Wagner was sitting at his desk when David walked by.
"You were pretty lucky," he said. "The doctor said that all Tony has is a concussion and a couple of broken ribs. He'll need twelve stitches in his cheek, though."
"He was lucky," David said. "It was an accident."
The supervisor's gaze fell before his. "The garage across the street wants ten bucks to fix the jack."
"I'll give it to them tomorrow."
"You don't have to," Wagner said quickly. "I already did."
"Thanks."
The foreman looked up from his desk. His eyes met David's squarely.
"I wish we could pretend this morning never happened," he said in a low voice. "I’d like to start all over again."
David stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled and held out his hand.
"My name is David Woolf," he said. "I’m supposed to see the foreman about a job."
The foreman looked at David's hand and got to his feet.
"I’m Jack Wagner, the foreman," he said, and his grip was firm.
"Let me introduce you to the boys."
When David turned toward the packaging tables, all the men were grinning at him.
Suddenly, they weren't strangers any more.
They were friends.
7.
Bernard Norman walked into his New York office.
It was ten o'clock in the morning and his eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks pink from the winter air, after his brisk walk down from the hotel.
"Good morning, Mr. Norman," his secretary said. "Have a nice trip?"
He smiled back at her as he walked on into his private office and opened the window. He stood there breathing in the cold fresh air.
Ah, this was geshmach.
Not like the day-in, day-out sameness of California.
Norman went over to his desk and took a large cigar from the humidor. He lit it slowly, relishing the heavy aromatic Havana fragrance.
Even the cigars tasted better in New York.
Maybe, if he had time, he'd run down to Ratner's on Delancey Street and have blintzes for lunch.
He sat down and began to go over the reports lying on his desk.
He nodded to himself with satisfaction.
The billings from the exchanges were up over last year. He turned to the New Yorker theater reports. The Norman Theater, his premiere house on Broadway, had picked up since they started having stage shows along with the picture. It was holding its own with Loew's State and the Palace.
He leafed through the next few reports, then stopped and studied the report from the Park Theater.
An average gross of forty-two hundred dollars a week over the past two months.
It must be a mistake. The Park had never grossed more than three thousand tops.
It was nothing but a third-run house on the wrong side of Fourteenth Street.
Norman looked further down the report and his eyes came to rest on an item labeled Employee Bonuses.
They were averaging three hundred a week.
He reached for the telephone.
Somebody must be crazy.
He'd never O.K.'d bonuses like that.
The whole report must be wrong.
"Yes, Mr. Norman?" his secretary's voice came through.
"Tell Ernie to get his ass in here," Norman said. "Right away."
He put down the telephone.
Ernie Hawley was his treasurer.
He'd be able to straighten this out.
Hawley came in, his eyes shadowed by his thick glasses.
"How are you, Bernie?" he asked. "Have a good trip?"
Norman tapped the report on his desk.
"What's with this on the Park Theater?" he said.
"Can't you bastards get anything right?"