Crap, Stanislaus Warshawski, Jr. thought. Why me?

He took his feet from the stack of papers on the corner of his desk, put them on the floor and swung around to look at the full-sized photograph on the wall behind him. The image of a tall, distinguished-looking man in his seventies, wearing fencing padding and carrying a foil stared back at him silently. He wasn’t sure why it did, but at least thinking of his father sometimes made things a little clearer.

Damn, maybe his father was right after all. When Stan had been a little boy, his father had started him out with fencing, and it had been his father’s dream that his son would be even better than he was. And that was pretty good – his father won the bronze medal in the 1952 Olympics. He didn’t have the medal anymore; it was Christ knew where in Poland, lost to him after he’d intentionally walked out a fire exit after a meet in Boston with only the clothes on his back and told the first cop he saw that he wanted political asylum.

The medal probably wouldn’t have helped his father a hell of a lot right then; that and a nickel in those days would buy a cup of coffee. Fencing just hadn’t been taken seriously, and people put nothing like the importance on the Olympics that they did twenty and thirty years later. Fortunately he’d had relatives in Toledo, and just by sheer damn luck the tiny University of Toledo fencing team had been looking for a coach. It wasn’t that good a job for a world-class fencer in those days, and there had been a while that he’d also had a second job pumping gas. But, over the years, he’d become the grand old man of fencing in the area, training kids one by one and two by two, building the sport up enough over the years that he could finally give up pumping gas to eke out a living before self-serve pumps came in. Stan’s dad had done it the hard way, but he’d made a good life for his kids, put them through college. Even today, he was happiest down at the storefront salle not far from St. Vinnie’s, teaching kids how to use a foil or a sabre. He was still damn good, too; he was probably the best in the country in his age group, and in the top fifty in the country.

But whatever magic he had with a foil didn’t get passed along in abundance to his son. Stan had made E-level once, on a fluke, when the guy he’d been fencing had a supremely bad day, but when it expired he slipped back to Novice, and there he still was. He still enjoyed getting out and messing around with a foil a little over at the club near Arizona State, but he really wasn’t much more than a moving target for beginners. He could see the moves; he could coach them – that much had been passed along from his dad – he just couldn’t make them himself. But his dad could solve a lot of the problems in his life with a good guard and a strong parry. If only it could be that simple for him. Right now, he thought his dad was right: it was better to be a fencing coach than a CEO.

Once again, he wished to hell that he’d taken even one personnel management class in college. Just one, that was all. Every damn thing he did around here to fix problems was winging it, or on the advice of others, who usually weren’t any more qualified to make those decisions than he. But no, he had to load up on the engineering – first at the University of Toledo, because with his dad an employee, he could go there for free, and later for his master’s at Georgia Tech, then his doctorate at MIT. He’d made a hell of a lot of mistakes with this company, but at least they were his mistakes and most of them had worked out all right in the end by sheer luck. Sometimes, even often, he wished that he and Sam and Dick and Troy hadn’t been so damn cute when they put together the organization of this place. Overall it had worked out, but it still meant that hot potatoes got dropped in his lap more often than he thought they needed to.

Damn it, this wasn’t getting anywhere. It wasn’t even thinking about the problem, it was woolgathering and wishing. He let out a long sigh, pushed a couple of loose papers off of the phone on his desk, and quickly dialed an extension. "Sam," he sighed again once the phone had been answered. "Can you slide over here? We gotta talk."

"Jennlynn?" Sam asked.

"What else?" Stan frowned. "Jesus, how can one woman have a temper like that?"

"I’ll be over in a minute," Sam sighed. "You’re right, something needs to be done."

It was a damn shame, Stan thought again as he hung up the phone and put his feet back up on the corner of his desk. Jesus, the woman was brilliant, maybe the brightest person in the company, but my God, at what price! When she got in a mood like the one this morning, she could grab a plastic butter knife, take on his father armed with a sharp and carve the living hell out of him.

In a moment, Sam walked in the office and closed the door. "Sam," he said without preliminary. "What the fuck are we going to do? I don’t want to lose her, she’s too damn smart, but if we keep her, we’re going to lose most of the rest of the staff."

"It’s getting to be a problem," Sam conceded.

"It got to be a problem a hell of a long time ago," Stan agreed. "Don’t get me wrong, I like Jennlynn, she’s sharp as hell and gets results like no one else around here, but what she has gives PMS a good name when she gets in these moods. We can’t have her calling a customer representative a lying, pimple-dicked sack of shit. What in hell is the matter with her?"

"Jennlynn is tricky," Sam shook his head. "She doesn’t react to things like other people do. You remember her sitting right here in this office and saying that she gets very focused on things, that she hates being interrupted, and when she gets stressed it gets worse. I don’t know what happened, but I presume the rep called her while she was trying to think something out and asked some stupid question that she’s told him the answer to six times before."

"Well, it would piss me off, too," Stan said. "But Jesus, not like that! Shit, she never got that bad the summer she was working here as an intern. Oh, a little snappy once in a while, but not even a warm-up to this morning. Not even last summer. What the hell happened?"

"Oh, shit," Sam shook his head. "Actually, I do know what the problem is. Jennlynn had a long cry with Maureen a few days ago. But damn it, even with what you did for Maureen and me, I’m uncomfortable discussing the intimate details of other people’s sex lives with you."

"Sex?" Stan frowned. "I mean, I know what she did for two years, up till she came here full time. And we agreed long ago that it wasn’t going to be an issue."

"I know," Sam sighed. "I’m probably at fault. After all, I’m the one who told her that it probably would be a good idea for the company’s sake to give it up. I mean, she’s right. How would it look to have a hooker on the staff?"

"I know, you told me about it, and I agreed. She did what she had to do."

"I don’t know how to say this without getting a little embarrassed about it," Sam shook his head. "Again, I got it from Maureen, so it’d probably be best if she doesn’t hear it from you if you want to keep her from taking off your head. Look, I knew from when I first met her that she has a hell of a sex drive, and I understand how that works because I have one, too. In simple terms, she’s been keeping her pants on like we want her to. What we’re seeing is the results."

Stan shook his head. "You mean, she needs to get laid?"

"Badly, seriously, and regularly," Sam agreed. "I don’t think it’s the ultimate cure-all, but I’ve seen it work. You remember how she got a little bitchy toward the end of last summer, and then she turned real mellow?"

"Yeah, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as this."

"Maureen fixed her up with this guy who works over at Alro Processing. He has the reputation of being a real cocksman, she said. He burned it out of her for a while, but I guess she about killed him in the process. She called him up a month or so later, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. I believe it. I’ve only come across one woman better than she is, and she’s a lot older, doesn’t have the endurance. I know damn well she hasn’t had any since then, or at least that’s what she told Maureen."

"I can’t believe that she can’t go out to the nearest bar, crook her little finger, and get all the dick she thinks she needs."

"She won’t do it," Sam said flatly. "Her idea of morality is just a little skewed. Actually, I’m a little surprised she took on the guy from Alro. She’s in a sticky position, Stan. Having been a hooker in Nevada, if she picks up some guy in this state, it could be considered soliciting, even though there’s no money involved. I doubt the cops are after her, or would even raise any problems on a deal like that. But you never know." He leaned back and sighed. "How do I say this? She takes pride in having been a legal prostitute. Maybe not everyone here knows that or understands that, but I do. It’s the same reason I won’t pick up a girl here locally, so Maureen and I drive 500 miles one way and pay more money than I would to an indie."

"Too goddamn bad they don’t have cathouses for women," Stan snorted.

"Yeah," Sam shrugged. "Women get laid in cathouses every day, they just get paid for it, rather than paying for it."

"So what do we do? Tell her to go for it?"

"I think so," Sam nodded. "Look, I see two outcomes. One, we can her, and she goes back to being a hooker. Or she goes back to being a hooker and we don’t can her. I don’t think we want to lose her, but we can’t put up with her the way she is. I think it’s time to break the paradigm on this one, Stan."

"Can we tell her to keep it a little quiet?"

"That’s the tough part," Sam nodded. "That’s why I’ve been reluctant to bring this to you. It’s a security-clearance issue."

"Do we need to bring Maureen into this discussion?" Stan asked, a little amazed at the direction the conversation had taken.

"We could if we wanted to," he shrugged. "But from what Maureen tells me, the situation is goofy and there’s no precedent. Normally, if a security check found that a woman was a hooker, they’d pull her clearance so fast it wouldn’t be funny, strictly because she’s doing something illegal, like felony illegal in some cases."

"But a legal prostitute, in Nevada?" Stan smiled. "Yeah, I see how that could throw a fly in the ointment."

"Right," Sam grinned. "There’s no precedent, unless you use my situation. I mean, technically, messing around with hookers in this state is just as much a crime for me. Although men with clearances go to hookers all the time, the wrong clearance person would still have a shit fit if they found out. But I’m doing nothing illegal when I go to Nevada. Now, the other take that Maureen has on it is that if Jennlynn did try to keep it covered up, then that would be a security risk since it would leave her open to blackmail. If she’s wide open and legal, she can’t be blackmailed. It’s the same thing with me, and really that’s the precedent we have to work with."

"Well, from that viewpoint, I guess I can’t argue," Stan shook his head, wondering once again how he’d gotten into this mess. "How about her working with clients? I mean, Lambdatron clients? Isn’t that going to have a hell of a feedback? That’s why we agreed that it wasn’t a good idea if she kept it up, anyway."

"Has to be better than calling them lying, pimple-dicked sacks of shit," Sam grinned. "She doesn’t necessarily have to be all that open about it. After all, we’ve got some goofier people than her running around here."

"That’s true," Stan nodded. "But here’s a point. So she is open, it’s no secret, so she goes to have a consultation with some client. Isn’t that bribery? Or even pandering?"

"Again we run into that legal versus illegal question," Sam shook his head. "First, I think the last four months have proved that if we ask her to keep her pants on, it’s as good as locking her in a chastity belt. If she only does it in a house in Nevada . . . "

"Then it’s legal, as long as the customer pays," Stan finished for him. "Piss, we could talk this around all morning, but the bottom line as I see it is that we might as well tell her to go do it if she wants to. It can’t work any worse than it’s already working, and might work better."

"That’s about how I saw it already, I just wanted to be sure you saw it the same way."

"God have mercy," Stan shook his head. "I guess it’s just as good that I never went to management school. I can just imagine what any professor’s reaction would be if they found out we told one of our most brilliant employees to go back to being a hooker for the good of the company. When we started this mad house I never thought I’d see the day that happened."

"Well, we do have a reputation for innovative and unusual management," Sam grinned. "How do we break it to her? I can tell her, maybe with Maureen involved, but I’d like to make it clear to her that you approve. And frankly, she’s got more experience from her side of the coin than we do, so maybe she’d have some valuable input."

"I guess we get her up here, and Maureen, too," Stan shook his head. "Then we break the news to her and get the hell out of her way. Sam, tell me, why the hell did we ever get the idea of running an elevator with an 8008?"

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.