Chapter 1
Jim Benton checked the address on the face of the building against the scrap of paper he held in his hand. He nodded to himself, crumpled the piece of paper, and dropped it into one of the meshwork trash baskets which decorate the streets of Manhattan.
He stepped back to the curb to look up toward the roof of the building. Behind which one of those eighteen stories of windows, he wandered, was the office he wanted? It was one of the older buildings of the city with arched windows on the first floor above street level.
The windows of the upper stories were huge expanses of glass, some of them with gold leaf lettering on them.
Looking up like that he must look like a hick from the country, he knew, and he turned his head down once again, thrust both hands into his pockets, and hunched his shoulders.
In a minute he'd go in. In just a minute. He wanted time to collect himself, to prepare himself. This was going to be a very important day in his life.
He fingered a cigarette out of the pack in the inside breast pocket of his thirty-five dollar suit, and stopped with the paper cylinder halfway to his mouth to grin wryly. Taking out one cigarette at a time like that, without exposing the pack, was a gesture of habit which was no longer necessary.
The lighter with the transparent plastic body through which the fuel could be seen was in the side pocket of the jacket. He took it out, turned it over, and pressed the little button that fed fuel to the wick. Only one measly bubble worked up to the surface. His long, lean fingers snapped back the lid and flicked the wheel against the flint in one quick motion. The wick burst to flame and he lit the cigarette.
There was a lamp post a few steps away and he went over to lean against it. Five minutes, he told himself. In five minutes he would go inside, check the office directory, and take the elevator. Just five minutes to get over the nervousness.
It was a real New York fall day. The sky was leaden gray, its color blending, almost perfectly with the soot and dirt of the city. The air was clammy cool and there was just the tiniest hint of a breeze. The midtown sidewalks were jammed with people and he felt that most of them were looking at him.
Everyone was hurrying somewhere. They were all intent on some purpose, the men in business suits, some of them with light topcoats against the early fall chill, the women with their coiffed hair and smart dresses, the housewives with their shopping bags bumping against their hips as they scurried to or from a sale at one of the department stores.
Everybody was busy; even the dirty kids with their shoeshine boxes had a purpose. And there was Jim Benton lounging idly against the pillar of a street light. He was young and healthy-looking. Why was he idle when everyone else was so busy? He must be a bum!
Jim managed to prevent the grin that the word evoked. "Bum!" How many times in his life had he heard that word? From the beginning, ever since he'd been old enough to understand, that word had been in almost constant use in his house. The iceman who serviced the tenement buildings was a bum because he charged so much money for a little frozen water. All Jim's friends had been wild bums who would come to no good. The landlord was a bum. The neighbor's daughter was a bum. The neighborhood shopkeepers, the union representative in the plant where his father worked, the foreman, the owner, yes, even the wealthy owner of the paint company was a bum.
You had to go to school so you wouldn't be a bum.
In summer you couldn't go swimming in the river with the rest of the guys because it would make you a bum. If you asked for a little money you were a bum, but you couldn't take a job after school because delivery boys were all bums, too.
It was a funny word. There were rich bums and poor bums and middle-class bums. Everybody in the world but papa and mamma and little Jimmy were bums and somehow you must, at all costs, avoid becoming a bum.
And it was a pity, too, because everything that was fun would make you a bum. There were times when you actually wanted to be a bum deep down in your secret heart.
Then came the accident at the plant and papa was dead. The railroad flat was filled with shapeless women and squat, ugly men in shiny suits and unblocked hats. They consoled mamma in the thick, guttural tongue of the old country. They drank the fiery liquor, ate the platters of food, talked about the dead man, and each, in turn, warned Jimmy about becoming a bum.
Mamma didn't live too long after that. They had been old people to start with. Jimmy had been a late baby. Three previous children had perished in the old country. Mamma died and Jimmy went to live with his father's sister.
His mother had been in her late fifties. Aunt Kris-ten was in her late thirties. She'd been married twice. Her first husband had divorced her and her second husband hadn't even bothered with any of the legal technicalities. He'd simply disappeared one day, never to be heard from again.
Jimmy's parents had been, despite citizenship school and the environ mental influences, Europeans living in America. But Aunt Kristen had come to America while she was still a teen-ager. High school and business school had completely Americanized her. She had a job in an office. She never went to church. There were lots of men friends, a steady succession of them.
It was a complete change for Jimmy. He still had two more years of high school when he moved in with his aunt, and for those two years he never once heard the word, "bum."
She made him stop calling her aunt and it felt peculiar to call her Kris just like the men who came around. She encouraged him to get a job after school and she even let him keep half his earnings.
Jimmy worked hard and had fun in those two years. After graduation, it was his own decision to make application to the city college. Kris, Aunt Kristen, didn't care one way or the other. He could do as he pleased as far as she was concerned so long as he continued to bring a little money into the house.
He went to school days, worked evenings, and studied between midnight and dawn. It wasn't too bad the first year. The second year was really hell and by the end of the second semester of that second year his grades had fallen terribly low. The polite letter of dismissal from the Dean of Students came as no surprise.
Flunking out didn't upset Jimmy as much as he'd expected. In a funny way he felt actually relieved. College was okay if there was something definite you wanted to be. They could train you to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or an engineer. But for anything else you could learn much better from experience than you could from textbooks.
After college came the Army. Jimmy had a choice to make. He could enlist for six months and spend the next seven and one half years going to meetings once a month and doing two weeks of active duty every summer. He could volunteer for the draft for two years and let them do whatever they wanted with him for that time. He could wait for them to draft him with the same result. Or, he could enlist for three years and have his choice of schools in the Army-It was only one extra year. And at nineteen, when you had your whole life still before you, when you still believed in your own immortality, a year was a small thing.
They sent him to electronic repair school. The course took almost a year so it was still only two years of really being in the Army. After graduation from the school Jimmy was assigned to a small post in the middle of the Arizona desert. The closest he came to electronic repairs for the next two years was when he plugged in a lamp or a radio. Down at Fort Merriman they taught him to type and stuck him in an office and there he stayed until it was time for his discharge.
It was at Fort Merriman that Jim had become friends with Tom Guising. Tom was one of those people for whom the Army and the military way of life had been invented. He was an operator. Three days after he arrived on the post he was firmly entrenched in the money-lending business at a very profitable twenty per cent interest rate. Within a week he was selling government property. And within a month he was amassing a small fortune.
Tom needed a contact in the personnel section and that was how he and Jim met. Guising strolled into the office one day, sat down at Jim's desk, and blatantly offered him fifty dollars for a transfer to supply.
Fifty dollars was a lot of money and the transfer was easy enough. The officers were nominally in charge but it was the clerks, the pencil pushers, who ran the Army. Jim arranged the transfer and pocketed the money. But he didn't let it rest there. He had to find out why the transfer had been worth so much.
Guising didn't try to hide anything. Jim strolled over to the supply building one day and found Tom checking a shipment of materiel against a list on a clipboard. In the peacetime Army there is always too much time and not enough work. The sergeant in charge of the Supply section was over at the N.C.O. Mess swilling beer, which left Tom Guising in charge, which was what the young man wanted. He didn't mind doing most of the work.
Tom led Jim to the small office at the back of the warehouse. They sat down, lit cigarettes, and talked for a few minutes. Then Jim asked the question. Tom's answers shocked him.
Working in Supply was the easiest way to get your hands on merchandise. Somehow slip-ups were always made material was always being lost, or declared unfit. Forged requisitions could be sent through channels. Extra material in one unit could be traded with another unit. Somebody needed sheets while somebody else needed boots or trousers. Deals were made back and forth and Tom Guising had a piece of every deal.
In six months Guising had made more than three thousand dollars above and beyond his meager salary. And the more he made from his deals the more capital he had available for loan-sharking at twenty per cent.
But those weren't the only two angles. There were the payday dice and poker games which could be expected to yield a couple of hundred dollars. There was an employment service. The guys who went broke in the gambling games were willing to earn a little money by pulling K.P. and Guard Duty for the regularly assigned men for ten dollars a shift. Guising got a thirty per cent cut on those deals.
The money really started rolling in when Tom Guising decided to buy a car. Actually, he didn't buy it. When he decided he needed one he began to play cards only with those men who owned cars. It took almost two months for him to win a car in a card game, but it was better than paying money for one.
Guising used the car as a bus, charging five dollars a head for one way trips to the border nearly a hundred miles away. Just across the Mexican border was a small town which depended entirely upon servicemen tourists for its existence. All the guys wanted to get down there and sometimes Guising made ten trips on a week end.
And every guy who went down also had to come back. That was five dollars a head, too. Six passengers could be crowded into the car, which meant a gross of thirty dollars a trip, which could mean as much as three hundred dollars on busy week ends.
But Guising couldn't drive the car and play in the week-end card games, too. First he hired drivers, which freed him for the twenty-four hour gambling sessions; then, later on, he formed a syndicate of gamblers. He chose the four top poker players and the best crapshooter on post, financed them in their various games, absorbed the losses if there were any and took sixty per cent of the winnings.
Business grew by leaps and bounds. But the money really started to roll in when Guising began to import stuff from across the border. He brought back liquor by the case, willingly paid the import duty, and sold it for twice his cost.
The customs men at the border grew to know him. He always had a neat and accurate list of the things he was importing and he didn't mind leaving a bottle now and then as a little gift. The customs men never saw the packages of marijuana or the boxes of illicit books and pictures.
In the two years he spent there Tom Guising managed to make more than thirty thousand dollars! And this was tax free money! Only an idiot would declare that kind of income when he was in service. Nobody ever bothered auditing servicemen's tax forms.
Tom Guising and Jim Benton became fast friends. And when Guising was discharged two months before Jim they made promises to keep in touch. Guising was as good as his word. Three weeks later Jim received a letter from him. Guising was setting up business in New York and Jim was invited to look him up when he got out.
Jim contacted Guising the minute he hit town. They had dinner together that evening and Guising took Jim for a wild cruise through the nitespots of the town. There was much drinking and laughter. Sometime during the evening they collected a pair of pretty girls.
It was three days before Jim and Tom sat down to talk about the business venture. It was quite a simple and profitable thing, really. Guising had managed to lay his hands on an immense stock of illicit materials. There were books, pictures, eight and sixteen millimeter films, and assorted fetishist material.
Jim considered the proposition carefully before refusing. The risk was too great. Material like that couldn't be peddled for very long without the authorities becoming aware of it. And this was the sort of material for which there would be no legal defense. Then, too, there was no sure profit. If a customer skipped without paying they couldn't take him to court. They might make a thousand dollars one week and not one thin dime for fifteen weeks after that.
It was far too big a change for Jim even to consider. He had no compunctions about the morality involved.
He didn't see anything patently wrong in selling material which concentrated on describing all the forms and variations of bedroom encounters. It wasn't stealing. It wasn't murder. Just because some bluenose had managed to get a law passed against this stuff didn't make it morally wrong. Every red-blooded American male, and quite a few of the females, too, got a kick out of seeing that kind of stuff. There was nothing wrong with that.
What was wrong for Jim was the uncertainty of the thing. You would never know when the knock on the door was the long arm of the law. You could never be sure how much money you would make that day, or week, or month. And, at best, the business was limited in the sense of time. What would happen, what would they do, when the stock of material was gone? Was there more available? How risky was it to get?
It was too big a step for him from the secure, though stifling, military life to the uncertainty of this illegal existence. It was easy for Tom. Even in the Army he had lived on the thin edge of total disaster.
Tom understood Jim's refusal and didn't let it make any difference in their friendship. He even went so far as to arrange for this job interview for Jim. The job was on the staff of a weekly newspaper with nationwide distribution. The paper was called the Gotham Whisper. It was a scandal sheet that specialized in gory and perverted stories with headlines like: "I Hated My Baby."
It wasn't the New York Times, but it was a start. It was a place to learn the trade. If a guy had what it takes there wasn't any reason why he couldn't go on to more legitimate work.
Jim stirred himself from the lamp post, flicked away the stub of his cigarette, straightened his suit, took a deep breath, and went into the building. The building directory listed the Gotham Whisper offices on the ninth floor. Nine-twelve, to be exact.
The automatic elevator whisked Jim up to nine. He stepped out into the corridor, felt twinges of the apprehension return, and paused for a moment. Room nine-twelve was at the end of the corridor. The lettering on the opaque glass was gold leaf. Only the name of the company appeared. The other doors on the corridor were all blank, except for the one that said, "MEN."
Jim opened the door and found himself in a large, noisy office. A low railing separated a waiting area from the working area. There were several uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs, a water cooler, a stand of dogeared magazines, and many dirty ash trays.
Behind the railing, just beside the double-hinged gate, was the receptionist. She had a typewriter on the desk before her and a small switchboard at her side. A call was just coming in when Jim entered. The girl spoke into the receiver of her telephone for a moment, then went through the stylized routine of plugging in one of the jacks, dialing one number on her dial, speaking for another moment, then putting through the call.
She was not quite what Jim expected a Manhattan receptionist to be. Her voice had just a touch of whine to it. Her inflection was poor and the local accent quite strong. She was no kid, either. Jim placed her age somewhere around thirty, and at that he felt he was being generous.
Her face had a hard, used look. You knew, by watching her for a very few seconds, that this was a lousy job for any girl. Of course, you also knew that any job would be lousy for this girl. She seemed grudgingly efficient.
She wore a white, short-sleeved blouse which curved over her rounded bosom. The short vee neckline only hinted at the bounteous treasures beneath. Her legs could be seen through the open kneehole of the desk. They were acceptable. The short skirt had ridden above her knees to show the rolled tops of her stockings cutting deep into the soft flesh of her upper legs.
She saw Jim look at her legs but made no move to pull her skirt down. Her eyes flicked over him, taking in the cheap suit and the slightly nervous manner. The disapproving glance made careful inventory and her evaluation was evident in her tone and manner.
"Yeah," she almost snarled. "Whadda ya' want?"