You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (26 page)

He could feel her eyes tugging at his face. ‘That long? Too bad. What’s it like where you are, anyhow?’

‘Horrible,’ Judy said. ‘You?’

Benny shrugged. ‘Could be better,’ he said. ‘You know about the takeover, of course?’

For maybe half a second she went out of focus. ‘What d’you mean, takeover?’

‘Nobody told you?’ He was shocked. ‘Jack and Dennis and Cas sold the business,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed you didn’t know. I’d have thought—’

‘Sold the business?’ She blurred again, as though someone had splashed water over a movie camera lens. ‘What the hell did they want to go and do that for?’

Benny shrugged. ‘Well, you know what a complete fuck-up everything was, what with Theo and Ricky getting killed, particularly since it was so soon after Humph and—’

‘And me.’

‘That’s right. I mean, losing four partners out of seven in under a year. Basically, it was sell up or shut down. In fact, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, in a way.’

‘The bastards,’ Judy hissed. ‘Screw it, Benny, how dare they? I’m still a partner in this goddamned firm - what about my share? They can’t do that, it’s—’

It’s done,’ Benny said gently. ‘And just in time, too. As it is, we have to close all the overseas offices - Paris, Hollywood, Frisco, Lisbon, Stockholm, Guadeloupe. Half our Entertainments & Media clients defected to UMG—’

‘That stinking bitch Betty Capoferro,’ Judy snarled. ‘Half? Which half?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Benny replied. ‘It’d only upset you.’

‘Which sector, movies or politics?’

‘Both,’ Benny said wretchedly, feeling her pain. ‘We lost Ashford Clent and Maeve Richards …’

‘Fuck.’

‘And Doug Tree and Dermot Fraud, all to UMG; Charlie Wilkinson’s gone to Sorcercorp. We only hung on to Alan Titchswamp by cutting our commission to three per cent. It’s been pretty rough, I’m telling you.’

For a while, Judy was just a swirl of pink cloud, glittering with incandescent sparkles of furious anger. ‘I turn my back for five fucking minutes,’ she wailed, ‘and everything I worked for goes straight down the toilet. Who are these clowns, anyhow?’

‘Ah.’ Benny frowned. ‘That’s the question. See, we don’t know. They haven’t seen fit to tell us. Jack and Dennis and Cas must know, presumably, but they aren’t telling.’

‘How do you mean, you don’t know? You must’ve seen them.’

‘Seen them, sure. None the wiser. I thought I knew everybody in the business, but they’re complete strangers to me. Which makes me think they’re outsiders or something.’

‘That’s not allowed.’

‘There’s ways round it, you know that. But I’ve been doing some investigating of my own. Oh, by the way, they just fired Connie Schwartz-Alberich.’

‘They did what}’

‘Exactly.’ Benny nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here, basically. We need to find out who they are before we can stop them. But listen up for a moment—’

‘You came here to see me,’ she said quietly, ‘to help Connie Schwartz-Alberich. I see.’

‘Listen,’ Benny repeated, his voice both soothing and urgent, ‘and I’ll tell you what I’ve got so far.’

And he told her, about what he’d seen in the fragment of mirror, and what Mr Dao had found out for him from the Bank’s records. When he finished talking, she was quiet for what felt like a very long time; and when she did speak, she said, ‘Benny, you’ve got to get me out of here. Yes, I know,’ she snapped before he could interrupt, ‘but this is important. This is for the good of the firm. I can deal with these jerks, but not if I’m stuck in here. And you—’ Pause. ‘Well, no offence, but—’

‘Nice try,’ Benny said firmly. ‘Listen, Jude, if it was—’ He took a deep breath. ‘If it was anybody else but you, maybe I’d do it, at that. But I can’t let you out of there, you know that. You’d be back to your old ways—’

‘Benny.’

‘No. Please don’t ask me again, OK?’ He took a step back, then looked over his shoulder. ‘Judy,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The door, Judy.’

(Because, at some point, somehow, the door had vanished, just as if the wall had healed up. A room with four walls and no door is a very bad place to be.)

‘What? Oh, go on, then.’ The door reappeared. Benny opened it, took off his left shoe and used it to wedge the door slightly ajar. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you, Jude—’

‘Liar.’

‘All right. But you know I can’t —’

‘Fine.’ She sighed, like the wind blowing through the last dead leaves of autumn. ‘So, let’s get this straight. They don’t show up in the imp-reflecting mirror, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘And you asked your pal at the Bank, and he told you that no reservations have been made in their names.’

‘That’s right. He checked the register for the next hundred unit fifty years.’

‘Then it’s obvious, surely.’

Judy explained it to him, point by point and step by step. ‘It’s so simple,’ she added afterwards, ‘I’m amazed you didn’t figure it out for yourself. It’s the only possible explanation.’

‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ Benny objected. ‘I mean, if you’re right, why? Why the hell would anyone bother going to all that trouble?’

‘There’s a reason,’ Judy replied, ‘but you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s all. Now, if only you’d let me come back, just temporarily, for a week or so—’

Benny felt something pressing gently on his left instep. It was, he realised, his shoe; the one he’d wedged the door open with.

‘Judy,’ he said, ‘please put the door back.’

‘What? Oh, shucks.’ She grinned; the sort of grin a face wears when all the skin and flesh has rotted away, and only bone is left. ‘Silly me.’

‘The fucking door, Judy.’

‘It’s only because I want us to be together again,’ she cooed. ‘Together for ever, right?’

‘Not like this, no.’

‘Then screw you.’ Behind him, the door flew open; he heard it bang against the wall. ‘Get out of here and solve your own goddamned problems. You know what? I think you never did give a damn about me, Benny. Otherwise you wouldn’t leave me here all alone, in this—’

‘So long, Judy,’ Benny said. ‘Thanks, you’ve been a great help.’

He backed away toward the door. He’d almost made it when a bolt of blue lightning flashed at him from the spout of the lamp. It missed, but not by much; he felt it burn his cheek - cold, not fire. He looked up at Judy, who blew him a kiss before she was sucked back into the lamp.

Benny took his time returning to his office. His legs were weak and a bit shaky, and he found it difficult to concentrate on anything, even on where he was going. Partly he was still recovering from the implications of what Judy had told him - yes, she was right, it was all perfectly simple when you looked at it logically, but the simple and obviously correct solution just didn’t fit. He was also somewhat preoccupied with other issues that had nothing to do with Connie, the takeover or the identity of the new management—

Mostly, it was something that Judy had said. He knew why, of course. It was nothing more than a blind thrust at his centre of guilt, a pretty obvious and feeble attempt at manipulation. It didn’t mean anything, and he would be entirely justified in deleting it from his mind—

You came here to see me, to help Connie Schwartz-Alberich. I see.

Strange, though. Benny was under no illusions about Judy’s motivations, or about how close he’d come to taking her place under the Glass Mountain. Attributing any sort of humanoid feeling to Judy was a bit like trying to psychoanalyse a bomb. Jealousy, therefore—

It wasn’t Judy’s feelings he should be concerned about, of course.

He was just outside the boardroom door. He stopped, and listened. There were no voices coming from inside, so the room was empty. He shrugged, opened the door and went in.

The JWW boardroom was meant to be imposing and intimidating; it had never had that effect on Benny. If anything, he found it vaguely restful, perhaps because it reminded him of home. If it hadn’t been for the windows, it could almost have been a room in the house where he’d grown up. That house was long gone, of course: looted, trashed, undermined and filled in by goblins over a century ago in one of the last raids before the peace settlement of 1899. No great loss; by dwarf standards it was a slum, an end-of-gallery two-up-ninety-seven-down. He’d left home when he’d been a mere boy of eighty, hadn’t been back since, never regretted it. Nevertheless; the boardroom’s dark panelling and massive furnishings always helped him settle his mind. He thought well here. He sat down at the great mirror-polished table, leaned back in his chair and applied his mind.

So simple. The imp-reflecting mirror had shown nothing, and there were no reservations in the new management team’s names in the Land of the Dead. Therefore, they didn’t exist. Whatever it was he’d spent half an hour with that morning, it wasn’t a living being; it wasn’t real.

There could be all sorts of reasons for that. It could simply be a tax thing, or an elaborate mechanism for circumventing corporate law. The technology wasn’t all that complex, though it was pretty long-winded; someone had been to a certain amount of trouble and expense to create the illusions of the annoying little man and his colleagues. Pause; who could do that sort of stuff? A piece of cake for the Fey, all of whom were natural effective magicians. They could create illusions and glamours and phantoms and incubi just by thinking. But ever since Judy’s overthrow the Fey were safely locked up in their own shallow, tormented dimension, unable to interact or interfere with anything on the other side of the line. Among humans, pretty well any accomplished effective magician could have done the engineering, and Benny could’ve filled two sides of A4 with the names of likely suspects without having to pause for thought. The question, though, was why.

It only mattered, Benny told himself, because whoever was behind it all had seen fit to sack Connie Schwartz-Alberich, and of course that wasn’t on. Furthermore, why would anybody want to? She earned the firm more money per fiscal quarter than Cas Suslowicz or Peter Melznic, she was efficient, reliable, highly respected in the trade, an asset and a credit to the firm. If they were getting rid of her, therefore, there had to be a very good reason, or a very bad one.

Who was it who said ‘Never attribute to malice anything that can be explained by incompetence’? Benny couldn’t recall offhand. But, unreal or not, the new management were still Management, and the M-word is, after all, just Latin for couldn’t-find-their-arse-with-both-hands. Management tends to do stuff like that, as part of its contribution to keeping the world imperfect and chaotic. Even so; even so.

In which case, he was forced back on the conclusion he’d already jumped to, the moment Connie had told him the news. They were getting rid of her because she’d found out something that they didn’t want anybody to know, or she was inadvertently doing something that got in the way of their secret agenda.

Benny groaned aloud. He didn’t like conspiracy theories; for one thing, they imply that there’s an efficient and competent providence shaping the course of events, even if it’s a malign one, and Benny preferred to believe (reasonably enough, in his opinion) that nobody, good guys or bad guys, is capable of being that organised. Far more likely that stuff, good or bad, simply happens, how and when it wants to, and the most anybody can do is be shrewd enough to take advantage, surfing on the crest of the tidal wave.

Even so.

But Connie wasn’t like that; she didn’t snoop, spy, insert her nose, unless she was compelled to do so by a very good reason. The only things outside the work in her in-tray with which she’d concerned herself recently had been the identity of the new management (and Benny knew she’d been no further forward than him or anybody else at the time of her dismissal) and this stupid business with young Cassie and the guy from Hollingshead’s.

Unless—

The vague outlines of an idea were starting to form in Benny’s mind; no more than shapes, structures, an aerial photograph of an idea taken from so high up that you could barely recognise it for what it was. Something to do with the— He frowned, then scowled. Something to do—

Quickly, decisively, he looked down. There in the polished table top he saw his reflection; and, since he was no more nor less than he claimed to be, the imp-reflecting surface showed him exactly the same image as he’d have seen in any ordinary mirror. But he concentrated, screwing up his eyes behind the massively thick lenses of his glasses. He was zooming in on the pupils of the reflection’s eyes, trying to see if there was anything odd about them.

He saw what he was looking for, and turned his head away.

All dwarves have brown eyes; it’s DNA or something equally technical. Benny was no exception; indeed, he owed two of his marriages to the apparent soulfulness of his eyes, though that had been a blessing so mixed as to be practically scrambled. The eyes of the reflection, however, were grey.

‘Judy,’ he said, quiet but clear.

A sharp twinge, the sort you get from eating ice cream or biting on a bit of silver foil. He looked down again. The brown eyes were back; unfortunately, the idea, or the schematic for the idea, was completely gone.

All well, Benny thought, can’t blame her for trying. And Judy might have her faults, but nobody could deny she was as sharp as a tack.

At any rate, if she’d solved the problem, then it meant that the problem was soluble. It was a pity he was going to have to figure it out on his own, slowly and laboriously, instead of taking advantage of Judy’s superior insight and intellectual voltage. A pity; but the price was too high. Well - any rate, she’d set him on the right path.

Benny glanced at his watch. His chat with his ex had taken longer than he’d anticipated, and he had work to do; he should he getting back, finishing up the daily chores. If there was time, he’d drop by Connie’s office and fill her in on what he’d found out. After all, she was much better at intuitive leaping than he was. Maybe she’d solve it in a flash, like Judy had done.

He yawned as he pushed open his office door. These days, mortal peril took it out of him more than it used to; maybe he should start thinking about retiring, while he still—