“And the Bookworms don’t like it,” says Wensley. “Well, we made our decision. They’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”
“The trouble is,” says Thurston, “they haven’t. In a series of what the memos call ‘guerrilla raids’, the Bookworms have systematically been throwing out whatever merchandise the Computers Department employees set out in this ten-metre strip and replacing it with their own merchandise. And the Computers employees –”
“Technoids, I believe they call themselves,” Chas offers helpfully, keen to show off his knowledge of shop-floor jargon.
“The Technoids,” says Thurston, using the nickname with some distaste, “haven’t been taking it lying down. Fights have been breaking out and sales assistants on both sides have been getting hurt.” He pulls up another e-memo on the terminal: “‘Three sales assistants had to be hospitalised today as a result of a skirmish on the strip of floorspace between Books and Computers, the latest and bloodiest episode in this rapidly escalating conflict. This matter now demands the administration’s most urgent attention.’”
Sato winces. “Sick-leave. Sick-pay.”
“Worse,” says Mungo, “stock has been damaged. Why didn’t anyone draw our attention to this sooner?”
“As I said, it was on the files,” says Thurston. “Security has put in a total of seventeen e-memos, but the first was filed under Employee Disputes and all the subsequent memos were automatically routed the same way.”
That explains it. Every once in a while a head of department will single out one of his subordinates for a hard time or a floor-walker will be accused of claiming others’ commissions as his own, but the arguments almost always resolve themselves by the time the reports reach the Boardroom, and so the brothers have taken to ignoring Employee Dispute e-memos. Why bother?
“But still we should have noticed,” says Chas, “because Employee Dispute e-memos usually come from Personnel and these ones came from Security.”
There are murmurs of agreement.
“So it’s an oversight,” says Wensley, shrugging. “It’s not too late to rectify it.”
“Quite,” says Sato. “But in the light of our apparent inefficiency, instead of issuing our decision electronically it would be more politic if one of us actually went down there and dealt with the matter in person. The personal touch may make all the difference.”
“And we all know who that someone’s going to be,” says Chas, with feigned rancour. As though he never has any choice in the matter.
“Oh, Chas,” says Fred, clasping his hands together beseechingly. “Please. None of us wants to go down there, and you’re the best at dealing with, you know,
ordinary
people. Oh, please say you’ll do it for us. Please. I’ll get down on my hands and knees and kiss your patent leather brogues if I have to. Anything. Just say you’ll go.”
“Chas, would you mind?” says Thurston. “It’s simply a question of getting the heads of both departments together and giving them a good talking-to.”
“Threaten them with their jobs if you have to,” says Mungo. “That’s what I’d do.”
“Just get them to stop damaging our property,” says Wensley.
Chas is about to raise his hands in surrender and agree to do as his brothers ask, at the same time declining Fred’s generous offer for fear that his brother’s lips will ruin the shine on his shoes, when one of the Boardroom doors is flung open.
A moment later a head appears round the other door, followed by a body. The hair on the head shows signs of having recently been towelled dry, while the body is clad in wrinkled jeans and a checked shirt that has been buttoned incorrectly.
The new arrival comes tottering into the Boardroom, a hand clamped to one side of his forehead as though to keep his brains from spilling out through a fissure in his cranium. He shuffles across the floor, each step seeming to cost him a world of effort, until he reaches the table. There he stops, steadying himself against its edge, and, swaying slightly, stares around at the faces of the six brothers, who look back at him with expressions ranging from mild concern to thinly-veiled contempt. He takes his hand from his forehead and examines the palm as though genuinely expecting to find it smeared with grey matter. Then he returns his gaze to the brothers.
His
brothers.
“Morning, all,” he says, then lets out a short, abrupt laugh, as though he has cracked the funniest joke of all time.
“Good morning, Sonny,” says Thurston, icily. “We were wondering where you’d got to.”
14
Benten
: one of the Shichi Fukijin, the seven Japanese gods of luck, and the only female among them, she brings good fortune in matters pertaining to wealth, feminine beauty, and the fine arts.
9.58 a.m.
A
GLANCE AT
a wall clock reminds Frank that a lightning sale is about to take place.
Having memorised the order of the day’s sales while Mr Bloom was running through them during the morning briefing, he doesn’t have to check his Sphinx for the location. First on the list is Dolls. Four departments away, and therefore close enough for him to feel obliged to attend.
Since collaring the shoplifter, Frank has been wandering the Blue Floor, mulling over his conversation with Moyle. Moyle is right about him not having the soul of a collector. But how to account for the objects and gadgets that cram his apartment? All the artworks and items of furniture he has accumulated over the years almost without being aware of it, all the possessions purchased on a whim, all the
things
he has surrounded himself with and barely notices – what absence in him do these fill?
The root of the problem lies, he thinks, in his time at the Academy. In his Ghost Training.
Frank was eighteen and fresh out of school, a young man with high hopes and low self-esteem, when he applied for a job at Days. He had no idea what aptitude he might have for working at the store. His exam results had been good, but they alone would not guarantee him employment even as a sales assistant, and anything higher than a sales assistant – anything at the administrative level, for instance – was barred to all but university graduates with good degrees. He filled in the relevant forms and sent them off simply because that was what everyone else was doing, and while he waited for the response to his application to come through, he found work as a night porter in a medium-grade hotel, a nice, unobtrusive job that gave him plenty of time to read, think, and generally be by himself.
Months went by, and every once in a while he would ring Days Personnel to enquire whether his application had even been received. More often than not he listened to a recorded message informing him that all the lines were busy. On those rare occasions when he got through to a human being, he was assured that job applications were being processed as fast as humanly possible and that his would doubtless be got round to eventually.
He was beginning to lose hope, and considering reapplying, when the reply came. Inside a fat brown envelope watermarked with Days logos was a vast questionnaire dozens of pages long that covered over a thousand topics, some as innocuous as Frank’s favourite foodstuffs, television programmes, and newspapers, others as prurient as his religious inclinations, his sexual feelings (if any) for children under the age of consent, and his relationship with his parents (which was almost nonexistent, seeing as his father had passed away several years ago and his mother was surviving on state benefit and a diet of prescription tranquillisers). The questionnaire took hours to fill in, but he persevered, suspecting that it was intended as a kind of first hurdle for prospective employees, there to winnow out the half-hearted.
He sent it back, and expected to have to wait several months more before learning if he had earned an interview or not. The form letter accompanying the questionnaire had warned him that interviews were being booked as far as two years in advance. He resigned himself to a long wait, and continued working nights at the hotel.
But the response from Days was surprisingly swift. Barely weeks passed before a letter arrived asking him if he could come in for an interview that autumn.
The interview, in a chamber in Personnel in the Basement, lasted three hours. Senior Personnel administrators went over many of the same topics that had been covered by the questionnare, interrogating Frank closely in order to ascertain whether he had been telling the truth or not.
He was an only child?
That was correct, he told them.
Good. And his father?
Died when Frank was eleven.
He rated family and friends low on a scale of “things important to him.” Why was that?
Because he found people in general troubling and intrusive.
Good, good. And did he have trouble getting served in shops?
Sometimes, yes.
Did people sometimes barge in front of him in queues without apologising?
That had happened, yes.
Did he often find himself standing alone in the corner at parties?
He didn’t get invited to too many parties.
And so it went for three long, gruelling hours, and at the end of it Frank was sent to sit out in the hallway while the Personnel administrators conferred. He slumped on a chair, feeling like a wrung-out dishrag. Some time later, he wasn’t sure how long, he was invited to come back in, and was told that his personality profile was ideally suited to Tactical Security.
Embarrassed by his ignorance, he asked what Tactical Security meant, exactly, please.
Store detection, he was told. Would he consider training to become a Ghost?
Not entirely sure that he wanted to spend the rest of his life as a store detective, and a little hazy about what the job entailed, Frank was nevertheless not so stupid as to turn the opportunity down, reasoning that if things didn’t work out he could always go back to night portering or, since it appeared that he had a bent for law enforcement, apply to join the police force. He told the administrators yes, went home and told his mother what had happened (she, predictably, was underwhelmed), went to the hotel and handed in his notice (the manager there was considerably more impressed and encouraging), and almost immediately embarked on the year-long course of Ghost Training.
The first six months of Ghost Training took place at the Academy, a fenced-in compound on the outskirts of the city, situated in one corner of the spacious grounds of the mansion owned by Septimus Day. There, at the hands of a team of instructors made up of former Ghosts, Frank was taught the basics of self-defence, use of sidearms, and the technique of guttural ventriloquism known as subvocalisation. He learned how to recognise the flagging signs that identify a shoplifter and was instructed in the methods the more inventive professional boosters employ, such as carrying a box with a false side for slipping stolen goods into, or pushing a hand through a slit in a coat pocket in order to pillage shelves under cover of the coat flap.
Once he had mastered those skills, he was initiated into the mysteries of congruity – the art of blending into the background, of appearing just like anyone else and therefore like no one. In this his natural drabness helped him greatly. Since childhood Frank had always been one of those people who are overlooked, whose face no one remembers, whose name slips out of people’s memories and lodges on the tip of their tongue where they can’t find it. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a nobody, and naturally this was an attribute he had always considered a drawback, but his Ghost Training showed him that it could also be a virtue. He was taught to cultivate a bland, abstracted air and never let his face show what he was thinking; to avoid making sudden, erratic gestures which might mark him out as an individual; in short, to damp down of what little spark of personality he possessed until it was no more than a infinitesimal wink of light, dimmer than the farthest star. By the end of the six months he had refined his innate innocuousness to such a degree that he could, if he wanted to, walk through a crowded room and pass entirely unnoticed.
Halfway through his training his mother died. He was given time off to organise the funeral, which he did in an efficient but perfunctory manner. At the ceremony itself, in the company of a handful of estranged relatives and his mother’s semi-estranged friends, he felt some sadness, but not much. Perhaps this was a by-product of his training, perhaps not. For a long time there had been a distance between him and his mother, a drug-chilled void. Death only made that distance slightly more remote. In many ways losing her came as a relief. It shaved further complications from his personality, helping to strip away the emotional ties that stood between him and full Ghosthood.
On average, only a tenth of the trainees at the Academy develop congruity sufficiently to go on to become fully-fledged Ghosts. The rest are advised to seek an alternative career. Frank was singled out by his instructors as being an exceptionally apt pupil. Without much difficulty he graduated to the second part of the course: six months of practical experience on the shop floor.
Donald Bloom, who himself had been a Ghost for only a little over a year, showed Frank the ropes. Under Mr Bloom’s affable tutelage he learned the ins and outs of the store, tramping the floors (all seven of them, because this was back in the days before the brothers commandeered the Violet Floor for themselves), going over and over the same ground until he had the location of all seven hundred and seventy-seven departments securely locked away in his memory. At the same time he further refined the skills he had acquired at the Academy. Side by side with Mr Bloom he drifted behind customers and lurked where he was least likely to be seen but where
he
could see as much as he needed. The two of them loitered without intent, lingered with langour. It was Mr Bloom who helped Frank make his first official collar, and that was a moment of achievement whose sweetness Frank will never forget.
By the time the year of Ghost Training was up, the metamorphosis was complete. Frank had become a living cypher. A professional nonentity. Congruous. A Ghost.