Free I Can Get It for You Wholesale by Jerome Weidman Page B

silent stuff. Maurice Pulvermacher and Calvin Coolidge.
    “So what’ve we got?” I said, leaning back. “We’ve got five hundred trips a week for which you’re paying out two hundred and ten dollars.” I pointed the cigar at him. “If I were to tell you, Mr. Pulvermacher, that I could make those five hundred trips for you for a hundred and twenty-five dollars—meaning you’d be saving eighty-five dollars every week, maybe even more, but at least eighty-five—if I told you that, would you be interested?”
    He shrugged and said, “Well, why not?”
    He was lukewarm, but I wanted him hot.
    “And suppose I were to tell you further, Mr. Pulvermacher”—it wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it—“that you wouldn’t have any labor troubles, you wouldn’t have any strikes, you wouldn’t have to worry about hiring shipping clerks, or anything like that. And , on top of all that, besides saving you the money, when the slow seasons come around, and there aren’t so many deliveries, instead of paying fourteen shipping clerks they should sit around on their behinds all day, instead of that you’d only be paying for the few deliveries a day that they made, and you’d save twice as much as during the busy season, suppose I were to tell you that, what would you say?”
    He lit his cigar, hunching himself around it, before he spoke.
    “You been doing a lot of talking, Mr. Bogen,” he said, “and all I been doing is listening, but I still don’t see what you’re driving at. How are you going to save me all this money and cut out all my labor troubles and all the rest of this shmei-drei you been talking about? How are you going to do it?”
    “That’s easy. I represent the Needle Trades Delivery Service, Inc.” This is a free country, isn’t it? “We specialize in deliveries in the garment district.” You’d never guess that from the name. “For twenty-five cents a package,” I said, “we’ll deliver as many packages, bundles, boxes, or what-have-you, that you ask us to, any place in the neighborhood. At twenty-five cents each we’ll deliver those five hundred packages for you. It’ll only cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars, instead of the two hundred and ten you’re paying now. There won’t be any shipping clerks to go out on strike on you. When it gets slow, and you don’t have five hundred deliveries a week, it’ll cost you just that much less. You pay as you go, twenty-five cents a package, and we do all the worrying. How does that strike you?”
    He took the cigar out of his mouth and began to pinch his lower lip. I put my cigar into my pocket and lit a cigarette.
    “What firms do you do this kind of work for?” he asked.
    The clever little son of a bitch!
    “I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Pulvermacher.” To a baloney bender this is what’s known as making a virtue out of a necessity. To me it’s just using your head for something else besides a brace to keep your ears apart. “We’ve just started our organization,” I said. “You’re the first one we’ve approached.”
    “And why me?”
    Well, now he’d let himself in for it.
    “Because not only are you the president of the biggest and most representative firm of dress manufacturers on Seventh Avenue, Mr. Pulvermacher, but you’re also the president of the Associated Dress Manufacturers of New York. That’s why.”
    He smiled a little and plugged his mouth with the cigar. But he should have seen me. Inside I was laughing out loud.
    “What good will it do your organization if we sign up for your service, if we’re the only ones you’re working for?”
    “Ah, Mr. Pulvermacher, that’s where you’re wrong. Once we get you on our books, the rest of them will follow like sheep. You know that as well as I do. You know they do anything you say, Mr. Pulvermacher.”
    Maybe he didn’t know it, but all you had to do was take one look at his squash to see that he believed it.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waving the