FaceMate

by Steven M. Greenberg

  Sure they did. Hell, when had they ever turned down an offer from the Sage of Red Bank, for Chrissakes? Never a daily regular exactly, for the majesty of an expert’s presence falls off inversely with his over-saturation on the tube. But he’d been a participant certainly—on the set of FBC or CNBC or Bloomberg often enough to keep his name on the business show marquee and the Atherton Firm ever in the public spotlights. And his advice, his opinions: Hell, if he wasn’t sure about a subject, he wouldn’t say a word—Which meant that when he was sure, he spoke, and when he spoke, his words were always oracularly dead-on right. You could bank on Ben’s assurances, and many did, to their inevitable and enormous gain.

  So when Neil and Stuart and Maria got those heads-up calls, they bit. And when they bit, Ben got all the publicity a publicity hound could ever wish for. He took the copter to the limo, the limo to the station, the elevator upstairs to the set—and voila! He opined, he predicted, and, being sure of his predictions—being absolutely positive where the FaceMate prospects were concerned—and, moreover, talking up that confident certainty, and, finally, forcefully, putting this newborn website on the tongues of investors and consumers and the grown-up moneyed populace at large—Well, the FaceMate servers, which were already getting swamped pre-publicity, went into thermal overload immediately afterward

  Ten days after Ben’s TV appearances commenced, Eddie barged into Ben’s office again, fresh off the phone with Rajiv:

  “Hey, Bennie! Our guy Rajiv just called again and….”

  “I know. Don’t tell me—He needs more computer muscle, right? I figured on that. So go ahead and give him what he needs. What’s the total now?”

  “The FaceMate enrolment, you mean?” Eddie asked.

  “Sure. It was sixty million last time I checked. So how many are we up to now?”

  “I’m not sure. Eighty, I think; over eighty. He says their hard drives are bulging at the seams.”

  “OK, so take care of it. You know what to do. Give him whatever he needs, but not just cash. These kids don’t know beans about handling cash. Take care of it yourself, you hear? Hey. you’ve done this stuff before a hundred times. Run down right now, call Brandon, have him fire up one of the Lears, and get out there. Get our little wizards what they need.”

  “Now? Today? You want me to fly out there today?”

  “Do I want you to? Let me ask you, Eddie—do you know what kind of equipment they’re using now, huh? Do you know what kind of office space they’re renting?”

  “No, I honestly don’t, Ben. I went and picked them up three weeks ago; but I didn’t take a tour of the facility. But they must have a fairly decent set-up if they’re handling eighty million users with the stuff they’ve got.”

  “Maybe so, but they’re going to need to host a whole lot more subscribers in the weeks and months to come at the rate the site is growing now, right? So how are you going to know what they need if you don’t fly out there? Look, take care of it, Eddie. Come on, man; you’re experienced enough to know what to do.”

  And he was. He knew exactly. Not computers per se—that had never been his stock in trade—But business stuff in general: That was the kind of thing he could handle well enough, for scads of business knowledge had rubbed off on him from Ben—Good lord! How many dozens of derelict factories had the firm resuscitated from imminent demise? How many failing retailers had come to life with AthCorp’s expert CPR? So as for websites? As for computers? How much different in concept were they from what had been the standard kind of stuff they generally did? Hell, not that much.

  So Eddie summoned Brandon in from home—he was working in the garden planting posies or some such silly shit—And they fueled up the jet and headed out. By just a bit past noon, scarcely two hours after leaving Ben’s office, he was down on the tarmac in Columbus, and climbing in the limo that was waiting open-doored, and speaking on the cellphone with Rajiv enroute.

  “So—where are you guys located exactly? I’ve got an address here—the driver says it’s an office building near downtown and right around the college someplace—But I haven’t got a suite number or a floor.”

  “God—Eddie! You’re here? Here in Columbus?”

  “Sure I’m here. You asked the Firm to help you out, didn’t you? How are we gonna help you out from Red Bank?”

  “OK, right, great; thanks for the attention. Umm—look, just head on over to the building—the address you’ve got, OK? And I’ll run down and meet you downstairs.”

  And there he was, true to his word, right at the front entryway to the unimpressive building the limousine pulled up to. No fancy threads today; no sport coat, no tailored slacks, no spiffy shirt and nattily loosened tie, like the outfit he’d worn three weeks ago in Red Bank. No, today Rajiv was in his working duds: plain old shopworn jeans, yellow polo shirt, worn athletic shoes—but just as neat and clean as ever. Rajiv was the type of well-groomed guy who just looked neat and clean whatever he wore, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. Friendly as always, the kid took Eddie by the arm and led him inside the place: Which was less an office building, honestly, than an old converted warehouse, updated and modernized far enough back in time to look a little threadbare in a brick-and-mortar sort of way. The first floor had doctor’s offices of a Medicaid-ily shabby kind, and past them was an elevator that took them stumblingly up to Three.

  “This it?” Eddie was not particularly taken by the place’s elegance or size. Three thousand, maybe thirty-five hundred feet of open space with a few impromptu partitions stuck in here and there, haphazardly, it seemed—Haphazardly, that is, all but for that structure way over in the far left corner of the layout, where a tomblike enclosure the size of a downscale condo’s second bedroom stood fortress-built and walled up tight. Eddie naturally figured that must be where the cash was kept—But his figuring this time was wrong.

  Anyway, as for the rest of the place—the mostly un-partitioned area—it was what you’d call, in technical terms, a friggin’ mess. Or maybe not so much a mess as a jumble, not so much cluttered as disorganized. The computer hardware—Eddie assumed that Rube-Goldberg-looking contraption in the center of the open room was the computer hardware—gave the impression of—what would you call it, even? Oh maybe a junk electronics dealer’s stockroom after a cyclone rattled through. Computing devices, ancient and new—desktops, laptops, towers, phones—pieces of computer hardware—circuit boards, monitors, cables, plugs—all linked together in apparent randomness by what looked to be a thousand miles of wiring—And not what you’d call systematic wiring, either, but more like a bushel of spaghetti thrown against the wall. Eddie had expected some degree of disorganization, sure—these kids were still rank amateurs, after all. But utter chaos? Ben had been right: It was lucky he had come.

  “Jesus, Rajiv! This place looks like a shithole in a garbage dump, for Chrissakes! What the hell have you got going on here?”

  “Oh, don’t be put off by first impressions, Eddie. Actually all the equipment we’ve installed in the place works just fine. Alex built it by himself, and anything Alex builds is state-of-the-art, no matter what it seems like when you look at it. He’s….”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s brilliant, I know, a genius. I’ve gathered that, buddy boy; but, good God!”

  “OK, well, actually, truthfully—all this stuff?—we kind of found it here and there and scrounged it up, I admit; but the way he’s got the circuits wired—You know we’re up to eighty-seven million this morning, and we’ve got capacity for probably ten million more. Alex just plugged a couple more big boards in that they gave us from the college, and, you know, the equipment doesn’t need to be a Michelangelo masterpiece to do the work.”

  “OK, I hear you, kid, but you’re gonna blow past those other ten million in—what?—a week or less? What are you gonna do then, huh? Look, bottom line, let’s get you guys up to speed. Tell me; be extravagant: what kind of hardware do you need to cover all the bases? I’m talking, primo stuff here, not makeshift, not Elmer’s glue a
nd cardboard shit like this. Tell me—Hey, go for it, pal; think big, be grandiose: What would you buy if you had unlimited resources? Figure high, Rajiv. Go for the gold.”

  “I don’t really know for sure, Eddie. Probably Alex does.”

  “OK, so ask him—Or no, cancel that; don’t ask him; don’t even bother to ask him. Let’s surprise him—how’s that? Look, let me make a call to Ben—He’ll get somebody who knows the kind of stuff you’re gonna need—Oh, and one other thing: Let’s say we go ahead and buy a bunch of big league computer hardware for you budding geniuses, huh?—Where the hell are you gonna put it? What’ve you got here—three thousand feet? Not enough, definitely not enough for how this thing is gonna grow. They got any more space available on this floor?”

  “I don’t think so, Eddie. The other half of Three is one of those telephone bank places—you know, the ones that make annoying calls all night and day? And I don’t think they’ve got any plans on moving out.”

  “OK, so how about a different floor then? How many floors you got here?

  “In the whole building? Seven, I think. It goes up to seven from what the elevator says.”

  “OK, so what’s upstairs? Or maybe down—What’s down on Two?”

  “Two’s full, I know that for sure. Four isn’t, I don’t think. I don’t think there’s much of anything up on Four.”

  “And it’s the size of Three?—Well, I guess it’s got to be; that’s a really dumb question, huh? OK, so if Four’s available and we put the new stuff up there, can you run the wires up to interlink? Let’s say we keep this space and add the space on four—Can you run connections up?”

  “I don’t see why not. It’s an old warehouse; it’s got wood floors. We can drill through easy enough if the owner gives permission.”

  “Great. Terrific. I can guarantee we’ll have permission. So while we’re waiting for Ben to get us info on the stuff you’re gonna need, I’ll see about the space upstairs. Do you know who owns the building?”

  “I know the rental place. Don’t you want to call them first? The owner probably wouldn’t handle leases by himself.”

  “Hey, Rajiv, this is the big time, kid. I don’t want to rent more space for you. I want to buy the whole fucking building, all seven goddam floors. So go get the number of the rental guy; he oughta know some stuff about the owner.”

  Cindy was Ben’s secretary, and if he wanted her for something and he was tied up at his desk—on the phone or in the middle of a face-to-face meeting, let’s say, he’d buzz her on the intercom. But if he wanted her and just happened to be sitting there alone, his standard practice was to get up off his ass, walk the forty-something feet to the outer doorway, and fetch her in person himself. Which is what he did today, now, at 2:35 p.m., right after hanging up on Eddie’s frantic call.

  “Hey, Cindy—you free?”

  “Yes, sir. What do you need me to do?”

  “OK, come on in here, bring your note pad, and I’ll tell you.”

  Cindy was twenty-nine. She was five-foot-three, blonde with bright blue eyes, great facial bone structure—a little nose, high cheek bones, a delicate chin. She wasn’t one to sit in the sun, so her skin was soft and smooth and white as the girl in the ad for Ivory Snow. Her teeth were even and unblemished, her lashes long, her lips full and charmingly turned up at the corners in a perpetually engaging smile. All of that up to par, much of it way superior to par; and she would have been a knockout with a mile-long list of adoring men wanting to take her out—Except for one contrasting negative: Her weight, clocked in at two hundred and fifty-seven pounds.

  Not always, though. Depending on her activity, her appetite, and the menstrual time of the month, she might tip her heavy-duty scale at two-fifty-two at times, at others up to two-sixty-three. But the average was two-fifty-seven, and if anyone asked her, that’s the weight she owned up to.

  She’d been with Ben for seven years now, and the way he’d discovered her was a fascinating story in and of itself:

  One night, as he was sitting at his desk at home—not the desk from Sotheby’s yet; that wouldn’t be bought for another couple of years—But whatever desk it was, Ben was sitting there at just a little after 10:00 p.m. when the phone rang. Now when the phone rang that late in the evening, Ben naturally assumed it was for him. A natural assumption, since something going on that late tended to be an accident in one of the AthCorp-funded chemical plants, say, or a strike in some factory in Hong Kong. Carole knew not to pick up, so he did, and the voice on the line very sonorously asked him:

  “Mr. Atherton? Is this Mr. Atherton?”

  “It is. What’s up?”

  “I wanted to tell you something, sir, something very important. Something vital.” A very sweet female voice told him this, purely American, with a sort of mid-western twang to it. The voice of someone in command.

  “Yes? I’m listening.”

  “I want you to know that we have a very detailed profile on you. It’s a profile we get from your interests and transactions on the Internet.”

  Now Ben was on the Net a lot, and many of the subjects he clicked on might be considered questionable at best. Business research in various trouble spots around the world, for example—that was one concern. Then that film distribution network that Atherton bid on but didn’t wind up buying—those folks had handled the occasional made-for-selected-audiences type of films, not for the prudish viewer. Clicks on potential terrorist targets, clicks on potential operatives: Lots of things that might wave the old red flag at the Federal bull; and so this ten-o-clock voice had got his interest aroused enough to make him listen a little more intently than he might have listened otherwise.

  “All right, then,” he inquired, “so what kind of profile do you have?”

  “Oh, everything, sir. We know your purchases, your tastes, pretty nearly everything you do publicly—or privately as well, if you know what I mean—so what we’re offering….”

  “Yes? What is it that you’re offering?”

  “How is your health, sir? How is your energy? Your love life? Your stamina…?”

  “My what? What is this exactly? Are you selling something or what?”

  “Not selling, sir, no. It’s an opportunity. A fabulous opportunity for you to feel a hundred and ten percent, to be healthier, to have more energy, more drive, to be….”

  “Great! You’re great!” He stopped her in mid-sentence. “You really are, I’m serious. Whoever you are, you’re a master at this business. Let me ask you something; Is this a canned presentation or did you come up with it yourself? It’s very important for me to know—Maybe it’ll be important for you too. So tell me.”

  “What, sir? Tell you what?”

  “Listen to me. Are you on a clock? Do you have a certain volume of calls you need to make?”

  “I … umm….”

  “OK, look. Tell me what you’re selling and I’ll order some. Are you on a commission?”

  “It’s a supplement, sir. It’ll do wonders for your health.”

  “OK, how much?”

  “I’ll need to tell you about it first, though.”

  “No you don’t. Sign me up. How much is it going to cost me?”

  “What we do, sir, is we take your credit card number and every month you get a fresh new month’s supply.”

  “OK, great, I’ll give you the number, I promise I will, and I’ll pay you for a year—OK? Up front. Just one condition: I want to talk to you person-to-person, off the clock, understand? So—First of all, what’s your name?”

  “It’s, umm … it’s Angela, sir.”

  “OK, now give me your real name. You wouldn’t have hesitated like that if it was really Angela—So what is it really?”

  “It’s umm—Well actually it’s Cindy, sir. It’s really Cindy.”

  “OK, great—Cindy, then. So answer me this: That routine you used—it’s terrific. It’s really off the charts. And what I’m asking—and I want to hear the truth now, OK?”

  “Yes, si
r, OK.”

  “Well? Is it a canned routine that you got from your company or did you come up with it yourself?”

  “More myself, sir. Mostly myself, I guess. People hang up right away if you don’t really get them engaged.”

  “Terrific, Cindy—just terrific! I bet you’re about the best canvasser in the place, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am, sir. I kind of get a bonus every month.”

  “Well, you’re great at it—So—where exactly are you? Where is your place of employment located?”

  “In Colorado, sir. Denver.”

  “Is that your hometown? Are you tied to anyone or anything there?”

  “Umm, no, not really. My folks live in Boulder Springs.”

  “How much do they pay you? Do you make more than fifty a year?”

  “Fifty? Fifty what, sir?”

  “Fifty thousand. Do you make fifty thousand?”

  “A year?”

  “Yes, a year. Do you make fifty grand a year?”

  “Oh no, sir, nothing like that.”

  “How much then? What do you make?”

  “A lot less than what you asked me.”

  “OK, fine. Would you consider moving to another place if you could make a lot more money?”

  “You mean like fifty thousand?”

  “Yes, fifty thousand—or maybe a whole lot more.”

  “Sure I would, sir. Not out of the country though—And if I did change jobs, it would have to be doing something honorable.”

  “Well, you’ve got my profile, right? You ought to know I work at something honorable.”

  “Yes, but as to that, sir….”

  “You don’t really have any profiles, I know. It doesn’t matter. I like your style, Cindy. OK, so how about this: How about I send a plane to pick you up, bring you here for a job interview, and if you like me and I like you, I’ll start you north of fifty thou—how does that sound?”