Indie, p.7
Indie, page 7
Midas steeled himself. This was no longer odd duck territory. Sometimes, he knew, the wealth of some degenerated into a source of delusion. Just because they sat on a mound of gold like bad dragons should never justify a sick desire to unnerve people. It was common in business that in a negotiation one might put forth a threatening comment — a position, sure, but for a strategic purpose, not to unnerve alone. The nervousness would come naturally, of its own accord. All you did was state your position. Now he heard queasy. This was different. He opened his mouth to say something — take an assertive stand, make a claim — but instead the blue dog shook its shoulders and turned to Midas. He turned to it.
Its eyes delved into his. Things slowed then as their blackness expanded. Even from this distance, Midas swore the dog’s eyes swirled a hint of purple. He tore his eyes away and looked back at the annoying, arrogant customer to focus on making the man leave.
“No, I don’t enjoy that,” he said. “And I’m closing. You’re going to have to leave now.”
The blue dog growled.
“That’s fine, for now, that is,” said Caesar. “Of course, you’ll change too, Midas. Like everyone. Your concept in this little shop really is too simplistic. A much bigger business plan is afoot, and you’d do better to mind it. If you know what’s good for you.”
Midas’s blood pressure rose. Who says such a thing? In a peaceful place such as this?
Forcing a calm, he asked, “What’s Creed?” while reminding himself he didn’t need to have this conversation. But he did, didn’t he, he thought. He had to know more: whether Hippias lied about Lazuli’s betrayal of their contract, and whether Lazuli now worked with Creed.
Caesar’s face contorted again, and his bulging cheeks squeezed within the tight straps of his sunglasses.
“Your future.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Creed has business with you, to be sure. You’ll see the merits of our business plan.” Caesar’s grin curved upwards, in a heartless effort to appear real. “You’ve been highly recommended by your associate, Lazuli. You’ll come on board, just like the rest of them. In fact, not much choice, really. You see, Midas, you’re the perfect fit for Creed. We’ve seen your business practices, your ways over the years. Perfect.”
Perfect? Not much choice? His future? This was outrageous. He knew this kind of arrogance. This man was already staking claims over him.
The blue dog jumped onto the stage by the left pillar. The leash stretched almost to the breaking point and Caesar stumbled. He resisted and tried to pull back, but the dog maintained its close gaze behind the pillar where he’d hung the painting. Caesar’s arm remained in the air as the two struggled in their tug-of-war.
Midas imagined how pleased Ira would be at the prospect of the dog’s sharp jaws ripping through the painting’s canvas.
And it seemed that Hippias was, indeed, on to something about Lazuli. Apparently, he may have met Caesar. Still, he doubted a man like Lazuli would affiliate with a guy like this. “So what exactly is this idea, this business plan?”
Caesar laughed but made no effort to smile, only one horizontal line.
“Creed,” he said. “It stands for so much. First and foremost, Creed is a way. A set of methods and a mindset. You just need to free yourself and embrace it. Maintain contact with your network, and the assigned ones.”
“Sounds like a cult.”
Midas meant it. Cults grew and disappeared, thrived or died, all over the place. They were more common these days given the unsteady circumstances not only south but here too. He thought of Ira’s past, of Zora’s former cell and its ideological bent, of business elites and how they framed their missions. This, however, was next-level.
Caesar turned away from him. “So many fascinating collectibles,” he said.
Midas began to feel panic as Caesar clambered onto the stage toward the dog and the pillar. Why not just let it go, he pressed himself, for the dog might take a swipe at him too. The low noise from the back of the dog’s throat grew louder and its shoulders bunched into rippling muscle.
“Easy there, doggie,” said Midas.
The blue dog bared its long teeth at the painting. Midas stepped back and turned to Caesar who maintained his stoic stance, arm raised with the leash while he stared at Midas like a frozen, stuffed insect.
“Look, bud,” said Midas, mustering himself. “I’m not interested. It’s time you left.”
Caesar emitted a long slow chuckle. His strange laugh offended Midas like nothing he’d heard before. “Let me be clear,” Caesar said at his slow pace. “This is business. I now own Lazuli. As he’s your business partner, like so many others, we visit them. All of them, in the spirit of business development, you’ll agree. You’re simply one of many but you, Midas, deserve a special one on one with me. So everyone, in an ever-expanding network, joins Creed because it simply makes the most sense, you’ll agree.”
Midas’s nerves prickled and he sensed the whole room become seized with an alert stillness. Eyes widening, they flicked over to the lanky suited man on the love seat and back to Caesar.
“You’ll join us too, just as Lazuli recommended. And don’t hesitate. We promise great riches, boundless opportunity freed of the moral constraints that have held people back for so long.”
His voice grew stronger as he spoke. Despite the bland face, made anonymous and bereft of empathy by the wide dark sunglasses, he now showed passion. The paleness of the fat folds of his face took on a pink hue that reddened. His free fist clenched and seemed to pound an imaginary podium before him.
This guy really thinks he’s convincing me, thought Midas. He tried to say this to himself with dry humour and instead his spine only tingled more.
“In fact,” Caesar continued with a rising voice consumed by a distant promised glory where his blank eyes shone. “They’re all just beginning to come on board. The drones of Bay Street, as you people here might say. It’s spreading, and we at Creed need to accelerate the spread. Because there’s a path forward. In fact, a pathway. All we need to do is master it. So join us now, Midas. Get in early. You’ll be at the top of the heap. Consider it to be a kind of enhanced networking. You know the drill as a successful businessman, don’t you? We meet Lazuli, we meet his associates, partners, suppliers, they join our network and they grow forward in the same manner as all of their associates, and then theirs and then theirs in turn, and so on and on. And finally, in fulfillment of this great pathway — once the legend we’ve uncovered is at last found — we expand through it, to the endpoint, and we then bring those riches and ways back here.”
At this point in Caesar’s monologue he softened his tone, convinced he offered a balanced reason for his argument. He opened both palms upward before him toward Midas, as though in mock supplication. Then his voice swiftly rose again into a fevered pitch. “So you see the plan: We grow here, we link to them, we grow with them. And then—” He paused and the reddening pink hue consumed his entire bulbous head as his exclamation echoed through the empty café, across its narrow length and invasively into the back room’s dome. “We rule. All of it, Midas.”
His fist slammed the air before his rotund belly, and his mouth broadened into a wide slit that might have been a victorious smile on any other human being. Here, it reminded Midas of the awful slit of a mouth on a great white shark that, when opened, revealed a rushing range of jagged fangs.
“So join our network, dear friend. Truly, you see, you really have no other option.”
Midas looked away from Caesar, to the lanky man in the suit. He sat still as a stone, staring out the bay window at the cruisers gliding by on Dundas, oblivious to this exchange. Midas looked more closely and noticed tears in the man’s suit, burn marks here and there, and a long, thick spike of dark hair that fell out from beneath the fedora. Midas backed farther into the darkened stage area, and his heel bumped an ancient radio. As he fell to the floor on his buttocks, it began to play jazz through static, a distant big band from way back in the last century. Midas turned on his pained haunches to the blue dog, who growled and showed its long canines as a thick line of drool dripped to the floor, and back to Caesar.
“All right, bud, that’s enough. Get out of my café.” But as small and absurd as this stranger and his words were, Midas felt unsteady as it dawned on him that he didn’t know what either of these men or the dog were capable of. The strange man was presumptuous and demanding, the dog growled fiercely and a tall man in a tattered suit who looked like he’d just walked out of an explosive traffic accident sat calmly nearby, watching with his back turned to them.
Caesar faced him. “You owe Lazuli. Because he gave you so much. So you’ll do this. For him, and for me, and for yourself.”
“I don’t owe him anything. And I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only thing I got from Lazuli was beans.” The blue dog faced Midas with its intense fixed gaze, other than the slight movement of an arched eyebrow. He held himself as steadily as he could, but he knew he was anything but confident. The dog growled and drooled, Caesar made claims and a quiet man in a suit sat still as a tiger, poised for something.
Caesar shook his head. “Some of these precious artifacts came from around his ranch. I know, Midas. In fact, you roamed the South, taking things, didn’t you? Even as a wicked hobby? He told me.”
Midas cringed at the accusation. It was offensive and overstated. In fact, it was twisted. He reached for the broken radio and fumbled with a dial to turn it off. But it was stuck. He turned back to Caesar, this odd man who made such demands of him.
“No wonder Lazuli recommended you,” Caesar said. “The perfect fit for our network. And here you are, up here in the North where new opportunities abound. And I haven’t even made it to the cruise yet.” Caesar let out a delighted cackle. “Whether you like it or not, want it or not, you’re joining us. So make it peaceful, Midas, you see?”
The air went from Midas’s lungs and he suppressed a gasp. “Get out.”
Caesar stood unmoving. His mouth gave up its vain attempt at a grin and settled back into a still, flat line. “You haven’t been transparent, Midas. Not to me, or to Lazuli. First, the beans. And you refused, back then, to admit your responsibility for a certain swindle.”
“Yeah, what was it then? What are you talking about?” Midas felt his voice rising. He knew he was guilty of dishonest business dealings. Happened all the time. That’s why he got out. And the first deal with Lazuli had been messy, but he smoothed it out. He reminded himself he had no interest in finding out what, specifically, this creepy predator meant by his claims.
Midas got to his knees. The dog growled.
Caesar ignored him and continued, “So yes, the perfect fit with us, Midas, you see? The ability to say what you need to say to get through a deal. Very good. We at Creed celebrate such talents. Well, Lazuli didn’t get too far into the details, or couldn’t by the end of the conversion…”
Midas felt nauseous. This strange man showed genuine curiosity for how Midas had lied. As though he admired it. The technique, the skilled application. He looked across the narrow expanse of the café from his stance on the staged area of the back room, saw the lanky man in the tattered, ripped suit and was struck in that moment by its similarity to some of the murderers’ in the Hallowe’en Ball massacre.
The blue dog’s muscles bulged and it turned to Midas.
Midas thought to hurl something at the dog — anything from his precious collection back there — to disable it, even for a moment while he took on Caesar. But the dog was large and perhaps somewhat trained. “Well I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Midas said.
“At first, Lazuli was defiant too,” Caesar continued. His head kept turning from right to left, surveying the back room from pillar to pillar. Midas took the opportunity to pull his Probe out of his pocket. “Denying his true nature. Pretending to be a good man. A powerfully good man.” He shook his head with pity. “And then after a time — and it did take a good long while, regrettably for all the horrific pain we had to subject him to — he saw the light. Our light.” Caesar’s head stopped shifting.
If the creepiness of this odd man’s business proposition wasn’t enough, then the lanky suit who sat by the bay window, his image harkening back to the massacre, was enough to convince Midas to do something. He knew enough to sense danger, as amorphous as it was with Caesar’s mere talk and the lanky man’s mere sitting while he stared at Midas’s blurred, distant reflection in the bay window. Midas saw that gaze and stared back at the man’s shadowed cheeks and chin beneath the fedora.
Midas glanced down at the Probe in his hand and typed fast: Urgent. Need your guys now. Being harassed. Unfriendly intruders here. I’ll do the deal. Need you RIGHT NOW.
“You’ll agree,” Caesar said, “deep down, your boss had it in him. Maybe more than most. The stuff of Creed, that is. He just hadn’t had the opportunity to come up with the idea himself. Unlike me.”
“He wasn’t my boss,” said Midas. “Get out.”
The blue dog growled and glared at him. Throwing something would only goad the dog on, and he imagined Caesar might have a concealed weapon too, which reminded Midas of the ancient pistol stored somewhere amongst the artifacts. He stumbled, half on knees, half on fumbling feet. Midas glanced at the small Probe in his hand, desperate for a response, then up at the immovable man standing all too comfortably before the stage, his arm still outstretched, and back to the dog.
“You must be wondering what exactly happened to your boss?” said Caesar.
Midas quickly recovered his footing and stepped back, deeper into the back room, watching all three of them — the stubby man, the blue dog who sat staring at the painting like a golden retriever at the ready, and the lanky man in the suit at the far end by the window — as he stepped slowly around a chest, a bass drum and came to the bookshelf where lay a nineteenth-century Remington revolver.
“Not interested one bit,” he said as he stood and pointed the pistol at Caesar. Midas cocked the gun. It surprised him, with a mix of dismay and added confidence, that it was in fact loaded. With some relief, he saw the scene more clearly and now with some measure of contempt. Caesar stood staring at him, and Midas was oblivious to the dog’s whereabouts other than Caesar’s outstretched hand at the end of the dog’s leash. What had turned disturbing and borderline predatory, at least in words, now seemed with this loaded gun in hand a little more absurd.
But for the lanky man in the tattered suit at the far end of the café who stood and turned to face them with his fists at his waist. So, now a clear offence. How dare they. Midas felt his field of vision cloud into shrouds of red rage.
“Come join us at our next sales meeting,” Caesar said, sounding calm and inattentive to Midas’s outrage behind the gun. “The Torontonians are coming in clumps. They see the value. The unique proposition will appeal even to you, or perhaps especially someone of your experience. For we may have a special guest call in, your very own Lazuli, if he’s ready and up for it after his recovery…”
He looked at the blue dog and tugged at the rope, but the dog dug its old claws into the wooden floor and bunched its heavy frame in resistance. Caesar sighed and said, now looking at Midas again, “What we promise has the capacity to lead Creed to the most awesome resource, perhaps to the largest and most dense source of wealth and power. So come to our meeting. And these meagre chattels will mean nothing to you. Come find your new self and wealth. You know what to do Midas. You’ve done it before. It’s called taking. And it’s okay to take. You can have it all, Midas. See Creed’s goals, live with them, see what’s on the other side, that beautiful land of milk and honey, and still do what you’re doing. All at once.”
“Fuck you, get out,” Midas said.
The blue dog surged but instead of tearing his flesh to shreds, it veered away and leapt off the stage at the same time that the front door of the café tinkled, opened and through it walked two large men in black leather coats each carrying two bags of coffee beans in either arm. They marched past the lanky man who stood — moving slowly and calmly as though to convey nothing was going on here at all, that they were just about to leave — and they continued along the length of the espresso bar toward Midas’s incredulous eyes while Hippias burst through the door behind them.
“So pleased to provide the first formal delivery!” he exclaimed with a swoosh of his hand in a wide arc.
“Ah, what have we here?” Hippias asked as he strode behind his men along the espresso bar. The lanky man in the suit bristled and moved forward. Before anything happened, the blue dog bolted to the front door, pulling Caesar whose face twisted again as he resisted, white-knuckled, then relented and followed the dog with the suited man quietly trailing. At the door beneath the tinkling bells, Caesar turned his vacant glasses toward the café and said, “You can’t run, Midas.” An alto cackle bubbled out of the slit that was his grin. “The trouble with indies is: It is retail. I know where to find you.”
They disappeared into the street and the door slid down.
Midas lowered the pistol, went to the roaster room and found an old bottle of rum. Midas didn’t drink much but the stress called for some kind of immediate relief. Hippias and his delivery men could wait a moment. He poured a tumbler half full of it, sat on a stool at the end of the espresso bar and drank. Shaken and numb, he drank and drank again.
“Oh my, my friend,” said the cheerful Hippias as he patted Midas’s shoulder. “Whatever happened? Good thing we were nearby. Well, to tell you the truth, I was on the way to pay you another sales call. And drop off the first delivery.”
He held out his hand, then shrugged with smiling abandon as he laughed and gave Midas a strong bear hug. Midas couldn’t help but grin.
“Oh, you poor man,” Hippias said loudly into his ear. “All is well. Not to worry. Got it? I told you we have security. You could be safe now.”
