The Seventh Candidate (25 page)

There was a long silence from the other end.
Lorz was used to this by now. Mr Mysels had come across as a
pathologically suspicious individual accepting no statement at face
value, his parsimonious voice nagging for explicit confession.
Whatever Lorz said was sniffed at, then worried as a dog did a
bone.

Finally Mysels said: “What’s he done?”

“Teddy? Nothing at all.”

The other examined the director’s prompt
answer for long seconds, turned it over, prodded it.

“He’s done nothing at all?” he finally
echoed. “You mean he refuses to work?”

“He works when we ask him to, of course,”
the director replied, doing his best to keep irritation out of his
voice.

Silence at the other end of the line.

At last: “You have to ask him all the time
for him to keep at it, you mean?”

The director said with a certain testiness:
“Theo’s work is fully satisfactory.”

Silence.

Now puzzled and suspicious: “Who are you
talking about, exactly? Who is Theo?”

The director had to explain that he’d meant
Teddy, of course. Teddy was Theodore. Theo was a shortened form of
Theodore, just as Teddy was. Even to the director his explanation
sounded confused, as though three distinct individuals were
involved.

The pause was even longer. Hadn’t he
understood? The director added that it was like the English name
William which could be Will or Bill. “Or Billy,” he added. It
sounded like a crowd now. The silence at the other end was even
longer.

“Or Willy, even,” the director couldn’t help
adding.

Finally Mysels asked curtly: “Who is this
talking, please?”

He had to assure the other man that he was
talking to Edmond Lorz, the director of
Ideal Poster.

Lorz finally retreated out of the whole
thing. He told Mysels that his assistant had just passed him a note
saying tomorrow’s appointment had been cancelled. So of course Theo
– Teddy – could come that afternoon as usual.

They staggered through that afternoon and the
two following afternoons with Theo.

On Friday evening they weakly
congratulated each other that they’d be alone with Teddy the
following week. Mysels had confirmed a few hours earlier that the
attendant would continue conveying Teddy to and from the
Ideal Poster
office but would no longer be
in attendance.

The following week, however, there was the
job inspector. Supposedly the job inspector was to visit the office
once a week at an unspecified hour and day. Actually he showed up
five times that week. He was a stout, balding young man with full
red lips, slightly crossed eyes and flaring nostrils.

His first visit had surprised Theo
unplugged, gazing at the giant underground map. The job inspector
stared hard at him, frowning, while the director cast about for an
explanation. At that moment his assistant emerged jingling from the
storeroom, the waterfall raging behind her. She swiftly placed
herself between the young job inspector and Teddy. She smiled and
introduced herself. Her voice was musical.

The director thought he saw the young man’s
wide nostrils quivering like a horse’s as in response to her scent.
Although he seemed already to have lost interest in Teddy – her
body masked him – she accounted for the boy’s apparent idleness. He
had, she explained, just shifted about the hundreds of piles of
posters for a solid hour and they insisted on his resting for ten
minutes. There was no question exploiting him.

How did she manage to come up with
plausible-sounding inventions off the bat like that, the director
wondered. It was a gift, like absolute pitch. Meanwhile Theo had
emerged.

She turned to him. “Don’t like to be a
slave-driver, Teddy, but we’ve got more work for you.”

She had him do more labels, in New Gothic
this time. She and the job inspector stood behind Theo looking at
those hands. At least she did. The young man seemed indifferent to
the boy’s miraculous proficiency and asked Dorothea question after
question in a low voice. He seemed to be staring insistently down
at her neckline although this may have been an illusion created by
the faulty focus of his eyes. Why was she laughing now?

Finally the fat, cross-eyed job inspector
went away.

He was back two hours later. The job
inspector seemed to come mainly to inspect the director’s
assistant. Still, he was obliged to show interest in the director’s
new member of staff too. He tried to justify his return by
questions supposedly forgotten that morning.

The next day he was back again, with no
attempt at justification.

After his second visit they had to take
emergency measures. It was doubtful after all, the director now
acknowledged, that the squat attendant had been entrusted with
spying functions. But espionage was explicit in the fat, cross-eyed
young man’s very title. If the job inspector came upon Theodore
during one of the boy’s frequent fazed-out periods he’d be sure to
inform the autocratic life-and-death Commission people that the job
was largely pretence (a fact that Lorz now allowed his mind to
formulate in such bald terms for the first time). The job would be
eliminated, along with Theodore.

The job inspector had accepted the first
explanation for the boy’s idleness. But the excuse couldn’t be
indefinitely repeated. After the job inspector’s second impromptu
visit, during which fortunately Teddy had been busy with the broom,
the director’s assistant came up with another good idea.

She trained Teddy to drop whatever he was
doing (or, more frequently, snap out of what he wasn’t doing). At
the command, “Teddy! The ladders! Clean and oil the ladders!” he
went into action. The boy insisted on keeping all five of the spare
ladders in the office itself, strictly aligned. Working over the
contraptions with their strut-like rungs and their clumsy wheels
they resembled archaic wingless flying machines and he a mechanic,
land-bound but fanatically devoted, preparing the machines for some
heroic dawn patrol. Sometimes he would climb up on one of them and
then climb down.

So the third time the job inspector came,
the signal was rapidly given and the man found Theodore busy over
the ladders. The fourth time too. The job inspector ended by
wondering about the necessity for such incessant cleaning and
lubricating. “You have no idea of the wear and tear on them in the
underground,” Dorothea explained.

During the man’s fifth visit Theodore
started experimenting with the last of the superfluously oiled
ladders. He kicked off powerfully, hoisting himself to the top
step. His dark gold head skimmed the filthy ceiling as the machine
jolted across the room at great speed. Despite his air of total
abstraction he skillfully avoided the desks, the chairs and the
filing cabinet at the very last moment by shifting his weight. The
ladder swerved, teetering on two and sometimes one wheel.

“Why is he doing that?” the inspector asked,
removing his eyes from the director’s assistant and following the
evolution of the vehicle with alarm and wonder.

“He’s testing the wheels,” she said quickly.
“They’re the weak spot. It’s part of the wear and tear I told you
about.”

She recounted glib wry anecdotes to
illustrate her point. She was a genius at inventions. She didn’t
tense and blink and come out with her inventions too fast. The job
inspector gazed at her with an expression of absolute belief.

“He seems to be having a good time, anyhow,”
the man said, staring at the boy’s daring figures and then
nervously pulling back as the ladder sailed a centimeter past
him.

Did the job inspector mean that as a
criticism? “Why should work be synonymous with boredom?” the
director asked. He was pleased with his own invention even though
the statement ran counter to his basic philosophy.

Lorz felt he was cracking under the tension
of those visits. He almost rang up Mr Mysels of the Commission to
ask about them. At the last moment he rang off, remembering his
last conversation with the man. If the single weekly visit hadn’t
in fact been modified and Mysels learned that in less than
forty-eight hours the job inspector had inspected Theodore five
times already wouldn’t he (Mysels) conclude that something was
radically amiss with the new member of staff?

The director could hardly attribute those
visits openly to his assistant’s perfume, neckline and manner. In
self-defense the job inspector would be sure to justify his
repeated presence by failings supposedly observed in Theodore. So
the director hung up and went on worrying.

However, the problem was solved the next
day. At eleven his assistant got a call. She laughed musically and
returned from lunch half an hour late. “Peter invited me for
lunch,” she explained. Lorz didn’t have to be told that Peter was
the fat, cross-eyed job inspector. He said nothing.

After a while she explained: “It’s to keep
him away from the office. You didn’t notice but he doesn’t really
come to inspect Teddy. If I see him outside he won’t come so
often.”

Lorz thanked her for her self-sacrifice.

“Oh it’s no sacrifice. He’s a nice boy. A
little dull, maybe.”

The director had another worry. What if
Silberman visited them? The doctor had vaguely spoken of dropping
in to see how Teddy was doing. In the course of his proposal to
hire Teddy the director had foolishly mentioned new furniture and a
paint job for his office. What would Silberman say when he saw the
old shabbiness? Mightn’t he conclude that all the other statements
of Lorz’s were misrepresentations too?

On Wednesday of the third week (as Theo sat
staring at the giant map of the underground) the director asked his
assistant how much she reckoned it would cost to hire painters to
do the job on successive weekends.

“Here?”

Theo, roused by her alarm, followed her
melodramatic gesture at the four walls. She objected that she was
allergic to paint fumes. They gave her blinding headaches. She
acted like a madwoman when that happened, she said.

No problem, Lorz replied. He went over to
the panel next to the ventilator. It was permanently on Force One.
But there were ten speeds. He touched a button and the blades
blurred behind the protective wicker. The whir rose to a deafening
roar for a few seconds. Papers on the desks took off. And that was
only Speed Five, he shouted. He quickly returned to Force One.
Imagine Speed Ten on all night Sunday, he said, now too loudly. In
a matter of hours the paint fumes would be evacuated, he said,
lowering his voice. Nothing could resist Force Ten.

She was unconvinced. He compromised. At
least a washing, to brighten the room up. The walls were
filthy.

The next day Theo came in with a bulky
package under his arm.

“What’s that, Teddy? A present for me?” said
Dorothea.

The boy went into the storeroom and a minute
later emerged naked except for inadequate (or superfluous) briefs,
a figure out of Greek mythology bearing anachronistic gifts: two
pails, three sponges, folded plastic sheets.

“Teddy!” she exclaimed, staring at him as he
transported her desk alongside the director’s. With dedicated
purposeful gestures he unfolded the plastic sheets. Swiftly he
placed them over the two desks and the filing cabinet.

The director said nothing. Powerless, he
looked on without moving.

In accents of growing alarm his assistant
said: “What’s that, Teddy?” then “What are you trying to do,
Teddy?” Finally: “What are you doing, Teddy?” It was a pointless
question since by then he’d rolled a ladder up to the two desks.
Also pointless now, her faint wail: “You can’t do that now, we have
to work!”

But he’d calculated everything. He secured
the brake-device and climbed up and started in. It was another one
of his magnetic performances.

Lorz stood stock still, staring. How could
you not look? It was like being in the grip of some power.

The boy seemed endowed with more than the
normal complement of arms, a near-naked Shiva, as he warred on the
ceiling filth alternatively with the two sponges. The right-hand
sponge skimmed and sipped the cleaning liquid in one pail and
created a vast arc of brightness overhead. His great hand descended
like a hawk, balled into a fist, expelling a dirty dribble into the
second pail. At the same time his left hand dipped the second
sponge into the third pail of clean water and mopped up the traces
of cleaning liquid on the arc of cleanliness while the right hand
prepared for the following assault.

Over and over, no respite, perfect
synchronization. Now the right-hand sponge surged forward in broad
thrusts as in a schematized military map: breakthroughs of
cleanliness into the somber front, now the pockets of filth
surrounded and annihilated.

He was operating above the two desks. The
plastic sheets proved superfluous. Not a drop fell on them. Simply
a trickle down his muscular upraised arm, disappearing in the dark
gold tangle of his armpit. Or there, another trickle past the left
nipple, down the arch of the rib cage, down the taut muscled
abdomen and then vanishing into the broadening criss-cross of dark
gold hair beneath the eye-like navel.

“He heard what you said about washing down
the office,” Dorothea exclaimed reproachfully to the director.
“We’ll have to watch what we say.”

Lorz looked on in silence. Abruptly he broke
off and returned to his desk, which Theodore had freed of the
plastic sheet. The ceiling above formed a light patch, almost white
in contrast to the dinginess that surrounded it. He’d finished
there. Business could go on. Business had to go on.

“Business can go on now,” he said, seating
himself at his desk. They’d wasted too much time already. Dorothea
sat down at hers. Head in hands Lorz plunged into the poster
statistics, trying to abstract himself from what was going on in
the room. His hands even covered his ears although the only sounds
audible above the ticking wall clock and the whirring ventilator
was the whisper of the sponge on the ceiling, the trickle of water
in the pail from the squeezed sponge and Theodore’s hard
breathing.