A Bad Man (32 page)

Only gradually disappointed, held off for eight months by Feldman’s ploys: Feldman dutifully inspecting Victman’s sites. “You know your business, Victman, or you wouldn’t be working with me, but I thought we were speaking about three generations. Can you see this place in even
two
generations?” (They were standing in a green pasture eight miles from town.) “It’ll be a slum. Women unsafe on the street after eight o’clock at night, men unsafe after nine.” Held off some more by his ploys for backing (“We don’t want our capital from American sources”). Sent once to India, another time to Dutch Guiana (“That’s where the money is, Norman, in your underdeveloped nations. Among those old Dutch planters”). And one time actually coming back with a pledge for twenty million from a man in Mexico (“No, Norman, I want thirty million from him. Either he’s willing to show some good faith in this or we don’t want to have anything to do with him”).

And then, in a year, the disappointment growing in leaps and bounds: “I don’t understand, Leo. Let’s not sit on this. It’s been eighteen months. We should break ground this winter so we can start building in the spring. The competition has its sites already.” “Give them their rope, Norman, please.” And then, later, after he had obtained additional pledges and pushed the Mexican up to thirty million: “Leo, we could have the capital investment tomorrow if we wanted. Let’s move already.” “‘Let’s
move
already’? We
have
moved. We
have
moved, Norman, you silly man. What else do you think we’ve been doing for two years? And don’t talk to me about having the capital investments tomorrow, when I have them today, when I’ve had them for two years.
You’re the capital investments, Norman
. Don’t you see what’s happening? They’ve taken the bait! They’re
overextending!
Those stores will be open in a year. Built in the sticks. Who’ll go? Who’ll go? And not just the double maintenance, but the double staff, the double advertising, the double trouble. We’ve thinned them out, we’ve spread them thin. You did, Norman. With your table talk, your reputation, your picture and the three columns in
Woman’s Wear Daily
. You believe in progress? Progress is irreligious. Read your Bible. Seven fat years. Seven lean. And the seven lean shall be seven times leaner than the seven fat are fat. Seven lean, Norman, and all it takes is two—say three. No, Norman, no, they’re tough, these guys. Say four. Say five, and have a margin of two. So don’t speak to me about capital investment, nor prattle of progress. Checkmate is the name of the game. Not moving forward: standing pat when all about you are losing theirs.”

“Don’t you
believe
in progress?” Victman asked, shocked, shattered, who had based his life and staked his reputation on that principle.

“I believe,” said Feldman softly, for they were in a restaurant now too, and he recognized faces and the walls had ears, “I believe in smearing the competition, survival of the fittest, cartel by default. I believe in the disappointed expectation and the harpooned hope, and that the best-laid plans of mice and men often gang astray. The tire with the plumpest tread has never moved an inch. Norman, Norman, consider the man in the club chair. That bulk comes from exercise’s opposite: if you’d increase, decrease and desist. The proud falsetto of the castrate, the fat lap of the dowager, the banker’s big ass—seats of power, Victman. I believe in ploy and stratagem and maneuver and conspiracy. I believe in espionage, the coup d’état, assassination, the palace revolt, guerrilla attacks and the cheaper revolutions. No more parades, sir. No more expensive reviews and costly May Day brags. No more shopping centers, no more sites, no more branch stores. Think me up commando schemes!”

He’d been had, poor man. When the other stores had their grand openings Feldman would have fired him, but he had invested $150,000 in him in the past two years and could not consider the deal closed until the stores had gone under. In the third year, having thoroughly discredited him, he lowered his salary to a more wieldy $30,000. (Two years, and not one coup to add to his score. No one knew, of course, how Feldman used him.) And the next year his salary was lowered again, by five thousand dollars. “The laborer is worth his hire,” Feldman told him. “That’s the best rule of thumb, I think.”

Only one thing. And Feldman now considered it.

The stores had
not
gone under. There had not been seven fat years and seven lean ones, but fourteen fat. Disastrously, there had been no disaster. Red China had not laid a finger on the competition. “If you’re so smart,” he sang, “why ain’t you rich?”

“They’re taking us off the charge plate, Leo,” Victman said.

“They’re what?”

“What they threatened. When the new plates come out in the fall, we won’t be on them.” Feldman stared at him. “We haven’t kept pace,” Victman said shyly.

“Why? How can they do that?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. There isn’t any one reason—pressure from the retail clerks’ union.”

“I pay a straight commission.”

“Hiring policy—”

“The first store in the state to hire a Negro?”

“Token, Leo.”

“
Tahkee
token,” Feldman said.

“They claim we run phony sales.”

“Phony sales?
Phony?
”

“Who celebrates Arbor Day today?” Victman asked tragically. He was inconsolable.

“Some irony, hey, kid? It must be tough for you. You practically invented the charge plate.”

“I was in on the discussions.”

“Sure you were,” Feldman said. “Come on, Victman, cheer up. It’s not so bad. Smile once for me. Grin and bear it. Say ‘cheese.’ We’ve been there before, you and me. Back to the wall. Listen, try to look at it this way. You’ve had your back to the wall ever since you came here. I put you there. I made you stand in the corner with your back to the wall. What, you’ve forgotten all the lousy tricks I’ve played on you? The underhanded deals, the way I’ve used you, all the dirt I’ve made you eat? I’ve been hacking away at your salary for years. Why let a little thing like this get to you?
I
know. It’s symbolic, your being in on the discussions and all, but frig them, I say. Listen to me. Please take heart. You’ve got Feldman back there against the wall with you now. That’s my territory, the landscape I know and love.

“So they’ve taken us off the charge plate, have they? Well, who needs them? Say that with me. ‘
Who needs them?
’ The charge plate is new-fangled anyway. It’s against nature. We’ll put out our own charge plate. We’ll do better. We’ll make the customer bring a note from home. Come on, we’ll show them, Victman. Are you with me on this? The ammo’s running out and winter’s coming and there’s nothing between an enemy bent on rape and our helpless, sleeping women and children but you, me and the token niggers.
Never say die
, I tell you. Rally round the flag, pal. Stomach in, chest out. Five, six, pick up sticks and beat hell out of them. What do you say?
Never
say die. What do you say?”

“Leo, the property I told you about—why don’t you look at it? Won’t you look at it now? This is no joke. Our volume is down. We
haven’t
kept pace. Come this afternoon. I’ll get the developer to meet us. What do you say?”

“I say die.”

“It’s a beautiful site, Leo. When the projects go up, there’ll be ten thousand middle-income families within a twelve-block radius.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

“Parking for fifteen thousand cars. At least talk to the developer.”

“Die.”

“You can’t avoid it any longer. The handwriting’s on the wall. Leo, I warned you a year ago. It’s no joke, being dropped from the group charge plate. It’s a slap in the face.
What do you keep me for if you don’t listen to me?
I don’t sell for you, I don’t wrap packages or wait on trade. I’m an idea man, Leo, a merchandising-concepts man. I see ways to bring this all off. We can get financing. My home-shopper plan, Leo—”

“Die,” Feldman said. “I say
die
.”

“It could be terrific. We put the customer’s size on IBM tape, we code his tastes, his needs, then we keep him advised what we have for him and send it to his house. They’ll go for this big, Leo.”

“Die.”

“Leo, you don’t listen. My franchise plan. What was wrong with my franchise plan? It’s only logic. If the little name can’t absorb the big name, let the big name absorb the little name.
Merge
, Leo.”

“Die?
You say die?
”

“All right, forget that, but at least look at the site I have in mind. This charge-plate business is only a first step. If the big stores put on the pressure, the papers won’t accept our advertising. It could happen. It happened in Mobile to Blum’s. Our volume is down eight percent. We let go sixteen people this year. Gerard Brothers took on fifty, Llewelyn’s thirty-seven. At least
look
at the site.”

“All right,” Feldman said, “I’ll see the sites. Die. Die.”

“Listen to what the developer tells you. It’s important.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

Feldman with his buyers—there were more men than women now (the war over and no more shortages, it being everywhere a nineteenth or even twentieth fat year, Feldman’s girls had been replaced, no longer traded away in his name their ultimate quiff pro quo, happily married for years, raising kids; really, he thought, it was astonishing how many of them had married the very men who had once been their clients, the boys stirred to sacrament by the premise of unvirtue). They were in a private dining room of the best hotel for the Quarterly Lunch. Back from the Coasts, returned from the factories and showrooms and warehouses for the ceremony, they felt, he supposed, in what was after all their home base, somehow even further than the miles they had traveled, because they were all there together, like correspondents returned from the fronts, knowing some special sense of
colleague
that lent distance. Specialists, authorities, one big happy family with private knowledge of the skies over Texas, Twin Cities’ economy, what’s moving in Portland. Today their mysterious brotherhood even deepened by a still unconfirmed report of a brother downed, Chester Credit of Furniture, alleged to be aboard a plane that had crashed outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.
One of our aircraft is missing
.

Feldman taps the cut-glass water goblet with the edge of his butter knife, rises to speak, their gloomed attention making him cozy, snuggish, solemn-comfy in the orderly business reality, actually at home, and them too—you couldn’t tell him otherwise—in the reserved room, reassured by the deep brown walls and the dark carpets and the white tablecloths and black waiters and, oh yes, this too, even Credit’s empty chair. He waves off the white sleeve of a waiter offering a dish of ice cream. He speaks to him in a soft voice, making an arrangement. “Don’t bother with that now, Waiter, please. I have to speak to these people.” The waiter looks at him. “If it melts, it melts, pal, okay? My responsibility. Thank you very much.” He clears his throat, a joy rising in it with the phlegm. He loves saying something important. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dear associates,” he begins formally, pleased as always by the rhetoric he brings to these occasions (his Secretary of State diction, as he thinks of it). “In private conversations just prior to this luncheon, I have already given some cursory briefing to a few of you regarding the absence of Chester Credit. I did not intend that my unfortunate news be imparted to some rather than all, and if I may be permitted a rather bitter paradox, it pleases me to see all of you so solemn. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all myself, and I take it that the seriousness of your composure is an indication that you have all been apprised of my fears for Chester.

“Regarding the crash itself, I have very little additional to report at this time. During salad I was in telephone contact with our Miss Lane, and she tells me the situation in Charlotte is still indefinite. Let me emphasize that there has still been no official confirmation of the crash—repeat—there has still been no
official
confirmation of the crash. All we know for certain is that a check with the tower in Pittsburgh indicates that Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven is seven hours overdue. My informants tell me that an airliner’s instrumentation, and that would include its radio apparatus, frequently kicks out during the traumatic jar of a forced landing. But this ought not to comfort us very much, as none of the control towers between Charlotte and Pittsburgh report having had any communication with Flight Number Eighty-seven. The reflex s.o.p. for a pilot forced to bring his ship down is first to declare his intent over a special emergency frequency. Additionally, the weather throughout the East has been almost preternaturally clear for the past eighteen hours with an unlimited ceiling. Thus, unfavorable climatological murk can have nothing to do with the plane’s disappearance. For all these reasons, we can only conclude that the ‘fireball’ reportedly discerned by the two farmers fifty miles from Charlotte probably
was
Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven. I can extend no reasonable hope that these men may have been mistaken.

“Half an hour ago, during meat, Charlotte Airport was still unwilling to release its passenger manifest for Flight Eighty-seven. Coast Airlines was quite as adamant. I’m not blaming them for their reticence. Indeed, as I understand it, they are bound by law to maintain silence until it is positively ascertained that there has
been
a crash. Frankly, they have been most cooperative, and I for one am proud as hell of both of them. I’ve obtained their promise to release the manifest to us as soon as it’s made available, even before the agonizing rituals of positive identification and notification of next of kin, which, strictly speaking, they are obliged by law, though not, I gather, so stringent a one as the other, to observe. Their cooperation here could save us literally days of anxiety, and so, even under the oppression of our feelings, I don’t think we ought to let this occasion of still another instance of the mutual courtesy and respect between one American industry and another go by without acknowledging it. Whatever happens, I am tomorrow sending my personal letter of appreciation both to the executives of the Charlotte Airport and the executives of Coast Airlines.