Elkan flapped his hand wildly, but it was too late to prevent the entrance of no less a person than Jacob Paul—the connoisseur of antiques and fine arts.
"Hello, Finkman!" he said; "what's the trouble here?"
Elkan started from his seat to interrupt his visitor, but there was something in Finkman's manner that made him sit down again.
"Why, how do you do, Mr. Paul?" Finkman exclaimed; and the clarion note had deserted his voice, leaving only a slight hoarseness to mark its passing. "What brings you here?"
"I might ask the same of you, Finkman," Jacob Paul replied; and as his keen eyes scanned the assembled company they rested for a minute on Leon Sammet, who forthwith began to perspire.
"The fact is," Finkman began, "this here is a meeting of creditors of Louis Dishkes, of the Villy dee Paris Store on Amsterdam Avenue."
Paul turned to Louis Dishkes, proprietor of the Ville de Paris Store, who sat at the side of the room behind Scheikowitz's desk in an improvised prisoner's dock.
"What's the matter, Dishkes?" Paul asked. "Couldn't you make it go up there?"
Dishkes shrugged hopelessly.
"Next month, when them houses round the corner is rented," he said, "I could do a good business there."