Potash & Perlmutter Part 57

Abe nodded. He knocked at the door, and Liszt's transcription of the _Liebestod_ ceased immediately.

"Well?" Mozart Rabiner cried and, for answer, Abe opened the door.

"Hallo, Moe!" he said. "You don't know me. What? I'm Abe Potash."

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, Potash!" Rabiner said, rising from the piano stool.

"That's some pretty mournful music you was giving us, Moe," Abe went on.

"Sounds like business was poor already. Ain't you working no more?"

"I am and I ain't," Mozart replied. "I'm supposed to be selling goods for Klinger & Klein, but since I only sold it one bill in two weeks I ain't got much hopes that I'll get enough more money out of 'em to move me out of town."

"What do you make next, Moe?" Abe asked.

"St. Paul and Minneapolis," Mozart replied.

Abe handed him a large cigar and, lighting the mate to it, puffed away complacently.

"That was a pretty good order you got it from Prosnauer which Sol Klinger tells me about," he said.

Mozart nodded sadly.

"Looky here, Moe," Abe went on, "how much money do you need to move you?"

Mozart lifted his eyebrows and shrugged hopelessly.

"More as you would lend me, Potash," he said. "So what's the use talking about it?"

"Well, I was going to say," Abe continued, "if it was something what you might call within reason, Moe, I might advance it if----"

"If what?" Moe inquired.

"If you would tell me the insides of just how you got it that order from Prosnauer."

Mozart gave a deprecatory wave of his right hand.

"You don't got to bribe me to tell you that, Potash," he said, "because I ain't got no concern in that order no longer. I give up my commission there to a feller by the name Ignatz Kresnick."

"A white-faced feller with a big red mustache?" Abe asked.

"That's him," Mozart replied. "The luck that feller Kresnick got it is something you wouldn't believe at all. He could fall down a sewer manhole and come up in a dress suit and a clean shave already. He cleans me out last night two hundred dollars and the commission on that Prosnauer order."

"But you didn't get that order in the first place, Moe," Abe said.

"Marks Pasinsky got the order."

"Sure, I know," Mozart replied, "but he got set back a couple of four hundred hands last Tuesday night with Katzen and me in the game, and the way he settles up his losing is that Katzen and me should take his commissions on a couple of orders which he says he is going to get from Simon Kuhner, of Mandleberger Brothers & Co., and Chester Prosnauer, of the Arcade Mercantile Company. Sure enough, he gets the orders from both of 'em the very next morning. That's the kind of salesman he is."

"But why didn't Pasinsky send us along the orders, Moe," Abe protested, "and we could fix up about the commissions later? Why should he sent it the orders to Klinger & Klein and Sammet Brothers?"

"Well, you see, business was poor with me and I wanted to make good, being as this was my first trip with the concern; so, as a favor to me Pasinsky turns over the whole order to me," Mozart explained; "and then, when Katzen sees that, he wants the other order sent to his concern, too."

"But this was Pasinsky's first trip by us, also," Abe cried.

"I know it," Mozart said, "but Pasinsky says that he didn't care, because a good salesman like him could always find it an opening somewhere, and anyway he wasn't stuck on working for a piker concern like yours."

Abe rose with his eyes ablaze.

"That settles it," he said, jamming his hat on his head. "I'm going for a policeman. I'll teach that sucker to steal my orders!"

He bounced out of the room and, as he rang for the elevator, Isolde's lament once more issued from beneath. Mozart Rabiner's fingers:

_Mild und leise wie er lachelt Wie das Auge hold er offnet_

While from the floor above came the full, round tones of the salesman, Marks Pasinsky.

"Sixty queens," he said.

Abe ran out of the hotel lobby straight into the arms of a short, stout person.

"Excuse me," Abe exclaimed.

"I'll excuse you, Potash," said the short, stout person, "but I wouldn't run like that if I got it the rheumatism so bad."

Abe looked at the speaker and gasped. It was B. Gans.

"What are you doing in Chicago, Potash?" Gans asked.

"You should ask me that," Abe snorted indignantly. "If it wouldn't be for you I wouldn't never got to leave New York."

"What do you mean?" Gans asked.

"I mean you gives me a good reference for this feller Marks Pasinsky,"

Abe shouted. "And even now I am on my way out for a policeman to make this here Pasinsky arrested."

B. Gans whistled. He surrendered to a bell-boy the small valise he carried and clutched Abe's arm.

"I wouldn't do that," he said. "Come inside the cafe and tell me all about it."

Abe shook himself free.

"Why shouldn't I make him arrested?" he insisted. "He's a thief. He stole my samples."

"Well, he stole my samples, too, oncet," B. Gans replied. "Come inside the cafe and I'll give you a little sad story what I got, too."

A moment later they were seated at a marble-top table.

"Yes, Abe," B. Gans went on after they had given the order, "Marks Pasinsky stole my samples, too. Let's hear your story first."

Straightway Abe unfolded to B. Gans the tale of Marks Pasinsky's adventure with Mozart Rabiner and Arthur Katzen, and also told him how the orders based on Potash & Perlmutter's sample line had found their way into the respective establishments of Sammet Brothers and Klinger & Klein.