by Joe Nelms
“Knock knock!”
It was Mike D., as in Determined, to interrupt their fake work process.
“Hey, guys! How’s it going? You kicking some killer ideas around?”
“Brad thinks TMZ is the Bible.”
Mike D. stood there, D. for Dumb.
“Were you looking for something, Mike D.?”
Mike D. snapped to.
“Oh, yeah. I wanted to see what kind of progress you guys were making on the brochure project. We’ve got a status call with sales tomorrow, and I’m hoping you can go over stuff with Alan and make revisions before then so we can keep this thing moving. Have you shown the big guy anything yet?”
“Not yet. We were going to stop by after lunch.”
“But it’s done?”
“Yeah, it’s all done.”
“Sounds good.”
This was an unusual protocol for Brad. He was used to the more creative-driven agencies where his department conducted activities in Opus Dei–like secrecy and let the account team know when they were good and ready.
Now, why the hell was Mike D., as in Doofus, still standing in the doorway, smiling?
Oh.
“Sounds good, Mike D.”
“Thanks, team!”
Mike smacked the doorframe like it was a right tackle’s ass and set off on his merry way.
Just for that, Brad decided to make the account team wait a few more hours by making Alan wait a few more hours.
“Lunch?”
“Don’t you think we ought to see if Alan’s free?”
“Later.”
Stump shrugged. Not his problem.
Brad opted for the bacon cheeseburger and garlic cheese fries. Sort of an extended toast to Gracie. Stump joined him at a table in the middle of the large seating area of the cafeteria after piling two plates full of vegetables and tofu.
“We should figure out how to frame the work.”
Stump knitted his eyebrows. Huh?
“How we’re going to sell it to Alan. How we set it up. So he buys it.”
“Can’t you just show it to him?”
“Mmm hmm. Sure. We’ll walk in, dump it on his desk, and leave. That’s how all the great salesmen do it. ‘Somebody order some ads?’ Let’s make it a point to do it in thirty seconds or less. I hear that goes over big.”
Brad stuffed his mouth with fries and talked anyway.
“We have to make him love this stuff. And in the process give him the tools to go sell it to everyone else.”
“So they can sell it to the public.”
“Right.”
“What if it’s the wrong stuff and you’re just really good at selling it to your boss?”
This guy had no idea what he was talking about. Brad took a beat to compose himself before he started explaining the complex world of advertising to the cretin sitting across from him.
“You can’t be honest with people. That never works. You have to figure out an angle. For instance, with these brochures and bookmarks, we didn’t just create some offline marketing tools. We thought about it and asked ourselves, What do old, incontinent people do and what do they really need?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“I know. But I’m just saying. It’s a good way to set up the work. We asked the question and the answer was If you haven’t discovered Assure yet, you probably spend a lot of time on the can . . . reading.”
“Ah.”
Across the hall, Brad noticed Dr. Yo standing by the exit, calmly observing him. Yo gave him the universal man chin bob, acknowledging that they had seen each other. Brad returned the gesture, but flavored it with a bit of question. Yo flicked his head sideways, follow me. Brad nodded. Yo turned and walked out. Stump didn’t see Yo’s half of the conversation and thought the head movements were somehow an acknowledgement that he and Brad were now on the same page.
“Got it.”
“I’m going to go grab some more lemonade. I’ll meet you back at the office.”
Brad got up and moved toward the drink section before detouring and heading out the exit after Yo.
Down the hall to the left, Yo stood waiting. He opened the stair doors and went in. Of course, Brad understood that following the gentleman who was essentially a stranger into uncharted territory without his bodyguard’s knowledge was behavior that Stump would frown upon. A lot. At the same time Brad realized that if Yo were the hired assassin a suspicious mind might suppose him to be, Brad would have been dead on the roof already.
He trailed Yo down six flights of stairs to find him holding the door open in the second subbasement. The floor was white and sterile like some secret government lab. Down the hall were a series of doors, each secured with a security card lock.
“Yo.”
“I know. You told me. I’m Brad.”
“No, I mean Yo, as in hello.”
“Oh. Yo, Yo. Where are we?”
“I’m gonna show you something. Come here.”
Yo ran his security card across the scanner on the lock to his office and the light above it turned green. He opened the door and welcomed Brad to the dark room where he spent his days.
Yo closed the door and slid into his chair in front of the desk that held four monitors for the computer tower below. Brad looked around and let his eyes adjust to what little light there was.
“So, what is this?”
“This is what I do for a living.”
Brad was still adjusting to the darkness.
“Okay, so what do you do for a living? Develop negatives?”
“I watch people. I’m the head of liability security.”
“Are you going to sell me some insurance?”
“No. I have cameras. I read everyone’s e-mails. Listen to their voice mails. Monitor the websites they go to.”
“You get paid for that?”
“Someone’s got to do it. It’s an easy way to keep the company safe from intellectual property theft, harassment suits, corporate espionage, bullshit like that. My main job is to protect Assure from losing money, IP, or being sued for someone doing something stupid.”
“Adult diapers have intellectual property?”
“And it’s all digital. But everyone lives on the computer now, so it’s easy for me to keep track of pretty much everything that’s going on.”
“Why?”
As he spoke, Yo cycled through a number of feeds from cameras in the building.
“Liability. Cost efficiency. Most companies with more than fifty employees have someone like me watching. It’s a minor investment compared to what they could lose. We got guys watching porn all day when they should be working. Grown men stalking ex-girlfriends. Harassing them with e-mails. Calling them forty, fifty times a day. People spending more time managing their fantasy football teams than doing their job. Guys cheating on their wives. Wives cheating on their husbands. People planning divorces. Managers losing their salaries to online gambling. Anything you can think of.”
“Why don’t you stop them?”
“Some we do. Some we don’t. Liability and cost efficiency. If it looks like an employee is engaging in behavior that could get themselves or someone else hurt or, more importantly, cost the company money for negligence or failure to interfere, I let my boss know and somebody stops them. Sometimes you just need to goose ’em. Have a manager to stop by a little more often so they’ll calm down. Sometimes you disguise your voice and call up pretending to be from IT wondering what’s up with all these calls to the same number.”
Yo brought up someone’s computer desktop on his left screen and called up the security cam in the same office.
“See Daniels here on screen three? He’s going to be arrested tomorrow morning as soon as we get all his files and records of his Internet activity backed up. He’s been trying to sell some company secrets to a competitor. See ya, Daniels.”
“Holy Jeebus.”
“Most people we leave alone. They’re not hurting anyone, just making their friends and
family crazy.”
“You watch me?”
“Please. I already know your deep dark secret. I heard you on the roof. You’re on the run from the goodfellas.”
“That’s it?”
“And you pick your nose a lot. You have allergies or something?”
“Fuck, there’s a camera in our office?”
“Sure, take a look.”
Yo punched up Brad’s office to find Stump sitting alone. Brad seized the opportunity.
“What about him?”
“Nothing. Straight arrow. He checks the weather online. That’s pretty much it. Most of the time he just sits there like he is right now. Is he asleep?”
“I don’t think the guy ever sleeps.”
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“No, he’s the marshal assigned to me for the Witness Protection Program.”
“Ahh.”
“Why are you showing me all this? Isn’t this super confidential?”
“Oh yeah. I’d be fired on the spot if anyone knew you were here.”
“So?”
“So, I haven’t told a soul in the five years I’ve worked here. You’re the one person in the world I know isn’t going to say a word. Plus you’ll probably be dead in a few weeks. So why not?”
Brad spent the next half hour in Yo’s office peppering him with questions about the worst things people did at work (masturbate, sleep, and hold down second jobs). A good twenty minutes of that was spent watching Mike D. flit around the building as he checked in with almost every office.
Finally, Brad realized he should probably get back and present some work to Alan.
“Thanks for showing me all this. It’s amazing.”
“Any time. It’s not like you’re busy, right?”
Brad couldn’t help smiling. It was weird being able to be totally honest with someone.
Before he left, he turned to Yo. Brad was building a new life for himself. At some point that should probably include relationships with people who weren’t assigned to him by the government.
“You ever play PlayStation?”
“I’ll kick a fool’s ass on PlayStation.”
“So, yes?”
On the way back to the office, Brad popped into the men’s room and found an open stall. The solitude lasted approximately twelve seconds before the bathroom door blew open.
“Pitt?”
It was Alan.
Whoa. Time out. Wasn’t the shitter off limits? Can’t a man crap in solitude? Wasn’t it understood that, all advertising jokes aside, what an art director did in there didn’t constitute work and therefore shouldn’t fall under the jurisdiction of his boss? Was there no decency? Apparently not.
“Pitt. I saw you walk in here.”
Alan charged the stall next to Brad’s, stood on the toilet, and looked over the divider.
“There you are. Listen, you guys have some brochures to show me? Mike D. is up my ass and I can’t keep those guys waiting.”
“Um, yeah. We’re going to show you some stuff in a few. It’s good. Exciting.”
Alan lit up.
“Yeah? It’s good? Tell me about it.”
Really? Right here on the throne looking up with my junk all tucked between my legs like a tranny? Is there some other place we might find in say, two minutes?
“Can I come down to your office in a few—”
“Broad stroke it for me.”
Brad really hoped he was talking about the work.
Alan waited.
“Um, well, we took a look at the brief and thought to ourselves ‘What do old, incontinent people do and what do they really need?’”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then we figured out that if they haven’t discovered Assure yet, they probably spend a lot of time on the can . . . reading.”
“You’re not reading.”
“I’m not incontinent.”
“That’s it?”
Brad continued and as he went further and further with his explanation of bookmarks versus brochures, he noticed Alan’s face getting redder and redder. Unsure if this was because of building excitement over his pitch or because Alan was struggling to maintain his position looking over the stall, Brad tap danced even faster in his framing. Finally, he ran out of steam.
“. . . So that’s it. A bookmark?”
“Uh, yeah. And some brochures.”
Alan hopped off the toilet and marched out of the bathroom.
“You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
Brad breezed into his office ready to tell Stump the whole men’s room invasion story only to find Alan and Mike D. poring over his layouts with Stump taking them through the work.
“. . . so that’s why we felt that treating the copy like this made a lot of sense.”
Mike D., as in Didn’t I mention that I was going to tell Alan you were done with the brochures? looked up.
“Hey, buddy! Great work. Really creative. Love the bookmark thing. Waaaaaay out of the box.”
Brad snuck a look at Stump who raised his eyebrows to indicate he didn’t have much of a choice but to show them.
“Um, thanks.”
Alan, face still flushed like a beet choking on a piece of popcorn, turned around to Brad.
“This is fucking great stuff. Well done.”
“Oh, right, yeah, well we thought that understanding the target market’s need—”
Alan looked to Mike D. for approval.
“Perfect, right?”
“Sounds good.”
Mike D. high fived Alan and nobody got strangled.
A Visit with Giggles
“Don’t worry about a thing. I’m going to file so many motions, they’re going to need a snorkel to get through them all. Years. That twat lawyer is going to retire before we even get to opening arguments.”
The tabloids had described Tommy Gigliani as “a rumbling carnival show of legal shenanigans,” “a human law library slash frat house with a Little Italy address,” and “a coldblooded litigator who preferred fistfights to debates.” And he was okay with that.
Say what you will about his professional ambition and predatory behavior in the courtroom, Tommy was on balance a fairly laidback guy. He tended to laugh things off pretty easily and often used that laughter as a trick to lull an opposing counsel into a state of overconfidence. Then he cut their balls off.
The papers called him “Giggles.” The public dug him. He was the Wolf Boy of lawyers. A Giggles cover always sold out.
Standing only five feet five inches tall and weighing well over two hundred and fifty pounds, Giggles was almost a perfect circle and, based on the seemingly flawless memory he possessed, many hypothesized that the volume of his person was created by law theory and case studies that went in and never came out. He was a legal killing machine with supercharged instincts. So he was surprised by Frank’s reaction to his plan.
“Fuck that. No motions.”
Giggles giggled while he thought about the best way to tell his good friend the murderer that he was way off base on this one.
“Frank, they’ve got video. And eyewitnesses.”
Yeah, no shit. None of this was breaking news to Frank. But he had some thoughts on these issues. In fact, he had to finish up this business with Giggles and get to a meeting he had with the Aryans.
As soon as Frank had entered prison, he set up shop. He didn’t plan on being there long, but to keep his legacy creation on schedule, a few key things had to happen. As much as it sucked to have to sleep in an eight-by-six cell every night, prison life did offer certain advantages to a man who had needs as specific as his.
His first move was to convene Skinny Al, Big Fredo, Moldy Tony, Pete the Phone, and Johnny Pancakes, also known as The Boys—a crew of inmates who used to work for Frank on the outside and had the good sense to keep their pie holes shut when they got busted. They were the suburb to Frank’s city family. A Mafia cul-de-sac in a really bad neighborhood.
Priso
n was a lot like high school—a dense population of mixed interests carved up into a bunch of little fiefdoms. Only with more butt-rapery. There were an assortment of factions around the facility involved in different activities and, therefore, with varying levels of power and influence.
The Boys filled him in on who was moving the good drugs, where the various cells of power lay, and who owed favors to the Maraschino prison family. At the top of the list in all three categories were the Aryans, led by a charmer named Mitchell.
In the real world, Frank wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a skinhead sporting a large forehead tattoo of a cartoon penis protruding from a giant swastika. But the Aryans had strong outside ties and didn’t mind killing a man for money. To them, it was just another business exchange. And they liked killing people.
This would have been a Sal thing on the outside. But Frank understood that since his was being billed as yet another lengthy “trial of the century,” every one of his capos and soldiers was being watched very closely lest they try to thin out the witness herd in an untimely manner. No, this would have to look like it had nada to do with Frank Fortunato. A freak accident. A random murder. It could look like gender reassignment surgery gone horribly, horribly wrong for all he cared. It just couldn’t look like it was done on his orders. So the Aryans got the nod.
It was time for Frank to give Giggles the heave ho.
“Yeah. Eyewitnesses and video. Listen, I have a right to a speedy trial, right?”
“Okay, sure. You also have the right to pay good money for front row seats at a Josh Groban concert, but I don’t advise you do that either.”
“Forget years. I want this thing wrapped up in a few weeks.”
Giggles giggled again.
“You’re a funny guy, Frank.”
“Just make it happen. And don’t worry. I know a few things about a few things.”
“I don’t know what the fuck that means, but don’t do anything stupid. I have to tell you, the feds are out for blood. We can beat them, but you have to trust me.”
“I trust you. Now, get me into the courtroom, do your job, and don’t fuck it up.”
“Frank . . .”
Frank hung up his receiver and walked away.
