"A question!" he exclaimed. "Do I know him? Every afternoon, when I am in Chicago, Simon and me drinks coffee together."
Abe and Morris looked at each other with glances of mixed wonder and delight.
"I'll tell you another feller I'm intimate with, too," he said. "Do you know Charles I Fichter, cloak buyer for Gardner, Baum & Miller, in Seattle?"
Abe nodded. He had been vainly trying to sell Fichter a bill of goods since 1898.
"Well, Charlie and me was delegates to the National Grand Lodge of the Independent Order Mattai Aaron, and I nominated Charlie for Grand Scribe. The way it come about was this, if you'd care to hear about it."
"That's all right," Morris interrupted. "We take your word for it. The point is, could you sell it him a big bill of goods, maybe?"
Marks Pasinsky leaned back in his chair and laughed uproariously.
"Why, Mr. Perlmutter," he said, all out of breath from his mirth, "that feller is actually putting his job in danger because he's holding off in his fall buying until I get to Seattle. Fichter wouldn't buy not a dollar's worth of goods from nobody else but me, not if you was to make him a present of them for nothing."
He gave many more instances of his friendship with cloak and suit buyers. For example, it appeared that he knew Rudolph Rosenwater, buyer for Feigenson & Schiffer, of San Francisco, to the extent of an anecdote containing a long, intimate dialogue wherein Rosenwater commenced all his speeches with: "Well, Markie."
"And so I says to him," Pasinsky concluded, "'Rudie, you are all right,' I says, 'but you can't con me.'"