Stilk moved across to a smaller side table, glancing sideways at his audience with a mocking lift of the brow. A barely suppressed voila!, and he removed a dust-cover from the object on the table. It was a bottle.
'And here we are, gentlemen,' he said. 'Your bottle as redesigned by what this agency is pleased to call its think-tank. And adjusted a teeny-weeny bit more by yours truly.'
The businessmen did not know whether they were supposed to be amused or impressed, and one of them compromised by scraping his chair on the polished, wood-block floor. It made a suitably ambivalent sound.
'There is as yet no label, since there is as yet no name,' Stilk said, placing the bottle very precisely off-centre on the mirrored table-top. Tall and tapering, except for a slight bulge near the middle, the bottle was filled with an amber liquid. There was a glitter of small, shining octagonals around the neck, and these set up a series of endless reflections with the mirror below. 'And the name, as you well know, is almost as important as what is being named.'
Stilk brushed the bottle with the tips of his fingers. His own modest proposal, he said was Lagoon or, possibly, Laguna. This seemed to merit applause, and he waited for it.
'This bottle will, after all, hold your product, gentlemen,' he said, when none came. 'I think it would positively glow for a few distinct murmurs of approbation.'
The businessmen continued to stare, in awkward silence, at the bottle, which was gleaming in the puddle of its own reflection. They were troubled by Stilk: his language, his manner, his guessed-at sexual predilections. Somewhere near, the men knew, beautiful young women were changing into bikinis and high-heeled shoes, ready to perform. Why all this talk?
[Blackeyes, Potter, D.]
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