The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,17
is the best goddamn job you ever had.”
Park nodded and I just smiled. Sure, it wasn’t exactly coal mining, and I was grateful to have a position that got me out of the house—when I’d left that evening, Sally was listening to “Baby Snooks” on KFH, and if I’d had to listen to a whole half hour of that shit I’d have blown my brains out—but this wasn’t the best job I ever had, not by a mile.
In the army I used to look back at my pre-war self with a mixture of nostalgia and pity. What the hell had I thought I was accomplishing selling airplanes? The QM Corps gave me thrilling and lucrative work. Men needed the things I offered for sale. Women, some of them beautiful women, relied on me for protection and income, and the army relied on me to distribute whatever I wasn’t able to reroute and sell elsewhere. It was a good life, and by the time it came to its violent end I could see my sweet situation beginning to unravel. There would be no place for me in Italy after the war, without the army to protect my position and provide my clientele, and my stab wound—for which I managed to con my way into a Purple Heart—got me home months earlier than was right.
So acting as bag man and babysitter for an alcoholic skirtchaser came in a poor second. Hell, I had a job as a kid selling pots and pans door to door that might give this one a run for its money.
THE FRONT DESK man at the Crosley greeted Collins by name and told him to go right up. “Elevator’s broken, you’ll have to use the stairs.”
The stairs smelled like a lioness in heat had pissed her way up to the fourth floor, by which time Collins was gasping. “What the hell happened to this place?” I asked. “This used to be a nice hotel.”
“Whores and hopheads now,” Collins said between wheezes. He knocked on the door of room 406, which was answered by a tired looking forty-year-old with blonde bangs wearing a tattered silk robe that hung open, revealing a matching set of underwear underneath.
“Benny called and said you was coming up, but he didn’t say you brought friends. Let me call a couple girls and we’ll all of us have a party.” The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises, and I suspected that once she doffed that robe we’d be treated to the sight of track marks inside her elbows.
“I think I’m going to make an early night of it, boss.”
“What the hell?” the old man said, his fury manifesting itself instantly and, as usual, without warning. That chopped-up ear was the color of a July tomato. “I’m paying, where the hell do you get off saying no to a free piece of ass?”
“Hey, fellahs, not in the hallway, please,” the girl said, trying to usher us into the room. “There’s still citizens live in this hotel.”
“I’ll get a cab,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“How about you?” he asked Park. “You a fucking water lily too?”
“I’ll have me a piece, sure.”
“Good. Go on get in there. Ogden, you’re fired, you lousy little queer piece of shit.”
Without turning around I waved them goodnight. This wasn’t the first time he’d fired me in such a state, and in the morning he’d be lucky if he remembered enough to regret it. Everett Collins didn’t know it, but he’d just sent me on a much-needed vacation.
I HAILED A cab on North Main and told him to drive out toward Red’s. I shouldn’t have gotten to thinking about Italy, where I was my own boss, even if several thousand men could legitimately claim to have the power to give me orders. I pulled from the inside pocket of my sport coat a letter I’d been carrying for two weeks, from my old buddy Lester, stationed now in occupied Japan. After the usual pleasantries and perfunctory asking after my family, he got to the real gist of the matter:
You ought to be here, Oggie, there is action all the time and guys arriving looking for a game or a girl or a fix and man oh man its wide open. Local enforcers are all on the run and that’s the way it is going to go around here till they get thereselves ready to re-join civization. Come on back to Mother Army, Oggy, all is forgiven. If you re-up