The Branch Read online

  “And now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’d like to take another walk around our circus. My associates will provide you with the proper contracts. I had a feeling that we could come to an equitable agreement, so I took the liberty of having them drawn up before I left my office. My men,” he added meaningfully, “will keep you company until the contracts have been signed. Since you won’t be needing me for the next few minutes, I think I’ll take my leave of you. I find these interviews personally distasteful.”

  He put on his bowler—another anachronism—and walked out of the building.

  It was not, he reflected as he mingled with the crowd, a bad night’s work. Nightspore and Thrush ran the same kind of show as everyone else: it was geared for fear, lust, and greed, with a fair share of side trips into the bizarre. It was also rigged to the teeth, which made it fair game for him.

  He looked up at a Eurasian girl proudly displaying her four nipples as a come-on for the Freak Show. Yes, he reflected, people would shell out all kinds of money just to see something different, to get out of their ruts and worship somewhere other than at the altar of Humdrum.

  And as long as people like Nightspore and Thrush were willing to bilk them, he’d stay solvent by bilking the bilkers.

  Of course, there were legitimate business interests to be considered too, and he’d been buying into quite a lot of them lately: a leatherworks factory in New Hampshire, a computer plant in Pittsburgh, thoroughbred yearlings in Kentucky and California, a professional basketball team in Albuquerque. With more and more time to fill, there were more and more ways to capitalize on the needs of one’s fellow man. Although, Moore acknowledged grimly, even the capitalizers had to battle against boredom. He himself had more money than he could hope to spend in one lifetime, and a reputation that would take him several lifetimes to expunge, and yet he kept at it.

  And why not? After all, what else was there to do? The moment he stopped feeding off humanity he would become indistinguishable from them, ripe for somebody else to come feed off him. He had started as a small-time burglar, learned the ropes, had begun gathering a meticulously selected organization about him, had been careful never to move prematurely, and because he was a little smarter and a little hungrier and a little more ruthless than the next guy, had taken over the next guy’s territory, and the next guy after that, and after that. He had a good, solid structure behind him, peopled with the best men and women that money and the opportunity to escape from boredom could buy. Every one of them wanted his job—he had no use for anyone who willingly settled for second-best—and it kept both him and them on their toes, a reasonably healthy state of affairs in this day and age.

  He’d been uncommonly successful in his chosen field of endeavor, although that didn’t really surprise him. When all was said and done, everyone else was running away from dullness and drudgery, while he was running toward his problems, molding men and situations to fit his various needs.

  A shrill yell broke his train of thought, and he looked up to find himself in front of the Chamber of 1,000 Pains. He grimaced. Why people would pay perfectly good money to have the hell flailed out of them was beyond his capacity to understand, and he had no greater empathy for the hundreds of spectators who shelled out still more money to watch. He shook his head, shrugged, and continued walking.

  He circled the entire Thrill Show, feeling increasingly unclean from his proximity to the marks, and finally decided to return to the office building to pick up the contracts. As he approached it, he noticed a small crowd gathered around a young man with dark glasses. The man had a moth-eaten top hat in one hand and a white cane in the other, and was singing psalms in a less-than-outstanding tenor.

  Moore stopped and looked into the hat. “Not much of a haul,” he remarked. “You’d do better with bawdy ballads.”

  “You want one, you got one,” said the young man, breaking into one of the three million or so verses of “The Ring-Dang-Doo.”

  “Enough!” laughed Moore a moment later, flipping a coin into the upturned hat.

  “You don’t like the songs of the masses?” asked the young man with a smile.

  “I don’t like anything about the masses,” replied Moore. “Want to make some real money?”

  The young man nodded.

  “Five hundred dollars says you’re not blind.”

  The young man felt around in his hat, fingering the coins. “Sixteen dollars and seventy-three cents says you can’t prove it.”

  Moore lit a match and casually tossed it toward the young man’s face.

  There was no reaction.

  “Not bad,” said Moore, suddenly releasing a blow to the young man’s midsection. The air gushed out of him and he fell to his knees. Some of the change rolled out of the hat, and his fingers traveled frantically over the ground, trying to retrieve the lost coins. Moore walked over to him and faked a kick at his face, which went unheeded.

  Finally Moore helped him to his feet, then dug a wad of five-dollar bills out of his pocket, counted ten of them off in front of the young man’s face, and placed them in the hat.

  “Thank you, sir,” wheezed the young man.

  Moore paused a moment, then took the money back, withdrew his wallet, peeled off ten fifty-dollar bills, and dropped them into the ragged top hat.

  “I was wrong,” he said, giving the young man a pat on the shoulder and walking off toward the office building.

  Then, as he reached the door, the young man called out after him: “Hey, Plug-Ugly, where the hell did you ever buy those godawful white spats? They make you look like a goddamned faggot!”

  Moore wheeled around, but the young man had already vanished into the crowd.

  And that was the first meeting between Solomon Moody Moore and Jeremiah the B.

  Most historians would have swapped their fortunes, their spouses, and their eyeteeth to have been there.

  Chapter 2

  Tuesday was smut day.

  Or, more properly, Tuesday was the day of the week when Moore went over the reports of his publishing corporation and its affiliates and issued his directives for the coming week.

  He sat now in what was quite possibly the most spartan office in the entire Chicago complex. Unlike most executive suites it contained no televisions, no radios, no sound systems, no paintings, no couches, no exercise areas, no handicrafts alcoves, no wet bars. It was spare and barren, like the man who worked in it. There was one large desk, made of artificial mahogany, which supported a computer terminal, three telephones, and a quartet of intercoms. Facing it were six chairs, none of them very comfortable. There were doors on three of the walls, two of which were rarely used, and one of the walls contained a small built-in safe. There was only one window in the room, albeit a huge one, and the view was invariably obscured by a row of blinds that had been layered between the inner and outer panes of glass. What pleasures Moore sought were found elsewhere; his office was a place for work, and nothing else.

  “The reports, Ben, if you please.”

  The man sitting across the desk from Moore handed him a sheaf of computer readouts, along with a large breakdown sheet. Ben Pryor, his clothing as loud as Moore’s was muted, his wavy blond hair a stark contrast to Moore’s straight steel-gray, was Moore’s second-in-command, in charge of the day-to-day management of all Moore’s enterprises.

  He was shrewd, highly intelligent, and totally competent, possessed of a master’s degree in business administration and another in economics. He was also openly ambitious, which was natural but regrettable; he knew far too much about the operation for Moore ever to let him go, and the day wasn’t too far off when Moore would have to eliminate him in a more permanent manner.

  Moore began reading the reports, making an occasional comment, issuing a rare order. The pornography industry was doing very well these days, as usual, and the problems of management had more to do with the vast size of the operation than with any legal or sales problems.

  Indeed, sometimes the scope of it am
azed even Moore: he owned three publishing companies that specialized in erotic books, magazines, and newspapers, and two others that churned out pornographic videotapes and computer disks. Between them, they produced some three hundred different titles each month, with sales in excess of eighty million units.

  But that was just the beginning. Pornography, though going through one of its cyclic periods of legality, was still far from being socially acceptable and was subject to occasional harassment, which meant that the huge, monolithic distributors who monopolized service in the densely populated metropolitan areas didn’t care to handle the stuff, or at least didn’t push it with the same verve and zest that they applied to the more suitable publications. So Moore had quietly bought up a number of existing secondary agencies and created still more, each of them specializing in the type of material the large, independent distributors didn’t want.

  From there it was just a small step to buying and building some four thousand pornographic emporiums that specialized in carrying his merchandise. Since many of them catered to prostitution and the more bizarre sexual desires of the public, Moore had also branched out very thoroughly into such services. Finally, he had purchased a huge printing plant that not only sufficed for all his needs but also printed a goodly portion of his rivals’ output as well, and had built a small factory that manufactured most of the sexual gadgets he carried in his stores.

  The money didn’t just roll in; it poured. The average publisher needed to sell about forty percent of his print run to break even; Moore, who owned the publishing company, the printing press, the distribution agencies, the bookstores, and all the associated items, broke even with a sale of five percent. He sold more than five percent, though; more than eighty percent, in point of fact. It wasn’t that his products were superior; they weren’t. But when you control the distribution lifelines, you control the industry, and when you have the power to fire any distributor who puts a single copy of a rival’s publication on display before all of your own are sold, you are a lead-pipe cinch to wind up with the lion’s share of the market. Moore not only had the lion’s share of the market, but held on to it with the tenacity of a lion defending his kill from all the scavengers of the jungle.

  The orders came slowly as Moore studied the reports: fire this man, promote that woman, sell this store, print more copies of that magazine, kill this line of plastic sex aids, place ten more girls in that city. Pryor took it all down on a pocket computer and left to set the wheels in motion. He returned a few minutes later, a beer in his hand, and sat back down opposite Moore.

  “That’s your fourth today,” noted Moore disapprovingly, gesturing toward the beer.

  “Haven’t your spies got anything better to do than measure my alcoholic consumption?” asked Pryor with no trace of surprise or concern.

  “They’re doing it.”

  “Maybe you ought to send them over to the Thrill Show. Your new partners have already been pulling strings to get out of their contract.”

  “Let ’em,” said Moore coldly. “This is my town.” He paused. “If they want to mess around with me, they’d better choose a city where I don’t own half the politicians and all of the coroners.”

  “What’s the show like?” asked Pryor. “I haven’t had a chance to get out there yet.”

  “Maybe if you’d stop trying to seduce my secretary and my stockbroker and every other woman who’s ever had anything to do with me, you could find the time,” said Moore with a mirthless smile.

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” replied Pryor easily. “Besides, not everyone can lead your ascetic life.”

  “That’s what keeps us in business,” said Moore. “The way I live, and the way they live.”

  Pryor stared across the desk for a long moment, mystified as always by the concept of a criminal kingpin who grew rich off his victims’ lusts and seemed violently opposed to displaying any of those drives himself.

  Finally he shrugged.

  “You still haven’t told me what the show is like,” he said, taking a swallow of his beer.

  “Pretty typical,” said Moore. “They’re selling dreams, just like all the others.”

  “That’s a good commodity these days.”

  “It always was,” said Moore. He clasped his hands together and stared thoughtfully at his fingertips. “I wonder if there isn’t a cheaper way to go about it, though.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Pryor.

  “Dreams.”

  “We’re already in it, except that we call them drugs.”

  Moore shook his head irritably. “Drugs create dreams. I want to fulfill them.”

  “You mean like putting a harlot in every room?” chuckled Pryor.

  “I’m being serious, Ben,” said Moore coldly.

  “You always are,” sighed Pryor. “But I haven’t got the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about.”

  “Just what I said: Dream Come True, Inc. I wonder if it’s feasible?”

  “How the hell should I know? What’s the angle?”

  “The angle is simply this: we’ll fulfill any dream for a price. After all, the Thrill Show isn’t going to be here forever, and besides, they’re long on promises and short on results.”

  “Give me a for-instance.”

  “Okay,” said Moore slowly. “Let’s say some guy finds his life unbearably dull …”

  “Which he probably does.”

  “And he wants to have one all-out fling and some excitement.”

  “Such as?”

  Moore shrugged. “I don’t know. Let’s say he wants to rob the First National Bank.”

  “You’re not seriously suggesting that we do it for him?” said Pryor incredulously.

  “No. But what if we help him do it for himself? We make up the plans, help him case the joint, supply all the muscle and expertise he needs, and guarantee that he gets away scot-free.”

  “There’s got to be a gimmick,” said Pryor skeptically. “Why do we take all the risks so he can grab all the dough?”

  “Of course there’s a gimmick,” said Moore patiently. “We’re not altruists, Ben. What if we charge him a flat fee of half a million, hold his take down to a hundred thousand, and split our fee sixty-forty with the bank? Everybody’s happy, nobody goes to jail, and we all get a little richer.” He paused. “Anyway, it’s got possibilities. What do you think?”

  “I think you picked a loaded example,” said Pryor. “There are something like nine elephants left in the world, all worth tens of millions. What if he wants to shoot them all in one afternoon? Or take an example closer to home: I would love to kill my ex-wife and sire fifty bastard children within a year. What can this outfit do for me?”

  “We could certainly supply you with fifty women over a three-month span; the rest would be up to you. As for killing your ex-wife … well, that could probably be arranged for a substantially higher fee.” Moore smiled. “Of course, you’d have to tell us exactly which of your many ex-wives you had in mind.”

  “And the elephants?”

  “He’d have to be a very rich daydreamer,” said Moore with a shrug. “Anyway, have our people work out a schema of what is actually possible with this notion, and have them get it back to me in a day or two. Why should I split all the dreamers’ money with Mr. Nightspore and Mr. Thrush?”

  “Are those really their names?” asked Pryor with a disbelieving grin.

  “What’s in a name? It’s their business that interests me.”

  Pryor left a few minutes later, and Moore took a brief lunch break, after which he began working on some of those enterprises that the government did not know about. Most of it was accomplished by telephone, through so many middlemen that nothing could be traced back to him. No records, written or computerized, were kept anywhere, and even Pryor didn’t know the full extent of the operation, though Moore knew that he spent a lot of his own time and money trying to find out.

  Moore left the office in late afternoon, as was his cu
stom, boarded an underground monorail, and, accompanied by a solitary bodyguard, went to the center of town. The area had once been called the Loop, because of the elevated train tracks that encircled it, and the sobriquet still held, though the tracks had long since been torn down and the vast business buildings, all interconnected on every level and covered by an enormous dome, took up three square miles of incredibly valuable real estate. The suburbs might know rain and snow, but the inner city was always clear and pleasant.

  He rode the slidewalks and escalators until, half a mile above the ground, he came to his regular Tuesday-evening eateasy, a swank and illegal little restaurant with a grubby exterior that proclaimed to all nonmembers that it was a branch of a silicone surgery beautification chain. The government had been rationing meat and most other non-soya products for more than a decade, but men and women of means soon found entrepreneurs to cater to their tastes and hungers, and the eateasies had become some of the more affluent pillars of the huge underground economy.

  Moore left his bodyguard outside and his umbrella at the door—it never rained within the enclosed downtown section of the city, but he carried it religiously—and was ushered to a small table in the back, where he dined on a felonious meal of genuine veal cutlets and whipped potatoes. He ordered blueberry pie for dessert (six months for selling it, one thousand dollars for eating it, courtesy of the United States Fair Food Administration), capped it off with a cup of real coffee, and paid the standard flat fee of six hundred dollars. Then, sated, he picked up his umbrella and, joined by his bodyguard, he reentered the world of soybean by-products and flavored water.

  He toyed with the idea of returning to the Thrill Show, hunting up the phony blind man who had duped him yesterday, and offering him a job in the organization, but concluded that the man was sharp enough to have a different gimmick for every night of the week and would be impossible to spot.

  He decided to go home for the night instead. As he approached the monorail station he reached into his pocket for a token, and felt his fingers come into contact with a piece of paper. He pulled it out and saw that it was a business card: