Free The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad

Dickie.
    “Kinda dull, Dickie,” I told him. “Went to a party in a loony-bin, met the Devil, didn’t like him, got picked up by a naked chick in a peacoat, balled her, she dropped LSD in my breakfast coffee, took me on a magic carpet ride, and I spent Sunday recuperating with the funnies. An off-week.”
    Dickie tsk-tsked. “I feel for you, m’boy,” he said. “You lead such a mundane existence.”
     
    Dickie and I had a strange thing going: we pretended to believe each other’s most outrageous bullshit while really not taking seriously a word the other said. Thus, I could tell Dickie the absolute truth about my lost weekend secure in the knowledge that he would accept it without blinking an eye as the usual Monday morning cock-and-bull story in our endless game of rank-counter-rank.
    “I, on the other hand,” Dickie said, opening the walnut-veneered door with Dirk Robinson Literary Agency, Inc. lettered in fading gilt on the upper toilet-door glass panel, “met an exiled Yugoslavian countess unfortunately afflicted with nymphomania and spent two solid days polluting my vital bodily fluids in a Park Avenue penthouse. I’ve got a charleyhorse in my dick.”
    Into the entrance foyer, paneled in walnut plywood, carpeted in black synthetic, lit by an atrocious monster of a chandelier, the walls festooned with a display of books the agency had had a hand (or even a pinky) in, and barricaded at the far end by an enormous desk behind which Maxine the receptionist-telephone-answerer-fee-writer-intimidator with the enormous tits should’ve been sitting in the usual tight blouse if she hadn’t, as usual, been late.
    “La vida es suena,” I commiserated with Dickie as he outflanked the desk and opened the door to the office itself by yanking on the giant brass doorknob.
    “Verdad,” he said, as I followed him into the boiler room. The boiler room was another of Dirk Robinson’s exercises in cut-rate image-mongering. From the entrance, you did not really notice that the room was painted a high-school-corridor gray and floored with the cheapest of beige plastic tiles because your vision was immediately channeled along the black strip of carpeting that ran from the door between two pairs of walnut desks that faced each other across it like an honor-guard before the big door in the walnut-paneled rear wall that bore a heavy bronze plaque proclaiming Dirk Robinson, President. The entrance foyer had been built along the right wall of the boiler room and if you looked to the left, you saw a smaller door in the rear wall that had Richard Lee, Vice President lettered directly on the wood in gold paint and backing the left-hand pair of pro desks, a businesslike line of filing cabinets covering the entire left-hand wall. This was what the rare fee-writer who managed to penetrate the outer defenses saw.
    But as Dickie trotted past the pro desks, where Phil and Bob, two of the three guys who handled the bona fide professional writers, had already arrived, I made a hard left turn, opened the gate in the waist-high railing and was in the sweat-shop area, hidden from the glance of the casual visitor by the inner wall of the entrance foyer partition: two parallel ranks of three-desk gray metal consoles facing the railing out of light-of-sight of the entrance. And don’t think Dirk Robinson didn’t plan it that way.
    The front rank of desks belonged to Arlene, the bookkeeper and general top-level flunky who was already busy on her phone; Nancy, the bouncy little filing clerk who was busily sorting the Monday morning overload of manuscripts; and the probationary fee-reader of the moment, a nameless pimply youth who wasn’t there and odds-on had been fired by Dickie on orders from Dirk last Friday.
    I sat behind the middle desk in the back row, flanked on my left by Mannie Berkowitz, an aging, balding, promising young writer who was already moaning softly over a manuscript, and on my right by Bruce Day, a crypto-hippy in perfunctory