There wasn't any.
Suddenly, he was aware that work had stopped and everyone was looking at him.
He felt the nervous perspiration breaking out on his forehead.
"You can smoke in the can," Wagner called, pointing to the back of the warehouse.
David walked down the aisle to the back, until he found the men's room.
Suddenly he felt a need to relieve himself and stepped up to a urinal.
The door behind him opened and he sensed a man standing beside him.
"Khop tsech tu," he said.
David stared at him. The man grinned back, exposing a mouth filled with gold teeth.
"You're Chaim Woolf's boy," he said in Yiddish.
David nodded.
"I'm the Sheriff. Yitzchak Margolis. From the Prushnitzer Society, the same as your father."
No wonder the word had got around so quickly. "You work here?"
David asked curiously. "Of course.
You think I come this far uptown just to piss?" He lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. "I think it's very smart of your uncle to put you in here."
"Smart?"
The Sheriff nodded his bald head. "Smart," he repeated in the same stage whisper.
"Now they got something to worry about. Too long they been getting way with murder.
All you got to do is look at the tickets."
"Tickets?"
David asked. "Yeah, the shipping tickets.
I pack three times in a day what it takes any of them a week.
Me, I don't have to worry. But the loafers, let them worry about their jobs."
For the first time, David began to understand.
The men were afraid of him, afraid for their jobs.
"But they don't have to worry," he burst out. "I'm not going to take their jobs."
"You're not?" Margolis asked, a puzzled look in his eyes.
"No.
I'm here because I need the job myself."
A disappointed look came over the Sheriff's face. Suddenly a shrewd look came into his eyes.
"Smart," he said. "A smart boy. Of course you won't take away anybody's job.
I'll tell 'em."
He started out. At the door, he stopped and looked back at David.
"You remind me of your uncle," he said.
"The old fart never lets his left hand know what his right hand is doing."
The door closed behind him and David flipped his cigarette into the urinal.
He was half way down the aisle when he met Wagner.
"You know how to work a fork lift?"
"The kind they use to lift bales?"
The foreman nodded. "That's the kind I mean."
"Sure," David answered.
The anxious look left Wagner's eyes for a moment.
"Good," he said.
"There's a shipment of five hundred thousand heralds downstairs on the platform.
Bring it up."
5.
The elevator jarred to a stop at the ground floor and the heavy doors opened on the busy loading platform.
Several trucks were backed up to the platform and men were scurrying back and forth, loading and unloading.
Along the back wall of the platform were stacks of cartons and materials.
David turned to the elevator operator.