by Ben Elton
The hard sell.
‘Am I going to kill you?’ Tolstoy said, reiterating Max’s question. ‘I don’t think so, no. You don’t know shit, and your pal Schwartz knows less. That’s why he sent you here, to try and truth-drug a confession out of me. I guess the last thing I need to do right now is to give credence to his libellous hypothesis by murdering his stool pigeon, right?’
‘And about his hypothesis?’ said Max, trying to hide his relief. ‘Is it true? Do you sink oil tankers to sell Claustrospheres?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think if you can fund Mother Earth while they try to kill you, you’d pretty much do anything to make a sale.’
‘You know you may not be so stupid after all, Max. How did you cotton on to the fact that I fund Mother Earth?… Oh yeah, I remember now, you were with Nathan Hoddy, weren’t you? That’s right. I guess he told you the plot of his movie, huh?’
‘That’s right, and when he died for it, I guessed he must have unwittingly stumbled on the truth.’
‘Clever. No, really, clever. You sure the girl didn’t work all that out for you? I never had you picked out as a brain boy.’
‘No, I figured it out all on my own. The girl’s my wife now, by the way.’
‘Really? Congratulations. Like I could give a fuck about your domestic arrangements. I must confess to you though, she looked eminently screwable, nice and natural. Although to be frank, armed women with too much attitude make my dick go limp.’
Max was thinking hard, trying to conjure up the right words to suit his purpose. He knew that it was his job to coax some information out of Tolstoy about the secret Claustrosphere marketing strategy. He also knew that he was dealing with a far subtler and cleverer man than he was himself. But even clever people have weak spots, Max felt that he knew what Tolstoy’s was. It was vanity.
‘Plastic, does it ever bother you that what you do might be a little unethical?’
‘Huh?’ Tolstoy asked, as if he did not understand the question. ‘I mean, I grant you it’s clever but. .
‘No, Max, no buts. It’s clever, just that.’
Max congratulated himself. He felt that he had judged his man well, he believed that he was drawing Tolstoy in, playing on the well-known fact that Tolstoy could not resist the sound of his own voice. Unfortunately for Max, this was not the case. Contrary to what he’d said earlier, Plastic had decided that Max would have to die that day. The Mother Earth girl and the FBI man, he was unconcerned about. One was a terrorist, the other Plastic knew to be held in contempt by his own colleagues and known in the Bureau as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Without evidence, of which they clearly had none, their voice would not be heard. Max however was different. Here was a colossal star, a man whose every word was reported in the media. True, Tolstoy owned the lion’s share of that media, and Max, like his comrades, had no evidence. None the less, he was a figure of sufficient significance to be capable, in a single interview, of sparking public debate and rumour, which Tolstoy naturally wished to avoid.
Tolstoy had therefore decided to have Max killed immediately, before he had a chance to make his suspicions public. This was not a job which Plastic wanted carried out in his house and so he had therefore decided to occupy Max for a few minutes, whilst summoning his killing people. They could then be instructed to despatch the inconvenient film star, once he had driven a suitably non-incriminating distance from the Tolstoy mansion.
Tolstoy idly pressed a button on his intercom.
‘Hey, Sugar,’ he said to his trusted assistant, ‘I’m busy with a pal right now. When the guys from despatch arrive, just get them to wait at the main gate, will you?’
The guys from despatch had not, in fact, up to that point, been summoned, but they had been now. Tolstoy turned back to Max with an easy smile. Max had been right about one thing, Tolstoy loved to show off and, confident that he would not be overheard, he was quite happy to occupy a condemned man’s final minutes by demonstrating what a genius he was.
‘What I do is not unethical at all,’ Plastic said.
‘Maybe just a little bit,’ said Max, pleased with himself for being such a subtle interrogator.
‘No, I don’t accept that. It is not unethical.’
‘But you do deliberately sink oil tankers, cause nuclear leaks and hole toxic waste convoys in the middle of big cities.’
‘I do that, yes. Or, at least, I have my people do it. My sabotage people.’
‘And this is not unethical?’
‘I don’t consider it unethical. Illegal, certainly. But not unethical.’
‘Look,’ said Max. ‘God knows, I realise you’re busy, but I would love to know how you get from poisoning kids to not being unethical. I mean, genuinely, I’m fascinated. I know you’re a brilliant guy, I bet you can make the leap.’
‘It ain’t unethical, because all the things we do would happen anyway,’ Tolstoy said.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Max.
‘Because you’re stupid,’ Tolstoy replied, and commenced to explain what had to be the nastiest marketing campaign in history, and there had been some horrors.
‘So the Second Great Green Scare is coming to an end and we’re trying to offload the early model Edens, right? Eden One, Eden Two, Eden Three. You wouldn’t remember them because all this was before you were born, right? But the boom’s over and I’m feeling down, OK? Sure, we’d done great for a while there, sold a shit-load of product, but things were dropping off. I was young and hungry and I knew that with a sure-fire item like Claustrosphere, we could do better. You getting me?’
Max explained that, though he might not be Albert Einstein, he could follow a simple narrative. Tolstoy continued.
‘My problem was that I could not use negative advertising; you know the kind of thing… Hey! The worlds fucked! Save your ass! Buy a shelter!’
‘Why couldn’t you do that?’ Max inquired, to demonstrate how attentive he was being. ‘Seems to me that would have been your best shot.’
‘Yeah? Well, you’re wrong. Popular research informed us that people felt guilty enough about the environment already. They took a very negative view towards a company gleefully embracing Earth death in order to make a profit from it. So I had to be clever, right? And believe me I was. I was young and I was clever. I had ideas then! Man, did I have ideas! I used Rodin’s Thinker as my principal symbol and that bit out of Shakespeare… you know, “This fortress built by Nature” etc.’
“‘This sceptered isle, This earth of majesty … This other Eden,”’ said Max, remembering how recently he had heard that very quote, and how happy he had been for a short while.
‘You know it? Cute piece, am I right? And beautifully deployed, though I say it myself. I had a product which was basically an immoral, irresponsible, cowardly cop-out and I gave it class. If you give something class, then you make people think they’re being clever. If you’ve done that, you can sell them anything. But not for ever right? You can only play the class game for so long. Engaging a customer intellectually has never been a substitute for engaging them emotionally. What I really needed was scare tactics, and like I say, I couldn’t use them. So as the Second Green Scare dies down, so do my figures; plummeting would not be too depressing a word to describe the sales situation during this time. Sure, we had some good months, sometimes very good, but we were bumping along the bottom. Then I began to notice something, I noticed that those good months always coincided with —‘
‘Some terrible environmental catastrophe.’
‘Clever kid. That chick must be good for you, Max. Of course they did. You open a paper, you see there’s some province of India where no one can breathe any more. You think, hey, the future’s looking kind of bleak, maybe I’d better start covering my ass here. Disaster was good for business. So I started to buy into news channels to make sure everybody got to hear about all the disasters. If Claustrosphere itself couldn’t use scare tactics, then I’d get somebody else to do it.’
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br /> ‘Cute,’ Max observed.
‘Wasn’t it?’ Plastic Tolstoy agreed. ‘There I was, running these news channels which were getting awards and praise from greenies for prioritising environmental news, and all the time I was just doing it to scare people into buying my product. Boy, it was funny! We had all these environmentally concerned journos and researchers lining up to work on my channels. They thought, “At last somebody’s taking the fate of the planet seriously.” And I sure was! Claustrosphere was turning into a multi-billion dollar industry. To me, that is serious.’
Tolstoy had leapt from his chair and was pacing about the room in a manner that Nathan would have recognised, had he not been dead.
Back at Max’s place this movement caused some concern.
‘I wish he wouldn’t do that,’ said Rosalie. ‘He keeps walking out of shot.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Judy replied, scarcely able to contain his excitement. ‘We’ve got enough of his smug mug and the voice is coming over fine.’
Indeed it was, and Plastic Tolstoy, blissfully ignorant of the phone trick, had scarcely stopped for breath.
‘That’s when I started to fund Natura and Mother Earth. They were my best adverts of all. Anything environmentally conscious, I promoted it … secretly, of course. Protest concerts, documentaries, terrorism. I was the greenest guy on Earth, and all the while, I’m selling Claustrospheres. Ha ha ha! It was perfect. But I still got a problem.’
‘It all seems pretty straightforward to me,’ Max ventured.
‘Straightforward! It was a nightmare! Everything depended on one, non-constant factor and, in manufacturing terms, if you’re dependent on a non-constant factor, that’s your profit gone.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Max, the eager pupil.
‘A non-constant factor! Which in this case was environmental disaster! Everyone was hanging around waiting for one. The manufacturer, the distributor, the retailer, the marketer, all waiting, and why? Because none of them could move without the customer, and the customer did not appear in any great numbers without the disaster. The tail was wagging the dog! You got Joe Soap, right? He runs a small-town Claustrosphere showroom, normal weeks he’s selling one, maybe two units, right? Suddenly, there’s a local disaster. The methane build-up in an old landfill that has since been built over goes pop, and wipes out half the suburbs. Bang! It’s a wake-up call! A Pavlovian response. “My God, Marjorie,” says every short-sighted little schmuck in town, “the world’s exploding, we’d better get a Claustrosphere.” Suddenly Joe Soap gets four, maybe five hundred orders. But he doesn’t have the stock, he’s geared to selling one a week. “I’ll get ‘em,” he cries, and calls the factory which starts a rush build. Three months later five hundred units worth a billion dollars turn up in Nowheresville, by which time the explosion is forgotten, it’s history, and everybody has spent the money on sending little Jimmy to college instead. A nightmare. Like I told you.’
‘It certainly sounds it,’ Max agreed, trying to look sympathetic.
‘All the time the product was chasing the demand. You can’t run a business like that, the demand has to chase the product. I knew then that I had to rationalise my principal sales strategy.’
‘Your principal sales strategy? That would be the environmental disasters, would it?’ Max inquired.
‘Exactly. I get to thinking, if only I knew when these terrible things were going to happen I could have the whole operation ready in place. The news teams ready to report, the stock ready to go and above all the tasteful, classy, non-exploitative little Claustrosphere commercials to play in heavy rotation around the news breaks that reported the disaster. That’s the connection your FBI pal made, and which he tried to prove with his pathetic little plan to drug me. The breakthrough was to get the news to fit my commercials, in fact, to make the news itself the commercial, and the actual commercial just the pack-shot.’
‘So you start creating disasters?’ Max asked.
‘Hey hey hey! Hold on!’ Tolstoy replied, and for a moment Max thought he might be about to become cautious, but Tolstoy was waiting for his killing people and was happy to tell his story in his own time and in the right order.
‘At first, I’m still trying to do it legitimately, right? Trying to work out when these genuine disasters will occur so I can be ready for them. So I get all these scientists together and ask them to predict what’s going to happen next. Ask me how they did.’
‘How did they do?’ asked Max obligingly.
‘They did shit. Never picked one, not one! They’d say, maybe a tanker will go down off Alaska, maybe a Russian power station will blow. Well, of course they would! I knew that! What I didn’t know was when! Now here is where we get to the point about what I did not being unethical.’
‘I just can’t see how you’re going to make that trick, Plastic,’ said Max, his face a picture of concentration.
‘Watch me. So I’m telling you that me and my scientists know the stuff is going to happen, we just don’t know when. They’re giving me all these probability charts saying ten nuke disasters a year, fifty oil spills, tigers to be extinct some time soon, all that stuff, and I’m thinking, well if it’s going to happen anyway, then there’s nothing wrong in me organising it to happen in a disciplined manner. It’s like carrying your own bomb on to a plane because the chances of there being two people with bombs on any one plane are basically zero.’
‘I’m not sure I follow that analogy, man,’ said Max.
‘What are you, stupid? It’s like crystal. I’m thinking, if my science guys say that two tankers will sink in the Panama Canal in the next three months, then why don’t I sink ‘em? It’s the same damage and there are huge national and international benefits to be achieved. The common good is well served.’
‘It is?’
‘Well, of course it is! Have you any idea how many jobs are involved in Claustrosphere manufacturing? Also distribution and installation? Even then, we had a colossal workforce, not to mention the associate industries. Maybe you think that millions of working men and women should be laid off while we all wait for some dumb rust-bucket to sink in the Panama Canal? A rust-bucket, I might remind you, that we all know is going to sink anyway! Then there’s the huge investment involved. Even then anyone could see that Claustrosphere was going to be bigger than cars. In global economic terms Claustrosphere is the difference between boom and bust. If the wind goes out of our sales, bang, recession! I had a duty to make the Claustrosphere operation manageable. The issue was jobs and dollars in the heartlands! That is not something that can be left drifting up to vagaries of non-specific probabilities.’
‘You mean chance?’
‘Exactly, I mean chance.’
‘So you saw creating environmental disaster as a kind of moral thing, then?’ Max really was fascinated. Tolstoy’s sense of conviction was awesome.
‘I saw creating a situation that was healthy for investors and employees alike as a moral thing, certainly, and if that meant creating environmental disaster, then so be it,’ said Tolstoy. ‘To me, encouraging growth and creating jobs is the only morality, which as it happens is fortunate, because I must admit to you, it turned out that my probabilities’ theory did not hold water.’
‘The one about if two tankers were going to sink anyway, you might as well be the person to sink them?’
‘Yeah, what actually happened was that four tankers sank, our two and the two that were going to, anyway.’
‘So the bomb on the plane theory’s crap?’
‘It’s a cute theory. I still think it should work.’
‘But it doesn’t?’
‘Apparently not, no.’
Plastic Tolstoy paused for the first time in a while. Max could not help but gape at the enormity of the horrors of which he had been told. Back at his house, Rosalie and Judy too were completely dumbfounded. The sheer scale of Tolstoy’s crimes left them lost for words.
‘Well, I guess tough decisions take tough guys,’ Max said fina
lly.
‘Exactly,’ Tolstoy replied. ‘Personally, I see myself as a global philanthropist.’
Another job for the killing people.
Max decided it was time to leave. The danger he was in had suddenly dawned upon him. He remembered how Tolstoy had served Nathan for simply suggesting a screenplay idea. Now he, Max, knew the whole dreadful story.
‘Thanks, Plastic, it’s been real,’ he said and ran for the door. Unfortunately, the door of the office was locked. Max turned to face Plastic Tolstoy, who was playing with his gun.
‘Max, you leaving without saying goodbye?’ said Tolstoy.
‘Are you going to kill me, Plastic?’ Max inquired.
‘Oh yes, thanks for reminding me,’ said Plastic and fired at Max. When the noise died away, Max was still standing, if rather paler than before.
‘Just kidding,’ said Plastic. ‘It’s a hologram. Ha ha! Like I told you, I don’t want dead movie stars cluttering up my house. Besides, Schwartz and your girl know you came here. If I kill you here, it might get complicated, even for a guy with my clout. See ya, kid. Be lucky.’
Tolstoy pressed a button, the door sprang open and Max turned and ran. He left everything behind, including the telephone. He just ran, out of the office, out of the house, into his car and away.
Rosalie and Judy turned to each other in triumph. They had the whole confession on tape, this was dynamite indeed.
‘We have to take it to the police,’ said Judy. ‘Now.’
‘No way!’ Rosalie replied. ‘If we do that, sure we get Tolstoy, but the tape becomes evidence, prejudicial to the trial, then the appeal, then the appeal on the appeal. We need it now! People have to see it, they have to know what’s been happening to the world, what we’ve all let happen. This tape could be the thing that finally turns the environmental argument around.’