Good Behavior (14 page)

“That's nice,” Dortmunder said.

Stan Murch, still looking out the window, said, “I wouldn't want to be making any getaway through
that
mess down there. Just from here, I can see five separate and distinct gridlocks.”

“The idea is,” Dortmunder reminded him, “we make our getaway completely inside the building. Just to here.”

“That's the part I love,” Kelp said.

Tiny gave Kelp a look. “You told us,” he said.

The door opened and J.C. Taylor came in, shrugging into a short jacket. To Dortmunder, she said, “Is this everybody?”

At the desk, Tiny closed the detective course book and sat with a belligerent defensive look on his face, as though expecting her any second to demand her desk. Stan's concentration remained mostly on the traffic seven stories down, but Kelp abandoned “Camptown Races” at the far turn and looked alert, capable, ready to be of assistance. And Howey blinked at Taylor with undisguised lust, which she ignored.

“Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “This is all of us.”

“Okay,” she said. “There's a couple things we should talk about before I go.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Such as.”

“Such as do me a favor and don't use the phone. And if it rings, don't answer. And if anybody comes around and knocks on the door, for Christ's sake don't any of you birds say you're J.C. Taylor.”

Dortmunder, thinking of Chepkoff, said, “Process servers?”

“There's always a little lawsuit or two in this business,” she said. It didn't seem to bother her much. “Just so J.C. Taylor doesn't get served any papers, that's all I ask. Cover your ass is the name of this game.”

“Just a foul-talking woman, that's all,” Tiny said. He grumbled it in his low voice, like an earthquake over in the next county, but he could be heard very clearly in this room.

Howey, looking shocked, said, “Say, wait a minute there, Tiny!”

Facing Dortmunder, ignoring the others, Taylor said, “We can always call it off now, if you want.”

“Everything's just fine,” Dortmunder assured her. “We appreciate the place.”

She hesitated a second, not looking away from Dortmunder, and he knew that if anybody said anything now, no matter what, she'd balk and the deal would be off. But Tiny had crunched down into something the size and shape of an irritable Volkswagen Beetle, and the others clearly all sensed something in the air—even Stan, who had turned away from the window now with an air of mild curiosity—so everybody just stood and waited.

And then J.C. Taylor let out a held breath, and nodded, and said, “Okay. These keys”—she dropped them both in Dortmunder's palm—“you'll need. The bigger one's for the men's John, down at the end of the hall on the left. The other one's the office door. I don't subscribe to any part of the alarm service—I mean, what have I got to steal, right?—so you can go in and out as much as you want.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said.

“I'll be back Monday morning at eight.”

“We'll have the goods in this back room here.”

“The mailers you wanted,” she said, “are on the shelves outside.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “You got paid?”

“Oh, yes.” Her smile had just a hint of mockery in it. “Mr. Bulcher was very agreeable,” she said.

A low rumble sounded; maybe a subway train going by far below.

J.C. Taylor looked around the room, giving it one last visual check before turning it over to the sub-tenants. “Just try not to bring the cops in here, okay?” she said.

“That's top of our list,” Dortmunder promised her.

“Okay. Well, break a law,” she said, and left.

Tiny broke the little silence that followed: “That woman,” he grumbled, low and gravelly, as he frowned at the door.

“The office,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Forget the woman, Tiny, look at the office.”

“I can wait,” Tiny said. “But that broad is too unrefined. When this is over, she's goin to finishing school.”

21

Once upon a time there was a small and mountainous South American nation called Guerrera, run by a small and fat dictator named Pozos, a man who devoted his life to his fellow countrymen; devoted his life to robbing them, torturing them and murdering them. In the capitals of the great world outside, his domestic arrangements mattered not at all. He was welcomed in palaces and parliaments, his Guerrera belonged to alliances and organizations, he received (and pocketed) foreign aid from great powers. What a happy man Pozos was, all in all!

But then, one dark day, he went too far. He annoyed Frank Ritter.

Frank Ritter's second son, Garrett, was a tall and big-shouldered man of thirty-four, already balding on top and already starting those jowls which would someday be his most salient feature. His body was kept in trim by skiing, sailing and scuba diving, but it seemed there was absolutely nothing he could do to keep his face from rushing toward lax and puffy middle age.

For the past three years, Garrett had been in charge of Mergers & Acquisitions for Templar International, a job that had familiarized him with much of the free world's industry, many of its top executives and most of its bases of wealth. It was time, Frank Ritter had decided, for Garrett to be introduced to the Greater Reality. Or, as Ritter had described it aphoristically in his commonplace book:

“The real world is just beyond the visible world.”

In his private suite in the Margrave Corporation on the seventy-fourth floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, that Saturday afternoon, Ritter shared a drink and some of his thoughts with his son Garrett before going on to greet the freedom fighters assembling in the larger conference room. “The essential point is,” Ritter told his son, “the world has changed. The world
always
changes. I would say that most people in this country still retain a nineteenth-century view of the United States as an independent industrial nation with a republican form of government, wouldn't you?”

“Well,” Garrett said, his puffy face frowning above his trim body, “that's what it is, isn't it?” Like all of Frank Ritter's children, Garrett walked warily, but had learned that one was always relatively safe to behave as though Dad knew best.

Now, Dad shook his head and said, “Of course it isn't. And when that's what America
was
, in the nineteenth century, people didn't know it.
They
thought the United States was still an agrarian democracy with a government run part-time by farmers and lawyers. Reality is always one jump ahead of the masses, Garrett.”

“Okay,” Garrett said, and sipped at his vodka-tonic. Dad didn't like people who drank too much. On the other hand, Dad
hated
people who didn't drink at all. A narrow path, but a sure-footed Ritter child could find it.

Frank Ritter said, “Insofar as America is a major industrial nation, no, it is not. What we are today is the premier technological and service nation. Heavy industry is done in Japan and Germany and Poland. Arms manufacture is done in Brazil and Israel. But American technological preeminence has meant increasing partnerships with these foreign industries. Any partnership that survives is merely a gentlemanly form of absorption, so now we have the multinational corporation, and
that's
where power lies today. Not in the UN, certainly, and not in national governments.”

“Gee, Dad,” Garrett said. “No?”

“No. The multinational is in the position of the bank robber in the old West; all he has to do is ride straight and hard to be safe, because the posse can't cross the border. We have taken over the roles that nations recently held; we wage war, collect taxes through debt service, protect our areas of property and the worker/citizens within those areas, and we distribute power as we see fit.”

Garrett, along with his brothers and sisters, had grown up believing that his father spouted two things fairly constantly; verbal nonsense and lovely money. Accept the former with obvious pleasure, and the flow of the latter was unending. “That all sounds exciting, Dad,” he said. Past his father, across this tastefully anonymous living room, the window showed a pale blue sky with stray clouds. The skiing would be good in Norway now. Oh, to be in Ostersund, now that spring is here!

“It's more than exciting, Garrett,” Ritter said. “It's
real
. The truth is, the pendulum has swung all the way back, several hundred years, and we are today entering upon the next great era of feudalism.”

Garrett blinked. Feudalism was something that had wafted by once or twice in college days, leaving no residue. Doubtfully, he said, “You mean, King Arthur and like that? The Round Table?”

Ritter laughed, a sound that always had a threat in it. “I don't mean myth,” he said. “I mean reality. Feudalism is a system based not on national citizenship but on loyalties and contracts between individuals. Power lies not in the state but in ownership of assets, and all fealty follows the line of power. Very sensible.”

“I guess so,” Garrett said, blinking slowly.

Ritter said, “Think of it this way. I am the baron. Templar International and Margrave Corporation and Avalon State Bank and so on are the castles I have built in different parts of my territory, for defense and expansion. The subsidiary companies we've bought or merged with owe their allegiance not to America but to
Margrave
. We reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. When necessary, we can protect our most important people from the laws of the state, just as the earlier barons could protect their most important vassal knights from the laws of the Catholic Church. The work force is tied to us by profit-sharing and pension plans. I don't expect national governments to disappear, any more than the British or Dutch royal families have disappeared, but they will become increasingly irrelevant pageants. More and more, actors will play the parts of politicians and statesmen, while the real work goes on elsewhere.”

“With us, you mean,” Garrett said. His puffy face lit up with excitement. He thought about buying new skis in Scandinavia.

“And in fact,” Ritter said, “this is ultimately a benevolent advance for humanity. Of course, some eggs will get broken in the making of this omelet—”

“Happens,” said Garrett understandingly.

“Yes,” said Ritter, who didn't like his train of thought interrupted. “But once the omelet is made, this will be a happier, more prosperous, far more peaceful Earth. The test-case of Japanese industry shows us that workers whose primary loyalty is to their employer rather than their citizenship or their union are more contented, more productive, less disease-ridden and longer-lived.”

Frowning, vaguely remembering something he'd read in a newspaper on a plane, Garrett said, “Don't they commit suicide a lot?”

“Not at all,” Ritter said. “Only among the youngest entrants to the work force, a natural weeding-out process. Japs
like
to commit suicide anyway, it's deeply embedded in their culture.”

“Mata Hari,” Garrett agreed, nodding.

“Hara-
kiri
,” his father corrected, in some annoyance. “Mata Hari was shot by the French government as a traitor.”

Grinning uncertainly, Garrett said, “I guess that's a level of power we haven't got to yet, is it?”

“Not in America,” Ritter agreed. “Though we're close. Consider this building we're in. Is it in the United States? Or is it within the sphere of Avalon State Bank?”

“Well, both,” Garrett said, brow furrowed. It was so easy to be wrong with Dad.

And apparently he was wrong again. Smiling coldly, Ritter said, “Where does government influence show, Garrett? To begin with, we got a tax abatement in return for setting aside a garden downstairs as a public space, which is so public we get to lock it every night at eight. In this building we have technicians of various kinds who are foreign nationals and who technically can't work in the United States without government permission; the infamous green card. But their employer of record is some foreign subsidiary of ours, therefore no green card needed. But what about, let us say, invasion?”

Garrett, who'd been nodding along like a good son, was brought up short. “Invasion? You mean the Russians?”

“Certainly not. The Russians are the greatest false threat to this country since the Yellow Peril. I'm talking about physical attack on any part of this building. Let's say someone was foolish enough to try to rob our bank or one of our tenants, would the police or the FBI be the first line of defense? Absolutely not. A small part of our army is in this building, Garrett, with equipment as up-to-date as any garrison force on Earth.
Our
sentries would repel attack, and
our
insurance subsidiary would make good any unlikely loss that might be suffered in this building.”

“So we're the government here,” Garrett said.

“Exactly. The great task for you children in the next generation will be the new distribution of power, deciding which of the new barons will become the new kings.”

“King Garrett the First,” Garrett said, smiling. He saw himself swooping down a Norwegian glacial slope in an ermine robe and gold crown.

Another thin smile from Dad, who said, “The old terms won't come back, Garrett, only the old reality. If you'll always bear in mind that we are now on the threshold of the new feudalism, that today's CEO is every bit as powerful as yesterday's duke or marquis, you'll never be at a loss when business problems arise.”

“I really appreciate all this, Dad,” Garrett said, sounding hearty and sincere, looking puffy and false.

A shadow of doubt crossed Ritter's face, quickly obliterated. “That's why,” he said, “family is so important. With the obsolescence of national patriotism, ultimate loyalty to the barons must reside in family connections, blood and marriage.” He sighed. “Which is one of the many truths I can't seem to get across to your sister Elaine.”