“Bowman.”
“Oh. Where the hell’s Chester?”
“You mean that guy that was here at the phone a minute ago?”
“Yes.”
“Funny thing happened.”
“What?”
“A minute ago he just keeled over. Dead as a doornail.”
“Oh no!”
“Yep! Heart attack or something. They’re laying him out in the next office.”
Hot damn, that really does fix my wagon right down to the last nut and bolt! I knew that ass had an unreliable streak in him and now what am I supposed to do? I don’t know a damn phone number in this town except his and Marge’s and the Roughahs’, couldn’t even call the Fire Department. Well GASCOYNE I say to myself, you’ve got yourself in a real fix this time, but there’s no sense crying over spilt milk, so I start up the engine and pull onto the road, hell with them all, and make an illegal U-turn right in the teeth of some Cadillac and head right toward town to take matters into my own hands. I may be cutting my own throat this way but that’s a chance I’ve got to take while I’ve still got a chance to take chances. At the rate I’m going it won’t be long.
I turn right at Flashflood Gulch Lane and head down the long twisting hill toward town as fast as the old Kaiser can take it, tires howling and bouncing on the curves and the thing backfiring like mad because I think something went out of tune when it heated up. Well the old buggy’s got a lot of miles on her and I’m so generally pissed off I’d do something really extravagant and call what’s-his-name —can’t even remember that now—at the agency and have him get out a new Imperial and ready for me except that little matter of not having his phone number handy, and I don’t think he knows my voice anyway. Scares me a little. Never seen me either.
I blast some guy on a motorscooter out of the way with my air horn and hit the bottom of Flashflood Gulch Lane and turn left onto Ben Hur Boulevard heading straight downtown to GASCOYNE CENTER which has the outside floodlights on now but some asshole forgot to turn on the GASCOYNE CENTER neon light on top just below the radio-TV tower. He’ll be fired soon enough with a lot of other farts. The only trouble with this free enterprise system is that you have to pay a lot of people and this costs a hell of a lot of money to the employer as I ought to know and what do you get out of it but a lot of nonsense, but seeing the radio-TV tower gives me an idea and I turn on the car radio and give the band a twirl. KGAS and KCOY are off the air which is strictly illegal but I catch something on KNES that isn’t the before-dinner music it’s supposed to be and I tune it in as best I can which isn’t well because it’s beamed in the other direction and just about blow another temper muscle, damn if the radio isn’t talking about me.
“… made his influence first felt with the unexpected construction of GASCOYNE CENTER in nineteen forty-nine. Yet now fifteen years later perhaps only as few as a hundred people in the city can be certain they have ever seen his face, and still fewer have spoken with him. Who is GASCOYNE? What does he look like? Where does he hide? Does he even exist? Many of us think we see him every day—a paper-thin old man driving an old car which in its day was just a little too flashy—but no one is ever certain. We will not have long to wait, however, it—One moment please. Excuse us ladies and gentlemen, Police Commissioner O’Mallollolly is here in the studio and would like to speak a few words.”
“Thank you ladies and gentlemen. First I’d like to tell all you people out there how much we appreciate—” and then there’s a sort of twittering zip sound and then complete silence and so it sounds to me like the whole thing was on tape and somebody took it off in a damn hurry, well at least nobody has to listen to O’Mallollolly’s Gettysburg Address, though I’m beginning to wonder what is going on in that place.
Still heading down Ben Hur Boulevard I try to check out the rearview but the lousy thing comes off in my hand and I have to hold it up like a pocket mirror, hardly worth the bother because I’ve seen the sight before which is six black and white Mercurys filled with state troopers and followed by the red Porsche. They’ve probably all got their safety belts fastened. They’re that type, these troopers. Probably singing O’Mallollolly Uber Alles or inspecting each other’s private parts.
I toss the mirror on the seat and begin to wonder if O’Mallollolly is making this fuss to get me to walk right into his hands with a big public arrest and all that with lots of pictures. A chance I’ve got to take, just can’t sit around and watch the place go up in smoke.
I slow down a couple of blocks from GASCOYNE CENTER and from what I can see the place is surrounded by cop cars and God knows how many cops but I really have to laugh at the piddling crowd he’s collected to watch the show. It’s damn clear nobody gives a used fart what O’Mallollolly’s doing and he’s made a complete failure out of his attempt to capture the public imagination if it’s got any.
But I’m getting too damn close so I pull the Kaiser into the GASCOYNE CENTER ANNEX TWO PARKING RAMP LOT and park the car in the space reserved for me in front of the alley fire exit and as I climb out damn if the six patrol cars don’t come waddling in the place followed by the red tin can. “Charge ’em double,” I shout to the attendant and duck down the basement stairwell.
Below I unlock my private tunnel door and step inside and close it behind me and throw the three heavy bolts. It’ll take a cannon to open that and I turn on the lights and make my way down the tunnel which is just a great big water-main pipe with yellow linoleum for a floorway and lights strung up above. I come to the GASCOYNE CENTER ANNEX ONE PARKING RAMP LOT tunnel junction and turn left and switch on the lights for the next section and switch them off for the one behind. Finally I come to the door in the basement of GASCOYNE CENTER and throw back the three bolts and open it and step into the basement. There’s no one there. The basement unguarded might mean O’Mallollolly does want me here and knows how I get in and out, though I can’t be sure. Can’t be sure of anything anymore.
I trot over to the service elevator and push the button and watch the lights as the thing comes down from the sixth floor, BIG DADDY OFFICES. The door slides back and I climb in and push fourteen and up we go, though I’m not very happy about this ride since the floor is littered with papers from I can’t tell what departments and a couple of beer bottles, nonreturnable wouldn’t you know it, and the stinking contents of a couple of ashtrays, filthy habit, which all makes me pretty angry. The elevator stops and opens at fourteen, DOCUMENTS AND RECORDS for all my companies located outside GASCOYNE CENTER, and the place is the worst mess you’ve ever seen in your life. I step out and see that the incinerator next to the elevator is so crammed with papers that if anyone lit a match the whole building even though it’s fireproof would go up with a bang, and it’s damn hard for me to visualize the asshole who got the idea to fill the whole thing up at once like that, a bright-eyed college kid no doubt.
The rest of the place makes me want to close my eyes and count sheep but it’s hardly the atmosphere for that. About two hundred filing cabinets are open and have been emptied onto the floor which is solid with papers and photographs and negatives and movie film and recording tape and over in the corner about twenty jokers are having a party. My employees. This sort of thing really makes an employer feel good.
I scramble through the mess over to File X which is a walk-in safe that hangs over the street in such a way it can’t be broken into from the outside. It’s been emptied but the contents are all outside the door spilling all over a large handcart with Municipal Police, A. O’Mallollolly, Police Commissioner, stenciled on it—and it’s pretty clear they’re intending to haul the stuff away as evidence and boy I hate to think what they’ll do with it. There’s not a damn thing I can do about it the way the incinerator’s jammed up and I really doubt that any of my loyal employees would be willing to lift a finger at this particular moment. I’m damn tempted to light a match and run but the trouble is it’s my barn too.
What can I do but turn away and get out of the place and so out th
e main door I go and up the staircase also jammed with papers and up to the fifteenth floor. Some yokel has pushed over and broken into the BIG DADDY SUPER SWELL KOLA machine and the stuff is spilled all over the hallway, what a mess when mixed with paper.
I walk into Chester’s office and the phone jacks of his little switchboard are all pulled out hanging limp and this creep is going through his desk.
“What the hell you think you’re doing?” I ask.
“What does it look like?”
“Looting,” I say.
“That’s it.”
When you come right down to it what does it matter and what can I do about it? I go out the other door into the secretarial bay and there’s another creep who’s stacking electric typewriters onto a handcart. My typewriters. He looks at me and says “Hi!” with a smile and keeps on stacking my typewriters. This is sort of exasperating but hell I can’t go around the whole building all night saying Say fellow please don’t steal my typewriters. Keep calm I tell myself and turn to go out and notice this fellow laid out on the floor and wonder what they ever did with Chester. Then I slip down the hall to the office I use when I come here which isn’t very often, the last time was nine years ago as a matter of fact, and it looks like the place was hit by a grenade. The desk and chair and phone are all broken up in little pieces and the plate-glass window is all blown out and a pretty stiff breeze is coming through the hole. I stick my head out and look down and my don’t they look just like black ants, and it looks like a few more battalions have arrived but I still have to laugh at the pisspoor crowd O’Mallollolly’s whipped up, maybe two hundred people in all minus a hundred who’re probably plainclothesmen. If there’s anything to make me feel good at the moment, that’s it. I can just see O’Mallollolly chewing on his cigar and fingernails saying to Subcommissioner MacTule or somebody, “Christ you’ve got to fix up my public image, they’re not eating it up!” He doesn’t even know a damn thing about rigging elections, the slob, and boy will he be sorry.
I pull my head back in and go up the stairway to the roof and it looks like maybe good news time is starting up again because there’s my little Hughes chopper sitting right there on the landing pad, Chester the dimwit forgot to tell me they’d fixed it and brought it back, well so there’s a way out of this mess though I’ve never done a takeoff or landing solo.
That cheers me up enough that I decide to go back down and see what else can be salvaged and I slip down the stairs through my office and go back into Chester’s to see if he left any handy phone lists around. The looting creep’s gone and I start shuffling through the papers in Chester’s desk but the trouble is I’m pretty badly farsighted and left my glasses somewhere and anyway it’s been so long since I’ve read anything but signs and things like that that I’ve pretty well forgotten how to read, haven’t even looked at the Herald or Times for thirty years, but that’s the sort of thing I pay all these people for.
I give up that idea and walk into the secretarial bay and wonder about that Negro laid out there and think maybe he’s one of O’Mallollolly’s crew. About then some character charges around the corner with a handcart and about bowls me over and pushes it over to some electric adding machines and starts loading them up, pretty disgusting, though I must say the guy’s got guts and an enterprising spirit, we all start out that way. He sees me watching him and he looks up and says, “You work here?”
“No,” I say thinking it best to keep my identity secret under these conditions, “I’m just a friend of Chester’s.”
“Yeah, too bad about him,” he says pointing to the stiff.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“Who’s that? I thought you said you were a friend.”
“That’s not Chester,” I say.
He looks at me a minute and says, “We got the right Chester, don’t we? I’m talking about Chester Jones,” and he points a pretty firm finger at that colored corpse.
Well it hits me with both barrels then and really burns me right up, Chester colored all these years and nobody ever told me, boy what kind of friends do I have? Worst piece of news I’ve had in years. Turns out I’ve been depending on a goddamn Negro. Explains a lot and a hell of a lot, just when I’ve been about to blame myself for all this mess. And nobody ever told me, that’s what really pisses me off, really does. Well I get the point loud and clear and as soon as I get things back running right the first thing I’m going to do is find my glasses and go through every lousy employee photograph and fire the whole lot of them, just can’t depend on them.
*
I head out of there as fast as I can go because that’s one thing I want to forget about quick, and slip down to floor thirteen where I run into about twenty cops in the hallway loitering around and getting ready to rape the secretaries who seem to be looking forward to it like the one in the corner who’s getting an intimate talking to by some cop while another cop’s waving her brassiere around. A bunch of state troopers are playing games with their rifles and prying up squares of plastic tile spelling out nasty words in the floor and one pervert is throwing staplers at the light fixtures and making a big mess everywhere. When I walk through they all sort of stop and stare a moment and then go back to what they’re doing which is destroying all my property, every last piece of it.
I walk down the hall and look in on a couple of the radio-TV studios but the joint’s such a screaming mess jammed with my employees and cops all soaked up in liquor that if they let the city zoo loose here the place’d seem like a tea party by comparison, and all I hope is that all this sin is being broadcast all over the city.
I’m about to take the elevator down to the twelfth floor but the damn thing is filled with secretaries and clerks having a party and slopping liquor everywhere and singing like cats in heat and you can imagine what else. I hit the stairs instead and squeeze through about five discussion groups and a couple of bridge parties and poker parties and what looks like is shaping up as a gangbang, and it’s pretty damn clear to me that if you don’t keep people working like dogs they’ll behave like rabbits and monkeys. You’ve got to put them inside little boxes with their work and throw away the key for eight hours every day and then chase them out of the box as soon as you can after their time is up, give them fringe benefits like pastel toilet paper and maybe a Christmas party to make them feel grateful but otherwise if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile like this and start breaking up the place and develop loose morals.
The Herald-Times editorial offices on floor thirteen are a shambles like somebody’s about to start a bonfire and everything there’s out of hand so I catch a service elevator finally and speed her down to the second floor where the auditorium is because if anybody’s in charge here it’ll be there and I can present the bastard with a few questions, namely on what the hell he thinks he’s doing on and with my premises.
This is going to be a little tricky because what I’ve got hanging around GASCOYNE CENTER and a lot of other places is a picture of an ivy league type around thirty and blond with a toothpaste-ad smile and everybody thinks it’s me GASCOYNE. Of course that’s what I want because I figure people work better if they think they’re working for some young but not too young up-and-coming fellow. Makes them think the whole shebang is nice and good-humored and if it isn’t it’s because, so they’re supposed to think, there’s somebody balling up the works between them and the toothpaste kid and nothing to get really excited about because the young knight on the white steed will come dashing to the rescue some day with a pat on the back and a three percent raise. To me the toothpaste kid looks like a real shit, but the public relations people said that’s all right and not to worry because it’s all right if he looks like a real shit to some people some of the time or even all of the time because they say to themselves How can I be happy working for an ass like that and they keep on being unhappy, but boy do they keep on working too. You’ve got to play the angles. But no I wouldn’t have my picture up here on the walls of hundreds of offices, for o
ne thing it’s against my policy and another is that I’m not very photogenic. I don’t know anybody of my age that is, I’m no spring chicken anymore, but what counts is not my face but my name which is a lot easier to carry around than a wad of cash and like in the old days when anybody just dropped the name of the King of England everybody’d throw themselves down on their knees. Well I want it that when they hear the name GASCOYNE they reach straight for their wallets, don’t give a damn whether they smile or not.
I pop out of the elevator and shove my way through a bunch of cops standing around some cases of beer making slurping noises and squeeze through the door of the CELESTE GASCOYNE MATERNAL MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM and find the place sardine-packed with cops and former employees of mine drinking beer and stuff out of paper cups and all jabbering away like they were being paid for it.
Up on the stage this pervert is blowing into the microphone and yelling “Testing, one-two-three, can you hear me out there?” And on the stage curtain above him somebody has pinned a couple of paper letters of a slogan or something and hasn’t gotten around to finishing it. I slip back out the door and around the hallway to the side stage entrance and go in that and come out on the stage where I stop and give a significant pause at the audience. A couple of nice people notice my presence and then I walk over to this type who’s spreading his germs all over the microphone and say, “All right junior beat it. I’ve got a few words to say.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he asks.
“It’s me, GASCOYNE,” I say in such a way the microphone picks it up and broadcasts it all over the auditorium. Things suddenly go quiet down below and people turn around and look up.
“Prove it,” says junior.
I whip out my driver’s license before he can come out with some wisecrack I’m sure he’s got buzzing around in his pea-brained pinhead. He looks at it and then at me and gives it back and looks at me a second and says, “Okay,” and walks off the stage waving to some broad with a tight blouse down below.
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