“You’re comptroller!” Griff said incredulously. “If you haven’t the power to—”
“Comptroller!” Manelli snorted. “At two hundred dollars a week! Do you know what Kurz was earning? Have you any idea? Close to five bills, Griff, five bills, and I’m comptroller now and I’m making two hundred bucks, and they call me comptroller. No, I can’t do anything for your friend, I’m sorry. That’s the way it is.” He shook his head violently. “I’ve got my own job to think about. No. No, I can’t do anything.”
“Did you fire him, Joe?”
“Yes,” Manelli said.
“Did you?”
“I said yes, didn’t I? The comptroller fired him. J. Manelli, comptroller of Julien Kahn, Inc., fired him. Are you satisfied now? Are you satisfied you came in here and… and…” Manelli shook his head wildly. “Get out of here, will you? For Christ’s sake, leave a man alone, will you? I got enough headaches of my own. Can’t you just leave a man alone?” He shook his head again, and then buried his face in his hands.
“All right, Joe,” Griff said.
He left Manelli’s office with his head crystal-clear.
His head rang with its new clarity. It rang like a village bell atop a high steeple against a painfully blue sky, it rang loudly and sonorously and incessantly. It rang with knowledge that had hung in his hand from almost the very beginning, knowledge he had somehow hidden from his own consciousness until just now. It figured now, all of it, the IBM Room, and the memos from Manelli, and the hosing, and the Diaz girl, and now Danny. It all figured very clearly.
When he learned that Joe Manelli had fired the eagle-eyer, the man who gave quality to the bottom of a Kahn shoe, on the same day — there was no longer the slightest doubt in his mind.
He knew for certain then that any order coming from J. Manelli, comptroller, was conceived by J. McQuade, The Man From Titanic.
9
John Grant was a union delegate.
He was a busy man who represented several other factories besides Julien Kahn. On the day that Bob Gardiner — the shop steward in Kahn’s Packing Room — called him, Grant’s desk was piled to the ceiling. He was not in a mood to listen to complaints.
“Grant here,” he said.
“Mr. Grant?” Gardiner said.
“Yes, yes.”
“This is Bob Gardiner. I’m a shop steward at—”
“I remember you, Bob,” Grant said. “How are you?”
“Fine. Mr. Grant, we’ve got troubles here at Julien Kahn. They sent this guy up from Titanic, and he turned a hose on two workers in the Cutting Room, and just because a pair of shoes was stolen in—”
“Just a minute, just a minute,” Grant said. “Give it to me slowly, will you?”
Gardiner gave it to him slowly. Grant listened. He knew the union didn’t have a leg to stand on in either the hosing incident or the theft. A fist fight always meant automatic expulsion, and theft was an unpardonable sin. But he listened to Gardiner patiently and when Gardiner came to the firings at Kahn, Grant realized that here was something else again and decided to use those firings as a wedge.
“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Grant,” Gardiner said. “I’ll be waiting.”
Gardiner was pretty happy about Grant’s reactions, because he knew he belonged to a fairly powerful union, and he was certain the union would work out this problem for the men. That’s what unions were for, to protect the workers. Certainty, under the old Kahn regime, they’d never had any trouble with the company. Oh, slowdowns and things like that, and once a general sitdown — he could still remember blowing the signal whistle in his department — but nothing serious. The Kahns had always come across.
So he was rather pleased, and he was even more so when Grant called him back to tell him he’d arranged a meeting for later that week, and would he come with two other shop stewards and they’d try to iron this thing out. Gardiner said he’d certainly be there. He chose his stewards, and he looked forward to the meeting with a good deal of excitement and pleasant anticipation.
The meeting had been called for Thursday, April 1. Gardiner’s two other shop stewards were a man from Stock-fitting named George Hensen and a man from Bottoming named Alec Karojilian. John Grant was there as union delegate. The foursome represented Labor.
Joseph Manelli and the company’s labor man, the man who set the pay rate for piecework, a man named Sal Valdero, were there representing Management. Jefferson McQuade went along “just for the ride.”
The men met in Manelli’s office, and Manelli was most cordial, behaving like the perfect genial host, passing out cigars and introducing everyone to McQuade, and asking everyone if they’d care for a little schnapps, eh? The men — with the exception of, McQuade — all accepted the smokes and declined the drink. McQuade neither drank nor smoked.
They sat around and lighted up, and Manelli beamed at them from behind his desk and said, “Well, fellers, to what do I owe the honor of this meeting?”
The men all laughed a little and enjoyed the aromatic pleasure of the fifty-cent cigars Manelli had handed out (cigars which Kurz had left behind in the desk humidor) and then they cleared their throats and got down to business. It was a little difficult to get down to business with McQuade sitting there. McQuade, as it happened, was a major part of their business that day.
“I understand there’s been a lot of unrest in the factory, Mr. Manelli,” Grant said, glancing at McQuade.
“Is that right, John? What sort of unrest?”
“The wholesale firings for one thing. The men tell me—”
“The men don’t like the way people are getting fired right and left,” Gardiner said.
“Well,” Manelli said, spreading his hands, “what can we do, fellers? You know as well as I do that this is a business and not a charity organization. When a man’s got to go, he’s simply got to go.”
“Seems like an awful lot have been going lately,” George Hensen said sourly.
“Well,” Manelli said, “we’re trying to modernize this business, George. We’re trying to make it a better place in which to work. That means clearing out the dead wood. More profits mean higher wages for those men who remain. I’m sure you know that.”
“We haven’t seen any higher wages yet,” Hensen said, glancing at McQuade. “We only see people getting fired, and we don’t like it.” McQuade remained silent, staring thoughtfully at his hands.
“There’s more to this than just the firings, Mr. Manelli,” Gardiner ventured. “A lot of us have been working for Kahn for a good many years now. We like Kahn, and we like making shoes, and so we’ve stayed on. But there was always a healthy respect for the working man here, and now there doesn’t seem to be that respect any more.”
“How do you mean, Bob?” Manelli asked.
“Well…” Gardiner looked at McQuade. “Everybody knows about what happened to those two cutters. Now, really, Mr. Manelli, that’s a hell of a way to treat a human being. We’re not slaves here, you know, and we’re not prisoners, either. I mean, turning a fire hose onto—”
“Those two men were ready to kill each other, Bob,” Manelli said.
“Kill, yeah, maybe,” Gardiner answered. “They didn’t kill each other before the hose was turned on, though, did they? And chances are they wouldn’t have killed each other, neither. But that’s not the point. The point is, we got our dignity, too, and you don’t go turning fire hoses on people. What is this, Alcatraz?”