The east wall was also entirely of glass. It was, in fact, one immense vidlink screen fifteen feet high and thirty-five feet wide, originally installed in this permanently leased suite to demonstrate the fact that vidlink, unlike conventional television, employed what United Services referred to as “Infinite Scanning,” by which the United Services copywriters meant that a vidlink picture was not divided into a number of scan lines and hence could be magnified—like reality itself—to any extent. When this screen was turned off it was a dark and brooding presence upon which the room instinctively focused, but no drapes were provided that might be used to cover it. (When turned on it was sometimes camera as well as screen, the viewer beheld in his beholding.)
The red tile floor was, except at the edges of the room, covered with a dark Moorish carpet on which were scattered, as smaller and less regularly shaped carpets, the hides of Angora goats. The twenty-two armchairs that did not orient themselves to the north wall were arranged on this floor facing (generally) east in a way suggestive of a loose theater. A portable bar stood close to the west window, and at this bar Peters sat eating scrambled (mexidos) eggs.
The large door in the north wall opened and Donovan came in. He was wearing a light-colored suit and a panama hat. He saw Peters and asked, “Everything set for tonight?”
Peters shrugged.
“It better be. It better be good. I’ve got people coming from all over.” He named an important German industrialist. “——is coming.” He leaned closer to Peters, who was afraid for a moment that the end of his (Donovan’s) tie might fall into his (Peters’s) eggs, which were covered with a sauce that, without being ketchup, was nonetheless the color of blood. “Do you know what he told me? This’ll be the first time he’s been outside Germany since 1944. Think of it. Damn near fifty years. The old man himself.”
Peters nodded, his mouth full of eggs, and said, “Wow!”
Donovan named a prominent Italian industrialist. “——is coming too. From Turin. Of course he goes all over, buying art and all that crap. Hell, he spends more time in the States than I do.”
“Not now he doesn’t,” Peters said.
“Well, hell no,” Donovan said, offended. “What do you expect?”
The door to the central bedroom opened and Lewis’s secretary came in wearing a yellow dress and carrying a tear sheet from the vidlink. She said, “Call for you, Mr. Peters,” and Peters took the sheet from her and went into the bedroom.
The call was from a modeling agency in another quarter of the city, and he found himself talking to a sharp-featured, crew-cut young Englishman who wore jade earrings and a (phallic) jade pendant. The Englishman said, “Tredgold here,” and Peters nodded and asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Tredgold?” and then, unconsciously imitating Donovan, “Everything set?”
“Just what I was going to ask you,” Tredgold said, and smiled. “You’re going to do it still?”
“Have our little party?” Peters said. “Oh, yes.”
“Marvelous. You know, you people have come back wonderfully just in the past few weeks.”
“Oh, we’re not dead yet,” Peters said.
“Spirit.”
“The girls will be here?”
“Ten on the dot.” Tredgold looked at his watch. “Never fear. They are primping their little hearts out at this very moment.”
“The ones Mr. Lewis selected.”
“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again. “I daresay the old boy enjoyed that; did he say anything after?”
Peters tried to remember, then decided it was one of those cases where a lie—he called such lies fables to himself—would serve better, and said, “He talked about it for an hour after we got back, and—you know—told me why he’d picked this one and not that one, all the fine points.”
“He has an eye for décolletage; one saw that. For that matter I have myself.”
“Interesting business you’re in.”
“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again, his fingers twiddling one of the round jade ear bobs. “Peters, I shouldn’t ask this if I were a gentleman, but how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Just my own age. Good school and all that?”
“Harvard Business School,” Peters said.
“That’s good, I suppose. I went to a redbrick university myself. You like what you’re doing? Following old Lewis about and all that?”
“I suppose so.”
“And someday you’ll be a big pot yourself—that is, if the hairies don’t tear it all down for you—but right now it’s a bit of a bore, eh? Big company and all that. Our little agency here is big company too, you know. Owned by ——[he named a British newspaper] and they’re owned by ——” (a company Peters had always associated with music tapes). “That’s American, you know. Small world.”
“It is,” Peters said. He was wondering what would happen to Tredgold if they lost the war. Probably nothing.
“So I was once where you are now—not quite so high, of course. At the paper; Mum and Dad had scrimped and put me through, and I was to be a journalist. One is chosen to go up in the first three years—you’re aware of that? Or not at all. Only I made a bish. You only make one bish, you know.”
“I know,” Peters said.
“But I was fortunate: I made a cracking good one, and they sent me here. Old Wellingsford called me into his office just after and said they wished to transfer me—‘a nice place for a chap like you,’ was the way he put it. They wanted an Englishman to run it, but the wages were Portuguese—‘very sorry and all that, but the rule about dismissed if you refused transfer still holds, can’t go breaking rules every moment, can we?’ ”
“So you went,” Peters said.
Tredgold nodded. “Boring you, aren’t I? But you can’t say so—that’s the fault of a good school.”
“You’re not boring me,” Peters said honestly.
“Ah,” said Tredgold. He leaned back in his chair and for an instant Peters thought he was about to put his foot up on the desk, but he did not. “Well, I put up a brave front, you know. ‘Going to be manager there, Mums, and good-bye for a bit, eh?’ Tear. Dick Whittington and all that. Tear.”
“ ‘Bye, Dad,’ ” Peters said, getting into the spirit of the thing.
“Right. Absolutely. Salary four thousand bloody escudos per month, and never told them the bloody escudo’s hardly worth a farthing.”
“You can live here cheaply, I suppose, once you know your way around the city.”
“I shouldn’t know,” Tredgold said. “The week I came the really big pots got tired of seeing their little subsidiaries on the bad side of the books and declared a bonus for management—three percent of the net; damned little really, you’ll say, but I’m the only management we have, and all we’re going to have, as long as I’m managing. And I mean to say, a modeling agency with all those great newspapers behind it to threaten the politicians—how can one lose?”
“If you’re in the red,” Peters remarked wisely, “three percent of nothing is zero.”
“Oh, but we didn’t stay there, you know—not with that sort of money in view.”
“Sounds as though they should have put you in charge long ago,” Peters said. It was one of his stock compliments.
“They didn’t want it, you know.” Tredgold’s smile was broader than ever. “I daresay you think profit’s what they’re generally after, don’t you? Went to business school and they taught you that.”
“Yes, they did,” Peters admitted. “Or I should say they taught us that the object of business management was to maximize the value of the stock—that was the definition we had to learn.”