The Spiked Heel

NAKED FLESH, and the name traveled like wildfire. NAKED FLESH, and the housewives, and the debutantes, and the social butterflies, and the hat-check girls, and the chorus girls, and the waitresses, and the dowagers who should have known better, and the dowagers who did know better, and college girls, and highschool girls, and matrons, and mothers, and women all over the country saw the printed word, and the printed word was law, and they wanted NAKED FLESH!

They wanted NAKED FLESH, and they went to their local shoe store and asked for the shoe, and they were promised delivery within a few days, a week at most, and they waited patiently, because NAKED FLESH was something to wait for.

In the factory…

“He’s shifted the Naked bitch to the 1440s last!” Zibinsky shouted at Griff.

“The 1440s? But—”

“He’s stamping 1284 into the shoe as the last number! But he’s building half the pairage on the 1440. Griff, that almost amounts to fraud! Dames’ll be going into the shop thinking that shoe was made on the 1284 last when it wasn’t! Griff, that shoe’s gonna give us trouble. Griff, that goddam shoe ain’t gonna fit right! Somebody’s got to stop him!”

Alec Karojilian said, “I told him we had to keep those shoes on the lasts for at least seven, eight days. Griff, if this sole is going to stay glued to the upper, the shoe has to stay on for at least seven, eight days. I told him this. Jesus, Griff, do you remember when Santoro worked for us? He was a real quality-minded bastard, and he wouldn’t allow a shoe to leave a last for a minimum of fourteen days! I told McQuade.”

“What’d he say?”

“He says he has to free those lasts. He has to meet delivery dates. He says women are screaming for the shoes. Zibinsky tells me he’s building it on the 1440, in addition to the 1284, but he still ain’t got enough lasts. So he’s rushing the stuff through the factory.”

“How many days?” Griff asked wearily.

“Four days, Griff. He doesn’t want that shoe on the last more than four days. Okay, we’ll pull them. I don’t give a damn. But when the shoe falls apart on a woman’s foot, what happens then?”

“Hello, Griff?” Stiegman asked into the telephone.

“Yes?”

“What’s this latest nonsense?”

“What are you talking about, Dave?”

“This memo from McQuade.”

“What memo?”

“About air freight.”

“I don’t know anything about it, Dave.”

“He wants me to ship all orders of Naked Flesh via air freight. He says Julien Kahn will absorb the, additional freight charge. Now what the hell kind of a note is that?”

“We’ll pay the extra freight? Doesn’t he realize how much that’ll cost?”

“How do I know? He wants those shoes in the shops. But tell me something, Griff. Who absorbs that charge? Factory or Sales? This shoe is priced low as it is. He’s overadvertised it, and he’s given a bigger discount, and now he’s slapping this extra freight charge onto it. Who absorbs it?”

“That shoe had better be a tremendous smash,” Griff said. “It had better be the biggest damn seller this company ever—”

“And what about our other orders? Has he got that goddamned factory cutting nothing but Naked Flesh? I’m already beginning to get screams from the retailers. Griff, I’ve got a whole line to worry about. This son of a bitch is in love with Naked Flesh, but Julien Kahn has two hundred and ninety-nine other shoes in the line. What happens if Naked Flesh flops? What the Christ is going to happen then?”

Griff saw the trouble, as they all saw the trouble.

He saw the trouble, and he wondered exactly what he owed Julien Kahn, exactly what he owed Titanic.

And because Cost had become an integral part of his thinking over the years, he automatically thought now in terms of Cost. Item by item, he tallied the additional cost burden McQuade had heaped onto Naked Flesh, and then he put that alongside the selling price of the shoe. He was certain that unless McQuade’s baby produced an unprecedented landslide sale, it would most certainly put the company into the bottom of a deep hole. And even then, McQuade was sacrificing quality for speed, and quality had always been the trademark of Julien Kahn.

There was time to stop him. There was time to advise the salesmen against taking orders which could not possibly be met. There was time to revise the price of the shoe on future orders, so that the increased cost of material and labor could be absorbed. There was time to remember the rest of the line, time to concentrate on selling every shoe the firm made, time to get all those eggs out of that single basket, time to do an honest job and do it well.

There was still time to stop what could turn out to be the biggest fiasco in the history of the firm.

And the only people who could stop it were the people at Titanic Shoe — in Georgia.