Larry Niven - Lucifer's Hammer

“If someone has complained, I’ll take him off the list,” Harry said. “I like to keep my customers happy.”

“Mrs. Adams,” Wolfe said.

“Oh.” Too bad. Without Trash Day he wouldn’t have an excuse to go up to the Adams house and talk to Donna.

“You will deliver the commercial mail according to regulations,” Wolfe was saying. “As it comes in. Not in batches Trash Day will cease.”

“Yes, sir. Any other way I can be obliging?”

“Shave your beard. Cut your hair.”

Harry shook his head. That part of the regulations he knew.

Wolfe sighed. “Harry, you just don’t have the right attitude to be a mailman.”

Eileen Susan Hancock’s office was small and cramped, but it was an office; she had worked for years to get an office of her own, away from the area behind the counter. It proved that she was more than a secretary.

She was poking at the buttons on her calculator, frowning, when a sudden thought made her burst into rippling laughter. A moment later she realized that Joe Corrigan was standing in her doorway.

Corrigan came into the office. He had unbuttoned the top button of his trousers again, and it showed. His wife wouldn’t let him buy larger sizes. She hadn’t given up hope that he would reduce. He put his thumbs into the waistband and regarded her quizzically.

Eileen’s laughter cut off. She went back to the calculator, and now she wasn’t even smiling.

“Okay,” Corrigan said. “What’s the punch line?”

Eileen looked up with wide eyes. “What? Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

“If you drive me nuts, you think you can gain control of the company, right? Because it won’t work. I’ve covered that.” Corrigan liked to see her like this. Eileen was all-or-nothing: very serious and hard at work, or enjoying herself to the full. “Okay,” Corrigan sighed. “I’ll give away my secret for yours. I’ve had the decorators in. You see, Robin Geston signed up for the Marina deal.”

“Oh? That’s good.”

“Yup. Means we’ll need more help. As of the first, you’re Assistant General Manager, if you want the job.”

“Oh, I want it. Thank you.” She smiled flickeringly (like a flashbulb, on and off almost before you saw it) and turned back to the desk calculator.

“I knew you would. That’s why I had the decorators in. They’re turning that room next to mine into a new office for you. I’ve told them to consult you after they do the preliminaries.” Corrigan lowered his weight onto the corner of her desk. “There. I was keeping it for a surprise. Now what’s your secret?”

“I’ve forgotten,” Eileen said. “And I do have to get these estimates done so you can take them to Bakersfield with you.”

“Okay,” Corrigan said. He went back to his office, defeated.

If he knew, Eileen thought. She had an urge to giggle, but she held it back. She wasn’t really trying to tease Corrigan. She had been thinking: Well, I did it. And Robin was nice. Not the world’s greatest lover, but he didn’t pretend to be either. The way he’d suggested a rematch: “Lovers need practice,” he’d said. “The second time is always better than the first.”

They’d left it vague. Maybe, just maybe, she’d take him up on it sometime; but probably not. He’d also told her definitely that he was married; she’d only suspected it before.

Never had there been any suggestion that business had anything to do with their private lives. But he’d signed up with Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies for a very large deal — and she felt funny about that, and wondered if she’d have been as careless about finding out Robin’s marital status if the deal hadn’t been pending. But he’d signed up.

So here she was, adding up numbers, pushing papers around, and suddenly she’d asked herself: What does this have to do with plumbing? I don’t make pipe. I don’t lay pipe. I don’t ream it out, or tell people where to put it. What I do is push paper around.

It was an important job. Measure it by the chaos she could create with one random mistake or one malicious error: Thousands of tons of supplies might be sent to the ends of the Earth by a slip of her pen. But what she did had no more to do with creation, with making the things that held a civilization together, than income tax, or being the fireman on a diesel train.

Mr. Corrigan would probably spend the whole day wondering why she’d suddenly burst into sparkling laughter, and there was no way she could tell him. It had just come to her, unexpected and irresistible: What she had done with Robin Geston on the night before last was the closest she had ever come to any activity actually connected with plumbing.

The car wouldn’t be reported stolen for hours. Alim Nassor was pretty sure of that, sure enough that he would sit in it for another ten minutes. Alim Nassor had been a great man. When he had made himself great again, he would have to hide what he was doing now.

Before he was great he had been George Washington Carver Davis. His mother had been proud of that name. She’d said the family was named for Jefferson Davis. That honky had been a tough dude, but it was a loser’s name, no power in it. He’d had a lot of street names since. His mother hadn’t liked those. When she threw him out he took his own.

Alim Nassor meant wise conqueror in both Arabic and Swahili. Not many knew what it meant, and so what? The name had power. Alim Nassor had a hell of a lot more power than George Washington Carver ever did. You could read about Alim Nassor in the newspapers. And he could still walk into City Hall and get in to see people. He’d been able to do that ever since he broke up a riot with his switchblade and the razor blades in his shoes and the chain he carried around his waist. There was all that Federal money around for a tough dude. The honkies shoveled out money. Anything for quiet in the black ghetto. It had been a damn good game, and too bad it was over.

He cursed quietly. Mayor Bentley Allen. Los Angeles had itself another black mayor and this goddam Tom had cut off the pipeline. New people in city council. And that stupid son of a bitch of a black congressman who couldn’t be satisfied with the take, no, that asshole had to put all his relatives on the community payroll and the fucking TV reporters found out. A black man in politics needed a snow-white rep these days…

Well, the game was over, and he’d started another. Eleven jobs, each one worked fine. They’d taken… what? A quarter of a million dollars in loot in four years? Less than a hundred thousand after the fences went through it. Twenty thousand each for four men in four years. That wasn’t even wages! Easy to say, now, that some of it should have been stashed for lawyers’ fees, but at five thousand a year?

This would be the thirteenth. It wouldn’t be long now. The store did a lot of business. Alim waited, always aware of the time. Two customers left, and nobody was coming down the street.

He wasn’t happy about this job. He didn’t like ripping off blood. Honkies were fair game, but you ought to leave brothers alone. He’d hammered that into his followers’ heads, and what were they thinking of him now? But he was boxed in, he had to act fast.

The place was ripe, and he’d been saving it for an emergency, and this was one shitpot motherfucker of an emergency. His honky lawyer would probably beat this for him, but lawyers and bondsmen wanted bread, and now. It was crazy, robbing a store to pay a lawyer to get him off for robbing a store, Someday things would be different. Alim Nassor would make them different.

Almost time. Two minutes ago one of his brothers had got himself stopped for a traffic violation fourteen blocks away and that took one pigmobile off patrol. Twenty minutes ago another brother had a “family argument” and the sister called the station house, and there went the other fuzzwagon. There’d be only the two. Black areas didn’t get patrolled the way honky business districts did. Blacks didn’t have big insurance policies, or know how to kiss ass down at City Hall.