Free The Secret by Harold Robbins

cuter. Within two weeks at least one photo poster in each of our shops was a picture of Truda showing a lot of skin.
    This inspired her to think she could become a model. Her hair was red, so she took to calling herself Ginger. She had a portfolio of pictures taken and began to offer herself as a model. Sal and I thought it was strange, but a number of photographers hired her. She never became the fashion model she had dreamed of being, but her picture appeared from time to time in magazines given to photo art. One caption suggested a fat girl like her had to have a lot of courage to pose in the nude. That showed how much the caption writer understood about a woman like Truda. She wasn’t ashamed of herself. She was proud.

17
    Frank Costello had suggested that Sal’s chief value to Cheeks would be his contacts in the garment district. And so it turned out. He knew his way around in that business.
    When we went to the district, I expected to meet a bald, cigar-chewing man in a soiled shirt and vest, sitting at a scarred old desk, probably with his feet up—an Uncle Harry come back to life.
    What I met instead was an emaciated Chinese named Charlie Han, dressed in fashionable faded blue jeans and a light blue flannel shirt with white buttons. Charlie was a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels, and a pack of them always stood in his shirt pocket. He did not put his feet on a desk. If he had a desk. If he had a desk, I never saw it. In fact, I never saw any room that might have been his office. If you didn’t find him in one of his shops, walking around, supervising, you would find him sitting in a booth in a coffee shop on Thirty-eighth Street. As I would learn, Charlie did business in cash and kept no records, so the tax authorities could find no way to audit him. Well … actually, they could have, but he also made it his business to be inconspicuous, and I doubt that the agencies who might have wanted to look into his operations were even aware he existed.
    Everyone has heard the word sweatshop. Few have ever seen one. Charlie’s employees were almost all Hispanic women, from a variety of Latin-American nations. Few of them were legal immigrants. They worked at sewing machines on the upper floors of district buildings, in conditions that even I—who thought of myself as reasonably knowledgeable about how things were on the streets—found unbelievable.
    For example, there was just one toilet for as many as fifty women. They had one ten-minute toilet break in the morning and one in the afternoon, at which time a line naturally formed and most of them did not return to their machines by the end of the break. When they didn’t—or if they went to the toilet at another time—they were docked an hour’s wages. An hour!
    These women were young, most of them, and many of them were conspicuously pregnant. Abused by the sweatshop all day, they went home to some hovel at night to be abused by the man who had gotten them into this country, and who took their money from them. They were slaves; there was no other way to put it.
    Charlie paid his people cash. That way there was no record of how much he paid to whom, so he paid no social security, no workers’ compensation premiums, no unemployment compensation tax. God knows what other taxes or charges he did not pay. Of course he paid nothing like the minimum wage. Very few of the women who worked for him knew there was such a thing.
    Once in a while a union organizer came around and tried to organize the women. Those fellows were in a risky business. They had a way of … disappearing. Various kinds of reformers came around from time to time, representing organizations as lofty as the United Nations. An operator like Charlie could move his sweatshop in a matter of hours, so that when inspectors came in response to a reformer complaint all they found was a bunch of empty floors.
    “That’s the garment industry,” Sal told me. “Forget you ever saw this shop. The most upscale