The policeman looked down at the platform boss. "Call an ambulance," he said quickly. "Somebody help me get this thing off him."
David turned and went up in the freight elevator. He heard the clanging of the ambulance while he was in the bathroom, washing up. The door behind him opened and he turned around.
The Sheriff was standing there, a towel in his hand. "I thought you could use this."
"Thanks." David took the towel and soaked it in hot water, then held it to his face. The heat felt soothing. He closed his eyes. The sound of the ambulance grew fainter. "You all right?" the old man asked.
"I'm O.K.," David answered.
He heard the old man's footsteps. The door closed behind him and David took the towel from his face. He stared at himself in the mirror. Except for a slight lump on his temple, he looked all right. He rinsed his face with cold water and dried it. Leaving the towel hanging over the edge of the sink, he walked out.
A girl was standing near the staircase, wearing the blue smock with Henri France lettered on the pocket. He stopped and looked at her. She looked vaguely familiar. She must have been one of the girls he had seen downstairs.
She smiled at him boldly, revealing not too pretty teeth. "Is it true you're old man Norman's nephew?"
He nodded.
"Freddie Jones, who runs your still lab, says I ought to be in pictures. He had me pose for him."
"Yeah?"
"I got them here," she said. "Want to see 'em?"
"Sure."
She smiled and took some photographs out of her pocket. He took the pictures and looked at them. This Freddie, whoever he was, knew how to take pictures. She looked much better without a smile. And without her clothes.
"Like 'em?"
"Yeah."
"You can keep 'em," she said.
"Thanks."
"If you get a chance, show 'em to your uncle sometime," she said quickly. "Lots of girls get started in pictures that way."
He nodded.
"I seen what happened downstairs. It was sure time that Tony got his lumps."
"You didn't like him?"
"Nobody liked him," she said. "But they were all afraid of him. The cop asked me what happened. I told him it was an accident. The jack fell on him."
He looked into her eyes. They were hard and shining.
"You're nice," she said. "I like you." She took something out of her pocket and gave it to him. It looked like a small tin of aspirin but the lettering read: Henri France De Luxe.
"You don't have to worry about those," she said. "They're the best we make. You can read a newspaper through 'em. I inspected and rolled them myself."
"Thanks."
"Got to get back to work," she said. She walked back to the stairway. "See yuh."
"See yuh." He looked down at the small tin in his hand and opened it. She was right. You could read right through them. There was a slip of paper in the bottom. Written on it in black pencil was the name Betty and a telephone number.
Wagner was sitting at his desk when David walked by. "You were pretty lucky," he said. "The doctor said that all Tony has is a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. He'll need twelve stitches in his cheek, though."
"He was lucky," David said. "It was an accident."
The supervisor's gaze fell before his. "The garage across the street wants ten bucks to fix the jack."
"I'll give it to them tomorrow."
"You don't have to," Wagner said quickly. "I already did."
"Thanks."
The foreman looked up from his desk. His eyes met David's squarely. "I wish we could pretend this morning never happened," he said in a low voice. "I’d like to start all over again."
David stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled and held out his hand. "My name is David Woolf," he said. "I’m supposed to see the foreman about a job."
The foreman looked at David's hand and got to his feet. "I’m Jack Wagner, the foreman," he said, and his grip was firm. "Let me introduce you to the boys."
When David turned toward the packaging tables, all the men were grinning at him. Suddenly, they weren't strangers any more. They were friends.
7
Bernard Norman walked into his New York office. It was ten o'clock in the morning and his eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks pink from the winter air, after his brisk walk down from the hotel.
"Good morning, Mr. Norman," his secretary said. "Have a nice trip?"
He smiled back at her as he walked on into his private office and opened the window. He stood there breathing in the cold fresh air. Ah, this was geshmach. Not like the day-in, day-out sameness of California.
Norman went over to his desk and took a large cigar from the humidor. He lit it slowly, relishing the heavy aromatic Havana fragrance. Even the cigars tasted better in New York. Maybe, if he had time, he'd run down to Ratner's on Delancey Street and have blintzes for lunch.
He sat down and began to go over the reports lying on his desk. He nodded to himself with satisfaction. The billings from the exchanges were up over last year. He turned to the New Yorker theater reports. The Norman Theater, his premiere house on Broadway, had picked up since they started having stage shows along with the picture. It was holding its own with Loew's State and the Palace. He leafed through the next few reports, then stopped and studied the report from the Park Theater. An average gross of forty-two hundred dollars a week over the past two months. It must be a mistake. The Park had never grossed more than three thousand tops. It was nothing but a third-run house on the wrong side of Fourteenth Street.
Norman looked further down the report and his eyes came to rest on an item labeled Employee Bonuses. They were averaging three hundred a week. He reached for the telephone. Somebody must be crazy. He'd never O.K.'d bonuses like that. The whole report must be wrong.
"Yes, Mr. Norman?" his secretary's voice came through.
"Tell Ernie to get his ass in here," Norman said. "Right away." He put down the telephone. Ernie Hawley was his treasurer. He'd be able to straighten this out.
Hawley came in, his eyes shadowed by his thick glasses. "How are you, Bernie?" he asked. "Have a good trip?"
Norman tapped the report on his desk. "What's with this on the Park Theater?" he said. "Can't you bastards get anything right?"
Hawley looked confused. "The Park? Let's see it."
Norman gave him the report, then leaned back in his chair, savagely puffing at his cigar. Hawley looked up. "I can't see anything wrong with this."
"You can't?" Norman said sarcastically. "You think I don't know the Park never grossed more than three thousand a week since it was built? I'm not a dope altogether."
"The gross on the report is correct, Bernie. Our auditors check it every week."
Bernie scowled at him. "What about those employee bonuses? Twenty-four hundred dollars in the last two months! You think I'm crazy? I never O.K.'d anything like that."
"Sure you did, Bernie," Hawley replied. "That's the twenty-five-per cent manager's bonus we set up to help us over the slump after Christmas."
"But we set the top gross for the theaters as a quota," Norman snapped. "We figured out it would cost us next to nothing. What figure did we use for the Park?"
"Three thousand."
Bernie looked down at the report. "It's a trick," he said. "Taubman's been stealing us blind. If he wasn't, how come all of a sudden he's grossing forty-two hundred?"
"Taubman isn't managing the theater now. He's been out with appendicitis since right after Christmas."
"His signature's on the report."
"That's just a rubber stamp. All the managers have them."
"So who's managing the theater?" Norman asked. "Who's the wise guy beating us out of three hundred a week?"
Hawley looked uncomfortable. "We were in a spot, Bernie. Taubman caught us at a bad time; we didn't have anybody else to send in."
"So stop beating around the bush and tell me already," Norman snapped.
"Your nephew, David Woolf," the treasurer said reluctantly.