Kane and Abel (Kane & Abel 1)

'William,' said Grandmother Kane. 'Two cakes axe quite sufficient; d - ds is not your last meal before you go to Harvard.'

He looked at the old lady with affection and quite forgot the silver band.

13 That night as Abel lay awake in his small room at the Plaza Hotel, thinking about the boy, William, whose father would have been proud of him, he realised for the first time in his life exactly ~vhat he wanted to achieve. He wanted to be thought of as an equal by the Williams of this world.

Abel had had quite a struggle on his arrival in New York. He occupied a room that contained only two beds which he was obliged to share with George and two of his cousins. As a result, Abel slept onlywhen one of the beds was free. George's uncle was unable to offer him a job, and after a few anxious weeks during which most of his savings had to be spent on staying alive, Abel searched from Brooklyn to Queens before finding work in a butcher's shop which paid nine dollars for a six and a half day week, and allowed him to sleep above the premises. The shop was in the heart of an almost self - sufficient little Polish community on the lower East Side, and Abel rapidly became impatient with the insularity of his fellow countrymen, many of whom made no effort to learn to speak English.

Abel still saw George and his constant succession of girl friends regularly at weekends, but he spent most of his free evenings during the week at night school learning how to read and write English. He was not ashamed of his slow progress, for he had had very little opportunity to write at all since the age of eight, but within two years he had made himself fluent in hLis new tongue, showing only the slightest trace of an accent. He now felt ready to move out of the butcher's shop - but to what, and how? Then, while dressing a leg of lamb one morning, he overheard one of the shop's biggest customers, the catering manager of the Plaza Hotel, grumbling to the butcher that he had had to fire a junior waiter for petty theft.

'How can I find a replacement at such short notice?' the manager remonstrated.

The butcher had no solution to offer. Abel did. He put on his only suit, walked forty - seven blocks, and got the job.

Once he had settled in at the Plaza, he enrolled for a night course in English at Columbia University. He worked steadily every night, dictionary open in one hand, pen scratching away in the other; during the mornings, between serving breakfast and setting up the tables for lunch, he would copy out the editorial from the New York Times, looking up any word he was uncertain of in his secondhand Webster's.

For the next three years, Abel worked his way through the ranks of the Plaza until he was promoted and became a waiter in the Oak Room, making about twenty - five dollars a week with tips. In his own world, he lacked for nothing.

Abel's instructor at Columbia was so impressed by his diligent progress in English that he advised Abel to enrol in a further night course, which was to be his first step towards a Bachelor of Arts degree. He switched his spare - time reading from English to economics and started copying out the editorials in the Wall Street journal instead of those in the New York Times. His new world totally absorbed him, and with the exception of George he lost touch with his Polish friends of the early days.

When Abel served at table in the Oak Room, he would always study the famous among the guests carefully - the Bakers, Loebs, Whitneys, Morgans and Phelps - and try to work out why it was that the rich were different.

He read H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury, Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in an endless quest for knowledge. He studied the New York Times while the other waiters flipped through the Mirror, and he read the Wall Street Journal in his hour's break while they dozed.

He was not sure where his newly acquired knowledge would lead him, but he never doubted the Baron's maxim that there was no true substitute for a good education, One Thursday in August 1926 - he remembered the occasion well, because it was the day that Rudolph Valentino died, and many of the ladies shopping on Fifth Avenue wore black - Abel was serving as usual at one of the corner tables. Ile comer tables were always reserved for top business men who wished to eat in privacy without fear of being overheard by prying ears. He enjoyed serving at that particular table, for it was the era of expanding business, and he often picked up some inside information from the titbits of conversation. After the meal was over, if the host had been from a bank or large holding company, Abel would look up the financial record of the company of the guests at the lunch, and if he felt the meeting had gone particularly well, he would invest one hundred dollars in the smaller company, hoping it would be in line for a takeover or expansion with the help of the larger company. If the host had ordered cigars at the end of the meal, Abel would increase his investment to two hundred dollars. Seven times out of ten, the value of the stock he had selected in this way doubled within six months, the period Abel would allow himself to hold on to the shares. Using this system he lost money only three times during the four years he worked at the Plaza.