This Other Eden (44 page)

Back at
Max’s house the phone rang. Instinctively, Rosalie nearly picked it up, but
fortunately Judy stayed her hand. There were three rings and then the machine
clicked into action. First they heard Max’s outgoing message. ‘Ugh … Hi,
yeah .

OK, it’s
the machine, right? But you knew that. Listen, uhm leave a message, don’t leave
a message … live, die, it’s all the same dream, right? … Bye.’

Despite
the tension of the situation, Rosalie grimaced slightly at what she considered
to be a highly pretentious message. It did have one advantage, though, it was
delivered in a lazy, quiet growl, which at the other end of the line Max was
desperately hoping Tolstoy would not hear emanating from the phone.

‘C’mon
man!’ Max half shouted, timing it to coincide with the point when he guessed
his message would be playing. ‘I asked if you were going to kill me!’

Tolstoy
did not hear the message, and he did not spot the trick either, he had seen so
many portable phones placed on desks in his time.

Tolstoy
answered Max’s question at the point at which, in Max’s house, Max’s answering
machine began to record. The portable phone was a video phone, as indeed were
all phones, barring the occasional chic antique one, and Max had contrived to
place it with its tiny camera facing across the desk. Judy and Rosalie could
not only hear Plastic Tolstoy, but also see him, and all the while he was, of
course, being recorded.

The
hard sell.

‘Am I going to kill you?’
Tolstoy said, reiterating Max’s question. ‘I don’t think so, no. You don’t
know shit, and your pal Schwartz knows less. That’s why he sent you here, to
try and truth-drug a confession out of me. I guess the last thing I need to do
right now is to give credence to his libellous hypothesis by murdering his
stool pigeon, right?’

‘And
about his hypothesis?’ said Max, trying to hide his relief. ‘Is it true? Do you
sink oil tankers to sell Claustrospheres?’

‘What
do you think?’

‘I
think if you can fund Mother Earth while they try to kill you, you’d pretty
much do anything to make a sale.’

‘You
know you may not be so stupid after all, Max. How did you cotton on to the fact
that I fund Mother Earth?… Oh yeah, I remember now, you were with Nathan
Hoddy, weren’t you? That’s right. I guess he told you the plot of his movie,
huh?’

‘That’s
right, and when he died for it, I guessed he must have unwittingly stumbled on
the truth.’

‘Clever.
No, really, clever. You sure the girl didn’t work all that out for you? I never
had you picked out as a brain boy.’

‘No, I
figured it out all on my own. The girl’s my wife now, by the way.’

‘Really?
Congratulations. Like I could give a fuck about your domestic arrangements. I
must confess to you though, she looked eminently screwable, nice and natural.
Although to be frank, armed women with too much attitude make my dick go limp.’

Max was
thinking hard, trying to conjure up the right words to suit his purpose. He
knew that it was his job to coax some information out of Tolstoy about the
secret Claustrosphere marketing strategy. He also knew that he was dealing with
a far subtler and cleverer man than he was himself. But even clever people have
weak spots, Max felt that he knew what Tolstoy’s was. It was vanity.

‘Plastic,
does it ever bother you that what you do might be a little unethical?’

‘Huh?’
Tolstoy asked, as if he did not understand the question. ‘I mean, I grant you
it’s
clever
but. .

‘No,
Max, no buts. It’s clever, just that.’

Max
congratulated himself. He felt that he had judged his man well, he believed
that he was drawing Tolstoy in, playing on the well-known fact that Tolstoy
could not resist the sound of his own voice. Unfortunately for Max, this was
not the case. Contrary to what he’d said earlier, Plastic had decided that Max
would have to die that day. The Mother Earth girl and the FBI man, he was
unconcerned about. One was a terrorist, the other Plastic knew to be held in
contempt by his own colleagues and known in the Bureau as a paranoid conspiracy
theorist. Without evidence, of which they clearly had none, their voice would
not be heard. Max however was different. Here was a colossal star, a man whose
every word was reported in the media. True, Tolstoy owned the lion’s share of
that media, and Max, like his comrades, had no evidence. None the less, he was
a figure of sufficient significance to be capable, in a single interview, of
sparking public debate and rumour, which Tolstoy naturally wished to avoid.

Tolstoy
had therefore decided to have Max killed immediately, before he had a chance
to make his suspicions public. This was not a job which Plastic wanted carried out
in his house and so he had therefore decided to occupy Max for a few minutes,
whilst summoning his killing people. They could then be instructed to despatch
the inconvenient film star, once he had driven a suitably non-incriminating
distance from the Tolstoy mansion.

Tolstoy
idly pressed a button on his intercom.

‘Hey,
Sugar,’ he said to his trusted assistant, ‘I’m busy with a pal right now. When
the guys from despatch arrive, just get them to wait at the main gate, will
you?’

The
guys from despatch had not, in fact, up to that point, been summoned, but they
had been now. Tolstoy turned back to Max with an easy smile. Max had been right
about one thing, Tolstoy loved to show off and, confident that he would not be
overheard, he was quite happy to occupy a condemned man’s final minutes by
demonstrating what a genius he was.

‘What I
do is not unethical at all,’ Plastic said.

‘Maybe
just a little bit,’ said Max, pleased with himself for being such a subtle
interrogator.

‘No, I
don’t accept that. It is not unethical.’

‘But
you do deliberately sink oil tankers, cause nuclear leaks and hole toxic waste
convoys in the middle of big cities.’

‘I do
that, yes. Or, at least, I have my people do it. My sabotage people.’

‘And
this is not unethical?’

‘I
don’t consider it unethical. Illegal, certainly. But not unethical.’

‘Look,’
said Max. ‘God knows, I realise you’re busy, but I would love to know how you
get from poisoning kids to not being unethical. I mean, genuinely, I’m
fascinated. I know you’re a brilliant guy, I bet you can make the leap.’

‘It
ain’t unethical, because all the things we do would happen anyway,’ Tolstoy
said.

‘I
don’t understand,’ said Max.

‘Because
you’re stupid,’ Tolstoy replied, and commenced to explain what had to be the
nastiest marketing campaign in history, and there had been some horrors.

‘So the
Second Great Green Scare is coming to an end and we’re trying to offload the
early model Edens, right? Eden One, Eden Two, Eden Three. You wouldn’t remember
them because all this was before you were born, right? But the boom’s over and
I’m feeling down, OK? Sure, we’d done great for a while there, sold a shit-load
of product, but things were dropping off. I was young and hungry and I knew
that with a sure-fire item like Claustrosphere, we could do better. You getting
me?’

Max
explained that, though he might not be Albert Einstein, he could follow a
simple narrative. Tolstoy continued.

‘My
problem was that I could not use negative advertising; you know the kind of
thing… Hey! The worlds fucked! Save your ass! Buy a shelter!’

‘Why
couldn’t you do that?’ Max inquired, to demonstrate how attentive he was being.
‘Seems to me that would have been your best shot.’

‘Yeah?
Well, you’re wrong. Popular research informed us that people felt guilty enough
about the environment already. They took a very negative view towards a company
gleefully embracing Earth death in order to make a profit from it. So I had to
be clever, right? And believe me I was. I was young and I was clever. I had
ideas then! Man, did I have ideas! I used Rodin’s Thinker as my principal
symbol and that bit out of Shakespeare… you know, “This fortress built by
Nature” etc.’

“‘This
sceptered isle, This earth of majesty … This other Eden,”’ said Max,
remembering how recently he had heard that very quote, and how happy he had
been for a short while.

‘You
know it? Cute piece, am I right? And beautifully deployed, though I say it
myself. I had a product which was basically an immoral, irresponsible, cowardly
cop-out and I gave it
class.
If you give something class, then you make
people think they’re being clever. If you’ve done that, you can sell them
anything. But not for ever right? You can only play the class game for so long.
Engaging a customer intellectually has never been a substitute for engaging
them emotionally. What I really needed was scare tactics, and like I say, I
couldn’t use them. So as the Second Green Scare dies down, so do my figures;
plummeting would not be too depressing a word to describe the sales situation
during this time. Sure, we had some good months, sometimes very good, but we
were bumping along the bottom. Then I began to notice something, I noticed that
those good months always coincided with —‘

‘Some
terrible environmental catastrophe.’

‘Clever
kid. That chick must be good for you, Max. Of course they did. You open a
paper, you see there’s some province of India where no one can breathe any
more. You think, hey, the future’s looking kind of bleak, maybe I’d better
start covering my ass here. Disaster was good for business. So I started to buy
into news channels to make sure everybody got to hear about all the disasters.
If Claustrosphere itself couldn’t use scare tactics, then I’d get somebody else
to do it.’

‘Cute,’
Max observed.

‘Wasn’t
it?’ Plastic Tolstoy agreed. ‘There I was, running these news channels which
were getting awards and praise from greenies for prioritising environmental
news, and all the time I was just doing it to scare people into buying my
product. Boy, it was funny! We had all these environmentally concerned journos
and researchers lining up to work on my channels. They thought, “At last
somebody’s taking the fate of the planet seriously.” And I sure was!
Claustrosphere was turning into a multi-billion dollar industry. To me, that is
serious.’

Tolstoy
had leapt from his chair and was pacing about the room in a manner that Nathan
would have recognised, had he not been dead.

Back at
Max’s place this movement caused some concern.

‘I wish
he wouldn’t do that,’ said Rosalie. ‘He keeps walking out of shot.’

‘Don’t
worry,’ Judy replied, scarcely able to contain his excitement. ‘We’ve got
enough of his smug mug and the voice is coming over fine.’

Indeed
it was, and Plastic Tolstoy, blissfully ignorant of the phone trick, had
scarcely stopped for breath.

‘That’s
when I started to fund Natura and Mother Earth. They were my best adverts of
all. Anything environmentally conscious, I promoted it … secretly, of
course. Protest concerts, documentaries, terrorism. I was the greenest guy on
Earth, and all the while, I’m selling Claustrospheres. Ha ha ha! It was
perfect. But I still got a problem.’

‘It all
seems pretty straightforward to me,’ Max ventured.

‘Straightforward!
It was a nightmare! Everything depended on one, non-constant factor and, in
manufacturing terms, if you’re dependent on a non-constant factor, that’s your
profit gone.’

‘Excuse
me?’ said Max, the eager pupil.

‘A
non-constant factor! Which in this case was environmental disaster! Everyone
was hanging around waiting for one. The manufacturer, the distributor, the
retailer, the marketer, all waiting, and why? Because none of them could move
without
the customer,
and the customer did not appear in any great
numbers without the disaster. The tail was wagging the dog! You got Joe Soap,
right? He runs a small-town Claustrosphere showroom, normal weeks he’s selling
one, maybe two units, right? Suddenly, there’s a local disaster. The methane build-up
in an old landfill that has since been built over goes pop, and wipes out half
the suburbs. Bang! It’s a wake-up call! A Pavlovian response. “My God,
Marjorie,” says every short-sighted little schmuck in town, “the world’s
exploding, we’d better get a Claustrosphere.” Suddenly Joe Soap gets four,
maybe five
hundred
orders. But he doesn’t have the stock, he’s geared to
selling one a week. “I’ll get ‘em,” he cries, and calls the factory which
starts a rush build. Three months later five hundred units worth a billion
dollars turn up in Nowheresville, by which time the explosion is forgotten,
it’s history, and everybody has spent the money on sending little Jimmy to
college instead. A nightmare. Like I told you.’

‘It
certainly sounds it,’ Max agreed, trying to look sympathetic.

‘All
the time the product was chasing the demand. You can’t run a business like
that, the
demand
has to chase the
product.
I knew then that I had
to rationalise my principal sales strategy.’