Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  “Look at the time, Wladek,” she said. “It’s past eleven and I’m on first breakfast call at six tomorrow.”

  Abel had not noticed the four hours pass. He would have happily sat there talking to Zaphia for the rest of the night, soothed by her admiration, which she confessed so artlessly.

  “May I see you again, Zaphia?” he asked as they walked back to the Stevens arm in arm.

  “If you want to, Wladek.”

  They stopped at the servants’ entrance at the back of the hotel.

  “This is where I go in,” she said. “If you were to become the assistant manager, Wladek, you’d be allowed to go in by the front entrance.”

  “Would you mind calling me Abel?” he asked her.

  “Abel?” she said as if she were trying the name on like a new glove. “But your name is Wladek.”

  “It was, but it isn’t any longer. My name is Abel Rosnovski.”

  “Abel’s a funny name, but it suits you,” she said. “Thank you for dinner, Abel. It was lovely to see you again. Good night.”

  “Good night, Zaphia,” he said, and she was gone.

  He watched her disappear through the servants’ entrance; then he walked slowly around the block and into the hotel by the front entrance. Suddenly—and not for the first time in his life—he felt very lonely.

  Abel spent the weekend thinking about Zaphia and the images associated with her—the stench of the steerage quarters, the confused queues of immigrants on Ellis Island and, above all, their brief but passionate encounter in the lifeboat. He took all his meals in the hotel dining room to be near her and to study the boyfriend, who, Abel had concluded, must be the young, pimply one. He thought he had pimples, he hoped he had pimples—yes, he did have pimples. He was, regrettably, the best-looking boy among the waiters, pimples notwithstanding.

  Abel wanted to take Zaphia out on Saturday, but she was working all day. Nevertheless, he managed to accompany her to church on Sunday morning and listened with mingled nostalgia and exasperation to the Polish priest intoning the unforgotten words of the Mass. It was the first time Abel had been in a church since his days at the castle in Poland. At that time he had yet to see or endure the cruelty that now made it impossible for him to believe in any benevolent deity. His reward for attending church came when Zaphia allowed him to hold her hand as they walked back toward the hotel together.

  “Have you thought any more about the position at the Stevens?” she inquired.

  “I’ll know first thing tomorrow morning what their final decision is.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad, Abel. I’m sure you would make a very good assistant manager.”

  “Thank you,” said Abel, realizing they had been talking about different things.

  “Would you like to have supper with my cousins tonight?” Zaphia asked. “I always spend Sunday evening with them.”

  “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  Zaphia’s cousins lived right near The Sausage in the heart of the city. Her cousins were very impressed when she arrived with a Polish friend who drove a new Buick. The family, as Zaphia called them, consisted of two sisters, Katya and Janina, and Katya’s husband, Janek. Abel presented the sisters with a bunch of roses and then sat down and answered, in fluent Polish, all their questions about his future prospects. Zaphia was obviously embarrassed, but Abel knew the same would be required of any boyfriend in any Polish-American household. Aware that Janek’s envious eyes never left him, he made an effort to play down his progress since his early days in the butcher shop. Katya served a simple Polish meal of pierogi and bigos, which Abel would have eaten with a good deal more relish fifteen years earlier. He gave Janek up as a bad job and concentrated on making the sisters approve of him. It looked as though they did. Perhaps they also approved of the pimply youth. No, they couldn’t; he wasn’t even Polish—or maybe he was. Abel didn’t know his name and had never heard him speak.

  On the way back to the Stevens, Zaphia asked, with a flash of the coquettishness he remembered, if it was considered safe to drive a motor car and hold a lady’s hand at the same time. Abel laughed and put his hand back on the steering wheel for the rest of the drive back to the hotel.

  “Will you have time to see me tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I hope so, Abel,” she said. “Perhaps by then you’ll be my boss. Good luck anyway.”

  He smiled to himself as he watched her go through the back door, wondering how she would feel if she knew the real consequences of the next day’s outcome. He did not move until she had disappeared through the service entrance.

  “Assistant manager, indeed,” he said, laughing out loud as he climbed into bed, wondering what Curtis Fenton’s news would bring in the morning, trying to put Zaphia out of his mind as he threw his pillow onto the floor.

  He woke a few minutes before five the next day. The. room was still dark when he called for the early edition of the Tribune. He went through the motions of reading the financial section and was dressed and ready for breakfast when the restaurant opened at seven o’clock. Zaphia was not serving in the main dining room this morning, but the pimply boyfriend was, which Abel took to be a bad omen. After breakfast he returned to his room; had he but known, only five minutes before Zaphia came on duty. He checked his tie in the mirror for the twentieth time and once again looked at his watch. He estimated that if he walked very slowly, he would arrive at the bank as the doors were opening. In fact, he arrived five minutes early and walked once around the block, staring aimlessly into store windows at expensive jewelry and radios and hand-tailored suits. Would he ever be able to afford clothes like that? he wondered. He arrived back at the bank at four minutes past nine.

  “Mr. Fenton is not free at the moment. Can you come back in half an hour or would you prefer to wait?” the secretary asked.

  “I’ll come back,” said Abel, not wishing to appear overanxious.

  It was the longest thirty minutes he could remember since he had come to Chicago. He studied every shop window on La Salle Street, even the women’s clothes, which made him think happily of Zaphia.

  On his return to the Continental Trust the secretary informed him that Fenton would see him now.

  Abel, his hands sweating, walked into the bank manager’s office.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rosnovski. Do have a seat.”

  Curtis Fenton took a file out of his desk. Abel could see “Confidential” written across the cover.

  “Now,” the older man began, “I hope you will find my news is to your liking. The principal concerned is willing to go ahead with the purchase of the hotels on what I can only describe as favorable terms.”

  “God Almighty!” said Abel.

  Curtis Fenton pretended not to hear him and continued: “In fact, most favorable terms. He will be responsible for putting up the full two million required to clear Mr. Leroy’s debt, while at the same time he will form a new company with you in which the shares will be split sixty percent to him and forty percent to you. Your forty percent is therefore valued at eight hundred thousand dollars, which will be treated as a loan to you by the new company, a loan that will be made for a term not to exceed ten years, at four percent, which can be paid off from the company profits at the same rate. That is to say, if the company was to make in any one year a profit of one hundred thousand dollars, forty thousand of that profit would be set against your eight hundred thousand debt, plus the four percent interest. If you clear the loan of eight hundred thousand in under ten years you will be given the one-time option of buying the remaining sixty percent of the company for a further three million dollars. This would give my client a first-class return on his investment and you the opportunity to own the Richmond Group outright.

  “In addition to this, you will receive a salary of five thousand dollars per annum, and your position as president of the group will give you complete day-to-day control of the hotels. You will be asked to refer to me only on matters concerning finance. I have been entrusted with the task of repo