Bertha shook her head and said, “You’re the coolest customer I ever saw. If you only weighed fifty pounds more, you’d be a gold mine to Bertha.”
“Too bad,” I said.
We drove for a while in silence, then I said, “I’m going to need a secretary and an office. I’ll either hire one or have to borrow Elsie Brand.”
“Donald, are you crazy? I can’t fix you up in an office. That costs money. It costs altogether too much money. You’ll have to find some other way of working your plant, and I can’t let Elsie Brand go, even for half a day.”
I drove along without saying anything, and Bertha got sore. Just before I drove the car into a parking lot in front of the Jap’s gymnasium, she said, “All right, go ahead, but don’t go throwing money away.”
We went up to the gymnasium, and the Jap threw me all over the joint. I think he just practised with me the way a basketball player practises tossing balls through a ring. He gave me a couple of chances to throw him, and I used everything I had, but I could never get him up and slam him down on the canvas the way he did me. He’d always manage to twist himself around in the air, and come down on his feet, grinning.
I was awfully fed up with it. I’d hated it from the start. Bertha said she thought I was getting better. The Jap said I was doing very nicely.
After the shower, I told Bertha to be sure to get me a suite of offices for a week, be sure the name I gave her was on the door, see that the furniture looked all right, and have Elsie Brand on hand to take dictation.
She fumed and sputtered, but finally decided to be a good dog. She promised to ring me up late that evening, and tell me where it was.
Henry Ashbury got hold of me that night before dinner. “How about a cocktail in my den, Lam?” he asked.