Sala grinned at him. Don’t worry, Schwartz — you’ll get a pension — probably forty acres and a mule, too.
I remembered Schwartz’s first appearance at the News. He wandered into the newsroom and asked for a job the same way he’d walk into a barbershop and ask for a haircut, and with no more idea of being turned down. Now, if there was another English-language paper in town, the collapse of the News would mean no more to Schwartz than the death of his favorite barber. It wasn’t the loss of a job that upset him, but the fact that his pattern was being threatened. If the paper folded, he’d be forced into some strange and irregular action. And Schwartz was not that way. He was perfectly capable of doing a strange and irregular thing, but only if he’d planned it Anything done on the spur of the moment was not only stupid, but immoral. Like going to the Caribe without a tie. He viewed Moberg’s way of life as a criminal shame and called him that job-hopping degenerate. I knew it was Schwartz who had put into Lotterman’s head the idea that Moberg was a thief.
Sala looked up at me. Schwartz is afraid they’ll cut off his credit at the Marlin and he’ll lose that special seat at the end of the bar — the one they save for the dean of the white journalists.
Schwartz shook his head sadly. You cynical fool. We’ll see how you feel when you start looking for a job.
Sala got up and started for the darkroom. No more jobs in this place, he said. When Greasy Nick jumps ship, you can bet the word is out.
A few hours later we went across the street for a drink. I told Sala about Chenault and he twisted nervously in his seat as I talked.
Man, that’s awful! he exclaimed when I finished. Christ, it makes me sick! He whacked the table with his fist. Goddamnit, I knew something like that would happen — didn’t I tell you?
I nodded, staring down at my ice.
Why the hell didn’t you do something? he demanded. Yeamon’s pretty good at slapping people around — where was he all that time?
It happened too fast, I said. He tried to stop it, but they stomped him.
He thought for a moment. Why did you take her to that place?
Come on, I said. I didn’t go over there to play chaperon to some lunatic girl. I looked across the table at him. Why didn’t you stay home and read a good book the night you got whipped by the cops?
He shook his head and fell back in the booth. After two or three minutes of silence, he looked up. What the hell are we heading for, Kemp? I’m really beginning to think we’re all doomed. He scratched his face nervously and lowered his voice. I’m serious, he said. We keep getting drunk and these terrible things keep happening and each one is worse than the last. . . He waved his hand in a gesture of hopelessness. Hell, it’s no fun anymore — our luck’s all running out at the same time.
When we got back to the office I thought about what he’d said, and I began to think that Sala might be right. He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
So, with this theory firmly in mind, I went to see Sanderson that night, meaning to leap from the bog of threatened unemployment to the high-dry branch of fat assignments. It was the only branch I could see within a thousand miles, and if I missed it, it meant a long haul to a new foothold, and I didn’t have the faintest idea where it would be.