But Edwin never seemed to buy anything. Or take any time off.
For Topper, the action was the juice. But he hadn't seen any real action since he had bounced a few rockets off the Cromoglodon's head. That had been fun. That was the way evil was supposed to be. But an insurance company? Sure, insurance companies were evil, but it was evil with a lowercase “e.” Topper wanted to be Evil with the big “E.” He wanted to be able do whatever the hell he wanted and laugh maniacally while doing it. In short, to indulge all the perverse whims and appetites contained in his libidinous little heart.
But that hadn't happened. Something far, far worse had happened. Something far more sinister. It had all turned into a job—a corporate job. Topper hated jobs. Corporate jobs, most of all.
So he hid in the comforter and alternated between sleeping and feeling sorry for himself. Two hours later, Stevie wheeled the car up to a large manufacturing facility. He parked behind an identical Town Car that belonged to Edwin. The tall man was obsessed with standardization and the economies of scale that came with fleet management.
Topper fought his way free from the comforter cocoon exactly the way a butterfly doesn't.
"How do I look?" he asked.
"Like hell," said Stevie.
"Thanks, asshole."
"Sorry, sorry, you look like a million bucks. Please marry my daughter," the chauffeur responded, not changing tone or inflection. Topper grabbed his tiny, custom-made leather briefcase and got out of the car. The little man wasn't rested. He wasn't ready. But he had a full head of steam that was looking for a place to blow. Today, that would be enough.
Edwin was waiting for him in the lobby. He was a tall man, of course, but in addition to his great height, there was something else. It was as if he had been constructed on a different scale than other men. Fashioned by an artist who worked in the finest materials and liked to work big. Topper stopped when there was still a substantial distance between him and his friend. He was in no mood to crane his neck back to talk to anybody. His head hurt enough already.
"What gives? Why do you disturb my beauty rest, Beanpole?"
"Good morning, Topper," said Edwin.
"Not from where I'm standing."
"Please, Topper, your protests grow tiring, we have work to do. Do you have the contract?"
"Yeah, I have the contract. You had Stevie print it out and bring it to me."
"Very good."
"No, it's not very good. If you can have Stevie print out the contract, then why do you need to send two guys to haul my small but shapely ass out of bed when I'm clearly busy with more important things?"
"A hangover is of small importance."
"Yeah? How would you know?"
Edwin had no answer. He said, "I need you here in case anything unexpected pops up. In case they make a counter-offer."
"Counter-offer? We're running an extortion racket! There is no counter-offer. Ya pay, or we breaka you face. Or building, or whatever."
"We are not in any racket. We are selling insurance. And there is a way that these things should be done."
"Eh-henh, well, your way isn't very efficient." The words hung in the air like a curse. Neither man said anything. Neither man looked away.
The stare-down was interrupted when a receptionist entered the lobby and said, "Mr. Windsor? Mr. DeTsavo will see you now."
"Are you with me?" Edwin asked.
"Yeah, yeah," said Topper, as he walked across the expanse of lobby. "But you gotta learn to respect the hours of a gentleman of leisure."
"Gentleman?" asked Edwin.
"Yeah, I'm a gentleman 'cause I'm rich enough to sue the pants off anybody who says otherwise."
From the moment they were shown into the office, Topper had an urge to smash the beautiful model that occupied the left side of the room. It was a scale replica of a brand new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. Its prominence showed that Leo DeTsavo, the CEO of General Business Machines, loved it very much.
As Edwin made the introductions and the nice-nice with the fat man who didn't get up from behind his desk, Topper could barely take his eyes off of the model. It was a thing that could be beautiful only to model makers and corporate drones. All function, no style. Not even the style of elegant functionality. It was a box. A really big box, painted General Business Machines Blue with a band of General Business Machines Off-White #3 running around the top.
"And this is my attorney, Topper Haggleblat," said Edwin.
"How ya doing?" Topper asked, absent-mindedly. He was so preoccupied with the model he missed the unhappy look Edwin shot him.
"Would you gentleman care for anything to drink?" asked DeTsavo, his finger hovering over a button that would summon a person to take care of anything he wanted.
Before Edwin could cut him off, Topper blurted, "Scotch."
"Scotch?"
"Yeah, whiskey, brown stuff. Comes in a glass. Before that it's usually in a bottle."
"It's 8:15 in the morning."
"Okay, Bloody Mary? Mimosa? Anything!” Topper said with glee.
DeTsavo looked to Edwin for some kind of context. Wasn't this a business meeting?
Edwin shook his head slightly, as if to say, just ignore the little man.
Bored already, Topper walked to the horrid model.
Trying to salvage the small-talk portion of the meeting, DeTsavo asked, "You are an admirer of models, Mr. Haggleblat?"
"Nah, I just like blue things," answered Topper. Screw this guy, thought Topper, anybody who thinks this thing is beautiful deserves what he gets. Why is Edwin wasting time like this? Just extort the bastard and get on with it.
What had happened to the tall guy? When had he turned respectable? Or soft, or, or—Topper didn't even know. Topper stared at the model and hoped that the meeting would be over soon.
In the background, Edwin and DeTsavo carried on while some drone brought coffee and/or tea. Topper and Edwin had done at least a hundred of these meetings. The set up was always the same. And the best part was, most of it was legal.
It worked like this: about 50 years ago, a few people developed superpowers. Call it mutation, government experimentation, the next stage of evolution, whatever—everybody had a theory. Topper didn't care about the how, what he cared about was the law.
Superpowered people had introduced a giant loophole in insurance law. While a villain would be held liable for the damage he or she caused, a hero wouldn’t. And between the two of them, heroes and villains managed to bust up a lot of real estate. They were like human natural disasters. After one insurance company had gone bankrupt from a battle between a superhero and a supervillain, no other company would offer that kind of coverage again. The risk was just too high. All policies were amended so such battles were deemed uninsurable risks as “Force Majeure”—acts of God and superpowered persons.
That had given Edwin the loophole.
When Topper felt the floor shake he realized that DeTsavo had struggled out from behind his desk and was waddling towards his model as gracefully as he could manage.
"It's a marvel," Leo DeTsavo said, “85% automation. In fact we run two of our shifts with nothing more than a team of engineers and a few security guards. Far cry from when I started with the company."
"Ah, you started in manufacturing then?" Edwin said, feigning interest to smooth the deal.
"Oh, no, no, no. Finance. But we've had terrible trouble with our pension liabilities. Unions and such. Actual people are difficult to deal with. Machines for me. Machines and robots. When you're done you just switch them off. And you get to amortize the cost of them. You can't amortize a person, you know."
Amortize, a legal term from Latin, meaning literally, to kill off over time. When Edwin said, "Oh, I don't know. Not in the traditional sense, surely..." Topper had to give a wry smile, even as unhappy as he was. Amortization was exactly the kind of thing Edwin did with people. And had done it more often and with greater enthusiasm since Agnes had passed.
"Machines don't file workers compensation," DeTsavo continued, "Machines don't sue for age discrimination or sexual harassment. Yes, machines for me."
Edwin nodded at the logic. "Total capitalization of the facility?"
"Still putting the finishing touches on it. Something on the order of $3.2 billion."
"That's quite a lot of money."
"It's nothing compared to the ROI."
"It is a marvelous facility. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it," Edwin said, as he threw the hook in the water. "But, I'm sure you have plenty of coverage."
DeTsavo heaved his bulk to face Edwin. "Are you trying to sell me insurance? Is that what you and your little monkey came here for?"
Topper felt his jaw quiver as the old anger flooded into him. That fat bastard was calling him short. Oh, now he really didn't like him. Before, it had just been business. Now, it was something else. What was that word he was looking for?
"That is precisely what I am selling," continued Edwin, "My company, Omdemnity Insurance, is prepared to indemnify you against all acts of persons of a superpowered nature."
This was Topper's big moment. He was supposed to take the contract out from the briefcase and lay it on the table. It was a tiny little part. And Topper was sick to death of his tiny parts. The way he saw it, it you don't give a little part to a guy with a big soul. And if you do, you deserve what you get.
Topper heaved his briefcase up onto the model table. It wiped out some lovely landscape miniatures near a depressingly functional looking parking lot.
"CareFUL!" rumbled DeTsavo.
Topper plunged his hand into his case and came out with the contract.
"Standard package, indemnifying you against all acts of superpowered people or animals of all known and yet to be discovered powers," said Topper in bored monotone. "Sign, here, here and here." Topper indicated the little sticky tabs that highlighted the important parts of the contract. All business, no pleasure.
PLEASURE! That was it. That was the word he had been searching for. The joy had gone out of Topper's life. How long had he just been going through the motions? As he watched DeTsavo smear his fat hand across the pages of the contract, Topper remembered—knew down the pit of his black little soul—that this wasn't the kind of fun that he had signed on for.
In fact, none of this was what he'd had in mind when convinced Edwin to stop advising villains and become one. Topper had been hoping for car chases, shootouts, maniacal schemes, pretty girls who liked bad boys and most of all, getting to do whatever the hell he wanted. What the hell happened? He didn't get to do ANYthing. Now it was all this briefcase, that form contract, and meetings like this.
DeTsavo was red in the face. Even before he spoke, Topper knew he wasn't going to go for it. The fat CEO bellowed at Edwin "No, insurance company in the world will provide this kind of coverage. Windsor, what's your racket?"
"It is no racket. As you will see from the policy we are more than adequately capitalized to carry this kind of risk. Per our calculations..."
And here it started again, the droning business talk. Topper was so bored with it. How many times had he sat through the same meeting with Edwin? How many times had he listened to him use his cold, geometric intellect to bludgeon someone into submission, hammering them and hammering them with logic until they had no choice but to sign.
As the two bigger men went back and forth and back and forth, Topper's attention strayed to the model once again.
Maybe it was because Topper was smaller than actual size that he imagined he could see inside the square blue and off-white building. Inside that featureless utilitarian box, he could imagine, were other featureless, utilitarian boxes. Row upon row of cubes, which would house row upon row of featureless, utilitarian workers, performing featureless utilitarian tasks before they returned to their featureless, utilitarian little lives at the end of each day.
"Hey, Bob, I put in a pool!"
"That's great, Steve; I'm doing that next month."
"Gee, Bob, then we'll be completely the same."
Topper realized that his sad, silly imagining was far too close to what his life had become. Where had the passion gone? Where was the fun? He could restrain himself no longer and raised his voice in song—
"Hey, asshole. Ya need insurance!"
DeTsavo, the Chief Executive Officer of one of the largest computer companies in the world, was not accustomed to being spoken to in this way. His brain could find no adequate response for an angry little dwarf, so it dispensed with a number of non-crucial functions. Like keeping his jaw shut.
Edwin also stared at Topper, not so much in shock as in knowing exasperation.
Since Topper had the floor, he continued, "Okay, since you're a busy man, and my tall friend seems to be through dicking around, I’m gonna tell you how this works," he warbled in his high, New York-accented falsetto. "This is your building."
Topper climbed up on the table. As he held his foot over the northeast corner of the model, he said, "I am a fucking giant!" Then Topper slammed his foot down on the corner of the building sending splinters and shards of it everywhere.
A tiny cry of distress issued forth from between DeTsavo's wide open teeth. Let's call it an “eep!” Edwin just buried his face in his hand.
"If that happens and you're not covered, ya screwed. You know, screwed like an ordinary person who has to pay taxes and obey the law and stuff like that?"
"Topper, that's quite enough," Edwin said, trying to salvage the situation while some dignity remained. But Topper was having none of it.
Screw it, thought Topper, if this is a shakedown operation, then let's shake 'em down. "So here's the deal, Fat Money, you buy an," and here Topper made large air quotes with his fingers, "'Insurance Policy’ from us or," Topper stomped his foot and destroyed more painstakingly arranged balsa wood and poster-board, "we're actually going to send a giant," CRUNCH, "like me, but to scale, and crush your entire magic robot factory." CRUNCH, CRUNCH. "And then you're gonna see what it's like to get screwed by the little guy for a change." CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH. "Ahhhh? Ahhhh?"
