“Uh, yes, that’s right,” Griff said, glancing apprehensively in McQuade’s direction.
“He there now?” Aaron asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” Griff said.
“You can’t talk?”
“No,” Griff said.
“If you keep answering in monosyllables, he’ll know damn well you’re talking about him,” Aaron said.
“Yes, I guess so,” Griff answered. “In that case, why don’t you get back to what you were doing?”
“Now there’s a fancy bit of subterfuge,” Aaron said, chuckling. “Has he got you doing some work for a change?”
“I’m pricing some orders,” Griff said.
“And I’m costing some samples, which makes us blood brothers, sort of. Brother, wait until you see the fall line! I know you saw the style sheets, but the shoes themselves, man! You’ve never seen such beautiful stuff!”
“No kidding?” Griff asked, leaning closer to the phone.
“It’s wonderful, really wonderful. Griff, if Guild Week isn’t a success this year, the industry can’t blame Julien Kahn. We’ve got some stuff that makes Paris look like Wichita. You remember the style sheet for ‘Naked Flesh’? Jesus, what a shoe!”
“What’s it made of? Old chorus girls?”
“It’s that lizard pump, Griff, but in a natural tan, and the smoothest goddam job you ever want to see. Griff, there’s not a bit of crap on it, not a bit. No bows, no stripping, no trim, just a plain shell pump, but with these lines that make you want to eat the goddam shoe. It’s out of this world, I’m telling you.”
“When do I see it?” Griff asked, visualizing the shoe.
“Come on down. I’ll show it to you now.”
“I’m busy as hell, Aaron.”
“Can’t you break for five minutes? I want your ideas on what we should price this baby at, anyway. It’s like nothing we’ve ever done, Griff, I mean it, and you’ve got to hand it to Chrysler for coming up with a tag like Naked Flesh. If that doesn’t sell a shoe, nothing will.”
“It sounds like an ad for a whore house,” Griff said.
“And it looks like what a whore would wear,” Aaron added, “but a very high-priced whore. Griff, let’s face it. Every woman in the world thinks of herself as a whore.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Griff said, smiling.
“There’s a certain glamour attached to the profession of prostitution,” Aaron expanded. “Every woman recognizes that glamour, so every woman wears low-cut blouses that reveal her breasts, dresses that hug her ass, shoes that accentuate the curve of her leg. Every woman—”
“Now you sound like a morality play,” Griff said.
“And you sound too goddam smart for your own good. Are you coming down to look at this shoe?”
“No.”
“All right, screw you,” Aaron said playfully.
“And thee, dad,” Griff answered.
“And tell the Georgia boy that my grandfather was one of the few Jews in Sherman’s army. See how that sits with him.”
Griff burst out laughing. “I’ll do that,” he promised.
“Yeah, I’ll bet. So long, chicken.”
“So long, hero.”
He put the phone back into its cradle, the smile still on his face. He shook his head and went back to the orders.
“Was that Aaron?” McQuade asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t see a summary here from him.”
“No, he hasn’t been in the office since Friday. We didn’t get a chance to pass the word to him.”
“Pretty busy, is he?” McQuade asked.
“He’s costing our fall line,” Griff said. “I usually handle that myself, but this time I was jammed up and couldn’t… Aaron knows as much about costing as I do, anyway, and we had to get a man on it right away. Guild Week is coming up in a little over a month, you know, and Chrysler is beginning to put on a little pressure.”
“I see,” McQuade said. “Pretty important, is it? Guild Week?”
“Guild Week?” Griff asked, surprised. “Oh sure, Guild Week is… well, don’t you know about Guild Week?”
“I’m afraid not,” McQuade said. He ducked his head. “Here comes my abysmal ignorance to the surface again.”
“Oh, Guild Week is a lot of work,” Griff said. “Hell of a lot of work, but it’s fun, too. It’s a showing for the entire fashion shoe industry, you see. We usually take over a hotel somewhere; this year it’s in New York, last year it was in Chicago; it varies. Kahn will have one floor, or room, like the Empire Room, for example, and I. Miller will have another, and De Liso, all of them will be represented, as well as the allied leather trades, handbags, belts, stuff like that. Our salesmen are all called in, and most of our accounts show up, and we give them a preview of our complete line for the following season, either spring or fall. There are models, and a sales pitch, and a dinner sometimes, and drinks, and, well, it’s something like a convention, I suppose, and really pretty exciting because we do a bang-up job on the presentation of our line. Guild Week is something, all right.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” McQuade said.
“It isn’t until the middle of April,” Griff said probingly.
McQuade only nodded in answer, and Griff looked at him for a moment before he went back to his pricing.
“I’m really glad I asked for these summaries,” McQuade said at length. “It really makes things a whole lot easier, do you know?”
“I imagine so,” Griff said.
“And I’m glad no one took them really seriously. They’ve told me just what I want to know, with no attempt at making their jobs more important, no attempt to deceive me. Hell, I’m not an inquisitor.” He smiled happily. “Yes, I’m very, very pleased with these summaries. Very pleased.”
4
The entire IBM Room was fired on Friday of that week. The firing came as something of a shock, because Julien Kahn usually let people go on Wednesdays, when the payroll was tallied. Titanic apparently preferred the last day of the week, a preference which would lead to a good deal of anxiety on that day for many weeks to come.
Everyone, of course, knew that the IBM Room was not worth a damn the way it was being run. Frank Fazio was a hell of a nice guy, but he didn’t know the IBM from the BMT. Ever since the machines had been installed last August, the department had been in a constant state of harried bewilderment. The machines, which would have simplified the department’s job if properly utilized, had become separate, quietly calculating monsters, and each employee in the department approached them with a mental illusion of being devoured, punched, and filed under D for Digested. Fazio had, of course, taken the required IBM course of study, but Fazio was an old dog, and these new tricks were a little too much for him to absorb. He had tried passing on his partially learned tricks to the people who worked under him, and the result was a confused mass of uninformed people playing around with a very well-informed mass of machines machines which assumed the characteristics of master brains by comparison. But even so, even knowing the department was something of a beheaded chicken, everyone in the factory had sort of grown accustomed to its aimless meanderings. It was something like having a drunken husband lying on the living-room couch all day long. You certainly didn’t call the ASPCA to come take him away, did you? No one in the factory would have dreamed of taking the IBM Room away.
Except Joseph Manelli, it seemed.
Joseph Manelli, it seemed, had no particular fondness for drunken spouses cluttering up the living room of his factory. Joseph Manelli called International Business Machines and told them to have their infernal monsters out of the building by Friday of next week, at which time most of the members of the department would officially leave the employ of Julien Kahn. There were seven people in the IBM Room: five girls, Fazio (who was supervisor), and an assistant supervisor. Manelli’s one-week notice applied only to the five girls. Fazio and his assistant were expected to stay on for an additional sixty days while they cleaned up shop, after which time the Accounting Department would take over its duties. Or so the memo from Manelli decreed.