Chapter Two: Seattle
Subject: Seattle
From: Randall Clay
Date: 12/26/14 09:43
To: Douglas Clay
Deal.
There are, of course, two halves to the why of what I'm doing out here. The first is why I'm doing it in general, which is fairly simple to answer: our father, Aaron Clay, vanished, apparently without a trace, around six years ago. Once he's missing for seven years, he can be declared legally dead, which would be all well and good for us, inheritance-wise, but much less so for mom, if the way dad set up the trusts is anything to go by. However, dad did have a substantial life insurance policy out through his employers at MP NeoTech. Unfortunately, it won't pay out on a missing person case unless we can show a certain amount of due diligence trying to find him. So that's what I'm going to do. Besides, I already wanted to take a semester or two off and travel abroad on general principles. So I intend to go to where he had been and was headed toward when he vanished, and find out what happened to him. If he's dead, I'll then give him a decent burial, and if he's alive, I'll give him a shift kick to the groin, because either way he'll deserve it.
But, I can hear you asking, why now? Why not start this grand globetrotting quest in January, with the new year? And I'll tell you why: because dad's old boss is a complete and utter bastard.
I'd been trying to arrange for a meeting, some kind of interview with some of the people who worked with dad for months, since I decided to take time off of college in the first place. I didn't expect to get a sit-down with Martin Panzer himself, mind you, but I thought there might be some upper-middle management types from dad's time that could find a little time for me. No such luck; I was getting stonewalled at every turn. Until last Friday, the 19th, when the phone rang, just after I'd finished packing up my luggage to come home.
I picked it up, and heard a quintessentially secretarial voice say "Have I reached Randall Clay?" I said that she had, and she continued. "Mister Panzer has an opening in his schedule, and would like to give you the interview you've been asking about."
I told her that was great, and that I'd be happy to come out there. Then I asked what time it was for, and she said "2 PM this coming Thursday." For a while I said nothing, doing the math in my head.
"That's Christmas day," I said.
"Yes, Mister Clay." she assented. "I understand you're in Eugene Oregon now?" Without pausing for an answer, she continued "Mr. Panzer has booked a flight to Seattle leaving this evening for you, and made reservations at the Westview Hotel. He'll send a driver to the Hotel on the day of the meeting. Thank you for your time." And then she was gone, and I was on the line with dead air.
And then I was pretty much trapped, wasn't I. I mean, I'm sure that Senators and CEOs have had their lives reduced to dust for less than standing up Martin Goddamn Panzer in a meeting, haven't they? So what chance did I have?
So, that pretty much explains how I found myself in downtown Seattle with a couple of winter days to kill. On one of them, I went down to the UW, to do a little bit of research on the Digital Stacks; see if there was any interesting information about dad there. Not a productive move; Dad was MP NeoTech's lead international contract lawyer back in his day, and so his name shows up on just about every international contract that the company made at that time, which, let me tell you, is quite a large number of contracts. And, alas, search engine technology has not yet advanced to the point where one can simply apply a "Not: Boring" filter to one's search.
So there I was, flipping absently through a series of hypnotically uninteresting contract abstracts, when a young woman I'd never seen before in my life walked up to me and said "Excuse me. You're Randall Clay, right? Douglas's brother?"
I have to say that you do have excellent taste, brother of mine. She struck me immediately as being quite attractive, with a whole 'sexy librarian' thing going on. The glasses work for her, which certainly isn't always the case. At any rate, I admitted to being your brother and, desparate for any excuse to escape the virtual stack of old contracts before me, I agreed to grab a quick coffee with her.
As far as I was concerned, the first order of business was finding out just how it was that she instantly knew who I was and who I was related to. Well, it turns out that the people who ought to have been working on that anti-boredom web filter I mentioned above have recently added another new feature to the wonderful Web-what is it supposed to be now? 3.5? 4.7? 6.0? Whichever, it's newest and greatest tool is something called 'Faceback', which is a reverse image directory specialized to human faces. Just upload a picture of a face, taken, no doubt, surrupticiously with the camera hidden subtly in one's phone, and, voila! It will tell you, with about 85% accuracy, exactly who that face belongs to, after which more traditional searches can bring about further information such as that person's immediate geneological background. Once again, the advance of internet technology conspires to obsolete the honest labors of the private investigator and personal stalker alike. This is not to say, of course, that your friend Jenny goes around Facebacking every stranger she should happen to meet on the street. Far from it; she assures me, and I have every reason in the world to believe her, that she noticed in my face a family resemblance which piqued her curiosity and used the freshly availible tool merely to confirm an intuitive suspicion. So that's all right, then.
So, the two of us had a pleasant afternoon's conversation, during the course of which I don't quite think that I managed to reveal every embarassing story from when we were growing up together. Have to save a few for Mom to tell when you introduce them to each other, right?
Not much more happened up here between then and the big meeting, apart from weather, of which the city produced a prodigious quantity, particularly of the cold, wet, and windy varieties in all their assorted permutations. It was the combination of all three aspects that prevailed on Christmas morning itself, which made me immensely grateful for the provided driver even if it was going so short a distance that in any other circumstance I'd have preferred to go on foot.
The Seattle offices of MP NeoTech were almost completely deserted, contrary to the mental image I had formed of a modern-day Ebeneezer Scrooge driving an entire crew of cube-dwellers to eek out their daily ration of productivity with a half-day's ration of heating coal: of the droves normally at work in those offices, only three remained. Martin Panzer himself, the secretary who had called me (who, I am pleased to report, had an appearance every bit as quintessentially secretarial as her voice, no doubt requiring a not inconsiderable amount of daily maintenance.), and one other, a towering human being- or perhaps I should keep safe and simply say 'primate', as the theory of an evolutionary regression to Homo Habilis or Homo Erectus was not at all without explanatory power with regard to this specimen. He did not speak but simply loomed slightly to Martin Panzer's side throughout the interview. Panzer introduced him as Arthur Krov, a name which, taken in comparison with the thing itself, seemed distinctly lacking in an embedded nickname, preferably one that implied or overtly stated something violent. Surely his friends and enemies alike called him Art "The Hammer" Krov or Art "Crusher" Krov, or the like.
Art "Puppy-Mangler" Krov pulled back a seat for me in front of Martin Panzer's desk, and I sat down in it. For a short while there was only silence between us, as I pondered my opening. It occured to me that this entire meeting was some kind of test, and I wondered whether by showing up I had passed or failed it. I remembered a story Grandfather once told about a Naval Admiral, interviewing people to potentially serve directly under him. The Admiral, so the story goes, asked the applicant if he had a girlfriend, and the applicant responded in the affirmative; that he not only had a girlfriend but was in fact engaged to the woman in question. The Admiral told the applicant that he preferred to have only bachelors in his service, and handed him the phone to call his fiancee on the spot if he wanted the position. The applicant did so, at which point the Admiral booted him straight out of his office, as he did not want to have anyone in his service who displayed such a small and pitiful amount of backbone. The question was, what did Martin Panzer want to see? Was he interested in someone who wants information about his father enough to sacrifice his holidays, or disgusted by someone who would neglect the family members he has to chase after closure with one who has been gone a long while running?
Almost as if he had been reading my thoughts, Martin Panzer said "I'm not surprised t'see you here, if that's what your wondering. Blood tells, and Aaron wouldn'ta thunk twice about it."
"So, can you help me?" I asked.
"Well, sure. What do you wantto know?" said Panzer.
"First off, what was Aaron working on when he vanished?"
"Hard to say, hard to say" said Panzer. "We weren't much more than a glorified start-up at that time, working on putting cutting edge manufacturing processes together with cheap labor, so we had a lot of pies all over the world. Aaron went all the way around twice, three times a year, working on abouta dozen projects each time."
"And the trip where he vanished?"
"Let me check my notes" said Martin, who did just that. "Looks like he made it halfway that time. Flew out to Seoul, then his Taipei before bounching around Europe a bit, and vanished somehwere on the way to Cairo. There was one more stop planned, in Kenya, but he never made it there."
"What was he doing in Cairo? And right before?"
"Cairo was all about a contract to reconfigure some oil processing facilities away from fuels and toward chemical precursors. Lost that one to Beltra, and that was a cryin' shame."
"And before that?"
"Paris."
"Renouned for its cheap labor" I blurted. Martin Panzer tensed for a second, and Art "Imapler" Krov seemed to loom a few inches taller. Or maybe he was just leaning.
"Coul have been, actually" said Panzer, relaxing. "City's got thousands of unemployed- what's the current phrase- North Africans, right? Actually, I think current practice is t' just not mention 'em at all. Unassimilated Muslim immigrants. We were gonna put the all to work, start integrating them into the economy, but the goddamn frogs would rather keep them isolated in no-go zones and on the dole. Bunch of damned cowards, if y' ask me. You ever hear of a brave Frenchie this side of Joan of Arc?"
"Well, there was the resistance." I said. There was some reason I wasn't actually nearly as intimidated as rationality ought to have demanded, under the circumstances. I think part of it was a growing conviction that when he named his book 'You Think I Was Born With This' one of the things he was talking about was his accent.
"Okay,but they're pretty damn overrated, and don't say near as nuch about the national character as people want to think. See, in the War, they were fighting the fucking Nazis. Pardon my...French." Martin Panzer managed to make that word sound considerably more obscene than anything else he'd said recently. "And when you're fighting a bunch of fucking Nazis, you've got a rock solid moral god damn obligation to fight right down to the last man, woman, child, and dog. Which they clearly did not do. So sure, after the cravens in the government showed their bellies, a few, asmall few, did what decent morality required. That just means that, on the other hand, that most of them didn't.
"Besides, even of them that did fight, almost half of them were really only fighting to make sure that when the future became a boot stomping on a human face, forever, that that book would be manufactured in Moscow rather than Berlin. So no, I've not got all that much respect for the Resistance."
Having finished this tirade, Martin was silent, waiting for me to make some reply. Eventually, I broke in with "What was the Kenya visit going to be about?"
"What? Oh, that. Just some real-estate deal. I think we would up getting that one after all. Anyways, I don't have all day here, so let me get to my point. When Aaron went off the map, I worked like hell to find him He was damned good at what he did. None of my guys ever found a lick of evidence one way or the other, if he ran off or just up and died. But I've decided that I like you, and that you're going to go off down his trail not matter what I do, os I'm going to give you some support. Basically, for tax purposes, hire you, as a contract investigator to do what you're already going to do. Not going to pay much more than squat, mind, but you'll have plane tickets wherever you want to go and an expense account. Interested?"
Now, I'm fully aware that any time I use the tickets or the corporate charge card good old Martin Panzer is going to know exactly what I'm doing. But let's be serious: even if I weren't, the third richest man on the planet is going to be able to find out just as much with only fractionally more effort. It's hard enough to go privacy-mode, off the grid in one country; flying around doing it would be ipossible. So I checked thecontract over as best as my mid-Junior Year Pre-law major eyes could manage, and signed on the dotted line. By which time the airport was snowed under, so no chance of a heroic last minute arrival down there. So the next leg of the trip will be by car, up to Dad's old house.
Next Stop: Vancouver.
From: Randall Clay
Date: 12/26/14 09:43
To: Douglas Clay
Let us honour, O my brothers, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labours-let us feast with friends and neighbors,
And be merry as the custom of our case;
For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follows after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.
-Rudyard Kipling, "Christmas in India"
Deal.
There are, of course, two halves to the why of what I'm doing out here. The first is why I'm doing it in general, which is fairly simple to answer: our father, Aaron Clay, vanished, apparently without a trace, around six years ago. Once he's missing for seven years, he can be declared legally dead, which would be all well and good for us, inheritance-wise, but much less so for mom, if the way dad set up the trusts is anything to go by. However, dad did have a substantial life insurance policy out through his employers at MP NeoTech. Unfortunately, it won't pay out on a missing person case unless we can show a certain amount of due diligence trying to find him. So that's what I'm going to do. Besides, I already wanted to take a semester or two off and travel abroad on general principles. So I intend to go to where he had been and was headed toward when he vanished, and find out what happened to him. If he's dead, I'll then give him a decent burial, and if he's alive, I'll give him a shift kick to the groin, because either way he'll deserve it.
But, I can hear you asking, why now? Why not start this grand globetrotting quest in January, with the new year? And I'll tell you why: because dad's old boss is a complete and utter bastard.
I'd been trying to arrange for a meeting, some kind of interview with some of the people who worked with dad for months, since I decided to take time off of college in the first place. I didn't expect to get a sit-down with Martin Panzer himself, mind you, but I thought there might be some upper-middle management types from dad's time that could find a little time for me. No such luck; I was getting stonewalled at every turn. Until last Friday, the 19th, when the phone rang, just after I'd finished packing up my luggage to come home.
I picked it up, and heard a quintessentially secretarial voice say "Have I reached Randall Clay?" I said that she had, and she continued. "Mister Panzer has an opening in his schedule, and would like to give you the interview you've been asking about."
I told her that was great, and that I'd be happy to come out there. Then I asked what time it was for, and she said "2 PM this coming Thursday." For a while I said nothing, doing the math in my head.
"That's Christmas day," I said.
"Yes, Mister Clay." she assented. "I understand you're in Eugene Oregon now?" Without pausing for an answer, she continued "Mr. Panzer has booked a flight to Seattle leaving this evening for you, and made reservations at the Westview Hotel. He'll send a driver to the Hotel on the day of the meeting. Thank you for your time." And then she was gone, and I was on the line with dead air.
And then I was pretty much trapped, wasn't I. I mean, I'm sure that Senators and CEOs have had their lives reduced to dust for less than standing up Martin Goddamn Panzer in a meeting, haven't they? So what chance did I have?
So, that pretty much explains how I found myself in downtown Seattle with a couple of winter days to kill. On one of them, I went down to the UW, to do a little bit of research on the Digital Stacks; see if there was any interesting information about dad there. Not a productive move; Dad was MP NeoTech's lead international contract lawyer back in his day, and so his name shows up on just about every international contract that the company made at that time, which, let me tell you, is quite a large number of contracts. And, alas, search engine technology has not yet advanced to the point where one can simply apply a "Not: Boring" filter to one's search.
So there I was, flipping absently through a series of hypnotically uninteresting contract abstracts, when a young woman I'd never seen before in my life walked up to me and said "Excuse me. You're Randall Clay, right? Douglas's brother?"
I have to say that you do have excellent taste, brother of mine. She struck me immediately as being quite attractive, with a whole 'sexy librarian' thing going on. The glasses work for her, which certainly isn't always the case. At any rate, I admitted to being your brother and, desparate for any excuse to escape the virtual stack of old contracts before me, I agreed to grab a quick coffee with her.
As far as I was concerned, the first order of business was finding out just how it was that she instantly knew who I was and who I was related to. Well, it turns out that the people who ought to have been working on that anti-boredom web filter I mentioned above have recently added another new feature to the wonderful Web-what is it supposed to be now? 3.5? 4.7? 6.0? Whichever, it's newest and greatest tool is something called 'Faceback', which is a reverse image directory specialized to human faces. Just upload a picture of a face, taken, no doubt, surrupticiously with the camera hidden subtly in one's phone, and, voila! It will tell you, with about 85% accuracy, exactly who that face belongs to, after which more traditional searches can bring about further information such as that person's immediate geneological background. Once again, the advance of internet technology conspires to obsolete the honest labors of the private investigator and personal stalker alike. This is not to say, of course, that your friend Jenny goes around Facebacking every stranger she should happen to meet on the street. Far from it; she assures me, and I have every reason in the world to believe her, that she noticed in my face a family resemblance which piqued her curiosity and used the freshly availible tool merely to confirm an intuitive suspicion. So that's all right, then.
So, the two of us had a pleasant afternoon's conversation, during the course of which I don't quite think that I managed to reveal every embarassing story from when we were growing up together. Have to save a few for Mom to tell when you introduce them to each other, right?
Not much more happened up here between then and the big meeting, apart from weather, of which the city produced a prodigious quantity, particularly of the cold, wet, and windy varieties in all their assorted permutations. It was the combination of all three aspects that prevailed on Christmas morning itself, which made me immensely grateful for the provided driver even if it was going so short a distance that in any other circumstance I'd have preferred to go on foot.
The Seattle offices of MP NeoTech were almost completely deserted, contrary to the mental image I had formed of a modern-day Ebeneezer Scrooge driving an entire crew of cube-dwellers to eek out their daily ration of productivity with a half-day's ration of heating coal: of the droves normally at work in those offices, only three remained. Martin Panzer himself, the secretary who had called me (who, I am pleased to report, had an appearance every bit as quintessentially secretarial as her voice, no doubt requiring a not inconsiderable amount of daily maintenance.), and one other, a towering human being- or perhaps I should keep safe and simply say 'primate', as the theory of an evolutionary regression to Homo Habilis or Homo Erectus was not at all without explanatory power with regard to this specimen. He did not speak but simply loomed slightly to Martin Panzer's side throughout the interview. Panzer introduced him as Arthur Krov, a name which, taken in comparison with the thing itself, seemed distinctly lacking in an embedded nickname, preferably one that implied or overtly stated something violent. Surely his friends and enemies alike called him Art "The Hammer" Krov or Art "Crusher" Krov, or the like.
Art "Puppy-Mangler" Krov pulled back a seat for me in front of Martin Panzer's desk, and I sat down in it. For a short while there was only silence between us, as I pondered my opening. It occured to me that this entire meeting was some kind of test, and I wondered whether by showing up I had passed or failed it. I remembered a story Grandfather once told about a Naval Admiral, interviewing people to potentially serve directly under him. The Admiral, so the story goes, asked the applicant if he had a girlfriend, and the applicant responded in the affirmative; that he not only had a girlfriend but was in fact engaged to the woman in question. The Admiral told the applicant that he preferred to have only bachelors in his service, and handed him the phone to call his fiancee on the spot if he wanted the position. The applicant did so, at which point the Admiral booted him straight out of his office, as he did not want to have anyone in his service who displayed such a small and pitiful amount of backbone. The question was, what did Martin Panzer want to see? Was he interested in someone who wants information about his father enough to sacrifice his holidays, or disgusted by someone who would neglect the family members he has to chase after closure with one who has been gone a long while running?
Almost as if he had been reading my thoughts, Martin Panzer said "I'm not surprised t'see you here, if that's what your wondering. Blood tells, and Aaron wouldn'ta thunk twice about it."
"So, can you help me?" I asked.
"Well, sure. What do you wantto know?" said Panzer.
"First off, what was Aaron working on when he vanished?"
"Hard to say, hard to say" said Panzer. "We weren't much more than a glorified start-up at that time, working on putting cutting edge manufacturing processes together with cheap labor, so we had a lot of pies all over the world. Aaron went all the way around twice, three times a year, working on abouta dozen projects each time."
"And the trip where he vanished?"
"Let me check my notes" said Martin, who did just that. "Looks like he made it halfway that time. Flew out to Seoul, then his Taipei before bounching around Europe a bit, and vanished somehwere on the way to Cairo. There was one more stop planned, in Kenya, but he never made it there."
"What was he doing in Cairo? And right before?"
"Cairo was all about a contract to reconfigure some oil processing facilities away from fuels and toward chemical precursors. Lost that one to Beltra, and that was a cryin' shame."
"And before that?"
"Paris."
"Renouned for its cheap labor" I blurted. Martin Panzer tensed for a second, and Art "Imapler" Krov seemed to loom a few inches taller. Or maybe he was just leaning.
"Coul have been, actually" said Panzer, relaxing. "City's got thousands of unemployed- what's the current phrase- North Africans, right? Actually, I think current practice is t' just not mention 'em at all. Unassimilated Muslim immigrants. We were gonna put the all to work, start integrating them into the economy, but the goddamn frogs would rather keep them isolated in no-go zones and on the dole. Bunch of damned cowards, if y' ask me. You ever hear of a brave Frenchie this side of Joan of Arc?"
"Well, there was the resistance." I said. There was some reason I wasn't actually nearly as intimidated as rationality ought to have demanded, under the circumstances. I think part of it was a growing conviction that when he named his book 'You Think I Was Born With This' one of the things he was talking about was his accent.
"Okay,but they're pretty damn overrated, and don't say near as nuch about the national character as people want to think. See, in the War, they were fighting the fucking Nazis. Pardon my...French." Martin Panzer managed to make that word sound considerably more obscene than anything else he'd said recently. "And when you're fighting a bunch of fucking Nazis, you've got a rock solid moral god damn obligation to fight right down to the last man, woman, child, and dog. Which they clearly did not do. So sure, after the cravens in the government showed their bellies, a few, asmall few, did what decent morality required. That just means that, on the other hand, that most of them didn't.
"Besides, even of them that did fight, almost half of them were really only fighting to make sure that when the future became a boot stomping on a human face, forever, that that book would be manufactured in Moscow rather than Berlin. So no, I've not got all that much respect for the Resistance."
Having finished this tirade, Martin was silent, waiting for me to make some reply. Eventually, I broke in with "What was the Kenya visit going to be about?"
"What? Oh, that. Just some real-estate deal. I think we would up getting that one after all. Anyways, I don't have all day here, so let me get to my point. When Aaron went off the map, I worked like hell to find him He was damned good at what he did. None of my guys ever found a lick of evidence one way or the other, if he ran off or just up and died. But I've decided that I like you, and that you're going to go off down his trail not matter what I do, os I'm going to give you some support. Basically, for tax purposes, hire you, as a contract investigator to do what you're already going to do. Not going to pay much more than squat, mind, but you'll have plane tickets wherever you want to go and an expense account. Interested?"
Now, I'm fully aware that any time I use the tickets or the corporate charge card good old Martin Panzer is going to know exactly what I'm doing. But let's be serious: even if I weren't, the third richest man on the planet is going to be able to find out just as much with only fractionally more effort. It's hard enough to go privacy-mode, off the grid in one country; flying around doing it would be ipossible. So I checked thecontract over as best as my mid-Junior Year Pre-law major eyes could manage, and signed on the dotted line. By which time the airport was snowed under, so no chance of a heroic last minute arrival down there. So the next leg of the trip will be by car, up to Dad's old house.
Next Stop: Vancouver.
posted by Jeff R. at 5:08 PM
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