“But what’s that got to do with rowboats and canoes?” Pinny said.
“It’s a joke,” I said. “A funny name accountants give to this milking the business secretly. Here, look.” I pointed to the yellow sheets of analysis paper on which I had just wrapped up the DuValle cash payments schedule. “For the last two years the guy who owns DuValle has been drawing big fat checks every week to someone called D. G. Crystal. On the stubs, in the checkbooks we’ve been auditing, the explanation for what the money is for, he’s written in things like, look.” I ran my finger down the left-hand column on the top yellow sheet. “Forecast analysis,” I read aloud. “Chandeliers. Luggage racks. Statistical study. And so on.” I looked up. “You get the point?”
“Chandeliers,” Pinny said slowly, sending his glance around the dirty loft. “Luggage racks. You mean how come they’re spending all that money on chandeliers and luggage racks?”
“And forecast analysis,” I said, nodding. “And statistical study, whatever those things are. To us, to an accountant, it looks suspicious. These things are just words used to cover up what the money was really being used for. Like suppose, instead of saying chandeliers and luggage racks, he’d written on the check stubs the money was going out to buy rowboats and canoes. It makes just as much sense. Why should a company that manufactures pants spend all that money to buy a lot of rowboats and canoes? Get the joke?”
Pinny didn’t answer. He was scowling down at the yellow sheets.
“You mean you make a list of all these checks?” he said finally. “The money that went out for all these suspicious things? And you do what with it?”
“We turn it over to the receiver,” I said. “It’s part of our audit. Our report says here, from such and such a date to such and such a date, the owners of this business deflected so much and so much of the company’s funds into channels we can’t explain. The receiver then drags the guy into court and makes him explain. What did you do with the money? they want to know—and he better tell them.”
“But you guys?” Pinny said. “The accountants. You don’t know?”
I laughed and said, “What do you think we are? Dumb? Of course we know. We just don’t put it in the written report. We can’t say a man is a crook even though we’re damn sure he is. Not in writing, anyway. What we do, we give the receiver our opinion, where we believe the money went, and the receiver tells the lawyers, and they get it out of the guy when they get him into court.”
“This firm,” Pinny said. “DuValle. The guy that owns it. This outfit’s rowboats and canoes. The money he milked out of the business so it went bankrupt. What did this man spend the stolen money on?”
There was something in Pinny’s voice, a the-kidding-is-finished note, that brought me back to earth. I had the feeling that he had been treating me like an equal because he’d wanted to get something out of me. Now that he had it, or most of it, his impatient arrogance would not allow him to continue the pretense. The man for whom I’d had a sudden feeling of affection was gone. I was back with the kid whose guts I’d hated at Jefferson High. He might have addressed his question to the chauffeur who used to deliver him to school every morning.
“Who wants to know?” I said and, in my anger, I realized there was a lot more I wanted to say. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said. “What gives you the right to follow me down here from my office and come busting in here and ask a lot of questions? In fact, what are you doing in New York? Why aren’t you up at Yale or Harvard or Princeton? Cramming away at your courses in how to clip bond coupons without soiling the lifted pinky?”
“It happens to be N.Y.U.,” Pinny said coldly. “And what right I’ve got to come busting in here, who the hell do you think owns the DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation, you stupid little son of a bitch?”
He shouldn’t have said that. I am not stupid. Anyway, in 1930 I didn’t think I was. And I am not a son of a bitch. More accurately, I hadn’t yet learned how to be one. It was Pinny Slater who helped me take my first big stride toward that achievement, and he did it on that day in 1930, at that particular moment. Because at that particular moment a scrap of information that had been lying around in the back of my mind all day now stood up and started to scream inside my head: the major stockholder of the DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation, the bankrupt whose books Mr. Bern and I had been auditing, the man who had signed all those nice fat rowboats and canoes checks made out to D. G. Crystal was named Ernest Slater.
“You mean this is your father’s firm?” I said. “Ernest Slater is your old man?”
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” Pinny said. “At least you’re able to put two and two together. I guess you have to be able to do at least that much, to get a job with an accountant. Now let’s see what else your big brain is able to do. This D. G. Crystal. The one all those checks were made out to. What’s that?”
Suppose Pinny had been a nice guy? Or suppose he had been like the other rich kids at Jefferson High? Someone you were jealous of, but did not actively resent? Or suppose, being what he was, Pinny had merely been a little more self-controlled at that particular moment on that particular day in that particular year of The Great Depression?
What I mean is this: if Pinny hadn’t called me a stupid little son of a bitch, would I have answered his question as I now answered it? Truthfully?
I like to think I wouldn’t have. But I’m not sure. A number of things that you always considered absolutes, things about which it never crossed your mind there could be two points of view, vanish once you master the not too difficult skill of being a son of a bitch.
“D. G. Crystal,” I said, speaking just as coldly as he had spoken to me, aware of why I was uttering every single word, “is a female. Girl or woman, I don’t know. I can only judge from the indorsement on the checks made out to her. My boss and I agree it does not look like a man’s handwriting. For two years D. G. Crystal has been receiving checks from the chief stockholder of the DuValle Men’s and Boys’ Pants Corporation. He may have been giving her money in other forms for longer than that. I don’t know. All I know as an accountant is what the audit shows. It shows that for two years large sums of money have been milked out of the DuValle corporation by its president into the hands of this female. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“Yes,” Pinny said icily. “Since when has keeping a dame become so expensive it can bankrupt a firm as big as this?”
“I didn’t say the president of DuValle was keeping her,” I said. “That’s only one of many possible interpretations. Assuming your interpretation is correct, though, I don’t know why this dame should be so expensive. I’m just an accountant. Accountants can learn a lot from studying a man’s books and records. One thing an accountant can’t learn from a ledger is the kind of mistress a guy has got.”
“I’ll bet a good accountant could,” Pinny said.
I didn’t need that extra prod. But it helped. This guy had asked for it. Okay. I’d give it to him. In spades.
“You happen to be talking to a good one,” I said. “As a matter of fact, there are a few things along that line that I have learned.” Actually, it was Mr. Bern who had learned them. As we had worked away, piling up the figures, he had given me his experienced guesses. I now passed them on as my own. “Our examination of the canceled checks made out to this D. G. Crystal,” I said, “indicate that the biggest ones she indorsed over to Parke, Turner, and Rhodes, the Wall Street brokers. In plain English, which I don’t know that you ever managed to learn at Jefferson High and maybe they don’t teach at N.Y.U., the DuValle corporation was not only paying her rent. It was paying her gambling debts in the market, and she seems to have been a lousy gambler. Anything else?”
“Yes, one more thing,” Pinny said. “Where can I find this—this whatever her name is?”
“Why don’t you ask your father?” I said.
“I can’t,” Pinny said. “Since he disappeared from home on Thursday, the d
ay this bankruptcy petition was filed against him. But I want to see him. I’ve got some questions to ask him.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like how come my tuition at N.Y.U. hasn’t been paid, and why our rent, my mother’s and mine, it’s so far behind, the landlord is evicting us. We’re broke, my mother and I. Flat. I want to ask my father how come. Since my mother and I don’t know where he is, I thought I’d come down here and see if I couldn’t find out where he’s hiding out. It looks like I’ve run into somebody who knows.”
In actual fact, I didn’t. Any more than I knew that D. G. Crystal was a chorus girl. As far as my actual firsthand knowledge went, she could have been the Queen of Sheba, or even a he. What I knew were not really facts. What I knew was how to make certain guesses that almost always turned out to be right. I had learned this from working with Mr. Bern and Mr. Jablow and the rest of the staff of Maurice Saltzman & Company. Some of these guesses I had already, in my anger, passed on to Pinny Slater. Now, all at once, anger gave way to uneasiness.
I had passed on these guesses to a rich kid I hated because he had advantages I’d never known. Now, all at once, I grasped that he was no longer a rich kid. When you got right down to it, Pinny now had less advantages than I had. At least I had a job. It occurred to me that now, for the first time in his life, Pinny Slater was in a position to suffer the pain of losing a friend the way I had lost Natie Farkas. It gave me a funny little feeling in my heart.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t really know where this D. G. Crystal lives.”
Perhaps he sensed a change in my voice. At any rate, Pinny sounded quite different, too, as he said, “You know everything else.”
“Not really,” I said. “All those things I told you, they’re just guesses. They’re guesses based on facts and figures turned up by the audit, and they may prove to be right, but they could also prove to be wrong. They’re just guesses.”
“All I’m asking is make a guess about where this girl lives,” Pinny said. “It might prove to be right, like your other guesses.” He hesitated. It didn’t occur to me until a couple of moments later that he was pulling himself together to make a special effort. “I really want to see my father,” Pinny said. “Please.”
The single syllable did the trick. The word that had always been a one-way street, a word other people used to him, never the other way around, had become a thoroughfare on which Pinny Slater had no more privileges than I had.
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about all those things I told you. I mean about your father. They may not be true. I don’t want you to be sore at him because of my guesses.”
“I’m not sore at him,” Pinny said. “I’m sore at the guys who hired your boss to do this audit. I’m sore at the creditors. It was those bastards put my father into bankruptcy.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “They couldn’t do anything else. Your father owes them almost three hundred thousand bucks.”
“That’s nothing compared to what they’re going to owe me,” Pinny said. The look on my face must have been something to see. Pinny laughed. “I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “But I’m going to get those guys. To hell with college. I’m going into my old man’s business.”
“The pants business?” I said in astonishment.
“You bet the pants business,” Pinny said. “I’m going to start a new firm. Men’s and boys’ pants. It’s going to be the biggest pants manufacturing firm this town ever saw. I’m going to buy all my piece goods from these same bastards who just threw my old man into the bath, and when I’ve run up bills for half a million, maybe even a million, as much credit as I can get, instead of paying them, I’m going to milk off the cash. Rowboats and canoes, boy, rowboats and canoes. And then they can throw me into the bath, too, the way they did my father, and they can whistle for their million bucks, the rotten bastards.”
It sounded exactly as he had said it sounded: crazy. Pinny Slater was my age. The notion that a seventeen-year-old boy could start a million-dollar corporation to manufacture pants was a joke. Maybe that’s why there was laughter in Pinny’s eyes.
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
Curiously enough, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t laughing laughter in his eyes. It was mean laughter. It made me feel that someone who could laugh like that was capable of doing anything.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that, well, what you just said you’re going to do, it’ll take years and years.”
“I know,” Pinny said. “But it’ll make my father feel good to hear it. Wherever he is now, he must be feeling the whole world is against him. I’d like to go see him, and tell him what I have in mind. A man hearing a plan like that from his own son, at a time like this, it’ll make him feel good. Come on, where does this girl live?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s only a guess, but here, look at these checks.” I picked up the batch of canceled checks Mr. Bern and I had accumulated in our hunt through the DuValle records. “You’ll notice every one of them is marked on the back with the rubber stamp of the bank where she deposited them. The Northeastern Trade Bank & Trust. It’s a small bank. No branches. We run into it on a lot of these audits. Just one office on the street floor of the Saranac Hotel on Seventy-second and Broadway.”
“I know the Saranac,” Pinny said, his voice lifting in surprise. “It’s practically around the corner from where we live at Seventy-second and Central Park West. Just up the block, anyway.”
It occurred to me with equal surprise that it was just up the block from his mother, too. I had always assumed that men who kept mistresses kept them as far from their legal homes as they could without creating an inconvenience that took the fun out of the whole expensive enterprise. Apparently Pinny’s father, however, had not worried about the fact that on his way into the Saranac to visit D. G. Crystal, he might run into his wife on the street.
“Well,” I said, “on these audits, these rowboats and canoes accounts, we find a lot of these kept women live at the Saranac, I don’t know why, and they use the Northeastern Trade & Trust because it’s convenient, I guess. Right there in the building. So, as I said, while it’s only a guess, it seems a pretty good one that you’ll find your father at the Saranac Hotel.”
“Thanks,” Pinny said. He touched my arm briefly, in a curiously inept gesture that puzzled me until I thought about it later: he had apparently never made it before. Certainly not to somebody like me. “Don’t look so worried,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody how I found out. Your job is safe.”
“I’m not worrying about that,” I said. This was only partially true. “I was thinking about your father,” I said. “You’re going up there to make him feel good, you say, but I wonder if what you’re going to tell him will do the trick.”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“What you have in mind, sticking his creditors for a million bucks,” I said. “He’ll see right away that a thing like that takes years, even assuming it can work. What I mean is, you’re going up there to tell him you’re planning revenge on the guys who threw him into bankruptcy, but this thing you’ve got planned, it’s an awful slow kind of revenge.”
“Maybe on the way uptown I’ll think of something quicker,” Pinny said.
Apparently he did. The next morning every newspaper in New York reported on its front page that moments after he walked in on his father and his father’s mistress at the Hotel Saranac, a seventeen-year-old boy named Pinny Slater shot them both dead.
Years later, after he was paroled, I received a letter from Pinny. It came from Caracas in Venezuela, where, his engraved letterhead indicated, he was in the wine business. My wife, who over the years has heard the story of my life in The Great Depression, thought Pinny could have said a little more. I thought he said enough.
“Pants are slow,” he wrote. “Liquor is quicker.”
Besides, the printed letterhead answered a question that had puzzled me for years. Pinny was called Pinny because his given
name was Pinero. I still wonder who thought that up.
8
“The Great Business Of Life Is To Be, To Do, To Do Without, And To Depart.”
John, Viscount Morley
ON COLUMBUS DAY OF 1930, Maurice Saltzman & Company enjoyed its most successful day since Mr. Saltzman and Ira Bern founded the firm. On that day the Receiver in Bankruptcy for the Southern District of New York retained the partners to do four bankruptcy audits. Two big ones, one real big one, and one sockdologer. The staff had to go on a seven-day week, and the firm had to do something about it. One of the things they did was raise the salary of Benny Kramer from eleven to thirteen dollars a week. As a result the Kramer family moved from 390 East Fourth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to 1075 Tiffany Street in the Bronx. Mr. and Mrs. Kramer were pleased with their new surroundings. For a while Benny didn’t have time to think about it.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Benny Kramer Novels
1
MY MOTHER’S BODY DISAPPEARED three weeks ago from the Peretz Memorial Hospital in the Borough of Queens. The event took place sometime between 8:25 A.M. and 11:40 A.M. on the morning before Christmas Eve. It was a Sunday. At 8:25 on that morning I received a phone call at my home from Dr. Herman Sabinson.
Fourth Street East Page 21
