Read Online Tiffany Street by Jerome Weidman - Free Book Online Page B

of the truck and slid his rear end over toward the driver. “Hop in,” he said.
    I hopped in and pulled the door shut. The light changed. The driver put the truck into gear and we rolled off down Seventh Avenue.
    “Whereabouts downtown?”
    “Twenty-first and Seventh,” I said.
    “This is your lucky day, kid,” the driver said. “We’re taking this load to Ohrbach’s on Fourteenth. Okay if we drop you at the corner of Twenty-first and Seventh?”
    “That will be fine,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
    Then Hot Cakes and I seemed to become aware of each other. He was wearing a pair of battered khaki pants, a torn and sweaty T-shirt, a pair of scuffed sneakers, and he smelled like the locker room in Thomas Jefferson High after a basketball game. I was wearing my graduation suit and shoes, my mother’s beautifully laundered shirt, a tie that had been given to me for my bar mitzvah by my Aunt Sarah from New Haven, and I was certain I smelled better than Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. It would have been difficult to smell worse.
    “You look like you’re doing pretty good,” Hot Cakes said.
    “Not bad,” I said. “It looks better than it is only because it’s clean. A firm of certified public accountants. How about you?”
    “I’m with Built-in Uplift Frocks, Inc.,” Hot Cakes said. “It’s actually not as bad as it looks because it looks so dirty. Right, Al?”
    Al was dressed exactly as Hot Cakes was dressed, but Al was older, in his forties, I guessed, and he had not shaved for several days.
    “It stinks,” he said. “But these days what doesn’t?”
    “You still down on Fourth?” Hot Cakes said.
    “No,” I said. “We moved to the Bronx three months ago.”
    “Us, too,” Hot Cakes said. “Just a coupla weeks ago. Where you?”
    “Tiffany Street,” I said.
    “Jesus,” Hot Cakes said with a grin. “We’re just around the corner. Fox Street.”
    “Okay, Tiffany,” the driver said as he pulled the truck up to the curb at 21st Street. “Here’s your stop.”
    “Maybe we could get together?” Hot Cakes said.
    We had never been close friends. In fact, I knew very little about him except that he had been very good at wigwagging one-flag Morse code. But we had come from the same country, so to speak, and now we had rediscovered each other in an alien land. Previous friendship was unnecessary. From now on only death could us part.
    “I’d like that,” I said.
    I opened the truck door and jumped down to the sidewalk. Hot Cakes moved over to the window and pulled the door shut. Al started the truck.
    “Where can I reach you?” Hot Cakes called.
    I replied with a phrase I’d learned from listening to Mr. Bern. It packed weight.
    “I’m in the phone book,” I called back.
    The track disappeared into the flow of downtown traffic. I turned west. Walking up 21st Street toward Mr. Roon’s address, I was in the grip of two emotions. I felt virtuous, and I felt clever. I felt virtuous because I had arrived at Mr. Roon’s address as rapidly as a taxi could have carried me. I felt clever because I had made a dollar on the deal. In the lobby I forgot my feelings.
    It did not look much different from the lobbies of the other loft buildings in which Maurice Saltzman & Company clients functioned, and yet it seemed totally different. The difference puzzled me. I looked around the brown marble walls, but learned nothing. I walked over to the directory, found on the black felt the little white metal letters that spelled out I. G. ROON, LTD. 1201, and pushed the elevator button. As the car came rumbling down the shaft, I found myself sniffing. For what? The car arrived. As soon as I stepped in, and the operator slammed the door, I knew what was different about this building. It was the smell.
    All the other loft buildings I knew, most of them on Seventh Avenue, had very distinctive odors. Not necessarily unpleasant. In fact, as you moved up the avenue from 34th Street (dresses) to 37th (frocks) toward