You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps Read online

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE EVIL TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS by TOM HOLT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Three weeks, and still nobody had the faintest idea who they were. There were rumours, of course: they were Americans, Germans, Russians, Japanese, an international consortium based in Ulan Bator, the Barclay brothers, Rupert Murdoch; they were white knights, asset strippers, the good guys, the bad guys, maybe even Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits operating through a network of shells and holding companies designed to bypass US anti-trust legislation. Presumably the partners had some idea who they were, but Mr Wells hadn’t been seen around the office in weeks, Mr Suslowicz burst into tears if anybody raised the subject, and nobody was brave and stupid enough to ask Mr Tanner.

  ‘We bloody well ought to be able to figure it out for ourselves,’ declared Connie Schwartz-Alberich from Mineral Rights, not for the first time. ‘I mean, it’s a small industry, the number of players is strictly limited. Only—’ She pulled a face. ‘Only I’ve been ringing round - people I know in other firms - and everybody seems just as confused as we are. You’d have thought someone would’ve heard something by now, but apparently not. It’s bloody frustrating.’

  Thoughtful silence; a soft grunt of disgust from Peter Melznic as half of his dunked digestive broke off and flopped into his tea.

  ‘I still reckon it’s the Germans,’ said Benny Shumway, chief cashier. ‘Zauberkraftwerk or UMG. They’re the only ones big enough in Europe.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ muttered the thin-faced new girl from Entertainment and Media, whose name nobody could remember. ‘I worked for UMG for eighteen months - it’s not their style.’

  For some reason, the new girl’s statements were always followed by an awkward silence, as though she’d just said something rude or obviously false. Unfortunate manner was the generally held explanation, but it didn’t quite ring true. Peter Melznic was on record as saying that she gave him the creeps - coming from Peter, that was quite an assertion - but even he was at a loss to explain exactly why.

  ‘I don’t think it’s anybody in the business,’ the new girl went on. ‘I think it’s someone completely new that none of us has ever heard of. Possibly,’ she added after a moment’s reflection, ‘Romanians. It’s just a feeling I have.’

  ‘I don’t care who it is,’ Connie Schwartz-Alberich lied, ‘so long as it’s not Harrison’s. I couldn’t stand the thought of having to take orders from that smug git Tony Harrison. He was a junior clerk here once, believe it or not, years ago.’

  Benny Shumway frowned. ‘Is that right?’

  Connie nodded. ‘It was just before I got sent out to the San Francisco office. He started off in mineral rights, same as everybody. He was an obnoxious little prick even then.’

  Benny shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s Harrison’s,’ he said. ‘I happen to know they’re in deep trouble right now. In fact, if it wasn’t for the bank bailing them out—’ He paused, and frowned. ‘Anyhow, it’s not them. Not,’ he added, standing up, ‘that it’s something we can do anything about. And so far, admit it, they’ve not been so bad.’

  Connie snorted; Peter scowled; the new girl was staring in rapt fascination at a picture on the wall. She did things like that. Benny glanced at his watch and sighed. ‘Time I wasn’t here,’ he said.

  Left alone with four empty mugs and her thoughts, Connie tried to get back to the job in hand, but she couldn’t concentrate. Benny had been right, of course. Whoever they were, they’d bought the company, and she and her colleagues went with the rest of the inventory, the desks, chairs, VDU’s and stationery at valuation; it’d be entirely unrealistic to classify them as part of the goodwill. It was, she couldn’t help thinking, a funny old way to run a civilisation, but she’d become reconciled over the years to the fact that her consent was neither sought nor required. Five more years to retirement; a long time to hang on, but at her age she had no choice. Whoever they were, accordingly, they had her heart and mind.

  Just for curiosity, she turned her head and looked at the picture, the one that had apparently fascinated the new girl. Poole Harbour, in watercolours, by Connie’s brother Norman. There vas something odd about that girl, but for the life of her Connie couldn’t quite pin down what it was.

  She picked up a stack of six-by-eight black-and-white glossy prints. Most people would’ve been hard-pressed to say whether they were modern art, the latest pictures of the surface of the Moon sent back by the space shuttle, close-ups of wood grain or the inside view of a careless photographer’s lens cap. She picked one off the top of the stack, closed her eyes and rested the palm of her hand on it. Harrison’s, she thought, and scowled.

  The phone on Connie’s desk rang, startling her out of vague recollections of Tony Harrison as a junior clerk asking her in crimson embarrassment where the men’s bogs were. As she lifted her hand off the photograph to answer it, she noticed a faint cloud of moisture on the surface of the print. Ah, she thought, I must be worried.

  ‘Cassie for you.’

  ‘God,’ Connie sighed. ‘All right.’

  The usual click, and then: ‘Connie?’

  ‘Cassie, dear.’

  ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘What, again}’ Connie closed her eyes. I-will-not-be-brusque. I-was-young-and-feckless-once. No, she reflected; I was young, but I didn’t keep getting stuck all the bloody time. ‘Listen,’ she said pleasantly, ‘it’s just a tiny bit awkward at the moment, do you think you could possibly hang on there till lunch—?’

  ‘No,’ Cassie squeaked. ‘Look, I’m stuck, you’ve got to—’

  ‘All right,’ Connie sighed. ‘Tell me where you are, and I’ll come and get you.’

  She wrote down the directions on her scratchpad, the corners and edges of which she’d earlier embellished with graceful doodles of entwined sea serpents. ‘Please hurry,’ Cassie pleaded urgently. ‘Sorry to be a pain, but—’

  ‘Be with you as soon as I can,’ Connie said, and put the phone down. Bugger, she thought. It was, of course, only natural that the younger woman should have chosen her as her guide, role model and mentor. Even so. She glanced down at the pile of prints; she could always take them home and do them this evening, it wasn’t as if she had anything else planned. Somehow, that reflection brought her little comfort. She stood up, took down her coat from behind the door, and left the room.

  To get out of 70 St Mary Axe without (a) official leave (b) being seen by Mr Tanner, assuming you’re starting from the second floor back, you have to sneak across the landing into the computer room to the rear staircase. This will bring you out in the long corridor that curls round the ground floor like a python, and of course you’ll pass Mr Suslowicz’s door on your way. But that’s all right, because Cas Suslowicz—

  ‘Connie,’ said Mr Suslowicz, poking his head round his office door. ‘I was just coming to look for you.’

  ‘Ah,’ Connie replied.

  ‘You’re not busy right now, are you?’

  Yes. ‘No,’ Connie said, in a neutral sort of voice. ‘I was just on my way to the library, as a matter of—’

  ‘You couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’

  It was, always, the way he said it. You wouldn’t expect it to look at him; he had vast shoulders, gigantic round red cheeks and a dense black beard whose pointed tip brushed against the buckle of his trouser belt. Somehow, however, he managed to sound like a very small child who’s been separated from his parents at a fairground.

  Cassie, stuck, awaiting her with frantic impatience. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s these dratted specifications,’ said Mr Suslowicz; and Connie asked he
rself if she’d ever heard him use coarse or profane language. Buggered if she knew. ‘Some of it I can understand, but a lot of it’s horribly technical. It’d take me a week to look it all up, and even then I probably couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Do you think you could possibly—??’

  ‘Of course,’ Connie said brightly. ‘Get Nikki to leave it on my desk and I’ll look at it first thing after lunch.’

  ‘Ah.’ He could look so sad when he wanted to. ‘Actually, it’d be a tremendous help if you could just cast your eye over it terribly quickly now. I’ve got the client coming in at three, you see.’

  Connie thought quickly. Poor stuck Cassie; but stuck, by definition, means not likely to be going anywhere in a hurry. And maybe, just possibly, having to wait an extra forty minutes might encourage her to look where she was going, the next time.

  ‘No problem,’ Connie said. (And she thought: just five years to go, and then they can all get stuck permanently, with or without reams of incomprehensible technical jargon, and it won’t be any of my concern.) ‘How’s your back, by the way?’

  ‘Much better,’ Mr Suslowicz replied. ‘My own silly fault, of course. I just can’t get used to the fact that I’m not able to do the kind of stuff I could handle twenty years ago.’ He grinned sheepishly - he must have stupendous lip muscles, Connie reflected, In order to lift that bloody great big beard - and held the door for her.

  One glance at the wodge of single-spaced typescript reassured Connie that Cas wasn’t just being feeble. It was pretty advanced stuff, all about atomic densities and molecular structures, and she was rather proud of the fact that she could understand it.

  Explaining it, on the other hand— ‘Quite a job you’ve got on here,’ she said. ‘New client?’

  Cas nodded; she managed not to look at the tip of his beard massaging his crotch. ‘Quite a catch, if we can keep him happy,’ he said. ‘Hence the urgency.’

  Connie avoided his gaze. ‘Friends of the new management?’ she asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

  ‘Yes and no.’

  She waited a full half-second, then said, ‘Ah’ and turned her attention back to the technical drivel. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s like this. Imagine the Einsteinian spatio-temporal universe is a globe artichoke—’

  Whether or not Cas really understood what she’d endeavoured to explain to him, he let her go an hour later, thanking her profusely and apologising for taking up so much of her time. That was the infuriating thing about Cas Suslowicz, she thought, as she hurtled toward the front office. There ought to be a law, or something in the European Declaration of Human Rights, about bosses not being allowed to be nice. It went against a thousand years of tradition in the field of British industrial relations. Of course, she reminded herself as she pushed through the fire door, Cas Suslowicz is nominally Polish—

  ‘Early lunch?’ snapped the girl behind the reception desk. She was slight, slim, blue-eyed, red-haired and to all appearances not a day over twenty-two. She was also Mr Tanner’s mother.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about lunch,’ Connie counter-snapped. No chance of even a fleeting sandwich, if she had to go and unstick Cassie and be back in the office by two p.m. The explanation wasn’t, however, something that she could share with a boss’s mother. ‘If Tillotsons call, take a message,’ she added, and lunged out into the street.

  Poor stuck Cassie - Connie scowled. Impossible, in the circumstances, to take a taxi to Charing Cross and put in a pink expenses chit to get the money back off the firm; which meant that either she’d have to pay for a taxi out of her own money, or take the slow but cheaper Tube. Well, she thought; Cassie’s been there a fair old while already, another twenty minutes won’t kill her. As a sop to her conscience, Connie increased her pace to a swiftish march (new shoes, heel-tips not yet ground down to comfortable stubs). Halfway down St Mary Axe, however, someone called out her name and she stopped.

  ‘Connie Schwartz-Alberich,’ he repeated. ‘You haven’t got a clue who I am, have you?’

  He was short, slim, thin on top, glasses, fifty-whatever; Burton’s suit, birthday-present tie. His voice, however, came straight from somewhere else, long ago and very far away. It couldn’t be.

  ‘George?’

  He grinned. Voices and grins don’t decay the way other externals do. ‘Hellfire, Connie,’ he said, ‘you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘Balls,’ she replied demurely. ‘You have, though.’

  ‘True.’ He frowned. ‘I was going to say, fancy meeting you here, but—’ His frown deepened. ‘Don’t say you’re still stuck at JWW.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My God.’ He shrugged. ‘Why?’

  ‘Too old to get a decent job, of course. How about you? Still .it M&F?’

  He laughed. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘I went freelance - what, fifteen years ago. Got my own consultancy now.’

  ‘Doing all right?’

  ‘I guess so.’ His grin made it obvious that he was being modest. For over a second and a half, Connie hated him to death. ‘Better than the old days, anyhow. Look, is it your lunch hour, or can you skive off whatever you’re doing?’

  Poor Cassie, stuck; on the other hand, George Katzbalger, apparently returned from the dead. ‘Oh, go on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have a pizza.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘A what?’

  ‘Pi—’ She remembered one of the salient facts about George. ‘You choose,’ she said.

  ‘Pleasure. There’s this really rather good little Uzbek place just round the corner. Know it?’

  ‘Uzbek?’

  ‘Big bowls of rice with little bits of stuff in it.’

  ‘Yes, all right. But I can’t be too long, I’ve got to go and rescue someone before one-fifteen at the latest.’

  George shrugged. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘So,’ he went on, as he fell into step beside her, ‘how long’s it been, since New York?’

  Connie did the maths. ‘Twenty years, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t be. My God.’ He sighed. ‘And you’re still with JWW. Is it true, by the way, what I’ve been hearing?’

  ‘That depends on what it is,’ she said quietly.

  ‘About the takeover.’

  ‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘So what have you been hearing, exactly?’

  Yet another salient fact about George: he always knew less than he thought he did about everything. So, over the rice with little bits of stuff in, Connie learned that J. W. Wells & Co, the oldest established firm in its field, had been having a rough time of it lately - four of the seven partners dead or in permanent exile, public confidence shattered, client base uncertain, the corporate hyenas prowling - and had finally succumbed to an aggressive hostile takeover by an undisclosed buyer. Unfortunately, she knew all that already, and George hadn’t heard anything else apart from the kind of vague rumour she’d been swapping with the others over coffee an hour or so earlier. Annoyed, she let George pay for lunch and scuttled off to do whatever it was she’d been on her way to do when she’d bumped into him—

  Ah, yes. Unstick Cassie. Connie sighed. One damn thing after another.

  In Mortlake, where the shadows lie, the small family business of Hollingshead and Farren have been making small, intricate brass widgets for the plumbing, heating and hydraulic industries practically since the dawn of widget-making in the United Kingdom. Put an H&F widget in the hands of a skilled engineer who truly loves his craft and he’ll recognise it at once; most likely he’ll comment lovingly on its beautiful lines and exquisite quality of manufacture before pointing out that you can get something nearly as good and made in China for a fifth of the price. Even so, the old firm is still there, pouring, fettling and machining its small brass miracles; and although the Farrens have long since died out or gone away, the Hollingsheads remain: father, two uncles, six cousins and one son, Colin.

  ‘And when you’ve done that,’ Dad had said at breakfast, ‘you can nip down to Crinkell’s and pick up those end-mills.’

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sp; ‘Fine,’ Colin had replied. ‘Can I take the car?’

  ‘No, I’m using it. Walk’ll do you good. And you can drop in Boots while you’re passing and get me some of those heartburn pills.’

  Not for the first time, Colin reflected as he trudged down the High Street, collar folded up against the rain, that it really wasn’t fair that he didn’t have a car of his own any more. True, the business wasn’t doing as well as it should have been, and times were hard, and if he absolutely needed a car for something he could always borrow the Daimler, if Dad wasn’t using it. Even so. He’d been fond of his perky little Datsun, and they’d got next to nothing for it when it was sold.

  Preoccupied with these reflections, Colin was almost through the door of Boots before he noticed it was Boots no longer. Instead, it had at some point turned into a John Menzies. He went in anyway and bought a refill for his pen (a Christmas present from Uncle Phil; it hurt the tip of his middle finger, but you don’t want to give offence). That, and a detour to Tesco (who did a practically identical heartburn tablet in a slightly different-coloured box) explained his late arrival at the meeting, which he’d forgotten all about.

  It turned out to be the sort of meeting that he’d cheerfully have missed altogether. There was a grim man from the bank, and an equally forbidding-looking woman from the accountants; also some sort of lawyer and a young woman whose name and function Colin didn’t quite catch, but what the hell; from context he assumed her to be another species of commercial vulture, wheeling by invitation over the moribund carcass at seventy-five pounds per hour plus VAT.

  ‘The bottom line is,’ the man from the bank was saying, ‘unless you can find a way to compete with low-cost imports—’

  Colin tuned out. The same man, or someone very like him, had said the same thing at the same time last year, and the year before that, and just because something’s unpleasant and true it doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes for gripping listening. He glanced across the table at the unspecified young woman. Her name, he remembered from the round of cursory introductions, was Cassandra something, and she was rather nice-looking; not that that signified, since it’s hard to take a romantic interest in a scavenger who’s about to strip the residual flesh off your atrophied remains. Assuming she was a vulture, of course, but it was probably a safe bet. Unless she was a fabulously wealthy widget collector who wanted a hundred thousand 67/B’s by next Thursday, chances were she wasn’t there to make things better.