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Death Smells of Cordite. Gordon Landsborough
Читать онлайн.Название Death Smells of Cordite
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781479409556
Автор произведения Gordon Landsborough
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
The main body of pickets had made themselves comfortable on the edge of the car park. They had plenty of room. There weren’t two hundred cars where normally two thousand workers’ vehicles stood.
The strike leader had got a trailer parked, so that he was always on the spot for talks. The boys had fixed him with electric light and a telephone, so that he could ring his wife and tell her how he much he missed her, the liar. For themselves they’d got beach chairs on the concrete, and there was more card-playing and dice-throwing than you’d see even downtown on a Sunday.
When Farran came out, the card-playing stopped. Every eye came round to the boss. He gave them the eye back, and some shuffled and looked quickly away. While he was watching a truck trundled to a stop and opened up. It was the chuck wagon for the picket. Some of the strikers went up to it immediately, but most stood and watched what Farran was going to do.
He went over to look at the wagon. It was a properly equipped mobile food bar, all streamlined and chromium.
Farran said, “You sure do yourselves well.”
The smell of hot coffee came richly to his nose, and there were hotdogs and hamburgers in the hot box to make the afternoon even more aromatic.
A big man, first in the queue, came round with a mouthful of hamburger and sneered, “Why not, brother? Guess you don’t do bad yourself with all your millions.”
Farran had seen him before at the gate. He was always there, the most assiduous striker. And the toughest. He came back with his mouth at the slightest opportunity. His raucous, irritating voice prompted Farran to mentally dub him the “yawp.” That’s what he was.
Farran looked at him. He was nearly his own height, but heavier. Much heavier. There was a pile of stomach trying to bust the strap he wore around his pants. And the pants looked sleep-weary, as if he bedded down in them. The face wasn’t as soft-looking as the middle, though it was stubbly-unshaven, and the hair looked as though it had been scratched on rising and not otherwise combed since. A tough, mocking face.
Farran said, “I won’t have many millions left, soon. This strike’s costing me half a million a week. You figure how long I can last before it’ll be no good picketing the place anymore.”
But it didn’t shake the strikers any. They knew modern finance and economics now. Knew that the Farran plant couldn’t die, couldn’t go out of existence, no matter how much it lost. They wouldn’t scrap the Boulder Dam even though it was losing millions a year. Or the whole of the Tennessee Valley scheme. Or Fords or Boeings or Lockheeds, to bring it nearer to aviation.
Because they were national assets. With war apparently never far ahead, such firms couldn’t be allowed to die.
Anyway, in the fat years the Treasury took most of their profits, and when they had a lean year, as this, they were able to draw back. So it didn’t matter a damn, in many ways, and the wise guys knew it.
The yawp said, brusquely, “It don’t cost you nothin’. But it costs the workers more’n half a million bucks a week in lost pay. I don’t give no tears for the poor li’l rich fellar called Farran no more.”
Farran heard an admiring, “Just lissen to Mac! He ain’t scared of no one!”
“Scared?” Sag-belly scratched under his shirt. “What in hell’s there anything to be scared of in this fellar?”
It got Farran mad. “By God,” he snarled, “someday you’ll be back at your job. So help me, when that day comes I’ll be after your hide, fellar!”
“You got me scared,” said the big yawp, but his sneer was twice as big. “You want another strike when this one’s over? You want another walkout because I’m bein’ victimised, huh?”
Shooting off his mouth he was, standing up to the boss and being truculent. And the other men watched and admired. It was as well that someone stood up to Russ Farran, they thought; few men ever did.
The big yawp finished and shouted up another coffee and hamburger. Farran complained, “I don’t suppose the boss gets more’n a smell of that coffee?”
The yawp spoke with a mouth full. “Brother, you supposed right. This is for the oppressed workers.”
“Oppressed? God knows what you’re striking for now!”
And he didn’t. They’d been in and out so often, especially in the last six months, he couldn’t quite remember what it was this time. Something to do with the Social Security scheme.
He left the pickets in full enjoyment of better hamburgers than he’d get downtown and got into his car. He was thinking of the Social Security scheme. It had misfired, badly, and he couldn’t understand why.
They’d had so much trouble. Farran had thought up this scheme to show labour he wasn’t antagonistic to their interests. And yet it had recoiled on him. He knew the trouble was they were completely suspicious of him, they suspected double-dealing in everything he did. And he couldn’t understand why.
The hell, he thought, stabbing for the starter button, he didn’t give a damn about anything except putting his beloved planes out. Labour was welcome to the best they could get out of the deal, the best he could give them, with a bank holding most of the mortgages, and ten thousand shareholders owning thirty-five percent of the shares. But they wouldn’t get the best with this series of wildcat strikes to strangle production. No one got the best out of such things.
He threw his car into a skid deliberately, passing the chuck wagon. The yawp was on another hamburger, sneering as he passed. The dust shot up quickly from the slipping wheels and got him nicely. Farran heard the crowd laugh to see him put one over so neatly on the big yawp. They always kept their humour, those boys, that was one good thing.
It put Farran in a good temper, and he took a look back. The yawp was saying things and trying to get the dirt off his hamburger.
Farran went to town. He didn’t know what to do there, but he knew he couldn’t do anything profitable out at the plant. That was a dead place, and for the moment he was better out of it, leaving things to Labour Relations Officer Uncle El.
As he drove into Los Angeles, he kept wondering why a perfectly good scheme, designed to give the men security, should be so misinterpreted. But no sooner had he put up the idea than there’d been trouble—trouble somehow ending in a walkout.
They’d got the idea that the weekly deductions to pay for the scheme (though the firm put up half the money, in the end) was an attempt to cut their wages. It took some working out, thought Farran cynically, but that’s how they’d got it in their heads. They argued that for years—on an average twenty years—the Farran concern would be having the use of part of their earnings. Multiplied by ten thousand, it represented millions. They thought it was a swindle. And somehow, because they were touchy, they’d come out on strike.
Farran thought, “There’s more to it than this,” but couldn’t think what it was.
He gave the red coupé a lot of gas, going over the plain towards the screen of hills behind L.A. It was a pretty good car, as it should have been, because it had cost half a million to make.
It could do around a hundred and forty, so he’d been told, though he’d never tried to shove the needle up so far. He liked to tool around at a modest pace; he wasn’t in any hurry when he was on four wheels. Eighty suited him—or maybe an occasional ninety when there weren’t any kinks in the road. But not speeding. He liked to do his speeding at least twenty thousand feet above sharp bends and traffic snarls.
Farran let the needle doodle around the eighty figure. Burt might be a sorehead, but he sure could design a car—given half a million or so.
It had been Burt’s idea. Right after the war, when cancellation came in for combat planes and the mighty Farran plant stood nearly as empty as it was now, Brother Burt had come up with the scheme. Aviation,