The flight was short but very pleasant. Wally had never flown first class before. He was a teetotaler, so he passed up the complimentary drinks and settled for a bitter-tasting mineral water.
The stewardess was unfailingly polite but reserved as she served Wally. That was, until he blurted out that he had just joined IDC.
She practically sat in his lap the rest of the way.
Wally Boyajian decided that yessiree-bob, he was really, really going to enjoy working at IDC.
At Logan Airport there was an honest-to-goodness chauffeur waiting for him. The chauffeur didn't wear livery, only a neat dark sharkskin suit and a cap. He stood nearly seven feet tall and was built like a library bookshelf. Somehow, he seemed more like a chauffeur than if he had worn a uniform, Wally decided.
"You the guy from IDC?" the chauffeur had asked.
"Yes, sir," Wally had said, at a loss for how to address so imposing an individual. Since the Gulf War, he was very respectful of anyone in uniform.
"Come on, then. We're going for a ride."
The limousine was no stretch model, just a long black Cadillac with tinted back windows. The chauffeur opened the door and clicked it shut after Wally had slid in.
The car eased out of the congestion of the airport and into the tiled fluorescent paralysis of the Sumner Tunnel.
"Ever been in Boston before?" the chauffeur called back.
"No. I was reading about it on the plane, though. I hear this is where practically all the cranberries are grown."
"Yeah, there are lots of cranberry bogs out in the sticks."
"Maybe if I have the time, I might visit one. Cranberries remind me of the holidays coming up. This will be the first holiday season I've spent away from my folks. I miss them."
"Pal," said the gruff chauffeur, "if you can fix my boss's computer, I guarantee you all the cranberry bogs you wanna splash around in."
"It's a deal," said Wally Boyajian with the unbridled enthusiasm of a young man to whom all of life's rich possibilities beckoned.
After twenty minutes of stop-and-go riding, Wally noticed they were still in the white-tiled tunnel.
"Is Boston traffic always like this?" Wally asked at one point.
"Only on good days."
Thinking this was a local joke, Wally essayed a timid laugh. He swallowed it when the chauffeur failed to chime in.
Finally they emerged in a section of narrow, twisted streets where the brick apartments crowded one another with suffocating closeness. Almost no sun peeped down past the rooftops.
"By the way," Wally said suddenly, "this company you're taking me to-what is it's name?"
" F and L Importing," the chauffeur said in a bored voice.
"What's the F and L stand for?"
"Fuck 'em and leave 'em," replied the chauffuer. This time he did laugh.
Wally did not. He did not care for profanity or those who resorted to it.
" I never heard of it," Wally admitted.
"It's a wholly owned sub . . . sub . . ."
"Subsidiary?" Wally offered.
"Yeah. That. Of LCN."
"I don't think I've ever heard of LCN. What does it make?"
"Money," the chauffeur grunted. "It makes tons of money. "
Before Wally knew it, the car purred to a stop.
"We're here?" he said blankly, looking around. They had pulled into a tiny parking spot behind a dirty brick building.
"This is the place," said the chauffeur.
Wally waited for the door to be opened before stepping out. Almost immediately before him was a blank green-painted door. The air was thick with heavy food smells. Spicy, pleasant food smells. Wally assumed these enticing odors were wafting from the company cafeteria as the tall hulk of a chauffeur opened the blank green door for him.
Wally had only a momentary-impression of a cool woodpaneled dimness before he passed through the alcove to a nearly bare room where three very husky men in business suits stood around a tacky Formica-topped card table on which an ordinary IDC-brand personal computer stood like a blind oracle.
"A PC?" Wally said. "I expected a mainframe."
The three husky men in suits tensed.
"But you can fix it, right?"
"Probably," Wally said, laying down his custom leather tool case and testing the cable connections in back of the PC. "What's wrong with it?"
"The whatchcallit-hard-on disk-cracked up."
"Hard disk. Don't you people know that?"
"They're security," said the chauffeur from behind Wally's back.
The room was small and Wally said, "I could use a little elbow room here. Why don't you fellows take a coffee break?"
"We stay," said one of the husky men.
Wally shrugged. "Okay," he said good-naturedly. "Let's see what we got." Wally got down to work. He tried to initialize the system but it refused to boot on. He next inserted a diagnostic floppy. That got him into the system, but the hard disk remained inaccessible. It was going to be a long first day, he realized. But he was almost happy. He had a job. At IDC. Life was sweet.
By twelve o'clock he started to feel his stomach rumble. No wonder. The close air was redolent with the spicy tang of garlic and tomato sauce. He kept working until one o'clock, imagining that someone would tell him when it was time to break for lunch. Wally didn't want to give an important IDC client the impression that he was more concerned with his stomach than with their hardware problem.
Finally, at one-fifteen, he stood up, stretched his aching back, and said, " I think I need to have a bite to eat."
"Is it fixed?" asked the chauffeur.
"It's a long way from being fixed," Wally said.
"Then you get to eat when the box is fixed."
Wally thought of his three-hundred-dollar-a-day living allowance and the fine dinner it would buy and said, "Okay."
Maybe this was some kind of test, he thought. Getting into IDC entry-level was something. Being promoted to chief customer engineer on the first day was too good to risk rocking the boat.
It was well past eight P. m. when Wally wearily finished his last diagnostic test. He had accomplished nothing more than to activate every error message in the system.
Frowning, he removed his glasses, wiped them clean, and restored them to his thin face.
He looked up to the husky chauffeur and said, "I'm sorry. The data in this system is irrecoverable."
"Speak American," the chauffeur growled.
" I can't fix it. Sorry. I tried."
The chauffeur nodded and went to a door. He opened it a crack and called into the next room. "He said he tried."
"They all fuggin' say that."
"He said he was sorry."
"Tell him not as sorry as he's going to be."
Wally Boyajian felt his heart jump into his throat. The way the three husky security men were glowering at him, he was sure his failure to debug the hard disk meant his job.
Silence. The husky men surrounding him looked at Wally Boyajian as if he had made a flatulent noise. Then the chauffeur asked, "What do we do with him?"
The voice from the other room said, "Scroom."
"Before, he said he wanted to see the cranberry bogs," the chauffeur reported.
"Give him the fuggin' cook's tour," said the voice from the other room.
"Actually," Wally said when the chauffeur had closed the door and was walking in his direction, "they can wait. I just need a decent meal and to be taken to my hotel."
A hand grabbed him by the back of the neck. It was quite a big hand because the fingers and thumb actually met over his Adam's apple, restricting his ability to swallow.
Surrounded by three big F and L security men, Wally was hustled out the side door to the waiting limousine.
Again the chauffeur opened it for him. The trunk this time, not the rear door.
Wally would have protested being stuffed into the car's ample trunk, but the meaty hand kept its inexorable grip on his throat, preventing any outcry louder than a mew.