“Fine. Now look, there’s a broken window, and I had Ted tape it with adhesive tape for the time being. I want you to check it before you close to make sure that tape is nice and secure. Okay?”
On his way out he stopped to thank the janitor and commend him for his caution. He pressed a couple of cigars on him.
“Thanks, Mr.—er—”
“Paff.”
“Oh, yeah. Well thanks, Mr. Paff. I won’t forget next time.”
When he got back to his car, it was jammed in between two others. By the time he had extricated himself, he was bathed in perspiration. I’m getting too old for this, he thought. Then he remembered he hadn’t had lunch. Glumly, he passed a nearby restaurant, noting the lot was full. He decided to eat on the road and stopped at a diner, where the only stool vacant was in front of the grill. Morosely watching the short order cook in a dirty apron, he managed to consume a dry hamburger and a cup of bad coffee.
Chapter Five
In the Officers’ Cafeteria of Hexatronics, Inc., on Route 128, there was a long middle table where the executives usually ate family-style, while on the sides there were a number of booths available for those who had guests and wished to talk in private. In a booth, Ted Brennerman studied the menu and said to his host, Ben Gorfinkle. “Hey, you guys do all right for yourselves.” He gave his order, and as soon as the waitress left, he leaned across the table. “As I was saying, Ben, there’s thirty-seven guys with nameplates on their seats in the sanctuary; there’s another fifty or sixty get the same seats all the time—figure a hundred altogether. The rest of us—the peasants—sometimes we get a seat up front, and the next year we’re way out in left field someplace. Last year I sat in the last row. So what difference did it make? With the public address system, I could hear just as good. But there are plenty others who don’t feel like I do. They want to sit up front.” He was a tall, good-looking young man, eager and with a ready, infectious smile.
“But they paid a special price for those seats. At least those with the nameplates did,” Gorfinkle pointed out.
“Don’t you believe it. I checked into it. I went back to the minutes of the general meeting of five years ago. What happened was they were putting on a drive for the Building Fund and getting all kinds of pledges. Then Becker, who was president that year, said that anyone who would donate a grand could have his seat reserved from year to year. Now, that wasn’t anything the board had decided on and voted on. It was during the meeting and came out on the spur of the moment, if you see what I mean. Then”—he pressed Gorfinkle’s arm for emphasis—“the board at their next meeting had to make some ruling to get Becker out of the jam he’d got himself into. So they said that those who had come forward with their thousand-buck donation would have their seats held until the last day of the ticket sale each year. But then the very next year they stopped selling seats anyway and made it part of the annual membership dues, so it seems to me that those guys don’t have any kind of a claim on those cushy seats that they get year after year. And I’ll tell you another thing: Not all of those guys who had nameplates put on their seats gave their thousand bucks.”
Gorfinkle, a stocky, square-faced man in his mid-forties, said. “One of these days, we’ll be putting in theater-type seats. Maybe we ought to wait till then.”
“Nussbaum’s project?” Brennerman laughed. “He came to see me right after I was elected president of the Brotherhood. I should have the Brotherhood start a drive for the additional money to put in new seats. And he spoke to me again only last week. He’s bugged each of the Brotherhood presidents for the last four years, and the Sisterhood, too. I told him it wasn’t anything I thought you could work up any enthusiasm for.”
“I don’t know, they’re mighty uncomfortable. And we’ve got the money for about half the job.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame to think of that money lying there, and we can’t touch it. Boy, if we could use that for the Social Action Fund! Say, maybe Mrs. Oppenheimer’s will could be interpreted so at least we could use the money to buy upholstered pads for the present seats,” Brennerman suggested.
Gorfinkle shook his head. “That wouldn’t do any good. It would just make the seats higher, and they’re too high as it is. It’s not so much the seat part as the back. It’s so straight or something. The only one who likes it is Doc Klein, the osteopath. He gets more leg cramp and sacroiliac business after Yom Kippur than he gets all year round.”
Brennerman laughed. “Who picked that type seat in the first place?”
“Nobody picked it. They were so overwhelmed—most of them, those same people with the seat plates—by the reputation of that architect that they let him do whatever he wanted. Those were copied from some old English church. I understand. What did he care? He was just interested in how it looked; he wasn’t going to have to sit in them. It’s funny about this seat business. In the shul that my father used to go to, where you sat was a big deal. By tradition, the big shots, the guys with yiccus status, always sat down front. The nearer you were to the ark, the more important you were. In that shul they even had a row of seats up against the wall where the ark was, facing the rest of the congregation. I remember the guys that sat there, most of them old guys with long beards, wearing these long woolen prayer shawls. My father called them p’nai. Gosh. I haven’t thought of that word in years. It’s a Hebrew word, and it means faces. My father used to explain to me that they were the faces of the congregation, the most pious and the most learned.”
“Well. I don’t suppose we have any of those in our congregation unless maybe old man Goralsky and Wasserman.”
“I think maybe Meyer Paff thinks he’s one.” Both men chuckled.
“One thing bothers me, though.” Gorfinkle went on. “I still think that this kind of thing—announcing a whole new social action program for the temple—ought to be presented at the general meeting of the congregation. When you come right down to it, we haven’t even formally presented it to the board.”
“Hell, we campaigned on it. Ben. So it’s no secret. And since we’ve a majority, we’ve got a right to run things our way.”
“Still—”
“And don’t you see.” said the other eagerly, “presenting it at the Brotherhood service—that’s the beauty of it. For one thing, we’ll have more people there than we ever get at a general meeting. The last meeting we only got a little over a hundred. We get close to three times that at the Brotherhood service. And with the rabbi away, we won’t have to worry about anything he might say afterward.”
Gorfinkle chuckled. “And he doesn’t know it yet, but he won’t be there for the meeting Sunday either.”
“No? How come?”
“Well, he expected to drive home right after the evening service Saturday, but they’re having a kind of party for him Saturday night at the college, according to Stu. He won’t be able to leave until Sunday morning. After all, they’ve got the kid with them.”
“Good thinking.”
“But it’s not the rabbi I’m worried about; it’s Paff.”
The younger man grinned. “Well, don’t worry about Paff. I’ve got an idea how to take care of him.”
Chapter Six
There were no customers present, and Meyer Paff looked around uncertainly for a moment and then made his way to the rear of the store, where Mr. Begg sat glowering at him.
“I’m Meyer Paff,” he said. “Mr. Morehead said you had the key to the Hillson place, that you were like a caretaker—”
“I live in the carriage house. I keep an eye on the place.” said Begg evenly.