The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [184]
to devote the necessary time and money. In short, Grammick and I were intended to hold the line. I learned to do somewhat as he did. He would work sixteen hours daily for ten or twelve days at a stretch and then for two whole days he couldn't be found by anyone. He spent that time in his mother's flat, sleeping and eating steaks and ice-cream, taking the old lady to the movies or read K* ing. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law too. Grammick wasn't going to be sucked away from all private existence. I went along with this rush, really needing some such thing now because of my blowout with Simon. After office hours I was out on the streetcars, traveling to see cooks and dishwashers or hotel clerks on night duty--those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont, when the white catalpa bells were opening and even the dust could have a sweet odor. Many clerks especially asked you to come at night, when they could speak freely. The conspiratorial part of it was fine; and with the radical ideas then going, these people who were placed in a position to be thoughtful, since they were up all night, wanted the chance to say those self-rehearsed things that sometimes had been on their hearts too long. True and false light was distributed just about as usual, is my opinion. But it wasn't my place to judge that, but only to advance the work. Some of these guys just plain meant business. I suspect they wanted me to be more dangerous than I appeared to be.. I know I, seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion. And here instead I would breeze in--I knew sometimes that my color and the height of my hair, my relaxed way, would give offense. But there wasn't any help for that. Occasionally they'd even ask for my credentials. "Did they send you from headquarters?" "You Eddie Dawson?" "That's right." "I'm March. You talked to me on the telephone." "You?" said Dawson. And I knew he had expected to see some sandy, suck-cheeked devil, veteran of coal fields or oil or New Jersey textile strikes. Yes, that at least--someone on whom it was evident that his first strength had been drawn out of him in the Paterson jail. "You don't have to worry. I'm reliable." Then he resigned himself; he had been taken in by my telephone voice. I could be at least a messenger to the higher-ups who'd be busy Guy-Fawkesing the Drake Hotel or the Palmer House--because it was that to Eddie Dawson, hauling up gunpowder in the tunnels. He would tell me, then, what he wanted my superiors to know and give me directives. "I want you to arrange a meeting with your top man down there--" "Mr. Ackey, you mean?" "You tell him I can get the employees together, but before we go out off strike we want to talk to him, all of us. That's to give my people confidence." "Why are you sure you'll have to go out? Maybe you'll get your demands." "Do you know who runs this bedbug palace?" "What, some bank? Is it a receivership? Most of these small joints--" "It's an outfit called Holloway Enterprises." "Karas?" "You know him?" "Yes, I do, it so happens. I used to work for the insurance man Einhorn who is his cousin-in-law." "He writes the policies for this place. You know what kind of a joint this is, don't you? For quickies." "Is that so?" I said, observing that the big forehead, flushed and deeply vein-fed in the light cloud of fair hair, was covered with a sweat and that he wiped his hands the nails of which were manicured nails on his pink-striped shirt with an unconscious clutch. "If that's a problem it's a police problem. You don't want the CIO to start a union of | them, do you?" "Don't talk foolish. I mean I get the brunt of the trouble because I'm- night clerk. Anyhow, if you know Karas you can tell me how easy it'll be