Death Kit (11 page)

But (now) all that was changing.

Four years ago, there appeared on the market a Swedish microscope-camera that was every bit as good as the Micro-Recorderscope. Why shouldn't it be? It was constructed on almost identical principles. The availability of the Swedish apparatus had halved the European sales of Scope 21. But because the instrument was priced higher than Scope 21, the Swedes hadn't tried to invade the American market.

This year the big trouble arrived. A company in Belgrade, believed to be French-financed, had come up with a powerful instrument built on principles different from those of Scope 21, but equally small, sensitive, and efficient. And cheaper, too, even after allowing for the duties. Since the Yugoslavs had set up an office in New York, their photomicrographic outfit had already been adopted by several of the company's best customers. A big hospital in Philadelphia, a biological institute in Chicago, the laboratories of one of the highest-ranking medical schools in the Northeast.

(Now) coming up, something worse. The Japanese model.

Rumors had been flying about the New York office for months. Some people said it didn't exist. Diddy wondered if perhaps the top echelon of the firm mightn't be spreading the rumor themselves to goad the junior executives to work harder, or to prepare some of them for a salary cut or for dismissal.

“I wonder,” said Jim. “It's not that I think they're too honest to pull a stunt like that. I doubt if they're clever enough. No, I believe in that Japanese boogeyman.”

Diddy wasn't sure. Not easy to lay a suspicion to rest, to decide conclusively whether something dangerous is true or false. But what did it matter? Wasn't it best to believe the worst?

“I'm with you there, Dalt,” Jim said. “Especially since it usually turns out that right behind the worst jam you can imagine is something even worse. So bring on the disasters,” he concluded cheerfully. “We'll still be ahead of the game.”

Diddy said he doubted things looked that grim for Watkins & Company.

“Grim! They're dead on their feet and don't know it,” exclaimed Jim. “You know what's wrong with this company? The goddamn company philosophy. They make me puke with their phony dignity. You know? All that stuff about science and public service. A bunch of fat lazy ostriches is what they are. Soft sell and lots of prestige is okay. But business is still business. And this one is going down the drain.”

Is the company that badly off? Diddy hadn't noticed. Nor ever imagined Jim to be so disaffected.

The question is, can anything be done about it. “Honestly,” Jim went on, “I don't think Watkins or Reager has any idea what the company is up against. When they see sales drop off, they always assume there's something guys like you and me can do, like selling louder, to make the figures go up again.”

Diddy mentioned his ideas for a new advertising campaign. The material typed, lettered, and drawn on the sheets of yellow legal-sized paper, clipped together in his briefcase.

“Dalton, come on! Do you really think you're going to turn the tide that way?”

No.

From sarcastic speculating on whether anything useful would be accomplished at the conference, Jim passed to more griping about the firm's old-fashioned business practices and lamenting the pack of useless relatives and untalented descendants of the founder that filled the top executive positions.

“I don't know, boy,” said Jim. “I figure I'm really stuck, labeled, you know, good member of a team. Right now in the Bolivian foothills some poor slob is mining the gold that's going into the watch Reager will present me with on my thirtieth year with the firm. Well, I'm not sticking around for that. Life's too short. Don't repeat this, but between us, if things don't look different in eighteen months, a hell of a lot different, I'm putting myself on the job market. Now that I got the M.A., it shouldn't be hard. It better not be! I've got a wife and three kids.”

“Lucky you,” said Diddy. “I wish I had a wife and three kids.”

“Sure, I'm lucky. I know that. But sometimes, don't I wish it were different! Do I ever! Look at your setup, Dalton. Assuming the whole company doesn't fold up, you could survive a retrenchment. Or maybe I'm exaggerating, and it's not that bad. But if they are about to tell us to pull in our belts, you're not too squeezed. And if it's just a matter of their not promoting you pretty soon, you can afford to wait. Unless you get the chance to jump to something better.”

Diddy shrugged his shoulders.

“Anyway,” Jim grinned, “you might end up marrying Reager's daughter or one of those other broads in the direct line of succession. Then you'd be sitting pretty, and no sweat.”

“I hope to marry again,” said Diddy pensively. “But Evie Reager isn't exactly what I have in mind.”

“Got someone in mind?”

“Maybe.”

“Don't want to talk about her, huh? Okay, I won't pry.”

Diddy does feel lucky (now). Even Jim's well-meaning inanities don't gall him as they usually do.

“Anyway, Dalton, you know I'm not sounding off just because I think I've had a rough deal. It makes me mad to see how things are run.”

“Well, they have had practically a monopoly. And now they're going to have to give it up.”

Jim didn't answer.

“Let's show them how to compete, Jim,” said Diddy, laughing. “Young business geniuses from Manhattan in vinyl space suits invade dull upstate city, tweaking the noses of the old fuddy-duddies, climbing right over their rocking chairs. After taking over the foundering genteel business of their choice, they reorganize from top to bottom, offering a new—”

“You making fun of me, boss?” said Jim good-humoredly.

“Yes, if you want to know. And of myself.”

“Look!” Jim shouted, waved. “Over here, you guys!” Katz and What's-his-name, two other delegates from the New York office, had just walked into the hotel restaurant. They came over to the table and joined Diddy and Jim for coffee. Diddy excused himself for a minute. Hurried upstairs to get his briefcase. At nine forty-five, all four men were in front of the Rushland, where a black limousine driven by an elderly Oriental wearing a dark blue uniform waited for us. The front door on the driver's side has a small dome-shaped insignia, painted blue and gold. Otherwise, all black. Like a hearse, Diddy thought. But it didn't bother him.

“What's your name, son?” said Jim, putting his hand on the chauffeur's shoulder.

“Chang,” said the man. Jim winked at the others, then settled back in his seat.

Diddy claimed the jump seat. Not altogether comfortable. Because of an ache in his spine, it took time to search out the good position. Turning sideways, to face the rear door of the limousine. He couldn't cross his long legs. But because his seat was different, almost an afterthought, Diddy felt himself to be under a different dispensation than the others. Exempted from tacking on to those indigestible strips of words being exchanged by the three men seated in a row to his left more strips of words; his words, which were bound to be sticky as taffy or tough like overchewed bubble gum. Allen, Katz, and What's-his-name, sitting side by side, sunk deep in the gray felt upholstery. Jim not perceptibly different from and no more human than the rest of the trio; and Diddy no fonder of him than of the others. Nothing remained. Mr. Dalton Harron in the jump seat maintains, always has maintained, exacting standards for personal relations, though life has promised him nothing. Knows that idle conversation of one with three cannot be, fully, the word- and paper-clogged plenum of business, unswallowable but at least necessary or anyway justifiable. But is already too many for real talk. One with three is a middle condition, serving nobody. The number precludes genuine nourishment, which is possible, when it's possible, with one. Only one other.

On time. We left the city by the northwest. In a few minutes the car had cleared the disheveled downtown area, the streets scarred with trolley tracks and bloated with traffic; the views disfigured by clashing buildings and punctured with construction sites.

Monday has bloomed into a sunny soft late October morning. (Now) we were cruising along the expensive smooth asphalt of quiet residential streets; no irregularities in the surface or unreasonable gaps in the views. Streets lined with long sloping lawns and widely spaced houses sixty to eighty years old, all well cared for and in pretty much the same pleasing style, but whose original symmetry had been violated with the addition to each house of a garage in which two cars were tucked away.

“Here's where the local Four Hundred hold the fort,” sneered Katz.

“Wonder where the local Chinatown is,” said Jim in a stage whisper.

Diddy, rendered almost nerveless by contradictory feelings, doesn't mind Jim's abrasive coarseness. And finds it easier (now) to stomach Katz, whom he made a point of having little to do with in the New York office. By sneering, Katz exposed himself, made himself understandable. But why did Katz move about restlessly in his third of the comfortable seat? Could all that fidgeting be provoked by the spectacle of such commonplace, modest luxury? Katz probably grew up in a Bronx slum apartment with nowhere to play except P. S. Number Something's cement recreation yard, shut in by a high Cyclone fence. Or on the sidewalk of his dingy block where he'd had to worry about the ball shattering a window, calling down the curses of screaming tenement housewives, among them his own mother. Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable. Diddy will be generous. He had been lucky, sheltered. Enough space, green space, in which to play. For Diddy had grown up in just such a spacious house, entrammeled with ivy, as those they were passing (now), on such a mild tree-lined street, and in a smallish city not unlike this one. Before the war. Before all such prosperous old neighborhoods concealed, beneath their complacent regard, an anxious insecure look which came from learning what was to be their eventual destiny: demolition. And faceless apartment buildings and housing projects, filing cabinets for living away one's life, put up in their stead.

But maybe they wouldn't be torn down. To Diddy today the bastions of the small-city bourgeois family looked virtually impregnable. The car glided along the wide, sparsely traveled asphalt that separated the facing houses. Houses that are quiet (now), emptied of father-breadwinner and school-age children. Being cared for and stocked with provisions by mother-wife and her domestics. It was five minutes to ten. In two hours, the children would rush, trudge, and dawdle home. Someone like Mary would have the table set and lunch ready. Some of the fathers probably came home, too.

“Mind if I open the window,” said Diddy. Not a bad day. Rather warm. Diddy was accepting the ride, able to gaze out of the car window at the complacent houses and the livid red and brown foliage of autumn's trees.

He did not refuse these houses. How could he? That would be to refuse himself. Nor did Diddy feel ironic about their inhabitants. The businessman and the businessman's wife. The lawyer and his Wife. The minister and his wife. The doctor, who was like his father, and the doctor's wife, who was like his mother. The principal of the local high school, like Uncle John, and his wife, like Aunt Alice. Nor did he, even in imagination, condescend to their pampered well-fed children; equipped with shiny English bicycles that moved on thin hard tires, tended by garrulous devoted Irish nursemaids, packed off for their weekly piano lessons. Why should Diddy mock himself?

We paused at a railroad junction, then crossed over with a rude bump into the less prosperous belt of two- and three-story frame houses and narrow front yards, small grocery stores, used-car lots, and warehouses that girded the edge of the city. The surface of the streets became rutted and uneven; all the available curb space for parking was occupied. Diddy catches a glimpse of blue and gold profile, which vanishes after a moment. No vistas here. Besides cars, the street was crowded with slow-moving trucks; some, double parked in order to make deliveries, nearly blocked our passage through the street. The black limousine moves slower (now), but there's less for Diddy to look at. The long low-lying factory was just ahead. Jim gave a mock groan. “Here we go! Ready or not.” The car went through the gate; without needing to stop, or anyway not stopping, to be cleared by the guard, who stands still as an effigy in his tiny booth. We go by too fast for Diddy to see his face. But time enough to notice that he wore a uniform different from our chauffeur's. Wrinkled, less smart. Hadn't the company driver who picked up Diddy at the Rushland on his last trip worn a tan uniform similar to the guard's, rather than the navy blue worn by today's chauffeur? Diddy would concede that about this his memory might be mistaken. But he's positive the other chauffeur wasn't an Oriental.

Up the long landscaped driveway. We halted before the main door of the plant. No farther to go. “Thanks, Chang,” said Jim, still insisting on finding a joke in the man's name or simply in his own effort to be familiar with him. No jokes for Diddy. There aren't many Orientals who drive hearses, are there? But the man would be good at that job, too. An alert careful driver. One couldn't imagine him running anyone over; or even, through no fault of his own, being involved in an accident.

And stepped out of the limousine. Before a building that had not been a harmonious whole for three decades.

Once there was one structure built of brick. A pungent, dusky red color. Four stories; perforated by high, narrow, deeply recessed windows with heavy wood frames. And surmounted by a sloping, gray-slate roof.

In the late 1940's, two long wings or annexes were added, over whose basic building material, reinforced concrete, a thin skin of stucco had been applied; and on that a relentless decoration of crescent lines had been incised. The stucco once white; a stained, coarse off-white (now), the color of a vanilla ice defiled by mud and urine. Three stories. A thin continuous belt of window glass on each floor. Flat-roofed.