"Now this is what you do, my boy," Fred gave me quick instruction in the
hushed voice of a conspirator. "A minute or so after I leave you, you
take your hat and coat and pass through the room where I'm talking to
him. I won't notice you. When you're nearly at the door, I'll call you
back. You'll be in a hurry, but you'll come back. I'll introduce you
to Mr. Visconti, then I'll say confidential-like, but loud enough for
him to hear, 'You going out about those bonds?' 'Yes,' you answer, 'but
I'll be back soon.' 'While you're about it,' I'll say, 'you can tell
Spifkins we can let him have that two-hundred thousand on call at four
and three quarters.' You just nod quickly, like a busy man, salute Mr.
Visconti and out you go."
"Where--do I go?" I stammered in a daze.
"You go to a telephone booth downstairs in the lobby and you call me up
on the wire. And don't be surprised at anything I say until I hang up.
Then you can walk round the block and come back. Is that clear?"
"Clear as an asphalt pavement," I answered in my bewilderment.
"That's all right then," he grinned and left me.
Complying with his absurd charge, nevertheless, I was duly introduced to
the well-dressed, well-fed, deep-hued Italian banker from Macdougal
Street and made my way to the telephone booth in the lobby of the
building below. And this is what I heard in Fred's most suave and
ingratiating tone.
"Oh, not at all, Mr. Ferris--always glad to hear from a customer.
Ah--yes, Mr. Ferris. We can still let you have those bonds. Though in
reality they are sold to another client. But I think we can give him
something just as good that will suit him equally well. Yes, that will
be all right. A hundred thousand, wasn't it? Well, well--ha! ha!
Better late than never. Don't let that bother you. Yes, yes, Mr.
Ferris. Send them over to your office as soon as my partner comes back.
I am a little busy now with a customer. Oh, don't mention it, don't
mention it! Eh? Why, yes--thanks. At the Waldorf about five, then.
Ta-ta." And he hung up the receiver.
For a moment I stood speechless in the steaming booth with the telephone
receiver in my hands and then I staggered out, shaken by helpless
laughter.
When I returned, Visconti, smiling broadly, was in the process of being
ushered out by Fred with warm exchanges of amiabilities. We all shook
hands on the threshold in a cordial flurry of busy enthusiasm and a
moment later Fred and I were alone.
"Just sold that fine peach of a Guinea ten thousand dollars' worth of
Hesperus Power bonds," chuckled Fred in irrepressible glee.
"But where," I demanded, "did you get the bonds to sell?"
"Haven't got them yet," he paced the room in nervous jubilation. "But
we'll get them in a jiffy--at the National City Bank. They've got lots
of 'em over there."
Something dark and heavy and cold seemed to have dropped inside of me
upon the vital parts, and chilled me for an instant.
"So this is this kind of a business?" I muttered.
"This is the way this kind of a business begins," he replied composedly.
That interlude of actual business after the ferocious activity of
renting, equipping and furnishing an office, getting stationery printed
and engraved, installing a ticker, making that mysterious body of
connections that was Fred's province, was sufficiently exhilarating to
make me accept it without much scrutiny. After all, what could I do?
This was the furrow in which my plow was set and this, I suppose, is the
custom of the country.
"How," I could not help wonderingly asking, "did you land the effulgent
Visconti?"
"Oh, he's a good scout," explained Fred. "He runs a banking house for
his fellow dagoes in Macdougal Street. He saw we were new and he likes
to give young fellows a chance. He was quite frank. You see, it's
nothing for the big houses to sell ten bonds or so. But he knows that
to us just opening up it means a lot more than the commission. It means
a Sale. Oh, he's a sport, all right."
"That surprises me more than I can say," I told him.
"There are some good-hearted brutes even in this business," growled
Fred, "and don't you forget it."
"Do you think," I asked with a twinge of shame, "he saw through your
telephoning business and that rigmarole of yours to me in the booth?"
"Damn if I don't think he did!" roared Fred. "But never mind. He's a
sport. And some day, when we're big guns, we'll show him that we
appreciate his hand-out by putting him on to something good--see if we
don't!"
I felt as shamefaced as though we had committed a felony. Yet I suppose
that this is the ordinary comparatively innocent chicane of even honest
business, remnants of oriental chaffering and huckstering that still
survive. I am hoping we shall grow out of it. Though at times I suspect
a certain flamboyancy of temperament in Fred that makes him resort to
such shifts rather than not.
A man who had purchased some bonds called up and inquired whether we
would take them back. There was no reason for Fred's offering anything
but an endeavor to dispose of them. But instead his grandiose reply
was:
"Why, certainly we shall take those bonds back, Mr. Smith--and as many
more of them as you've got. Yes, bring them down by all means."
Once he had hung up the receiver he turned toward me with blank dismay,
muttering:
"Now what the hell shall we do with those things?"