He had pretended not to remember the kid. Actually he'd been in his thoughts off and on since he hired him. There had been no trouble with Angelo since his grim little interview with the boy. Farwell hoped, rather sentimentally, he knew, that the interview had launched him on a decent career, turned him aside from the rocky Bohemian road and its pitfalls. As he had been turned aside himself. The nonsensical "really creative synthesis of Pinero and Shaw" pattered through his head again and he winced, thoroughly sick of it. For the past week the thought of visiting a psychiatrist had pattered after Pinero and Shaw every time, each time to be dismissed as silly.
His phone buzzed and he mechanically said, "Jim Farwell."
"Farwell, why didn't you check with me?" rasped Greenbough's voice.
"I don't understand, Mr. Greenbough. Where are you calling from?"
"The Hotel Greybar down the street, of course! I've been sitting here for an hour waiting for your call."
"Mr. Greenbough, all they told me from New York was that you were coming to Chicago."
"Nonsense. I gave the instructions myself."
"I'm sorry about the mixup—I must have misunderstood. Are you going to have a look at the office?"
"No. Why should I do anything like that? I'll call you back." Greenbough hung up.
Farwell leaned back, cursing whoever in New York had crossed up the message. It had probably been done deliberately, he decided—Pete Messier, the New York office manager trying to make him look bad.
He tried to work on an account or two, but nervously put them aside to wait for Greenbough's call. At 5 he tried to reach Greenbough to tell him he was going home and give him his home number. Greenbough's room didn't answer the call or his next four, so he phoned a drugstore to send up a sandwich and coffee.
Before he could get started on the sandwich Greenbough phoned again to invite him to dinner at the Mars Room. He was jovial as could be:
"Get myself some of that famous Chicago hospitality, hey, Jim? You know I'm just a hick from Colorado, don't you?" He went on to give Farwell about ten minutes of chuckling reminiscence and then hung up without confirming the dinner date. It turned out that it didn't matter.
As Farwell was leaving the deserted office his phone buzzed again. It was Greenbough abruptly calling off the Mars Room. He told Farwelclass="underline"
"I've got somebody important to talk to this evening."
The branch manager at last dared to pour himself a heavy drink and left.
His bedside phone shrilled at 3 in the morning. "Jim Farwell," he croaked into it while two clock dials with the hands making two luminous L's wavered in front of him. His drink at the office had been the first of a series.
"This is Greenbough, Farwell," snarled the voice of the senior partner.
"You get over here right away. Bring Clancy, whatever his name is—the lawyer." Click.
Where was "here"? Farwell phoned the Greybar. "Don't connect me with his room—I just want to know if he's in."
The floor clerk said he was and Farwell tried to phone the home of the Chicago branch's lawyer, but got no answer. Too much time lost. He soaked his head in cold water, threw his clothes on and drove hell-for-leather to the Greybar.
Greenbough was in one of the big two-bedroom suites on the sixteenth floor. A frozen-faced blond girl in an evening gown let Farwell in without a word. The senior partner was sprawled on the sofa in dress trousers and stiff shirt. He had a bruise under his left eye.
"I came as quickly as I could, Mr. Greenbough," said Farwell. "I couldn't get in touch with—"
The senior partner coughed thunderously, twitched his face at Farwell in a baffling manner, and then stalked into a bedroom. The blond girl's frozen mask suddenly split into a vindictive grin. "You're going to get it!" she jeered at Farwell. "I'm supposed to think his name's Wilkins.
Well, go on after him, pappy."
Farwell went into the bedroom. Greenbough was sitting on the bed dabbing at the bruise and muttering. "I told you I wanted our lawyer!"
he shouted at the branch manager. "I was attacked by a drunkard in that damned Mars Room of yours and by God booked by the police like a common criminal! I'm going to get satisfaction if I have to turn the city upside down! Get on that phone and get me Clancy or whatever his name is!"
"But I can't!" said Farwell desperately. "He won't answer his phone and in the second place he isn't that kind of lawyer. I can't ask Clarahan to fight a disorderly-conduct charge— he's a big man here. He only does contract law and that kind of thing. You posted bond, didn't you, Mr.
Greenbough?"
"Twenty dollars," said the senior partner bitterly, "and they only wanted ten from that drunken ape."
"Then why not just forget about it? Forfeit the bond and probably you'll never hear of it again, especially since you're an out-of-towner. I'll do what I can to smooth it over if they don't let it slide."
"Get out of here," said Greenbough, dabbing at the bruise again.
The blond was reading a TV magazine in the parlor; she ignored Farwell as he let himself out.
The branch manager drove to an all-night barber shop near one of the terminals and napped through "the works." A slow breakfast killed another hour and by then it wasn't too ridiculously early to appear at the office.
He dawdled over copy until 9 and phoned the Greybar. They told him Mr. Greenbough had checked out leaving no forwarding address. The morning papers came and he found nothing about a scuffle at the Mars Room or the booking of Greenbough. Maybe the senior partner had given a false name—Wilkins?—or maybe the stories had been killed because Greenbough and Brady did some institutional advertising.
Maybe there was some mysterious interlock between Greenbough and Brady and the papers high up on some misty alp that Farwell had never glimpsed.
Don't worry about it, he told himself savagely. You gave him good advice, the thing's going to blow over, Clarahan wouldn't have taken it anyway. He hoped Pete Messier in New York wouldn't hear about it and try to use it as a lever to pry him out of the spot he held, the spot Pete Messier coveted. Maybe there was some way he could get somebody in the New York office to keep an eye on Messier and let him know how he was doing, just to get something he could counterpunch with when Messier pulled something like that garbled message stunt.
The intercom buzzed and Grace said, "Angelo wants to see you. He says it's personal."
"Send him in."
The kid was beaming. He looked pretty good—not raw and jumpy; just happy.
"I want to say thanks and good-bye, Mr. Farwell," he told the branch manager. "Look!"
The plastic-laminated card said "WORK PERMIT" and "Brother Angelo Libonari" and "International Union of Spacemen, Spacedockworkers and Rocket Maintenance Men, Unaffiliated (ISU-IND)" and "Member in Good Standing" and other things.
"So that was the game," said Farwell slowly. "We take you and we train you at a loss hoping that some day you'll turn out decent copy for us and as soon as you have a thousand bucks saved up you quit like a shot and buy a work card to be a wiper on a rocket. Well, I hope you show a little more loyalty to your space line than you showed us."
Angelo's face drooped in miserable surprise. "I never thought—" he stuttered. "I didn't mean to run out, Mr. Farwell. I'll give two weeks notice if you want—a month? How about a month?"
"It doesn't matter," said Farwell. "I should have known. I thought I pounded some sense into your head, but I was wrong. You're forgiven, Angelo. I hope you have a good time. What are your plans?" He wasn't really interested, but why go out of his way to kick the kid in the teeth?
Obviously he'd meant it when he registered surprise—he didn't have the boss's viewpoint and his other jobs had been one-week stands in hash houses.
The boy carefully put his work card in his breast pocket and beamed again at what he was saying—partly to Farwell, it appeared, mostly to himself in wonder at its coming true at last. "I'll be a wiper at the start, all right," he said. "I don't care if I never get higher than that. I want to see it and feel it, all of it. That's the only way the real thing's ever going to get written. Higgins and Delare and Beeman and the rest of them—