Finally, the agency gets busy trying to undo the damage.
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.