Reinhart in Love (14 page)

The Maker hopped out and opened the rear door, which was more than a white taximan would have, but then he proceeded to do another peculiar thing: cheat on the distance by taking the longest way, up around the end of the suburbs, where a sallow woman scratched the start of a garden; down to the other extremity, where some Slav with an enormous family all boys sold waste paper and rusty iron; then plunged to the eastern limits and its railroad of abandoned boxcars.

Now Reinhart never said a word until they finally stopped before the mock fieldstone exterior of Humbold's one-story office at the edge of the business district. Over the years he had never learned how to remonstrate with a malefactor face to face; between his indignation and its expression always rose the specter of his own corrupt person; he feared damaging countercharges.

Thus now he could only say with veiled sarcasm: “Thanks for the tour.”

The Maker answered: “We aim to please.” He left the taxi, slipped between its forward bumper and the rear one of a bloated auto parked ahead, probably Humbold's, and opened Reinhart's door. He announced the fare as thirty-five cents. It slowly became apparent to Reinhart, who tipped him the remainder of a half-dollar, that the Maker's cab like all suburban taxis went by zone charges rather than meters. The ride had cost him under five cents a mile, and he just wished he had been intelligent enough to enjoy it.

To boot, the Maker returned the tip, explaining that he was owner-driver, not wage-slave, and Reinhart thanked him, and the Maker rejoined “Yours truly,” and drove away.

Expecting the resistance of a compressed-air device, Reinhart thrust too hard against the glass door to the office. It swept back, hit some hidden elastic stop, and came forward with great velocity. Was he struck? No, deft fellow, he performed a neat evasion, but the door's wind raised the papers from the secretary's desk and whirled them to the floor.

“I'm terribly sorry,” he said, secretly resentful. Since the inconvenience must occur repeatedly, he supposed it was artfully arranged to happen, to put the caller at an immediate disadvantage. On the other hand, he was thrilled he understood it, that within his first moment on the premises he had divined one of the subtleties of modern business.

“Not at all,” the secretary answered malignantly. “You're not sorry at all. Neither are you really the regional director of the FBI.” She was actually as young as he, but in her clothing and make-up pretended not to be, wearing the tight under-armor and pungent perfume of a middle-aged woman simulating youth, as well as conspicuous junk jewelry. She stared so caustically at Reinhart as he crept about fetching papers that he believed his fly must be open. Coughing as a cover, he checked it, and it wasn't; but he regretted not having bought a new suit, for at his right hip was a considerable moth hole through which protruded a corner of his olive-drab drawers.

“You don't want to do anything for us,” the secretary charged. “You want us to do something for you.” She wet on her tongue the end of a purple-taloned finger and pressed it upon her glossy knee.

“Got a runner?” Reinhart asked sympathetically, trying to ingratiate himself, for he foresaw that working with or near this girl would be abrasive unless he could, metaphorically speaking, refasten her brassiere strap from the tightest to the loosest connection.

She swung her legs into the cavity provided for them below the desk. “You don't look like an Italian, but you have Roman eyes.” She bit her lips, which were small but full and permanently drooped in exigence. Every so often she widened her gray eyes and then squinted, at which times the point of her little nose was depressed and the back of her brown bob seemed to lift like the behind of a chicken in flight.

She was really kind of cute, and Reinhart turned on for her his winning grin. He fundamentally liked all girls, especially those who worked in an office and took it seriously; a woman's life being ever threatened with disorder—for example, at least once a month—he found both delightful and touching a secretary's illusion she had hers arranged.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked, meaning the counterfeit Fed, and she understood. He also liked clever people, or tried to.

“I remember voices like a sensitive person remembers slights.” This was perhaps too clever, and she meant it to be, and flipped both her pretty, insolent head and the switch of an intercom, reporting: “Mr. Humbold, a person to see you.” Dirty with static, a reply was metallically audible:
“Hen or rooster?”
Miss X answered: “Rooster,” and superciliously pointed coxcomb Reinhart to the private door.

Humbold, sitting behind a blond desk, next to a rubber plant in a bamboo-wrapped urn, lost no time in demonstrating his disappointment; nor could the gravel in his voice be blamed on static any longer; he had a throatful of saliva and was too lazy or arrogant to clear it. Frankly, Reinhart would never understand such a person, and thus at a moment which called for strength had only weakness to offer. On the other hand, perhaps the weakness was just as good, since Hum-bold would not permit the offering of anything. It was
his
office,
his
secretary, and shortly Reinhart discovered that he himself was owned by Humbold, having hypnotically assented to an oral indenture which he failed to hear properly except for the wage terms, which were extraordinarily generous: sixty-five dollars a week.

Reinhart was suddenly rich; at the same time, he felt distinctly deprived of something he had with him when he entered the office. He studied his employer, to see if he had taken it.

Humbold wore his trousers very high to cover his wide belly; the end of his gaudy necktie was secured under the waistband of his pants, and a golden safety pin fastened his tie to his shirt, which was white with a white figure, looking at which you were sure your vision was failing. He wore a pin at the collar as well: conspicuous consumption, for the collar was also button-down. In his shirt pocket, fastened to an isinglass liner bearing on its fold an advertisement for his own business, he carried a matched pen and pencil of silver with onyx topknots, though no cigars. His face was smooth as a bladder and as fat, but harder. He had unusually long and loose earlobes; like a turkey's wattles, they continued to move when he did no more than stare. His eyes were smaller than the muzzles of his shotgun nose.

“O.K., bud,” said Humbold, “never had a job? You ain't paid for gawking.”

“Excuse me.” Reinhart collected himself—which was what had turned out to be missing—and asked: “Mr. Humbold—”

“Call me Claude,” said the boss.

“I just wanted to be sure you knew who I was.”

“No danger of that,” jeered Humbold. “You just flush when I pull the chain. Your daddy called me every day. I done a lot for your old man, and I'll do more, though ten years younger than him. I'm
making
this job for you, bud, there being no opening. Everything I got, I built for myself.” He touched the knot of his tie with a hand wearing two rings, a watch, a manicure, and hair fine as a baby's. “Now get to your work.”

“Just what would that be?” Reinhart asked, choosing this moment to sit upon a chair of metal tubing.

“Well it ain't sitzing!” cried Humbold. “Bud, you ain't one to appreciate opportunity. A man give me a opportunity like this and I'd have his bidniss inside a year.” He rose, impudently rejecting the swivel chair with his large hams. His face grew so amiable as to appear imbecilic: his eyes vanished, his ears grew, his teeth showed, and his tongue dangled. Rubelike, he sauntered to Reinhart and squeezed his hand as if it were a cow's udder. He doffed an imaginary straw hat and droned: “Take a piece of propitty off muh hans? You an me'll mosey later to take a look at whut I got fuh sale, but fust we drink a bourbon and branch water?”

Humbold came out of his role and explained: “That technique is for the city type, contrary to what you might think. You always be different from the client. What a man buying a property don't want is for the salesman to be no more than him. Now if you get a hick, you act hoity-toity and then show a property near a exclusive golf club, tell him everybody in the neighborhood eats supper in a Tuxedo and set their dogs on Baptists. Get the point? You always work
against the grain.”

Humbold returned to the other side of the room, where two different kinds of his own calendars were hung, turned, put a twist on his hip, and waltzed back like a fruit.

“The mosth darling little place,” he lisped, “that you'll
dearly
love! … The approach for a crude, physical type with a mousey wife. You have to watch he don't belt you, but you'll make a real hit with the little woman. On the other hand, you get a sissy, you lay on the threat: you start by hurting his hand when you shake. You belch, sneeze, spit, and pee in a deserted hallway. You pull him inta some tough saloon and show only slum properties near a factory where the air stinks.”

It had taken Reinhart all this while to understand that he was being hired as a real-estate man, and he was very gloomy about it, disliking nothing more than houses and lots, dreaming invariably of palaces in parks on the one hand and urban apartments on the other. For a moment he hated Dad for having had to do him this favor.

“Never,” said Humbold, “sell a man what he wants!”

“Why?” Reinhart asked. “Why are people like that?” For if Hum-bold said they were, they were; he did not challenge his employer, the one man hereabouts who had made an unqualified success and was worth, they said, six figures, and continued to live in the same neighborhood as Reinhart's parents only because he had the biggest house there.

Contrary to what his employe expected, Humbold looked pleased at the query and answered ecstatically: “Because that's not what they want!” He plunged into a closet and brought out the jacket to his pin-striped suit, a fawn-colored topcoat, and a kind of Confederate cavalry hat of light gray with a narrow black band. From the lapel of his jacket sprouted a crimson feather-duster boutonniere, apropos of the predominant color, in a melange of others, in his necktie. An Alp of white handkerchief rose from his breast pocket. He cocked his hat and cried to Reinhart: “Let's move out, bud!”

Struggling into his old trenchcoat, Reinhart followed Humbold through the outer office and past the secretary. Their air swept her correspondence to the floor again. She shook her little fist at Reinhart, and he stopped to make things right. “Bud!” shouted Humbold, half through the street door, admitting a March wind that mocked any efforts at reorder. “Step lively before it gets away!”

“Before what does?” Reinhart screamed into the wind. He was now outdoors; Humbold, already in his eight-cylinder Gigantic, started the engine. The vehicle began to move as Reinhart caught the door handle, and he had to run alongside for half a block before a red light halted it and he could enter.

The boss played the pushbuttons of the radio as if it were an organ, producing a mishmash of sound. At last he settled for a rancorous raving about a deodorant: You're
a dirty pig unless you use Dream Mist
.

He thrust his face down into his coat and alternately sniffed at both armpits. “Why,” he then answered, “whajuh think? Life!”

By the end of Reinhart's first working day there were two new developments, both encouraging. One, Maw was up and around again, showing no damage from whatever her trouble had been, but obstructively trying to talk of some amidst Reinhart's account of his triumph. Two, there was Reinhart's triumph, a feature of which was that suddenly after all these years he ceased to think of Humbold as an enemy.

Humbold was generous—irrespective of the sixty-five per week, which was not exactly a salary but an estimate of what Reinhart could earn by making sales, fair enough. He had driven first to Gents' Walk, the local clothiers, and got Reinhart reoutfitted from sole to scalp (or, as Humbold put it, “from corns to dandruff”), charging it to his own account, the squaring up to come from his employe's future earnings.

Humbold was egalitarian: he vigorously pressed Reinhart to dress after his, Humbold's, fashion; and while the apprentice politely rejected the pinstripes, the aurora borealis neckties, and any kind of hat, he did appreciate his boss's selfless concern—your typical employer would rather have striven to maintain the distinctions. (Gents' wasn't where Reinhart would have gone on his own; yet he managed to find a harmless brown sports jacket, gray flannels, cordovan-dyed oxfords which might or might not run in the rain, and a single-breasted gabardine raincoat which might or might not shed it; he gave his old clothes to the halitosic clerk to burn. “I'll package them and send them to
MISSIONARY
, in care of your local postmaster,” said the clerk. “An appeal in which your neighborhood clothiers are cooperating, to cover the nakedness of certain tribes in New South Wales.”)

Humbold had authority: he operated his great car as if it were a chariot fitted with hub-scythes and the pedestrians were Roman infantry. Walking, Reinhart had always condemned such driving; he saw now how the grass could be green in one's own yard. He felt, if not power, at least his adjacency to it. Their next call was to a gas station, where Humbold flashed a credit card and a herd of lackeys swarmed over the vehicle and filled it and cajoled it and laved it with a variety of their fluids, and stood in platoon formation, saluting, as the Gigantic at length blasted off, just missing a fox terrier with his nose at the tail of another upon the edge of the blacktop.

Humbold had esprit: they roared towards a couple of “live ones,” which was to say, clients, people in the market for a house, and the boss already had the scent of prey in his big nostrils; he increased the volume of the radio and whistled through his teeth in accompaniment of the musical commercials; he sideswept his hat brim like an Anzac; he ground two sticks of gum between his molars and winced as if in some excruciatingly sweet pain.