Hit and Run

HIT ANDRUN

JAMESHADLEYCHASE

COPYRIGHT

©1958

CHAPTER ONE

I

Roger Aitken was the kind of boss who never mixed his home life with his business life. It wasn't until he fell down the Plaza Grill steps and broke his leg that I went to his home and I met his wife.

It had never bothered me that he hadn't ever invited me back to his house. To my thinking there is nothing worse than the Big Wheel who looks on his employees as part of his family. I have always regarded the man who invites his employees to his home for a monthly nightmare dinner where no one dares take a drink or raise his voice as a boss to be avoided like a plague.

There was nothing like that about Roger Aitken. He was strictly the feudal type of boss. He picked the men and women who worked for him with searching care, paid them a quarter more than any other advertising agency, and if they didn't make good in their first week, he'd put his foot under their tails and out they'd go. You weren't given a second chance with Aitken: it was strictly deliver or out!

Before coming to work for the International and Pacific Agency, the biggest and best agency on the coast and which was managed by Aitken, I had been working for a crummy little outfit that had one foot in the financial grave, and a boss who was later hauled off to a home for incurable alcoholics. This was some two years ago. At the time I remember I was sitting at my desk wrestling with a scheme to promote a new kind of dish-washer that couldn't even shift the gravy stains off a plate when I had a call from Roger Aitken's secretary. She said Aitken wanted to talk to me on a personal matter and would I come over around six o'clock?

I knew Aitken, of course, by reputation. I knew he ran the agency for a board of rich business men and had made a wonderful thing out of it. Naturally enough I wondered if he were going to offer me a job. Naturally enough I was pretty excited: a job with the International was the ambition of every ad man on the coast.

At six, dead on the second, I was in his outer office, and at five past six, I was standing before his desk, getting the treatment from a pair of steely blue eyes that went through to the back of my head like the proverbial hot knife through the proverbial pat of butter.

Aitken was a big man, just over six foot two, massively built, with a whisky complexion, a mouth like a gin trap and a high executive's aggressive jaw. He was around fifty-seven and thick around the middle, but if it was fat, it was hard, solid fat. He looked the kind of man who kept himself in pretty good condition.

He stared at me for maybe ten seconds before he got up and thrust out his hand with a knucklecracking grip.

'You Chester Scott?' he demanded in a voice you could hear in the outer office without having your ear to the keyhole.

I don't know who else he thought I could be since I had had to give my name to at least four minor officials before breaking into his office.

I said I was Chester Scott.

He opened a file on his desk and tapped the contents with a thick finger.

'This your work?'

The folder contained about two dozen layouts clipped from various newspapers and journals I had been working on over a period of four or five months.

I said they were my work.

He closed the folder and began to prowl around the room.

'They're not bad,' he said. 'I can use a man like you. What are they paying you?'

I told him.

He paused in his prowling to stare at me as if he wasn't sure if he had heard aright.

'Do you know you're worth more?'

I said I did.

'Then why haven't you done something about it?'

I said I had been pretty busy recently and hadn't had time to get around to it.

'Work more important to you than money, huh?'

'I wouldn't say that,' I said. 'It's just that I've been pretty busy.'

He stared at me some more, then went behind his desk and sat down.

'I'll give you a hundred a week more than you're getting now: you can start Monday.'

That's how I came to work for the International.

And now, two years after this meeting, I was second in charge and only responsible to Aitken himself. I was pulling down a salary that two years ago would have seemed just a pipe dream. I had a Cadillac convertible, a three-bedroom bungalow that faced the sea, a Filipino boy to take care of me, and a respectable balance in the bank.

Don't imagine I moved into this class by sitting on my seat and smoking cigarettes. When you go to work for Aitken, you go to work. I was at my desk at nine o'clock every morning, including Saturdays, and there were times when I didn't get away until around midnight. If the International paid well, Aitken took good care he got his pound of flesh. I don't think I have ever worked so hard, but I enjoyed it, and I had a good team working with me: every one of them was a hand-picked Aitken man or woman, and that meant something. I was sitting right on top of the world. I looked set to go on sitting right on top of the world, but it didn't work out that way.