"You say you're trapped?" he demanded.
"Yes! Help me, American! Please help me!"
"How much?"
"How much what?"
"How much would you pay me if I got you out?" demanded Randal Rumpp, getting right to the point.
"I will pay any price. Honestly."
"Okay, I need three billion bucks."
"Billion with a b?"
"Yes."
"Okay, I do this for you. Three billion."
"Up front."
"I cannot advance any money while I am in telephone," the weird, tinny voice said, reasonably enough.
"I'll settle for half up front," countered Randal Rumpp, who, had he not been so hard-up, would never have wasted time talking to the disembodied voice. But the man sounded hard-up. And vaguely foreign. The real money today was in foreign hands. Maybe this was some wealthy Japanese industrialist, and Randal Rumpp would luck into a killing. It had happened before.
"I am sorry. You must release me first."
"What are you, some kind of telephone genie? I pop the cork, and you give me three wishes?"
"Three billions. That is our agreement."
"Get lost," said Randal Rumpp, knowing a scam when he smelled one.
The cacophony of office phones having fallen silent, he moved on to his executive assistant's office.
"Dorma, I want every phone on this floor off the hook. Now."
The woman sat frozen at her desk, eyes staring straight ahead in the classic thousand-yard stare. They were misting over. She held a white linen handkerchief before her, as if it were too heavy to raise to her eyes or let fall to her lap.
"Did you hear me?"
"They . . . sank . . . without a trace . . . ." she moaned.
"How would you like to sink without a trace?" suggested Randal Rumpp, who boasted in his autobiography that he hired women to staff his empire because he felt they were just as capable as men. He neglected to mention that they also worked a third more cheaply and were twice as easy to intimidate as men.
"I . . . don't . . . care. . . ." Dorma whispered eerily.
"Then I'll do it myself," Rumpp snapped.
It took a while. Every so often he heard the weird foreign voice crying out from the receiver's diaphragm, like a lost soul. He slammed those phones harder than the others.
By the time the floor had fallen silent, the sun was setting. It was then and only then that Randal Rumpp realized the electricity was off. It had not been off before. The computers had been running. Now their screens were dim to the point of grayness.
Whatever had happened, the electricity was no longer flowing through the building's wiring.
He made a mental note to sue the contractor who had put in the wiring, and Con Ed as well. If he sued enough people, he was bound to recoup enough of his losses to bounce back.
Randal Rumpp brushed past his executive assistant and plunked himself down behind his massive desk. He decided to play a hunch.
There was one cellular phone in the office. It had not gone crazy like the others. He picked it up, extended the antenna, and stabbed out the number of the President of Chemical Percolators Hoboken, his chief creditor.
"Mr. Longstreet's office," a crisp voice announced.
"Randal Rumpp calling."
He was put through without another word.
"Alan? Randal here. By any chance have you heard about what's going on up here in the Rumpp Tower?"
"The TV is full of it. I don't understand. What is going on? Are you all right?"
"Never felt better. Listen, I don't appreciate being foreclosed on."
"The Tower was our collateral on the Shangri-Rumpp deal, and we had to call in the note. We had no choice."
"And neither did I."
"Beg pardon?"
"You can't seize a building you can't touch," Randal Rumpp said flatly, looking at his face reflected in his buffed and polished fingernails.
"Are you saying you're responsible for this . . . this Halloween prank?"
"No prank, Chuck. The Rumpp Tower is Randal Rumpp's top tangible asset. Now it's been converted into an intangible asset. Never play against a born winner. Chumps like you always lose."
At that Randal Rumpp hung up, smiling a simpering smile that could have belonged to a turn-of-the-century chorus girl.
"That ought to tangle up their balance sheets while I formulate my next move."
The trouble was, Randal Rumpp didn't have a next move. In fact, he still didn't know what the heck was going on. But in the game of life, he knew, he who talks big and bluffs high usually walks away with the jackpot.
And since he was a virtual untouchable in his own tower, he might as well pull on people's chains a little more.
"Get me BCN," he called into the next room.
"How? The phone's are all dead."