Over the next couple of weeks Domino kept getting on everyone’s nerves until Apollo popped off with that complaint and ended up leaving town. Just before he left, though, he had an idiotic physical confrontation with Domino. Hurley was a big guy and Apollo was thoroughly taken to the cleaners. Domino might have been a linebacker or something in college for all I know. He was a jock of some kind, anyway. It seemed that whenever he wasn’t on a case he was stripped down to his undershirt shadowboxing or skipping rope or whatever in his office, like he couldn’t take sitting still. ‘The Sweatiest Man in the Office’ I dubbed him. “You gotta sweat to sell, Cally, and you know it,” he’d say to me even though I had a couple of decades selling on him. What made his smugness hard to take was the fact that he was selling.
It isn’t that easy to be a sales agent. It’s not as simple as ‘good life=premium sale’. An agent has to put all the pieces of a life together and search out the absolute best a soul deserves and then convince the client to buy. It takes experience to do that well. Hurley claimed it was all a matter of ‘the winning attitude’; but even though that was a load of crap, he was selling a lot of premium packages for a beginner. Actually, he was selling a lot for a veteran.
Hurley got to me for another reason: I started to have a slump. There’s always an ebb and flow in cases. You can’t pick and choose your clients. Sometimes there’s a nice mix, sometimes you get a parade of SS officers and child molesters or, if you’re very lucky, two Double-Ns in a single week. For some reason I didn’t understand, my clients started to slide toward the ward-heeler and televangelist end of the moral scale. And this was while Hurley was raking in premium sales like it was autumn in New England.
Copal suddenly became ‘helpful’. He gave me little pep-talks and motivational sales books with titles like They Bought the Farm… Now Sell Them the Cows. For a little while I actually thought Copal and changed and I almost started liking the guy; and then he suggested I get sales tips from Hurley. From that moment Domino Hurley became my arch enemy. At that year’s Christmas party I got a little more tight than I should have and really told Hurley off. I guess I made something of a scene because the next day Eva asked me what the hell was I thinking. I was too hazy on the details to have a good answer, and too hung over to care.
Then came the terrible week when I made no premium sales of any kind. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘that’s as bad as it can get.’ But the next week was worse because I didn’t even sell anything as good as a bus package. Copal started shouting again and this time he seemed justified. I felt so low I actually started reading the books he had given me. The following week I was able to put someone on a bus and I thought the slump was ending, but I was wrong.
“What the hell’s wrong with me?” I asked Eva over lunch when the nightmare was in it’s second month. “How can I get a lead on a good client?”
“Sweetie,” she said, “I may send out the work orders, but I don’t pick who gets them. I just drop them in the tube and the dispatcher sorts them out.”
“Can’t you walk a good case over to me?”
“I don’t look inside, Cal. They all look the same to me.” She gave me an arch look. “Kind of like you guys. And besides, you read that memo Copal sent out, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I did my best Copal impression: “‘Swapping, selling, and especially stealing work orders will result in severe disciplinary action!’ I almost think that was aimed at me.”
“Well, maybe it was.”
“Don’t you think I’m paranoid enough?”
“It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you, darling.”
I thought Eva was nuts and told her so, but after we got back I decided she was a prophet when I walked into my office and found Hurley moving in. “What the hell are you doing!?!” I exclaimed even though it was pretty damn obvious what he was doing.
“Oh, Cally,” Domino said in a tone usually reserved for parents with a slow child. “Do I really have to connect the dots for you?”
I looked around. None of my stuff was in sight and Hurley already had his punching bag fixed to one wall. “This used to be my office!” I said, still in painfully-obvious mode.
“Yeah, I know.” He made a show of making sure his diplomas were hung square. “I found some comic books in the desk with your name on them.”
For the record, I never had any comic books. Not in my desk, anyway.
I thrust my face into Hurley’s… sort of… and tried to sound as menacing as I could. “I want my office back!”
“Don’t worry,” he said in a soothing tone that only made me angrier. “You’ll have years and years to enjoy it after I’ve been promoted out and you’re still here.”
“I wanna punch you in the mouth.” That sounded whiny even to me despite the state of mind I was in.
“Oh, no! Not the Christmas party all over again.” He shook his head as if very disappointed in me.
“What… happened at the Christmas party?” I was genuinely baffled.
“Blacked out on the whole thing, huh? Maybe you should switch to lemonade, kid.”
I went to the door, then turned back. “Is it hard to kiss up to the boss when you’ve got no lips?” I sneered.
Domino’s voice was soft and cold. “I got all the lip I need. I get it from you.”
I left. Eva was standing just outside. “Manny…” she said quietly and beckoned me to follow. She led me to the store room, Apollo’s old office. My name was on the door. “There’s a Dinh Nam in Domino’s old office. Copal says you’re in here now.”
“Did you know about this?”
She shook her head.
I sighed. “I feel like dirt.”
“Me, too, sweetheart.”
“Well, there’s one good thing about all this.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t sink any lower.”
YEAR 1
Excelsior
Hitting bottom doesn’t mean you’ll start rising again, I found. Months went by and still I had no premium sales. Which meant, of course, that I was working but not working off my time. I began to hate going into the office. It was hard to face my clients, to go through my spiel knowing it wouldn’t lead to anything. I’d send them into my crummy little office and make any kind of excuse so I could close the door behind them and take time to get my nerve up. And the time I made my clients wait kept getting longer. One of my last clients, Celso Flores, had to wait for me almost half an hour. Eva stared sadly at me from her desk by Copal’s office as I paced outside my door screwing up my courage. Finally I opened the door and went in to play salesman. Celso, chain smoking, was huddled in the chair by the cheap table I used as a desk.
“Sorry for the wait, Mr. Flores,” I said, sweeping into the office in my robes, surreptitiously using my scythe to keep my balance. “I’m ready to take you now.”
That was the wrong way to put it. Celso’s foot started tapping the floor while he tried to become one with his chair. “Take me?” he squeaked. “Take me where?”
“Now, now,” I tried to soothe him, “there’s no need to be nervous.”
Celso made an effort to get the compulsive tapping under control as he said, “Nervous? N-no. It’s just your appearance. It’s, well, it’s a little intimidating.”
I almost laughed. “Intimidating? Me? But I’m your friend. My name’s Manny Calavera. I’m your new travel agent.”