by Tom Holt
‘Now what?’
‘Dad.’
‘Well?’
Pause. ‘Why’ve we got a bloody great big tree growing up through the middle of our house, and why can’t you see the top of it from outside?’
Dad scowled at him. ‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘You need to be up early in the morning.’
CHAPTER TWO
Assessments,’ Peter Melznic wailed. ‘Bloody assessments. We never had anything like that before.’
Connie Schwartz-Alberich shrugged. ‘Lucky, weren’t we? Makes you realise how soft we’ve had it up to now. Never felt like it at the time, of course.’
The palefaced girl sniffed. ‘When I was at UMG’
‘For two pins,’ Peter continued, ‘I’d go straight up to Tanner’s office and tell him where he can stick his job. I’ve been in this business seven years, and I’ve never had to put up with this kind of shit before. And what about this other bloody stupid idea, “ongoing vocational training”? Like I need some snot-nosed academic telling me how to do what I do.’
Connie, who’d been in the trade for five times seven years and seen a dozen Peter Melznics come and go like the flowers in spring, decided not to comment on that. ‘It’s modern management theory,’ she sighed, ‘the stuff they teach you at business school and so on. It’s just a fashion, some more bloody stupid hoops to jump through, that’s all. Did I ever tell you about when I was at the San Francisco office and some pinhead decided we needed a company song?’
‘What I’d like to know,’ Benny Shumway interrupted, ‘is who’s going to be doing these assessments.’
‘Good point,’ Connie said. ‘Anybody heard anything about it?’
Nobody had, apparently. But the thin-faced girl mentioned that she’d heard somewhere that Messrs Tanner and Suslowicz, and even Mr Wells himself, were going to have to submit to the same procedure. Connie looked sharply sideways at her, but nobody said anything.
‘Can you remember how it went?’ Bennie broke the silence.
‘How what went?’
‘The company song.’
‘Oh, that.’ Connie grinned. ‘Never came to anything. I believe the pinhead sent a memo to Humph Wells, who pointed out that ‘d had a company song since 1877, but you needed to be an operatic baritone to get through it without choking to death. It sort of fizzled out after that. But we had a whole month of doing physical jerks on the roof every morning, until the pinhead turned his ankle over. Which sort of proves my point,’ she went on. ‘They come up with these stupid ideas, you go along with them for a bit till they self-destruct, and then you can get back to doing things properly, like you’ve always done them. No harm done, everyone’s happy, and we remain defiantly unspoilt by progress.’
Benny finished his coffee. ‘Where’s young Cassie, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Not stuck again, is she?’
‘No.’ Connie smiled indulgently. ‘In a meeting with clients. Some potty little job south of the river, but I think she’s milking it for something to put on her time sheet.’
Peter scowled. ‘That’s another thing I’m really not happy with,’ he said, ‘these bloody time sheets. I don’t like being treated like I’m some wet-behind-the-ears trainee straight out of college. If the job gets done and the client’s happy and we get paid, what the hell does it matter how many six-minute units you took writing a letter?’
We all had to do time sheets at UMG,’ the palefaced girl said. ‘Of course, it was a complete shambles at the Munich office, given the sort of work that we were doing, but it kept the management happy.’
A brief who-let-her-in-here? moment, then Benny thanked Connie for the coffee and left, triggering a general evacuation. It was nearly time for Benny to go to the Bank, but (as usual) he wasn’t in any hurry to carry out that particular chore. Instead, he went quietly down to the basement and fed the goats.
He’d raised an interesting point over coffee, he thought as he weighed out the barley, oats and concentrates, though he said so himself. If they were going to have assessments, someone would have to do the assessing, and if the palefaced girl (what was she called? He was usually good with names, but hers slipped through his mind like car keys through a frayed pocket) was right about the partners having them too, presumably it’d be the new owners, or their trusted representatives, asking the questions. Unless they had in mind some set-up with one-way glass and microphones, it’d mean coming face to face with them at last; and if he was given that opportunity, he had a trick or two of his own up his sleeve, which might help him find answers to the questions that had been bugging him for the last three months.
Benny emptied the feed bucket into the trough, gave Esmeralda her apple, and paused, frowning. There was always the direct approach, he reflected. He could always go to Jack Wells or Dennis Tanner and ask him, straight out. After everything he’d done for JWW over the years, they owed him that. The thing was, did he really want to know the answer?
To the Bank; a wretched business, as ever, and when he got back to his office and closed the door behind him he dropped into his chair and sat still and quiet for a while, until he’d recovered his usual equanimity. Maybe I’m getting too old for this, he thought; maybe it’s time I thought about packing it in. Retirement: all the things he’d claimed to have been daydreaming about all these years. A nice little bungalow somewhere on the South Coast; a small open-cast mine of his own, just to keep his hand in; time for hobbies and gardening and stuff. He shuddered. Thoughts like that helped put going to the Bank in context.
His door opened, and one of the more appealing aspects of working at JWW these days appeared in the doorway. He found himself smiling. ‘Hiya, Cassie,’he said.
‘Are you busy?’
‘Not really. Just been and done the banking. I was just about to get a cup of coffee. Can I make you one while I’m there?’
Cassie shook her head with extreme vigour. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but no, thanks. Never touch the stuff.’
‘Coffee?’
She nodded. ‘Brings me out in blotches. And it’s not the caffeine, because I can drink enough tea to kill a whale and be none the worse for it. Funny, but there it is.’
‘All right,’ Benny said, with a shrug. ‘No coffee, tea instead. Won’t be a tick.’
He opened a drawer of his desk, took out two empty mugs und gave them a ferocious look, as though they’d betrayed him unforgivably. Immediately they filled with brown liquid and began to steam, and he handed one to her. ‘Now then,’ he said, what can I do for you?’
(Five failed marriages; seven disastrous long-term relationships; and that was only counting the times he’d actually managed to get the girl in the end, albeit temporarily. By now he ought to be completely immune to nice-looking faces, even ones with red hair and freckles. But that was like saying you don’t get colds or the flu any more when you’re dead.)
‘It’s these stupid reconciliation figures,’ Cassie said, dropping into the chair opposite and dumping a sheaf of papers on the desk. ‘I can’t make them come out, but I know the numbers are right, because I checked them all three times against the file, so it must just be some stupid slip-up in the arithmetic or something.’
Benny grinned. ‘Give them here,’ he said. ‘I’ll go through them this afternoon - I’ve got time before I cash up.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’ll owe me, mind. And I always collect on favours owed.’
Cassie scowled at him, mock-ferocious. ‘I don’t do ironing,’ ťhe said. ‘Not for anybody.’
‘It shows. Now me, I’m an absolute bloody virtuoso. Give me a flat surface and a late-model Rowenta, and basically the sky’s the limit.’
She smiled, but her mind was somewhere else. Over the years, Benny had got used to it; nice-looking young women drifting into his office at quiet times of day to think past him. Not a bad thing; they cheered the place up, more so than flowers or a nice watercolour, and they generally only turned nasty if you married them.
‘So,
’ he said, ‘these assessment things. I take it you’re a hundred and ten per cent in favour.’
She looked up at him. ‘What? Oh yes, absolutely. I can’t think of anything I’d like more than some goldfish-faced git asking me where I think I’ll be in five years’ time. Still, it does mean there’s a chance we’ll actually get to find out who our new masters are at last.’
‘I was thinking that just now,’ Benny replied, ‘while I was feeding the goats. Of course, they might cheat: bring in people from outside, management consultants or whatever.’
‘Bastards,’ Cassie said absently.
‘Management,’ Benny paraphrased. ‘At least, so far, they haven’t come interfering in the actual work. You got anything new on at the moment?’
A slight reaction to that, but too vague to assess properly. ‘One new job, came in last week,’ she replied. ‘Just boring stuff.’
‘Boring or really boring?’
‘Fairly boring.’ She sighed, but her heart wasn’t in it. ‘When I was at Mortimers, they let me do proper cases, really big stuff for the multinationals.’
Benny nodded gravely. ‘You never did tell me why you left.’
‘You’re right.’ A warning grin. ‘I never did.’
‘They fired you.’
‘They did not.’ Cassie stood up. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘better go and do some work, I suppose. Can you let me know when you’ve sorted those stupid reconciliations?’
Nice girl, Benny thought, as the door closed behind her. Bright, too; wasted here, of course. Not as smart as she thinks she is, mind, or she wouldn’t keep getting stuck and needing Connie to go and fish her out. He pulled a sad face. Twenty years ago, he could really have made a complete and utter idiot of himself over a girl like that. Happy days.
The door opened, and a small face appeared round it; a curious face, in its way, which had made more than one observer think of an early attempt at head-shrinking by an apprentice Javanese headhunter. It belonged to Dennis Tanner, ex-partner and head of the mining and mineral rights department.
‘Got a minute?’ he said.
Benny nodded. ‘What can I do for you?’
Mr Tanner frowned. ‘I need the Ibbotson file,’ he said, ‘and the expenses ledger for June ‘73. Oh, and the client-account paying-in book, as well.’
Benny clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘The auditors have arrived, then.’
‘Too bloody right.’ Mr Tanner sighed. ‘Nine o’clock, on the doorstep. Miserable sods, by the look of them, typical Moss Berwick. They’ve taken over Humph Wells’s old office and they’re demanding files right, left and centre.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I said we should never have changed from Andersen’s.’
Benny pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and took out a folder. ‘Auditors are auditors,’ he said. ‘I often wonder what makes someone decide that’s what he wants to be when he grows up. A sadistic streak and a total lack of a sense of humour, probably.’
‘It’s the way they look at you,’ Mr Tanner said, ‘like you’ve got your flies undone and snot dribbling out of your nose. And we pay them to do it, too.’
Once Mr Tanner had gone away, Benny glanced quickly at the botched reconciliations sheets that Cassie had left with him, observing in a detached, scholarly manner that it appeared to be an inexorable rule of nature that the prettiest girls always had the most indecipherable handwriting. He dumped them in his in-tray, made a mental note to deal with them later so he could call her and tell her they were done five minutes before coffee-time tomorrow. (‘Hell of a job, took me all afternoon, but I got there in the end.’) Then he opened a file and ran his finger down a list headed ‘Things To Do’ until he came to an uncrossed-out entry that read United Global Finance. He clicked his tongue. There are some jobs you keep putting off until the thought of them is enough to depress you to death; when you eventually pull your finger out and get on with them, they turn out to be the proverbial piece of cake.
He stood up, crossed the room to a tall, padlocked corner cabinet, unlocked it and took out a long cloth bag, closed with a drawstring, and a small aerosol spray can. Inside the bag was a sword: broad, curved, single-edged, deeply fullered, in a battered black leather scabbard. He drew it, tested the edge with his forefinger (ouch), sprayed a dab of oil on the blade and worked it in with the palm of his hand. He paused for a moment to glance at the familiar inscription cut into the ornate steel hilt: a serial number, and Property of J. W. Wells & Co, in runes.
Benny dropped the sword back in its bag, tightened the drawstring, tucked in under his arm and, on his way out of the office, flicked his desk phone to fax/answer mode. At the door he paused, went back and retrieved his umbrella.
Colin was stuffing brochures into envelopes in the back office when his father sent for him.
‘Got a job for you,’ Dad said, stubbing out one cigar and’ lighting another. ‘Take the Tube up to the City - 70 St Mary Axe, I’ve written it all down for you - and pick up some paperwork. Bring it straight back, it’s urgent. Got that?’
Colin nodded. London, he thought, that’ll be nice. If I play my cards right and spin it out a bit, I could stop for a burger on my way back. ‘Sure,’ he said, brightly but not too eagerly, because his father knew him well enough to be suspicious of anything resembling enthusiasm. Colin was painfully aware that he tended to overact when trying to hide an ulterior motive behind a facade of cheerful compliance. Zeal and ham pie, so to speak. ‘Anything else you want done while I’m up there?’
Dad grinned. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘I want you back here in plenty of time to finish off those brochures.’
Curses. Never mind. At least it was out of the office for an hour or so. Even reading a book on the train was a small but valuable treat, compared with what he’d be doing otherwise.
70 St Mary Axe turned out to be more or less what Colin had been expecting - a bit upmarket, maybe, for the likes of H&F, but that could be explained away easily enough as a hold-over from the days of the company’s prosperity, when it could afford to use posh lawyers and accountants. Which of the two J. W. Wells & Co was he didn’t know, but it was a reasonable bet it was something of the sort; chartered actuaries, maybe (he had no idea what chartered actuaries did for a living), or just possibly stockbrokers or merchant bankers. Vultures, in any case. But, since they’d afforded him an unexpected outing and possibly a chance of a quarter-pounder with cheese, regular fries, large vanilla shake, he was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt until such time as they did something nasty to him.
On the way in he nearly barged into a short, broad, bearded man with enormously thick-lensed glasses and a funny-looking cloth bag stuck under his arm. He stepped aside (the man looked so much like Mr Magoo that Colin couldn’t rely on him to avoid a collision) and let him pass before going in.
A distinctly old-fashioned revolving door hustled him into a rather daunting, oak-panelled front office. He paused to take in his surroundings.
‘Did it get you?’ said a musical voice from behind the broad, elegant reception desk.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The door.’ The voice belonged to a startlingly attractive blonde. Good heavens, Colin thought mildly. ‘It nips your ankles if you don’t watch out.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ he replied self-consciously. ‘Um, I’m Colin Hollingshead, I’m here to see’ He couldn’t remember, so he dug the bit of paper Dad had given him out of his top pocket. ‘I’m here to see Ms Clay.’
‘Oh.’ For some reason, the startlingly attractive blonde didn’t seem entirely pleased. ‘All right, I’ll let her know you’re here. You’d better sit down.’
There was a lot of space in the front office, entirely uncluttered by chairs. ‘Right,’ Colin said.
‘Through there.’ The startlingly attractive blonde (she wasn’t quite so appealing with her eyebrows ruckled together like that) nodded at a doorway in the far distance. ‘She won’t be long.’
The carpet was deep and springy, lik
e bog moss. He felt as though he was leaving a trail of footprints in it.
The waiting room was small and curiously depressing. The chair Colin selected turned out to be wobbly one false move and it’d probably disintegrate under him - and the best the magazine stack on the table could offer was the Sunday Times colour supplement for 16 April 1987. He spent the first five minutes of his wait flicking through it, and the remaining four staring aimlessly at the light fittings on the ceiling. It was still better than cramming brochures into envelopes, but the margin was tightening by the second.
‘Hello.’ He looked up and recognised her. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,’ she went on, I was on the phone. I’m Cassie Clay.’
‘Like the boxer,’ Colin replied before he could stop himself.
Cassie’s rather wan smile gave him a rough idea of how many times she’d heard that one before. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Now, I’ve got all the draft papers here, but there’re a couple of points I’d just like to run over with you, because they’re slightly different from what I discussed with your father after the meeting.’
‘Actually.’ Colin looked away. ‘There wouldn’t be very much point, really. I’m just the messenger, you see. I don’t know what all this is about.’
‘Ah.’ She frowned. ‘In that case, if you could just let him know there are a few changes, and I’ll send him a letter to explain them.’
At that moment, if asked to put a cash value on himself, Colin would’ve suggested a figure somewhere between Ł1.50 and a pound. Odd; because although he had practically a complete set of character defects, an inferiority complex was one of the few gaps in his collection. There was something about this girl, however, that made him wish he wasn’t so obviously unfit for human consumption. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do that.’ She put a green folder down on the table. He waited for a second, then picked it up. That, as far as he could judge, was that.
‘You were at the meeting,’ Cassie said; and then she frowned, as if she hadn’t meant to say it.
‘That’s right,’ Colin replied. ‘I got there late, as usual. Forgot about it, actually.’