I am sorry for you, Mr. Feldman, and I read your letter offering to put your store up for sale, and I despair. Believe me when I tell you it is not concern for my job that makes me bold now. I know my value (if you never did: I recall with pleasure the time you tried to reduce my salary, your suggestion when I was still green that I be paid by the job, by the pages actually typed, so much per letter, per envelope, per licked stamp, per search in the files, per appointment made, per telephone call taken in your absence, per staple driven true — oh, there were so many. I recall all our agreements — my counterproposals and yours. That was a combat!), and I know that I could get another job tomorrow. (Did you know, speaking of combat, that I stole from you? That I used my position as your private secretary to obtain merchandise for which I never paid? I tell you this in writing because I know that in our state a convict may not bring suit against anyone on the basis of evidence obtained while he was in prison. Don’t worry. I said I knew my value, and all I ever took was by way of closing the gap between that value and what you paid me. And that at list prices, so you’re still ahead, or rather, we’re exactly even because I probably owe you something for the charm of the arrangement, and even at that I may still be ahead, for I would owe you something, too, for the secrecy, the thrill of the guerrilla risk, the absurdity and outlandishness.)
There are some around here — your “executives,” your department heads, your lawyers — who say that you have marred your image with the public, that not understanding the terms of your crime, they will be unable to come to this store and feel uncheated. I have heard Mr. Nichols make the very suggestion to Mr. Ray that you make in your letter: that the store be sold or merged, at the very least that its name its name be changed. I hope you never agree to this. I know what went on in that basement. (I came in clothes you had never seen, in a veil — which, it happens, was merchandise I obtained from your store under false pretenses. I disguised my voice and told you that to earn money I meant to become a call girl, and asked if you would put me in touch with any contacts you might have. You told me that the big money was in dirty photographs and tried to talk me into buying an ordinary box camera and doing a series of indecent poses for a “family album” because that was more appealing, more intimate and dirtier than the ordinary studio shots, you said. You even wanted to sell me the “corners” so I could mount the photographs myself when they came back from the drugstore in your physician’s building, where you said they’d develop them.) And I don’t see the harm. (And don’t you see? You’re not the only one who needs freedom, and to be kept alive by the sense of the special. The woods are full of us.)
Anyway, I hope you reconsider your idea about selling the store. The world is getting to be a terrible place, and I don’t know if it’s your kind or their kind who make it more awful, but if we must have terror, let it be gay and exciting, I say.
I know you may fire me for this letter, but if you sell the store I don’t care anyway.
Yours in Crime,
Silvia Lane
Feldman fired her. He wrote Billing a confidential letter to ask if she had a charge account at the store. She did, and he assumed that she would continue to use it. Figuring what she had been worth to him over the years at his figures, he subtracted this amount from his estimate of what she might have figured she was worth to him at her figures. Her figure was seven percent higher than his; she had been with him nine years, so she owed him, he guessed, $4,410. In a second confidential letter from Billing he learned that on the average she spent about $640 a year in his store. This, with her employee’s discount of twenty percent, represented $800 in purchases. Now that she was no longer with the store she would lose the discount, and so he wrote Billing a third confidential letter, asking them to research what single girls of Miss Lane’s approximate age and income and educational background could be expected to spend with him each year. The answer that came back was $500. She would be sore at him for firing her, of course, but he knew that buying habits, once established, were as strong as instincts. Say she spent only $400 a year. Round off the $4,410 she owed him to $4,400. He could get his money back, hiking her bills at the rate of fifty percent a year. It would take work. Sooner or later someone as efficient as Miss Lane would wonder why she was paying $600 a year for only $400 worth of merchandise. Carrying charges. (Beautiful things could be done with carrying charges.) Nickel-and-diming her on every bill. Here and there a really gross mistake in his favor. Occasional charges for items never purchased. Then some really flashy stuff with her credits if she objected. The rest to be done with seconds, damaged goods and the clever substitution of inferior merchandise. It would take work, all right, and patience, but the important thing was that it could be done. Of course, it meant that he could not sell his store for twenty-two years, but if that’s what it meant, that’s what it meant. She wanted combat? He’d give her combat.
In the prison, however, he was never more docile. He had gone underground. He tightened his belt and became a very Englishman of austerity. Realizing how close he was to being discharged — his Statement of Remaining Obligation was sent from the state capital on the same day he received an answer to his last letter to Billing — he regarded the time he spent there more bitterly than ever. He no longer speculated about Warden’s Mind or the meaning behind the sytem. Nor did he seek advantage. (In a way, he was actually grateful to Ed Slipper for exposing him. If Slipper had still been under an obligation to him, even one the old man did not acknowledge, he might have felt compelled to extract it, might have done something that would get him into trouble. The trick now was to stay out of trouble.)
When one day he awoke with what he was certain was a fever, he panicked. Suppose he was wrong, he reasoned. Suppose he reported to the infirmary and had no temperature — he would be charged a day for goldbricking. Suppose, on the other hand, he reported for work and the fever cut into his efficiency. Suppose he made a mistake; why, they would charge him for that too. Weeks could be added to his term. The percentage player would report to the infirmary, but suppose the fever had clouded his reason and he wasn’t reading the percentages clearly. What was he to do? In the end he decided — perhaps unreasonably; he was aware of that — that one ought not arrive at a decision and then, simply on the basis of some estimated margin for error, reverse that decision. But again, could he say he had arrived at a decision when he was only inclined toward one? What was he to do? What?
Eventually he went to the infirmary. His temperature was 102, and they put him to bed. Weak, feverish, feeling as if he would throw up, pains in his arms, his legs, all he could think of was that it was good time, perfect in fact, that it couldn’t be counted against him: that he was safest as a sick man. He resented the medications but took them obediently, unwilling to give any trouble which could boomerang. He thought it a hideous irony that perhaps the very medicines he took to make him well enough to return to that part of the prison where the dangers were might have been purchased with the funds he had given to Slipper.