I Can Get It for You Wholesale (8 page)

So
that’s
how they avoided breaking their teeth every time it came to saying his name.

“Thanks,” I said, and went in.

Have you ever been in Grand Central Station? Well, put a purple carpet on the floor, cover the walls with mirrors, spill a dozen small white tables all over the place and twice as many soft chairs and sofas, finish it off with a handful of classy-looking paintings on the walls, and if you can tell the difference between it and the Pulvermacher showroom, then you’re a better man than I am. If the money that that room cost couldn’t pay off the national debt, then I’m Mahatma Gandhi. I took a mental snapshot of the whole place and filed it away for future reference. I’d seen showrooms before, but this one walked away with the onionskin medal. I was learning things.

A short, fat guy came out of a door in the far end of the room and walked toward me like his ass was made of cake and he was afraid to crack the icing. Except for two things he was such a dead ringer for my ex-boss Schmul of Toney Frocks, Inc. that I was getting all set to spit in his eye. But when I saw the glasses he was wearing with the black ribbon that went around his neck, and the white piping that showed up under the edges of his vest, I knew I was in the presence of a big shot himself. To wear those kind of glasses and white piping under your vest you’ve either got to have a lot of nerve or a lot of dough. And this guy looked like he never even crossed the street against the lights.

I walked across the showroom to meet him.

“Mr. Pulvermacher?”

“Yes, sir?”

“My name is Bogen.”

“The girl told me.” Ah, well, that eliminated
her
automatically. I don’t like dames that talk. “What can I do for you?”

I decided to be a wise guy. Within limits, of course.

“I’m afraid it’s the other way around, Mr. Pulvermacher,” I said, giving him the old toothpaste grin. Joe Personality. You know. “I’m afraid
I’m
going to be the one that’s going to do something for
you
.”

What did I mean, I was afraid? Well, that’s being a wise guy within limits, isn’t it? So all right.

“So?” he said.

Yeah,
so
, fat boy!

“Shall we go some place where we can talk?” I said.

He waved his hands around the room.

“What’s the matter with here?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I only thought it would be better if we could go some place where we wouldn’t be interrupted by buyers coming in and—”

“Don’t worry about buyers,” he said with a grin that must have hurt him, judging from the way it looked. “Since that damn strike began we haven’t been able to move a dress out of the place. Cancellations we’re getting, not orders. Don’t worry about being interrupted by buyers. I haven’t seen one in three days.”

I’ll bet the buyers weren’t complaining.

“Well, that’s just what I’m here to talk to you about,” I said.

“Then you better talk quick, young man,” he said, “because things can’t keep up like this for long. If we don’t get our dresses moved in another couple of days we’ll have to meet the demands of the strikers, that’s all. We can’t afford to have things go on like this.”

Jesus Christ and the gas company! It looked like I’d just come in under the wire.

“Oh, you don’t want to do that, do you, Mr. Pulvermacher?”

He shrugged.

“Of course we don’t. But what else can we do? We can’t get even with them until the slack season sets in. Right now, we’ve got to move our dresses. We’ve got to fill our orders.”

“Sure, but you’d rather do it without giving in to the strikers, wouldn’t you? You don’t want them to be able to say they won the strike, do you? And besides, I hear they’re making some pretty high demands in wages and hours and things like that. You don’t want to give in on all that, do you?”

“What are you doing, cracking jokes, Mr. Bogen?” Look, he remembered my name! “Of course we don’t want to give in to them. But what can we do?”

“I’ll tell you what to do, Mr. Pulvermacher.” The hell with him. From now on I was going to leave it out. Why couldn’t he get himself a handle that you didn’t have to take a running start for? “That’s what I came up to see you about. I’ve got a way to get your dresses delivered, cut your costs on it in half, and at the same time you won’t have to give in to the strikers. Does that sound good to you?”

“It
sounds
good.”

Little Pulvy, the skeptic!

“And it’s even better than it sounds.”

“Well, let’s hear it.”

I took his arm and pulled him over to a sofa.

“Let’s sit down,” I said.

He pulled out a couple of cigars and handed one to me. I took it, but I didn’t light it. I can’t smoke them. Every time I light a cigar, I have to sew up the bottom of my pants first.

“How many shipping clerks have you got, Mr. Pulvermacher?” There I go again! I just can’t keep my resolutions.

“You mean how many
did
I have.”

To all my other troubles, he has to turn out to be a wise guy. All right, dope, have it your way.

“That’s right,” I said. “How many
did
you have?”

“Let’s see. Ten, twelve, and the two colored boys—fourteen. I had fourteen.”

“And how much do you?—excuse me. How much
did
you pay them a week?”

“I paid them what they were worth. Nobody that works for us is underpaid. Our wage scale is one of the highest on Seventh Avenue. You can’t expect us to pay a shipping clerk what we’d pay a—”

“I
know
they were well paid, Mr. Pulvermacher,” I said. Yeah, I knew it. “I’m just interested in how much you paid them. I want to do a little calculating for you, Mr. Pulvermacher, that’s all. I’m not in any way criticizing you.”

“Fifteen dollars a week, with fifty cents extra for supper every night they work late. And I’d like to see anybody on the Avenue say that’s a bad salary for a shipping clerk, or that they pay more than—”

“Fifteen dollars a week for fourteen shipping clerks makes two hundred and ten dollars every week, doesn’t it?”

“Two hundred and ten? Yeah, yeah. Two hundred and ten. So what?”

“Just a minute, Mr. Pulvermacher, please. Now, how many times a day would you say each of your shipping clerks goes out with a delivery? I mean, how many trips does each one make? Just roughly, now, just an estimate. I don’t expect you to make it accurate or anything like that, but just an estimate.”

He rubbed his hand over his bald dome and shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know?”

“Well, I mean roughly, you can make an estimate, just a guess.”

“Well, I don’t know—three-four times, maybe five—I don’t know. How should I know a thing like that? I don’t sit there watching them.”

“You’d be surprised how right you are, Mr. Pulvermacher. I know because I’ve made a study of these things. The average shipping clerk goes out four or five times a day. All right, then. You say five times. But for the sake of my figures, just to allow for everything, we shouldn’t take any chances, you know, let’s say six. Let’s say six times. Let’s say every shipping clerk goes out six times a day with a delivery.”

“All right,” he said.

“So what’ve we got? We’ve got fourteen shipping clerks going out six times each, means, let’s see, six times ten is sixty, and six times four is twenty-four, twenty-four and sixty—makes eighty-four. That means your shipping clerks make eighty-four trips a day. Right?”

“If you say it’s right, so it’s right.”

“But Mr. Pulvermacher, I want
you
should say it’s right. There’s nothing wrong with my arithmetic, is there? Six times fourteen is—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s right. It’s right. So what?”

“Now just one more little bit of figuring, and we’re through,” I said. “You’re open here six days a week, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“So we have eighty-four trips a day, times six days in the week, means—here, wait.” I pulled out a pencil and a pad and did the multiplication so he could see it. “That makes five hundred and four trips a week. So it should be easier to talk about, let’s say five hundred. Five hundred trips a week. Right?”

He nodded again. Strong silent stuff. Maurice Pulvermacher and Calvin Coolidge.

“So what’ve we got?” I said, leaning back. “We’ve got five hundred trips a week for which you’re paying out two hundred and ten dollars.” I pointed the cigar at him. “If I were to tell you, Mr. Pulvermacher, that I could make those five hundred trips for you for a hundred and twenty-five dollars—meaning you’d be saving eighty-five dollars every week, maybe even more, but at
least
eighty-five—if I told you that, would you be interested?”

He shrugged and said, “Well, why not?”

He was lukewarm, but I wanted him hot.

“And suppose I were to tell you further, Mr. Pulvermacher”—it wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it—“that you wouldn’t have any labor troubles, you wouldn’t have any strikes, you wouldn’t have to worry about hiring shipping clerks, or anything like that.
And
, on top of all that, besides saving you the money, when the slow seasons come around, and there aren’t so many deliveries, instead of paying fourteen shipping clerks they should sit around on their behinds all day, instead of that you’d only be paying for the few deliveries a day that they made, and you’d save twice as much as during the busy season, suppose I were to tell you that, what would you say?”

He lit his cigar, hunching himself around it, before he spoke.

“You been doing a lot of talking, Mr. Bogen,” he said, “and all I been doing is listening, but I still don’t see what you’re driving at. How are you going to save me all this money and cut out all my labor troubles and all the rest of this
shmei-drei
you been talking about? How are you going to do it?”

“That’s easy. I represent the Needle Trades Delivery Service, Inc.” This is a free country, isn’t it? “We specialize in deliveries in the garment district.” You’d never guess that from the name. “For twenty-five cents a package,” I said, “we’ll deliver as many packages, bundles, boxes, or what-have-you, that you ask us to, any place in the neighborhood. At twenty-five cents each we’ll deliver those five hundred packages for you. It’ll only cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars, instead of the two hundred and ten you’re paying now. There won’t be any shipping clerks to go out on strike on you. When it gets slow, and you don’t have five hundred deliveries a week, it’ll cost you just that much less. You pay as you go, twenty-five cents a package, and we do all the worrying. How does that strike you?”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and began to pinch his lower lip. I put my cigar into my pocket and lit a cigarette.

“What firms do you do this kind of work for?” he asked.

The clever little son of a bitch!

“I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Pulvermacher.” To a baloney bender this is what’s known as making a virtue out of a necessity. To me it’s just using your head for something else besides a brace to keep your ears apart. “We’ve just started our organization,” I said. “You’re the first one we’ve approached.”

“And why me?”

Well,
now
he’d let himself in for it.

“Because not only are you the president of the biggest and most representative firm of dress manufacturers on Seventh Avenue, Mr. Pulvermacher, but you’re also the president of the Associated Dress Manufacturers of New York. That’s why.”

He smiled a little and plugged his mouth with the cigar. But he should have seen me. Inside I was laughing out loud.

“What good will it do your organization if we sign up for your service, if we’re the only ones you’re working for?”

“Ah, Mr. Pulvermacher, that’s where you’re wrong. Once we get you on our books, the rest of them will follow like sheep. You know that as well as I do. You know they do anything you say, Mr. Pulvermacher.”

Maybe he didn’t know it, but all you had to do was take one look at his squash to see that he believed it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waving the cigar at me. “What makes you so sure?”

Fore!

“I’ll tell you,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I happen to know that there’s going to be a meeting of the A.D.M. this afternoon. Am I right?”

“Never mind,” he said. “So?”

“And I also happen to know that the purpose of the meeting is to discuss the demands of the strikers for the last time, and, if necessary, vote to meet them. Right?” He didn’t say anything. “Now, Mr. Pulvermacher, if you were to drop a bombshell into that meeting. If you were to tell them that they don’t have to meet the strikers’ demands, that they don’t have to give in, because you know a way to beat the strikers at their own game, if you could tell them that, Mr. Pulvermacher, what would happen? Don’t tell me,” I said, although he seemed to be about as ready to do that as I was to kiss him. “Let
me
tell
you.
Two things would happen. The members of the A.D.M. would think you’re about the smartest man between here and Three Oaks, Michigan, which, I don’t mind adding, they wouldn’t be far wrong.” Boy, could I sling it! “And, incidentally, the Needle Trades Delivery Service, Inc. would go over with a bang.”

He patted his belly, smiled, bit off the soggy end of his cigar, spit it out on the carpet, and kicked it under one of the classy-looking sofas.

“Ohhhhh, I don’t know,” he said slowly, meaning he knew damn well, “maybe you’re, well, overestimating my, well, my, my
power
over the members of the Associated. Maybe you’re gambling a little too heavily on my ability to swing them over to you. After all, I’m only a human being, you know.”

That’s what
he
said. I wouldn’t put any money on it unless I saw an affidavit.

“Mr. Pulvermacher,” I said, in the tone of voice that that
yoineh
Nathan Hale must’ve used when he made that crack about dying for his country, “Mr. Pulvermacher, I’m willing to take that chance. No matter what the odds, Mr. Pulvermacher, the Needle Trades Delivery Service still puts its money on you.”

He jumped up quickly.

“You wait here, Mr. Bogen,” he said. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

He hurried across the room toward the door through which he had come and before I knew it, I was alone.