Sydney Blake considered that until some ash broke off his cigarette and splattered grayly on his well-pressed pants. Foreigners. He should have known from their olive skins and slight, unfamiliar accents. Not that it made any difference in the McGowan. Or in any building managed by Wellington Jimm Sons, Inc., Real Estate. But he couldn’t help wondering where in the world people had such names and such disparate sizes.
“Very well, Mr. Tohu. And—er, Mr. Bohu. Now, the problem as I see it—”
“There really isn’t any problem,” the tall man told him, slowly, emphatically, reasonably, “except for the fuss you keep kicking up, young man. You have a building with floors from one to twenty-four. We want to rent the thirteenth, which is apparently vacant. Now if you were as businesslike as you should be and rented this floor to us without further argument—”
“Or logical hairsplitting,” the tiny man inserted.
“—why then, we could be happy, your employers would be happy, and you should be happy. It’s really a very simple transaction and one which a man in your position should be able to manage with ease.”
“How the hell can I—” Blake began yelling before he remembered Professor Scoggins in Advanced Realty Seminar II (“Remember, gentlemen, a lost temper means a lost tenant. If the retailer’s customer is always right, the realtor’s client is never wrong. Somehow, somewhere, you must find a cure for their little commercial illnesses, no matter how imaginary. The realtor must take his professional place beside the doctor, the dentist, and the pharmacist and make his motto, like theirs, unselfish service, always available, forever dependable. ” ) Blake bent his head to get a renewed grip on professional responsibility before going on.
“Look here,” he said at last, with a smile he desperately hoped was winning. “I’ll put it is the terms that you just did. You, for reasons best known to yourselves, want to rent a thirteenth floor. This building, for reasons best known to its architect—who, I am certain, was a foolish, eccentric man whom none of us would respect at all —this building has no thirteenth floor. Therefore, I can’t rent it to you. Now, superficially, I’ll admit, this might seem like a difficulty, it might seem as if you can’t get exactly what you want here in the McGowan Building. But what happens if we examine the situation carefully? First of all, we find that there are several other truly magnificent floors—”
He broke off as he realized he was alone. His visitors had risen in the same incredibly rapid movement and gone out the door.
“Most unfortunate,” he heard the tall man say as they walked through the outer office. “The location would have been perfect. So far from the center of things.”
“Not to mention,” the tiny man added, “the building’s appearance. So very unpresentable. Too bad.”