The Business

'Your Muse?' Dessous said, almost choking.

'Yeah,' Dwight said, glancing from his uncle to me. 'Otherwise I'm just, like, a fake, and I won't be a fake, Kate.'

'Dwight, ah, there's a movie out at the moment called The Siege —'

'Yeah yeah yeah,' Dwight said, smiling tolerantly and patting the air as though pacifying an invisible dog. 'I know.  Completely different sort of movie altogether. This movie's going to be big budget and ultra-spectacular, but it's going to be, like, thoughtful?'

'The people who made The Siege probably thought it was thoughtful, too.  They probably didn't mean to upset the entire Arab-American community and have movie theatres picketed across America.'

'Well, across New York City, anyway,' Dwight said, shaking his head at my lack of understanding. 'You really on Uncle Jeb's side?' he asked me, disappointed. 'Frankly I was hoping you might help me talk him into putting some money into this project.

This time Dessous did choke on his beer.

'I think you'd be mad to go ahead with this, Dwight,' I told him.

Dwight stared at me, aghast.  Then he leant towards me, eyes narrowed.  'But you do think it's a great idea?'

'Brilliant.  It's a breathtakingly good idea.  But if you really want to put it to good use, find somebody in the movie industry you hate and would like to see ruined or dead and suggest the idea to them in a way that would let them claim it as their own.'

'And watch them pick up the Academy Award?' Dwight laughed at my naïveté. 'I think not!'

Dessous and I exchanged looks.

Di

Jebbet E. Dessous was into weaponry the way Uncle Freddy was into cars.  Hand guns, rifles, automatics, mortars, heavy machine-guns, tanks, rocket-launchers, he had everything, including a helicopter gunship stored out at the airfield where I'd landed and a motor torpedo boat which he kept in a large boathouse on the lakeside.  Most of the heavier stuff — like the tanks, housed in a warehouse in the town — was old; Second World War vintage or not much later.  He grumbled about the government's reluctance to sell tax-paying citizens main battle tanks and anti-aircraft missiles.

Dwight and I followed him round the stables attached to the main villa; this was where Dessous kept his collection of howitzers and field pieces, some dating back to the Civil War.

'See this?' He patted what looked like a load of long, open pipes mounted on a trailer. 'Stalin's organ pipes, they used to call these.  The Wehrmacht were terrified of them.  So were the Red Army; used to fall short too often.  You can't get the rockets any more but I'm having a bunch of them made.' He slapped one of the dark green metal tubes with his giant hand again. 'Make a hell of a noise, apparently.  Looking forward to letting these suckers off, let me tell you.'

'What's the biggest missile you've got, Jeb?' I asked, as i

He gri

'Goddammit, Telman, I thought you of all people would agree with that!'

So I was Telman, now.  I had kind of thought that when Mr Dessous had said he'd call me Miss Telman until he knew me better he meant that in the fullness of time he might get round to calling me Kathryn, or Kate.  Apparently not.  Or maybe that would come later.  The point at issue was how easy it was to bootstrap yourself out of poverty.

'Why, Jeb?'

'Because you came up out the slums, didn't you?'

'Well, if not slums, certainly a degree of deprivation.'

'But you did it!  That's my point; you're here!'

Here was the dining room of the villa, which was fairly big and untidily sumptuous.  As well as myself, Dwight, Eastil and Dessous, there was Mrs Dessous, who was a stu

The long table was stratified, with Dessous at the head dispensing Pétrus and the junior technicians somewhere at the far end swigging beer.  The food had been Mexican, served by small and wondrously deft and inconspicuous Mexican men.  I wondered if Dessous themed all his meals, so that if we'd eaten Chinese we'd have been surrounded by pigtailed Chinamen, while an Italian di

'I was extraordinarily lucky, Jeb,' I said. 'Mrs Telman's car blew a tyre near where I was playing with my pals.  If it hadn't been for that piece of luck I'd probably still be in the west of Scotland.  I'm thirty-eight.  By now I'd have had three or four kids knocked out of me, I'd weigh another twenty or thirty pounds, I'd look ten years older, I'd smoke forty a day and eat too much chocolate and deep-fried food.  If I was lucky I'd have a man who didn't hit me and kids who weren't doing drugs.  Maybe I'd have a few high-school qualifications, maybe not.  There's an outside chance I'd have gone to university, in which case it might all have been different.  I might be a teacher or a social worker or a civil servant, all of which would be socially useful but wouldn't let me live the sort of life I've come to appreciate.  But it's all based on luck.'

'No.  You don't know.  You're just making assumptions,' Dessous insisted. 'That's the Brit in you coming out there, this self-deprecating stuff.  I knew Liz Telman; she told me when she found you, you were selling candy at fifty per cent mark-up.  You trying to tell me you wouldn't have learned something from that?'

'Perhaps I'd have learned how easy it was to rip people off, and decided never to do it again.  Maybe I'd have ended up working in a Citizens' Advice Bureau or —'

'This is perversity, Telman.  The obvious lesson to draw is how easy it is to make money, how easy it is to use initiative and enterprise to pull yourself out of the environment you find yourself in.  You'd have done it anyway, with or without Liz Telman.  And that's precisely my point, dammit.  The people who deserve to will get out of their deprivation, they'll rise above any goddamn social disadvantagement, whether it's in Scotland, Honduras, Los Angeles or anywhere else.'

'But it's not the people who deserve to,' I said. 'How can you condemn the vast majority who don't get out of the slums or the schemes or the barrios or the projects?  Aren't they going to be the ones who put family, friends and neighbours first, the ones who support each other?  The ones who rise are more likely to be the ones who are the most selfish, the most ruthless.  The ones who exploit those around them.'

'Exactly!' Dessous said. 'Entrepreneurs!'

'Or drug-dealers, as we call them these days.'

'That's evolution, too!  The smart ones sell, the dumb ones use.  It's vicious, but that's the state and its dumb laws.'