Ellis Weiner - Atlas Slugged AGAIN - The Secret Sequel to the Towering Masterpiece

Taking hold of its elegant china platter, she passed him the brisket. Glatt used a pair of beautiful sterling silver tongs, a gift from a wealthy individual with excellent taste, to transfer several slices of the rich, delectable meat to his plate. He cut through the braised animal flesh and impaled it on the tines of a fork—efficiently, pitilessly. He tasted it, and a dark scowl formed on his face. He rang for the footman, who hurried in from the kitchen. “Pierre,” Glatt said contemptuously, “the brisket has gone cold.”

The footman took the platter and hurried off to the kitchen. Dispassionately eying a basket of dinner rolls, Glatt picked one up in his bare hands and began to eat it. “Oh, Dragnie, Dragnie,” he said. “How was your day?”

“Mine?” Dragnie exclaimed. It was not like Glatt to express an interest in her day; indeed, it was not like him to express an interest in any other person. His independence, his self-sufficiency, his supreme individuality were the character traits for which she most admired and despised him—and for which, she knew, she would willingly kill him and be his slave.

She became suddenly aware, with a deep certainty, that the pressures on Glatt, his responsibilities—not to others, for he had none, but to himself—were taking a toll, as they would on any man. Glatt not only functioned both as C.E.O. of Glatt Industries as well as its Top Breakthrough Inventor, but as Head Advisor of Governmental Bureaucracy Affairs for Economic Ideas for the federal government. The international situation had been deteriorating for some time; no wonder, Dragnie now thought, Glatt looked vexed. “My day was rather interesting,” she said. “In fact, I met a most extraordinary young man at the Glatt School—“

The butler silently entered the room, stopped before Glatt, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but three gentlemen are down in the lobby and insist on meeting with you.”

Glatt chuckled and made a gesture of impatience and mockery and contempt. “Who are they, Farnsworth?”

“Mr. Rawbone, Mr. De Soto, and Mr. Daghammarskjold.”

Glatt and Dragnie exchanged a look, a look of significance and meaning and shared visual contact.

“Send them up,” Glatt said.

Moments later, having ascended the 287 floors of the Johnsonwood Building in a streamlined supersonic elevator of Glatt’s invention, the trio where ushered into the apartment.

“Hello, John,” said Hunk Rawbone. “Hello, Dragnie.”

Dragnie chuckled and Glatt chuckled. That Rawbone had once been Dragnie’s lover was known to all present. Tall, handsome, with the muscular build of an athlete and the brilliant mind of a genius, Hunk Rawbone had founded Rawbone Metals and single-handedly invented the miracle metal Rawbonium. Stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, cheaper than sand, one-hundred-percent gluten-free and packed with important vitamins and minerals, it had revolutionized the railroad industry, the aviation industry, and every other metal-using industry. There had been a time, ten years before, when its manufacture, distribution, and sale had been strictly regulated by the second-raters and me-too-ers and so’s-yer-old-man-ers of the national government, when the entire metals industry had been hobbled and bound and gagged by men like Francis Pissypants, the Bureaucrat-in-Chief, and J.B. Mucklicker, director of the National Board of Caution.

That, however, had been before John Glatt had convinced various businessmen to hide out in Wyoming, and brought the entire world to its knees. Now Hunk Rawbone was both President of Rawbone Industries and Head Business Person of the Department of Business.

“Hello, Hunk,” Dragnie said. She turned to their second visitor. “How are you, San?”

Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely De Soto chuckled in a mischievous South American way, a way outwardly suggestive of lighthearted frivolity and consistent with his former but faked-up image as a feckless, womanizing and girlizing playboy but now openly proclaiming his absolute fidelity to a code of values that held that the mind was the supreme expression of man’s intellect. “ I ?” De Soto chuckled.

Like Dragnie, Sanfrancisco was a self-made man who had inherited an industrial empire. Handsome, brilliant, dashing, and with a certain dangerous but appealing Latino flair, he had become director, upon his father’s death, of the fabled De Soto Talc Mines. El Mino De Soto de Talco Incorporado was now the source of eighty-six percent of the world’s baby powder, which was daily administered to more than seventy-one percent of the world’s babies in both Natural and Springtime Fresh scents. “I am well, Dragnie,” he said with an amused twinkle.

“Well, I am fine, too, in case anyone cares!” joked Regnad Daghammarskjold.

“And what if we don’t?” chuckled De Soto.

“Well, then, you can go to hell!” rejoined the boisterous Swedish-American Swede to the chuckles of everyone else except the servants.

Dragnie pursed her lips in amusement as her eyes glittered with appreciation for his rascally personality. Handsome, blond, and attractively beautiful in a way that appealed to men as well as women, Regnad Daghammarskjold was a pirate. He spent most of his time aboard his ship, the Fjord Fusion , with his rollicking but deadly serious and often lethal band of beautiful blond fellow pirates, plundering merchant ships from other countries and pillaging the state-owned vessels for loot, swag, and booty. When not haunting the shipping lanes of the bounding main and asserting the supremacy of private theft and entrepreneurial swashbuckling over state-run maritime mediocrities, Regnad lived in a modest two-bedroom co-op in Murray Hill with his wife, Grace Adams, the beautiful movie star.

“Would any of you like a drink?” Dragnie asked.

“I would like a beer,” Regnad Daghammarskjold said. “Do you have any?”

“I don’t know,” Dragnie replied.

“You might,” the pirate said. “Look around. Check your premises, Dragnie.”

“Let me tell you something about beer,” Sanfrancisco De Soto said, his eyes blazing. Thirty-five minutes later, when he had concluded his discourse on the history, morality, and metaphysics of beer, Dragnie signaled for Pierre to bring three bottles. She handed them around. Each of the visitors gave her a ten-dollar bill. There was no need for anyone to thank anyone for anything. “I won’t insult you by offering you food,” Glatt said. “You are all perfectly capable of obtaining your own sustenance.”

“I know it,” Regnad said.

The group settled in the living room and Hunk Rawbone opened the discussion. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, John,” he said. “But Goa has fallen.”

“I didn’t know it,” Glatt said. “Goa be damned!”

“That’s the last one,” Sanfrancisco added. “Now every nation on earth has become a People’s State of the People.”

“Every nation—save one,” Dragnie murmured. “The United States.”

“Shall I tell you what the product safety boys are saying?” Rawbone asked out loud. “They’re saying that the People’s States’re complaining that our manufactured goods’re dangerous. They’re talking about an embargo.”

“Then we must meet with Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said. “We should also alert the boys in the Pentagon, our nation’s most brilliant scientist boys, and our leading achiever-boys in industry, research, and engineering.”

“This is serious, isn’t it, John?” Regnad said with unflinching directness.

“Yes,” Glatt replied.”

The three visitors had gone, and Dragnie and Glatt were preparing for bed, when Glatt mentioned their earlier topic of conversation. Standing in their elegant bedroom, clad in the simplest of pajamas whose clean design, quiet sense of style, and always-tasteful pizzazz made a striking statement of individuality wherever he went, he said, “You were telling me about an extraordinary young man you met today.”