A pretty girl from the Bronx was Mary Louise Fensen and raring to go.
“I had enough of fellas that think they’re the cat’s meow because they can fix the terlet,” she said. And Mary Louise had made it clear as polished glass she was not really interested in marrying a glorified plumber. He had a couple of lads hired on, from time to time, but not the big contracting and engineering company he’d always envisioned. It’d be a long time before he could save up enough to start a big contracting outfit of his own. There was no shame in it.īut there wasn’t much money in it either, working on assignment for Chinowski’s Maintenance. Heading up to some rich bloke’s penthouse. A dirty little job screwin’ pipes for the nobs. Just a mechanic and, lately, a freelance plumbing contractor. They were looking for some snappy young chap out of New York University, not a cockney blighter who’d worked his way through the East London School of Engineering and Mechanical Vocation.īill heard them say it, through the door, after they’d dismissed him: “Another limey grease monkey.”Īll right then. He had done his best to speak in American phraseology, to suppress his accent. They seemed bored by the time they called him in, and their faint flicker of interest evaporated completely when he started talking about his background.
The two interviewers were a couple of snotty wankers-one of them was Feeben Junior. They had looked at him with only the faintest interest when he’d walked into the Feeben, Leiber, and Quiffe Engineering Firm. The pay would start low, but the job would take him in a more ambitious direction. He’d taken the morning off from his plumbing business to interview for an assistant engineer job. But his mind was on earlier doings in another building, a small office building in lower Manhattan. He’d been sent so hastily by the maintenance manager he didn’t even have the bloody name of his customer. He was toting a box of pipe fittings in one hand, tool kit in the other. Bill McDonagh was riding an elevator up to the top of the Andrew Ryan Arms-but he felt like he was sinking under the sea.
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