Free The Secret by Harold Robbins Page A

stores in the country sell name brands that come from sweatshops like Charlie Han’s. Their buyers have no idea—or can pretend they have no idea—about the conditions in which the clothes they buy for their stores are made. Charlie is a contractor. He gets a contract—an oral contract, nothing in writing—to make a thousand dozen skirts, let’s say, for Big Store chain. That contract comes from a middleman who may have got it from another middleman, and only the middlemen deal directly with Big Store. Big Store defines design and fabric, Charlie buys the fabric and thread and zipper for, say, a dollar seventy-five per skirt, has the sewing done in his sweatshop at a cost of a dollar twenty-five per skirt, and sells the skirt to Middleman One for seven-fifty. Middleman One sells it to Middleman Two for eleven twenty-five, and Middleman Two sells wholesale to Big Store Corporation for, say twenty-one dollars—”
    “Why two middlemen?” I asked.
    “Levels of insulation,” Sal explained. “It’s illegal to sell sweatshop merchandise, so they build a barrier between Charlie and Big Store. Now, Middleman Two sells the skirt to Big Store for twenty-one dollars, and Big Store sells it to the public for seventy-five fifty. Sometimes Big Store has a sale and sells the Leigh skirt for fifty-six fifty. Customer thinks she’s got a great deal!”
    “So we…?”
    “We make a deal with Charlie Han to make stuff for us. We don’t want to get in trouble with the law, so we deal with Charlie through a guy I know by the name of Murray. That way we don’t sell stuff we know is sweatshop-made. Murray insulates us from Charlie. That’s his business. He’s an insurance broker, so to speak. He takes the risk of getting in trouble with the law for dealing in sweatshop merchandise. He takes the fall if shit happens, and we’re protected.”
    “Jesus!”
    “Hey, don’t think you can reform the garment industry. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been—hell, for a century at least, and more than that I imagine. And let me tell you something else: Charlie will deliver quality merchandise. Forget how it gets made. From the standpoint of quality and cleanliness, it’s made right. ”
    Okay. If I didn’t take a profit out of this way of doing business, somebody else would. And, of course, if Herr Standartenführer Schultz hadn’t had his squads shoot all those Jews down there in the woods, somebody else would have. It’s a common rationalization, one that covers a multitude of sins. The unsubtle don’t even realize they are rationalizing and soldier on with clear consciences.
    But Charlie Han would only do the sewing. We had to provide the designs, and as it turned out we would have to provide the fabrics.
    For Cheeks, design would be everything.
    In this, Sal was not at all helpful. Giselle tried to be helpful. But she knew little about American designers. Help came from an unexpected source.
    Melissa Lamb, whose hair had shown above the top of her bikini when we took the first photographs for the shops, was a professional model and modeled for many sales campaigns for my lines. I had kept in touch with her. When I mentioned to her that I was looking for a designer, she named a name. He was good, she said, and he specialized in the sort of thing I wanted.
    So, with some reservations, I contacted the designer she recommended: Larkin Albert.
    I took him for a flaming fag, a swish. God knows I’d had my fill of fairies, having had to work with a whole family of them and their cutie-boys for almost two decades. But Larkin was something else. And I was wrong about him. He was not homosexual. He was a cross-dresser. What’s more, he was damn good at it.
    Often he went on the streets as a woman, wearing a wig, falsies, and high-heeled shoes, carefully limited makeup, and a miniskirt. I hardly need say that men tried to pick him up. They could experience not just one but sometimes two most unpleasant surprises.