Domino resented the whole thing and refused to cooperate. He wasn’t going to be a slave to anyone no matter what he was supposed to have done. That no one would tell him what that something was only convinced him that it was all a scam. He was so intransigent that some higher-up was brought in to talk to him. But once Hector LeMans got Domino alone with him, Domino became very interested in what he had to say. There was a scam going on all right, and it was Hector’s.
Hector told Domino that the Department of Death was on the level, but that Hector was in a position to profit from its operations. It was a simple racket: divert tickets for the Number Nine train from ‘good’ souls, get them out of the way, then sell the tickets and split the take. Hector had made a start, but he needed a better organization, and he needed to gain control of a division in the Bureau of Acquisitions to make things a cinch. Hector already had an office manager on his payroll, but he needed a reaper to go with him. He wanted Domino to be that reaper.
It sounded good to Domino. He liked the fact that Hector seemed to be taking a risk in telling him about his scheme. If Domino talked… but Domino didn’t want to talk. There were two kinds of people in the world: pigeons and their keepers. He saw himself as the latter. If Hector was inviting him to help rule the roost, he wanted in. But if he wanted in, he had to go through with the training. Domino had to know the ropes if he was to reap for Hector. If Hector was just jerking him around to make him cooperate, well, Domino didn’t know what he could do to a man who was already dead, but he’d find something.
So Domino went along with the training. When that was finished, he had another meeting with Hector. His office-manager plant hadn’t yet opened a space for Domino, but that was fine because Hector needed a new place to store his pigeons. They were getting to be a handful, and once Domino got to work reaping, there’d be a lot more of them. Domino’s first job, then, was to find that new place. Somewhere out of the way, remote and escape proof. Hector already lines on a few possibilities, but he wanted Domino to check into them and be his contact with their respective owners. It wouldn’t do for an upper-level DOD official to be seen playing in real estate.
Domino did his homework and found the perfect place: a worked-out industrial island at the southern edge of the world. In addition to being thousands of kilometers from the nearest inhabited lands, and far off the shipping lanes, the island had one other big attraction for Domino. The island was surrounded by an unusual barrier reef. A lot of the coral, Domino learned, fluoresced brightly and had been made into light bulbs by the current owners; but now that they had dug out all they could reach with their heavy equipment, they didn’t find it practical or economical to expand further from the island, so they were selling out.
Domino made the coral a big point in his pitch to Hector. “Forget the machinery,” he said. “The owners are right. The capital investment required to extend the mining platform as far out as they’d need means there’s no way to make enough of a profit on the coral to make it worth doing. But who cares about industrial capital when you have slaves?” Don’t just ship the pigeons out of sight, Domino argued. Make a little extra gravy out of them while you’re at it. And the appearance of legitimate enterprise on the island would discourage any further curiosity about what was going on out there. Hector couldn’t have been more pleased with the suggestion. He bought the island through Domino. Since the owners were convinced their property was virtually worthless, they sold cheap.
Hector had Domino oversee their takeover of the island and the initial stages of transferring his pigeons. A few weeks after the operation was in full swing, he told Domino that his man in Acquisitions, Don Copal, had made an opening in his division. By being such an ogre, Hector said with a chuckle, that one of the agents decided skipping town was better than working for him any more. Hector made that into a lesson for Domino. The whole operation depended on secrecy and subtlety. It was almost impossible to fire agents since that meant they would probably never be able to earn off their time. The company wanted them to move on, after all, so the manager would have to provide a compelling reason for his actions. Better to give the agent, any agent, a reason to skip. Then it’s the agent who was causing trouble. And if the agent ran off because of Copal’s conduct… well, lovability wasn’t a requirement of Copal’s position. Domino didn’t think shouting at agents—Copal’s method for demoralizing his staff—was all that subtle, but then he had never read Poe.
Domino moved out of the downtown office Hector had been renting for him and went to the Bureau of Acquisitions, a large Mayan-Deco building in an older neighborhood of El Marrow. The area looked like a former commercial district halfway through an urban renewal project. Tall, modern buildings (if Bauhaus and Beaux-Arts structures, however new, could still be called ‘modern’) were mixed in with squat turn-of-the-20th-century buildings (starkly functional boxes with minimally-decorative afterthoughts tacked here and there just to let you know that architecture had been committed).
Domino carried his box of things with him as he rode the elevator up to his floor. He could have handed it off to a demon—the box was large, awkward, and heavy—but he couldn’t risk letting it out of his sight. The box contained too many records of his activities since he started working for Hector to be entrusted to anyone or anything else. He still needed those papers, unfortunately, but he also needed a more secure way of keeping them. He had a safe in his old office, but as a reaper he wasn’t expected to be holding any documents that required that kind of security. He figured he could just scan them into his computer and destroy the originals. Nothing suspicious or unusual about a screen-saver password.
It was still early when Domino arrived, but not too early. None of the other reapers nor Don Copal had gotten in yet. The secretary was already there. She seemed surprised to see Domino, and a little annoyed for some reason. Domino didn’t care. He was probably just interrupting her routine. Nothing important. She wasn’t a bad looker, either. She had a nice shape under her dress, although Domino knew he’d see only a flat ribcage if he took a peek. He also knew enough by now not to take things too literally in the Land of the Dead. So he took his time studying the illusion of her figure, and gave a purely mental shake of his head when she opened her mouth and a Brooklyn accent jumped out.
Domino introduced himself, got the secretary’s name, and waited a few moments to be shown to his office. When Eva kept on shuffling papers at her desk, he said, “I’m pretty sure they didn’t say anything about me working out of a hallway.”
Eva looked up crossly and said, “You know, we weren’t expecting anyone so soon.” She sighed and stood up. “OK. I’ll take you to Lana’s office.”
“I thought I’d have an office to myself,” Domino said. If he had to share…
“Lana’s… gone,” Eva said. “It’ll be all yours. But all her files and things are still in there. There hasn’t been time—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Domino said. “I can get her junk out of the way myself if I can get another box.”
“Fine,” Eva said. She stopped at one door and opened it. “Here you go.” She turned to walk back to her desk.
“What about that box, huh?” Domino snapped.
Eva gestured vaguely, “There’s a storeroom—”
“So stop talking about it and go!”
She snapped her jaw closed over whatever she thought to say and stomped off.