A Foolish Consistency (3 page)
Read A Foolish Consistency Online
Authors: Tim Tracer
STRANGE TALES by Tim Tracer
Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, June 2011.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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.
The Magic Man
Five minutes into my day, my boss squeezed into my office, his breath reeking of garlic. If not for the expensive Valentino suit, he looked like he should have been behind the counter of a pawn shop: greasy, slicked-back hair, amber-tinted bifocals, and a layer of fat around his neck that was like the hose to a vacuum cleaner.
I had been with Biggs Enterprises four days, but it had taken me only one to despise Norman Gordal. It had nothing to do with his appearance. It had everything to do with him sticking me in a basement closet full of boxes of HR files when the rest of Legal was on the thirty-second floor.
"H. William Ivanlone," he said, reading the replacement nameplate I received that afternoon. When he spoke, there was a faint whistle between the words, so it came out
H. seee William seee Ivanlone seee
. "Well, you got what you wanted, Harvard. No first name on the nameplate, just that lonely little initial. Now that you've got that
important
business straightened out, maybe you can do a job for me."
Beneath the desk, my index fingers twitched, itching to give him a double bird. My real first name was Harvey, but ever since I told him I preferred my middle name because it was classier, he had taken to calling me Harvard after my alma matter. It didn't help that I mentioned I graduated summa cum laude on a full ride scholarship. If I had known he put himself through night school at the City University of New York, and that it had taken him seven years to get the position I landed straight out of college, I never would have said it, but there it was.
"The name's William," I said.
"Oh, right, right." He picked up my nameplate and squeezed it like a stress reliever. I imagined the obsidian rock screaming for mercy. "Look, I hate to do this to you, it being your first week and all, but the Board wants somebody in Legal to take care of this."
Behind the yellow lenses, his eyes glinted, and I could tell he was suppressing a smile.
"Well, I'll do whatever I can, sir."
"Oh, I am sure you will, Harvard. I'm sure you will. And this isn't a job I relish giving to anyone, but someone with your talent, well, I thought it would be a good test."
It took all of my willpower to sit there calmly. Since I started, Gordal had been doing his best to bury me with a series of
tests
. My first day he had me delivering two dozen time-sensitive legal documents all over New York even though I had only lived there two weeks. I got it done. The second day he gave me a thousand pages of a recent lawsuit and told me there was something missing, and that they needed to know what it was by five o'clock. I found the memo with three minutes to spare. The third day he didn't see me at all, and let me smolder in the basement by myself. I didn't make a peep.
I would suffer any indignity he could throw at me because I knew one day soon, if I played it straight and narrow, I would be Gordal's boss because I had more talent in the cuticle of my pinkie than he had in his entire sauerkraut body. I had a future, a future of prestige and power, and I wasn't going to let some pork chop with a weakness for Italian food make me lose sight of it.
At least that's what I thought until he told me what I had to do.
"It's like this," he said. "The Board wants to give the old man his pink slip. And they want you to do it."
I must have looked like a man who just found out his 401K had been reduced to zero due to a computer glitch, because Gordal chuckled.
"They want . . . " I began, and then, shaking my head, said, "You're talking about Rodney Biggs?"
"That's right, Harvard. El supremo. The head honcho. The Magic Man himself."
I couldn't believe it. Biggs was the reason I had chosen to work for the company. I had always admired him. "Why?"
"Oh, come on, kid, you know why. The old man always makes an ass of himself with his stupid magic tricks and his crude jokes. They've let him float along for a few years in his big office up there while he slowly goes senile, but the suits from Japan want a fresh start."
"Can they do that?"
"Can they
do
that? You did go to Harvard, didn't you?"
I didn't answer. The truth was, I knew Rodney Biggs currently owned only thirty-five percent of Biggs Enterprises. He had owned fifty-one percent a few years earlier, but when he reached the age of eighty he started liquidating his shares. He had done it to give the money to charity, but there had been an unintended side effect: a massive Japanese conglomerate had seen a way to pick up a bargain. It hadn't taken them long to buy a controlling share from people wanting to make a quick buck.
Now Biggs, who once performed to packed theatres under the headline of
The Magic Man
, was out. And I was going to tell him.
"I'm not sure about this," I said.
I was going to say
I'm not sure I can do this,
but I knew that's what Gordal wanted me to say. He leaned forward, his tongue flicking out and wetting his bottom lip. He leered at me like some juvie fresh out of prison who just found another cat to douse with gasoline.
"Are you saying you
refuse?
" he said.
I could see it clearly in his ravenous expression: he desperately wanted an excuse to toss my Ivy League derriere in the street.
The truth was, I wasn't squeamish about delivering the bad news because Biggs was boss, although I should have been. Lately, from what I had heard, he had been the king of pranksters, always with a buzzer on the hand and a gerbil up his sleeve. And when he was mad, he was known to set fire to the object of his wrath's clothing, especially the parts that left the most embarrassing areas exposed.
But the real reason for my reluctance was because at one time, before Advanced Placement classes and SAT scores in the Kansas plains, before long nights in the Harvard library memorizing case histories so boring they could turn anyone into a narcoleptic, before interning with some of Boston's best attorneys and having every one of them tell me to give them a call when I graduated, and long before I had taken to reciting key passages of
Think and Grow Rich
in the shower like some kind of Wall Street mantra, Rodney Biggs had been my hero.
More than a hero — my idol.
Because when I was twelve, a good fourteen years earlier, I thought I wanted to be a magician.
In fact, I wrote it on a three-by-five card and stuck it to my bathroom mirror: Harvey Ivanlone, World's Greatest Magician.
My three younger sisters were my audience. I pulled their stuffed animals out of a hat, and since they were young, they clapped even though my hat was a mesh-backed baseball cap that couldn't hide a thing. I progressed to card tricks, pop-out bouquets, disappearing coins, and smoke bombs. At some point during all this I turned on the television and saw Rodney Biggs, the world's most renowned magician up to that point, and a man who would have
owned
Copperfield if they went head to head, give a rousing final performance at a sold-out Forum in Los Angeles. At the end of the show, Biggs floated across the stage and disappeared in a burst of fireworks. As the stage went dark, and applause rained down on his absence, I knew that's exactly what I wanted to do.
Because Biggs was the first magician who made me want to believe that magic was
real.
And if it was real, I desperately wanted to be part of it.
But instead, I grew up, as everyone dies, became convinced that magic wasn't real, and that if it wasn't real, I didn't think it wasn't worth doing. So I became a lawyer — a lawyer sitting across the desk from a man I wished I could make disappear at that very moment.
"I'll do it," I said reluctantly.
There was a flicker of a frown, as if it was a subliminal message spliced into a filmstrip.
"Good, good, I knew I could count on you," he said.
He dropped a manila envelope on the desk. Neatly typed on the front was the old man's name.
"Give him that," he said. "He's up there now. Get it done in the next hour,
capish
?"
He tried to throw in a Marlon Brando sneer, and I nearly burst out laughing because he
did
look like Brando — not the one from
Godfather
, but the overweight version in the twilight of his career.
"No problem," I said, bolting to my feet.
I snatched up the envelope and marched out the door. It was scripted well: two secretaries from the mailroom got off the elevator and I stepped inside. As I turned, I saw Gordal filling the doorframe of my office with his bulk. I punched the top floor and gave him a thumbs up.
When the doors closed, I changed my thumb to my index finger.
"
Capish?
" I said.
I remembered then there was a camera inside — when I started, a guy from security joked not to have sex in the elevator as some fools from Marketing did — and so I changed my gesture into a brush through my hair, scolding myself for letting Gordal get a rise out of me.
The elevator stopped four times on the way up, people ferrying in and out. My collar was damp and tight. I felt like a condemned man riding up to the top of a towering scaffold. I had not even met Rodney Biggs, and I had no idea what I was going to say.
When the doors opened on the executive level, I stood looking out on what some guys in the mailroom called Kiss Ass Lane — a long hall paneled in maple and trimmed with gold molding. A gray-haired receptionist sat behind a counter right at the front, and she smiled at me.
I told her who I was and waited while she called him. She laughed at whatever he said, then nodded for me to pass. I walked down a hallway that smelled like freshly stained wood, and, after taking a few deep breaths, tapped on the glass door. I couldn't see anything inside but shadows.
I expected the resonant voice of a southern preacher, the one I heard boom at the audience from a Los Angeles stage, but the voice that came back sounded tired and perfunctory.
"Come in," he said.
When my trembling fingers made contact with the polished brass door handle, one that stuck out to the side like a blade, I felt a surge of electricity rip up my arm. I howled, swallowed a few choice words, and danced around shaking my fingers. Purple stars flashed in front of my eyes.
From inside the room came a devilish cackle.
"Sorry, son, couldn't resist," he said. "Got to do that to everybody once. "
Again I reached, again my hand burned, and this time I didn't hold back the swear words.
His cackle became a roar of laughter.
"Special people get it twice," he said. "You can come in now, I'm finished."
I hesitated.
"Come on, son. I've had my fun, and I won't do it again."
"Promise?"
"I swear by the ghost of Houdini."
Like a fool, I reached for it again. Like a fool, I was burned again. His laughter was as loud as before, and this time I heard a fist banging against wood. Seething, I held my stinging fingers between my legs.
"Care to try for a fourth?" he said.
Instead of answering, I balanced on one leg and raised my other foot, pressed down on the door handle with my rubber-soled shoe, and pushed the door open.
There was a haze in the air, and the room smelled faintly of cannabis. A pair of black wires threaded from the door along the taupe carpet and underneath a wide mahogany desk.
Behind the desk sat Rodney Biggs. He was only a shadow of the man who flew across the stadium in Los Angeles. I had seen pictures of him on the company website, of course, but somehow my image of him as a tall, suave gentleman with a Hawaiian tan had remained indelibly imprinted on my mind. Now, confronted with the truth in the flesh, I saw he was half a step away from a nursing home, his body like roped together kindling in his black, three-piece suit. His skin was liver-spotted. His bald head had only a few patches of hair. His red bow tie, perfectly dimpled, was patterned with the Jack of Hearts.