"I really, definitely, truly care! Call off your procurement force,
Laara. That's an order. Go out and get us some money."
"Where?"
"Why, from Baldid, of course."
"But Baldid doesn't have any money."
"No? No money?" Heck said in alarm.
"But I can get some. I can rob a bank via teleportation. Shall I go
now?"
"No." Heck cried. "Don't do that. I didn't mean like that. Dismiss the
staff. Forget the whole thing. I'll get a job. Maybe Jason Spooner will
hire me. But I won't be a party to any wholesale burglaries."
"Very well," the blonde Laara said. "If that's what you want. But first
I'd like to point out we have a staff of over five hundred in this
building. They've all been here an hour or so. They'll all demand at
least a day's pay, if you let them go. Some of them will demand two
weeks pay and the courts might decide they're entitled to it. Do you
imagine--_can_ you imagine--where that would put you? In debt for life,
Hector Finch, unless you go through with our business arrangements."
"Crooks and all?" Heck said in despair.
"I'm handling this. Crooks and all, is that clear?" The blonde stared
at him defiantly. Defiantly? he wondered. But defiantly meant she was
trying to defy him. It wasn't that way at all. If there was any defying
that had to be done, it would be on Heck's part. The blonde was in the
driver's seat. Heck wondered: who really runs _Hector Finch. We Sell
Anything_? It certainly wasn't Heck.
Gangsters, he thought. Criminals. And how many robberies a day? He
shuddered, and teleported.
* * * * *
He blinked.
He stared.
He gaped.
He had begun to materialize in a locker room. He had of course been in
locker rooms before. But never in ladies' locker rooms.
And this was very definitely a ladies' locker room.
Heck heard the hiss and roar of showers, heard the talk of many girls.
He saw them, too, in the aisles between the lockers. Some were dressed
in mufti. Some were dressed in a kind of uniform with the letters HF
stitched across the left breast. Some were dressed in fractions of
each, or either. Some were in undies. Some were in towels. Some were
not dressed at all. And every girl in the locker room was a beauty,
sleek and well-formed and lovely to look at except that with all of
them there, Heck thought, it was something like a man dying of thirst
in the middle of the Sahara being thrust suddenly head first into a
vat of beer. He'd want to drink a lot but he couldn't drink that fast
and if he didn't watch out he might even go--in seconds--from dying of
thirst to drowning.
Heck flushed, and decided to teleport. Before he could, however, a
woman wearing a towel and a lot of wet skin grabbed his arm. "Stick
around, honey," she said. "You're the boss, aren't you?"
"That's right, Miss. I--"
"You like the new uniform?"
"Well, I--"
"Georgette!" called the woman, who seemed to be several years older
than the others and reminded Heck of his impression of what a madam
ought to be like.
A strawberry blonde came over in the HF uniform and slowly pirouetted
for Heck. The uniform was maroon and silver, with a tight clinging
bodice and tapered slacks that fit her buttocks and legs like sun-tan
oil. Heck gaped.
"Like it?" the strawberry blonde asked.
"That's enough, Georgette," the older woman said. "This is the boss."
Georgette went away, wagging an acre of pulchritude.
"What are you all going to be," Heck asked, "elevator operators?"
"Elevator operators?" repeated the woman, and laughed. It was a loud,
unrestrained sort of laugh, but somehow not uncouth--exactly what Heck
would have expected if the woman had been what Heck thought the woman
looked like. "Dear me, no. Elevator operators!" And she went off into a
second fit of laughter.
"Then what?"
"We're the sales staff, of course."
"Sales?" Blankly.
"Sales. It's Miss Laara's feeling that a sales staff ought to be expert
at selling."
"Obviously," Heck said.
"Look at these girls! Can they sell, d'you think? In those uniforms
they could sell Union Station to the police chief and make it stick."
"But their experience--"
"They're all experienced. They're chorus girls or burlesque girls or
party girls or pr--"
"That's enough!" Heck cried. "You've made your point."
"Then all I want to know is, do you approve of the uniform or don't you
approve of the uniform?"
Heck couldn't think. Everybody was running _Hector Finch_ but Hector
Finch. He took one more look around the locker room. Most of the girls
were in their uniforms now. They had not minded Heck's being there. Why
should they? They were all used to that sort of thing.
* * * * *
Heck should have been happy. Access to this room alone might have
been worth five years of a healthy young bachelor's life. But he
wasn't happy at all. Yesterday the ace salesman of a big electronics
outfit. An ace salesman, who loved selling, perfectly, splendidly,
magnificently adjusted. Today, the owner of a huge--and illegally
functioning or soon to be illegally functioning--company. Well, the
so-called owner. The owner in name only.
Because he hadn't made one decision....
"Excuse me," a voice said timidly. "I was told I might find Hector
Finch here. Is Hector--" The voice trailed off. It was Patty's voice
and now Patty saw Heck, sitting apparently unconcernedly, among all the
uniformed and ununiformed and partially uniformed beauties.
"Heck!" she cried. "You come out of there! You come with me this
minute." But then she looked at his face, saw the worry, the
indecision, the confusion. "Heck," she said, her voice softening.
"Heck, you poor guy. You look so befuddled. You come on with me, Heck."
Mechanically, he went. Laara ran procurement. The madam-like woman ran
selling. Patty ran Heck. He was one hell of an executive.
* * * * *
They ran smack into their first serious trouble three days after the
company began to function.
In those three days, Heck almost succeeded in turning his own head.
His job apparently consisted of signing a few routine interoffice
memorandums, making a daily tour of inspection, spending as much time
as he wanted with the sales force, arbitrating disputes between some
of the more tempestuous beauties either of the sales force or the
secretarial staff, and trying to convince Patty, who had come that
first day because she had seen an ad Laara had placed in the papers in
Heck's name, that everything was going to be all right. He never did
actually get right down to it and tell Patty the truth, but he didn't
have to. On the second day, Laara told her. And, coming from Laara, not
Heck, Patty believed every word.
And they were making money, as the expression goes, hand over fist. The
first day, four hundred thousand in net profits. The second day, six
hundred and fifty thousand. The third day, just short of a million.
In three years at this rate, Heck thought, he'd be a billionaire. So
why worry about little details like how the procurement force got
merchandise to sell or how the sales force did the selling?
Then on the third day, while Heck was settling a petty dispute between
Georgette and another saleswoman named Marcia, he got an intercom call
from Laara.
"Heck, you'd better come down to my office. There seems to be some
trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
"Procurement trouble. Hurry up, before the police get here."
The word police sent Heck teleporting instantly. To hell with
elevators and corridors, he told himself. To hell with a billion
dollars. Police.... And if they were caught, they were caught with a
warehouse full of stolen goods.
Heck materialized in the procurement office. A thug sat there nibbling
at a finger half the size of a baseball bat. Laara was looking at him
angrily. The thug resembled Manetti, but seemed bigger if not tougher.
They all seemed to resemble Manetti.
"This is Mr. Fanetti," Laara said. "Mr. Fanetti, Mr. Finch."
"You mean, The Boss?" Fanetti said in a deep but awed voice. "A time
like this I got to meet the boss? Jeez, boss, I'm sorry." For all his
size and bulk, Fanetti cowered in front of Heck. He looked as if he
expected Heck to hit him.
"What did Fanetti do?" Heck asked Laara. He was surprised that he could
be so calm. It was Fanetti's attitude, he supposed. Fanetti's awe and
respect did things for his ego.
"Let Fanetti tell it," Laara said, and Fanetti began:
"I work out of wholesale liquor, boss. Man, for three days it's just
like prohibition all over again. Hell, I was a punk kid then, but I
remember. You know? Honest, boss, I didn't--"
"Get to the point, Fanetti," Heck said curtly.
"We had this deal. The National Liquor Warehouse is in this city, you
know?"
* * * * *
"That was Fanetti's first mistake," Laara cut in. "I told them. I tried
to drum it into their stupid heads. It would be better to work other
cities. With teleportation at their fingertips, what's the difference
how far they went? They could have crossed oceans in split-seconds. But
Fanetti couldn't get that through his thick skull."
Heck stood up impatiently, lighting a cigarette. Fanetti misunderstood
the gesture, and raised a hand in front of his face to ward off an
expected blow.
"Go ahead, for crying out loud," Heck said.
"Well, anyhow," Fanetti continued, "I been heisting Scotch and bourbon
at the National Warehouse and doing great on my ten percent, boss.
When, all of a sudden, along comes Scarface Willy."
"Scarface Willy?" repeated Heck. He smiled: it sounded too much like
a TV crime melodrama for him to do otherwise. Then he remembered what
Laara had said about the police. He stopped smiling. "Who is Scarface
Willy?" he asked Fanetti.
"Just the kingpin bootlegger in Metropolitan City during prohibition,
that's all!" Fanetti cried in a hoarse voice.
"But that was over twenty years ago," Heck protested.
Laara pointed out: "Don't you think Scarface Willy has to go on making
a living?"
Fanetti said: "Scarface Willy is real mad, see? After prohibition,
Scarface gets into the protection racket. He knows the liquor trade,
see? He knows the liquor people. So he starts protecting all the liquor
distributors in Metropolitan City, back in the thirties. And ever
since."
"Including National, from which Fanetti has been taking out several
hundred cases of liquor a day."
"Including National," Heck groaned.
"Today," Fanetti finished, "Scarface Willy meets me there. He's mad.
He's boiling, lemme tell you. Fanetti, he tells me, you're looking
to get killed. Fanetti, you're as good as dead if you take as much
as another shot of liquor from National. Fanetti, he screams, I get
fifty thousand bucks a year in protection money from National Liquor.
How in hell can I protect National, he hollers, from guys like you
who just make the goddamn liquor disappear? Fanetti, if you ever
do that again, I will have you hit in the head and put in a cement
overcoat and dropped in the river. So I tell him I ain't the boss
and this gets Scarface Willy mad, too. He figures he is the boss of
liquor in this city. He wants I should take him to you. As we have
strict orders from Miss Laara that nobody but ourselves is to ever get
telewachamacallited, I tell him he will have to come here on shank's
mare. So, he's coming."
"Scarface Willy?" said Heck.
"Scarface Willy," said Laara, looking worried for almost the first time
since Heck had known her.
* * * * *
"But what about the cops?" Heck asked.
"What can you tell Scarface Willy? That we'll stop? If we do, and he
gets wise to the rest of our business, he can blackmail us for every
cent we're worth. Or that we'll give him a cut? But then he'll want a
cut of everything."
"You said the cops."
"That's after you kick Scarface Willy out on his rear end. He's got
political connections in this city. Doubtless he'll use them."
"I'm going to do what to Scarface Willy?"
Fanetti got up and came over and pounded Heck's back with a hand like a
punch-press. "You can do it, boss," he said. "I know you can do it."
Just then the intercom buzzed and a voice said: "This is Main Floor
Reception, Miss Laara. A Mr. William Talese has just reached the
elevator and is now going up. He has an appointment with--"
"I know who he has an appointment with," said Laara, and cut the
connection.
"With me?" Heck asked glumly.
"Not yet with you. Want to soften him up first. Remember Georgette?"