“Hello, Ju,” she said. “Yes, he’s in all right. Can’t you hear him? He’s going away, and you’d think he was never away before in his life. Do I have to announce you?”
“I think you’d better. Where’s he going?”
“Oh, New York,” she said, and spoke into the telephone. “Mr. English is here to see Mr. Reilly. Shall I send him in?”
Just then Harry appeared, bag in hand, hat and coat on. “I’ll be back by Tuesday at the latest,” he was saying. “Phone Mrs. Gorman and tell her I made the train all right.” He turned his face, and for the first time Julian was able to see that Harry’s eye was decorated with a shiner, there was no other word for it. The ice apparently had smacked his cheekbone, and the pouch of flesh under the eye was blue and black and red and swollen. “Oh, it’s you,” said Harry.
“Yes, I thought I might as well come—”
“Listen, I can’t wait another minute. I’m catching the ten-twenty-five and I have about four minutes. I’ll be back next week.” He ran through the office. Julian thought of going along with him to the station, but rejected that plan. He couldn’t get anything said to a man who had four minutes to catch the train. On her own hook Betty Fenstermacher was calling the station and telling them to hold the train; Julian became conscious of this, and when she finished he said:
“What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know. I heard him shoot off his mouth about a lot of railroads going together. You’d think he was the one that was getting them together, the fuss and fury we been having around this office this morning. I hear you gave him the shiner, Ju. What was he, making passes at your wife or something?”
“No. Good-by, darling,” he said. Ordinarily he would have stopped to kid Betty, to whom you could say anything without insulting her, but now he was still blank from Harry’s breezy walk-out. It wasn’t like Harry.
On the way back to the car Julian recalled that he had heard some talk about a merger of the New York Central, the Chesapeake & Ohio, Nickel Plate, Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania, and such merger certainly might have an effect on Harry Reilly’s fortune. Harry had large holdings in Virginia and West Virginia, in the soft coal fields. But Harry was a teller of elaborate lies, too; and he might be using the merger as an excuse to leave Gibbsville until the black eye was less black. Julian wished he knew whether the merger really was going through. Not that he would do anything about it now, but he still had the curiosity about such things that anyone who has traded in the stock market never quite loses: inside dope is fun to have, and he might risk a hundred or so on it. No, he guessed he wouldn’t. If he knew anything, there was not going to be any merger; Harry Reilly was still a four-flusher; couldn’t even leave town without making it appear that he was leaving on an errand of big business.
Driving out to the garage he could think of only one thing that occurred so far this morning that wasn’t especially designed to annoy him; and that was that the fact of Harry Reilly’s going away, the fact that Harry was going to be away with a legitimate reason would keep people from talking when he did not show up at the party tonight. Considering the way things were going today, that was a good break…. Yes, there was one other good break this morning; he had not been given a ticket for parking. At that moment a cross-link on the tire chains broke, and he rode the rest of the way to the garage with the link banging, cack-thock, cack-thock, cack-thock, against the left rear fender.
He blew the horn at the garage door, and it was fully two minutes before Willie, who washed cars and was an apprentice mechanic, opened the door. Julian had left orders at least fifty times that no one was to be kept waiting at the door, and he was going to bawl Willie out, but Willie called out: “Merry Christmas, boss. How’d Santa Claus treat you?”
“Yah,” said Julian.
“Well, thanks for the Christmas present,” said Willie, who had received a week’s pay. “That fifteen bucks come in handy.” Willie was closing the door and talking above the sound of the idling motor and the sounds of the mechanics working upstairs. “I said to my girl, I said—”
“Cross-link busted on the right rear chain,” said Julian. “Fix it.”
“Huh? When’d it break?”
“Right now, at Twelfth Street.”
“Well, say, it held up pretty good. Better’n I thought. Remember, I told you Wensdee already, I said you better leave me fix them cross-links.”
“Uh-huh.” Julian had to admit that Willie had told him. He went to the office, which was in the rear of the big show room on the street floor. “Good morning, Mary,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Mary Klein, his secretary.
“What’s doing?”
“Pretty quiet,” she said, adjusting her spectacles.
“Have a nice Christmas?”
“Oh, it was all right I guess. My mother came downstairs in the afternoon, but I guess the excitement was too much for her. She had another spell around a quarter after five and we had to have Doctor Malloy out.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” said Julian.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Doctor Malloy said not, but those doctors, they don’t always tell you the truth. I want her to go to Philadelphia to see a specialist, but we’re afraid to tell Doctor Malloy. You know how he is. If we told him that he’d say all right, get another doctor, and we owe him so much already. We do the best we can, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of my brother getting a job yet, although it isn’t for the lack of trying. Dear knows he isn’t much of an expense and my mother, she has some money, but I have to keep up the building and loan and the insurance and food is so high again, my goodness.”
One nice thing about Mary’s morning recital of her woes was that usually you could stop her at any point and she would not be offended. “I guess we all have our troubles,” he said. He had said this at least three mornings a week since Mary had come to work for him, and always Mary responded as though it were a shining new idea.
“Yes, I guess so,” she said. “I was reading in the paper on the way to work about the man that used to write those comical articles in the Inquirer, Abe Martin, he died out west somewhere. I thought he was from Philadelphia but it said Indiana. Indianapolis, I think. Now there was a man—”
“Hello, Julian.” It was Lute Fliegler. Mary immediately ended her talk. She disliked Lute, because he had once called her the biggest little windbag this side of Akron, Ohio, and to her face, at that.
“Hello, Lute,” said Julian, who was reading a letter from a dealer in another part of the state, planning a gay party for the week of the Auto Show. “Want to go to this?” he said, throwing the letter to Lute.
Lute read it quickly. “Not me,” he said. He sat down and put his feet up on Julian’s desk. “Listen, we gotta make a squawk again about Mr. O’Buick.”
“Is he at it again?” said Julian. O’Buick was their name for Larry O’Dowd, one of the salesmen for the Gibbsville-Buick Company.
“Is he?” said Lute. “I tell you what happened this morning. I went out to see Pat Quilty the undertaker this morning. I had him out a couple times in the last month and he’s ready to go, or he was. He wants a seven-passenger sedan that he can use for funerals and for his family use. Or he did. Anyhow, I honestly figured, I said to myself, this is the one day the old man won’t be expecting me to come around, so maybe I’ll surprise him into signing today. And he’ll pay cash on the line, too, Julian. So I took a ride out to see him and I went in his office and started kidding around—he likes that. Makes him feel young. So I noticed I wasn’t getting a tumble from him, so finally I broke down and asked him, I said what was the matter, and he said to me in that brogue, he said: ‘Will now Oill till you, Meesturr Fliegler, the way I hear it the coompany you do be working for, I hear they don’t like people of my faith.’