Diplomatic Consanguinity

 “Fascism First,” murmured Manguy.  He turned a page of the dossier he’d been given when he walked into Meeting Room C and started reading from the top.  He was bland and uninteresting to look at, an appearance he cultivated carefully.  He had the faintest impression of a moustache that might, if you got closer than his bodyguards would allow, be drawn on with eyeliner.  His hair, too black for it to be a natural colour was slicked back with gel and his skin, a neutral olive shade that fitted his hair-colour just a little too perfectly for them both to be real, was clear and healthy.  He wore glasses, but they were delicate, platinum framed, oval-lensed things that looked like a strong breeze would blow them away and so made you wonder if they were actually necessary.  “What a concept.  That is has come to this….”

“It began with the Sweden problem,” said Demetrion who was sat against a wall. His copy of the dossier was set on the chair next to him and one long, bony leg was crossed over the other.  “Though I thought we resolved that one rather well, personally.”

“We did,” said Margoyle.  She was wearing her usual pearl choker and a tidy, pale rose fitted suit that contrasted pleasantly with the odd shade of grey that her makeup gave to her skin.  She looked a little bit like a statue that had inconveniently come to life before the sculptor was completely finished with it.  “We have that in writing.  In triplicate, in fact.”

“Then how did we get from there to Fascism First?” asked Manguy.  The other two carefully didn’t answer, spotting a trap when it was set in front of them.  “I suppose the exact route isn’t important—“

“It might be,” said Margoyle quickly.  “I have two interns on the problem.”

“We have interns again?” Demetrion sounded interested.  

“JDR has been… persuaded—“ there was a faint sigh from everyone in the room “— that he could play croquet with other… things,” said Margoyle.

“The exact route isn’t important,” said Manguy.  There was no hint of impatience in his tone, nor any note of censure, but nonetheless there was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the room.  “What is important is whether we are happy with the destination.   Surely we can all agree on that?”

This was a firm where agreement was so famously hard to come by that voting was done in absolutely secrecy with no way of determining who had cast what vote or even when they cast it, in order to actually achieve the occasional consensus.

“The GOO,” said Margoyle cautiously, using the acronym they had decided upon for the leader of Fascism First, “appears to have located a source of help.  Page seven,” she added as Manguy looked up from the dossier.  “Though it remains unclear who could be helping him.”

“Us,” said Manguy, turning the pages backwards to find page seven.  “We are the only agency with sufficient connections and knowledge to do this.  But we are not doing it, and we have no been contacted with regard to it.  Which should have been impossible.”

“I can put two interns on it,” said Demetrion.  His attempted joke fell as flat as a deep-ocean dwelling fish and as the silence lingered he started to wish that he’d thought a little harder before speaking.

“Unlikely to help,” said Manguy after the silence had stretched to breaking point.  “What we need to know now is what the agency is that’s helping the GOO.  Without some indication of who is behind this, we’re flying blind.  And JDR will not like that at all.”

“He doesn’t like it,” said a new voice.  Jeronica sat down on a chair next to Margoyle, who delicately edged away, one hand clutching her pearls.  Manguy pretended not to notice, but watched carefully out of the corner of his eye.  “But at the moment he is trying to ensure that he cannot be blamed for it.”

Manguy relaxed.  Jeronica was the person he considered his biggest rival and threat, but if she was reporting on JDR like this then this was probably one of their truce-zones.  He made a mental note to check where she’d been for the fifteen minutes prior to her arrival though.

“Naturally,” she continued, “he will determine that he cannot be blamed.”

She didn’t need to say the rest; as soon as JDR was satisfied there was no solid path that led to him he’d be looking for a scapegoat.

“Scaramantha,” said Margoyle as though coughing.  Absolutely nobody said anything for a few seconds.  Then Manguy carefully closed the dossier without ever finding page seven.

“Jeronica,” he said, and Demetrion noticeably tensed.  Manguy made a mental note of that; clearly Demetrion was more junior than he’d been led to believe.  “I think that you currently have Diplomatic Consanguinity in your remit?”

Jeronica nodded.  Manguy was well aware of that, just as she was acutely aware of all the areas that he was responsible for.  Bringing it up was just a formality, indicating obliquely that there was something here that might be held to fall into this category.

“If Non-local Genocides were to become unaffiliated,” said Demetrion looking at his fingernails and absolutely nowhere else, “then I could consider bringing them under Alpaca Issues and Isolation.”

“In that case,” said Margoyle, her voice distant as though she wasn’t aware she was speaking, “it would seem likely that Fruit Production and Distribution would need a new home as well.  In Orangeries, perhaps?”

Jeronica stood up without saying anything and left.

Manguy set the dossier down on the chair next to him.  That was that then; Scaramantha would be blamed for the emersion of Fascism First, Jeronica would reassign Scaramantha’s major tasks and then left… that left the problem of figuring out how to get a handle on the GOO and then using it to take control.  He sighed softly, knowing that Margoyle would understand and Demetrion would puzzle over it, and followed Jeronica out of Meeting Room C.

Manumission

“Manumission,” said Jeremy Diseased-Rat, CEO of Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations.  The various employees sat in the conference room with him all looked first at one another and then at him.

“Bless you?” suggested Margoyle, a slight smile tweaking her thin, blue lips.

“I think that might be the name of the new Head of Suffocating Relationships,” said Stephanotte, her eyes not quite meeting Margoyles.  “He’s arriving sometime this week with a mandate to look over out ex-Soviet portfolio.”

“Dimitrion has taken over Suffocating Relationships already,” said Margoyle, her eyes staring at the top of Stephanotte’s head as though wishing her gaze could trepan.  “That does leave some room in Textiles and Bad Potteries, though I would have expected anyone taking them to want to take Soft Furnishing and Pillow Politics too.  Which are your remit, are they not?”

“Manumission is the practice of freeing slaves,” said Jeronica.  Sitting down she wasn’t noticeably taller than the men around the table, though when she’d come in her eighteen inch designer stilettos had left her towering over everybody and left small holes in the carpet wherever she walked.  “It sounds like something many of our clients would be disinterested in.”

Jeremy Diseased-Rat, a fresh bruise on his left cheek-bone and a small cut weeping on his chin, nodded.  “Much of what you all say is true,” he said.  His voice was even and carefully modulated to get people to listen to him, and his voice coach was rumoured to spend hours teaching him to undo what alcohol and nicotine did in the first place.  “We were hiring someone called Manumission, but that has been indefinitely suspended thanks to the reshuffle.  There is an opening for Textiles and Bad Potteries, and…..”  He paused for a moment, steepling fat, coarse fingers in front of his face while he looked over at Stephanotte.  “And,” he concluded, leaving no-one around the table in any doubt that she was in trouble.  “But more importantly, it is the code name for a new project that we will be starting in 2014 that I have high hopes for.  As you are all undoubtedly aware, there is much political tension in the Americas at the moment, with the concepts of universal health-care being a rallying point for various factions.  We have been retained to conduct a study of such health-care initiatives and produce a report on how ineffective they are, and their contribution to overall economic decay.  We will be focusing on the private health-care sector and the efficiencies that a market economy brings, how it improves health-care in the long term, and how competitiveness can result in a patient not being tied into a single primary care-provider, but instead travelling the country and seeing new sights as they are shipped from one expert to another to resolve their issues.  Considering the blind solely as outliers in this scenario of course.”

“Do people actually use public health care?” asked Margoyle.  She made a face. “Can that really be sensible?  Or healthy?  You might have to sit in a waiting room with ill people, for goodness’ sake!”

“Poor people,” said Jeronica.  Her tone of voice suggested that she was speaking from theory rather than experience.  “I think my last cleaner might have seen a government-sponsored doctor about something.  Possibly when her leg fell off.”

“People do,” said Manguy.  He was near the end of the table and had been playing with his pen the whole time Jeremy had been speaking.  “And some of them feel that they have no choice about this either, that they cannot afford private health care or the insurance that would get them access to it.  Part of what we’ll be doing in this study is showing that their estimations of this are actually a false economy.  They would do better, for example, if they abandoned eating fresh vegetables and instead used their health-care insurance to book themselves into hospital twice a year for liposuction and a crash diet.  This, in turn, would then increase the amount of produce available to restaurateurs and stock farmers, which in turn brings down the cost of fast food production and so the consumer benefits all the more by being able to eat more burgers, fried chicken-like protein and faux-fish fillets.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” said Jeronica.  Her eyes fixed on Manguy, who squirmed a little.

“Manguy will be heading this up,” said Jeremy, ignoring the speed at which Jeronica’s head snapped round to look at him.  “He’ll be taking on the Lead Product Owner role initially until we hire someone suitable, and then they will report into him in his capacity as Product Director.  I’m very pleased that he’s been willing to step forward and pick this up, as I’m expecting it to be high profile for this year.”

The other employees, all very much aware of this, glared at Manguy, who smirked back.  He set the pen down, now perfectly at ease and comfortable with his victory.

Manguy

Manguy told his secretary that he was off to gym, left his office with his gym bag, but then doubled back when he was out of sight and told the receptionist at the entrance door that he was just coming back from the gym and asked her if he looked presentable for a meeting with Jeremy Diseased-Rat, head of Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations.  The receptionist, who probably had a name but Manguy hadn’t bothered to ask for it, smiled and said that she thought he looked just fine.  Manguy smiled back and had to duck into the toilets to check exactly how he looked, but it gave him the opportunity to put his gym bag in one of the stalls, lock the door and climb over it, and then sidle out and down the fire-escape stairs to the canteen on the third floor.  There, sat alone at a table that looked out on the London street that their building kept in perpetual shadow, was Margoyle.  She didn’t stand as he approached, but she did push one of the cups in front of her forward an inch-and-a-half towards the chair she expected him to sit in, opposite her.

He sat next to her, and took her cup.  Then he put it back and took the cup she’d offered in the first place.  Then he put that down on the table again.

“It gets to you,” said Margoyle.  “I’ve seen it happen to people higher up the tree than you.  You’re now so paranoid that you think everything had to be at least a triple bluff.  I bet you can’t even hire your own prostitutes any more, can you?”

Manguy took a sip of the coffee from the cup she’d initially offered him, just to prove her wrong, but in the back of his mind a voice was screaming at him that she could have drugged it with anything.  He knew he’d have to go and see his doctor after this.

“Can you?” she pressed, smiling.  It was the smile of a preying mantis, and Manguy knew all about them.  Jeremy Diseased-Rat had a vivarium in his secondary office that contained them, and they’d all spent time watching them when meetings got especially tedious.  If you wanted paranoid, then the CEO of Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations was the perfect place to start.

“No,” he admitted finally.  The coffee tasted pretty good, dark and bitter with a hint of stone-fruit.  Margoyle sipped her own coffee and smiled too.  “I get a girl to get her pimp to hire another girl.”  Margoyle arched an eyebrow, but Manguy wasn’t biting.  It wasn’t always girls, but he’d revealed enough to Margoyle as it was.  When he said nothing, she sipped her coffee again, studying his face.

“You’re worried about Jeronica,” she said finally.  “Well, that’s not news.  We’re all worried about Jeronica.  She’s climbing the ladder faster than we can explain, and I alone have six analysts working on this.  Stephenotte’s pulling her hair out over this one, and it’s costing her a fortune in wigs to cover it up.  She’s got some trick up her sleeve that none of us have fathomed.”

“Yes,” said Manguy.  “She was the same level as me six months ago, and she wasn’t steady.  I had plans, and they should have worked.  She should be no higher than me still, and I should be in a corner office already.”

Margoyle sniffed.  “Corner offices aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” she said.  “And I rather think I would get one ahead of you, if only because I’m more ruthless.”

Manguy said nothing, as Margoyle would have done if he’d made that claim.  All employees of Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations were ruthless and psychopathic as it was the only way to progress in a company that made a habit of running the world for other people and not letting anyone else know about it.  He was aware that she’d asphyxiated her last intern when she’d found out that she’d been working for Jeronica on the side, but it hadn’t been enough to get her a promotion at the last meeting.  Of the two that had been promoted, Jeronica still seemed to be a star in the ascendant, and Hille, a small mexican man reputed to train alligators, was dead.  The police reports said that he’d committed suicide, but everyone thought that it had been assisted.  There was a book running on who’d assisted him, and whether they’d find out before the police did.

“So what do we do about Jeronica?”

“I’m waiting for her to fall,” said Margoyle.  “I can afford to play the waiting game.  I’ve got three years on you.”

Manguy cringed, he hated the fact that he was nearly 40.  That age was practically retirement age in a company this cut-throat.  “And me?” he said.  Then he answered his own question, but only to stop Margoyle from thinking that he really didn’t have any answers. “If I push Jeronica down, and I don’t immediately get on top of her, then I’ve just opened the way for the rest of you.  That doesn’t seem like a percentage play to me.  What will the rest of you do to support me here?”

“Nothing,” said Margoyle.  “There’s not enough to be gained, and Jeronica can’t go much higher without the Rat deciding she’s a threat.”

Manguy smiled suddenly and knocked his coffee back like a shot.  It burned the back of his throat, but he controlled his response and didn’t show it.

“That’s it,” he said.  “I shall give Jeronica all the help I can.  Let’s see her work this trick on the Rat himself.”

“By the way,” said Margoyle, casually changing the conversation.  “Did you hear that Stephenotte has taken control of Dentures and Fissure Politics?”

“No,” said Manguy, immediately assuming that Margoyle was lying.  “I did hear that Cathartic Coups might be coming up for grabs in the next two months.  Dimitrion doesn’t seem to know about certain photographs that might have there way to a newspaper.”

“Indiscreet,” said Margoyle.  “Very Dimitrion.”

Railway meeting

Manguy paused as he entered the train carriage.  He’d been in a hurry as he needed to be almost late for the train, but not so late that he actually missed it, in order to be sure that the others all realised that he was very busy and very important.  So he’d had his driver drive around the station sixteen times, irritating both the legitimate traffic, the taxi queue, and the little men whose job it was to run up to cars and help the occupants get out with all of their luggage.  When he’d finally pulled up, his phone affixed to his ear listening to a conference call between Margoyle (in her role as Head of Soft Furnishing and Cushioned Power) and a major manufacturer of industrial chemicals who were seeking new ways to dispose of waste products they’d all pointedly ignored him and left him to manage his own luggage out of the car.

Even that wasn’t going to make him dangerously late, but then he discovered that he was actually in a queue of people all of whom worked for Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations, all of whom had been thinking the same way that he was.  None of whom were due on the train that he was now going to be late for.  With some careful nudging, a sharp elbow, and in one case a quiet word about the inadvisability of not letting him go first, he’d managed to get through the gates with three minutes to spare, and so he’d not paid much attention to the train as he boarded it.  Now in the carriage though, his jaw dropped, albeit minutely.

The carriage had a panoramic view; the entire two walls of the carriage seemed to be windows.  They reached down as far as the floor and terminated perhaps only an inch before the curve of the ceiling started.  The carpet was moss green, and the chairs were green and brown, looking vaguely organic and tree-like.  The whole effect was like walking into a secret garden in the station, and right on cue he smelled honeysuckle.  He dismissed it as being piped through the air-conditioning, and stored his luggage in the rack by the door, taking the opportunity to marvel at the window-wall again.  He longed to reach out and touch it, find out how solid it really felt.

“Manguy,” said Jeremy Diseased-Rat with a broad smile.  He was sitting at the far end of the carriage, and his chair had swivelled to face the others.  Although the carriage could probably have seated thirty people with the usual density of seating, here there were only twelve chairs, each slightly apart from one another, offering a degree of privacy he expected on first-class aeroplane flights.  “You’re very nearly late.  You know I wouldn’t have had the train held for you.”

“I was overseeing the Stockholm problem,” he said, checking out who else were in seats here.  Jeronica, obviously, and there was Stephanotte next to her.  Daresh was flicking disinterestedly through the train company’s glossy magazine, and the other five people he half-recognised but dismissed as being drones.

“Margoyle is managing that,” said Jeronica.  She was semi-reclined, the seats had footrests it would seem.  “She was in conference with them this afternoon.”

“As was I,” said Manguy, now on his guard.  This felt like a set-up.  “I was delayed leaving my car as I wanted to make sure that the call concluded satisfactorily.”

“Dangerous,” said Jeremy.  “You never know when there’s going to be an expected queue, or an exploded suitcase to hold you up.”

Ah, definitely a set-up then, thought Manguy.  This is why there were so many Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations people at the gate.  “Fortunately I’m here,” he said.  The train started moving without even a slight jerk.  “Are we missing anyone?”

“No,” said Jeremy.  “This is all of us.  And we are on this train as it’s firstly something that we’ve been indirectly sponsoring for the last three years and I wanted us to see what the future of high-speed trains is going to be, and secondly because this is the only way I can sure that no-one is tampering with the atmosphere, the environment, or the food supplies.  None of which I disapprove of, by the way, but I need to be away from those distractions.

Gentlemen and Ladies, we are gathered here today to conduct your annual reviews.  This will be a competitive process and you will need to earn the willingness of your peers to support you, if not actually coerce them.  There are pay-rises available for only four of you, and a single promotion opportunity.  I do hope you’re all feeling at the top of your game!”

Little chef

Manguy stood at his filing cabinet, idling sorting through the papers in the drawer.  It was organised along GTD (Getting Things Done) principles, with a folder for each day of the month and then a folder for each month of the year.  It was complicated a little by the need to have folders in there for each of the Jewish and Muslim months as well, plus the fact that at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations they used a standardised 37-day month for a lot of internal billing and business practises.  Then there were a couple of additional folders of his own addition that marked deadlines for tax forms (in eighteen jurisdictions) and proposal tenders, plus a tracking folder for the CEO, Jeremy Diseased-Rat.  It was, in fact, a rather full filing cabinet drawer, and the data it contained was very important, so long as you knew how it all inter-related.

His fingers found a sheet of dove-grey paper that was otherwise unmarked and he paused.  This was the colour he reserved for Margoyle, one of his colleagues who was showing promise and signs of thinking about promotion.  The page here was to remind him that his last tactic, of suborning her assistant and making it seem like Jeronica’s doing, had gone oddly wrong.  Her assistant, Corisette, was dead due to a freak asphyxiation event in the stairwell that had lead directly to him (and about twenty-five people at his level) installing a fire-escape rope-ladder in his office for exiting the building via the window, but Jeronica didn’t seem to be suffering unduly from Margoyle’s rage.

Actually, Jeronica was an interesting puzzle in her own right at the moment.  A few more flicks and his fingers found a sheet of canary-yellow paper, one corner dog-eared and a loose staple in the diagonally opposite corner.  She was achieving far too much in internal meetings at the moment and he couldn’t figure out why.  Certain meetings where he was sure she would be stalled or blocked by equally-ambitious people were going smoothly instead of erupting into arguments and dividing along faction lines, and she was gradually drawing attention from the level above.  Soon enough she’d even attract Jeremy Diseased-Rat’s attention, and Manguy definitely wasn’t ready for that kind of competition.  He placed the sheet on his desk; he would need to sit down and do some planning to deal with this.

More flicking through the papers in the cabinet and he pulled out the only sheet of paper that was due tomorrow.  There was a drawing of a chef’s toque on it, and he sighed.  He closed the filing cabinet, closed the blinds on his office window that had a view of the corridor outside, and sat down in the leather swivel chair to think about this meeting.  A… let’s call her a lady, he thought, though that may be generous.  A lady, connected in not insignificant ways to the National American Society of Hipsters, was concerned that her children were insufficiently ambitious and may fail to obtain jobs that would allow them to lead the kind of lives she felt were appropriate for them.  She had four children, and Manguy had already managed to see to it that the girl who wanted to be a school-teacher had changed her mind and become a banking executive for an organisation that leased school-supplies to the third world using a scheme that applied punitive damages to anyone trying to leave it or think for themselves.  That had been almost simple: it was just a case of finding the right boyfriend for her and then having her attacked a small herd of five-year olds that had been eating sweets all morning.  The pay-off for him was the National American Society of Hipsters listening more attentively to his recommendations, and nominating the right presidential candidate.  The polls were looking promisingly like he’d win the next election too.  This time though, the issue was the son who wanted to be a chef.

Manguy wasn’t sure what was wrong with being a chef.  Occasionally, when his dealer failed to come through with the good stuff and he had to sleep unaided, he’d wake up from dreams of working in a kitchen and turning out plates of beautiful food that made beautiful women weep and powerful men offer him jobs on private yachts.  He would lie there in the morning light, remembering the scent of lobster bisque, or tasting the memory of a single perfect madeleine, and for a moment he would know what happiness was supposed to feel like.  Then he’d get up, pay the hooker to leave, and return to being Manguy, the go-to guy at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations and heir-apparent to Jeremy Diseased-Rat.

Well, now there was a point.  The woman wanted appropriate life-styles for her children, so perhaps the job wasn’t such an issue.  What she needed was a celebrity-chef for a son, someone with a television show, a chain of high-profile, high-turnover restaurants, a reputation for swearing like a hooker… no, wait that wasn’t the phrase, was it?  Swearing like a sailor, on shore-leave.  That was it.  Someone  who made powerful women fall in love with them and rich men offer them jobs on private yachts….

He made a couple of notes on the page, and jotted down a phone-number of the publicist to call to get this young man’s career started, and only had to brush a single tear away from his eyes.

Art and business

Manguy steepled his fingers together and tapped his index fingers against his lips.  His bright eyes darted from side to side, though his besuited body remained perfectly still in his black leather office chair.  For a moment he seemed tense, then he seemed perfectly at ease again.  It was exactly the kind of stillness that Zen monks attain after a decade of study in a remote temple on the roof of the world.  The woman sat in the chair on the opposite side of the desk tried to wait him out.
Forty-five minutes later her bladder was complaining noisily, which she was finding mildly embarrassing, and Manguy still hadn't moved.  She wasn't sure if he'd ever blinked, or if he'd somehow conspired to only blink when she did.  She didn't think that was possible, but then she'd never thought that someone could sit that still for that long either.  She stretched her arms above her head, knowing that this presented her breasts in a rather attractive light, and yawned noisily.
"Look," she said, her voice raucous to both their ears after the prolonged silence.  "I won't pretend that this is fun, though it is relaxing.  I've been to Yoga that was far worse that this, and in dim light you'd pass for the teacher too.  She was a woman by the way."  She paused, lowering her arms as an excuse for not talking, studying Manguy.  He never moved, not even a blink.  "But you asked me to come here, and here I am.  Was it really just so you could hold a staring contest with me?"
"Do you know where here is?"  His voice was low, musical, and far clearer than anyone who'd apparently not swallowed for forty-five minutes should be able to manage.
"Yeah, sort of."   Geraldinium frowned as she tried to remember.  The name of the organisation had been written at the foot of the email in small type but all she could remember was the postcode, which she'd had to look up in a 1970's edition of the London A-Z.  "I know your postcode."
"Here is Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations," said Manguy.  "We specialise in... specialising in things, and we're very good at it.  My colleagues arrange for people and organisations to make headway in the often conflicting environments that the modern world disports around us.  The incredibly tall and high-heeled lady you passed on the way to my office is Jeronica, and she looks after soft-power in the Northern Hemisphere.  Even if she didn't tower over you and intimidate you she could sit down with you and show you how to become the most exhibited artist in London.  In about twenty minutes."
"She's agreed to sit for a portrait," said Geraldinium, nodding.  To her great delight Manguy looked suddenly surprised, though he quickly controlled himself and his face firmed back into boredom.  "I'm doing an homage to Dali and his Temptation."
"The one with the Elephants?" asked Manguy, though his voice changed half-way through the question so that it became more of a statement.  "I wonder if Jeronica is aware of your intentions."
"I wonder if I'm aware of your intentions," retorted Geraldinium.  She lifted a leg and slung it over the arm of her chair, slumping towards her left to get more comfortable.  "You've told me who you are and I don't care.  You've told me what you do, and I don't understand, and I think I wasn't supposed to.  You've told me about your colleague, but nothing about you.  Why?  Why?  Why?"
"I'm Manguy," said Manguy.  "Can we pretend I offered you my hand and you declined to shake it on artistic grounds?"
Geraldinium shrugged.  "Or we can pretend I offered you my hand and you declined because you thought you might catch something."
"We wish to purchase your next year's output of art," said Manguy, controlling a shudder and the urge to call for the cleaners.  "We have a list of paintings that we'd like to commission from you.  To an extent, there is a lot of creative freedom, but there must be certain elements conveyed in the paintings, exactly as we define."
"Steganography?" said Geraldinium.  "Again?"
"Rather, still," said Manguy, allowing himself a small smile.  "May I take that as acceptance?"
"No," said Geraldinium.  "We haven't discussed my fee yet.  Shall we start by pretending that I've named something astronomical and you're so thrilled that it's me doing the work that you're going to pay it anyway?"
"Ah," said Manguy.  "I was hoping that we could start by looking at these pictures of your cat-press."  He didn't move, but somehow conveyed the impression that there might be a drawer on his side of the desk that might contain something interesting.
"Did you know," said Geraldinium sounding conversational, "that you can fit a person in a cat-press?  Not many people know that."
There was another momentary pause and then the staring competition resumed.