without the usual girl help.
Then, out of the blue, we got an offer to put up a block of apartment houses down by the river. The competition was blue murder, but we went at it like soldiers. We cut the costs to the bone and we got the job. Financially, we didn’t get much out of it, but at least it showed those interested what we could do.
Slowly we began to get other jobs, not as cut-throat but nearly as bad. It took us two more years to crawl out of the red into the black. Don’t imagine it was easy. It was tooth, claw and no holds barred, but we came out of it, and finally into the open.
Jack and I worked well as a team. He handled the outside work while I looked after the office. By now we were able to afford help. We hired Clara Collins, a thin, middle-aged spinster who looked on us as a couple of crazy kids, but who ran the office with an efficiency that more than covered her cost.
After we had been in business six years, we began to get a lot of private building: houses, bungalows, petrol stations, and even a small movie house, but we weren’t get ing any civic building and that’s where the big money lay.
I decided to cultivate the mayor. His name was Henry Mathison. I had met him a couple of times and he seemed pretty easy to get along with. His son had been killed in the Philippines and when he learned Jack and I had fought out there, he was friendly, but he wasn’t friendly enough to throw any business our way.
Every civic project that came up we sent in estimates, but we never heard further. The established engineers always got the jobs: three firms that had been in Holland City for over twenty years.
It was while I was trying to find a real point of contact with the mayor that I met Sarita Fleming.
Sarita was in charge of Holland City’s Public Library. Her people lived in New York. She had taken some kind of degree in Literature and had been offered this job which she had jumped at as her mother and she didn’t get along together. She had been at the library two years before I wandered in, looking for information about Mathison.
After I had explained to her exactly what I wanted, Sarita couldn’t have been more helpful. She knew quite a lot about the mayor. She told me he was keen on duck shooting, was a good amateur cine operator and he liked classical music. Duck shooting and cine camera work were out of my field, but classical music put me back in the fight. Sarita said he was wildly enthusiastic about Chopin’s piano music.
She mentioned she had four tickets for a Chopin recital that was being held at the City Hall with Stefan Askenase at the piano, one of the greatest Chopin exponents in the world. She had been selling the tickets in the library and she had kept four of them back just in case. She knew Mathison hadn’t got a ticket and wouldn’t it be an idea for me to ask him to go with me?
The idea was so sound I looked up and stared at her, and this was the first time I really saw her.
She was tall and slim with a good figure. She wore a simple grey dress that showed off her figure to advantage. She had nice brown eyes, brown hair, parted in the middle and pulled back to form a coil of silky hair on the nape of her neck.
She wasn’t pret y, but there was something about her that excited me. Just looking at her, I had a feeling that she was the only possible woman I could live with, wouldn’t grow tired of, and who would make me happy.
It was an odd feeling. It came to me in a flash, and I knew then that if I was going to continue with my streak of good luck, before very long, she would be my wife.
I asked her if she would make up the fourth of the party: Mathison, his wife, she and me, and she accepted.
Jack was enthusiastic when he heard what I was planning.
‘Thank the Lord I have a partner with some culture,’ he said. ‘Take the old fel ow to Chopin and impress him. Maybe he’l throw some business our way if he thinks you and he have the same taste.’
I called up Mathison and asked him if he and his wife would care to join me and a friend for the concert, and he jumped at it.
As it worked out, it wasn’t Chopin nor I who impressed Mathison, it was Sarita. She made a big hit with him, and not only with him, but his wife as well.
The evening had been a success.
As we shook hands before parting, he said, ‘It’s time we saw something of you at the office, young man. Look in tomorrow. I want you to meet Merrill Webb.’
Webb was the City’s planning officer. He was the guy who handed out the jobs. Without his say-so, you got nowhere. I hadn’t even met him.
I was feeling on top of the world as I drove Sarita to her apartment. I knew I had her to thank for this opening, and I asked her if she would dine with me the night after next and she said she would.
The next morning I went to the City Hall and met Webb. He was a lean, dried up, stoop-shouldered man in his late fifties. He talked to me casually, asking about my training and Jack’s training, what we had done so far and stuff like that. He didn’t seem particularly interested. Finally, he shook hands and said that if he had something he thought we could handle he would let me know.
I was a little damped by this. I had had hopes that he would have given us something to work on right away.
Jack said he wasn’t surprised.
‘You keep after Mathison. He’s the guy who tel s Webb what to do. Keep after Mathison, and sooner or later, we’l land in the gravy.’
From then on, I saw a lot of Sarita. We went out every other night, and after a couple of weeks I knew I was in love with her and wanted to marry her.
I was now making a reasonable living; not a great deal, but enough to support a wife. I saw no reason why we should wait, providing she was willing to throw her lot in with me, so I asked her.
There was no hesitation when she said yes.
When I told Jack he leaned back in his desk chair and beamed at me.
‘Boy! Am I glad! It’s high time one of us became respectable! And what a girl! I’l tell you something: if you hadn’t got there first, I would have grabbed her. The best, Jeff. I’m not kidding. That girl’s solid gold right through. I know a sterling character when I see one: she’s it.’
Don’t imagine during these years I hadn’t thought of Rima nor of the guard she had murdered. Don’t imagine there weren’t times when I would wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare when I imagined Rima was in the room, looking at me. But as the years went by, and the thing became something in the dim past, I began to feel confident that it was in the past and would remain that way.
I had thought a lot about it before I had asked Sarita to be my wife. Finally, I decided it was a risk I could afford to take. No one knew me as Gordon. I had grown up and altered considerably since I was in Los Angeles, although the scar persisted and so did the drooping eyelid. I felt I had seen the last of Rima and the last of my past.
We were married towards the end of the year. As a wedding present we got the job of building the new wing to the State hospital. It was a nice job and it made us money. That was Mathison’s influence.
It enabled Jack to move into a three room penthouse and Sarita and I into a four-room, more modest apartment in the better district. It allowed both of us to buy better cars and we entertained more.
Life seemed pretty good. We felt we had at last arrived. Then one morning the telephone bell rang and Mathison came on the line.
‘Come over here right away, Jeff,’ he said. ‘Drop everything. There’s something I want to talk to you about.’
This abrupt summons left me wondering, but I dropped everything, told Clara I’d be back when she saw me, told her to tell Jack who was out on a construction job where to find me, and hot footed over to City Hall.
Mathison and Webb were together in Mathison’s office.
‘Sit down, boy,’ Mathison said, waving me to a chair. ‘You’ve heard about the Hol and bridge?’
‘Why, sure.’
