In a weird kind of overlay he heard Harry the gun shop proprietor saying: We give a ten percent discount on orders over three hundred.

My God, he thought. Did I buy those guns yesterday? Did I really?

That room in his mind went dark.

Hey, Georgie, what are you-

“What’s the size of the order?” he asked. His voice was a little thick and he cleared his throat.

“Four to six hundred tablecloths a week once he gets rolling. Plus napkins. All genuine linen. He wants them done in Ivory Snow. I said that was no problem.”

He was taking a cigarette out of the box now, doing it slowly, so he could read the label. There was something he could really come to dislike about Vinnie Mason: his dipshit cigarettes. The label on the box said:

Now who in God’s world except Vinnie would smoke Player’s Navy Cut? Or King Sano? Or English Ovals? Or Marvels or Murads or Twists? If someone put out a brand called Shit-on-a-Stick or Black Lung, Vinnie would smoke them.

“I did tell him we might have to give him two-day service until we get switched over,” Vinnie said, giving him a last loving flash of the box as he put it away. “When we go up to Waterford.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. Shall I blast him, Fred? Sure. Blow him out of the water, George.

“Really?” He snapped a light to his cigarette with a slim gold Zippo and raised his eyebrows through the smoke like a British character actor.

“I had a note from Steve Ordner yesterday. He wants me to drop over Friday evening for a little talk about the Waterford plant.”

“Oh?”

“This morning I had a phone call from Steve Ordner while I was down talking to Peter Wasserman. Mr. Ordner wants me to call him back. That sounds like he’s awfully anxious to know something, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does,” Vinnie said, flashing his number 2 smile-Track wet, proceed with caution.

“What I want to know is who made Steve Ordner so all-at-once fucking anxious. That’s what I want to know.”

“Well-”

“Come on, Vinnie. Let’s not play coy chambermaid. It’s ten o’clock and I’ve got to talk to Ordner, I’ve got to talk to Ron Stone, I’ve got to talk to Ethel Gibbs about burnt shirt collars. Have you been picking my nose while I wasn’t looking?”

“Well, Sharon and I were over to St-to Mr. Ordner’s house Sunday night for dinner-”

“And you just happened to mention that Bart Dawes has been laying back on Waterford while the 784 extension gets closer and closer, is that it?”

“Bart!” Vinnie protested. “It was all perfectly friendly. It was very-”

“I’m sure it was. So was his little note inviting me to court. I imagine our little phone call will be perfectly friendly, too. That’s not the point. The point is that he invited you and your wife to dinner in hopes that you’d run off at the mouth and he had no cause to be disappointed.”

“Bart-”

He leveled his finger at Vinnie. “You listen to me, Vinnie. If you drop any more shit like this for me to walk in, you’ll be looking for a new job. Count on it.”

Vinnie was shocked. The cigarette was all but forgotten between his fingers.

“Vinnie, let me tell you something,” he said, dropping his voice back to normal. “I know that a young guy like you has listened to six thousand lectures on how old guys like me tore up the world when they were your age. But you earned this one.”

Vinnie opened his mouth to protest.

“I don’t think you slipped the knife into me,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall Vinnie’s protest. “If I thought that, I would have had a pink for you when you walked in here. I just think you were dumb. You got in that great big house and had three drinks before dinner and then a soup course and a salad with Thousand Island dressing and then surf and turf for the main course and it was all served by a maid in a black uniform and Carla was doing her lady-of-the-manor bit-but not being the least bit condescending-and there was a strawberry tort or blueberry buckle with whipped cream for dessert and then a couple of coffee brandies or Tia Maria and you just spilled your guts. Is that about how it went?”

“Something like that,” Vinnie whispered. His expression was three parts shame and two parts bullish hate.

“He started off by asking how Bart was. You said Bart was fine. He said Bart was a damned good man, but wouldn’t it be nice if he could pick his feet up a little on that Waterford deal. You said, it sure would. He said, By the way, how’s that going. You said, Well it really isn’t my department and he said, Don’t tell me, Vincent, you know what’s going on. And you said, All I know is that Bart hasn’t closed the deal yet. I heard that the Thom McAn people are interested in the site but maybe that’s just a rumor. Then he said, Well I’m sure Bart knows what he’s doing and you said, Yeah, sure and then you had another coffee brandy and he asked you if you thought the Mustangs would make the play-offs and then you and Sharon were going home and you know when you’ll be out there again, Vinnie?”

Vinnie didn’t say anything.

“You’ll be out there when Steve Ordner needs another snitch. That’s when.”

“I’m sorry,” Vinnie said sulkily. He started to get up.

“I’m not through.”

Vinnie sat down again and looked into the corner of the room with smoldering eyes.

“I was doing your job twelve years ago, do you know that? Twelve years, it probably seems like a long time to you. To me, I hardly know where the fuck the time went. But I remember the job well enough to know you like it. And that you do a good job. That reorganization in dry-cleaning, with the new numbering system… that was a masterpiece.”

Vinnie was staring at him, bewildered.

“I started in the laundry twenty years ago,” he said. “In 1953, I was twenty years old. My wife and I were just married. I’d finished two years of business administration and Mary and I were going to wait, but we were using the interruption method, you see. We were going to town and somebody slammed the door downstairs and startled me right into an orgasm. She got pregnant out of it. So whenever I get feeling smart these days I just remind myself that one slammed door is responsible for me being where I am today. It’s humbling. In those days there was no slick abortion law. When you got a girl pregnant, you married her or you ran out on her. End of options. I married her and took the first job I could get, which was here. Washroom helper, exactly the same job that Pollack kid is doing downstairs right this minute. Everything was manual in those days, and everything had to be pulled wet out of the washers and extracted in a big Stonington wringer that held five hundred pounds of wet flatwork. If you loaded it wrong, it would take your fucking foot off. Mary lost the baby in her seventh month and the doctor said she’d never have another one. I did the helper’s job for three years, and my average take-home for fifty-five hours was fifty-five dollars. Then Ralph Albert’s son, who was the boss of the washroom in those days, got in a little fender-bender accident and died of a heart attack in the street while he and the other guy were exchanging insurance companies. He was a fine man. The whole laundry shut down the day of his funeral. After he was decently buried, I went to Ray Tarkington and asked for his job. I was pretty sure I’d get it. I knew everything about how to wash, because Ralph had shown me.

“This was a family business in those days, Vinnie. Ray and his dad, Don Tarkington, ran it. Don got it from his father, who started the Blue Ribbon in 1926. It was a nonunion shop and I suppose the labor people would say all three of the Tarkingtons were paternalistic exploiters of the uneducated working man and woman. And they were. But when Betty Keeson slipped on the wet floor and broke her arm, the Tarkingtons paid the hospital bill and there was ten bucks a week for food until she could come back. And every Christmas they put on a big dinner out in the marking-in room-the best chicken pies you ever ate, and cranberry jelly and rolls and your choice of chocolate or mince pudding for dessert. Don and Ray gave every woman a pair of earrings for Christmas and every man a brand-new tie. I’ve still got my nine ties in the closet at home. When Don Tarkington died in 1959, I wore one of them to his funeral. It was out of style and Mary gave me holy hell, but I wore it anyway. The place was dark and the bouts were long and the work was drudgery, but the people cared about you. If the extractor broke down, Don and Ray would be right down there with the rest of us, the sleeves of their white shirts rolled up, wringing out those sheets by hand. That’s what a family business was, Vinnie. Something like that.