Like a Boss Page 3

  “You know, there are Freeborn in the Union,” I said. “The Prez, for instance.”

  “But she’s rare,” said Marolo. “Besides, she actually likes being a manager.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I run a small distillery,” he said. “She’s gotta run a government. That means more people, more money, more headaches.” He made a face. “Not that I wouldn’t mind us getting our act together. I don’t know how you Union people do it.”

  “Probably because we don’t resort to blowing stuff up.”

  “Hey, it was never proven that the Freeborn Organizing Committee had anything to do with those bombings.”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “I know. I know. Besides, that was all before my time. I was still an Indenture when all that went down.”

  Marolo gave a harumph. “That sounds like a lot of other people I know. It was either before their time or beneath their interest.”

  “You think I don’t care about working conditions for Freeborn people?”

  “I think you may not know the whole story.”

  I leaned on the jack. “I have plenty of time, apparently.”

  He waved a hand. “No, forget it. It is history now. And it’s just as well the FOC burned out. That would have meant turning this place into more of a city.”

  I resisted the temptation to tell him that Tanque, the Ward we were in, barely qualified as “city.” We were kilometers away from the edges of Santee City, more in the kampong, really. The only things that kept us connected were the single-lane road made of crushed palm crab shells and the line of ramshackle network towers that ran alongside said road. But, when you’ve spent your entire life surrounded by sugarcane and people without computers in their eyeballs, your perspective would be different, too.

  “I hope you guys don’t all think I’m some lunatic who’s going to destroy your lives,” I said. “I’ve never made anyone sign long-term contracts or anything that ties them to working here. And what about Martha? I got her that gig over at Bill Beaulieu’s when she wanted to be closer to her dad.”

  “This is all true,” said Marolo. “But the city’s not the kampong, Padma. It moves faster, it’s not dependent on rainfall or cane rats or fungus.”

  “So, it’s different from what you know.”

  “Exactly!” he said, beaming.

  I climbed down from the ladder and put a hand on his shoulder. “And it is different for everyone else who comes here. It’s a shock for someone who Breaches, no matter where they lived before. Hell, I’ve been here fourteen years, and I get thrown every now and then.”

  “What, you?”

  “Yes, me,” I said. “There are little things, like using tiffin-boxes instead of food wrappers or shortages of staples like coffee or curried ketchup. The big things, too. I was born in a hospital that looked like a greenhouse. My pediatrician was a palm tree.”

  He rolled his eyes. “See, that’s not fair, trying to make me feel like a hick.”

  “I’m serious!” I said. “My pediatrician was terrified of getting germs from his patients, so he used an animatronic palm tree to talk with us. He’d operate it by remote control from a bunker. Sweet guy, always gentle with the exams. That would never happen here. It wouldn’t be a thought for anyone.” I squeezed his shoulder. “I know this sounds cliché, but all of us, Union and Freeborn, we’re all trying to live our lives and not get too screwed by the Big Three.”

  He nodded. “That’s a great line.”

  “Isn’t it? And so’s this: are you to do this zen quitting on me, too? Or are you going to help me figure out how to get everyone back here?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “Everyone just needs to see you here more often.”

  I took a step back. “Really? That’s it? Everyone went home because they think I’m some absentee employer? The city’s only a forty-minute ride away!”

  “But it’s still the city. They want to know you’ll work out here, with them.”

  I sighed. “Okay. What the hell. I don’t have that much of a life, I might as well spend the little I’ve got out here.”

  Marolo smiled. “Also, everyone would like you to talk with that guy from the Co-Op.”

  I froze. “What guy from the Co-Op?”

  Marolo waved his hand over his chin. “You know. The one with the funky beard. The kind that looks like he’s got a crab hanging from his lower lip.”

  I didn’t have to blink through my buffer to know who he meant. “Vikram Ramaddy? What’s he been doing here?”

  “Trying to get the Co-Op to buy you out.”

  The wrench slipped out of my grip and clattered on the pourform floor. “He... what?”

  Marolo’s face crumpled. “Oh. You mean, you haven’t talked with him?”

  I took a deep breath to keep myself from screaming. “No,” I said, my voice level as the ocean on a windless day. “I don’t believe I have. Though I’m sure as hell about to. Probably with a cricket bat.” I let out that breath, drew in a longer, deeper one. “Did he make an offer to you?”

  “Not as such,” said Marolo, taking a step back from me.

  I gave him a glare. “Marolo, did the vice-chair of the Santee Anchorage Distillers Co-Operative give you an offer on this place? Or is this some new kind of zen aggression?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” said Marolo. “He just came here yesterday, took a look around, made sure our payments were up-to-date, asked what I thought about the cane harvest–”

  “Wait.” I held up my hands. “What about the harvest?”

  Marolo waved his hands like he was shooing a fly. “Other producers are having problems getting the cane they were contracted. But that’s because they’re idiots who work with idiot growers. Remember that guy in Bangsar? The one who flooded his fields with raw sewage because he thought it would help the soil?”

  “The guy who lost a foot to sepsis, yeah. What about him?”

  “Those are the growers Vikram’s dealing with, and it doesn’t affect us, because we grow our own.” He let out a slow breath, his body curling around his midsection. He gave me a smile. “That, by the way, is one of things I’m glad I don’t have to worry about. Nothing’s threatening our supply of cane.”

  “No, but Vikram Ramaddy is threatening my calm and placid mind. What did he say?”

  Marolo cleared his throat, and some of the tension returned to his spine. “He was worried about the future of this distillery because of certain rumors he’d been hearing. Rumors about people not showing up to work, about slowed production, about…” His eyes flicked at me, then looked as far away as possible.

  I put my hands behind my back and rocked back and forth on my feet, my work boots squeaking against the floor. “About?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then blurted, “About the state of your mental health. He was worried that all of this work, here and in the plant, it was all too much pressure, and he wasn’t sure you’d be able to meet your obligations to the Co-Op. And if that happened, if I saw any signs that you were going to crack, then he and the other owners would be happy to make sure we all kept our jobs and kept this place running by making a takeover offer under Article Thirty-Three.”

  I stopped rocking. “Article Thirty-Three?”

  “You know it, right?”

  “I have the entire Co-Op Charter memorized, and I am intimately familiar with Article Thirty-Three.” I bent down and picked up the wrench, put it back into the toolbox.

  Marolo exhaled and relaxed. “I really thought you’d be more upset.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said, looking at all the other wrenches and screwdrivers and spanners in the box and wondering how I could use each of them to murder the other members of the Co-Op. “However, I am a professional, so I’m not going to let my anger take charge of my actions. Not until I’m sure I can legally punch that crab-bearded motherfucker into the middle of the ocean.”

  Marolo nodded. “That sounds more like you.”

  “He ac
tually invoked Article Thirty-Three?”

  Marolo gave a half-shrug. “Well, like I said, it wasn’t an official offer, but it sure sounded like he was dancing around the subject.”

  I growled. “See, this is the reason why it would be worth you having some kind of recording device on your person at all times. So you can stop people from sneaky underhanded moves and force them to pull blatant underhanded moves.”

  Marolo shrugged. “I did tell him thanks but no thanks.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, looking around the distillery. “He smells blood in the water, and he’s not going to stop until the Co-Op gobbles this place up.”

  “But they can’t do that, right? Not yet?”

  “We are fine, finance-wise. I can show you the numbers.”

  He held up his hands. “I know them. You sing them to me every payday.”

  “Then I’ll have to sing louder, because you’re the only one who’s heard.” I opened my arms wide and did a slow circle. “What do you see?”

  Marolo beetled his brows. “An empty distillery?”

  “And why is it empty?”

  He scrunched his forehead a bit, then opened his eyes wide. “Oh, Lord. Everyone has panicked, and that will mean nothing gets done, so of course the place will go under.” He looked at the toolbox. “Now I want to hit him. What should I use?”

  “You leave that up to me.”

  “Not on your life.” He picked up a torque wrench. “He wants to come in here and screw up the best job I’ve ever had? Not without a fight.”

  “Which, like I said, you will leave up to me.” I held out my hand. After hesitating a moment, he gave me the wrench. “I’m the owner. I’m in the Co-Op. They want to try and screw us with rules and procedure? We’ll use ’em right back.”

  “You got a lawyer?”

  For a brief moment, I thought about Banks and wondered where his skinny ass had gone to. By now, the ship he’d boarded would be near the Red Line, ready to jump off into the Great Beyond. I didn’t expect to hear from him ever again, but, right now, it would have been nice to ping him a message and bully him into helping me.

  “I used to,” I said. “But I think I can handle it.” I patted the torque wrench. “Especially if I’ve got this.”

  THREE

  After telling Sirikit to drive much, much slower, we eased to a stop in front of the head office of the Santee Anchorage Rum Producers’ Co-Operative, way the hell northwest in Xochimilco Grove. This was where the sidewalk ended and the kampong began. The Co-Op office, an architectural student’s fever dream of warped glass, reclaimed hull plates, and ironpalm deckwork, huddled at the end of Chung Kuong Street. Behind it spread the kampong, the great fields of sugarcane that rolled beyond the western horizon. The only thing I could hear (after Sirikit killed the stereo) was the rustle of millions of hectares of cane, their leaves shaking in the evening breeze.

  Sirikit sniffed. “I thought it would smell more like rum.”

  “Not here,” I said, hopping out of the tuk-tuk. “This place is nothing but business.” I pointed at the buildings that lined the street. “Everything here used to support the distilleries, back when there were only a few of them. Sand would get hauled up to that plant” – I nodded at one squat square coated with soot – “and melted into glass for the bottling plant there” – I turned to a triangular building made entirely of blue-green glass – “before getting labelled there.” Now I looked right at the site of the Co-Op.

  “Not anymore?”

  “Too many distilleries now,” I said. “Not enough room. Also, some members like to control every aspect of their operation, but they stick with the Co-Op.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head. “Damned if I know. You need anything?”

  Sirikit scratched her neck. “I’d kill for some omusubi right now.”

  I handed her a hundred yuan note. “Two streets south, three streets west. Find the place with the blue maneki-neko on the door. Ask for Ian or Keiko, and they’ll hook you up.”

  She grinned. “You expect me to spend this whole blue boy?”

  “Depends on how hungry you are. Come back in twenty minutes, please.”

  Sirikit zipped away for food while I stood in front of the Co-Op. I tapped the torque wrench against my thigh, wondering how I would have to play this.

  Swing first, ask questions later, hissed The Fear.

  “Shut up,” I murmured, blinking up the time. Four fifty-eight. Oy.

  I’d been here every two weeks ever since I first showed up with the deed to the distillery, and every time I’d wanted to claw my eyes out. It wasn’t the members (most of whom were lovely) or the building itself (which had a really nice view from the second story that made me feel like I was on a boat on the edge of a great green ocean). No, it was the meetings.

  One insomniatic night, when I’d had way too much coffee and not nearly enough sex, I tried to bore myself to sleep by recounting how many meetings I’d attended when I was still an Indenture in the glorious Life Corporate. I could access footage from my pai, of course, but I thought the best way to bring my brain back into neutral was to drag them out of my memory. From university to business school to my WalWa gig to becoming Ward Chair, I had probably attended three thousand, two hundred ninety-four meetings. None of them, not even the times when I had to negotiate between the teams that controlled the soap supply and the ones who mucked out the water plant’s shit tanks, were as interminable as the ones I had attended at the Co-Op.

  I had hoped that everyone would be as passionate and mysterious as Estella Tonggow, but they all turned out to be penny-pinching parliamentary procedural nerds. They made motions and counter motions just to discuss where to order pastries, and that was only after the Pastry Subcommittee had determined that it was financially feasible to even have pastries at the Co-Op’s monthly meetings. Members spent more time jockeying for assignments to study groups than they did discussing the actual running of the Co-Op upon which our incomes (and my sanity) depended. What should have taken thirty minutes at the most would stretch on for hours until, out of desperation, I’d make a motion to run through the real meaty items on the agenda. It usually worked, but I had to threaten whoever sat next to me to second the motion or else.

  Now, I’d always had the feeling that there was a second, deeper group that kept things humming along, one that met somewhere tucked away from eavesdropping and the Co-Op’s lengthy by-laws. Tonggow would never confirm, and everyone else would always deny, that this was true, but the fact that the six hundred distilleries scattered across the planet had managed to keep the Co-Op functioning and profitable told me that someone had a steady hand on the tiller and another on a cricket bat. I only had to look and wait and I would get a sign. Maybe Vikram Ramaddy’s visit to my distillery (my distillery, dammit) was the opening move I’d needed.

  I gave the torque wrench another tap on my leg. Going in swinging was not the right move, as good as it might have felt. I had friends and allies here, people who’d lent me time and expertise when they hadn’t had to. They probably would abandon me if I walked in and smashed everything in my path. I wouldn’t blame them; violence had threatened to tear the Co-Op apart before, and it was no longer tolerated. Mutual benefits meant mutual profits, and that meant everyone had to behave themselves or face expulsion.

  But that didn’t mean I had to play the helpless sucker. If someone with Vikram’s mojo was trying to undermine me, that meant I had to let him know I wouldn’t be intimidated. I leaned to my right and put the wrench through the hammer loop in my cargo trousers. It hung there, just out of immediate reach, but close enough for anyone to see. As far as I knew, implied violence was still okay under the by-laws.

  A young woman in a business suit came out of the building, her face lit with a smile as she flipped through a sheaf of papers. She stopped short of bumping into me, and the smile vanished when she saw the Don’t-Mess-With-Me look on my face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Co-Op m
ember.”

  She smiled again, and there was something about her perfect skin and perfect teeth that screamed Life Corporate. She had no tattoo on her cheek, however. Otherwise, she could have been me, if I’d have Breached right after business school. “In that case, can I interest you in contributing to the Co-Op Mutual Fund? It’s a way to share our success with the rest of the planet.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said, jiggling my leg. The wrench clanked, and her eyes drifted down to it. She nodded and hustled away as fast as her pumps could carry her.

  I entered the building, the battered steel doors whispering behind me. The interior offices were built around a central atrium filled with all the varieties of heirloom cane, the kind that made rum instead of industrial fuel. A white kid in his twenties sat behind a desk made of burnished metal, its top covered by cheap brochures hawking Co-Op rums and the Co-Op Mutual, a scheme that got suckers to invest in the Co-Op without having any voting rights.

  The kid’s un-inked face stared down at a terminal. Soon, Freeborn like him were going to outnumber Breaches like me, and I had no idea what would happen. Now, however, I had age, authority, and a very heavy wrench.

  I tapped on the desk, and the kid looked up and gave me a smile so sweet my pancreas freaked out. “Good evening, Ms Mehta! How may I help you?” The name plate in front of him said TODD.

  “Is Vikram in?”

  Todd’s smile flickered. I didn’t wait for a response. Around the table, through the atrium, and up the stairs I went, the kid’s feeble pleadings following me. Vikram had the third-best office in the building, the one with an eastern-facing window looking out over the city and the water beyond. The Co-Op Chair, Elisheba McInnerny, got the best office, the one opposite Vikram’s; its windows emptied onto the kampong so the room would fill every morning with the deep green of the cane. The second-best office, the one in between both, went to the member with the best production that month. Tonggow had never won that space, and I hadn’t felt the need to compete for it either.