The Deceivers (9 page)

His function was easy. Find out what it costs, per unit, and down to the last fraction of a mill. It took fifteen people and over a hundred thousand dollars of accounting and tabulating equipment to perform the function. There are twenty-six thousand units in an order, say. So merely take the cost of materials, including waste and scrap, and the appropriate labor costs for production, inspection, packaging, etc., and a proportional amount of factory overhead (and keep track of that too, as closely as you keep track of every change in the cost of materials) and then divide the whole shooting match by 26,000 and you can step up proudly and say, “Gentlemen, each widget we made in the last reporting period cost us precisely $1.3931. This naturally includes that order’s share of the cost of reupholstering the furniture in the women’s lounge. And many other things.”

So mighty Ballinger computes the new sales price for the next batch of widgets—and with great guile sells the whole production to itself.

And, in the terribly important and significant annual report, the total unit costs of each of several hundred different products, multiplied by the total in each order, must, of course, exactly match the total operating expense of the Hillton Metal Products Division of the Ballinger Corporation.

And there is, of course, one other little function above and beyond merely keeping track. That is, by report and memorandum, call attention, in a severe and acerbic way, to those areas where costs are climbing too rapidly, and those areas where it would appear that a saving might be effected—without alienating entirely the devoted gentlemen in Production, Purchasing, Engineering, Design, Maintenance, Labor
Relations, Inspection, Stock Control, Storage and Shipment.

Watchdog all potential leaks because, should in the next reporting period an identical widget cost $1.4338, that is a serious matter. It is a 3% jump in the cost of making widgets in a reporting period when overall production costs advanced a mere .07%.

And what makes a widget stand out like a sore thumb? Too much scrap or too many rejections? Clamp down on Production or Inspection. Someone must explain. Ah ha! Now we have it! Stock Control goofed. Submitted an incorrect report on the present level of Compacted Gezundamite in stock, and so to avoid an interruption of production, Purchasing had some flown in by air express, and the widget order was debited with the expense involved, thus raising the unit cost by 3%. Appended hereto is the buff copy of the report from Stock Control explaining the situation and what steps have been taken to prevent a recurrence in the future. A new reorder level has been set. There is every expectation that on the widget order now in process of production, the unit cost will drop to the approximate level reported on May 8th to your office, covering the April reporting period. Signed, Carl A. Garrett.

A staff of fifteen, twelve of them female. Fifteen hundred square feet of working area for clerical personnel, eleven hundred square feet for files and electric accounting equipment, four hundred square feet for male staff assistants. One hundred and sixty-eight square feet for Carl Garrett, assistant to the plant manager in charge of factory cost accounting. An office twelve by fourteen. Name in dark red on the blond face of the flush door with the spun aluminum doorknob. Two casement windows through which can be seen, beyond the parking lot and the gritty old shoulder of the Pike Wire and Cable Company, the white span of the new bridge three miles away, and a glint of river, and the summer smog over the city beyond.

One standard sepia photomural of an aerial view of the plant. One air-conditioning grid in a high corner, humming almost inaudibly. Plywood paneling in pale birch. Wall-to-wall carpeting in a tufted blue-green. One gray steel executive desk with dark blue linoleum top. One stubby gray desk lamp, shaped like a toadstool. One heavy chair with arms, behind the desk, upholstered in gray plastic. Two other comfortable chairs. One straight chair. One machine for dictation,
standing against the wall behind the cattycorner desk, standing waiting on slender legs. On the side of the desk, a gray phone hanging. On the desk a dark gray intercom, a double pen set, a ceramic pot containing a half dozen needle-pointed yellow pencils, Venus No. 3, points upward, an in-basket and an out-basket, a memo pad, a framed snapshot of Joan with the kids, a large glass and leather ash tray with a grid of brass wire across the top.

Seated at the desk, the chief of section, in gray dacron, button-down collar, green tie with small black figure. He has swiveled his chair a quarter turn so that he looks rather blankly at a bank of gray filing cabinets against the far wall. The door to the corridor is closed. A financial report is open on his desk. He has a yellow pencil in his hand and he is gently stroking the rim of his right ear with the eraser end.

Enter through the open door at his left, Mrs. Brisbie, his secretary. Garrett is Captain of the command. Finch, Goldlaw and Sherban are his junior officers. Mrs. Brisbie is his master sergeant, a tall woman in her thirties with black hair, a cold, pale and elegant Italianesque face, a long white neck, thin legs and tiny and delicate ankles. But between the neck and the legs, there is an astonishing and startling abundance of big round warm thrusting breasts, and a protrusion of rounded meaty buttocks. Mrs. Brisbie carries herself as though all these feminine riches are an oppressive burden, an affliction she did not ask for and must endure, a grotesquerie she must continually attempt to ignore, despised burdens forever hobbling about, flaunting themselves in a continual state of bawdy insurrection. No man will make the mistake of being misled by her abundances, because there is about her the arid flavor of the voluntary spinster. She is a cold and utterly humorless and vastly efficient mechanism, which dresses itself with utmost severity and exudes a faint aroma of disinfectant. From the side her figure forms a startling and unlikely letter S, so pronounced that even though she tries to hold herself erectly, when she walks it appears that she is bent slightly forward from the waist. There is much office speculation about the unlikely fact of there ever having been a Mr. Brisbie. Some suspect that he is a myth. It is known that she lives with a maiden aunt, that she collects antique glass and crystal.

When the Hillton plant first opened, she was in the stenographic pool. It is remembered that an unwary stock
boy, deluded by the splendor of the hips clenching their way down the corridor directly in front of him, perhaps bemused beyond caution, administered a dreadful tweak. Mrs. Brisbie whirled like a striking snake and irrevocably flattened his nose against his face with a small white fist clenched to marble hardness.

She walks noiselessly to the desk, and makes a small correct sound in her throat. Carl Garrett starts slightly and swivels his chair back and looks up at the white face and feels for the ten thousandth time as though the stupendous breasts are aimed at him like twin howitzers.

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to remind you of the meeting in Mr. Hardy’s office at eleven, Mr. Garrett.”

He looked at his watch. “Thanks. Better take off right now, eh? It isn’t really a conference, Mrs. Brisbie. We just sit around and match quarters.” He watched her expression, saw the customary look of bafflement, then a faint flush, then comprehension that this must be one of Mr. Garrett’s jokes, saw the artificial smile, and heard the flat and deadly ha-ha. She walked back into her office and he stood for a moment, wishing he could stop himself from ever making any kind of light comment to Mrs. Brisbie, no matter how inane. He knew it was painful for her to have to cope, and it was painful watching her. As he walked down the corridor he wished he could get rid of her. He wished he could, just one time, have the guts to be unfair. She was ferociously competent and utterly loyal. But, by God, she was a deadening and stultifying influence around his shop. He realized dolefully that he would never have the heart to get rid of her. She wouldn’t be able to understand why. And she was healthy as a horse. Never missed a day. Just as he reached Jim Hardy’s office he realized that he might in all probability have to endure Mrs. Brisbie for another twenty-three years. He found the idea more distressing than he would have thought possible. He and Brisbie would grow old together. They would wither and fade, until nothing was left of either of them but wisps of dryness. Everything would fade but the Brisbie breasts. They would remain unchanged—vast taut globes, flushed with life and youth, quivering rebelliously.

“I like people to walk in here smiling,” Jim Hardy said. “What’s so funny?”

Jim Hardy, the plant manager, was an amiable and reasonably
able man in his middle fifties. He had a guilty secret and did not suspect that most of his staff was quite aware of it. He knew he bore a certain resemblance to President Eisenhower, and because of his deep admiration for the man, he had been, for several years, patterning his smile, speech, dress and habits accordingly. Hitherto a duffer, he had even gone to work on his golf game with such application and diligence that he had gotten it down into the middle eighties. And he had done such extensive reading in the field of military literature that he was able to use battlefield analogies in discussing HMP problems. Behind his back he was known as Little Ike, and even though Carl was terribly afraid that one day someone would slip and use it to his face, he did want to be a witness when that happened.

“A daydream, Jim. Or I guess you’d call it a mental image concerning my Mrs. Brisbie.”

Ray Walsh, doodling on one of the yellow pads at the small conference table, chuckled and said, “She’s got one advantage as a secretary, Carl. No wife, meeting her, is ever going to be alarmed when her husband has to work late at the office.”

“Everybody here?” Jim said. “All right, men. Tim here has been planning the order of battle on this extrusion problem, and now he’s come up with a flank attack that looks mighty interesting to me. Tell the boys about it, Tim.”

   Carl left the office at twenty after five on Monday. He drove into the city planning to eat at Herman’s Rathskeller on Grant Avenue. But, when he stopped for a drink at the bar, he ran into Gil Sullivan, a Crescent Ridge neighbor, and they got into a discussion about the school problem, and he had several drinks and then suddenly realized he wouldn’t have time to eat and get to the hospital by seven. So he had another drink, and when he drove out to the hospital he realized, to his surprise, that he was slightly tight. He drove with extra caution and so it was a little after seven when he got to room 314. Rosa Myers was in her bed by the windows reading the book Cindy had brought Joan. Joan had her bed cranked down and her eyes were closed.

She opened them and smiled and said, “Hi, dear. Crank me up, please.”

“How are you, honey? You look a little pooped.”

“I’m exhausted and I’m famished. I could eat a horse, but they won’t let me. And you smell like a still.”

“I was going to eat at Herman’s, but I ran into Gil Sullivan and we went around and around on the school thing. I’ll eat after I leave here.”

“Was there anything interesting in the mail?”

“I haven’t been home yet.”

“Oh, I was hoping there might be something from the kids. Aren’t the red roses lovely, darling? Molly brought them this afternoon.”

“Who else came?”

“Molly and Cindy and Jane Cardamo, and that horrible Martha Garron. I haven’t the faintest idea why she’d come see me. Her dress was absolutely filthy and she was high as a kite. We thought she’d fall off the chair, didn’t we, Rosa?”

“That one was a beaut,” Rosa said.

“Did Cindy stay long?”

“About fifteen minutes, I guess. She didn’t look very well to me. And I thought she acted a little bit odd.”

“Did she?” he said casually. He wondered why he so instinctively decided not to tell Joan what Cindy had told him. He was not accustomed to keeping secrets from her. Certainly this was not a guilty secret. And nothing could have been more innocent than having a beer with Cindy. He told himself that it was best not to tell Joan because she might fret about it, and this was no time for her to have anything on her mind. During the hour and a half of visiting hours, he had ten minutes alone with her. When he left he said, “Is the time still set for ten?”

“That’s what Bernie told me again today.”

He bent over the bed and kissed her and squeezed her arm. “I’ll be around. I’ll get here by nine-thirty anyway. Don’t be scared, baby.”

She frowned. “I don’t think I’ll like this spinal thing.”

“They’ll have you so doped up you won’t mind it a bit.”

He kissed her again. When he walked down the hall toward the elevators his eyes suddenly filled with tears. She looked so damn helpless. They were going to cut her and she was scared. He knew that the five or so drinks were making him more emotional than usual. And he suspected that he had stopped counting his drinks because he was frightened too.

He ate again at the drive-in and went back to the empty house. The mail was dull, and there was nothing from the kids. That made him feel less guilty about not thinking of the mail before going to the hospital. The effects of the drinks had worn off but for a slight headache. He went across the
back yard and was surprised at the sharpness of his disappointment when he found the Cable house completely dark. He hesitated, and then went to where he could see into the car port. It was empty.

After a few minutes he was able to be amused at himself for being so annoyed with Cindy for not being home. What she did, where she went, was no part of his business.

He decided he would read for a time and go to bed early.

It was twenty-five to eleven when he thought he heard her drive in. He lifted his head and listened, and heard the thud of a car door near by. He put the book down and walked over to a west window. When a light came on in the Cable house he could not see the window, but he could see the reflection of the light on the leaves and on the night.

He stood there for a half minute, and then went back to his book. He had been having difficulty concentrating on what he was reading, but now he found it almost impossible. He slapped the book shut and put it on the table beside his chair. He went into the bedroom, undressed and showered and put on his robe.