Lemon stands, irritated anew. “You don’t have to teach me my job, Mac.”
“I’m not.” He must be tired, to speak out like this! “You asked me how much the system will cost. I’ve told you. I’m not telling you how much our bid should be. That’s your decision. You can order us to make the system cheaper by downgrading the product, or you can keep the system the same and adjust the bid anyway. That’s your decision. But you can’t get me to tell you this system as designed will cost less than it does, because I won’t do it. My job is to tell you how much this system costs. I’ve done that. You can take it from there.”
So he has finally gotten McPherson to speak up! But it doesn’t make him any less angry, as he always imagined it would. In fact, he’s stung to the point that he forgets his persona. “Take that stuff and leave,” he says violently, and abruptly he goes to the window so that McPherson won’t see his face. Something—something in what McPherson has just said, perhaps—has given Lemon a fright, somehow, and it’s made him unaccountably furious. “Get out of here!”
McPherson leaves. Lemon heaves a sigh of relief, sits down and regains control of himself. That arrogant son of a bitch has put him on the spot again. The bid is too high, the system over-designed. But he can’t change that without endangering the bid from the technical point of view. You’ve got to balance quality and cost, but how to do that with a man like McPherson designing the thing? The man is crazy!
When he’s completely calm again he calls Hereford on the video link.
Hereford comes onscreen; he’s at his desk, before the window. Behind him is a fine view of New York harbor. They express pleasure at each other’s views, the usual opening between them.
Lemon hesitates, clears his throat nervously. He’s more than a little in awe of Donald Hereford, and he can’t help it. Lemon has driven himself all his life, and he’s risen at LSR very quickly indeed—about as fast as one can, he thinks. And yet Hereford is about his age, perhaps even a year or two younger, and there he is high in the complex power structure of Argo/Blessman, one of the biggest corporations in the world, sixtieth in the Fortune 500 the year before.… Lemon can’t really imagine how the man did it. Especially since he is by no means a monomaniac; on the contrary, he is very urbane, very cultured; he has Manhattan’s cultural world, perhaps the richest anywhere, at his fingertips, as he proves every time Lemon comes for a visit. Small galleries, the Met, theater on Broadway and off, the Philharmonic, dance… it’s admirable. In fact, Lemon finds it incredibly impressive.
So he gives the facts to Hereford in as casual and efficient a tone as he can muster. Hereford pulls at his lean jaw, scratches his silver hair, straightens a five-hundred-dollar tie. His face remains impassive. “This man McPherson is good, you say?”
“Yes. But he’s a bit of a perfectionist, and in the art of presenting a proposal, balancing all the factors involved… well, he’s still an engineer at heart.”
Hereford nods briefly, his aquiline nose wrinkling. “I understand. In fact, I was wondering why you described him as good, when his previous two proposals lost.”
Yes, yes; Lemon is perfectly aware of Hereford’s powerfully retentive memory, thanks. He shrugs, scrambling mentally, says, “I meant from the engineering standpoint, of course.”
Hereford looks down at Manhattan. Finally he speaks. “Cut everything by five percent, and the management and data costs by ten. Any more than that and the MPCs are likely to be embarrassing. But that’ll bring it down into the range of the other bids, right?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Good. When’s the proposal due?”
“A week from today.”
“Talk to me then. I’ve got to go now.” And the video screen goes blank.
30
Abe and Xavier are driving back from Buena Park Hospital after working a nasty head-on in Brea, and Abe can feel that Xavier has about gone over the redline. The torque has been too heavy for too long, all the parts are fatigued to shear points, Abe can hear the gears grinding within and it sounds like all the teeth are about to strip out and fly away.… The truth is that they’re both stressed, to the burnout point and beyond. Making up for clumps of vacation time in the past, setting up clumps of vacation time in the future, filling in for other friends on the squad: one way or another they have arranged for too many hours on in the last month, and the effects are showing.
So they get a call from the radio dispatcher and they both groan and then just stare at the thing. Tapped out again. Slowly, very slowly, Xavier presses the transmit button. “What do you want.”
They’re directed to a side street near Brookhurst and Garden Grove avenues, in Garden Grove. “How could anybody get up enough speed in that neighborhood to make more than a fender-bender?” Xavier wonders.
“The call was not too coherent, I’m told,” says the voice of the dispatcher. “No idea of the code or anything. There might even have been a relevant address—1246 Emerson.”
“Sure this one isn’t a police matter?”
“Said rescue squad.”
Xavier clicks off. “Don’t kill us getting there. This one has got to be bullshit somehow.”
So Abe drives then to Brookhurst and Garden Grove, and they find no sign of a wreck. They see only:
A Jeans Down discount clothing store.
A Seedy audio outlet, a See-All Video Rental.
The Gay/Lesbian Adult Video Theater, A Kentucky Colonel’s.
Your dingy apartment complex. You live there.
A retail furniture warehouse outlet.
A robotics and camera discount repair shop.
Two used-car lots. A Pizza Hut.
Yes, despite theory, the monad still exists.
Here you are, right?
A coin and map store. A dance hall.
The parking lot fronting all these establishments. The cars.
Billboards, traffic signals, street lights, street signs,
Telephone wires scoring the sour milk sky,
and so on, out to where parallax brings the tracks and the two sides of the long straight boulevard together. In short, the OC commercial street, which one can see repeated a hundred times anywhere in the county. But no sign of an accident.
“Well?” says Abe.
“Let’s try the address they gave us.”
“But,”—they track around to Emerson Street backing Garden Grove Avenue—“it’s just the back lot for the furniture outlet, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but observe, there’s maybe some aps tucked on top of it there. A look is in order.”
Abe shakes his head. “Looks suspiciously like police work to me.”
They get out of the truck and walk up the outside of the building on concrete stairs that rise above an alley between buildings. The alley is filled with gray metal trash dumpsters and flattened cardboard boxes of immense size. At the top of the stairs is a wooden door that’s been kicked open a lot, once painted an orange that’s faded to dusty yellow. Xavier raises a fist to knock and there’s a sudden yelping, like a dog in pain. They look at each other. Xavier knocks.
“Keep out! Ah, God—get the fuck out of here!” It’s a woman’s voice, hoarse and wild.
“Hmm,” says Xavier. Then he calls out: “Rescue squad, ma’am!”
“Oh! Oh, you! Help! Help!”
Xavier shrugs, tries to open the door. It’s locked. “Your door is locked!”
“Don’t bust it! He’ll evict me—ahh! Ahh! Help!”
“Well, come open up, then!”
“Can’t!”