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In the morning I bathed, borrowed a blow dryer and blew on my hair until I looked like the tail end of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Then I slipped into a fairly modest three-piece suit, put on tube socks, pulled plastic bags on over those and got out my bright-green high-top sneakers, stained and splattered with various toxic wastes. I kept them locked up in a small beer cooler until they were ready to be deployed. Wore a tie that simulated a dead trout hanging from my neck. Jim drove' me downtown in his pickup truck and dropped me off. He went out to look for a belt for a washing machine and I walked into the front doors of a large office building.
The security guys were waiting for me and they took me right up to somewhere near the top floor. We did your basic
whisk number, whisking through the secretarial maze, and then they showed me into a nifty boardroom where the top-management echelon of Boner Chemical was waiting for me.
It was all choreographed. There were a dozen rich white guys and one of me. Actually, I'm a white guy too, but somehow I keep forgetting. So the white guys were seated in a crescent, like a parabolic reflector, with a single empty chair at the focal point so that they could all point inwards and concentrate their weirdness energy on me. Instead, I wandered over and sat down on an empty chair way off to the side, over underneath the window. Shoe leather creaked and invisible clouds of cologne and martini breath wafted around the room as everyone had to turn around and rearrange. The chairs were massive; a lot of physical effort was involved. They had no coherent plan, so things got pretty raggedy, with some execs sitting way off to the sides and others peering over pinstriped shoulders. All of them were squinting into the sun-a fortuitous accident. I leaned my chair back against the windowsill so that my green sneakers rose into the air. I leaned back there and regarded this nervous phalanx of upper-crusters and got to thinking about what a twisted job this was. I spend days living and working with people who would probably be street puppeteers if GEE didn't exist to hire them. People who keep quartz crystals under their pillows to prevent cancer, who feel the day is lost if they don't get a chance to sing a new 2-4-6-8 chant in front of a minicam. Then I threaten the boards of directors of major corporations. On off days I go scuba diving through raw sewage. My aunt keeps asking me if I've gotten a job yet.
They all introduced themselves but I lost track of the names and ranks pretty quickly. Top execs don't wear "Hello! My name is..." tags on their charcoal-grey worsted. Most were Bonerites, but there were some fiasco people there too.
"Sorry about your dioxin outfall," I lied, "but don't worry. It's nothing that a few hundred pounds of dynamite won't fix."
"If you think you can just plug up a Buffalo sewer line, you're wrong, mister," said the executive with eyeglasses the size of portholes.
"... and get away with it?"
"Yes."
"Just did. Now, moving on to Item Two," I said, "we're steamed about your hidden outfall at the base of Niagara Falls. Tomorrow we're going to reveal its existence to the media."
"I don't know what you're referring to," said an executive I had mentally christened Mr. Dithers. "We'll have to take it up with Engineering."
"Item Three: you guys are getting bought out by Basco?"
"The details of that transaction are secret," said a half-embalmed guy with pale eyes.
"Not totally," I said.
An executive with a hard-on shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "What exactly are you getting at?"
I whistled. "Insider trading, baby. SEC's number-one no-no."
Actually, I just made that up on the spur of the moment. But I knew insider trading was going on. There always was. And it would really scare the shit out of these people if they suspected we had some way of bringing the SEC down on them.
"Mr. Taylor, I wonder if I could work an item into the agenda," said a Class-IV yuppie who'd been spending too much time on the Nautilus. He gri
I threw up my hands and said, "At your service, Mr.-"
"Laughlin. It's kind of hard to remember all these names, I know."
All this groovy informality was calculated, but up here I'd take informality where I could get it. I dropped the front legs of my chair to the carpet and crossed my legs in the all-American figure-four position, letting the shoe dangle way out to the side. I sipped some of Boner's toxic decaf and stifled a fart. "Okay. What's your beef, Laughlin?"
He looked almost injured. "No beef. Why does it always have to be a beef? I'm just interested in talking to you in less ..." he waved his hands around the room "... claustrophobic surroundings."
" 'Bout what?"
"Well, for one thing, whether Sam Horn's going to be as lucky in a tight spot as Dave Henderson."
"The world is full of Red Sox fans, Mr. Laughlin, and I only sleep with one of them."
"Touche. Another thing, then. We've got some work going on at Biotronics that would interest you."
"The Holy Grail?"
He was a little nonplussed. "I don't know about any Holy Grail."
"Dolmacher's phrase."
"Ah, yes! He mentioned that the two of you had had a little chat."
"Verbal combat is more like it. You work for Biotronics, Laughlin?"
The executives crinkled up and chortled.
"I'm the president," Laughlin said, kindly enough.
Oh yeah. I'd seen his picture in the paper, a couple of months ago.
Thirty floors below, Jim was waiting for me in his rusty pickup, reading the warranty on his washing machine belt. "This must be reality," I said, climbing in.
"Take it or leave it."
"Let's go to the Falls," I said, "and raise some hell."
"What happened?"
"Zip. Made an appointment with a young rising star in the cancer industry."
"To do what?"
"To shop for Grails."
We went to the Falls. Jim stood up near the top, wearing 501s and some Indian gear, squinting a lot, looking sad and noble for the camera crews and telling dirty jokes to the print reporters. A bunch of GEE people had come down from the Toronto office to give us a hand, so things were well under way by the time we got there. I kept asking where
Debbie was and people kept saying "over there," and eventually I got pointed over to a heavy railing overlooking the Falls. Three climbing ropes were tied to it, leading down the cliff, and Debbie was hanging from one of them down near the bottom, dressed in a stu