, and we all went our separate ways, at first the Polack went out on her own, hip-pocketing. Mostly Swiss watches, turn-of-the-century large finished pieces, some counterfeit cut color, and loose diamonds. Jim offered her a job with us when she gunned down this young kid, a customer of mine, outside my office.

The customer was a heavyset redheaded guy from Mexico City. He wore glasses and looked more like a poet than a diamond thief. He was selling me a cheap four-carat diamond. It was stolen, brown, and full of carbon, and I planned to offer him a hundred a carat. Five bills tops. It would flip to Moshe or Western Trading for twenty-five hundred, maybe three grand. But before I made an offer I needed to show him a few diamonds of mine so that he would understand how bad his diamond was.

I had prepared several stones with fake cheap prices printed boldly on the diamond papers so that he would believe you could buy pretty four-carats for a thousand or less. I had bought from him before and I knew he was stupid and in a hurry, so I knew it would be easy. But in the middle of my explanation he jumped up, yelled some word that I didn’t catch, and pulled a pistol on me. We had been robbed before, and the way he was bouncing on his legs I could see that he might shoot me accidentally. So I gave him the whole diamond box. I was already thinking of the numbers I had to call: first Paul, our insurance agent, then Jim at his girlfriend’s, then the police, next Granddad (they were mostly his diamonds), then Amos at HDC about his memo stones, and Ken over at the bank, then Wendy. But as the Mexican ran out of my office the Polack was there and she took him by the shoulder and shot him briskly twice in the stomach. From my office it looked like she was holding him up to shoot him. But she fired so quickly you couldn’t say. Then she stepped back and he fell. I looked for blood on her white dress. But she was as clean as a flame. She ignored the collapsed man, picked up the diamond box from the floor, and returned it to me. The poor kid was squirming on the floor. But he was oddly silent, like he was trying to catch his breath.

“Ha!” she said. “The young!” She was not thirty years old herself at the time. She sat down at my desk and opened her briefcase.

“Now you owe me, Clark! Ha ha! You better call the cops! The ambulances!”

“Hi, Polack,” I said. My hands wobbled. I took off my wedding ring and put it on my diamond scale. I had never seen a real live human being shot before.

“Just a second, Polack,” I said. “Hi. I asked could you give me one second.”

That was the day I fell in love with her. I asked her out to dinner.

Jim later remarked that it didn’t matter if she was my girlfriend for the next ten years, I would always only be a customer to the Polack.

Even after she came to work for us she continued her side deals. “I have money to make,” she told us, as though that were the end of the discussion. At times it was convenient. If we were short on cash ourselves. Our sales manager, Lou Sosa, sold her his Blancpain for fifteen hundred bucks. That was a thousand shy of what it should have been. The Polack paid less than everyone else but she always paid cash. Sosa needed the money to square up with his divorce attorney. It was a dirty divorce with a child and the worthless remains of Sosa’s old lawn-mowing business he kept on the side.

He asked me, “How can I turn this watch into cash in a hurry?” It was a beautiful automatic chronograph with a stainless head and a hobnail bezel. I had bought it off the street and given it to him as a bonus or a consolation when we first moved him from the shop onto the sales floor.

“I really hate to let it go, boss,” he said. Sosa had these sloppy, worn-out shoulders that made you feel sorry for him. He always used a kind of pity-close on his customers. Told them his hard-luck stories. His lips were thin and his ears were white and small. “It represents my success to me. But I got to have the money. I mean, unless you guys can float me a loan? Like five grand?”

“I’d buy it if I could. You might ask the Watchman,” I told him. “But if you’re in a hurry, sell it to the Polack.”

“I don’t like that woman,” he said. “No offense,” he added quickly. Officially nobody knew the Polack and I were involved but it was one of those open secrets. You couldn’t hide anything around our store for long. We worked too many hours.

“No big deal,” I said. “I don’t always like her myself.”

“Frankly I wish Jim had never hired the Anteater,” he went on.

That’s a bit much, Sosa, I thought. But I knew he was angry at all women, then, because of the divorce, so I let it slide. I changed the subject.

Over the years she had acquired many of these unattractive industry names. One of them was the Anteater, because people said she had a practice, when inspecting diamond packages, of licking out the melee while your eye was turned and storing it in her cheeks like a goddamn hamster.

“Wouldn’t that get her killed?’ I asked Jim once, skeptically. “I mean, if it’s true that she does that. Or thrown in jail or something.”

“I don’t think anyone has actually ever caught her at it, Bobby,” Jim said. “Plus she does a lot of business with those fellas. It’s like her commission, I guess. They’re all too busy staring at her legs to notice anyway.”

When Granddad heard we were putting her to work at our place he called me and told me not to do business with the Gypsy.

“I’ve known her since I was a kid, Granddad,” I reassured him. “She helped me sell my first Rolex.” That was not true but she had helped me sell plenty of them. She was the most dexterous liar I had ever met.

“She’s Russian mob, Grandson,” Granddad said. “We don’t want those guys in your store.”

He was a silent investor and he knew how to play by those elegant rules. But I could hear in his voice that he wanted to tell me I wasn’t allowed to hire her at all.

She liked to wear oversized gold hoop earrings. You might have thought that was why some people called her the Gypsy. But they called her the Gypsy because of a different story that no one liked to talk about. It wasn’t because she was a Gypsy, but because of something she was supposed to have done to some Gypsies.

I left Joe in my office and found her in back, at her desk, browsing through jewelry catalogues. She was wearing a bright green dress and her pale, snow-colored legs were bare. She was loveliest when she was concentrating on something, like she was at the moment. I stopped to look at her, for a moment, before she knew I was watching her. You couldn’t help yourself. She makes Kate Moss look like a dog’s belly, I thought.

She turned the pages in the catalogue. She would often tear out a page, look at it carefully, and then crumple it and throw it away. Like all independent custom jewelers, we ordered catalogues from every jewelry store and manufacturer in the world to get ideas for designs and to anticipate new trends. It didn’t work particularly well, but looking for designs was a job our people enjoyed.