“I like, I like,” Barron said. “But let’s lay off the race schtick this time round. He’ll be ready for that, and we want to hit him where he ain’t. Have the first screen boys feed all deathbed calls directly to you, and give me the best lily-white one you get.”
“You’re the boss, Jack,” Gelardi said. “But personally the whole schtick has me shaking. You hurt Howards too bad and you won’t scare him off, you’ll goad him into a kamikaze. You gonna really have to walk that line, man—and with both our jobs riding on it.”
“That’s the name of the game, Vince,” Barron told him. “You shove me out on the high wire, and I walk it. Trust old Uncle Jack.”
“Trust you like my brother,” Gelardi said.
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Yeah,” Gelardi said, grinning. “He’s doing five to ten in Sing Sing for fraud. See you in the frying pan, Jack.”
“Clean?” said Benedict Howards, looking past the head of the faceless, bookkeeperish man, out the picture window at the soothing white walls of the main Freezer of the Long Island Freezer Complex, monolith of immortality power, safe from crawling maggots of incompetence like this Wintergreen, random servants of the fading black circle of death like Jack Barren. “No man’s clean, Wintergreen, and certainly not a man with a past as rank as Jack Barren’s—a founder of the Social Justice Coalition, ex-Berkeley rabble-rouser, boyhood buddy of every Peking-loving Commie son of a bitch in the country, and you tell me Barren’s clean? He’s about as clean as an open cesspool.”
Wintergreen fondled the fat manila folder he kept shuffling from his lap to the desk and back, worried it like a goddamned nervous kangaroo. “Well, of course, not that way, he’s not, Mr Howards,” he said. (Rabbity yes-man bastard! Howards thought.) “But this is a complete dossier on Barren, and there’s nothing in here we can use against him, nothing. I stake my reputation on that, sir.”
“You’re staking a hell of a lot more than your nonexistent reputation on it,” Howards told him. “Your job’s on the line, and your place in a Freezer too. I don’t keep a head of ‘Personnel Research’ to produce a shitload of useless paper on a man I want nailed to the wall, I pay you to find me a handle I can grab on a man. Every man’s got a handle, and you’re paid to find it.”
“But I can’t manufacture something that isn’t there,” Wintergreen whined. “Barren was never a member of any organization on the old Attorney General’s list even though plenty of his friends were. There’s nothing to link him to anything more damaging than technically-illegal demonstrations, and these days that kind of thing makes a man a hero, not a criminal. He isn’t even a member of the SJC anymore, hasn’t been since a year after he got his TV show. He makes large amounts of money, spends it freely, but keeps out of debt. He sleeps with large numbers of unattached women, engages in no illegal perversions, and takes no illegal drugs. There’s nothing in any of it we can use against him, and in that sense, which I trust is the sense you’re interested in, sir, he’s totally clean.” Wintergreen picked up the folder again, began bending down the edges.
“Stop playing with that damned thing!” Howards snapped. (Goddamn cretin, whole country’s full of cretins who can’t find their asses without a roadmap.) “So we can’t blackmail Barren,” he said, and saw Wintergreen wince at plain truth-word blackmail. Imagine him living forever, clerk forever, rabbity coward forever. Immortality’s for men with the balls to grab it, fight for it, fight from dry windy Panhandle to circles of power circles of forever, toss the rest to the fading black circle garbage disposal, only what they deserve—like damned fool coward Hennering.
“So some men can’t be blackmailed,” Howards said. “But every man can be bought, once you know his price. So we buy Jack Barren.”
“But you’ve already offered him the biggest possible bribe, a place in a Freezer,” Wintergreen said, “and he hasn’t taken it.”
“He hasn’t turned it down either,” said Howards. “I know men, which means I got a nose for their prices. That’s why I’m where I am today. Way I know your price down to the dollar—more money than you can spend, and a place in the Freezers when you croak, and you’re mine simply because I know the price you set on yourself and I can afford to meet it fully. Barron’s no different from you or anybody else; he wants that Freeze Contract, you can make book on that. He wants it just enough to let me use him on his terms. With that coin, I can buy his services just until he thinks he can double-cross me and get away with it. And once those contracts are signed, he will be able to get away with it. And a man like Barron, he won’t play ball till I do sign. You don’t screw around with a man like that; you’ve got to own him down to the soles of his shoes. And a free Freeze just won’t buy that. For that fee, he’ll play ball so long as I answer all his questions and he likes the answers.
“But that’s not the way Benedict Howards does business. It’s easier to buy a Jack Barron than to destroy him, good business too. What I need from you is something that will let me meet the rest of the price he sets on himself. There’s got to be something the man’s hungry for and can’t get for himself.”
“Well… there’s his ex-wife,” Wintergreen said hesitantly. “But there’s no way we can deliver her.”
“Ex-wife?” Howards hissed. (You dumb puffed-up three-score-and-ten errand-boy bastard, sitting right in front of you all the time, egomaniac like Barron’s got to have some woman means something more to him than a good lay. What they call it, mindfucker, yeah, hippie Bolshevik mindfucker’s got to have some woman’s mind to play with, means she’s got to be able to screw around with his.)
“Well what about his ex-wife, idiot? What’s her name? Why’d they break up, if Barron still wants her? This is what I was looking for from the beginning, man! Do I have to do all the thinking around here?”
“I’m afraid it’s hopeless, Mr Howards,” Wintergreen answered, again toying with the folder. Howards started to bark, then thought—what the hell, forget it, take the long view, patience, patience, easy when you got all the time in creation.
“Her name’s Sara Westerfeld. She lives right here in New York, in the Village. Does kinesthop interior effects. Barron met her when he was still a student at Berkeley. They lived together for a couple of years before they were married, and were divorced about two years after he got the show. I anticipated this coming up, Mr Howards, and had her investigated. It’s all bad, sir. She holds a membership card in the Social Justice Coalition, and she’s a loud supporter of the Public Freezer League, and you know how that kind feels about us. And from what we’ve been able to learn, she seems to hate Barron as much as she hates us. Seems to have something to do with his being a television star; she actually moved out on him only six months after he got the show.”
“Sounds like the last of the red-hot hippies,” Howards said. Dammit, he thought, figures Barron would have the hots for a Berkeley Bolshevik artsy-fartsy, hair-halfway-down-her-ass Berkeley Bolshevik loser-bitch! But she hates him, good, means he can’t get her himself, buy her, you’ve bought Jack Barron. Question is how you buy screwball kook Sara Westerfeld…?