Grace House: The Trial of Obscurity

Chapter 3 Pitfall and Pinch

  On a bright December morning a few days later, and in the law offices of Snare, Pitfall, Trial, and Temptation, paralegal Pinch settled herself in her cubicle and began sorting her mail. She came to a letter that, closely read, made her narrow eyes light up and her lipsticked lips twitch. With a swish of dyed blond hair, she made off down the hallway to the lawyers’ offices.

  She stopped and waited respectfully just inside the open doorway of Lawyer Pitfall’s office, watching him while he completed a phone call. In the old lawyer a cloud of smoke had taken the form of a man. He was rumpled as an old paper bag, gray as a tombstone, slow and deliberate and nearing retirement. Pinch did not like him, but then nobody did.

  “I want that to be by the twenty-second,” he was saying into the phone as he consulted a desk calendar. “No, make it no later because of Christmas. Our offices are closed for.... Right, they’ll be picked up the night the house collapses. Tell them?” He laughed like an old car backfiring, then listened some more. “Well, if Mr. Blindfold wants to believe that, let him. It’s not our business. Ha ha! Thinks they get to come back in a new house and start over? That’s good. Let’s spread that story around, it would make our job easier.” More listening. “You’re serious, aren’t you? They really think that? Lordy, maybe we should prop their house up for another year or two just so he can talk up Reinhabitation to other people. No, not really, because we already have the date set with the Hellites, it’s fixed. Is that all you need then? OK, have a good day.”

  He put down the phone, made a note, and then turned to Pinch. She offered him the letter.

  “Mr. Pitfall, you told me early in the year to let you know if I could get any leverage on 1422 Sandhill Street.”

  He took the letter, invited her to sit down, and read it slowly. “Oh, the Pride place. Or I guess it’s called Grace House now. Yes, this was Mr. Power’s number one priority last year, but it’s pretty far down the list now. Still, he’d like to hear that it has been taken care of. It’s a dirty little leftover. Did you bring the file? Good.”

  As he opened the file, Pinch leaned forward. “I’ve been keeping an eye on this, looking for an opening, but as you can see, there’s not been much to work with. We’ve been striking out with our usual methods of leverage. The owner, that’s Pride, aka Dignity, has had some personal feud with Pastor Hypocrisy, and he broke up with Fame in that legal mess last year. Mr. Power’s office says that Dignity shows no interest in business or politics; and Mammonette tells us that he won’t even buy a lottery ticket.”

  “But now he has a book,” said Pitfall.

  “Finally something.” said Pinch with some heat. “I was beginning to think we’d never have a shot at him.”

  “Thank God for pious ambitions. And he’s tried to query it to at least one publisher according to this, uh—who is Obscurity? Does she work for us?”

  “She sends us free information sometimes. Apparently, she’s looking for business with us, but she hasn’t made her move yet. She runs BOSS, the Big ‘O’ Security Systems, and that gets her into houses where she learns things. She should work for us.”

  “Agreed. Get her talking with us.”

  Pitfall dug about in his desk until he produced a brightly colored flyer. He showed it to Pinch. “I think this may have had it’s effect on Dignity. It’s a mass advertisement that went out about three months ago. I’m betting he saw it.”

  Miss Pinch took the flyer, a mailing of the Cross Eyes Publishing Company. Several new books were being promoted, but the front cover was reserved for Fame Vainglory’s latest book, My Spiritual Phases.

  “I’ll make a note to find out whether this was delivered to Sandhill Street,” she said. “It would make for a nice interdepartmental memo if we could confirm how this stuff works.”

  Pitfall nodded. “Dignity may not be aware that Cross Eyes is owned by the Powers, and he certainly won’t have read Fame’s book, but if seeing the flyer has brought on his fit of ambitious discontent, then it’s done its work. In the long run, we’re not selling books, we’re selling envy.” He handed the letter back to her. “Thank you, Miss Pinch. We know how to proceed from here on.”

  “Uh, Mr. Pitfall?”

  “Yes?”

  “This Obscurity warns us that Dignity’s book amounts to an exposé of several important people in the City, including Mr. Power.”

  “Yes, I saw that.”

  “So shall I alert all the publishers not to print it?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Mr. Pitfall?”

  “Miss Pinch, our presses publish, I would guess, half a dozen of these exposés a year. Mr. Power hasn’t the slightest fear of them. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that we’re not going to suffer from bad publicity.”

  “But she writes that the book even suggests a connection between Mr. Power and the Hellites. And it also proselytizes for the Heavenites.”

  “Old stuff, Pinch. Good City people don’t pay any attention to it, probably because they don’t care whether it’s true. As for the Heavenites themselves, who cares if they read each other’s books?”

  Pinch was surprised and looked it. “You mean this book won’t do us any harm?”

  “Oh, possibly a little, even after editing, but no, this sort of information has always been available to anyone that wants it. Who doesn’t already know that Jesus is good and the Devil is wicked? Who can’t already guess which side Power is on? It’s useless for Dignity to point out what people already know and have been happy to discount.”

  “So you’ll let it be published?”

  “I’ll do nothing to prevent it, but I doubt it will be. We have very few such rewards to hand out, and they tend to go to insiders. But although we can’t publish everyone, we can get all the would-be authors eating out of our hand, and so weaken their resistance to us. Then whether we let the author have his little book in print or not, we have him.” Pitfall made a fist, as if around some scrawny neck. “You see, we always win. If we let an author succeed, he’s ours. Fame and Mammonette see to that. And the many who don’t succeed get so distracted and upset that they become ours too. We keep ’em busy, oh yes.” He laughed.

  Pinch felt back on solid ground now and laughed with him. She knew well how to handle ambitious losers, and Mr. Pitfall seemed to know how to handle even the winners.

  “Just rake them in,” she said.

  “Well, we do have to advertise.” He pointed to Fame Vainglory’s picture on the flyer. “But yes, then we just let them come to us, begging to be corrupted. When they douse themselves with gasoline, we oblige with a torch.”

  “And we get them all?”

  “All the writers?” Pitfall was still for a moment and his smile faded. “What we have to watch out for is the occasional hermit, the odd loner who thinks too much and then scribbles about it; but who doesn’t give a damn about us, that is, about his own success or reputation.” He lowered his voice. “Only that otherworldliness threatens us. We must get our enemies to concentrate on publication and distract them from the one thing that could harm us.”

  “But if this loner type, if he doesn’t get published, then what’s the harm?” Pinch giggled. “What can he do?”

  Pitfall looked as if he had taken a bite from a sour grapefruit, and he seemed to shrivel in his chair. “Miss Pinch, if you learn nothing else here, learn not to be stupid. Everyone must be a part of our game, everyone without exception, do you understand? No one must wander off and do anything, even think anything, outside our boundaries. These Heavenites are being told to imitate their King’s Son, who once came to this City like a chess piece dropped into the middle of a game, completely outside the rules, completely illegal, uncalled for, unexpected. The chaos that resulted still hasn’t been properly dealt with. And from time to time one of these Heavenites gets it into his head to do something similar, and then our foundations shak
e some more.”

  Pitfall leaned back in his chair, his wrinkled hands trembling. “So we must make sure, make sure that this so-called Grace House gets into our game. As for publishing, we can let them succeed or let them fail, but don’t let Dignity ever think that the success or failure of his book is of no importance. Because if he does, he’s a dog that’s broke its chain and is loose to do anything.”

  Pinch, who had never imagined such a reaction from Lawyer Pitfall, found herself digging in her heels and sliding her chair back an inch or two.

  “Of course not.” She forced a smile. “We’ll make sure there are no mavericks, just as you say. So, uh, any further instructions on 1422 Sandhill?”

  Pitfall’s jaw was trembling. “Get Temptation’s people to send somebody over. It’s routine. If this Obscurity is accurate, there’ll be an opening for one or more of our people in the house.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” said Pinch, making notes. “Anything else?”

  “No. Very good. That’s all.”

  Pinch skipped out the door as if she herself were a dog that had broken its chain, and she maintained a brisk pace all the way back to her cubicle. There she sat down and meditated the matter thoroughly, and grew afraid. So the City’s foundations were shaking? Chaos was on the loose?

  “Not if I can help it,” she said to herself. “I’m going to nail Grace House.”