I really couldn’t stop writing this book. There is an ADS 2 in the pipeline. Well, it’s not like the world has anything else to do. This comes after the bit about clients suing the agency for breach of contract.
“The only thing in our favor is that it will take a while to get to court. Their lawyer said that we had it coming for being so unprofessional.”
“Hard to disagree,” said Al. He went into spiel-mode accidentally:
“We might get out of this. We also need to get those clients back, and our credibility. I assume they refused to pay the minute they saw the amount, based on the contract price?”
“Yep.”
“OK, waive the whole fee. We’ll draft a letter, apologizing, and offering a discount on any future work. It’s not easy to turn something so basic into more than a total loss. This is a mendable fence, unless Tony managed any further feats of diplomacy.”
They conferred.
“Not that we know of, but it’s hard to say.”
“Whatever. We’re stuck with it. Anyway, according to the figures there’s still about three quarter mill in the kitty; that’s enough to start with.”
The silence told Al all he needed to know. He’s seen some iffy figures before, but Tony’s were more like a really optimistic crossword for illiterates.
“I take it all is not well in fantasy land?” he asked.
“Al, can Tony really read and write? I mean, in some known language?” asked Carla.
“I heard a rumor once that he could. You shouldn’t listen to gossip.”
“You noticed that I didn’t sign off on any of those accounts?” asked Bill.
“That was the first thing I did notice that made sense, yes.”
Bill sighed. It looked as though he’d been practicing sighing for about eight months.
“Al, as at this moment there’s about 150 thou in the kitty, and that’s it, total. Where the rest of it went we simply do not know. In theory there ought to be about that 750, but it’s not in the accounts, or anywhere else I’ve looked so far. Don’t worry, Saul knows, I rang him on Friday.”
Al sat very still. Bill had obviously been keeping Saul posted for some time. The trouble with that was that he still didn’t know what Bill’s connection to him was, and was unsure how to find out, or if he should. He moved on.
“We are very, meaning extremely, unlikely to get any more money soon from the States. The war is on over there and White is going to block anything he can.”
(At this point Bill raised an eyebrow; perhaps he wasn’t in that deep with Saul. Or he was a damn good actor.)
Briefly he outlined the problem, and made a bleak point that the Australian operation was marginal at best under the circumstances. They managed an impassive expression he didn’t recognize but wished he knew how to achieve.
“So we have to get some business, fast, and I’ll try to cut production costs. Don’t put me on the payroll, Bill; we don’t have the cash. I’ll sort it out with Keith.”
“How much does that save us?” asked Carla, interested, as Al went for another pot of coffee.
“About 150 thou,” said Bill.
THE CHASE.
The next week may well have happened. Al didn’t notice. He hunted down the fertilizer company and gave them a written apology and a verbal embalming that any jury would have loved. He did this with the firm’s lawyer present, knowing full well that the fee waiver was a good, grey, arguable, and reasonable, out. No money had changed hands, and the fertilizer-man decided not to proceed. Too difficult. However, he had paid his lawyer, a lot, apparently, and no further business was coming from that direction. Still, four hundred thousand plus legal fees wasn’t going out of the business.
Bill and Carla spent most of the week ringing everyone Tony had been known to have anything to do with and asking for copies of any correspondence, receipts, etc. “Lost in the office” seemed to be good enough as a reason. The bank managed to produce a very large itemized statement which if nothing else added up to the right figure, or within a hundred thousand or so. The sheer number of transactions was quite incredible. The statement weighed in at eighty nine pages of transactions. Disturbingly, a lot of those were ATM transactions. Cash? For what?
Al knew that they had to do all this before even talking about lawyers. It is very dangerous to accuse anyone of anything they can sue for, and White would make sure that his little pet was being well protected in that regard. The more he looked the less sense it made to Al. At most, they had deliberate sabotage at White’s behest. At the lower part of the spectrum, it would be easy to prove that Tony was a moron. However, being a moron isn’t illegal. The most they could do would be fire him, and they couldn’t do that either, because Tony was employed directly by White. If they tried suing Tony for the money, two things were obvious: (a) Tony didn’t have that sort of money, and (b) it would cost more than it was worth.
The ramifications were extremely expensive, very time-consuming, and would be based on some truly lousy and very debatable evidence. It’d take years. It would also make life in the agency pretty unbearable, even by the current dismal standards. What made it worse was that Al was obliged to go looking for all these solutions that he knew wouldn’t work. The process of business is such that if you have a problem, you are required by law to identify it on your books.
Al wasn’t surprised that Bill had opted not to try to control Tony. The arrangement he’d mentioned was really carte blanche, the sort of power usually given to real business people that know what they’re doing. It fitted the image of the agency being “rescued”, that was about all. Tony could rightly have said his contract allowed him to spend as he saw fit, and Bill would have lost any access to any figures. So Bill played what must have been a traumatic waiting game, trying to unravel what Tony was doing. Unless Saul told him not to interfere for some reason. Maybe Saul wanted Tony to hang himself thoroughly, to get at White……..but it was a very expensive hanging.
Back on the farm, there was Good Old Nigel, the other remaining staff member, who drifted in with the tide, bringing a strange odor with him. This wonderful object was a find of Tony’s, in a club somewhere. Good Old Nigel was a copywriter. He was English, which seemed strange, because he couldn’t speak it, and dressed like some TV version of a 1960s advertising executive; pink shirts, lethal ties, the whole useless archaic bit. He wasn’t “boyish”, which was just as well, especially in the morning.
Their one remaining bit of paying business was with a firm that made outboard motors. Simple enough, you’d think. Good Old Nigel had made a TV commercial, one of the 30 second masterpieces that make most people realize how much they hate commercials. Al, Carla and Bill sat mute as the epic unfolded. Good Old Nigel sounded like a canary whose liver had left a suicide note on the kitchen table.
“Worrrr! You’ll loove vis,” he chirruped. Perhaps Good Old Nigel’s voice hadn’t broken yet. There was a merciful rattle from the DVD as Good Old Nigel remembered to turn it on. Al smelt something and was deciding not to know what it was, as the “Fing”, as it was called by its loving parent, began.
A boat. This helped, in case the customers were wondering what to do with the outboard when they bought it. Two family-looking people strolled down the pier arm in arm. The male turned out to be Good Old Nigel, what a surprise for all. A “rear-lly greaaat” 1980s two chord pop song chugged along in the…….background…..foreground? It sounded as though it had been mixed with a spoon.
The next highlight was when the woman, now in a bikini, turned around, showing a face like a piranha that had been having emotional upsets recently. The 1980s thundered on. Good Old Nigel was now at the helm of what appeared to be a bathtub. Evidently the boat had still had some survival instincts. The sea seemed to have unwisely come from a slide show. Then there was The Line. High volume, no remission.
“You’re a Boater and you want A Motor? Get a Bloody Great Big Iota Motor!”
The piranha smiled and all was well with the world.
“All done dirt cheap, too,” said England’s answer to Whiter and Brighter. They smiled, he smiled, and wandered off to lunch.
“What was that?” asked Al, by now genuinely interested.
“That was our very last client’s commercial,” explained Bill, sympathetically.
“How do we kill him?” asked Al. “Does he have a contract?”
“Nah, Good Old Nigel don’t read vem fings, yer know ‘ow it is. As a matter of fact he couldn’t read anything, after about noon, anyway.”
“What was that smell? It’s gone now.”
“That, dear, sheltered, northern hemispherical person, was the smell of an Australian pub. You will have noticed that he and it left at the same time. He hasn’t realized it yet, but we can tell where he’s been, and for roughly how long, and sometimes with whom,” said Carla, watching for a reaction.
“Our first cost cutting is him. Get rid of him, today, Bill. I’ll write the letter in case he’s in any doubt.”
“What about the commercial?”
“Find some kid in a sand box and give him a camera. I’ll write the copy, it’s only 20 seconds. Find out if we paid for any of that.”
In practice the whole thing had to be done from scratch. Al dived into a newsagent and bought a boating magazine. He found as expected the main players in the trade, rang several and got their promo blurb. He found the market demographics, and started work.
So he was pitching to his own age group. Had Good Old Nigel been in a decent relationship with his brain, he would have noticed that. Al put together a short script with the word Iota and a cut and paste job using the firm’s logo. He tracked down a cheap non-copyright classical theme, Handel’s Water Music, as it happened, and grabbed the catchy hornpipe vivace, and asked Bill to find him a family and a beach house, easy enough in Sydney. Bill had by now dug up a camera crew and a digital processing firm glad of the work.
The kid, who was about four, played around, and Handel did his bit while the couple looked dreamily at their beach house, a powerboat and a remarkably cooperative sea. The client name and logo flashed on the screen, without a word being said, then a simple line for the female voiceover, “We call it home”. Done, in two days, on the air in three. Profit, a pleased client, and more importantly a TV contact that seemed to know what he was doing and didn’t require their putting newspaper on the floor when he was in the office.
Bill evidently did a few things based on his own reputation. That was useful, although to Al’s utter astonishment, Bill didn’t seem to realize it. In an industry where contacts and credibility equal the amount of money you’re allowed to play with, that was bordering on heresy. Al had heard of honest, non-megalomaniac businessmen, he’d just hadn’t believed it.
Meanwhile Good Old Nigel was given very specific written advice on the subject of his departure, and went, whining and groaning, or “whingeing”, as the Australians called it. The piranha helped clean out his office. Al wondered why a nice malocclusion would want to hang around with someone like that. He noticed that they smelt the same, too.
The result of this was that the suite was now 70% empty. David had apparently managed a deal with the owner and they were fully paid up in advance for another four months. However, the rent was high, and revenues weren’t going to justify it. As Al watched this procession of problems, his priority was to find the money. Tony seemed to have donated the whole three million to Sydney as a whole. Expense account? No, too obvious. Anyway, it’d be hard to pin anything on him for that, and would take years. Travel? No, he’d been to Melbourne once, and strangely come back the next day, no business and no comments provided.
Bill bullied the accountant Tony had used to produce his figures into a meeting on the Saturday. This interested Al, because Bill seemed to be a genuinely nice guy, but he heard him say to the accountant that it would “save some unpleasantness and a lot of time”. They arrived, with Carla tagging along ostensibly to take notes, at an office in one of the suburbs called Leichhardt, just a few minutes, despite traffic, from the city.
Al discovered that Bill being grim to someone really wasn’t much fun for the recipient. He didn’t crack a smile, called the guy Mr. Andretti, and stared the guy into the carpet. Andretti was a result of Tony’s “Italian” period, and the poor bastard didn’t know what hit him. Bill grilled him, item by item. He claimed that all he did was put the figures Tony gave him into something which resembled a balance sheet. He pointed out that he’d put disclaimers all over the sheets.
This didn’t wash with Bill. He informed Andretti that he could expect to be subpoenaed, and all documents would be required. Al decided the chill in the room wasn’t from the air conditioning when Bill mentioned “norms of accountancy”. As expected, Al was appealed to for some leniency. Andretti claimed, probably correctly, that he had no control over what his clients chose to withhold from him. He could’ve asked, although that obviously hadn’t occurred to him. Not that conversation with Tony was likely to be informative on any subject.
Al agreed that Tony’s own behavior had been erratic, to say the least, and Bill appeared to grudgingly agree. Andretti was now on their side in self defence, and that would do for now. They asked for, and got copies, of all the original material Tony had given Andretti, and they left a very relieved but onside accountant. This material included a lot of stuff which hadn’t found its way to Bill or Carla, which by now didn’t surprise them. Some of the missing money was there, for sure.
Carla informed them that the place and Andretti were as backward as they seemed. He also hadn’t bought any new Ferraris, from the look of the office since the last time she’d seen it. She’d been the main nexus for communications with Andretti by Tony. Everything he’d said stacked up against her memory of the frenzied bursts of activity which had preceded Tony’s sending the accounts to the States. There was nothing missing from the ream or so of stuff she’d sent to Andretti. Why he’d wanted an outside accountant was another mystery. Bill apparently hadn’t had Fazzina’s full confidence, which was another thing Al liked about him.
Al spent the Sunday wading into the messy collection of receipts, dockets, invoices, letters, useless as they were, and itemized lists of unfindable payments. “Photography; Sean Smith, $700,” no product, no receipt, no invoice, no cost center, no date, not even a beginning. “Post-production consultancy; Jean McIntyre, $1500.” Bull. Production of what? No way was anyone ever going to find these people.
Al had never heard of more inept business, or seen a worse attempt to cover it up. Bill had said that he’d found out about some of these transactions largely on an accidental basis. Apparently Tony got seasonal attacks of accountancy-consciousness, which had led to the righteous billing of the fertilizer firm. He would march in for a meeting with Bill and prove beyond any doubt that he had no idea what accounts were supposed to show.
Al rummaged through the apartment and Tony’s old office, now his, to discover that ironically there were some actual attempts to produce advertising material. This was a revelation. There was the fertilizer commercial, a truly Good Old Nigel-worthy piece of garbage, also with a family and Piranha Woman in a bikini, some quotes for production, a few brochures about products, several apparent tail-saving attempts in the form of receipts, which Tony had naturally managed not to include in his shipment to Andretti. They only amounted to about 90 grand, and seemed to have nothing to do with any identifiable business.
How could anyone spend so much for no result? Stone Gold and White were ruthlessly efficient on expenditure; you could go and see Jane Fischer and find out how much you spent on coffee ten years ago, if you wanted. Here, there was no product, Tony had only managed to produce eight finished jobs, all very small beer indeed. Al had run whole campaigns for half what Tony spent on whatever this mess was, and got more sales for the agency and the client.
Feedback from clients was informative:
“Dear Mr Fazzina; In view of the lengthy delays and difficulties in production of promotional material, our client Mad Irving’s Discounts wishes to advise that no further action will be taken regarding the proposed advertising campaign. You will be aware that such materials as provided, being at the mock-up stage, and with no arrangements made for broadcast, do not constitute fulfillment of contract.