Autobiography of a Lesser God

By Leo Cohen

Selwyn Berner is the lesser god of this novel. Rooted in America, Europe and WWII it begins with three short stories about critical people in Selwyn Bergner's life. Selwyn's autobiography then weaves these stories into his own. It involves shadowy people, questionable alignments, skimming cash and at least one murder, probably more. Selwyn Bergn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joshua Books, LLC
• Release date: Feb 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985549256

Leo Cohen

Leo Cohen has a fairly lengthy history in the early computer industry and published on program generators and database.Not the stuff of bedtime reading. And now, he writes; fifty or more political screeds published in local Colorado newspapers, a few short stories, some poems and six novels to date.

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Autobiography

of a Lesser God

Novels by Leo Cohen

Letter From a Fictitious Person

Running From Tomorrow

An Almost Perfect Murder

Tracking Shadows

Computer Dreaming

The Autobiography of a Lesser God

Autobiography

of a Lesser God

Leo Cohen

Joshua Books

Yucca Valley, California

Autobiography of a Lesser God

Leo Cohen

Joshua Books, LLC

7446 Chippewa Trail

Yucca Valley, CA 92284

joshua-books.com

Copyright©2022 Leo Cohen

All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed are fictitious.

Book and cover design: RSBPress, Waitsfield, Vermont

Cover image: Bernard Spragg. NZ from Christchurch, New Zealand, PDM-owner, via Wikimedia Commons

Tradepaper ISBN 979-8-9855492-4-9

Ebook ISBN 979-8-9855492-5-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902657

FOREWORD

My name is Selwyn Bergner and this is my autobiography. It is preceded by three brief biographies of people other than me. These are my father, Sid Bergner, a cousin, Marvin Figler, and an influential person named Nathan Stern-Guilbert, known as Stern.

The circumstances of my life are the consequences of choices I made, that is, my freewill. Clearly, freewill has a role. Each of the folks involved here, including myself, are stuck with it. Obviously, the freewill of A impacts the freewill of B. Which is to say, A’s freewill is perhaps seen by B as luck, good or bad.

But I’m not beating a freewill drum here. Rather, I’m telling individual, personal stories, including my own. The result is me quite literally up in the air above a bunch of subway cars and pissed off with how it all ends.

Selwyn Bergner

SID

1920, New York City, Hell’s Kitchen. When Sid Bergner was 17 and in the early days of his last school year, he had gotten his first bike. It was the end of a cool autumn afternoon and he was on the west side of 12th Avenue waiting on traffic when Dinky Luberwitz, a runner for Lou Buckholz, came zooming out of 35th on his bike. He tried to make a left turn to beat the southbound trolley and carriage traffic on the avenue but slipped on wet horse shit. His bicycle slid under the trolley and came out the other side, stopping almost at Sid’s feet. But Dinky tumbled and didn’t make it through, something in the trolley’s under carriage doing permanent damage to his head.

Dinky Luberwitz was a seventeen-year-old. The tenement streets had replaced his given name, Malachi, with Dinky because of his diminutive size. But his size didn’t keep him from speeding around almost carelessly on his bike, and it looked like he made pretty good money running for Lou. Sid wanted to be a runner for Lou as well, but he didn’t have a bicycle, until Dinky’s run in with the trolley. Bad luck for Dinky, good luck for Sid. Sid quietly picked up Dinky’s bike and pedaled it north up the avenue to Lou Buckholz’s office as the crowd surged around the trolley when it came to a stop. School was over and his runner career was about to start.

Sid’s parents were Edna and Bernie. They came to America at the turn of the century as thirty-year-old newlyweds from a small village in Austria. Edna was originally Edwina, Bernie was Baruch and they were the Bergnermanns. But Immigration, perhaps for patriotic reasons, shortened Bergnermann to Bergner. Edwina and Baruch wanted very badly to be good Americans, so ‘Edna’ and ‘Bernie’. They worked hard to learn the language, worked hard to get the skills for a decent job. But the best Edna could do was piecework sewing panels into dresses, and Bernie became a maker of hats, cutting felts and stitching brims on the sizing blocks. It was a tough, mean sweatshop life. They were both thirty-three when Sid was born on a morning promising spring in March, 1903.

That’s where Sid grew to school age and where he met Benny Ginzberg. Sid wasn’t quite retiring through his school years but something less than outgoing. It was outgoing Benny who kept him connected to other kids in the neighborhood, particularly the girls. He was fifteen when he decided his parents had a no-life, and that the schooling he was getting was preparing him for a no-life just like theirs.

Soon as I can find something that interests me, I’m done with school, he told Benny. I get more out of the newspapers.

Yeah, but there are a lot of jobs out there you gotta have high school.

Like what?

I don’t know, Benny answered. Maybe Wall Street.

Sid had laughed. Benny the stock market mogul. ‘Mogul’ was a word Sid had gotten from the papers.

Okay, not the stock market, but guys run messages down there and they do pretty good.

Well, I don’t think you need high school for that, Sid answered.

By the time Sid was nineteen, prohibition had doubled Lou Buckholz’s business. That meant much less sitting around waiting for a run. Sid was paid by location and now his runs were taking him all over Manhattan. So he was making pretty good money and he liked having something in his pockets and being able to add to his parent’s earnings.

Benny Ginzberg was working as well. He had graduated but the best that got him was a food preparation job at the uptown Automat in Manhattan. It’s not so bad, he said. Place is clean, the work isn’t heavy lifting, and it’s warm. Also, it’s a nice bunch of people. And there’s girls.

Girls. A subject Sid had been thinking more about lately. The only girls he knew were in the neighborhood and aside from the occasional sexual opportunity, there wasn’t really much to hold his attention. It didn’t take him long to figure out that his major attraction was that his pockets jingled. It made him good for a night out at a movie palace on Broadway, like the Strand in Times Square, and sometimes a shared after-show sandwich and soda at one of the little store front restaurants they would pass on the way back to The Kitchen. That would get him some front stoop hugs and kisses, and every now and then something more extensive in a back alley resulting in a handkerchief needing a good wash.

There was always talk on the street about girls, sex and getting laid. And every week or so some neighborhood girl was reported pregnant, some seventeen-year-old kid in the neighborhood was getting married. Well, it wasn’t going to happen to Sid. He would not allow his life to be decided by a fifteen-minute run-in that turned out to be a colossal mistake. His insurance was two rubbers in his billfold. However, it wasn’t easy to get laid in the packed tenements, and thus far he hadn’t been endangered.

Then one morning Lou handed him a prescription run, which meant a bottle of something wrapped in padding. If the destination was an apartment and the recipient a female, it was probably laudanum with a little spike. This one was for a lady on West 96th Street. You’ll probably get a nice tip, Lou said with a thin smile that was just a rung or two above a grimace, as he handed Sid the package. The smile surprised Sid. Lou was not a smiling type.

The address was in a middle class neighborhood and the building had an elevator. When he knocked on the third floor apartment door the peep hole opened almost immediately and a female voice asked, Who is it?

Lou sent me. Those were the prescribed words, secret code that opened the apartment door on a woman who looked to be in her mid-forties. She was tall, about an inch or two short of Sid’s six feet, and barefoot, wearing a thin camisole pushed out by ample breasts, nipples poking the material as if shouting for his attention. She almost grabbed the package and was effusive in her thanks for his bringing it, all the while looking him over. What she saw was an attractive nineteen-year- old, tall, a little on the thin side, with a face made up of well-defined parts, a strong face with what Sid knew to be a reliable look, a trustworthy look but with a hint of tension as if ready to react.

The woman’s face was narrow, eyes deep set under thin brows. She told him to come in, almost a command, saying that she felt he deserved a tip for the trip, taking his left wrist and gently pulling him into the foyer of what looked from there to be a rather large apartment. He stood just inside the door expecting her to conjure a handbag from somewhere. What’s your name? she asked.

Sid. I’m Sid. He thought he sounded juvenile, not in control of anything and felt he was simply responding in a scene in which all his lines would be simple and unimportant.

Do you always deliver for Lou? There was something earnest in her voice, as if she were hoping for a particular answer.

Sid’s voice was clogging up; Uh huh. Maybe his brain, as well.

Sid, a nice name, she said slowly, undoing each of the camisole’s four buttons and without another word, knelt before him unbuttoning his fly, freeing his penis which was already starting to harden, and put it in her mouth. After a minute or two she sat on the foyer rug and laid back, hiking the camisole’s hem to her waist, whispering, Put it in, fuck me.

Ten minutes later he had closed the apartment door on the woman, still on the rug, arms and legs akimbo, the package still in her right hand. He was feeling a little dizzy and the bike ride back downtown was unsteady for the first block or two. Then he stopped and let his mind settle around the experience, suddenly realizing he hadn’t used a condom. Oh Jesus! What if she gets pregnant?

Sid’s pharmaceutical deliveries continued for a little over a month and then they stopped with no explanation from Lou Holzman. The Laudanum Lady, the only name he had for her, was a gift and Sid was learning that you accepted gifts, particularly if they had no consequences like an ugly confrontation over a swelling belly. He had brought out a condom on the second delivery about four days later, and she had waved it off, so he figured the woman had some magic way of avoiding pregnancy and stopped letting the worry interfere.

The Laudanum Lady had made him feel more grown-up, as if he had stepped through a portal. He thought about the boys around his age in the neighborhood whose major interests were sex and drinking beer. The Laudanum Lady was sex with more style, and less groping and as a consequence of the experience he decided that although he liked it, he was not going to get grubby over his sexual demands and trade his life for them, however that may turn out.

Sid did not like alcohol, he had had a couple of brief experiences with it and it always left him with a foul taste that seemed to take forever to go away. He never had enough to consider himself drunk but enough to know that any more would have led him there from woozy. It was a sense of not being in complete control and by the time he was in his early twenties he understood that he needed to be in control; control of himself, his life and its future, and to some extent some control of the life around him. Controlling himself had always been easy. Since his early teens Sid had been able to marshal the necessary personal forces, energies and discipline that made him Lou Holzman’s best runner. It was that personal control of his sexual desires that gave him the ability to avoid trading his independence for the momentary satisfaction of a stupid error. The experience with the Laudanum Lady had not demanded anything more from him than an erection.

Dark chugs from the elevated engine above him marred the puffery of small clouds in an otherwise blue sky. Sid was pedaling up 9th Ave with 35th Street another block ahead, and passing a two-horse trolley.

It was mid-morning in early July and he was headed to Lou Buckholz’s storefront office on 37th to see if there were any runs for him. The fruit and vegetable stands were packed so solidly along the curb he was figuring he would have to get onto the sidewalk at 37th and push his bike up the sidewalk through the crowds.

With all the volume created by the hawking and haggling of myriad voices, plus the elevated and another trolley clanging toward him on the far track, he only registered but didn’t really see the three guys sprinting from across the street right in front of the trolley’s horses beside him. The first two guys spooked the horses and one of them reared, lurching the other one in its trace to the right. There had been a light morning rain and the shovel brigade had been out leaving the trolley lines slippery for bicycles and for off balance runners. The third guy glanced up at the horse, immediately skidded onto his behind and it looked like he was going to get a hoof in the head. But Sid was stepping off the bike even as he was going down, caught a flailing ankle and yanked him out of the way of a stomping.

The first thing Sid did was run to pick up his bike. It had rolled about ten feet before falling over. Accidents attracted crowds and in Hell’s Kitchen things not tied down tended to disappear. Sid understood that well. He righted it and then quickly walked it back to the guy struggling to get up. He was thick looking, pudgy about the body, his face starting to round out at the cheeks suggesting there were jowls in his future. He was in a dark suit, white shirt, no tie. The fall had knocked his gray fedora off and a hoof had landed on it. Sid quickly laid the bike on its side and then got behind him, hands under his arms at the shoulders, and helped him up with a good lift.

Just as he was getting him to a standing position, Sid felt a thick arm around his neck from behind, pulling him back, and then a punch in the stomach. He would have doubled over except that the neck hold kept him erect. The punch had come from a broad, really rough-looking tough, face grizzled and, Sid registered, of all things a gleam in his eyes. But the second punch was forestalled by a torrent of Italian, loud and commanding, from the stumbler; Ruffio! Fermati, idioti. Fermati adesso! He grabbed the puncher, who looked almost twice his size, turned him, slapping his face forehand and backhand, and yelling, Potrei essere stato ucciso da un dannato cavallo e mi ha salvato il culo.

Having been running around the streets of The Kitchen ever since he was allowed out the door of their tenement on his own, he understood enough Italian to know that this was a boss of some kind and he had just told his guy, Ruffio, that Sid had ‘saved his ass.’ Then he turned to a half bent over Sid, put a hand on his back and said, I’m sorry, really sorry. They got muscle where the brain’s supposed to be. You going to be okay?

Sid nodded, took a couple of deep breaths and slowly straightened up to his full six feet. Opening his eyes, he discovered that the spot, not five feet away where he had laid his bike down on the street, was empty. Oh shit.

What? Oh, Jesus Christ! Your bike. Goddamn thieves will steal anything you’re not holding in your hand. As he said that he pulled a small notebook out of his inside coat pocket. I’m Albertino Pignatelli. The notebook had a rubber band around its cover. He opened it and there was a stubby pencil hugged to the inside by the rubber band. He pulled the pencil out, quickly moistened its sharpened end on the tip of his tongue and began writing, saying to Sid, I’ll take care of the bike. Here’s my office. You come by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll take care of it.

Sid had been thinking of where he might look for another bike. He needed one for Lou Buckholz. Lou had messages to deliver, and envelopes, sometimes small packets about half the size of a brick. They went all over midtown and downtown, and he needed a bike. He didn’t know what was in these deliveries and he didn’t care. What he did know was that if he didn’t have a bike, there was another twenty-two-year-old with a bike waiting to take his place. He was really worried and it took him a moment to hear what Pignatelli had said as he tore the page out of the notebook and handed it to him.

Uh, thanks Mr. Pignatelli.

Albo. That’s what everybody calls me.

Sid gave his head a quick shake, as if to clear cobwebs. Okay. Albo. He was holding the small page almost delicately between thumb and forefinger. I’m Sid Bergner.

I promised some shopping, Sid, Albo said, indicating the vendor carts reaching up and down the street. That’s why I’m here. So thanks. Tomorrow, don’t forget. After noon. He nodded to Sid and walked away, flanked by his bodyguards, the fedora, a big tear in its crown, left forlorn in the street.

Pignatelli’s office took up the second floor of a four-story building converted from tenements and modestly refurbished. It was on 10th Avenue, the second building beyond the corner of 48th Street. The door at the second-floor landing opened on a reception area about fifteen feet in each direction. It was utilitarian pristine, new-looking but nothing fancy. There were half a dozen solid-looking chairs around the wall, leather seats and backs, leather-topped arms with small cut glass ash trays in them, no rug. Two of the chairs were occupied by well-dressed guys, both wearing fedoras, one of them smoking a cigar, but no receptionist. There was a door to his left, probably to the back of the building, another to his right he guessed looked out on 10th Avenue, and a third in the middle of the wall directly in front of him. One of the guys was reading what looked like a racing form and the other one was slowly paging through a New York Evening Post. Sid had just pushed the entrance door shut when a tall, thin guy came out of the left hand door, swinging it wide, a bulge of sound from a number of voices pushing out behind him.

He looked at Sid for a second or two, then quickly lifted his chin an inch or so and dropped it, saying, Yeah?

I’m Sid Bergner. Mr. Pignatelli said…

Oh, yeah, you’re the guy. Gimme just a minute. He shoved the door closed behind him and in two strides, opened the center door, Sid could see it was a bathroom. Five minutes later he was back in the reception area and said to Sid, Sorry. Nature. It was a phone call I had to answer. Wait right there. He went to the street-side door, knocked twice and stuck his head into the opening. Then he motioned to Sid, Okay, Albo wants to talk to you.

Sid had been in rooms like this before. He had delivered Lou Buckholz’s packages to them. They were big, but nothing much in it beyond self-aggrandizement. It had a huge desk, a high-backed executive chair and standard big shot stuff; framed photos at conferences, in offices, at golf courses, and each one including some public bigger shot. There was a very large rug in a repeating pattern of shapes in rose, gray and white that covered most of the floor space. Sid thought it was probably an Oriental. He had never seen one before but knew about them, knew they were expensive. Two stuffed leather chairs flanked a matching overstuffed leather couch against one wall. The furniture wood where it showed was dark, the leather-looking bronzed in the light coming in from three opened windows in the wall behind the desk and chair overlooking 10th Avenue. The room was also outfitted with two lieutenants, one lieutenant on the couch at one end, the other in the chair next to it, completing the picture. No particulars matched but the feel, the concept, was the same. If the room had been a little smaller, the furniture more used looking and Lou Buckholz behind the desk instead of Albo Pignatelli, Sid would have felt right at home.

One difference, and a very big one, was the brand new Indian bicycle next to Pignatelli’s desk perched solidly on its rear stand and its white walled front tire.

Hi, Mister Pignatelli. Sid knew the bosses liked the ‘mister’ formality around their captains and lieutenants. Lou had told him as much.

This is the kid I was telling you about, Lenny. Ruffio wanted to kill him, that dumb Wop.

You don’t know how much headache you saved all of us, kid. It was the lieutenant on the couch. His voice was flat, almost completely without inflection. Sid thought it matched his eyes. Scary, yes, but Sid had seen all of this before. Like the room, he was standard tough guy but up the ladder a few rungs; he could order the dirty jobs instead of doing them himself.

Mister Pignatelli would have been upset.

Upset wouldn’t be half of it, lieutenant two said.

Now Sid understood that Albo was the son, Boss Junior.

Right, Pignatelli said. That’s trouble we don’t need right now. Anyway, here’s your bike. And a little something for your trouble. He gestured toward the Indian from his chair and Sid noticed there was an envelope on its seat. Ride it in good health. And be careful. It’s dangerous out there. Pignatelli chuckled at his little joke and one of the lieutenants snorted over a thin-lipped smile.

Sid stepped over to the bike, pocketed the envelope and pulled it off its stand. It’s beautiful Mister Pignatelli. Thanks, thanks a lot. He started toward the office door pushing the bike, but at about the middle of the room he stopped and turned back to Pignatelli.

You got any money to lend Mister Pignatelli?

A silence rose over the room and spread out to cover it. Street noises two floors below that had been background coming in through the open windows, ceased. It seemed to Sid like minutes of total silence. Pignatelli was motionless, his expression a mixture of surprise and curiosity. Eyebrows bunched and lips pursed, he looked quickly at his lieutenants and then back to Sid, finally saying, You got money problems, kid?

No, not me, but I’m down the docks a lot and the stevies ask me if there’s anybody making loans, a few bucks until payday.

You want to lend money to the Irish? Dweyer will kill you. He’s trying to organize stevedores and separate them from the Chicago guys. He’ll think you’re competition.

No, I won’t be competition because I’ll only lend to stevies with Dweyer’s union card.

On his way to Pignatelli’s office Sid had stopped at Lou’s to tell him he couldn’t be there this morning but would be back no later than two. Lou had a group of four runners and Sid knew he was not only the best but the favorite. Lou had told him as much. That meant he had some leeway with Lou, maybe two days at the most before he was replaced by a different kid with a bike. But he said he would be back there in a couple of hours at the outside because he was sure Pignatelli would provide him with at least enough money to get another bike.

The sidewalks had been crowded as usual and it was not possible to avoid little bumps. One of them was a longshoreman hurrying towards the docks, his crate hook stuck under a suspender at his waist, its point covered with a finger length leather glove. Sid had felt the metal of the hook in that slight contact, looked up at the guy and suddenly the idea had rolled in on him. Most of them were Irish so probably a wife and a bunch of kids, and always behind the financial eight ball. They worked hard and lived hard, betting with the bookies, playing the numbers, or at a speakeasy getting their heads insulated for going home. Ten hours a day, six days a week. You only had to know a few of them, as he did from his own neighborhood of tenements, to be able to generalize with a degree of confidence. So he wondered if a lending business for stevedores was a possibility. It took him about 15 minutes more to get to Pignatelli’s office, and every step added new thoughts and ideas for the meeting.

Afterward, he marveled at the inspiration that had allowed him to reply to Pignatelli’s concern about his competing with Dweyer and his union. After no more than ten minutes of discussion, Pignatelli told him that if he could come back with a deal with Dweyer and a plan for the business that made sense, he would back him with the money. He was almost certain that the Dweyer deal he had in mind would work, and that gave his thinking direction for the planning.

Now he was on his new bike, pedaling South toward Lou’s because he still needed some income, and running provided it.

It was a good plan, Pignatelli had been enthusiastic and Sid had made a very smart deal with Dweyer. Sid would have an exclusive for two years, including Union protection. After that he would turn it over to Dweyer, lock, stock and barrel, to do with as he pleased.

The deadline was 1924. By that time Sid’s two storefront offices on the west side docks had become officially Union lending offices. It had worked so well that a few months before the turnover he tested the idea at South Street Seaport just a block away from the Fulton Fish Market, this time backed by Pignatelli, calling his new loan shop the ‘Payday Cash Store’. The smell was pervasive, but the smell of money was more so. Because it was a new location he had needed to be there, so he hired two of Dweyer’s smarter, more presentable members to operate the dockside businesses under the rubric of training for the Union takeover. Dweyer didn’t need to know about his expansion.

A year later his next target was Harlem. Pignatelli made a protection deal with a Harlem boss named Starkley and Sid set up a Payday Cash Store on West 114th Street, just about Harlem’s southern border at the northern end of Central Park. Then, in February, 1927 he established a Payday Cash Store at the newly opened Flushing Airport which was booming with construction at College Point.

At the outset he had no reason for Dweyer to know anything more about him other than he was a lender with money and backed by Albertino Pignatelli. With what would turn out to be great foresight, he had introduced himself to Dweyer as James Vitalli. As a consequence he became known to his stevedore customers as Jimmy The Wop, and privately to Dweyer as Dago Jim.

When Sid turned the business over to Dweyer’s union at the end of 1924, he was already averaging $250 a week, more than five times what Edna and Bernie brought in together. South Port was up and running and its business was booming. Albo Pignatelli was more than pleased. His bookkeeper for all operations was Joe Passeretti and he had told Albo that Sid’s reports were perfect to the penny and his operation was impressive. It had made selling the South Port plan easy, and Sid something of a star in the Pignatelli organization. Now it was 1924 and he had already done well enough to retire his mother and father from their sweatshop jobs and move them from the rough Hell’s Kitchen tenement to the first floor of a relatively upscale four-floor walk-up on Stanton Street on the lower east side that he bought for cash, half of it a loan from Pignatelli. It was a heavily Jewish neighborhood, the building cared for and solid. Definitely a step up from The Kitchen, but still a tenement in a tenement neighborhood. With some less than focused ideas about a family future, he reserved the entire 2nd floor for himself and rented out the two apartments in each half of the remaining floors.

Sid had drawn up a plan for a loan shop in Harlem and knew that running the downtown and uptown shops was not possible for him alone, and that he would need help. As soon as he began planning to open in Harlem he hired a cage clerk and then hired Benny Ginsburg away from the Automat and installed him as manager for South Port, and trained both of them. It had taken less than three months for that decision to prove itself and he was free to focus on Harlem.

Sid never assumed that any of his plans on first outing were perfect. And he was constantly reviewing those plans and revising as necessary. He had been working with Benny as his store manager at South Port for close to six months and was now having a lunch at the Wall Street Automat with him to detail his Harlem marketing ideas. They had just settled at a table with sandwiches and sodas when Benny spotted a Chaluik brother at the front door looking over the crowd in the room. Benny stood and waved an arm, saying, there’s Dave Chaluik, and a moment later Dave was at their table.

Sid and Benny had been in school with the younger Chaluik brother, David. His parents were Crimean Jews as estranged from the New World as if they had been deposited on a different planet. Their first born, Mozes—Moishe on the street—reflected their Crimean past, and Dave, four years later, their American future.

The three of them had been classmates and school friends. Dave finished high school and immediately found a job making cigars in a small neighborhood factory that sold them to a broker named Markland. Markland provided the factory with boxes and rings, each box labeled with a jockey-mounted racehorse in full stride, the legend, ‘The Markland’ arcing over the top and ‘A Thoroughbred Cigar’ underlining the horse and rider.

I stopped in your office, Chaluik said to them, pulling up an armless wooden chair that was free at a nearby table, and they said you were out having lunch somewhere. I figured the Automat was the closest place that didn’t smell like fish, and bingo.

Aren’t you supposed to be making cigars? Sid asked him.

Laughing, Benny said, if you’re making them down here you’ve probably invented the first flavored cigar.

What a great idea, Dave said. A fish-flavored cigar.

You’d have the market all to yourself, Sid added.

Okay, Dave said, suddenly serious. Cigars and marketing. That’s why I was looking for you. I got a business proposition. He looked quickly at Benny Ginsberg, and Sid picked it up immediately.

Benny’s okay. Tell us.

Dave sat back, looked at both of them, took a deep breath and said, Markland’s wife came in yesterday afternoon, quieted down everybody and the cutters and said her husband was in the hospital with a serious heart attack. It was almost certain, she says, that he wouldn’t be able to come back to the business. The best she could think of, she says, was to sell it. And that could mean the new buyer might get his cigars somewhere else. Well, that brought out a big groan. We all knew that Bookman’s factory wasn’t making much more than enough for himself and might even still be paying someone off for the set up money. I mean, there’s only eight of us and we’re doing about twelve hundred cigars a day. I don’t know what he gets for each cigar but I do know that a Markland sells for fifteen cents.

A hundred eighty bucks a day, Sid said in a speculative voice. After Markland and expenses, nobody’s getting rich.

"Right, and I think Markland’s problem is that he was