On the Other Hand, Death

Droplets of sweat dribbled off my chin onto the copy of Memoirs of Hadrian I'd been reading since midmorning. I stripped off my sodden T-shirt, used it to wipe up the lunch-hour sub bun crumbs from my desk, and flung the reeking shmateh into the wastebasket.
I checked my watch. Still time for two or three more chapters of Hadrian before I stopped by the apartment for a quick shower and drove out to Trefusis's office. I opened the book and looked at a page, which contained a picture of Boyd—or, more precisely, a picture of what I imagined the famously azure-eyed diving coach looked like. I re-focused and he was gone. I laughed, restrainedly, then reached down and jammed the balky air conditioner's plug back into the wall socket. Something popped. A plume of smoke erupted, and the lights went out from Ontario Street to Northern Boulevard.
I drove home.
 2 
 At four o'clock, Albany still lay blistering under a savage August sun, but the headquarters of Millpond Plaza Associates remained untouched by mere climate. From the outside, the five-story cube of black glass on outer Western Avenue was as austere and inward-looking as the company's two dozen or so suburban shopping malls. Past the revolving door I half expected to find crowds of young matrons toting G. Fox shopping bags and glassy-eyed kids in game arcades, but the airport-departure-gate-functional lobby was deserted except for a uniformed security guard hunched uncomfortably on a high stool. Bouncy music came out of holes in the ceiling, with no consumers to dance to it.
The temperature in the building couldn't have been above sixty and there was a faint odor of synthetic carpeting and cleaning fluids, as in the loan office at a branch bank or the cabin of a DC-10. Coming in from the steaming heat in chinos and a light cotton sport shirt, I wanted to wrap myself in a blanket. Getting on the elevator, I sneezed.
On the more expensively done up and equally well refrigerated fifth floor Crane Trefusis's secretary was seated in a funnel of brightness behind a kidney-shaped slab of white marble. The sleek blonde was groomed as elegantly as a transvestite I knew who once worked briefly behind the LeVonne Beauty Products counter at Macy's, and she wore a big amber bow around her neck, like a TV anchor-woman.
She flashed a rictus of corporate welcome. "Hi, I'm Marlene Compton. May we help you?"
I didn't know whether the "we" was corporate, imperial, or referred to the small television camera mounted halfway up the polished black granite wall and aimed at me. "Donald Strachey to see Crane Trefusis. He phoned." I sneezed again.
The woman mentioned amiably that her sister-in-law was bothered by the August pollen too, then conversed briefly on an intercom.
"Mr. Trefusis will be able to see you right away," she said smiling, as if I'd petitioned for this audience, then ushered me past an unmarked white metal door.
Trefusis's office was a long rectangle of rusts and buff with track lighting and Star Trek furniture upholstered in orange velvet. The sunlight was molasses-colored pouring through the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows; and Trefusis,
moving around from behind his desk with a kind of pained jauntiness, like an athletic man with a bad back, or chronic hemorrhoids, sported deep brown aviator shades. I was afraid he might stumble over something, but he seemed to know his way around the office.
"Good to meet you, Mr. Strachey," he said with a restrained but not uncordial smile. "Your reputation precedes you." His cool hand gave mine a tight squeeze.
"Thank you. Yours too."
He removed the shades and gave me a drolly appraising look. "Sit down and we'll get to know one another," he said, moving back behind the desk. "I'm really quite grateful for your taking the trouble to drive out here. I picked up the impression during our phone conversation that you're somewhat reluctant to work for Millpond— that we are not one of your favorite capitalistic enterprises. Or am I reading something into your manner and tone that wasn't there?"
He was unexpectedly un-ogreish and benign-looking, short and compact in a well-cut chocolate brown silk suit and pale orange tie, with thinning red hair streaked with gray, and sun-bleached eyebrows. His bright china blue eyes were the only objects of their color in the room, which might have meant nothing, or could as easily have been some goofy device with a vaguely manipulative purpose he'd picked up in Robert J. Ringer. I decided that if I ever again visited Trefusis's office I'd bring along six old ladies with aqua anklets and blue hair, just for fun, to see if it affected his powers.
I said, "No, I'm not sure I do want to take on this job for you, Mr. Trefusis—whatever it is. But you asked me to hear you out, and it's no trouble for me to do that much. What's the problem?"
An amiably sly look. "I'm guessing that it was partly your curiosity that brought you out here, Mr. Strachey,
am I right? Plus, of course, the large fee I mentioned must also have tempted you enormously," he added, the creep. "But I'm curious too. I'm told you've done work in recent years for other large Albany corporations. Naturally I've gone into that. You evidently are not anti-business to the point of turning away a fat fee when one is offered. I'm sure you could not do that constantly and survive. So, tell me. What exactly is it about Millpond—about me—that makes you so unenthusiastic? I'd really like to know. Be candid."
I'd been in his office for two minutes and the man almost, but not quite, had me feeling sorry for him. I said, "I've been reading in the papers about the way Millpond keeps pushing people around and ripping up the countryside in order to build the kind of shopping malls we've already got enough of. That's really about all there is to it, Mr. Trefusis. See my problem? I'm one of those ecofreaks. If I worked for you, it'd be a sort of conflict of interest."
Having heard all this before, he laughed lightly, knowingly. "Well, maybe one day we can have a drink and I can convince you that, on balance, our way of doing business ultimately benefits everyone, ecologically minded Americans like yourself included. Ever been to the GUM department store in Moscow, Mr. Strachey? It's a memorably depressing experience. A Soviet citizen once visited our mall in East Greenbush and told me confidentially he thought he had died and gone to heaven. I was impressed by that too."
"You miss the point. It's not retail outlets run by the Bureau of Mines I advocate, Mr. Trefusis. It's a sense of proportion."
"That's a nice catchy phrase. How about a 'Sense of Proportion Liberation Front'? You should put it on a bumper sticker." He waited for me to chuckle along with him.
I said, "You're planning a five-department-store mall in one of the few unspoiled areas left in west Albany, when we've already got Stuyvesant, Latham Circle, Colonie, Mohawk, Pyramid's mammoth going up in Guilder-land, and dozens of other smaller shopping centers all over the place. Who needs another one?"
"The hundreds of thousands of people who will shop there need it, Mr. Strachey. They need it and they want it."
"Has there been a referendum? I hadn't heard."
He grinned. "They'll vote when the mall opens, my friend. With their K-cars and Toyotas."
I couldn't argue with that, and I hated his being right. And the smaller shopping centers that would turn into plywood-covered eyesores surrounded by twelve acres of littered tarmac when Millpond opened its new mall were of no importance to anyone except the several hundred people who worked in them or lived around them. The throngs en route to Millpond's consumers' Utopia could carefully avert their eyes.