The Bialy Pimps (21 page)

“What am I, fucking Toad?” he said.

This remark caused Tracy to bounce and jump around him for the rest of the evening, making video game sound effects.

Dicky was torn. The staff had worn the ridiculous hats and that was great, but his email interception plot as a whole was a miserable failure. The employees were angry and embarrassed, and the deli’s quality was down the tubes. Yet revenue wasn’t down. How was Bingham’s ever supposed to go out of business if customers kept coming? How was 3B to take over and become profitable if the steady stream of customers kept paying more and more money?

Then he remembered something. Income was only half of the equation.
 

The other way to sink a business was to spend, spend, spend.

The next day, Tracy asked Philip what exactly the men in the lobby with the industrial dollies were up to.

“They’re delivering a handmade cherrywood bedroom set,” said Philip.
 

“To the lobby?”
 

“Wally says the place needs more ‘homey charm.’”
 

As they watched, two customers sat down on opposite sides of a low dresser and set their sandwiches on its top. After using a napkin to saturation, one of the customers opened one of the dresser drawers and tossed the napkin inside, then, surprised, removed a pillowcase and began wiping his face on that instead.
 

“That looks expensive,” said Tracy.

“Not for corporate,” said Philip. “The money for it came out the safe. You’d be surprised how much is in there lately.”
 

“Not as much as there was yesterday, apparently,” said Tracy as the movers began placing a headboard for the set’s bed.
 

“Especially after the Faberge eggs I bought to hang from the light fixtures,” agreed Philip.

Captain Dipshit had begun walking by the store regularly. He never went inside anymore, but severely enjoyed watching the action through the windows. The place was turning into a zoo. The other day, he’d seen the dwarf inside, bouncing on a bed near the windows. The little man had fallen off and crashed to the floor, then had laid still for thirty seconds, apparently unconscious, but then had climbed back up and resumed his trampoline antics.
 

When Captain Dipshit told Dicky what he’d seen and how happy it was making him, Dicky snapped at him.
 

“But we’re getting them back!” said Captain Dipshit, who only had personal motives for interfering with Bingham’s.
 

Dicky, who had both business
and
personal motives, was at the end of his rope. The place was doing better than ever, and Dicky only had himself to blame.
 

The situation was maddening. He’d done everything wrong. He’d vastly increased prices, lowered quality, and lowered service. He’d increased expenses and decreased morale. He’d made the place unprofessional and made the employees unhappy and mutinous. Why wasn’t it working? How much would customers put up with before leaving? How much would employees put up with before setting the place on fire? He had pushed as hard as was sensible – and, to tell the truth, well beyond.
 

And there was something else, too. Something troubling.

Back in school, the district psychologist had declared Dicky “unstable.” The boy liked dissecting things in science class for all the wrong reasons and kept proposing school projects that involved blowing things up – blowing up a cinderblock, blowing up an effigy of the principal (“For fun, you know?”), blowing up a storage shed that was still in use by the janitor. When called to the office to discuss his predilection for detonation, he justified his projects in disturbing educational terms.
This would demonstrate how much poison gas would be required to cause one hundred fatalities,
he might say. Or,
This explosion would teach lessons about primary and collateral damage, but also demonstrate the ratio of dead to wounded.
 

During Dicky’s four years in high school, the district went through three psychologists. They didn’t retire; they mysteriously transferred. One of them got himself unlisted in the phone book.
 

So Dicky had always had that area of instability, and he knew it. It didn’t matter. All genius was troubled. As long as he kept a close eye on what fascinated him and in what way, he could avoid the actions that tended to attract unwelcome attention.

But this Bingham’s business was unhinging him in much the same way as it was unhinging his idiot accomplice. Making his instabilities unstable.

Dicky went into a creative fugue when he wrote as Wally. Because he knew that his subconscious mind desperately needed an editor, he’d forced himself to come out of this semi-trance before sending the emails, just to be safe. And with a cup of coffee and five minutes’ perspective on what he’d written, he sometimes found things that were inappropriate. As time went on, there were more and more such things. Over the past few days, he’d had to remove several of his best but most potentially problematic managerial suggestions. “Try killing yourself” and “Try killing each other” were two notable edits.
 

He had to be crafty but reasonable. Devious but level-headed.
 

But if he stayed reasonable, what was left?
 

He’d strung this out too far. He should never have interfered. Before all of this email business, all Bingham’s had on him was one humiliating job experience and one humiliating job loss, plus a smattering of petty frustrations and unjust anecdotes.
 

But now he was in too deep. He was like a gambler down thousands of dollars and losing more all the time... but unwilling to make those losses final by quitting.
 

It shouldn’t be this hard to fail.
 

Dicky himself had failed miserably at 3B, and he wasn’t even trying. But as surrogate manager of Bingham’s, he was accidentally brilliant. Here he was, actively trying to ruin a business... and nothing he could do could so much as ding it.

At this point, there was really no reason to hold back. He could propose whatever he wanted and if they refused, they refused. It certainly couldn’t make things any worse.

So if he couldn’t propose violence, he’d propose the absurd. He’d propose the sure-to-be-effective-if-they-did-it.

He asked himself:
What’s one thing that, without question, would drive customers away in droves and ensure that they never ate at Bingham’s again?

He opened a new email. Might as well shoot for the moon.

“Oh, that is
it
!” Philip yelled when he read Wally’s latest email. “I’ve had just about enough of this profit-increasing strategy bullshit! First the dumb hats, then that idea to grease the floor behind the counter for ‘increased movability,’ then the secret bank accounts that you can’t withdraw from, and now this. I’m calling Wally. I’ve had it!”

He stalked over to the Ghetto Phone, almost running down the life-sized cardboard standies of Mel Tormé and Barbara Streisand that Wally had ordered him to put up to increase “celebrity appeal.” He picked up the handset and angrily punched Wally’s number.

“Hello?” said Wally from the other end of the line.

“Wally? This is Philip at Bingham’s. I just got your latest email, and there is just
no fucking way
I’m going to start serving possum. Or mouse. Or pigeon. Maybe you’ll want to fire me over this or whatever other bullshit policies Bingham is giving you to hand to me, but I just don’t care anymore, and if you
do
fire me, maybe the health department would like to know what you have in mind. Things are too weird around here nowadays, Wally. Don’t give me ‘profit and loss.’ Since when did you decide to start running a circus? You want to know the truth? I think you’re screwing with us. Maybe you bigwigs are having a nice big
laaaaugh
at the idiot kids in Columbus before dropping the axe. Why? I don’t know, but...”

“Hello?” Wally interrupted him.

“I said, you’re out of your minds, and if you think I’m going to...”

“Hello?” Wally interrupted him again.

“Hello?” Philip asked. “Hello, Wa...”

At that moment, Wally rudely hung up on him.

“Son of a bitch!” Philip growled, incredulous. “This phone is totally fucked!”

“I didn’t do it,” said Smooth B, who was wearing one of the Mushroom Kingdom bagel hats. He kept swatting at the plastic bagel when it bounced into his field of vision, like a cat with a toy.

Philip called to the Anarchist. “Hey, come here a sec. Do you know anything about phones?”

“Yes,” said the Anarchist. “You talk into the bottom and words come out of the top. If you press the numbers on that pad for long enough, somebody says hello to you.”

“Come over here. These things have been going for months now. I just called Wally and he couldn’t hear me.”

“And you were talking into the bottom part?”

Philip looked at him.

“Okay, fine. Take it apart,” said the Anarchist. “Maybe something’s loose.”

“Just rip it open? What if we break it?”

The Anarchist gave him a stoic eye. “Did you just express concern over breaking a broken phone?”

“But what if, you know, a pro could fix it and we ruin it?”

“Did you just express concern over a phone that during the past months has been taunting and mocking you with its shittiness? A phone that, in a monarchical kingdom with you as its liege, you would convict to torture and death, and show no remorse?”

“You’re right,” he said. “Fuck this phone.”
 

The Anarchist was ahead of him. He pulled at the plastic seams on the handset to no avail. “Do you have a screwdriver?” he asked.
 

“In the tool box.”

When the Anarchist came back with the screwdriver, he wedged it between the interlocked plastic pieces of the handset. It cracked open with a loud snap. Jenny, who was waiting on a customer, looked over curiously.

The Anarchist frowned at the two pieces of the severed phone and its spilled innards. He had knocked a chunk out of the already pitted plastic casing. “Quality construction,” he decided, and proceeded to poke around in the wires directionlessly.

“Any ideas?”

“This looks kind of broken, don’t you think?” he asked Philip.

“Yeah, but I think you just did that with the screwdriver.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

“But it’s the wire running to the mouthpiece! Didn’t you say that Wally couldn’t hear you talk? It seems logical that this was the problem.” The Anarchist believed that he always knew the solution better than anybody else.
Of course
that was the problem.

“It sure won’t work
now
,” Philip told him, “but I think you just snapped it. I think there must be another problem.”

“Well, we can try, right? Do you have any wire? Maybe I can... you know... splice it.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“No wire at all?” he looked around. “How about we break something else and use the wire inside of that?” He eyed the toaster, the ice machine, the slicer, and Smooth B.

“There might be some wire in The Steamer Graveyard,” Philip said.

The Anarchist felt a chill run through him.
The Steamer Graveyard.
“Do you want to go get it?” he asked.

Philip shook his head. “Nah.”

The Anarchist paused for a second, wary.

“Fine,” he said.
 

He turned and walked toward the back, past the grill hood and the ice machine, past the vomit sink, the office, and the miraculous portrait of Jason in the plaster. He paused in the back room. Ahead of him to his right was the long, steel triple sink, and to the sink’s left was the garbage can that had been the temporarily final resting place of The Rat incarnation that Rich had flattened with the carbon dioxide tank.
 

The Steamer Graveyard.

“Dammit,” he said aloud.

He walked through the back room and toward the outer door that opened into the alcove where the employees parked their cars. The beaten and dented back door was not tightly sealed (why should it? It too was ghetto), and he could see the white side of Philip’s car through the cracks where the weatherstripping had degenerated. He swallowed, cautiously pivoted to his right, and descended the ominous, dirty steps into the blackness of the old basement.

As soon as he was underground, the air changed. It became moist and cool, and blackness wrapped around him like a shroud. There were no lights, and this was the domain of The Rat. The Anarchist shuddered at the idea.

Once he reached the bottom, he pursed his lips, squinted, and felt along the wall for the light switch. He ran into a few spiderwebs and something gooey before finding what he was looking for, and turned on the light.

The gloom did not vanish; it merely retreated like a vampire backing away from a cross.

The entire basement was lit by three naked lightbulbs. All hung from wires, not fixtures, and the building inspector would have had many problems with each. The light from the bulbs, which were spaced evenly down the length of the rectangular main room, did not penetrate the darkness that huddled in the numerous side chambers.
 

The basement was a dungeon. Not much more than a double-wide hallway, it snaked and turned past the smaller sub-chambers. There were many such sub-chambers, and each had its own sub-chambers, many of which interconnected. The entire area somehow covered a space that (with a respectful nod to the house in
House of Leaves
) seemed much bigger than the floor above. In some of the small, dank auxiliary rooms were pieces of rusted-out furniture and the ancient remnants of Pizazzle’s gigantic deep fryers. Some of the paraphernalia seemed completely alien – troubling heaps of corroded metal which seemed not to have an earthly origin.
 

Somewhere down here lurked the ominous industrial bagel slicer. The Anarchist could feel it watching him.