How to Succeed in Evil - 02

by Patrick E. McLean

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Taking a Meeting

  Over the next few months, The Cromoglodon remains relatively calm. He destroys a few vehicles and breaks a few windows. He also tears down a statue of a Civil War general, but since nobody remembers who the statue commemorates, only the pigeons are put out.

  In an unusual spasm of sensibility, law enforcement agencies are given a standing order to leave The Cromoglodon alone. Under no circumstances are they to attempt to apprehend him. Yes, he is bad. But he is so bad that attempting to catch him will only mean more pain and destruction. So the Feds claim jurisdiction and do nothing.

  But this does not mean that The Cromoglodon’s life is peaceful. He has created new movements in the herd. Inexplicably, The Cromoglodon is hot. Hotter even than the heroes that have tried to stop him. Magazines pay top dollar to paparazzi daring enough to get a shot of The Cromoglodon in action. When a photographer captures an image of Barry tearing a tour bus in half over his head, t-shirts are printed with the caption, “Who says the big city isn’t friendly?”

  The media has a field day. And why wouldn’t they? It’s been a slow news summer and The Cromoglodon is a ratings dream. The fearsome creature just keeps on giving. First, he’s disaster news, then he becomes human interest and finally he crosses over into fashion and style. He is a hit. It becomes impossible to have a first-rate party without The Cromoglodon in attendance. And if he wrecks the joint (as he does, twice) it only serves to give new meaning to the term “smashing success.”

  When two news anchors are horribly injured trying to interview The Cromoglodon, their ratings shoot through the roof. Talk shows resound with questions like:

  “How do you pronounce Cromoglodon?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Why doesn’t he have a spokesperson?”

  “Do you know who’s he dating?”

  In this strange summer it seems the world has lost a sense of itself. And story after story is spoon-fed to lazy reporters and venial news directors by a well-oiled public relations machine. A machine that is designed, assembled and financed (through a dizzyingly complex structure of front companies) by none other than Edwin Windsor.

  An op-ed piece in a major newspaper describes The Cromoglodon as “a superhero for the post-modern age. The ultimate deconstructionist.” Another thoughtful journalist writes, “Who cares that he doesn’t have a concern about outdated conventions of morality? He is a symbol to all the oppressed and disenfranchised. Striking at the system itself — the only hero strong enough to combat the real villain, instead of acting as a repressive extension of an oppressive consumer culture.”

  And when the frenzy reaches its height, Edwin strikes. But strike is too severe a word for what Edwin does. Edwin taps, precisely and with great effect. It all starts with a left turn.

  “This isn’t the way to my hotel,” says the passenger. In the front seat of the town car, an Armenian kid pulls his chauffeur cap lower on his forehead.

  “Is will be fine. I professionalism.” Vasak figures everything will be better if he plays dumb.

  “Hey, goddamn it, that’s my hotel over there,” Mike Hainer isn’t used to the people who work for him, even the temporary help, making mistakes. He’s a busy man. An important man. One with no time to fix other people’s mistakes.

  “Yehghvelch,” Vasak says.

  “Yegwich? What the hell is a Yegwich? Look this is simple, I need to go to the Plaza. Sprechenzie habla Plaza Hotel?”

  Vasak nods and flashes him a moony grin. The hell with it, Hainer thinks. He’ll get to the wrong hotel, have this guy fired and take a cab to the Plaza. So he’ll be late for his next thing. It’s not like he’s never been late to a thing before. He returns his attention to the stack of papers in his lap.

  For Mike, there is always a stack of papers or a person demanding his attention. Mike Hainer is in charge of a frighteningly large sporting goods conglomerate. And over the last 20 years, he has wrangled his company from an obscure manufacturer of running shoes into the premiere athletic brand in the world. The logo on his hand-tooled leather briefcase is the same logo that marks more than 80% of the world’s finest athletes. From soccer to snowboarding, golf to gymnastics, Pysche has burned its brand on the world of sport.

  But that’s something of a problem. Pysche has grown so fast and been extended so far, Mike isn’t sure there are any worlds left to conquer. The proposals in front of him include sponsoring tee ball leagues and hiring archaeologists to forge his logo within the centuries-old ruins of Mayan ball courts. Mike doesn’t like any of these ideas. He is of the mind that it’s time to invent a new sport. One that is faster-paced, has frequent breaks for commercials and will allow every aspect of the game to be sponsored. If he could just figure out a way to make the outcome of the game hang on how much fans bought during the game…

  The towncar’s undercarriage scrapes along the ground as Vasak drives into a below-ground parking deck. Finally, thinks Mike, this waste of time can come to an end. On to the next waste of time. Growth is always an uphill battle.

  Vasak stops the car in the center of an empty level of the parking deck. “Where is this?” asks Mike. Vasak does not answer him. In keeping with his instructions, Vasak unbuckles his seat belt and leans across to the passenger seat. He feels around for the seat controls. He moves the passenger seat all the way forward. “What are you doing?” Mike demands.

  Vasak opens the car door. He turns to his passenger and says, “Mechshelevdevel.” Then he gets out of the car, locks it with the key fob and walks away with a happy bounce in his step.

  “What is going on?” says Mike. It occurs to him that he might be in trouble. He tries the door. When it doesn’t open, he gets angry. “Oh you Slavic Son of a Bitch! I’ll have your job for this. When I get through you won’t even be allowed to drive an ox cart full of dung in your native CrushinglyFuckingPooristan!”

  Vasak doesn’t break stride. He knows the angry man is right. He is going to lose his job for this. But a strange little man had paid him a lot of money to drive this limo. And the little man had promised a lot more when the car was delivered. What did Vasak care that Mr Hainer was upset? It was not like Vasak could afford to buy Psyche’s shoes anyway. Besides, he was through with driving angry, dull business men around.

  Hainer looks around the empty parking lot. He still doesn’t fully comprehend what is going on, but he has seen enough bad in-flight thrillers to know that it might not be good. Is it the Russian mafia? Is this some kind of shakedown? He begins to get scared.

  He yells until he is red in the face. He pounds on the window with his fist and then his shoe. He is so worked up, he does not hear the car locks click open. A tall, elegantly dressed man bends down and slides into seat next to him. Now he understands why Vasak moved the seat forward. This man is very, very tall.

  The man unbuttons his jacket and says “Mr. Hainer. I have a proposal for you.”

  “And who in the hell are you?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Pitch

  “Mr. Hainer, please try to calm yourself,” says Edwin.

  “Calm? I’ve been kidnapped! Evidently by you. Why would I listen to anything you have to say?” says Mark Hainer. He’s indignant and feeling his own self-importance.

  “Actually, you were kidnapped by an easily bribed, underpaid Armenian driver. I am just a good Samaritan who happened by and took pity upon you.”

  Hainer’s eyes narrow. “You want money?” Edwin says nothing. “You don’t want money? How much money do you want?”

  “All of it. But that’s the wrong question. The correct question is, what can I offer you in return?”

  “This is bullshit.” Hainer tries to open his door again.

  “Mr. Hainer, I have a business proposal for you. And I want you to understand that I am a serious man who has no time to waste. So please forgive my having skipped the runaround from your secretary.”

  Hainer narrows his eyes. “I’
m listening.”

  Edwin reaches forward and removes a stack of papers from the front seat. On the top of the stack is the justifiably famous picture of The Cromoglodon tearing a bus in half with his bare hands. “You are no doubt familiar with The Cromoglodon?”

  “That freak? Yeah, my kid’s nuts about him. That’s why he wears black all the time. That’s why he threw a birdbath through my screened-in porch. Wife wanted to kill him.”

  Edwin slips the photo to the bottom of the pile. The next page is filled with bullet points, a charts and a graph. Edwin hands it to Hainer. “This is the executive summary to a much larger scientific report I had worked up. It concludes that it may be impossible to measure The Cromoglodon’s physical capacity. If you must gorge yourself on the details I can get you the rest. The upshot is this, not only is he the strongest man on Earth, he is most certainly the strongest man ever.”

  “Stronger than Excelsior? C’mon, nobody’s stronger than Excelsior. Everybody knows that.”

  “If I could arbitrage everything that is known to be true but is actually false...” Edwin hands him a highly pixelated enlargement of a cellphone picture. It shows The Cromoglodon standing over Excelsior’s limp body. “Excelsior attempted to contain him and failed. The FBI is flailing about at the limits of their understanding. And right now, the entire law enforcement community is operating under a no-pursuit policy. Why do you think this monster is still at large?”

  “You certainly seem to know a lot about The Cromoglodon,” says Mark. He has no idea where this is going, but as a master salesman he enjoys a good pitch.

  “I represent him.”

  “Represent him!” Mark is unable to control his laughter. “You mean you’re, like, his agent? He’s going to play football or something?”

  “Not exactly. I am a consultant, an advisor.”

  “Okay, whatever. How does this benefit me?”

  “The Cromoglodon is simply the most powerful athlete on Earth.”

  “What? To be an athlete, you’ve got to play a sport. What sport does he play? Destruction isn’t a sport.”

  “Perhaps not, but it has the media coverage of a professional sport. Here is a listing of media exposure, estimates of cumulative viewership and readership and, of course, an estimate of what it might cost you to buy that kind of coverage.”

  Edwin shows picture after picture after picture. The Cromoglodon emerging from the wreckage of a building, throwing a car, roaring pointlessly at the sky; each one has the Psyche logo displayed on The Cromoglodon’s unique apparel. “All candid, all action and all prime placement.”

  “What? You want me to sponsor this abomination?”

  Edwin says nothing. Hainer is smart, Edwin knows he will put the pieces together for himself.

  “What did you say you were? Some kind of advisor? That has to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Associating Psyche with that, that menace? How much negative publicity do you think I can take? You expect me to come out with a line of destruction boots? My customers, the serious athletes and those who aspire to be, would leave me in droves! I’d be out of business in a year. And people would flock to those bastards at Apedis in droves. I don’t even know if droves flock — but they’d leave us — hell, they’d run away from us barefoot. In my 35 years in the business, this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You sir, are an idiot.”

  Mark lurches violently in his seat. He moves towards the door, but when Edwin raises his hand, Mark stops. Edwin has one last piece of paper. When he turns it over a smile spreads across Mark Hainer’s face. An evil giggle crawls out from the bottom of his bowels. “Oh ho. Ho ho ho, that’s good, that’s very good. Bravo.”

  It is the picture of The Cromoglodon tearing apart the tour bus but this time, blazoned across the middle of The Cromoglodon’s chest are the corporate stripes of Apedis.

  “It’s reverse sponsorship,” says Edwin, “You pay me, and I put any logo you wish on The Cromoglodon.”

  “No, no, no. That’s the logo I want. That’s the one. How much, and how do I know that it won’t get back to me?”

  “All of it. And I can provide complete deniability.”

  “All of it? That’s rich. You get me a realistic number and you’ve got a deal. Now seriously, I’ve got to get to this dinner thing.” He snatches the picture of The Cromoglodon wearing his competitor’s logo from Edwin’s hand.

  “Can I keep this?”

  “If you wish, but that may compromise your deniability.”

  “You’re right,” Mark says with an air of disappointment. He kisses the picture and hands it back to Edwin.

  Having secured one deal, Edwin makes his way across town. He has a similar meeting scheduled with the head of Apedis. There is nothing like a bidding war to add a little realism to a price.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Excelsior Speaks

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, the ‘Heroes of Business’ World Economic Summit is proud to present a man, well… certainly a man who is more than a man. One who is a hero to us all. The one and only Excelsior!”

  A follow-spot illuminates a podium that stands all alone on a bare stage. On the front of the podium is the official logo of the event, an ungainly conglomeration of initials that read HoBWEC. Dramatic music filled with strings, rolling tympani and augustly muted French horns pours from hidden speakers. On some undetected cue, the spotlight rises. Slowly, the circle of illumination climbs the heavy back curtain. Up, up, up, impossibly up, as if the operator has suffered a stroke and is slowly crumpling to the floor, still clutching the handles, unwilling to loose his grip on the wheel even in the face of certain death.

  The light comes to rest on an open hatch in the center of the auditorium’s ceiling. The music swells in crescendo. The crowd sees feet drop into the auditorium. They go wild. The rich and the powerful, men of consequence and accomplishment, are cheering their heads off like little boys. As Excelsior descends, the cheering becomes louder. As if the crowd has suddenly doubled.

  Excelsior waves down the applause and cheers. Shaking his head as if to say “No, no, not for me. You shouldn’t.” He does not betray how much he hates this kind of thing. How close he was to skipping out on the entire circus. In the dressing room he argued with Gus. “It’s stupid. Having me fly in through the ceiling. It’s demeaning. It’s like having me jump through a hoop.”

  “Ah, bullshit. I can’t even walk down a flight of stairs without my hip going out and you’re bitching about being able to fly? Candy ass. Just calm down,” said Gus, “go out there, make your damn speech, and we’ll get out of here. And whatever you do, let’s not have another Munich.”

  Munich. Gus always has to bring up Munich. Just can’t let it go. It was another one of these bullshit speaking engagements. Excelsior did the same fly-onto-the-podium trick, then said a few words that were translated into German. And when it was over they put him in a receiving line. He was forced to shake hands with an endless line of dignitaries. That’s when Yarlor the Terrible attacked. Right as he was shaking hands with the fat deputy minister of somewhere or another. At the time, of course, Excelsior had no idea that it was Yarlor. He just saw a bright blue flash coming at him from a clump of bushes on his left and he leapt into flight to avoid being hit.

  As the ball of blue energy crackled harmlessly past him, he heard a man screaming in agony. Then the shriek of a woman crying out in terror. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” he called down to reassure the people. Then he realized he was still holding onto the fat deputy minister’s arm. But the rest of the man was no longer attached. If it had happened away from the event it might not have been so bad. But as Excelsior scanned the area for the source of the blue lightning, the press was making lightning of its own. Cameras flashed and flashed as they captured thousands of images of Excelsior silhouetted against a bright blue sky holding a severed arm in his right hand. It was a public relations disaster.

  But Excelsior wasn’t thinking about public relations. He saw Yarlor, holding a 13th cent
ury arquebus covered in glowing runes that crackled with lightning, fleeing the scene. This made Excelsior mad. He dropped the severed arm and swooped down on Yarlor in the blink of an eye. He tackled the villain so hard that Yarlor’s spine broke in two places. He continued the motion of his dive back upward again and hurled Yarlor into the stratosphere. As he did, Excelsior bellowed in rage. Higher and higher Yarlor went, until the tiny speck of him was no longer visible from the ground.

  But even as he vented his fury on Yarlor, the arm that Excelsior had ripped out (and subsequently dropped) was returned to its rightful owner in accordance with the law of gravity. Blissfully, or tragically, depending on your view of the human condition, the fat man was knocked unconscious when his own arm hit him in the head.

  The cameras caught every minute from every angle. As Excelsior hung there in the sky listening to the squeal of the high-speed film drives, his conscience began to work on him. He had thrown a man to what would certainly be his death. Right now, as surely as the arm had tumbled to Earth, Yarlor was tumbling down from the upper atmosphere. But Excelsior wasn’t a killer.

  Gus was the killer. Or the people he directed. Excelsior never asked questions about what happened to the people and creatures he defeated after he was done with them. The government stepped in and took care of the mess. Once, when Excelsior had asked Gus what had happened to a man who called himself the Mean Streak, Gus had refused to answer. He’d given Excelsior a look that had chilled him to the bone. Even though Excelsior could burn Gus down with beams of heat from his eyes, it was Excelsior who’d had to look away. Excelsior never asked again.

  But as he thought about Yarlor falling to his death through the open air, Excelsior decided that he didn’t want to kill anyone. Not intentionally anyway. He wasn’t sure he cared about this two-bit thug and his arcane device. But if Yarlor landed on somebody’s house in Spain, Excelsior would feel bad about it. And he would never hear the end of it.