The Dream Merchants (67 page)

He nodded his head. “That’s right. In a little while he’ll be his old self again.” He turned back to me. “And you?” he asked, “you’re all right?”

I took out a handkerchief and mopped my face. It was hot out here in the field. “I feel good,” I assured him.

He looked up at me anxiously. “We’d better go into the wagon,” he said solicitously. “This sun is pretty strong to take. Especially if you’re not used to it.”

He turned and led the way up the steps and opened the door. The sun shone on the faded blue denim of his work shirt and the seat of his dark-blue overalls was shining and gleaming on his narrow shanks. The inside of the wagon was cool and dark and he took a match from his pocket and struck it. He picked up an old oil lamp and held the flame to the wick. It sputtered and caught the flame and then began to glow with a shiny golden color, lighting up the wagon.

I looked around me curiously. It was pretty much as I remembered it. The big roll-top desk was still against the wall. The bunks at the back were all made up. Even the old chair that Al used to sit in reading the paper was there. I smiled at him.

He smiled back at me proudly. “I’m glad I bought it,” he said. “Sometimes a man has to have something of his youth around him to remind him of what he really is.”

I looked at him curiously. It was a funny thing that he had said, but it was true. He never thought of himself as a banker, only as a carny operator, despite his tremendous success. I looked around me, and the room brought back many memories, but I couldn’t feel the way he did. I was not a carny guy; maybe I had never been one. I was of the picture business. His next words surprised me.

He walked past us and closed the door carefully. Then he turned back to me, his face serious and questioning. “What’s wrong, Johnny?” he asked suddenly. “Are you in trouble?”

I looked at him, then at Doris. Her eyes were wide and dark, but her lips were smiling gently. “You might as well tell him, Johnny,” she said softly. “Anyone who loves you can read you like a book.”

I took a deep breath, turned back to Al, and began my story. His eyes were alert, his face attentive, his lips silent as he listened. As we sat there opposite each other in the little wagon I was taken back many years to the times when we used to sit like this and talk to each other after the show had closed down for the night. And I marveled to myself as I kept on talking. He hadn’t changed very much in the years that had passed; I couldn’t believe that he must be at least seventy-seven years old.

When I had finished, he struck a match on the heel of his shoe and held it to the cigar that still dangled from his lips. The flame of the match rose and fell with his breath as he drew on the cigar. At last it was going satisfactorily and he carefully shook the match until the flame went out and then threw it on the floor of the wagon. He didn’t speak. Just sat there and looked at me with bright searching eyes.

We sat there so long that the atmosphere seemed to charge with tension. I felt a movement against my hand. I looked down. Doris’s hand had found a way to mine. I looked up at her and smiled slowly.

Al saw it too; his sharp, bright eyes missed nothing that went on in front of them. At last he spoke, his voice very quiet. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

I thought a moment before I spoke. “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “Nothing you can do, I guess. You were my last hope and I had to talk to you.”

He looked at me closely. “You want that company, don’t you?” His voice was very soft.

I looked at him. I remembered what Peter had said yesterday. He had been right. “Yes,” I answered simply. “I put thirty years of my life into that company and it’s not just a business any more. It’s a part of me that I don’t want to lose.” I hesitated a second, then laughed, a little bitterly, I guess. “It’s like the leg I lost in France. I can probably live without it. Maybe in time I will find something just as good, but it will always seem like this.” I tapped my artificial leg. “You get along with it. It serves the purpose and gets you around. But you always know, deep inside you, that you’re never the same. And you aren’t.”

His voice was still soft. “You could be wrong, Johnny. When I was your age I left the only business I ever liked. And I became a very rich man as a result. Maybe it’s time for you to quit.”

I took a deep breath and looked slowly around the wagon and then back at him. The words seemed to come out of me by themselves, my gaze was pointed. “If I did that,” I said slowly, “I couldn’t buy a studio and put it in my back yard.”

He sat very still, only the glow on the tip of his cigar kept him from looking like a graven image. After a while he took his cigar from his lips and looked at it carefully; then he let out a long, deep breath. He stood up and opened the door of the wagon. He looked back at us. “Come into the house with me,” he said.

The sun outside was still hot and bright. The men were still intent upon their game as we walked past them following Al to the ranch house. We went in through a back door into the kitchen.

A fat dark woman was rolling dough on a large wooden table. She looked at us as we came into the room. She spoke a few words in Italian to Al. He answered her in the same tongue and led us through the kitchen into the front of the house.

We stopped in the large old-fashioned parlor. Al told us to sit down and walked on into the hall and out of view. Doris and I looked at each other. We both were wondering what he was going to do.

“Vittorio!” I heard his voice calling in the hall. “Vittorio!” A muffled answer came from somewhere upstairs, followed by a short remark in Italian from Al, and then he came back into the room. He looked down at us. “Vittorio will be here in a minute,” he said, and sat down in a chair opposite us and looked at us.

I wondered what good Vittorio could do. Al’s voice cut into my thoughts.

“When are you two getting married?” he asked suddenly. “I’m tired of waiting for you to make up your minds.”

We blushed like a pair of kids and looked at each other, smiling. Doris answered for me. “We’ve been so upset since Papa got sick,” she explained, “we haven’t had time to talk about it.”

“Talk? What’s there to talk about?” Al exploded, his cigar throwing off heavy gray fumes of smoke. “Don’t you know your own minds yet?”

I started to answer, when I saw the grin on his face and realized he had been teasing us. I shut my mouth, stopping the reply just as Vic came into the room.

He ignored us. “What do you want, Al?” he asked him.

Al looked up at him. “Get Constantin Konstantinov on the phone in Boston.”

Vic looked quickly at me, then turned back to his boss. A flood of protesting words in Italian poured out of him.

Al held up his hand and Vic shut up like a clam, for all his size. “I said get him on the phone,” he told Vic. “I want to talk to him. And after this remember your manners. When there are people around who don’t understand our language, speak in English. Don’t be rude.” His voice was very soft, but there was a thread of steel that ran through it. “I brought Johnny up when he was a kid. And I know I can trust him not to reveal anything he might learn here.”

Vic’s face looked balefully at me, but he went to the phone and sat down.

I looked at Al. I didn’t know he knew Konstantinov. I wondered what he was going to do. What could he do? This was Sunday and Konstantinov was in Boston. Besides, Konstantinov was supposed to be a very important guy who listened to no one in connection with his business affairs. He was rumored to be of the richest men in the country even though nobody had heard much about him before the Greater Boston Investment Corporation began to lend money to the picture business back in ’27.

“What good will it do to talk to him, Al?” I asked. “He won’t listen to you.”

Al smiled back at me confidently. “He’ll listen to me,” he said quietly. There was something in the tone of his voice that suddenly made me feel he knew what he was talking about.

Vic turned from the phone. “Constantin is on, Al,” he said.

Al got out of his seat and took the phone from Vic’s hand. He smiled a moment at us before he began to speak into it. “Hello, Constantin,” he said. “How are you?”

I could hear the crackle of a voice in the receiver he held loosely against his ear.

“I’m pretty good for an old man,” Al said easily in reply to a question. Again the crackle of the voice in the receiver. When it stopped, Al began to speak again.

“I wanted to talk to you on that situation over at Magnum,” he said quietly. “I’m a little disturbed over what’s going on there.” He waited a moment while the voice buzzed again. “I think we ought to clarity our position in connection with that affair. My own feeling is that Farber will only bring confusion and be a highly annoying element in the company.”

The voice in the phone crackled excitedly into Al’s ear. He listened patiently. At last he spoke again. His voice was quiet, with authority. “I don’t care what Ronsen told you,” he said flatly. “Farber will only create a conflict within the company and perhaps even stop its progress back to a sound position. I want you to inform Ronsen that the loan will not be renegotiated if Farber is allowed to come into Magnum.”

The voice spoke again in the phone, only this time it sounded quiet and subdued. “That’s right,” Al said when the voice had stopped. “Tell him that under no circumstances will we agree to allow the operating management of the company to be interfered with.”

The voice spoke quietly again. “Right, Constantin,” Al said into the mouthpiece. “I’ll talk to you again, later in the week maybe.” He looked over at me and smiled, then turned back to the phone. “Good-by, Constantin.”

He put down the phone and walked back to me and looked down at us. He stood there quietly for a second before he spoke. “That’s settled now, Johnny,” he said slowly. “I guess you won’t have any further trouble from them.”

I looked up at him, my mouth almost open. “How could you tell him what to do?” I almost gasped.

Al smiled at me. I could see he was laughing at my amazement. “Very simple.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You see, I own the Greater Boston Investment Corporation.”

Then he told me something else that surprised me even more.

I was very quiet in the car going back. The little brown-faced, wrinkled old man in the faded blue denim shirt and the shiny blue overalls that I had left back there on a ranch was actually the most powerful man in the picture business. He controlled its money, no matter where it came from, East or West.

Now that I knew, I could see how simple it really was. Again I marveled at the brilliance of the little man who always thought of himself as a carny guy. He was smart enough to see there would come a time when the industry would outgrow its picture-by-picture method of financing, so back in ’25, when the companies started making calf eyes at Wall Street, he opened a little office in the East. On the plate-glass door were painted the words: “Greater Boston Investment Corp.”

Inside this office were two rooms: a reception room and a private office. The lettering on the door of this inner office read simply: “Constantin Konstantinov, Executive Vice-President—Loan and Collateral Department.” Until that time Konstantinov had been a clerk in Vic’s office.

In two short and hectic years as picture company after picture company turned Eastward for their financing, the office grew, and in 1927 it occupied a whole floor in a staid office building in the heart of Boston’s conservative business section.

I smiled to myself as I thought about it. Loans, wholesale or retail. Finance one picture at a time? See the Bank of Independence in Los Angeles. Finance a whole picture company for forty pictures at a time? See the Greater Boston Investment Corporation. I smiled again as I thought of many of the men in the other companies that I knew who had prided themselves on getting out of Santos’s clutches and never knew or would know that they were only doing business with him under another name.

I began to wonder how much Al was really worth. Fifty million? More? Suddenly it didn’t matter. I was satisfied. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

***

It was near ten o’clock when we got back to the house. We went into the library and Doris got some cubes from the kitchen and we made a couple of highballs. We were just toasting each other when the nurse came into the room.

“Mr. Kessler would like to see me right away,” I asked.

She nodded. “He wouldn’t go to sleep until he saw you,” she said disapprovingly. “So be as brief as you can. He’s had a pretty uncomfortable day and he must get some rest.” We put down our drinks untouched and hurried up the stairs to his room. Esther was sitting by the bed holding his hand as we came in. “Hello,
kinder
,” she said to us.

Doris went over to her and kissed her, then she kissed her father. “How are you feeling?” she asked them.

Maybe it was the light in the room—there was only one small lamp turned on—but I thought he looked rather wan and drawn. “All right,” he said to her; then he raised his head and looked at me. “Nu?” he asked.

I smiled at him. “You were right, boss,” I said. “He did help us. Everything is going to be all right now.”

His head sank back against the pillow weakly and he closed his eyes. For a moment he lay there quietly, then he opened them. Again I thought it might be the light in the room, but his eyes seemed dull and shadowed to me. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing them. But his voice was strong enough and there was a note of satisfaction in it. “Now you’ll be getting married soon?”

I started. It was the second time that day I had heard that. Again it was Doris who answered. She leaned over her father and kissed him lightly. I could see her mother squeeze her hand. “As soon as you’re well enough to give the bride away, Papa,” she said.

He smiled up at her. I thought I saw the tears come to his eyes, but he shut them quickly. “Don’t wait too long,
kinder
,” he said slowly. “I want to see yet grandchildren on my knee.”

Doris looked at me and smiled. I came close to the edge of the bed and looked down at him. “Don’t worry about that, Peter,” I said, taking Doris’s hand. “You will.”