The Merchant's War (15 page)

“Look at the way his hands are shaking,” I said kindly. “Not a chance. Next!”

Tall outdoorsy blonde, with the forearm muscles you get from long hours of table polo: “Too upper-class. Next!”

Elderly black woman with plump, permanently pursed lips: “Maybe probate judge, but get her a haircut. Next!”

Twin brothers with identical heart-shaped birthmarks over their right eyes: “Sensational reinforcement there, Dixmeister,” I lectured. “Have we got two alderman-at-large spots? Right. Next!”

Slim, pale, a faraway look in her eyes, no more than twenty-three. “I know what it is to be unhappy,” she said—sobbed, almost. “If you help me I’ll try my very best to take care of you too …”

“Too sappy?” asked Dixmeister.

“There’s no such thing as too sappy for Congress, Dixmeister. Take her name. Next!” The find of the day was a callow, sharp-featured youth who grunted his lines while his eyes darted fearfully in all directions. Heaven knows how he got listed with Central Casting in the first place, for he was surely not a pro, and his “presentation” was a stumbling account of a boyhood trip to Prospect Park.

Way over time, at that. Dixmeister cut him off in midsentence and glanced at me, eyebrows raised in amused contempt. As he was lifting a hand to wave the kid away I stopped him, for something was stirring in my mind. “Wait a minute.” I closed my eyes, trying to recapture the vagrant image. “I see … Yes. Got it! The unicycle races yesterday—one of the winners had just that look of eager stupidity. The jock look.”

“Actually, Mr. Tarb,” the kid called down, “I’m not much into sports. I’m a clip sorter in the Starrzelius mailroom.”

“You’re a unicyclist now,” I told him. “Report to Wardrobe for costumes and Mr. Dixmeister here will find you a coach for the cycle. Dixmeister, take a copy theme note: ‘My friends thought I was sort of peculiar for taking up the unicycle, but I don’t see it that way. Stubborn, maybe. Willing to pay the price to do the hard job, whether it’s on the unicycle or in the office of—’ Let’s see whether it’s—”

“Congress, Mr. Tarb?” Dixmeister ventured, holding his breath.

I said generously, “Right, Congress. Maybe.” Actually the wimp was too good for Congress; I was thinking of a lot higher, maybe Vice-President. But I could straighten out the casting later, and meanwhile it cost nothing to let Dixmeister feel good for a moment. “And, oh, yes,” I said, remembering, “call up the unicycle club and arrange for him to win a couple of races.”

“Well, Mr. Tarb,” dithered Dixmeister, “I don’t know if they’ll want to go along with fixing a—”

“Tell them, Dixmeister. Tell them what a good tie-in promotion for unicycling this is going to be.
Sell
them. Got it? Good. Then next!”

And next. And next, and next. Nine hundred nexts. But we needed a lot of candidates. Although there were nearly a dozen Agencies with strong political divisions, there was plenty of work for all of us. Sixty-one state legislatures. Nine thousand cities and towns. Three thousand counties. And the federal government. Put them all together and, on the average, there were a quarter of a million elective posts to be filled a year. (Of course, only a fraction of them were important enough—by this I mean expensive enough—to warrant the time of T., G. 8c S.) About half the time we could recycle incumbents, but we still had to find every year five or ten thousand warm bodies to teach and dress and make up and rehearse and direct … and maybe elect.
Usually
elect. It didn’t particularly matter who won any election in any real sense, but T., G. 8c S. had a reputation to protect as a can-do Agency. So we battled for our candidates as hard as though winning or losing made some actual difference.

By the time we got to the end of the nine hundred the “coffee” thermos on my chair arm had been refilled twice with Mokes and my stomach was beginning to growl its first pangs of hunger. We had reduced the nine hundred to eighty-two possibles and sent the losers home. I mounted the stage again, beckoning to the survivors. “Come up front,” I ordered. Briskly they obeyed; they knew they were on a streak. I reinforced that knowledge. “Let’s talk about money,” I said, and dead silence said they were listening intently. “The job of congressman pays as much as a junior copysmith. Even alderman pays not much less.” There was a sound—not a gasp, but a sort of suspension of breathing as each one of them contemplated the kind of wage that would lift them right out of the consumer class in a single bound. “That’s just
salary.
That’s only the beginning. The gravy part is the retainers and the consultancies and the directorships—” I didn’t have to say the bribes —“that go along with the position. They can be really big. How big? Well, I happen to know of two senators that sock away as much pay as an account executive.” Thrill from the crowd, and this time the gasps were real. “I’m not going to ask you if you want that, because I don’t think there are any crazy people in this room today. I’m going to tell you how to get it. Three things. Keep your noses clean. Work hard. Do what you’re told. Then, if you’re lucky—” I let the thought float in the air for a moment before grinning at them: “For now, go on home. Report at nine
A.M.
tomorrow for processing.”

I glanced at my watch as they filed out. The whole thing had taken four hours and a bit, and Dixmeister was fawning all over me. “What a great day’s work, chief! Sarms would have dawdled a week over this bunch. Now,” he twinkled, “if I’m not being too forward, I know a place where they serve real meat and just about any kind of grain neutral spirits you can name. What would you say to a good old-fashioned three-martini—”

“Lunch,” I finished for him, “will be a sandwich in my office and you’re going to have the same in yours. Because I want this hall filled up again in ninety minutes!”

Well, it was, or just about, and we got seventy-one more candidate possibles. But when I ordered the same thing for the following morning, Central Casting could only send over about a hundred and fifty. We were eating up their pool faster than they could replenish it. And so I went out and roamed the streets, from one Mokie-Koke dispenser to the next, studying faces, walks, gestures. I eavesdropped on conversations. I started an argument, now and then, to see how the prospect would react. Then I went home or back to my office and watched the Omni-V news, looking for talent in a traffic victim or the weeping mother of someone who had just been mugged—someone who had just been doing the mugging, even, because I found one of my best New Jersey congressman candidate prospects in the police line-up after an attempted smash-and-grab. And I rode hard on Dixmeister to see that he kept the loose ends tied up. He made me up a tape of the Agency’s present incumbents, and I cursored through the scenes to mark a good bit of business or a mannerism that they’d have to get rid of if they wanted us to run them again.

One gave me trouble. It was our President of the United States, a sweet-looking old man with turkey wattles strung from the point of his chin to his collarbone and the mummy of a face that three-quarters of the voters had grown up on. He’d played the daddy in the kiddyporn remake of
Father Knows Best
—you know, the one that’s always stepping in the dog excrement or breaking wind when he bends down to pick up a dropped handkerchief. He’d been on the news interviewing the new High Chief Secretary of the Free-Market Republic of the Sudan. No more than a twenty-second clip, but the Sudanese managed to light two Verily cigarettes, drink a cup of Coffiest and spill half of it over his new Starrzelius suit while he coughed out, “Oh, yis, Mister Pres’nt, mony thoun thank-us for saving us!” I felt a warm rush of patriotism and love in the pit of my stomach as I thought of that little gook and all his people now blessed with a true mercantile society … but I felt something else, too. It wasn’t the Sudanese. It was the President. He hadn’t moved fast enough, and half the Coffiest had drenched his formal daywear short-suit … and I had the idea.

“Dixmeister!” I yelled, and in three seconds he was hanging in the doorway, waiting on orders. “The unicycle jerk. How’s he doing?”

“Fell off five times this morning,” said Dixmeister gloomily. “I don’t know if he’ll ever master it. If you want to go ahead with this—”

“Damn sure I do!”

He gulped. “No problem, Mr. Tarb, I’ve got that under control. We’ll just take a couple of other unicyclists and matte his face in—”

“Ten minutes,” I ordered, and it was even so. In nine minutes and thirty seconds he was back in my office to say that the clips were ready. “Display,” I commanded, and proudly he keyed his selection of races.

They were all good, I had to admit. There were four of them. In each of them the winner was close enough to our jerk’s appearance for a close simulation match, and in each of them the winner, grinning and gasping, came full-face into the camera so we could patch in our jerk’s face delivering the commercial for his election. But one was better than the others, because it was just what I was looking for.

“Do you see it?” I asked. Of course he didn’t. I shook my finger at him. “The crash,” I said paternally. In one of the clips the fourth unicyclist at the finish had swerved desperately to miss colliding with the third. Yards short of the tape, he had come tumbling down in a splatter of arms and legs. The camera had zoomed in for a quick look at his face, sullen and humiliated, before whisking back to catch the winner.

And he still didn’t see it. “We’re going to run the wimp in the presidential primaries,” I announced.

That took his breath away. “But he hasn’t— He isn’t—There’s no way—”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” I explained, “and there’s something else. Notice the cyclist who fell down? Remind you of anybody?”

He zipped back, froze the image, stared. “No,” he confessed. “Not really, except—” He caught his breath. “The
President?”
I nodded. “But—but he’s
ours.
We don’t want to defeat our own man—”

“What we don’t want, Dixmeister,” I snapped, “is to have our own man lose— whichever man it is. I said ‘the primaries.’ If the President wins out, fine, he gets another chance. But if this unicycle jerk can take him, why not? And we’ll use this tape! Matte the President’s face onto the one that falls down— just a flash—just enough to suggest him flopping at the finish line—then we go into the kid’s commercial.”

Dixmeister stared at me incredulously for a moment. Then it began to penetrate, and the expression melted into hero worship. “Sub-liminalwise,” he glowed, “it’s a masterpiece, Mr. Tarb.”

Well, it was. Pedaling on both legs, I was. And yet it didn’t make me happy.

By Friday I was feeling very frayed. When Mitzi passed me in the hall she looked shocked. “You’re losing weight, Tenny! Get more sleep. Eat more decent food—” But then Haseldyne tugged irritably at her elbow and she was gone into the downlift, peering worriedly up at me.

It was true that I was losing weight. I wasn’t getting much sleep. I could feel that my temper was getting short, and even Nelson Rockwell didn’t seem to want to talk to me much any more.

I should have been happy. The fact that I wasn’t puzzled me very much, because never in my life had my prospects been so bright. Mitzi and Haseldyne were getting ready to make their move. I was proving every hour that I was the right stuff for them to take along in their takeover. I forced myself to daydream of the time when I’d be up there on the fifty-fifth floor, with a
window
in my
corner office,
and maybe a
stall shower
… and then, at last, they did it. They made their move. They made it that very Friday, at a quarter past four in the afternoon. I was out at a halfway house for recovering psychoneurotics, looking for an appellate court judge candidate, and when I got back to the Tower it was in an uproar. Everybody was whispering to everybody else, and everybody’s face was thunderstruck. On the way up I heard from the rungs below me the name “Mitzi Ku.” As I got off I waited for the junior AE who’d been talking and smirked to her, “Mitzi’s the new boss here, right?”

She didn’t smile back, only looked at me strangely. “New boss, yes. Here, no,” she said, and pushed past me.

Shaking, I finally made it to Val Dambois’s office. “Val, baby,” I begged, “what’s happening? Was it the takeover?”

He frosted me with a look. “The hands,” he said. “Get them off my desk. You’re smudging the polish.”

Yes, there had been a big change! “Please, Val, tell me!” I begged.

He said bitterly, “It was your girl friend Mitzi and that heavyweight Haseldyne, all right, but it wasn’t a takeover. Fooled everybody, though. It was the old Icahn maneuver.”

“Icahn!” I gasped. He nodded.

“A textbook case, just like old Carl Icahn himself. Scared the Old Man into thinking it was a takeover bid—got the stockholders to buy them out at ten times what their stock was worth—took the money and bought another Agency!”

And I hadn’t suspected a thing.

I reeled blindly toward the door, hardly aware of what I was doing, until from behind me Dambois said the magic words:

“One more thing. You’re fired.”

That turned me right around. I gasped. “You can’t do that!” He sneered. “No, really! My ConsumAnon project—”

He shrugged. “In good hands. Mine as it happens.”

“But— But—” Then I remembered, and brought it out as a drowning man might produce the only lifesaver in the ocean: “Tenure! I’m star class—I’ve got tenure—you can’t fire me!”

He glared at me irritably, then pursed his lips. “Hmmm,” he said, and sucked his teeth. He punched out my personnel code and studied the screen for a moment.

Then his expression cleared. “Why, Tarb,” he said warmly, “you’re a patriot! I had no idea you were in the Reserves. I can’t fire you, no, but,” he explained, “what I
can
do is furlough you to the services for a year or two—there’s some kind of call-up going on—”

I got up, a hollow feeling in my stomach. “This is preposterous! I’ve still got tenure, you know. When this military call-up is over—” He shrugged winsomely. “I always look on the bright side, Tarb,” he told me. “After all, you may never come back.”