They Walked Like Men

  Finally he came on.

  “Parker,” he asked, “what can I do for you?”

  “I’m being thrown out,” I said. “I need a roof above my head.”

  “Oh my God!” he said.

  “A room will do,” I told him. “Just one big room if that’s the best there is.”

  “Look, Parker, how long have you got?”

  “Until the first of the year.”

  “Maybe in that time I can do something for you. The situation may ease up a bit. I’ll keep you in mind. Almost anything, you say?”

  “Is it really that bad, Bob?”

  “I got them in the office. I got them on the phone. People hunting homes.”

  “But what happened? There are all those new apartment houses and the big developments. They had signs out front, advertised for rent or sale all summer.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he sounded frantic. “I wouldn’t even try to answer. I just can’t understand it. I could sell a thousand homes. I could rent any number of apartments. But I haven’t got a one. I’m sitting here, going stony broke, because I have no listings. They all ran down to zero a good ten days ago. I have people pleading with me. They offer bribes to me. They think I’m holding out. I have more customers than I ever had before and there’s no way I can do business with them.”

  “New people coming into town?”

  “God, I don’t think so, Parker. Not this many of them.”

  “New couples starting out?”

  “I tell you, honest, half of the folks waiting for me are older people who sold their homes because the families had grown up and they didn’t need a big house any more. And a lot of the others are people who sold their places because their families were increasing and they needed room.”

  “And now,” I said, “there is no room at all.”

  “That’s the size of it,” he said.

  There was nothing more to say.

  I said it.

  “Thanks, Bob.”

  “I’ll keep watch for you,” he said. He didn’t sound too hopeful.

  I hung up and sat there and wondered what was going on. There was something going on—I was sure of that. This was not just a situation brought about by an abnormal demand. Here was something that defied all rules of economics. There was a story somewhere; I could almost smell it. Franklin’s had been sold and Ed had lost his lease and Old George had sold this building and people were storming realty offices in a mad attempt to find a place to live.

  I got up and put on my hat and coat. I tried not to notice the semicircle out of the carpeting when I went out the door.

  I had a terrible hunch—a terrifying hunch.

  The apartment building stood on the edge of a neighborhood shopping area, one that had developed years before, long before anyone had thought of sticking shopping centers helter-skelter way out in the sticks.

  If my hunch was right, the answer might lie in the shopping area—in any shopping area.

  I set out, hunting for that answer.

  IX

  Ninety minutes later I had my answer and I was scared stone cold.

  Most of the business houses in the area had lost their leases or were about to lose them. Several with long leases had sold their businesses. Most of the buildings apparently had changed hands within the last few weeks.

  I talked with men who were desperate and others who had become resigned. And a few who were angry and another few who admitted they were licked.

  “I tell you,” one druggist said, “maybe it is just as well. With the tax structure as it stands and all the regulations and the governmental interference, I sometimes wonder just how smart it is to remain in business. Sure, I looked for another location. But that was pure reflex. Habit dies hard in almost any man. But there’s no location. There’s nowhere for me to go. So I’ll just sell out my stock as best I can and get this monkey off my back, then wait and see what happens.” “Any plans?” I asked.

  “Well, the wife and I have been talking for some time about a long vacation. But we never took it. Never got around to taking it. This business tied me down and it’s hard to get good help.”

  And there was the barber who had waved his scissors and snipped them angrily.

  “Christ,” he said, “a man can’t make a living any longer.

  They won’t let you.”

  I wanted to ask him who they were, but he didn’t give me a chance to get in a single word.

  “God knows I make a poor enough living as it is,” he said. “Barbering isn’t what it used to be. Haircuts are all you get. Now and then a shampoo, but that is all. We used to shave them and give them facials and all of them wanted stickum on their hair. But now all we get is haircuts. And now they won’t even let me keep the little that I have.”

  I managed to ask who they were, and he couldn’t tell me. He was angry that I asked. He thought I was smarting off.

  Two old family establishments (among others), each of which owned its building, had held out against the offers which had been made them, each more attractive than the last.

  “You know Mr. Graves,” said an old gentleman at one of the hold-out business houses, “there might have been a time when I would have taken one of the offers. I suppose that I am foolish that I didn’t. But I’m too old a man. Me and this store have become so entangled we’re a part of one another. To sell out the business would be like selling out myself. I don’t suppose that you can understand that.”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  He put up a pale old hand, with the startling blue of veins standing out against the porcelain of his skin, and smoothed the thin white thatch of hair that clung plastered to his skull.

  “There’s such a thing as pride,” he told me. “Pride in a way of doing business. No one else, I can assure you, would carry on this business in the same manner that I do. There are no manners in the world today, young man. There isn’t any kindness. And no consideration. There’s no such thing as thinking the best of one’s fellowmen. The business world has become a bookkeeping operation, performed by machines and by men who are very like machines in that they have no soul. There is no honor and no trust and the ethics have become the ethics of a wolf pack.”

  He reached out the porcelain hand and laid it on my arm so lightly I couldn’t feel its touch.

  “You say all my neighbors have lost their leases or sold out?”

  “The most of them.”

  “Jake up the street—he hasn’t? The one in the furniture business. He’s a thieving old scoundrel, but he thinks the same as I.”

  I told him he was right. Jake wasn’t selling out, one of the half dozen or so who hadn’t.

  “He’s the same as me,” the old man said. “We look on business as a trust and privilege. These others only see it as a way of making money. Jake has his sons he can leave the business to, and that may make a difference. Maybe that’s another reason he is hanging on. It is different with me. I have no family. There is just my sister. Just the two of us. When we are gone, the business will go with us. But so long as we live, we stay here, serving the public as honorably as we can. For I tell you, sir, that business is more than just a counting of the profits. It is a chance for service, a chance to make a contribution. It is the glue that keeps our civilization stuck together, and there can be no prouder profession for any man to follow.”

  It sounded like a muted trumpet call from some other era, and that, perhaps, was exactly what it was. For a moment I sensed the thrill of proud-bright banners waving in the blue and I felt the newness and the clearness that was gone forever now.

  And the old man may have seen the same thing that I had seen, for he said: “It is all tarnished now. Only here and there, in a few secluded corners, can we keep it shining bright.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “You’ve done me a lot of good.”

  As we shook hands in parting, I wondered why I should have told him that. Wondering why, I knew it was the truth— that somehow he’d d
one something, or said something, to put back some faith in me. Faith in what? I wondered, and I wasn’t sure. Faith in Man, perhaps. Faith in the world. Perhaps, even, some faith in myself.

  I went out of the store and stood on the sidewalk and shivered, cold in the last warmness of the day.

  For now it was not just happenstance, whatever it might be that was going on. It wasn’t only Franklin’s or the apartment in which I lived. It wasn’t only Ed who had lost his lease. It wasn’t only people who could find no place to live.

  There was a pattern here—a pattern and a vicious purpose. And a thoroughness and a method that were diabolic.

  And somewhere behind it all, a smooth-working organization that moved with secrecy and speed. For apparently all the transactions had been concluded within the last few months and all of them aimed at a roughly coincidental closing date.

  One thing I didn’t know, and could only guess at, was whether one man or a small group of men or a vast army of them had been needed to do the dickering, to make the offers, to finally close the deals. I had tried to find out, but no one seemed to know. Most of the men I had talked with were those who had leased their quarters and had no way of knowing.

  I walked to a corner and went into a drugstore. I squeezed into a phone booth and dialed the office. When a phone gal answered, I asked to speak with Dow.

  “Where you been?” he asked.

  “Goofing off,” I told him.

  “We’ve been going wild up here,” Dow said. “Hennessey’s announced they had lost their lease.”

  “Hennessey’s!” Although I don’t know why I should have been surprised, knowing what I knew.

  “It isn’t possible,” said Dow. “Not the two of them in a single day.”

  Hennessey’s was the second loop department store. With both it and Franklin’s gone, the downtown shopping district would become a desert.

  “You missed the first edition with your airport interview,”

  I told him, stalling for time, wondering how much I ought to tell him.

  “The plane was late,” he said.

  “How did they keep it so quiet?” I demanded. “There wasn’t a single rumor about the Franklin’s deal.”

  “I went over to see Bruce,” said Dow. “I asked him that. He showed me the contract—not for publication, just between the two of us. There was a clause in there which automatically canceled out the sale in case of premature announcement.”

  “And Hennessey’s?”

  “First National owned the building. They probably had the same clause in their contract. Hennessey’s can stay on for another year, but there’s no other building—”

  “The price would have to be good. At least good enough for them not to want to lose the sale. To keep that quiet, I mean.”

  “In the Franklin’s case, it was. Again, not for publication, in strictest confidence, it was twice as much as anyone in their right mind would pay. And after paying that much, the new owner shuts it down. That’s what hurts Bruce the worst. As if someone hated Franklin’s so much they’d pay twice what it was worth just to shut it down.”

  Dow hesitated for a moment; then he said: “Parker, it makes no sense at all. No business sense, that is.”

  And I was thinking: That explained all the secrecy. Why there had been no rumors. Why Old George had failed to tell me he had sold the building—scurrying off to California so his friends and tenants couldn’t ask him why he hadn’t told them he had sold the building.

  I stood there in the booth, wondering if it could be possible that there had been restrictive clauses in each one of the contracts and if the dates of those restrictive clauses could have been the same.

  It seemed incredible, of course, but the whole thing was incredible.

  “Parker,” asked Dow, “are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m still here. Tell me one thing, Dow. Who was it that bought Franklin’s?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some property management outfit called Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel had some hand in drawing up the papers. I called them—”

  “And they told you they were handling it for a client. They were not at liberty to tell you who the client was.”

  “Exactly. How did you know that?”

  “Just a guess,” I said. “This whole thing stinks to heaven.”

  “I checked up on Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel,” said Dow. “They have been in business a sum total of ten weeks.”

  I said a silly thing. “Ed lost his lease today. It is going to be lonesome.”

  “Ed?”

  “Yeah. Ed’s bar.”

  “Parker, what is going on?”

  “Darned if I know,” I said. “So what else is new?”

  “Money. I checked. The banks are overflowing with money. Cash money. They’ve been busy for the last week scooping it in. People come in loaded and are socking it away.”

  “Well, well,” I said, “it is nice to know the area’s economy is in such good condition.”

  “Parker,” snapped Dow, “what in hell is the matter with you?”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

  I hung up quick, before he could ask me any more.

  I stood there and wondered why I hadn’t told him what I knew. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have. There was, in fact, probably every reason that I should have, for it fell in line of duty.

  And yet I hadn’t done it, because I had been unable to, couldn’t bring myself to do it. Almost as if by not saying it, I’d keep it from being true. Almost as if I didn’t say it, there’d be no truth in it.

  And that, of course, was silly.

  I got out of the booth and went down the street. I stood on the corner and dug into my pocket and brought out the notice I had gotten in the mail. Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel was located in the loop—in the old McCandless Building, one of those ancient brownstone tombs that were marked for early razing by the city’s redevelopment authority.

  I could see the setup—the creaking elevators and the stairs with marble treads and with great bronze railings, blackened now with age; the solemn corridors with their wainscoting of oak so old it shone with the polish of its aging, with the ceilings high and the doors with great squares of frosted glass reaching halfway down them. And on the first floor the arcade with the stamp shop and the tobacco shop, with the magazine counter and the shoe-shine corner and a dozen other little businesses.

  I looked at my watch and it was after five o’clock. The street was packed with a solid stream of cars, the beginning of the homeward rush, with the traffic streaming westward, heading for one of the two great highways that led out into the area of huge housing developments and cozy little neighbor hoods tucked away among the lakes and hills.

  The sun had set and it was that moment when daylight is beginning to fade and twilight has not quite yet set in. The nicest part of the day, I thought, for people who weren’t troubled or had nothing on their minds.

  I walked slowly down the street, turning over slowly what was frying in my brain. I didn’t like it much, but it was a hunch, and I’d learned from long experience not to turn my back on hunches. Too many had paid off in the past to allow me to ignore them.

  I found a hardware store and went into it. I bought a glass cutter, feeling guilty as I did it. I put it in my pocket and went out on the street again.

  There were more people on the sidewalk now and more cars honking in the street. I stood well up against a building and watched the crowd flow past.

  Perhaps, I told myself, I should drop it now. Perhaps the smart thing to do was simply to go home and then hi an hour or so get dressed and go and pick up Joy.

  I stood there undecided and I almost dropped it, but there was something in me nagging, something that would not let me drop it.

  A cab came down the street, hemmed in by the cars. It stopped with the stream of traffic, caught by a changing traffic light, almost in front of me. I saw that it was empty and I
didn’t stop to think. I didn’t give myself a chance to make a real decision. I stepped out to the curb and the cabby saw me and swung the door open so I could get in.

  “Where to, mister?”

  I gave him the intersection just beyond the McCandless Building.

  The light changed and the cab edged along.

  “Have you noticed, mister,” said the cabby, by way of starting a conversation, “how the world has gone to hell?”

  X

  The McCandless Building was just the way I had imagined it, the way all the old brownstone office buildings were.

  The third-floor corridor was hushed, with the faint light of the dying day filtering into the windows at its end. The carpet was worn and the walls were stained; the woodwork, for all its ancient shine, had a tired and beaten look.

  The office doors were frosted glass, with the peeling, tattered

  gold of firm names fixed upon them. Each door, I noted, was fitted with a lock independent of the ancient lock built into the knob assembly.

  I paced the length of the hall to be sure there was no one around. All the offices apparently were deserted. This was a Friday night and the office workers would have gotten out as soon as possible to begin their weekend. It was too early yet for the cleaning women to come in.

  The office of Ross, Martin, Park & Gobel was near the end of the corridor. I tried the door and it was locked, as I knew it would be. I took out the glass cutter and settled down to work. It was not an easy job. When you cut a piece of glass, you’re supposed to lay it on a flat surface and work at it from above. That way you can manage, if you’re careful, to get a sure and steady pressure so that the little wheel can score the glass. And here I was, trying to cut a piece of glass that was standing on its edge.

  It took me quite a while, but I finally got the glass scored and put the cutter back into my pocket. I stood for a moment, listening, making sure there was no one in the corridor or coming up the stairs. Then I bumped the glass with my elbow and the scored piece cracked and broke, leaning at an angle, still held within the doorframe. I nudged it again and it broke and fell inside the room. And I had a fist-size hole just above the lock.