This book was huge fun to write. This is the setup for the main story. You can read more by clicking on the cover pic.

ADS

Al Hickey stared over the Pacific. If you want a good place to think about your life, a long flight from LA to anywhere is useful. Clouds don’t answer back, usually. The flight from the US was definitely more like meditation than travel. 40, single, never married, reasonably well off, medium build, almost fit, Al was able to think about himself without nausea, and without too much excuse-manufacturing.

The question now was whether this was the right thing to do. The alternative was to find a way of backing out, and there wasn’t one. He’d escaped the deadly personalities at the agency, at least. However, the smell of burning egos had managed to stow away in his luggage. In fact a lot of it was his luggage. He winced slightly at the amount of paper he’d had to go through.

The circumstances of Al’s departure were rough in the extreme.

The war between Harvey White and Keith Stone had erupted some months before. White wanted Stone out. Stone thought White was a dangerous idiot. Two of the three partners openly murdering each other in public every chance they got was no great help to the image of the business.

The third partner, old Saul Gold, had managed to avoid the problem somehow until Keith in a very uncharacteristic fury, had torn into him as a “useless old man”, a “petty cash chaser”, and then he got personal. Nobody knew what started that, although rumors were easy to find. White was now in the strange and very unwanted position of being the go-between for two guys that had worked together in agencies for twenty years and founded Stone and Gold ten years ago. That mess began two weeks ago.

In the midst of all this joy, the news that Tony Fazzina had managed to destroy the Australian agency had been a relief as something else to talk about. White got aggressive, Fazzina being one of his protégés. A nasty little meeting had resulted in White waving a finger at Al and saying, “OK, let’s send one of your guys!” Al hadn’t known he was thought of as being on any side, and would rather not have been allocated one.

This was in fact a killer. Al had made a point of not getting involved in the partners’ little wars, and was now being given a side to be on whether he liked it nor not. Stone had looked at him questioningly, and Al had said “If you want me to do it, Keith…..”, hoping that Keith would say no on principle, or at least just to annoy Harvey.

So here was Al, half an hour out of Sydney. He had made one condition: that he not be required to speak to Tony, nor have anything to do with him. Al despised Tony. The condition got the first laugh out of Keith anyone had heard in a month, which was one plus.

Al noted that even he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be chosen to fix the mess. There was nothing in advertising he hadn’t done, except run an agency. Al was a good client-handler, a good production man, a good copywriter, and knew his products and his contacts.

He could read accounts, check receipts, tell you what you spent on your expense account for the last five years just by looking at you and talking to you for a while. An expert, in fact. He could recite laws on advertising in several different countries, and he was a fiendishly accurate analyzer of market research and demographics. He’d run some highly successful campaigns, and won a few awards.

The only other choice would have been Bryce Lewis, Al’s main rival and also a very experienced insider. Al suspected that Bryce had managed to be out of the loop on purpose for this little picnic. Al got on pretty well with Bryce, considering they spent most of their time pitching very hard against each other. On the other hand, Al’s going made Bryce the senior turkey at Thanksgiving now that Al was out of the office.

Al reviewed yet again the pitiful condition of the agency he was supposed to rebuild. Tony had used up a $3 million two-year budget in eight months. There was revenue of about $750,000 to show for that, and the accounts were crap. So Stone Gold and White were down 2 million or so for the benefit of the exercise.

Tony’s problem, according to Al, was that he was a salesman, not an adman. He was very good at self promotion, too, which had got White as his main sponsor. Stone and Gold weren’t so sure, but they were eventually persuaded he couldn’t do much harm in Australia.

Tony had recruited an army. Film and production people, market researchers, anyone that cost the Earth. Copywriters he imported from the States, and they weren’t cheap either. He charged head on at the top end of the market. He got nowhere. Nobody knew who Stone Gold and White were, nor did they care, and they had their own people and agencies anyway. He regrouped, tried bread and butter solutions, and the agency got nutritional deficiencies. Eventually he degenerated into doing a few mangy-looking classifieds, which doesn’t go down too well on a 3 million outlay.

The irony was that White had replaced David Goldstein, a truly rocklike person with a lot of fundamental savvy, with the human Frisbee, Fazzina. Tony, who was about as Italian as a German plastic gelato, had even tried the Italian card, and was ignored studiously by people who strangely enough thought they were Italian, too.

White should have known better. Goldstein returned and spent two hours telling White what he could do with himself, and left the agency taking several good accounts with him. The fight with David had done White no good in some circles, where David was a very highly respected and liked long term player. That had actually been the first catalyst for the Stone-White war. An ugly war it was, too. Not often do internal office politics become public, but White had begun a campaign of discredit against Stone ever since, and there were few in the game that didn’t know it.

The second had been the nature of White, who was nobody’s idea of a team player. A one-man show. No understudies, either. You found out what he was doing when the annual accounts were finalized. The man went single mindedly at his own objectives, and that was all. He’d had his own agency, and had merged with Stone and Gold in some odd arrangement which boiled down to equity deals. He’d since hired and fired more people than the other two partners had ever employed between them.

White had managed to create a war in a highly successful agency. He’d come in with his own much smaller agency, Stone and Gold had been in need of some extra capital, and White had provided it somehow. The agreement made White an equal partner, which was strange by any standards, in view of the fact that his accounts were relatively small.

Stranger still was the fact that White had put in far more money than those accounts appeared to be worth as business. White also seemed to know a lot of big league people, which explained the money, but not the accounts. If he knew people like that, he didn’t need to be a partner with anyone, and should have been doing far more business than he was when he joined. White had the look of a person still on the make, at 50-something.

However, the fact was that he was entrenched, and he was even getting business on the basis of his big name friends; that was suspicious, but profitable. Very little about White made any sense, and the little that did was impossible to like.  

A runway lurched up at him. Al watched himself drift through Customs, and then succeeded in getting lost on the way out. A voice asked interestedly as he did a second circuit of somewhere, “Whaddaya lost?”

“Me, I think. I was with me. Where do you find a taxi around here?”

“Cheer up mate, you’ll turn up somewhere. Main exit, see the sign?”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

The taxi meandered eventually over to the city. Al noticed a lack of people which he found disturbing.

“Where is everybody?”

“Sunday morning. Don’t expect people until about 10. This is it, mate, Dixon Street. Where do you wanna go?”

“I’m not too sure, apart from the address they gave me. There’s supposed to be an apartment block…….”

Al was confronted with the sight of a Chinatown, which was about as disorienting as he needed. A tower block appeared.

“That must be it. Are there any other tower blocks around here?”

“Nah. That’s the one. Tell you what, I’ll wait, if you like.”

Al rattled over to the building, trying to avoid getting run over. It turned out to be the right place. He had keys, and let himself in just to make sure that it really was his apartment. Formerly David’s, then Tony’s. One look was enough. Fashion magazines everywhere. A suspicion of CK For Undertakers. He remembered the taxi and hurried back down. The cabbie watched him with his caravan-load of luggage. Al watched himself as he was slowly buried under it.

“Yer wanna get the hernia now, or can I help?”

The cabbie probably saved him from a heart attack. Elevator or not, those bags weren’t that heavy when he packed them. He thanked the man and tipped him heavily, despite his obvious surprise. Al surveyed the apartment. Fazzina was definitely a slob. Dishes in the sink, linen still on the bed. Hairs on the soap.

The place was expensive, too. He automatically valued it by American standards and realized he’d have to check it as a company asset. David had insisted on a city apartment. Al had seen worse, and there was security at the door, an intercom, pretty civilized.

There was no food. Not edible food, anyway. Why Tony ate rusks Al really didn’t want to know. A quite dead tomato. A bottle of ketchup, also not trustworthy. Plastic forks, an empty bottle of wine, some lipstick, and a pizza remnant from the early Pleistocene. With its original luxuriant fur.