Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

She laughed: “You may have changed since then a great deal.”

But the guy kept his eyes on Ira, a little worriedly, all the time the two were there. Why the hell didn’t Ira ask him, “Hey, do you remember that story about the Chinaman and the charabanc?” Too sensitive. But then again, what the hell would have been the difference? Ira shouldn’t argue with a tangerine in a barkeep’s outfit.

One night, when time came to cast up accounts, to turn in Ira’s receipts for the evening, he was ten dollars short. Ira compared actual receipts with the figures for receipts on the cash register, tallied and totaled and retallied, with growing alarm — he was still short by a ten-dollar bill. Ten dollars exactly! Not nine dollars and fifty cents, or ten dollars and a quarter, or some other number, but exactly ten dollars, give or take a measly penny or two, a discrepancy of no small consequence. To account for so large a discrepancy as the one in his receipts for the evening was beyond him — and beyond everybody else, Bob or Mr. Buckley, the assistant manager, who took over in the evening. Neither Mr. Ryce, the manager of the store, nor the day cashier, Mrs. Deane, whom Ira relieved in the evening, could account for the shortage. No one could. Had Ira — so Ira and others reasoned — inadvertently given a customer a ten-dollar bill instead of a one when he made change, then he would be nine dollars short. Or if Ira had been guilty of some other carelessness in making change, then he would be short some other explicable amount. But in no case an even ten dollars. The mystery resisted solution. Ira was docked ten dollars from his weekly total of sixteen dollars per week.

Slim pay envelope that week: reminded him of the time Biolov docked him two weeks’ pay to make up for the five-dollar bill he lost on his way to the wholesale drugstore on Third Avenue. Hard to cavil at the justice of the penalty, but hard not to, hard not to rankle at the sting, especially when one is certain of one’s scrupulous honesty and unfailing attention to business.

A week later, the mystery was solved: concentrating on making change for the customer who stood in front of the cashier’s cage, quick, vigilant Mrs. Deane spied — out of the corner of her eye — a youngster’s very small hand slide beneath the acorn-shaped ferrules of the upright brass rods that enclosed the cage, dip into the open till of the cash register, and pinch a ten-dollar bill out of its compartment. They habitually kept bills of larger denominations in the compartment on the left (which was also on the door side of the store). In a flick, the little hand snapped the bill out of the cage, and before Mrs. Deane could move, the little scamp beat it through the door. Out and away he fled, and into the crowd on 149th Street.

“Thief! Thief!” Mrs. Deane screamed: “Thief! There he goes, Mr. Ryce!”

At once Mr. Ryce set off in pursuit, glimpsed his quarry an instant, but lost him the next, as the kid dodged among the moving throng and vanished in shadow. Now they knew why Ira’s shortage had been exactly ten dollars. Together, Mrs. Deane and Ira signed a petition, which he drew up and Minnie obligingly typed, to the president of the Loft’s corporation, requesting forgiveness of the ten-dollar loss: the money had disappeared not because of the crew’s negligence, but because it had been stolen. The manager of the store himself attested to the fact. Noo, noo, as they said in Yiddish, it helped like cupping a cadaver. In her next pay envelope Mrs. Deane too found she had been docked ten dollars.

She fumed about the injustice a great deal. She was a slightly built woman, with shrewd, darting black eyes behind her eyeglasses. Angry, she seemed to condense into the very essence of outraged probity. But nothing could move the president of the Loft’s corporation. He sympathized, but in management’s view, Mrs. Deane and Ira had been wanting in alertness. Their carelessness was to blame for the loss of the money, and therefore they had to make amends. As a precaution against further thefts, a metal barrier was fastened to the bottom of either side of the cage, closing off the space between the acorn-shaped ferrules and the wooden ledge beneath.

For Mrs. Deane, after a few days or a week of indignation at the injustice the two had suffered at the hands of a great company, the matter ended there — Mrs. Deane sought to recoup the lost portion of her salary by flitting in and out of her cage to wait on customers. Staff were given a tenth of a percent on all sales they rang up. Whether in the course of time she succeeded in recovering her ten dollars, Ira didn’t know. Ira did know that a little brooding over the wrong done him hatched another and speedier system of redress. The system, or scheme, went as follows:

The Loft’s weekend special, three boxes of different kinds of candy for ninety-nine cents, was a very popular item and in great demand. With it, as with the purchase of any item in the store, came a little sales slip. The clerk behind the counter printed the amount of the purchase on the cash register, and issued the sales slip to the customer together with his purchase. The customer then presented the slip to the cashier, in this case Ira, and paid the amount of the sale printed on the slip. All Ira had to do was to retain the little sales slip, retain it absently, and instead of giving it back to the customer as proof of payment, simply hand the sales slip back to Bob. He would then issue it to the next purchaser of the ninety-nine-cent special, without ringing up a sale, who would then present Ira with the same sales slip, along with a greenback, usually a dollar, receive his penny in change, and go on his way — without Ira’s having rung up a sale. The sales slip would then be returned to Bob for another round in the nefarious cycle. Would Bob agree to be a party to the scheme? Ira made discreet inquiry: would he? Of course he would, and with alacrity. His sense of justice too had been violated by the company’s summary disposition of Ira’s appeal, especially since the two would go half on the proceeds: “That bunch o’ tightwads doin’ yo’ all outta ten skins. We only gettin’ even.”

They got even. If not in a jiffy, in short order: on two successive Saturdays, on the way to the speakeasy after work, they surreptitiously divvied up a little more than five dollars apiece. Ira was satisfied; he had gotten his money back. Justice was served.

Bob was not. His sense of justice outstripped Ira’s. The ease with which they had redressed the balance, or, witticisms aside, mulcted the company of over twenty dollars whetted his appetite for more. His day off was Tuesday, the day after Ira’s, and he was making it big with a honey of a beauty parlor operator, a blonde who looked like a million bucks in her black skirt and white blouse, and brother, could he use a little extra dough.

Ira too was impressed by how smoothly the stratagem had worked — not a hitch! How easily they had skimmed off more than twice the sum Ira felt the company owed him! Ira agreed to continue the ploy next Saturday. But nothing on the same scale. There were spotters, he warned. They both knew that: Mr. Ryce, the manager, had given Ira and Bob a report of the findings on their approach to customers: whether the two had addressed the investigator in guise of a bona fide patron with a properly obsequious “May I help you, sir” (or “ma’am”), and thanked him — or her — with due appreciation after the purchase. And of course — what went without saying — whether they were guilty of any irregularities in the way in which either, or both, Ira and Bob conducted the transaction, namely in the handling of sales receipts and cash. That was the main thing. And besides, Ira stressed to his cohort, Loft’s had an accounting department, and if the manager himself couldn’t explain the reason for a continued drop in the store’s income on Saturday — yes, even ten bucks, Ira overrode Bob’s skepticism vehemently — they would surely send somebody out to keep the two under surveillance.