Lawrence Block - Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

So it was a beautiful day, and my phone was ringing, and I picked up the phone, and in my little world the sun hid behind panther-colored clouds, the carbon-monoxide and sulfurdioxide levels soared, the stock market sank without a trace, and the sword of Damocles began its swift descent.

“Laurence Clarke? This is Mr. Finch’s secretary. Mr. Finch would like to see you in his office.”

“In his office,” I said. I have a tendency in moments of stress to repeat the last three words of other people’s sentences. When Fran and I were married, I said “Help you God” instead of “I do.” Which gave a few people a few bad moments until I corrected myself.

“Yes,” said Mr. Finch’s secretary.

“Now?”

“Now, Mr. Clarke.” Yecchhh.

Mr. Clayton Finch’s office is on the fourteenth floor, which is one floor above the twelfth. Clay Finch is not, as one might understandably guess, a target for particularly adept skeet shooters. He is in fact the president of Whitestone Publications, the fount from whence flows a torrent of paperback books and magazines of no particular distinction. In this capacity he has been, for just less than ten months, the employer of yours truly, Laurence Clarke.

He looked more like a cast-iron owl than a clay finch, anyway. He gazed at me over his desk, all eyes and a couple of yards wide. His was a much larger desk than mine, and his office, unlike mine, had windows. Several of them. Let it be known, though, that I in no way begrudged him these trappings of status. I was perfectly content with my little desk and my airless cubbyhole and my subsistence-level salary.

“Laurence Clarke,” he said.

“Mr. Finch,” I said.

“Laurence with a U,” he said. “Clarke with an E.”

“With an E,” I echoed.

He closed his eyes. He opened them, and he shook his head sorrowfully from side to side, and then he closed his eyes again. “I suppose you ought to sit down,” he said.

I sat down.

“You’ve been with us since September,” he said. “You were hired as the editor-in-chief of Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls. We pay you” — he consulted a scrap of paper — “a salary of $16,350 annually.”

I nodded.

He picked up a pipe, turned it around and around in his manicured hands. He said, “ Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls suspended publication with its January issue. I suspect the publicity had something to do with it. Your predecessor Haskell; even though we fired him, the story couldn’t be hushed up. An eleven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake. And then offering the defense that the boy told him he was fourteen. A bad hat, Haskell. And the scandal inevitably rubbed off on Ronald Rabbit .”

“It hardly seemed fair,” I put in.

He sighed. “You prepared the December and January issues,” he said. “After which time the magazine ceased publication. Since then you seem to have continued to come to your office every day, Monday through Friday, except for a week’s vacation in April and four days in February when you were ill.”

“Asian flu.”

“You’ve continued to draw your full salary. You’re listed in the books as the editor of this Ronald Rabbit thing.” His eye focused thoughtfully upon me. “Mr. Clarke,” he said, “just what on earth do you do?”

I swallowed, but that didn’t seem to answer his question. I said, “Uh, I get a lot of reading done.”

“I imagine you do.”

“And I, uh, keep myself available.”

“Whatever for?”

“For anything that might come up.”

“No doubt.” He closed his eyes for a longer period of time. He opened them and sighed, perhaps because I was still there. “It must be very boring for you,” he said. “Doing absolutely nothing, day after day, week after week, month after month.”

“Month after month,” I said.

“Eh?”

“I haven’t minded it, Mr. Finch.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Of course at first I hoped someone would find something for me to do, but after a while I began to get used to it. To having nothing to do, that is.”

“You never went looking for another job.”

“No, I’ve been happy here.”

“And you never tried to find anything else you could do here?”

“I didn’t want to call attention to myself.”

He winced. “Eight months of well-paid inactivity,” he said. “Two months of work and eight months of total sloth. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Do you realize what you’ve done, Clarke? You’ve stowed away on a corporation.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“It’s quite incredible. When this came to my attention I was fully prepared to be furious with you. For some curious reason I find myself unable to work up any genuine rage. Astonishment, yes. Even a sort of grudging admiration. I have to admit that I found myself looking around for something else you could do for us. But of course there’s nothing open. Everybody in the industry is busy reducing staff these days; combining jobs, eliminating deadwood. You’re the deadest possible sort of wood, Clarke. No offense intended, but you’re the rottenest limb on the Whitestone tree.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did he, so I finally broke the silence. “Then I’m fired,” I said.

“Fired? Of course you’re fired.”

I nodded. “I knew it would have to happen sooner or later. It was too good to last.”

“Fired? What else could you be but fired? Promoted, perhaps? Rewarded with a raise?”

“I’ll miss working here,” I said. To myself more than to Finch.

He stood up. “Oh, we’ll miss having you, Clarke. I don’t know how we’ll get on without you.” He started to chuckle, then broke it off sharply and resumed the head-shaking routine. “Well,” he said, “I’ve had a check drawn. Your salary through today plus two weeks’ severance pay and six days’ sick leave.” He picked up a check and frowned at it. “Of course you weren’t here five years or you would have been participating in the profit-sharing plan. Suppose you’d stowed away for five years? Or forever? The mind boggles. Well, I don’t suppose it will take you long to find something suitable. We’ll give you a good reference, needless to say. We’ve had no complaints about your performance of assigned tasks, have we?”

I laughed politely.

“And in the meantime you can begin collecting unemployment benefits. A comedown from your present salary, but your duties will be essentially the same.”

“Essentially the same.” I took a breath. “Could you tell me how you happened to, uh, find out about me?”

“Your expense account,” he said.

“My expense account?”

“Part of the current austerity program. I had someone going over expense account records for the past half year to see who might have been taking a bit of advantage. And your records immediately attracted attention.”

“I never used my expense account, Mr. Finch.”

“Precisely. An editor who doesn’t charge a minimum of three lunches a week to the company stands out like a sore thumb. Surprising you weren’t detected earlier. Why, you should have been gouging us for an extra twenty-five or thirty dollars a week at the least.”

“It didn’t seem honest,” I said, thoughtfully.

“Honest,” he said. “Well,” he said. “I won’t keep you, Clarke. You’ll want to clean out your desk. If there’s anything in it. And you’ll want to say goodbye to some of your coworkers, if you’ve happened to meet any of them in the course of your stay here. It’s been a pleasure, Clarke. An educational experience.”

We shook hands. I said, “If you should ever decide to reactivate Ronald Rabbit —”