01. Labyrinth of Dreams (25 page)

"Only by sight and reputation," Brandy replied. "So we
were
right about the decoy business!"

"It got more and more convoluted as it went along," Whitlock told us. "It was kind of insane to begin with, and so it fell apart in an insane way. We'll get to that in a minute. Just now we were talking about morality, Mrs. Horowitz. You see, Jamie, she's grown up in a pretty poor neighborhood where the pimps and the junkies battled for territory, and now she knows the relationship of that group to us. You were willing to work for that pig Nkrumah, though."

"That was different," she shot back. "That was crook against crook. You can't insist your clients be perfect, but if it was Nkrumah goin' after some poor sucker who skipped without payin' 'cause he was scared for his wife and kids, I wouldn'ta touched it in a minute."

Whitlock thought a moment. "You ever think of what organized crime really is today? I really didn't, until I analyzed it from a strictly business viewpoint, because that's just what it is—a business. It fills a gap in the system. People get up in arms about immorality, or want to legislate behavior, liberals and conservatives alike, and they outlaw all sorts of stuff—but it's stuff that a large number of people in society want. Take loan sharking, for example. Anybody with any job at all, even a fry cook at McDonald's, can get collateral credit for buying furniture, that kind of thing. Like any other bank, no loan shark will lend to somebody with no way or means to pay a loan back. They lend to the compulsive spenders, the compulsive gamblers, the people with long histories of stiffing credit companies, declaring bankruptcy, that sort of thing. Their own behavior has made it impossible for them to get credit. Nobody goes out on the street with a gun and says, 'You will borrow a thousand dollars from a loan shark.' They beat down the shark's doors with pleas. The shark sees they have the ability to pay, but the basic collateral is fear. These are people who
want or need
to be coerced, frightened, forced into paying back the loan."

"Yeah, and if you don't, they break your legs," she noted.

He shrugged. "That's why the interest has to be so high. If you have to enforce the contract, you remove the guy's ability to repay, and that cost is added on to everybody else's loan. It's a business, and a service people want. It's just based on a fact of human nature the churches and politicians want to ignore or pretend isn't there."

"So you make crooks out of them to get the payback money," I noted.

"Crooks don't borrow from sharks, generally speaking. If you have to stick up a store to pay back the shark, you're better off just sticking up the store in the first place and saving the interest."

"Yeah, well, what about drugs?" Brandy pressed.

"Another good example. About twenty percent of the country uses illegal drugs regularly. I suspect
you
have. Nobody is forced to use them; they do it by choice, and sometimes through self-deception. Nobody thinks
they
can get hooked. But they're so anxious to snort, smoke, or inject drugs into their bodies, they'll buy anything from anybody. Even the amateurs get into the act— and then we have bloodletting, and innocents die. Organized, with a steady supply at a stable price, we keep the victimization generally to those who victimize themselves. We don't force anyone to take anything; we just supply the demand because nobody legitimate would."

"And cause a crime wave so they can feed their habits," I pointed out.

"Yes and no. They got their drugs before there was organized crime, and they'll get their drugs from somebody one way or the other, because that's the kind of personalities they have. If the government legalized the stuff and doled it out, they'd stop that sort of thing. Otherwise, it's going to happen regardless. The demand is there. It's either a bunch of psychotic idiots or it's a business organization maintaining a constant supply."

He sighed and shifted in his chair. "You can do this with almost anything. No man was ever stopped on the street and had a knife put to his throat and told, 'You will go have sex with this prostitute.' Yeah, there are some forced into it, but you go talk to them sometime. You'll find most took it for the easy money, or because they have no sense of their own worth, or they're so insecure it's a safe haven. I know you once thought about it, Brandy. I've read your file. Now, you were smart and attractive. You could have taken a basic job, a fry-cook job, got your GED, maybe gone to college or business school and gotten a career job. You know it. You think what your reasons were for considering going the whoring route, and you'll see what I mean. Yeah, people get trapped in those jobs, but people get trapped in lots of ugly jobs because they're stupid or don't think straight or have too many romantic visions. We don't trap them, they trap themselves."

He was pretty good at rationalizing, and I knew the arguments from old. They were the same kind of arguments vice cops gave for going on the pad, and many of them were valid. "You mean those kids who get kidnapped and forced into kiddie porn trapped themselves?" I asked him.

"Of course not. They're the dregs of the business and I wouldn't have anything to do with them. I have kids, too. If I found them under a rock, I'd turn them in. The problem is, when you're working a business that is predicated on the idea of supplying goods and services that people want but can't otherwise get, you spawn imitators, spinoff businesses, that fill the gaps even you won't. Somewhere there are organizations that kidnap blue-eyed blondes for the harems of Middle Eastern princes, but that's not us. It's just the proof that wherever there is a demand, somebody will supply it. General Ordering and Development doesn't even do the criminal stuff. They just use it because it's there, and it can't be stopped until human nature is radically altered. It's an unpleasant pattern that works well, world after world, because corruption is itself easily corrupted. There are countless worlds, and they don't have many people for them, but they can't take but so many natives into their confidence or their existence is blown, their operation compromised. Crooks take the money and don't ask questions even when the requests are pretty weird. Big crooks have resources, established channels of information—connections to almost every major business, industry, and government institution—and an insular, underground economy ready to use. We use it."

"You say 'we,' " Brandy noted. "I gather you're with the Company, but are you the native Martin Whitlock?"

He chuckled. "Sure. I am—was—one of the district managers for Company Operations. At the start, it was just the matter of getting huge accounts for the bank when we were expanding to full multistate operation. They sized me up, liked what they saw, and realized that my position was excellent for handling operations here in the east. I jumped at it, but it was pretty unnerving for a while. While I was training, they brought in another Marty Whitlock, and I mean another
me.
So close he knew all my friends and family. His whole life paralleled mine to an incredible degree, except for one important and glaring difference. He was gay."

I took in a breath. "Women's clothing, too, I suppose?"

"No, he wasn't a transvestite. In fact, he wasn't comfortable the way he was. He'd even married the same woman, but they'd divorced and had no children. It was pretty bitter, and Bobbie—
his
Bobbie—exposed him. She used a private detective to find his assignations and document them. You might appreciate that, Mr. and Mrs. Morality. He kept most of his money, but he lost his job, position, social standing, that sort of thing. He became one of those rich bums with no aim or goals in life. The Company tracked him down, recruited him, prepped him, and we even tested him out experimentally. Nobody noticed. Bobbie—my own wife—knew. She had to. Meeting the both of us at once was a shock, but they can really
razzle-dazzle
you with their power and influence. She bought it, and the kids Were both away. He was me while I trained, and old Whitlock never missed a phone call. Then, of course, I came back, and you can guess what he thought by then."

I nodded. "He liked being back in his old position, having his old family, prestige, contacts, and the like. He didn't want to give it all back."

"Right. Oh, they had a world for him, as a reward, that was right up his alley, a world where he didn't have to pretend anything, but he saw no reason to start again when he already had it. We didn't know it at the time, but he'd already started the ball rolling in his favor. Somehow, while I was away, he managed to discover somebody in the criminal end who was working for the opposition and could get word to others with access to the Labyrinth. He got back and dropped from sight, and we couldn't find him. That's when we came up with this insane plot.
I
didn't, but some big airbrain at corporate headquarters did, and just like the rest, I was trapped by that time, so I had to go along. I think it was because they had two other versions of me that I was recruited in the first place, but because of that, some think tank at headquarters—composed of people who never had to live this kind of stuff—came up with using one of them, who, of course, differed from me in one even more vital way."

"Enter Amanda W. Curry—the
W
for Whitlock, I assume," Brandy said, nodding.

"Right again. We set up a command post in the apartment up in northeast Philly, with special scramblers and devices and remote phone hookups and all the rest. We couldn't use private detectives, because we had no idea where the other Whitlock was or what he was planning, and they'd always wind up fingering me. What we knew was that eventually he had to come to me. We used the mob, of course, to be our eyes and ears. Just told them my evil twin brother escaped from the asylum and was out to replace me."

"And they bought that?" she asked skeptically.

He shrugged. "Hey—these aren't exactly the intellectual cream of the crop. Mandy controlled the network, but
I
was director of operations, so it was my baby to control, and I knew the Company was mostly watching to see how I handled it. Of course, the way we had to give anybody the slip was the crazy one the boys back at headquarters invented. Mandy and I had the same parents, same society family and blue blood, same general aptitudes, so she was a natural to be their overseer on the project. When I needed to disappear, I'd walk over to Sansom, use a prearranged little hole there to get into deep disguise, while at the same time Mandy would also be there. Then she'd walk out as the drag queen Whitlock, and I'd get up to the apartment or out to track down leads I couldn't do publicly. My double worried me, but our big task was to find who the traitor was who'd given him the means, method, and opportunity for all this. That traitor was the key to finding him first, and also to making sure we were secure in the future. Mandy was about two inches shorter than me, but fingerprints don't lie, do they? And she was close enough to me in facial structure and the like to get away with it."

"She convinced almost everybody," I told him. "Confused the hell out of us, too. Still, the more I think of it, the less wild the idea really was. They didn't want to risk another double, but a female Whitlock was somebody different enough they could feel reasonably confident about; and you said she inherited your position, stock, and aptitudes, so she could run an intelligent investigation, understand your business and what you talked about and to whom. Still, in the end, it didn't quite work, did it?"

"No," he sighed. "They were too clever. I could be two places at once, but Mandy could never take my place in the office. When whoever the traitor was found out I was closing in on him, he moved. Left me a whole complicated string of red herrings that were very time consuming and very hard to unravel. It took time, so I arranged for a business trip as a cover—the Company's handy for that—and dropped out for ten days. As soon as I did, though, my double walked in—the very next day—and said the trip had been cancelled, and took up my spot in the bank. They prearranged this whole dope business—I would never have been directly involved in anything like that myself—and nabbed the two and a quarter million bucks that brought you into all this. We got the word almost immediately, but that put us in a bind. What could I do? Walk in and confront the bastard? You see what his plot was. Steal the money, vanish, which would bring me back with Nkrumah right on my neck. I would have to liquidate a lot of assets and cover the losses myself to save my own neck. He'd have made his point, and I would be as good as blackmailed. He could do anything he wanted to me. Ruin me, get me killed,
anything.
He could have it both ways. Be me whenever he wanted to, and be a bum playboy entirely on my assets when he didn't."

"And, if he ever got tired of it, he could bump you off anytime and replace you," Brandy added. "But I don't get why he didn't just bump you off in the first place. I mean, your wife knew, so she couldn't know if it was legit or not."

"Uh huh. I wondered, too, until I realized it was that crazy masquerade. Mandy confused them. They weren't sure if it was me or if it wasn't. We'd laid a pretty good foundation going back quite a ways, using Mandy's old family album pictures and stuff like that, so the servants weren't so sure, either. See, if Mandy was just me, it was a complication, but if Mandy was an alternate me then the Company would know the day after the switch was pulled. If he went along and dressed up as Mandy, and Mandy was really somebody else, then the jig was up, but if he
didn't,
then it was a radical change in behavior that would also be noticed, since Mandy was intimate with a lot of the gay and transvestite communities, and that was one part of my life he didn't share and couldn't fake. So, he finally decided half a loaf was better than none, and that he could find out the truth later and make decisions then. Either that or give it up—costing me a fortune, messing up my credibility, and running away with all that money as an untouchable. See what I mean?"

"But you didn't let him get away with it," I noted. "You pulled his plug instead."