In the large, central building, Seamus nervously asked a receptionist where he could find Mr. Schwartzinger. After deftly flipping through her card file, she said, "Oh, the funnybooks!" Though she was probably younger than Seamus and quite friendly, he was intimidated by her nice clothes and professional manner. "It's odd," she said, "to think of people making a living doing that. Making funnybooks"
                   "I guess someone has to make them," Seamus muttered, staring at her desk, not at her chest, as he worried she might think.
                   "Yes. I guess that's true." Her manner gave an air of authority to the noncommittal statement. After pausing to let its implications sink in, or so he felt, she directed Seamus to go to the building the furthest from the parking lot, next to the bowling alley.
                   The structure was short, though wide, a dull red brick edifice with few windows that reminded him of pictures of bunkers from the war. As he opened the door to enter, Seamus was struck by a stale smell of mildew. Unlike the reception area in the main building, which was bright and recently painted, this room was poorly lit and the walls looked as if they were water-stained. Seamus paused as his eyes adjusted from the sunny outdoors.
                   "Hey!"
                   His eyes began to focus. Behind a well-worn desk, he saw a young woman, dark-haired and petite. She was grinning, and her whole face squinted into a smile. The effect was pleasant, but something about the slant of her eyes struck Seamus as mischievous. Her pale skin glowed in the room's gloomy ambiance.
                   "You need to see someone?" she asked.
                   "Um." Seamus looked down into his fidgeting hands as if he were looking for something, though he came up empty-handed. "I'm here to see Mr. Schwartzinger."
                   "Sorry to hear that." She gave him a look of mock condolence, a perfect mask, except for the smiling eyes.
                   Seamus stood for a moment wondering what to say.
                   "What's your name?" she asked, and he told her.
                   The woman reached across her desk and pressed a button on a small plastic box.
                   "What?" crackled the box.
                   "There's a Mr. McMahon to see you, Mr. Schwartzinger," she said in a sickly sweet, sarcastic voice.
                   "Yeah, sure," sighed the box. "Send him in."
                   "OK, jerkface." Seamus was shocked for a moment until he realized that she was not pressing the button on the box as she said this.
                   The young woman led him down the hallway to the last doorway, then across the room, past a pair of desks, a pair of drawing tables, and a trio of men, to a large wooden door and knocked.
                   "Good luck," she said, smiled and left. Seamus watched her go.
                   "Yeah?" boomed a voice behind the door. Seamus started and heard someone laugh behind him, one of the three men.
                   "Who is it?" yelled the voice.
                   "Seamus McMahon. I have an appointment."
                   "Well, open the goddamn door!"
                   As the door opened, a figure came into view. It looked out of proportion, huge. The man standing behind the desk was well over 6 feet tall and very overweight. His face was pink, and his pink complexion shown through the sad strands of hair combed over his balding crown. He scowled. Seamus began to initiate a handshake but decided otherwise.
                   "Your Weiss' boy, right?"
                   Seamus didn't care for the phrasing of the statement, but he mumbled affirmation.
                   "What's your name?"
                   "Seamus McMahon."
                   "I thought I told Weiss, 'Irish need not apply.'" The man laughed brutally at his own joke.
                   McMahon wasn't a real Irish name. Even though Seamus' mother's side was indeed from the Emerald Isle, his father's people were actually German. But in Ohio, Nachtmann became McMahon during WWI after a neighbor named Schön had been lynched. But Seamus didn't offer this information to Schwartzinger. Instead, he smiled stupidly.
                   The larger man gave Seamus a hard, unfriendly look, a large brow looming darkly over small eyes. They stood in quiet for a moment, one scowling, the other proffering a tight, uncomfortable smile.
                   "OK, I don't have anymore time to waste on this crap," snarled Swartzinger. "Go talk to Farke. Get out of here."
                   Seamus stood for a moment longer, not moving.
                   "You're still here!"
                   The younger man shook his head and blinked his eyes, then turned to remove his self from the office, a blurred memory of wood paneling, file cabinet, cork bulletin board and an ogre. Back in the outer room, he saw two of the three men who had been there before. The elder of the two, a bespectacled, lanky, middle-aged man, with a shock of brown hair and a large nose, sat at one of the drawing tables, drawing with a brush on what looked to be a crossword puzzle page. As Seamus watched, the curves of the brushwork developed into figures, people and animals, spot illustrations to fill in spaces on the page. I guess someone has to do them, thought Seamus.
                   The other man sat at a desk, sullenly almost picking his nose, though his finger teasingly refrained from full nasal penetration. His skin was a mute gray beneath his light blond hair, and his features bore a piscine cast. He looked to be in his early 20s, though perhaps younger.
                   "I'm supposed to talk to Farke," Seamus said quietly, aiming his statement at neither of the workers.
                   Finger removed from his face, the grayish young man snorted and pulled back one half of his face in an apathetic sneer. He stood up and walked over to the other desk and gestured to Seamus, who came forward. The gray man, Farke, one supposed, pointed at a typewriter on the desk.
                   "Need text filler, one page, 250words," he said. "For next issue of Commie Busters."
                   Leaving Seamus staring at the machine, Farke turned around and walked back to his desk to stare blankly and continue to tease his nose.
                   Seating himself at the desk, Seamus worked a piece of paper into the typewriter, let his fingers lightly play across the keys like a pianist and mentally girded himself. OK, this was it, a professional writing assignment at last. He knew what a text piece in a comic looked like, though he admittedly never read them. He'd seen Commie Busters on the newsstand, and even if he'd never read it, either, he knew the type of book it was and the kinds of tales it presented. He typed.
                   "Blood Reds" was the title he chose for his compact espionage thriller. It began with the hero, Rick Sterling, a young, hot-blooded G-Man, in the grips of dastardly communists, Bolshevik rats gnawing away at our democracy, merciless tools of their masters in the Kremlin. But even a gun pointed at his temple wouldn't keep Rick from battling on, not an all-American kid fighting for world freedom in the name of God, mom and J. Edgar Hoover.
                   Yeah, it was turning out pretty good. Seamus looked up, and Farke was missing. He turned to look at the man at the drawing board, who was now drawing a cartoon cowboy body beneath a photographed face.
                   "You do comic books?" asked Seamus.
                   "Yeah," smiled the artist. "I do a little of about everything around here."
                   "I'm writing one of those one-page stories right now."
                   "Filler."
                   "So why do comic books always have them? I mean, they must be popular, as I see them in all the comics."
                   The artist unconsciously chewed on the back end of his brush for a moment.
                   "Postage rate."
                   Seamus stared at him.
                   "To get the better postage rate, the periodical rate," continued the artist, "there has to be at least two pages of text in a comic. If it didn't have the words, it wouldn't be considered a magazine, and the company would have to pay more."
                   "Oh," said Seamus, somewhat crestfallen. He sat and stared at the words he had just typed.
                   "Y'know what, though?" said the artist. "Mickey Spillane got his start writing filler pages, over at Stan Lee's. Used to do Human Torch, that kinda stuff."
                   "Really?" Though he had never liked Spillane's writing and didn't know this Lee was, Seamus was still impressed. The hardboiled writer had managed to sell a bajillion books since the end of the war. "Wow."
                   Rick knocked the gun from the spy's hairy hand and fearlessly tackled the dirty Red.
                   Seamus looked up again.
                   "Hey, thanks, mister," he said.
                   "Call me Sammy," said the artist.
                   Pretty soon, Rick had mopped up the entire cell, finishing up right before the other agents arrived to the scene. They were plenty impressed that he managed to take on that rough mob, but it was all in a day's work to Rick, smiling and ready for new adventures.
                   Seamus practically jumped up out of his chair as he tugged the page from the typewriter. He proudly carried his work over to the Farke, who had returned and was now pensively scratching his ear.
                   "Here you go," said Seamus, handing the sheet over.
                   Farke took it and placed it into a folder.
                   "Aren't you going to read it over?" asked Seamus.
                   "Why bother," he replied. "No one ever reads this crap."