ADS

Al Hickey stared over the Pacific. If you want a good place to think about your life, a long flight from LA to anywhere is useful. Clouds don’t answer back, usually. The flight from the US was definitely more like meditation than travel. Forty, single, never married, reasonably well off, medium build, almost fit, Al was able to think about himself without nausea, and without too much excuse-manufacturing. That, however, meant that he was also able to think about what he was doing. He didn’t have enough distractions.

The question now wasn’t whether this was the right thing to do. The problem was to find a way of backing out, and there wasn’t one. He’d escaped the deadly personalities at the agency, at least. However, the smell of burning egos had managed to stow away in his luggage. In fact a lot of it was his luggage. He winced slightly at the amount of material he’d had to go through.

The circumstances of Al’s departure were rough in the extreme.

The Stone Gold and White agency was throttling itself. The war between Harvey White and Keith Stone had erupted some months before. White wanted Stone out. Stone thought White was a dangerous idiot. Two of the three partners openly murdering each other in public every chance they got was no great help to the image of the business.

The third partner, old Saul Gold, had managed to avoid the problem somehow until Keith, in a very uncharacteristic fury, had torn into him as a “useless old man”, a “petty cash chaser”, and then he got personal. Nobody knew what started that, although rumors were easy to find. White was now in the strange and very unwanted position of being the go-between for two guys who didn’t like him and had worked together in agencies for twenty years and founded Stone and Gold ten years ago. This unwholesome arrangement meant that not much going-between was done. That mess began several months ago.

In the midst of all this joy, the news that Tony Fazzina had managed to destroy the Australian agency had been a relief as something else to talk about. White got aggressive, Fazzina being one of his protégés. A nasty little meeting had resulted in White waving a finger at Al and saying, “OK, let’s send one of your guys!” Al hadn’t known he was thought of as being on any side, and would rather not have been allocated one.

This was in fact a killer. Al had made a point of not getting involved in the partners’ little wars, and was now being given a side to be on, whether he liked it nor not. Stone had looked at him questioningly, and Al had said “If you want me to do it, Keith…..”, hoping that Keith would say no on principle, or at least just to annoy Harvey.

So here was Al, half an hour out of Sydney. He had made one condition: that he not be required to speak to Tony, nor have anything to do with him. Al despised Tony. The condition got the first laugh out of Keith anyone had heard in a month, which was one plus.

Al noted that even he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be chosen to fix the mess. There was nothing in advertising he hadn’t done, except run an agency. Al was a good client-handler, a good production man, a good copywriter, and knew his products and his contacts. He’d run campaigns, he’d practically given birth to them.

He could read accounts, check receipts, tell you what you spent on your expense account for the last five years just by looking at you and talking to you for a while. An expert, in fact. He could recite laws on advertising in several different countries, and he was a fiendishly accurate analyzer of market research and demographics. He’d won a few awards.

The only other choice would have been Bryce Lewis, Al’s main rival and also a very experienced insider. Al suspected that Bryce had managed to be out of the loop on purpose for this little picnic. Al got on pretty well with Bryce, considering they spent most of their time pitching very hard against each other for agency money. On the other hand, Al’s going made Bryce the senior turkey at Thanksgiving now that Al was out of the office.

Al reviewed yet again the pitiful condition of the agency he was supposed to rebuild. Tony had used up most of a $3 million two-year budget in eight months. The accounts were crap, and unimpressive crap at that, if they were to be believed at all in their current confetti form. So Stone Gold and White were down 2 million or so for the benefit of the exercise. Tony’s problem, according to Al, was that he was a salesman, not an adman. He was very good at self promotion, too, and had White as his main sponsor. Stone and Gold weren’t so sure, but they were eventually persuaded he couldn’t do much harm in Australia.

Tony had recruited an army. Well, maybe “recruited” wasn’t the word. He had paid for them, though, according to the rumors he’d sent the agency masquerading as returns. Film and production people, market hangers-on, the sort of useless parasites that infest many businesses and do nothing; anyone that cost the Earth. Copywriters he imported from the States, and they weren’t cheap either. He charged head on at the top end of the market. He got nowhere. Nobody knew who Stone Gold and White were, nor did they care, and they had their own people and agencies anyway. He regrouped, tried bread and butter solutions, and the agency naturally got nutritional deficiencies. Tony, who was about as naturally Italian as a German plastic gelato, had even tried the Italian card, having failed at everything else, and was disregarded studiously by people who strangely enough thought they were Italian, too. Eventually he degenerated into doing a few mangy-looking semi-classifieds, which doesn’t go down too well on a 2+ million outlay.

The irony was that White had gone to great lengths to replace Al’s best friend, David Goldstein, a truly rocklike person with a lot of fundamental savvy, with the human Frisbee, Fazzina. David had set up the agency a year or so before, and had been working on a cost-based plan. What was strange about it was the Stone and Gold hadn’t resisted this obvious mistake. White had carped about the returns from the Australian agency until they grudgingly agreed to send in Fazzina.

White should have known better. David was not the passive type. Goldstein returned and spent two hours of a very noisy monologue telling White what he could do with himself, and left the agency taking several good accounts with him. The fight with David had done White no good in some circles, where David was a very highly respected and liked long term player. That had actually been the nominal mutual vindication for the pre-existing Stone-White war. In practice Stone loathed White, and had never tried very hard to avoid showing it. Clashes were inevitably personal. Everybody was right. Therefore everybody else was wrong. An ugly war it was, too. Not often do internal office politics become public, but White had begun a campaign of discredit against Stone ever since, and there were few in the game that didn’t know it.

The second big catalyst had been the nature of White, who was nobody’s idea of a team player. A one-man show. No understudies, either. You found out what he was doing when the annual accounts were finalized. The man went single mindedly at his own objectives, and that was all. He’d had his own agency, and had merged with Stone and Gold in some odd arrangement which boiled down to equity deals. He’d since hired and fired more people than the other two partners had ever employed between them.

White had managed to create this war in a highly successful agency. He’d come in with his own much smaller business, when Stone and Gold had been in need of some extra capital, and White had provided it somehow. The agreement made White an equal partner, which was strange by any standards, in view of the fact that his accounts were relatively puny in dollar terms.

Stranger still was the fact that White had put in far more money than those accounts appeared to be worth as business. White also seemed to know a lot of big league people, which explained the money, but not the accounts. If he knew people like that, he didn’t need to be a partner with anyone, and should have been doing far more business than he was when he joined. White had the look of a person still on the make, at age 59-maybe. The people around White were also obviously not major league anything. They were more the “yeah, boss” type; you checked the toilets to make sure nothing had been stolen.

However, the fact was that White was entrenched, and he was getting business on the basis of his big name friends; that was suspicious, but profitable to a degree. Very little about White made any sense, and the little that did was impossible to like. Al was very conscious of how much he didn’t know about it, and would have liked to know a lot less.

A runway lurched up at him. Al watched himself drift through Customs, and then succeeded in getting lost on the way out. A voice asked interestedly as he did a second circuit of somewhere, “Whaddaya lost?”

“Me, I think. I was with me. Where do you find a taxi around here?”

“Cheer up mate, you’ll turn up somewhere. Main exit, see the sign?”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

The taxi meandered eventually over to the city. Al noticed a lack of people which he found disturbing.

“Where is everybody?”

“Sunday morning. Don’t expect people until about 10. This is it, mate, Dixon Street. Where do yer wanna go?”

“I’m not too sure, apart from the address they gave me. There’s supposed to be an apartment block…….”

Al was at this point confronted with the sight of a Chinatown, which was about as disorienting as he needed. A tower block appeared.

“That must be it. Are there any other tower blocks around here?”

“Nah. That’s the one. I’ll wait.”

Al rattled over to the building, trying to avoid getting run over. It turned out to be the right place. He had keys, and let himself in. The place was formerly David’s, then Tony’s. One look was enough. Fashion magazines, trashy, everywhere. A suspicion of CK For Undertakers. He remembered the taxi despite his revulsion and hurried back down. The cabbie watched him with his caravan-load of luggage. Al watched himself as he was slowly buried under it.

“Yer wanna get the hernia now, or can I help?”

The cabbie probably saved him from a heart attack. Elevator or not, those bags weren’t that heavy when he packed them. He thanked the man and tipped him heavily, despite his obvious surprise. Al surveyed the apartment. Fazzina was definitely a slob. Dishes in the sink, linen still on the floor. Hairs on the soap.

The place was expensive, too. He automatically valued it by American standards and realized he’d have to check it as a company asset. David had insisted on a city apartment, and loved Chinese food. Al had seen worse, and there was security at the door, an intercom, pretty civilized. There was no food. Not edible food, anyway. Why Tony ate rusks Al really didn’t want to know. A quite dead tomato. A bottle of ketchup, also not trustworthy. Plastic forks, an empty bottle of wine, some lipstick, and a pizza remnant from the early Pleistocene. With its original luxuriant fur.

He had just traveled several thousand miles, and he felt like it. However, he wasn’t about to collapse in a stupor in anything less than a nice clean apartment. He spent an hour tossing the decayed food, magazines, and a selection of unused but garish condoms and cosmetics into a garbage bag. Tony was an ex-model, and the flavor remained. The question now was where to dump it. He was pretty sure there was a garbage disposal around somewhere…… he found it, in the form of a subterranean garbage bin on wheels, with the help of a neighbor.

The call of food finally got to him. So did the fact that he was now very conscious of the domestic things the apartment needed. He cautiously set off into Chinatown. The first thing he saw was a large brick building with swarms of people. He scuttled carefully over with the lights. Cars driving on the left hand side still spooked him.

This, he discovered, was Paddys Markets, a Sydney institution, stall holders, souvenirs, people, plants, clothes, people, hot nuts, people, shoes, vegetables…….. well, he needed some of those. He bought a pile of greenery, some capsicums, a cantaloupe, which he discovered was called a rock-melon, some carrots, live tomatoes, spuds…….

According to the bathroom scales he bought 19 pounds of vegetables, some hot nuts, and a few good reasons to see an osteopath, soon. Added to which he still needed a meal, as in immediately. It was mid-afternoon, and he was literally starving. He tried across the road. Finally, in a shopping arcade-cum-pigeon roost he found some Chinese food. $4.50 for all you can fit on the plate. Expertly he made a bed of rice on which to balance the heaps of meat and vegetables. They even served beer at another shop.

“The superior man eats as though nothing in the world concerns him”, quoted Al to himself from an ancient Chinese text. Chopsticks keep the mind focused, too, and he thoroughly enjoyed the noisy clatter and chatter.

He discovered soon enough that Australian beer does not keep the mind focused. However, it was beautiful with the food. A truly enjoyable meal. He looked around dreamily at the herds of customers, smelt the magnificent aromas. Peace had come……….

His mistake was standing up. The beer, the food and the lurking jetlag had evidently decided that he needed to sleep, right then, right there, and there was no right of appeal. He dragged himself the 800 miles across the street and held on to the elevator as it went up to the apartment. He authoritatively and decisively flaked out on the couch.

Some hours later he woke with a form of furniture-induced arthritis. Groaning loudly enough to frighten himself, he managed to attain a vertical position and tried to walk. Well, so to speak. It was dark out. He turned on the TV and fooled around with the remote until he got a station plug. It must be about nine, he decided.

He cursed himself. No bedclothes. He wasn’t sleeping in that. He found a few clean looking blankets, washed, and piled into the bed. He was just drifting off when he realized he hadn’t set the alarm. He settled in, whereupon the phone rang.

“Yeah?” Al wondered if his phone manner was better when he was awake.

“Tony?” a female voice asked.

“No, this is Al. Tony’s gone back to the States.”

A silence, punctuated by a breaking sound, apparently something heavy.

“Sorry.” She hung up.

Poltergeists, thought Al. He found the bed and crashed out.

Two minutes later the alarm rang and the sun conspiratorially leapt through the window at him. Carrots for breakfast……there were no words…. His suit climbed onto him somehow and he followed gravity to the street. Using a ouija board and sign language he found George Street, which was coincidentally where he was going. He thought about getting a taxi, then realized that it was only a few blocks to the office, it was a little early anyway, and that walking would keep his brain from realizing it was waking up. Trotting uphill he watched commuters as they went on their staring way, as buses passed in streams. He arrived at what appeared to be a church with a church attached to it, and some odd, domed, Victorian building across the road from it.

There was a statue of Queen Victoria. The strange menagerie of Sydney architecture appealed to him somehow. He was right, the walking was preventing him thinking, which could lead to comprehension. Pleased at having outsmarted his brain, which he imagined to be plotting a terrible revenge, he crossed and looked closer at the bronze queen. Reminds me of White, he thought. Serves him right, looking like a statue. Happily he explored the big domed building and came out wondering if Escher had ever been a retailer. Down George Street he trundled, feeling pretty good for some reason.

He wandered happily. Arriving at Circular Quay, he discovered that The Rocks were the expanse of folksy looking buildings on the other side of George Street, which he’d crossed repeatedly in his sightseeing. Despite himself, he found the right building, two blocks down from George Street in a road/laneway which looked as though Queen Victoria had built it herself with her sandstone building blocks set. Somebody had sneaked in an office building while she wasn’t looking. He checked the index of offices, found the suite, and strode into the office looking dapper and alert, he hoped.

A plaster duck sailed past him as he entered. It spun on its axis and impaled a picture of Tony set up among the remains of several previous plaster avians. Its neck went through the picture with deadly accuracy. Probably a more dedicated duck than the others, reasoned Al. Removing his eyes from the scene he saw a young and dangerously attractive woman looking very much like she should be making an explanation.

“Nice shot,” said Al. “You knew Tony well, I take it?”

“Much too bloody well. I’m Carla Jones. You must be Al? I was the one that rang last night. Sorry…….”

Al decided that anyone prepared to kill Tony, literally or figuratively, with a plaster duck, was an asset to the company. He waved away the apology.

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I just wish I’d thought of offing him with a duck, myself…..Nobody ever suspects the plaster duck,” he explained.

“At least it’s a way of getting rid of these damn English curios, or whatever they’re supposed to be. One of our invaluable clients’ great promo ideas.”

“That bad, eh?”

“Worse. Actually, Bill should tell you about all that, but it’s been pretty grim. He’ll be in any minute. Tea?”

Al suddenly felt very weak. Giddy. My God, I’m recycling myself. Carrots for breakfast…….. a man rushed in, saw Al, remains of plaster weaponry, and Carla looking guilty. Al more or less saw a guy about the same age as himself, but bigger and fitter.

“Al? I’m Bill Mackenzie. You OK?”

“As well as a jetlagged man who had carrots for breakfast can be,” he said, from several light years away.

Bill looked at Carla. The look said, “You?” The return look said, “No, I was just killing Tony with plaster ducks.”

“Classic case of decaffeinated American. Get the shovel,” said Bill, kindly.

Al gathered that any sympathy was going to be slightly qualified.

“No, not that! Not…..the shovel,” he gasped piteously. He batted his eyelids unforgivably.

“In zizz case ve giffs zer patient zer caffeine. Zen ve fattens him up,” said Carla.

They each grabbed an arm and hauled him to a restaurant, where they filled him with coffee, very drinkable.

“I’m surprised you Yanks don’t have caffeine patches, or drips, by now. God knows nothing ever seems to happen over there without it,” said Bill.

“I once heard that the correct description of an unarmed, decaffeinated, American is a Canadian,” said Carla.

“The defence rests,” said Al.

They all reacted to the smell.

“Some ruthless bastard’s cooking a jaffle at us,” said Bill.

“Toasted sandwich, piquant, causes mysticism in housewives,” explained Carla.

“With salami, cheese, tomatoes…….” They found the culprit skulking behind the counter.

“Whatever that is, can we all have about eight of them, each?” asked Al.

“With salad?” asked the itinerant.

Al gaped. Salad? He remembered Salad…….wonderful town…….

Bill saved him from answering.

“Our friend here is just over from America and not used to our exotic customs. We will guide him. With salad, please.”

“Are all your cooks so inhumane?” asked Al, as he recovered from the mention of the word salad.

“Things are different here. Food, for example. Over here, we eat it. You’ll get used to it.”

The food arrived and Al gave a display of Olympian eating. Bill and Carla looked on in awe as he went through five jaffles, with salad, and three pots of coffee.

The conversation had covered Al’s arrival, Carla’s call, the dangers of Australian beer to the jetlagged, and grudgingly got round to Tony. Bill was no admirer. Personal info was pretty utilitarian; He was married, one kid, she wasn’t, he evidently wished she was, almost as much as she seemed to be avoiding saying she did. Al, now alert again, remembered that it was Bill, as business manager, who somehow had a direct line to Saul, who had pulled the plug on Tony, Harvey or no Harvey.

“The trouble was that he had so much “ongoing business” we were forever trying to find out who we were paying money to, and for what,” said Carla.

“That was when we had a theoretical say in what was spent. He had some sort of arrangement that covered his authorizing any expenditure, and we had to follow around and try and make accounts out of the paper trail. I think we met every account freeloader in Sydney in the process. He didn’t know anybody, and he scared off David’s clients. He brought in all these people and they sat around with nothing to do on big retainers, then they walked, with their contract money.”

It transpired that David’s low-end clients, painstakingly built up over nearly two years, hadn’t been impressed with sales spiel talking about vast sums, and projections they didn’t understand. From Bill’s politely outraged if terse description he gathered they also thought they were quite capable of making their projections for their own businesses themselves. Al groaned.

“Tony is no adman. He looks good and talks big. That works in some places. You start talking about other people’s money, and those people are going to get defensive, fast. David’s clients were little guys, and they have to watch what they spend. You want someone to sell you a lousy car, get Tony. You want someone to sell advertising, get David.”

“I was bloody well baffled by David’s going. What was Tony’s claim to fame?” Bill obviously cared.

“David was one of Keith’s guys. Tony is one of Harvey’s. Harvey managed to put enough spin on David’s figures to edge him out. Why Saul fell for that I cannot imagine. They both should’ve known. I wish I could figure the logic of it. David was starting to make headway. It takes time to build up contacts and sell product. Operations are expected to make a loss until they hit some good cash clients. Also, David was trying to set up for the local agencies of our US clients. That was all factored in; I know that, because I did the figures. One thing I can tell you is that nobody expects to go top of the market straight away. Tony was a fool to even try that, with no definite contacts. Are we still in touch with any of David’s clients?”

“Yes and no. One of them is suing us for going over contract price, and another is thinking about it.”

Al stared at Bill. If you go over contract, you don’t try and put it onto the client, if you have a brain. Well, of course that explained it. Nobody had ever accused Tony of having a brain.

“He billed them?” Why could wait.

“Yep. They were not thrilled to be billed.”

“How much, and for what?”

“$184.90, for a TV commercial, extra price on the edit. Never seen anyone deliver proof of breach by courier before. In triplicate, of course. Tony actually sat down and “showed me” how to do it.”

“How much are they suing us for?”

“About four hundred thousand. Breach of contract, failure to deliver on terms, you name it.”

“What do they sell?”

“Fertilizer.”

“What’s their profit for last year?”

“About two hundred thousand.”

“What a coincidence.”

“The only thing in our favor is that it will take a while to get to court. Their lawyer said that we had it coming for being so unprofessional.”

“Hard to disagree,” said Al. He went into spiel-mode accidentally:

“We might get out of this. We also need to get those clients back, and our credibility. I assume they refused to pay the minute they saw the amount, based on the contract price?”

“Yep.”

“OK, waive the whole fee. We’ll draft a letter, apologizing, and offering a discount on any future work. It’s not easy to turn something so basic into more than a total loss. This is a mendable fence, unless Tony managed any further feats of diplomacy.”

They conferred.

“Not that we know of, but it’s hard to say.”

“Whatever. We’re stuck with it. Anyway, according to the figures there’s still about three quarter mill in the kitty; that’s enough to start with.”

The silence told Al all he needed to know. He’s seen some iffy figures before, but Tony’s were more like a really optimistic crossword for illiterates.

“I take it all is not well in fantasy land?” he asked.

“Al, can Tony really read and write? I mean, in some known language?” asked Carla.

“I heard a rumor once that he could. You shouldn’t listen to gossip.”

“You noticed that I didn’t sign off on any of those accounts?” asked Bill.

“That was the first thing I did notice that made sense, yes.”

Bill sighed. It looked as though he’d been practicing sighing for about eight months.

“Al, as at this moment there’s about 150 thou in the kitty, and that’s it, total. Where the rest of it went we simply do not know. In theory there ought to be about that 750, but it’s not in the accounts, or anywhere else I’ve looked so far. Don’t worry, Saul knows, I rang him on Friday.”

Al sat very still. Bill had obviously been keeping Saul posted for some time. The trouble with that was that he still didn’t know what Bill’s connection to him was, and was unsure how to find out, or if he should. He moved on.

“We are very, meaning extremely, unlikely to get any more money soon from the States. The war is on over there and White is going to block anything he can.”

(At this point Bill raised an eyebrow; perhaps he wasn’t in that deep with Saul. Or he was a damn good actor.)

Briefly he outlined the problem, and made a bleak point that the Australian operation was marginal at best under the circumstances. They managed an impassive expression he didn’t recognize but wished he knew how to achieve.

“So we have to get some business, fast, and I’ll try to cut production costs. Don’t put me on the payroll, Bill; we don’t have the cash. I’ll sort it out with Keith.”

“How much does that save us?” asked Carla, interested, as Al went for another pot of coffee.

“About 150 thou,” said Bill.