Crisis! Page 8

  “I'm very well,” Johnson said, “and how are you?” The other man dropped his pretense when he heard Johnson's voice. “Better than I have been,” he said. “There's been a lot of misery around, and I've had my share."

  His name, he said, was Robert Scott, and he had been a professor of political science in the days when society could afford universities and people could afford to attend them. But he had been released—"terminated,” in the language of the profession—during the early days of the Depression, and ever since he had been unable to find work except for some editing and ghost-writing assignments that had dwindled into proofreading and then to nothing. “I worked my way through college as a television technician, but there hasn't been anything in that line either. King has its own communications section, however."

  Johnson did not talk about himself. Instead he asked questions and brought the conversation back, finally, to Scott's original skepticism about the lengthy wait. “Surely if King advertises jobs for everyone, he will have to supply them."

  “Sure he will,” Scott said. “I'm not worried about that, even though it doesn't seem likely that even the biggest conglomerate in the world can afford to hire everyone that's out of work. But if it could, why did it wait so long?"

  Johnson looked curious. Scott looked to either side as if he feared that he might be overheard and what he said might endanger his chances of employment. He lowered his voice. “I'll tell you why. Because King is one of the few companies that has prospered during the Depression."

  “Surely that is an indication of good management,” Johnson said.

  “I'll give King credit for that,” Scott said, “though I wonder about an enterprise that profits when everybody else is miserable. He's shrewd enough. Maybe too shrewd."

  “How can his offer be anything but generous?"

  The line shuffled forward. Scott looked around to see if any of the people in uniform were near. “King has bought up a lot of distressed industries recently, farms at bargain prices, and has negotiated a great many contracts that will be real moneymakers if the economy picks up and people start buying again."

  “How do you know these things?"

  “It's in the papers. You can put it together if you're looking. And just because I'm unemployed doesn't mean I can't read; the public library still is open a couple of hours a day."

  “So what King pays people he will get right back when they buy the food and other goods he produces."

  “They're going to spend everything they make, all right. And it's going right back into King's pocket. Plus the money from the people he doesn't pay. Plus the increase in prices as the economy improves. The contracts he owns will be worth two or three times as much as he paid for them. The industries he doesn't own will want to hire more people, but they will have to get them from him."

  “But isn't he doing what government could have done—should have done? Put people back to work? End the Depression?"

  “Government is unwieldy and pulled in dozens of directions by thousands of influences. And it's bound by laws and regulations, some of which King has persuaded Congress to waive, like the minimum wage."

  “If Congress can waive it, Congress can reinstate it."

  “They won't have to,” Scott said. “King will raise wages himself before the cry goes up for him to do so."

  “If government can't get the country out of a Depression, surely we should be grateful to someone who can. Even if he makes a profit at it."

  “Grateful?” Scott said. “Sure. And if it's only profit King is after, I guess the world can survive that. It survived Henry Ford, who paid his workers five dollars a day during a Depression when the standard was less than half that, and they made him a billionaire. But I've got a feeling there's something else behind this, and I'm going to find out what it is."

  But soon it was the end of the day, and they had nothing to show for their wait but a card attesting to their place in line.

  * * * *

  By the middle of the second day Johnson and Scott were allowed to pass through the far door with a group of ten other applicants. They faced a corridor with a row of cubicles on either side of it and a man and woman in uniform passing out questionnaires and forms and pencils.

  “So long, Johnson,” Scott said. “Good luck. Keep in touch.” He smiled ironically.

  “That might not be so easy to do,” Johnson said. “But I have a feeling we will meet again. And good luck to you. Whatever you do, don't give up."

  “I won't,” Scott said grimly. “I'll keep digging."

  “I know you'll do that,” Johnson said. “I mean on life and people. Give them a chance and they'll come out the right way."

  “I think you believe that. I hope you're right.” But Scott shook his head as he accepted papers and pencil.

  The cubicle was not much larger than a voting booth. It held a small table and a chair. Johnson sat down and filled out an employment questionnaire and a psychological evaluation form. It took him a while. At some of the questions he stared for several minutes before finally putting down an answer; others he simply left blank. By the time he was done Scott and all the others with whom he had been admitted were gone. The uniformed woman who took his papers told him to return the next day for an interview.

  “I don't have any money,” he told her, “and all I've had to eat in the past two days are the doughnuts and coffee you've passed out."

  She smiled sympathetically and gave him a card. “Print your name here and sign it, and the cashier as you go out will advance you ten dollars against whatever salary you finally earn."

  “What if I don't come back?"

  She smiled again. “You'll be back. No one wants to miss out on a job. If by some strange chance you don't, King International will consider it charity. That's the way Mr. King wants it."

  “Bless Mr. King,” Johnson said without irony.

  “That's what they all say."

  The next morning Johnson was admitted to the presence of a weary interviewer. She had an office with real though movable walls made of plywood, a standard-size metal desk with a computer terminal, and two metal-and-plastic chairs. The interviewer was a dark-haired young woman in tan slacks and a blouse. In other circumstances she might have been beautiful, but she was involved in a process that evaluated people in terms of skills and numbers.

  Johnson smiled warmly at her, but she did not look up from the computer screen as he sat down in the chair beside the desk.

  “Bill Johnson?” she inquired. He admitted that was who he was. “Bill, not William?” she continued. He confirmed that. “You have some curious gaps in your past history. No birthdate? No parents? No schooling? No—"

  “I have some curious gaps in my memory,” Johnson said.

  “Why is that?"

  “As I noted on the questionnaire, I seem to have attacks of amnesia."

  She looked at him for the first time and frowned. “Are you under treatment for this condition?"

  “There doesn't seem to be anything anyone can do.” It was not an answer to her question, but she didn't seem to notice.

  “Well,” she said, reacting to the change in her routine as much as she had earlier seemed to immerse herself in its lack of variety, “there doesn't seem much you're qualified to do."

  “Perhaps something for which a lack of prior attachments might be an asset?” Johnson suggested.

  She looked at her computer scope and punched a couple of keys. “You do have an unusual psychological profile: high empathy, low self-interest, high loyalty, low acquisitiveness, high trustworthiness, low—"

  “Surely there's a job for somebody like that."

  She gave him a quick suspicious glance and pushed more keys. “Your written responses would have to be checked by professional psychologists on our staff, of course...."

  “I understand."

  “Because you could be falsifying your answers...."

  “I've been totally candid."

  “But you might be qu
alified,” she said reluctantly, “for a special position that we've been asked to fill.” She looked at him defiantly before her expression began to soften in the face of his calm concern. “We do get people who try to fake the questionnaires,” she said. “It doesn't work. Not for long, anyway. We have ways to cross-check everything. But the official information about you in the social security and credit files doesn't contradict your statements."

  “Aren't those confidential?” he asked innocently.

  She looked at him scornfully and pressed another button. The desk began to talk to itself and then a chart unrolled from a printer beside her. She tore it off and inserted it into an envelope with a King International return and a pressure seal. “The psychologists will catch you up in any contradictions. This is to be handed to the woman at the desk down the hall—unopened."

  He stood up and accepted the envelope. “May the future be kind,” he said.

  “Good luck,” she said and smiled. It was a warm and honest smile, and it transformed her face. “Don't open the envelope,” she said.

  It was a test, of course—one of many. But none of them tripped him up, and neither did the psychologists to whom he talked at great length, answering their questions and taking their tests. A day later, with all his belongings, few as they were, packed into the shabby suitcase from his closet and a small advance against his salary gone to pay his back rent, he was driven in an inconspicuous brown automobile through the streets and freeways of a Los Angeles grown gray through five years of Depression but almost free of smog as industrial activity and automobile exhausts dwindled toward zero. The car was bigger on the inside than it seemed on the outside. It had a high-powered and illegal engine and a back seat that included a built-in bar, a television set, and a telephone. It also had a uniformed chauffeur who did not answer questions.

  The trip continued for almost an hour in silence as they passed through a decent middle-class suburb that had survived hard times better than most. Against the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, as the houses dwindled behind, trees began to line the road and then cluster into a small forest as they turned off the highway onto a road leading toward the mountains and what seemed like a modest ranch house.

  They came to a metal gate that swung open as they approached. It was set between inconspicuous brick pillars on which small, restless cameras were almost unnoticeable, and chain-link fencing set between brick columns was invisible until one was upon it.

  This was the home of Arthur King.

  The King mansion was a fantasy world. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, vast vistas opened in front of the intruder and surprises waited around every turn. The world outside was a grim reality that gritted between the teeth; the world inside was spotless and shiny. It gleamed in Johnson's eyes as he entered so that he could only discern the outline of the uniformed guard who patted him down efficiently. And as the spotlight dimmed, the walls of the entranceway remained milkily translucent, as if they concealed secrets like a metal detector and a fluoroscope.

  The flagstoned entranceway opened into a hallway that surrounded a glass-walled atrium, filled with cactus and other colorful desert plants as well as lizards and snakes and birds. It was open, apparently, to the air above, though it may have been covered by a fine mesh. Johnson had only a moment to gaze at it, however, before a door opened automatically on his left as if commanding his entrance.

  Inside was a library. Except for an opening in the right wall for a door, the walls were lined with books in uniform editions. There were large leather chairs in each corner, each with a reading lamp, and against the near wall a leather sofa with a table behind it. The dominant feature of the room, however, was a massive wooden desk, so large and intricately carved in dark walnut and tooled greenish-black leather, like the furniture, that it had to be one of a kind. It even made petite the figure of the woman sitting behind it, who beckoned slowly to Johnson with her right hand upraised and her fingers curling toward her face. As Johnson approached the desk, however, he could see that the woman was not small; it was the desk that was large.

  The woman was attractive but her face and body had been shaped by discipline and the habit of command. Her hair was dark with single strands of gray, her face a pattern of planes and triangles, her body tall and trim in a black, tailored dress, and her eyes like the hooded gaze of a falcon, watchful, unwavering.

  “My name is Jessica.” she said, as if she neither had nor needed a last name, “and I am the manager of this household. You are Johnson,” she went on, as if providing for him the necessary baptismal function, “and you will be paid two hundred dollars a week after deducting the advance. Twenty-five dollars of that will be in U.S. currency, one hundred seventy-five in King scrip.” Johnson opened his mouth, and she held up her hand. “Those are the same arrangements offered all new King employees. The scrip is exchangeable at King stores of all kinds and shortly is expected to be accepted at other stores. All this is academic since you will be living here—you will have a room below in the employees’ quarters. You have a private bath, but you will eat in the employees’ mess, also on the floor below. You will be on call twenty-four hours a day, and you will have no occasion nor need to spend money. Is that understood?"

  Johnson nodded. Jessica's gray eyes appraised him before she went on, her voice not quite so peremptory. “You will be the personal assistant to Mr. King himself,” she said. Her eyes glanced at the other door to the room and back to Johnson. “You will do anything Mr. King tells you to do, and, in time, anticipate his wishes before he makes them known. This will include but not be limited to carrying messages, bringing mail, fetching drinks, picking up newspapers or magazines where Mr. King may leave them, listening to Mr. King whenever he chooses to speak to you but never when he is speaking to anyone else in your presence. You will never, never touch anything on Mr. King's desk, and you will never, never, never mention to anyone anything about Mr. King or his affairs."

  She did not ask this time if Johnson understood, but her gaze still was on his face and he nodded anyway.

  “Mr. King has had other personal assistants who were unsatisfactory in one way or another. They all had to be gotten rid of.” She did not elaborate on the fate that had befallen Johnson's predecessors, but her expression grew a bit more severe as she said the words, and it was clearly an end to be avoided.

  Johnson nodded again, as if to indicate that it would not be necessary to “get rid of” him.

  “It is the business of all of us to free Mr. King from the concerns of everyday living that might keep him from his great work,” she said reverently. King's “great work” elicited a religious feeling from Jessica.

  Johnson did not ask what that great work was.

  “Mr. King's wife and daughter live with him in the living quarters on this floor, Mrs. King in the bedroom connecting with Mr. King's, Miss King on the opposite side of the atrium.” From her tone Jessica did not care much for Mrs. King and even less for King's daughter. “You will address them as Mrs. King and Miss King. If either of them asks you to do something for them, you will pass the request on to another member of the household. You must be free at all times to take care of Mr. King."

  Johnson nodded.

  “Do you speak?” Jessica asked.

  “Only when necessary."

  Jessica's face thawed into a wintry smile, as if she would have been happier in a time when it was standard practice to remove the tongues of personal servants. “I think you'll do, Johnson."

  “I'll do my best,” he said. His smile melted Jessica's expression into something resembling spring.

  “I think you will. Sally? You will show Johnson around the living quarters and then his room."

  Johnson turned to the door through which he had entered the library. There, summoned by some mysterious agency, was a young woman dressed in the black uniform of a maid. When Johnson reached the door and turned back to thank Jessica, she already was busy at the desk doing something that took all her
attention behind the raised tooled leather of the desk top; to her right several shelves of books had swung open to reveal the glowing screens of television and computer.

  * * * *

  Where Jessica was all command, Sally was all sweet compliance. “That is Mr. King's bedroom,” she said about the first closed door they came to on the left. “And that's Mrs. King's bedroom,” she said about the second. Beyond was a large casual living room looking out upon the end of a swimming pool and beach house and beyond, a low structure that Sally said was a guest cottage.

  On the other side of the atrium was a formal dining room looking out upon green lawn and trees. The next closed door was Miss King's bedroom, and the open door beyond exposed the neat order of Jessica's room.

  “She doesn't have a room in the employees’ quarters?” Johnson asked.

  “No, sir,” Sally said, her blue eyes round as if surprised at the notion that Jessica was an employee.

  The front hallway had only the entranceway through which Johnson had passed and the space beside it that provided room for the guard who had frisked him and perhaps other equipment and personnel to monitor the grounds and the interior of the building. At the opposite end, past all the closed doors and the living room again, stairs had been carved from the rock of the mountainside. Down those stairs was a painted cement corridor, and a few steps beyond, another, apparently matching the hallways on the floor above.

  Cut into the rock was a big kitchen and a large communal dining hall. The space under the atrium was unused, but small rooms lined each of the corridors. Johnson counted ten on each side.

  His room was under Mr. King's, Sally said. In addition to the other facilities, it had an elevator that opened into Mr. King's bedroom. The elevator was small, a close fit for two people; the control panel had four buttons on it.