The strippers were a bore. I had known one once, a second-rater who played some of the Fifty-Second Street tourist traps in New York. She had lived in a three-room walkup on West Seventy-Third near the park, and she had had a ten-year-old boy who wasn’t too clear on what she did for a living. For a period of about a month I shared her bed afternoons while the kid was in school. It had been exciting at first; she was a stripper and strippers are supposed to be exciting—that’s part of the American Dream. But she had been mindless and soulless and dead inside, and in spite of the thousand sexual tricks a thousand men had taught her, she had been every bit as frigid as death. So the strippers were a bore. If they did anything, they reminded me I wanted Joyce. That I needed her.
But there was a magician on the bill. He was around fifty. I didn’t recognize him but his name rang some sort of distant bell; I’d probably heard it when I was in the business myself. His tailcoat was frayed and his face was a map of blue alcohol lines and I looked at him and saw what I might have been if a dark-eyed man in Miami hadn’t had a proposition for me.
A grim prospect. But my watching him made my fingers itch for a tall silk hat and a rabbit to yank out of it. And he wasn’t even very good. He had a lot of stage presence but his moves were fairly obvious and his bag of tricks was a skimpy one. There was only one bit he had that I wasn’t able to figure, a routine involving a batch of Christmas-tree ornaments that disappeared into each other, something like that. And I could tell he wasn’t really essential to the trick. It was just a cute piece of equipment I didn’t happen to be familiar with.
A man nudged me. I turned and looked at him. He would have been a good ad for Alcoholics Anonymous; he was drunk, and he looked unhappy about it. “Say,” he said, “now how do you figure he done that?”
“What?”
“The trick,” he said. “What he did with them balls, making ’em do that and all. Now how could a man go and do something like that?”
“It’s magic,” I said.
“Yeah, but how’s he do it?’
“It’s the wand,” I said.
“It’s something special, the wand?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s magic.”
7
On Wednesday morning the phone woke me. The voice was Murray’s.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got something good for you. You have a free day today?”
“Sure.”
“Can you get over here around a quarter to twelve? I’m setting up a lunch appointment with Perry Carver for you. Perry’s running an outfit called Black Sand Syndications. They sell limited partnerships in real estate syndications. It’s been a big thing in New York City but it’s a fairly new form of investment around here. You can get around ten percent on an investment and most of it is tax-free. I was speaking to him yesterday. He needs a good salesman or two and there’s no previous experience necessary because the field is a fairly new one here. He’ll take you out to lunch and you can see how it looks to you.”
“It sounds good,” I said.
“It might not be bad at all. Wear a suit and brush your hair and smile like a good boy. You might wind up with a pretty good position.”
I wore a suit and brushed my hair and practiced smiling at myself in the mirror. I skipped breakfast and spent the rest of the morning in the library scanning everything I could find on the scintillating subject of real estate syndication. I dodged through a book or two on the subject and checked out what some back issues of the financial magazines had to say about it. After a quick cup of coffee on Main Street I presented myself to Murray Rogers for inspection.
“You look lovely,” he said in his office. “Come on, I’ll take you downstairs and introduce you to Perry. Then I’ll move out of your way and you two can see what develops.”
Black Sand Syndications had a large office on the seventeenth floor of the same building. We took an elevator downstairs and Murray introduced me to Carver. He was a hefty man, bald on top, with innocent blue eyes and a firm jaw. His handshake was strictly dead-fish but his eyes took me in quickly. Murray made some jokes that weren’t particularly funny, and I showed my capped teeth in a smile, and Carver wound up taking me to the Downtown Merchant’s Club for lunch.
We had martinis first. Then I ordered a ham steak and he ordered an open turkey sandwich. He told the ancient waiter to bring us another pair of martinis. The drinks came, then the food. We ate and drank and made small talk. We were working on coffee before he said the first word about business.
“Know anything about syndicates, Maynard?”
'A little.”
“Suppose you tell me what you know. That way I won’t feed you a lot of information you’ve already got under your belt.”
I played parrot for ten minutes. I regurgitated the library’s store of information and told him just what a syndication was and just why it was a good investment for certain people. I told him the potentials above and beyond the tax-sheltered return, mentioned a few syndicates that had converted into common-stock corporations, and generally ran off at the mouth. The blue eyes became progressively more interested as I steamed along. By the time I was finished, Carver was beaming.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You actually know the field, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“Where did you learn all that? Murray mentioned you were in Chicago before you came here, said something about a plastics firm. You in investments before that?”
It seemed like a silly time to lie. Perry Carver was a man who had pushed into a new field and was doing nicely in it. I guessed he’d be more impressed by quick learning ability than experience. I told him I hadn’t known a thing about syndicating a few hours ago, but picked it all up by reading a few books. For a few seconds he just stared at me. Then he started to laugh.
“I’m a son of a bitch,” he said. “You know what I have to go through to find a salesman who knows his rear end from third base? I’ll tell you, Maynard, I look at about twenty applications a week. None of them know the first thing. They just want to make money, that’s all. And the damned fools don’t know anything and can’t learn anything. I tried to set up a training program to drum a few facts into their heads. Didn’t work at all. I’ve got three decent salesmen working out of an office that could support ten of them but I can’t find seven more worth putting behind a desk. You already put together more than any of those lardheads got out of the program. Can you sell?”
“I think so.”
“Suppose you had a young fellow who told you he was more interested in growth than income. What would you tell him?”
He gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag, blew out smoke. “I’d tell him ten percent was more growth than he could expect to make in the market, and with a lot less risk. And I’d tell him that Glickman went from seven-and-a-half to thirteen or fourteen over-the-counter after conversion to a stock issue, and I’d name a few other syndicates that showed comparable performance.”
“Right,” he said. “Suppose your prospect was a widow with twenty thousand dollars in a savings bank. She’s afraid of risk. What do you tell her?”
“That the risk is low because she’ll be owning a piece of real property, not just a bag of dreams. And that the difference between four percent and ten percent is the difference between eight hundred dollars and two thousand dollars annually.”
“You’ve got a job,” Perry Carver said.
I had a job. He took me back to the Rand Building and gave me a desk next to the water cooler. He wrote out a check to me for five hundred dollars as an advance against commissions to be earned in the future. He handed me twenty cards from the prospect file, gave me a stack of letterheads and told me where to have business cards printed up.
