Zlimvaier struggled hard, and managed to feed and clothe his family. One by one, as soon as the children became old enough, he gave them as many dollars as he could spare and sent them off into the world to fend for themselves.
Leo’s turn came as the Depression was starting. He was armed only with a few dollars and a working knowledge of his father’s own profession: chicken sexing. Handicapped by poverty, but no idiot, he came to the rapid conclusion that nobody in the spring of 1930 in Boise, Idaho, or its environs, stood much chance of getting rich out of chicken sexing.
There was, he was soon to discover, an acute shortage of fruit boxes since, owing to the general shortage of jobs, much of the populace had taken to selling apples and other fruit in the streets. Wood, he found out, came cheap, in the form of millions upon millions of trees that no one seemed to be interested in.
Leo Zlimvaier set to work, with the simplest of tools and sheer sweat, turning trees into fruit boxes. There was no shortage of customers for his boxes and he rapidly discovered that with money in his pocket it was easy to find others willing to make the fruit boxes for him. Within 12 months he had built a very large shed and had 75 people working in it. Although he wasn’t as yet fully aware of it he was on his way to ranking alongside Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, and Leo Burnett, founder of the massive advertising agency, and many others who founded vast fortunes during the Depression years.
As the profits piled up, Zlimvaier started investing in machinery that could make fruit boxes very much quicker than the out-of-work engineers and stockbrokers and taxi drivers and insurance salesmen and such like, that were his workforce. Soon his shed was 3 times its original size, contained only 30 men, and churned out 100 times as many fruit boxes as before. At the very height of the Depression Zlimvaier bought his first Cadillac.
He married and produced a son, Dwight, but neither wife nor child really interested him. He was obsessed by boxes. Daily, people were writing to him, asking if he could produce other types of boxes. He started producing boxes for companies instead of farmers. He found the companies would pay higher prices and not quibble, so long as they got their deliveries.
A second factory was started, and the name of the company was changed to the National Business Box Company. Soon Zlimvaier was manufacturing everything from medicine chests to filing cabinets to safes. When the Second World War arrived Zlimvaier changed the name of the company again, this time to the National Munitions Box Corporation. One in every three packing cases and one in every three boxes containing ammunition used by the United States forces during the entire war was made by Leo Zlimvaier’s factories.
After the war he started experimenting with plastics. Soon he was producing plastic drink-dispensers, plastic filing cabinets, plastic golf-bags: he produced, in plastic, anything into which something else could be put. He changed the name yet again, now to the National Plastic Box Corporation.
Computers started to appear in general usage in business. At that time they were unsightly piles of spaghetti wiring, searing valves, sheets of raw welded metal, whirring tapes, sprawling over a considerable acreage of floor space in what had once been neat and efficient-looking offices. The National Plastic Box Corporation managed to produce smart cabinets for them so that all became concealed behind grey or blue boxes with a few impressive rows of switches and blinking lights.
Leo Zlimvaier went international and opened his first factory abroad, on an industrial estate between Slough and London’s Heathrow Airport. He once again changed the name of the company. It became the Intercontinental Plastics Corporation. Six months later Zlimvaier keeled over with a massive heart attack and died. His widow inherited the lot. She had no idea the business had ever expanded from the one original shed, which still churned out fruit boxes. She made their 19-year-old son chairman and chief executive. It was the second biggest mistake of her life; her first was marrying Zlimvaier.
As far as the Intercontinental Plastics Corporation was concerned, Dwight Zlimvaier was not his father’s son by any stretch of the imagination. He was not interested in plastic and he was not interested in business. His sole consuming passion in life was collecting butterflies. It was only with the greatest reluctance that he dragged himself away from the slaughter, framing and cataloguing of these creatures to sign cheques and approve major decisions. Within four years of his father’s death the profits of Intercontinental had slumped to an all-time low. Five factories were closing down through lack of work. The company was easy prey for the take-over brigade.
In an extremely complex and carefully planned succession of transactions the Intercontinental Plastics Corporation was bought by a consortium in England. This consortium needed a legitimate front under which to operate in the United States. Only a handful of Englishmen knew the true identity of this consortium: it was M15.
5
There was little traffic coming down the highway and what there was travelled slowly past me, only just starting to pick up speed after having gawped at the smash.
I had to try and get to Sumpy before the rest of this mob, and I knew if I had any time at all that it was precious little. My chances of thumbing a ride were slim. Nobody stops for hitchhikers on a dark New Jersey road except the odd rapist for a solitary female. They certainly weren’t going to stop for me, bleary-eyed, unwashed and with 36 hours of beard; if I was going to get myself a ride, I was going to have to dispense with the customary niceties.
A short way back, where we’d driven off the Parkway, we’d doubled back round and underneath it. I walked back there and up onto the Parkway, and stood looking down onto 9 West. It was a perfect vantage point; any car turning onto the Parkway would have to slow down to walking pace to make that turn.
I forced my adrenalin to start pumping, as I had been trained to be able to do, forced every muscle and blood vessel and nerve ending in my body into full alert by clenching and relaxing, clenching and relaxing, hyperventilating my lungs; my whole body began to tingle with energy; I was racing; the 25-foot drop to the road started looking easy, dangerously easy.
I crouched, poised, wound up like a spring; every factor of timing and movement that had been rammed into my skull during my training I yanked to the front of my brain’s memory banks. I waited.
A truck passed, grinding up through the gears. Another. A giant tractor-trailer, its diesel firing staccato cracks into the evening sky through the exhaust that rose up from the massive hood in front of the windshield. A station wagon, loaded with kids whose heads were swivelled round at the wreck behind them down the road. The siren of the first police car heading for the wreck cut through the air like a cheese knife. A Ferrari howled off up the road, pressed down on its suspension by the force of acceleration like some powerful jungle cat. A motorbike accelerated after it in a hopeless attempt to pace it. A beat-up Ford full of greasers, radio blaring out music through the walls of the car. And then my mark: a large, soft-top Chevrolet going slowly, right-turn indicator flashing.
I stared carefully through the windshield as the car approached; the driver was definitely on his own. I planted my feet firmly on the ground, made sure my right foot was rock firm, then my left foot; I bent my knees so that they were almost touching the ground, left knee slightly forward. I was going to have one chance and one chance only: if I landed awkwardly I would seriously injure myself; if I missed there was no way I’d get off the road before being hit by the next car, and what would be left of me by several more after that.