The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Ten on the dot.” Tredgold looked at his watch. “Never fear. They are primping their little hearts out at this very moment.”

“The ones Mr. Lewis selected.”

“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again. “I daresay the old boy enjoyed that; did he say anything after?”

Peters tried to remember, then decided it was one of those cases where a lie—he called such lies fables to himself—would serve better, and said, “He talked about it for an hour after we got back, and—you know—told me why he’d picked this one and not that one, all the fine points.”

“He has an eye for decolletage; one saw that. For that matter I have myself.”

“Interesting business you’re in.”

“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again, his fingers twiddling one of the round jade ear bobs. “Peters, I shouldn’t ask this if I were a gentleman, but how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Just my own age. Good school and all that?”

“Harvard Business School,” Peters said.

“That’s good, I suppose. I went to a redbrick university myself. You like what you’re doing? Following old Lewis about and all that?”

“I suppose so.”

“And someday you’ll be a big pot yourself—that is, if the hairies don’t tear it all down for you—but right now it’s a bit of a bore, eh? Big company and all that. Our little agency here is big company too, you know. Owned by ——[he named a British newspaper] and they’re owned by ——” (a company Peters had always associated with music tapes). “That’s American, you know. Small world.”

“It is,” Peters said. He was wondering what would happen to Tredgold if they lost the war. Probably nothing.

“So I was once where you are now—not quite so high, of course. At the paper; Mum and Dad had scrimped and put me through, and I was to be a journalist. One is chosen to go up in the first three years—you’re aware of that? Or not at all. Only I made a bish. You only make one bish, you know.”

“I know,” Peters said.

“But I was fortunate: I made a cracking good one, and they sent me here. Old Wellingsford called me into his office just after and said they wished to transfer me—‘a nice place for a chap like you,’ was the way he put it. They wanted an Englishman to run it, but the wages were Portuguese—‘very sorry and all that, but the rule about dismissed if you refused transfer still holds, can’t go breaking rules every moment, can we?’ ”

“So you went,” Peters said.

Tredgold nodded. “Boring you, aren’t I? But you can’t say so—that’s the fault of a good school.”

“You’re not boring me,” Peters said honestly.

“Ah,” said Tredgold. He leaned back in his chair and for an instant Peters thought he was about to put his foot up on the desk, but he did not. “Well, I put up a brave front, you know. ‘Going to be manager there, Mums, and good-bye for a bit, eh?’ Tear. Dick Whittington and all that. Tear.”

“ ‘Bye, Dad,’ ” Peters said, getting into the spirit of the thing.

“Right. Absolutely. Salary four thousand bloody escudos per month, and never told them the bloody escudo’s hardly worth a farthing.”

“You can live here cheaply, I suppose, once you know your way around the city.”

“I shouldn’t know,” Tredgold said. “The week I came the really big pots got tired of seeing their little subsidiaries on the bad side of the books and declared a bonus for management—three percent of the net; damned little really, you’ll say, but I’m the only management we have, and all we’re going to have, as long as I’m managing. And I mean to say, a modeling agency with all those great newspapers behind it to threaten the politicians—how can one lose?”

“If you’re in the red,” Peters remarked wisely, “three percent of nothing is zero.”

“Oh, but we didn’t stay there, you know—not with that sort of money in view.”

“Sounds as though they should have put you in charge long ago,” Peters said. It was one of his stock compliments.

“They didn’t want it, you know.” Tredgold’s smile was broader than ever. “I daresay you think profit’s what they’re generally after, don’t you? Went to business school and they taught you that.”

“Yes, they did,” Peters admitted. “Or I should say they taught us that the object of business management was to maximize the value of the stock—that was the definition we had to learn.”

“Oh, son!”

“I know in Britain”—Peters fumbled for words—“there’s more concern for, uh, social objectives, but still . . .” He stopped. Tredgold was laughing. “Well, what is it then?”

“My dear chap . . . my dear old chap, look about you; haven’t you ever seen a firm where one of the salesmen started to do really well selling on commission? What do they do, eh? Fire him, take part of the territory from him, possibly make him sales manager—no commission there, you know—something of the kind. Yet he was making the firm a mint and now they haven’t got it. He was a mere salesperson, you see, and they’d sooner bankrupt the place than have him make too much. Let me tell you something: the big ones, the ones with offices and works of one sort or another all about, like yours and mine, can buy profits whenever they choose just by offering a thin bit of them to the chaps who do the work. But they don’t and they won’t, and who can blame them? I mean, what would they do with the bloody stuff?”