Trustee From the Toolroom (35 page)

Keith asked, 'Who is this Julie? Captain Petersen said something about her once.'

'Julie Perlberg,' said Mr Rockawin. ' She's a Jewish girl, I think - quite young. Twenty-five, maybe. She's the old man's private secretary, sharp as a needle.' He paused. 'I've heard it said that there was some kind of a tragedy, I don't know. In any case, that's only rumour. If true, she'd be his granddaughter.' He paused. 'She lives at Wauna in the house with him - his wife's away in Florida most winters, so she runs the house servants. She goes to conferences with him, taking shorthand notes. You might say she's his eyes and ears right now.' He laughed, 'And say, they're mighty-sharp eyes and mighty long ears.'

Keith smiled with him. 'Long enough to hear what's going on in here ?'

'She's quite capable of having someone put a mike into that bowl of flowers,' said Mr Rockawin. 'Although I,don't really think she works that way. She'd know by just looking at us if we'd talked about the deal.' He paused. 'She's sharp, like all her family.'

'We'd better not talk about it, then,' said Keith.

'I'm not going to,' said Mr Rockawin. 'I told you that.'

He paid the cheque and they went out of the hotel to the car at the parking meter, where the policeman was just making out a ticket for staving too long. Rockawin talked him out of it by introducing Keith Stewart as an English visitor, which so intrigued the policeman, who had been in England in the war, that he forgot about the ticket. They got on the road for Tacoma and on southwards down the fringes of the Puget Sound. It was the first time that Keith had been in the United States and he was amazed by the high standard of living, at any rate in visible, material things. The size and beauty of the motorcars, the number of them, the size and quality of the roads, and the enormous number of great four-wheeled trailer caravans: these things impressed him very much indeed.

They drove through the industrial city of Tacoma at the head of Puget Sound and over the toll bridge across the Narrows out into the country again. Presently they left the road and turned into -an inconspicuous lane or drive marked only by stone pillars by the roadside, and went on winding up the hill through a forest of fir trees. After half a mile they came out on to an open hillside, a place of grass and granite outcrops with a little snow upon the ground, and with a magnificent view over to the snow-covered Olympic Mountains to the west. There stood the house, a long, low stone building, two-storeyed in the front and single-storeyed at the back by the slope of the hillside, a house very much larger than appeared at the first glance. Below it lay an inlet of the sound with boathouses and a moored motor yacht, and by the water's edge there was a long airstrip with a hangar by the road that led down to it.

Jim Rockawin drove up to the front door behind the house and parked the car. A manservant in a green baize apron came out and took the suitcase, and they went towards the house. A stout, elderly man came forward to meet them. 'Mr Stewart, isn't it?' he said. 'This is a real pleasure. We've exchanged letters, but we've never met before. Say, take off your coat and come right in.' He paused. 'I'm Sol Hirzhorn.'

They went into the huge living room with the great picture window looking out over the Olympics. 'Mr Stewart, would you like a cup of tea?' he asked. 'I know you Englishmen drink tea in the afternoon.'

Keith said, 'Don't bother about that for me, Mr Hirzhorn. I've been away from England long enough to get out of English ways.'

'We often have a cup of tea around this time,' said Mr Hirzhorn. 'It's getting so it's quite a habit in the office.' He raised his voice. 'Say, Julie!' She came into the room. 'Mr Stewart, I'd like you to meet Julie Perlberg. She does all my letters to you. Julie, this is Mr Stewart. Say, would you tell Jake to get us English tea, with cookies or sump'n?'

'I'm glad to know you, Mr Stewart,' she said quietly. Til see about that right away, Mr Hirzhorn.'

Keith walked over to the big window. 'What a wonderful view,' he said. 'I've never seen anything like it.'

' I built the house for it,' said Mr Hirzhorn simply.' I saw it first when I was quite a young chap and I used to go all over for the cutting. Lumber - that's my business -you know that.' Keith nodded. 'Nineteen twenty-two - or twenty-three would it have been? I can't just remember. I'd have been thirty years old or so about that time, and married about five years. I thought then that I'd like to have a summer camp up on this hill. Well, then that wasn't hardly practical with a young family and not much time to spare, but I never forgot about it. I got to realize that it would take a lot of money to live here and work at the same time. But anyway, I couldn't get it out of my head, and in 1936 things got so I could buy the land as an investment, so I'd got it, anyway.'

' How much land is there, Mr Hirzhorn ?' Jim Rockawin asked.

'Twelve hundred acres. A little more, I think - twelve hundred and thirty-six, far as I remember. Sarah said it was a silly thing to do because we'd never live there — it would cost a fortune.' He laughed. 'Well, then the fortune came, 'n I never wanted to travel or go horse racing or anything -just build the house and live in it, 'n go on working. And that's just what I did.'

Julie came into the room behind them. ' Tea will be here in a minute,' she said softly. She went through into her own room, leaving the men talking.

She closed the door, and went to a tall cabinet of steel drawers. She selected a file marked
stewart
and took it to her desk, and opened it again to refresh her memory.

One of her jobs was to protect her employer, who was also her grandfather. She never sought to influence his judgement ; she worked rather to get him the maximum of information with the least effort on his part. They had few contacts in England, but she quickly discovered that there was an agency in London which specialized in finding out the particulars of individuals in connection with hire-purchase credit. The first document that they had sent her read:

keith malcolm stewart.
Born, Renfrew, Scotland, 1915. Lives now at 56 Somerset Road, Ealing, Middlesex, a four-storey, ten-roomed house which is his property. The house was purchased for £3,200 in 1943 by Mr Stewart and subdivided. The top two floors are let at a rental of £2 150 per week. There is a mortgage of £2,200 on the property at 5^%. Mr Stewart is married and has no children of his own but has one daughter apparently adopted recently.

Mr Stewart worked as a fitter in the aircraft industry till 1946. He then became a freelance technical journalist y working principally for a magazine called the
Miniature Mechanic.
His income is estimated at about £700 per annum. His wife works whole time as a shop assistant in Baling. With the rental of the leased portion of the house, the family income appears to be about £1,100 per annum.

Mr Stewart does not bet or drink to excess. He does not own a car. He appears to live within his means, and has a good reputation in the neighbourhood.

This report reached Julie while Keith was on his way from Honolulu to Tahiti with Jack Donelly, and she was amazed. First she was surprised by the invoice sent with the report, which was for twenty-five shillings, only about three and a half dollars. Secondly, she was staggered by the smallness of the income, only about three thousand dollars from all sources, including the wife's earnings. And then, to go and adopt a child, upon an income like that!

She had taken the report at once to show to Mr Hirzhorn. He had read it with interest. 'A guy with his ability, he could earn a better wage than that,' he remarked presently, 'even in England. I guess it's just he kind of likes his work better than making money. There's nothing wrong with that.' He handed back the report to Julie. 'You know sump'n? I'd like to see some photographs. Photographs of the wife, of the adopted kid of the house, of the street, of the garden of the house, so I can see if he keeps it clean or not. Photographs of anything that you can get.'

'Okay, Mr Hirzhorn,' said Julie. 'We'll have to have them here within two weeks or so. They should be able to do that. I'll write today.' She paused in thought. ' I'll say we want it in a hurry. I think I might put three ten-dollar bills in with the letter. Kind of help things along.'

Four days later a pavement photographer took a picture of Katie in Baling Broadway as she went into the shop, in spite of her smiling denials. Janice got photographed by a strange man on her way home from school, to her surprise, and the house and street were taken from all angles, including the back garden. A week after that a sheaf of photographs arrived on Julie's desk at Wauna in the state of Washington. By the time Keith Stewart got there his hosts knew quite a lot about him.

She put the file back into the steel cabinet and locked it up. The little man looked like what the file and photographs had told her, added to what she had gleaned from sundry issues of the
Miniature Mechanic:
an honest little man of lower middle-class suburban type, content to go along upon a miserable salary for the sake of doing the work he loved, with a wife who was prepared to work in order that he should maintain that way of life. There was no deceit about this man.

That was important, for she had little confidence in Chuck Ferris. He was too anxious to sell his hydraulics, to get in to the lumber industry. Jim Rockawin was better, but not much. Seventeen hundred thousand dollars for the conversion of the Flume River mill was quite a contract, in anybody's language. She knew that production at the Cincinnati factory was declining on account of the reduction in aviation contracts; she knew that they laid off a thousand hands last month. Ferris Hydraulics had indulged in too much salesmanship, and made Julie suspicious. This lending of the yacht. . . seventeen hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money.

She had not mentioned her misgivings to her grandfather. Her business was to take his orders, take the load off him
_;
where she could, and get him information. She knew, however, that the same misgivings had occurred to him; there had been too much salesmanship. Chuck Ferris would have done better to have charged a charter fee for the
Flying Cloud.
His refusal to do so had undoubtedly held up the contract for the Flume River mill; the old man smelt a rat. He had delayed a decision till a fresh mind was brought to bear upon the problems of the mill, for fresh advice. He had been waiting for Keith Stewart, to see if this insignificant little engineer from England could say anything useful. She
got up from her desk. She had decided in her own mind that he was honest; that was where she stopped. Whether he was competent was a matter for her grandfather to decide.

She went out into the living room. The men seemed to have finished drinking tea, and Jim Rockawin was getting up to go. She went through to tell the houseman to clear away the tea, and came back to the hall in time to bid Jim Rockawin goodbye. She went on into the living room to pull the curtains over the great picture window and to light the lamps, for dusk was falling now.

Sol Hirzhorn came back into the room with Keith. ' Like to have a look at what I'm doing with your clock, downstairs ?' he asked.

'I'd like to very much, Mr Hirzhorn,' he said. They moved towards the door.

Julie said quietly, 'Drinks will be on the table here at seven o'clock, Mr Stewart, and dinner is at seven-thirty. Mr Hirzhorn usually goes to bed at nine.'

'You see how she keeps me on a string,' said the old man.

"That's what I'm here for,' she said equably. She smiled. ' I generally go down to the workshop about ten minutes to seven, and chase him out. Otherwise he'd be there all night.' The two men went down to the workshop in the basement. It was a long room, more than forty feet long, but only 8 or 9 feet wide. There was a long workbench for the full length of it lit by windows in the outer wall, and these windows looked down the hill over the sea inlet and the airstrip. The back wall was of light construction, separating ; the workshop from the heating plant and from the laundry of the house.

In this long shop was every machine and hand tool that a modeller in metal could desire, from lathes and a milling machine to oxyacetylene welding and soldering ironsr Keith stood and took it all in with a practised eye, from the clock parts laid out on a white cloth at the end of the bench to the racks of raw materials on the back wall. He had never before seen anything like it in a private house, and not in;; many institutions; its completeness staggered him,. He turned to the old man by his side. 'You've certainly got a. beautiful setup here,' he said. 'Did you do all this yourself?'

'No,' said Mr Hirzhorn. 'I'll be straight with you. When I first got interested eight years ago I had the bench put m, and got the South Bend lathe, and fixed that up myself. Well, then when I got going and got really stuck into it I decided on a whole raft of things I ought to have. I was new to it, you see, and the lathe took me a month to get fixed up the way I wanted it. So then I figured by the time I got the shop fixed up I'd probably be dead, and nothing done. So then I got along Clem Harrison, who runs our aviation section, and told him what I wanted, and he made I the plan and got the things for me, and put it all in with his boy, Pete Horner. I wouldn't like you to go thinking that I did all this for myself, with my own hands.'

'Very sensible,' said Keith. 'You've certainly got a fine shop.'

'You like it?'

' It's the best I've ever seen, in any private house. That's the clock, over there?'