Finger finger, p.15
Finger, Finger!, page 15
So that was why Jack Kenwood went to Topeka, Kansas, to make a nearly certain $3000—and I went to New York, on the far less sure proposition.
But nobody could have gone there with more blood in his eye. For if I could sell Drinkwater Dorr—and attain that $300 monthly salary—I could ask Winsome One to become Mrs. David Rand. And she—but as I said, I’m not an author, and I run off wildly here and there on the wrong tack.
When I stepped from my train in the Grand Central Station at New York, all fired with enthusiasm, I met my first setback. For when I called Drinkwater Dorr up from a station booth, I received the disconcerting news that he was not in New York. That he had gone to Montreal, Canada, to adjust a small four hundred dollar compensation due him for the illegal sale, by the Canadian Safety Razor Co., Ltd., of 56,000 blades containing his precious notch, but had wired that he could not see his man till Wednesday night, and so would not be back home in New York till Thursday noon. On top of all that, Mrs. Dorr said, they had booked passage for Thursday night on the Queen Mary, sailing at midnight for England, and they were going away for 4 weeks’ vacation.
And here it was only Monday!
Well, Mrs. Drinkwater Dorr most gladly made an appointment for me with Drinkwater for Thursday afternoon, 4 P.M. And that meant that I would have to sell him in one visit—or forever hold my peace.
So there was nothing to do for it but to mark time. New York was a big and interesting place, at least so it was claimed, and if it couldn’t fill a stranger’s time for a few days, it was badly overrated.
And, there being, likewise, no use of remaining further after that one visit with Drinkwater Dorr, no chance of any rebuttal arguments in case he handed me a negative answer, I bought my return ticket on the spot—and secured my berth—for I had been warned by the conductor coming east that travel westward would be gradually heavier as the week wore on, because of the Masonic Conclave at Chicago. And thus armored, went forth into the effete East, as it were, for the first time.
When I stepped from the station that Monday afternoon, October 27th, my small pigskin overnight bag in my hand, the weather was warm enough—Indian summer, no less—but a one chilly rain was beginning to fall. In fact, the porter coming east had said that it had been doing practically nothing else in New York the last two weeks, but rain, rain, rain.
I think that’s what started everything. That, and the big sign on the clothing store directly across the way. It announced in big letters: RAIN TODAY! To which was added the succinct additional information that $7.50 raincoats de luxe were obtainable for $1.59. Thanks to the failure of Greenstein Brothers and Goldberg, largest raincoat manufacturers in the world, sole makers of the Patented DRYO, America’s finest rain garment.
That’s why I forged straight across the street in the drizzle, and in. I had neither raincoat nor umbrella with me. And with Drinkwater Dorr cooling his heels in Montreal for the next 3 days, I intended to tramp New York from end to end, over that period, to see it all, Greenwich Village, the Ghetto, Chinatown, Riverside Drive—the whole works. To ride atop buses—not inside—and to the devil with weather.
I bought a raincoat. Yes, a Dryo. A beautiful thing, too, even though it was just a bit flamboyant. But well worth the money. Fine heavy rubberized cloth, with soft grey and darker grey vertical stripes on the outer surface, stripes just so-broad, however, that they came within an inch of being “barbershoppish”! The inside of the material a beautiful green plaid. Pockets, perhaps, a bit too plentiful, and too ornate as well, where they had pocket flaps. But well sewed, the garment was, in every way, and it even had an inside breast pocket to boot. The coat was certainly more than worth the $1.59 I paid for it. Greenstein Brothers and Goldberg must have fallen very hard. For if I didn’t see a thousand of those coats on New York streets in the subsequent 3 days, and another 1000 in the many windows of clothing and haberdashery stores, not to omit a few flapping already on sidewalk dummies in front of Jewish second-hand stores on the Bowery, I hope I may never fasten my eyes on Winsome One again.
That’s why, I guess, I lost the one I bought—and got another man’s in its place. Too many of ’em floating around, that’s all. It just seemed that—
O’Rourke was just in. He’s looked over what I have written. “You’ll never be an author, Rand,” he said. “Get on with the main facts. What has a clothing store across the street from a depot in New York got to do with the swirl of events what took place here in Chicago. And miles away, too?”
It seems to me that O’Rourke shouldn’t pass judgment on writing matters. He’s a detective, and nothing else, and he laid it entirely on me to write this stuff up which I’m doing the best I can. And it seems to me that the bankruptcy sale, and the thousands of Dryo raincoats, and the—
Oh well, I’ll get to events. I’m beginning for the first time to appreciate the difficulties that confront these fellows who write mystery novels. Of which, Lord knows, the events that sucked me in certainly constituted one.
I saw all the things that I intended to see. And more. The Ghetto, with its pushcarts, its screaming children, its terrific poverty. Almost exactly like our own crowded, yelling Maxwell Street, though. Greenwich Village, like a page from Horatio Alger—yet exceedingly like our Near North Side. Grant’s tomb. Chinatown—and so different from our own generously laid out Chinese district, since this section in lower New York had narrow curving streets which literally smothered one as one walked on them. And the various tong headquarters in Chinatown, silent and shuttered. And Brooklyn Bridge. And the American Museum of Natural History. And—but I filled in my 3 days well. I saw all that New York had to offer a stranger from the prairies.
Now we’ve reached Thursday.
I saw Drinkwater Dorr. At his modest home off Mount Morris Park. He was much older than Jack Kenwood. Twenty years at least. A queer looking fellow, with the vacant absent-minded eyes of the born inventor, peering forth from back of thick-lensed gold-rimmed spectacles. He went about, it seems, with half of his face shaved, the other half growing a goodly field of bristles. For, as he said, in his continual experimental work with safety razor blades, he had always to have a handy pasture wherein he could mow his way a couple of strokes, hither and thither, and record results. But though his eyes were apparently absent-minded, they were nevertheless quite shrewd. Nobody’s fool, Drinkwater Dorr.
I described for him Jack Kenwood’s whole racket, about which he already had half of an idea to begin with. I didn’t call it a racket, of course, for I’d been with it long enough to be enthusiastic about it myself. I spread all over Drinkwater Dorr’s library table the dozens of papers showing the sales of our magazine, our advertising receipts, the amount of money for which our salesmen sometimes got into us—how we pulled out. Everything, nearly. I guess I covered his hands, his knees, and his legs with the papers I had with me. Everything but the fantastic looking box that even then he was puttering away at—the Dorr automatic self-shaving machine, of which all I could see was the elliptical hole through which the victim was to thrust his head. As for spreading my papers all over Drinkwater Dorr, I had to; and fast. For he’d received his patent infringement settlement but 6 days before, and the money was in his bank—just screaming to be sunk into that automatic guillotine he was inventing, as well as various kinds of blades for shaving blond hairs out of brunette beards, and vice versa.
And I finished. And said: “Mr. Dorr, we’re hopelessly incapacitated, by lack of capital, towards achieving a big take on this business. Jack, your cousin, lives on a rich scale—and he’ll always have to. It’s part of his nature. And we can’t get ahead. We make a good living for him, yes—but we don’t make the killing that we should make. The really clever salesmen—the fellows who can land an order for 100 or more Ultrapolitans in a five minute talk—those boys suck the capital up. They want advances. And ever more advances. Night and day. And if you want to keep ’em on, you’ve got to give ’em those advances. Keep ’em perpetually digging themselves out of debt. Again, those are the very chaps who get temperamental. In the twinkling of an eye they’ll pack their grips and run home 300 miles to see their wives—and stay off duty sometimes for 3 weeks. In the meantime their advance is tied up. Hardly ever do they make a large sale but that they commence to wire for their commission on it even before we get our money. With the capital we’ve got now, we dare not put on a bigger force. We couldn’t finance it. But if we had just $20,000, we could triple the force we’ve got—and quadruple the rate of intake we’re now getting. You see yourself what we have made—do make—and can make. You see yourself what you could make if you received half of that net possible profit. Jack Kenwood doesn’t intend to stay in Chicago if he can get you in with him. He’ll come on here at once, where you can watch things. In the meantime, you can invent safety razors galore, if you are so inclined. All you’ll have to do is to endorse the checks that represent the dividends on your end. Kenwood will still keep the Chicago office, yes, for I can manage it with one stenographer, and in that way we will cut the time of all handling of business that comes from west of the Mississippi. Our idea is to map the whole U. S. A. out scientifically—not take it haphazardly as we’re taking it now—put that whole $20,000 into a larger sales force, and rake in the orders while the raking is good.”
Drinkwater Dorr was wavering, that was plain. And I pressed on.
“Besides, Mr. Dorr, Kenwood has ideas. He’s gotten hold somewhere—he hasn’t said where—of a former publisher of an ex-humor magazine who has 3 tons of halftones and zinc etchings in storage, the accumulation of 10 years of publishing. Kenwood can buy the whole kit and kaboodle, if he buys ’em outright, for 1 cent per pound, copyrights included. In them are hundreds of drawings by such people as Rolf Armstrong, Gluyas Williams, John Held, Jr., Russell Patterson. By fishing for a week through the mess, he figures we can jerk enough out to put together a de luxe art magazine whose contents would cost $25,000 if bought direct. For instance, Mr. Dorr, a one-page drawing by Russell Patterson today would cost us $250. But if we can find the Patterson zinc, it will cost us exactly 1 cent. And so on. That art magazine, Mr. Dorr, can be used as an effective follow-up for every client who has used Ultrapolitan on his list of customers. Even if we can re-sell to 1/2 of such—or 1/3—the whole territory already covered can be re-worked, resqueezed.”
Drinkwater Dorr let everything sink well in. Then he asked but one significant question. Ever since he asked it, I’ve had more respect for inventors. “How long will this racket—for that’s all it is—last?”
I had a prompt answer for that. It was in my breast pocket. It was Jack Kenwood’s set of sales-saturation curves. He’d worked on them for months, using up 50 tables of data that Winsome One had typed for him, and several kinds and colors of inks. They didn’t tell what they were about; they had to be explained by someone who knew them. I was that one. I pulled the big cross-ruled sheet out.
“Here you are, Mr. Dorr. The whole thing in graphical form. Look—this curve here represents the prospective sales even if continued at the rate now expanding under the present force. This curve here—”
And thus I showed him what every curve meant, took him in each case ascendingly to the saturation point, and descendingly to rock bottom; showed him how that, even under the law of diminishing returns, the thing could be steadily kept alive by gradually dropping off overhead. And on and on until every last dollar was squeezed out of Ultrapolitan. “Ten years, for a certainty, we ought to be able to go yet, Mr. Dorr; and your $20,000, according to this purple curve here, ought to draw back 6 times itself. That’s 600 percent in 10 years, or 60 percent per year.”
“What are you to get out of it all, young man?” he asked suddenly.
I was quite frank. “$75 a week and managership of the Chicago office, which Jack Kenwood feels we ought to retain.”
“Fair enough. You should have that. And the business should have a branch or two.”
He pondered a moment. Then proved himself to be very unlike an inventor. For he showed himself on the spot as one who could definitely make up his mind. “Well,” he remarked, “it all looks O.K. to me. As long as it’s legitimate—” I nodded, although half-heartedly, for there always was that angle to Kenwood’s business involving those spurious author names that seemed a little like skullduggery. “—I’ll come in. Tell Jack to come on whenever he’s ready. The money is waiting. But understand, young man—I wouldn’t come in just on the proposition itself. It’s ingenious, yes. Clever. But it’s because Jack’s staying in it himself. If he should sell out tomorrow, and the new owners wanted me in, I wouldn’t look at it. With all respect to you, young man, as new Western manager, and I can see you know all the ropes of the business, Jack is the directive spirit back of the thing. He’s a genius in his way, just as much as I am when it comes to getting hair off of people’s faces with the least discomfort. From what you’ve already explained, I can see that he’s the only man who could be relied on to successfully close up a big sale, involving thousands of Ultrapolitans, to some chain of stores where we wouldn’t dare to rely on the regular salesman. So Jack will positively have to post a bond agreeing to stay with the business—and if he’ll do that, I’ll come in on a 50-50 basis.”
That was fair enough. For no crowbar could have pried Jack Kenwood out of his own business. But I wanted to bring home the bacon more concretely than in the form of a mere promise.
“Will you put that in writing, Mr. Dorr?” I asked boldly. “For Jack Kenwood can’t very well upset all his affairs to come on here—unless he positively knows that everything’s set.”
“Of course,” said Dorr. And he turned to his desk and wrote rapidly, using an ancient quill pen, and tossing sand on his writing when he finished it. He handed his composition to me. It couldn’t have been legally more perfect. It authorized his bank to pay Ultrapolitan, Incorporated, $20,000 for 1/2 of its stock, the moment a bond was posted with them for that exact amount guaranteeing that Jack Kenwood would remain with the company as president and salesmanager, and specifying that the bond was forfeitable for the purpose of taking up the stock if, and when, Jack Kenwood left the company.
Couldn’t be better. Jack Kenwood could procure such a bond easily.
I had gotten the bacon; and all I needed to do now was to bring it home.
With Drinkwater Dorr so successfully won over, and New York seen from Bronx to the Battery, there was nothing to do but go home. And home I started, that very night, on Pullman Car 5 of the Chicago Flyer.
And it was on Pullman Car 5 of that Chicago Flyer that I first met the man with the short grey beard. Sure—the innocent victim—like myself, of fate, chance, call it what you will.
He had the seat across the aisle from me. He was a strongly built, stocky fellow, with sharp beady black eyes. Not young—50 years at least—but manifestly possessing the strength and virility of a younger man. I saw him raise a train window for a woman, that two other men had failed abjectly to raise. So he must have been strong. I think on a gymnasium mat, he could have given me 2 downs out of 3. I put his age at 50, at least at the time, because of the decided thinness at the top of his head, the salt and pepper hue of that short beard, and the fringe of greyish hair around this rapidly thinning top area. His face carried a most peculiar crafty look. The next day, after the berths had been made up, and I succeeded in getting into a casual friendly conversation with him, I found that he talked fluently of South Africa, Australia—in fact, of the most out-of-the-way places. Also, when it came to discussing things far more local, he dropped the information that, like myself, he had gotten his berth well ahead of train time. Thanks to a timely tip he also had heard about travel westward being unusually heavy.
Most of the time on the way to Chicago, he spent staring unseeingly out of the window, and gazing frowningly every 15 or 30 minutes at his wristwatch, held far out at arms’ length from his face, the while making the most weird contortions of his forehead muscles I have ever seen a man make. Half the time it was evident he could not discern even the positions of the hands; but he saw perfectly at a distance. Which he explained, when later I offered him a magazine to read; which he had to refuse, confessing that he had far-sighted astigmatism and had accidentally left his glasses at home. Maybe it was for that reason that he was so impatient of the railway journey. In our few brief conversations he called the Chicago Flyer every kind and form of tortoise and snail, and all the while it was running several minutes ahead of its own schedule. When he sat by himself, he would jump up—go to the water tank, down a drink or two he evidently hardly even wanted, come back, grunt, groan, try to look again at his watch held far out at arms’ length, and shake his head angrily as though all the fates in the world were conspiring against his reaching his destination. Even when we splendidly made up lost time by a 15-minute delay somewhere in Ohio, he refused to give the New York Central Lines any credit, but said that the Interstate Commerce Commission ought to fine them a million dollars just for holding down railroad speed in America. And that—
Terry O’Rourke was just in.
And thank the Lord, he’s going out of the city. From now on I can get ahead with this fool script. He says his trip is in connection with his work—it is not a pleasure jaunt. And it isn’t I who’s going to try to dissuade him from going, for unless he gets out of town for a few days, I’ll never get to the end of this report.
His two comments on my script, thus far, show exactly what I’m up against.
“Is this here a travelogue?” he wanted to know. “Can’t you get to where things begin?”
“Yes,” was my answer to that shot. “And will—at once and immediately!—if you’ll just get out of town.”
“Am going,” he said succinctly.
