I shrugged. “You want someone to go, I’ll go.”
“I saw the other names. It’s a good table. There’ll be a State Department guy who could talk to us about China. And maybe what we could do in Cuba when it goes off, how to get in there fast.”
“Right.”
“So, you’ll go?”
I nodded. Morrison had known I would agree to go.
“Mrs. Comber will call and change the reservation.”
“Right.”
“So these Volkman-Sakura guys arrive next week. It’s crucial we have him on board with this thing,” Morrison said, meaning the Chairman. “He’s got his shares and controls the ones owned by his foundation—”
The phone issued a soft plaint and Morrison took the call. I watched. His war wounds had not been the end of his bad luck; Morrison and his wife had suffered the stupendously horrible fortune to have two retarded children, both boys now in their late teens. I had often wondered if he lay awake at night wondering about the odds of having two sons such as his, or if there was something wrong with him or his wife. I’d never asked, of course. He had not put either of his sons into an institution, and both lived at home in Scarsdale with full-time attendants. I admired this. He kept the boys’ pictures on his desk; both looked retarded. It had been a tortuous twenty-five-year climb for Morrison—stints in sales, planning, finance, and other departments, licking each step of the ladder. Of course, now he made four million dollars a year, before bonuses and stock options.
“Right, as I was going to say, I think we got enough people on this,” Morrison began again, not quite sure where he’d left off. “The numbers take care of themselves, one way or another. It all comes down to people. We can get Volkman-Sakura all oiled up but nothing happens if he doesn’t tell the board it’s okay. Or, nothing will happen easily. If he doesn’t agree, then the board has to be forced to make a decision, which of course it is very uncomfortable doing.” Morrison shook his head in disgust. “I’d have to lobby each member beforehand and then give some kind of speech and then we’d have a big fight. The only way for this whole thing to happen easily is for someone to make the case to him, someone he isn’t expecting. He can’t stand me, so I can’t do it. It has to be someone who understands the whole complicated plan, the idea of it and all the aspects, and can talk about it. Samantha tells me he probably has a drift. But someone’s got to bring it up overtly, feel him out on the question. So, Jack, that’s why you’re here. I want to pull you out of the negotiating group—now, wait”—he’d seen my expression change—“before you interrupt me, just let me finish—Beales and Samantha can cover the marketing aspects—we have your whole thing on paper, so we’ll refer to it. You’ll come back into the deal later—”
“No chance,” I told Morrison. “No way I’m going to just walk away from all the—the thousands—of hours—”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack, just listen,” Morrison went on, “okay? Now, the Chairman’s guy—what’s his name—”
“Flicker.”
“The guy with the headaches. He’s not going to be coming back anytime soon.” We’d all been told that Flicker had developed a syndrome of dizziness and headaches, so acute he woke from his sleep with heart-stopping vertigo. He’d disappeared from the floor two months back. “Mrs. Marsh told me the Chairman doesn’t have time to interview anyone. But he needs somebody in there with him in the meetings, somebody who can carry his briefcase, the whole deal.”
“I didn’t know the Chairman even went to meetings anymore.”
“A few. Just to get around,” Morrison said dismissively. “Little stuff. Just to feel good.”
“He doesn’t know me,” I argued. “He’s going to want somebody who—”
“He doesn’t care who it is so long as the guy’s smart.”
“I worked months on this stuff.” Volkman-Sakura dominated portions of the European, Japanese, South American, and African markets. The two corporations had great intersecting mechanisms of production and distribution and marketing. “It’s the best work of my career, like try to wire two brains together, every synapse and capillary and whatever the hell else no longer works in Flicker’s head, all the marketing information—”
Morrison nodded as he fiddled with an antique mallard duck decoy on his desk. He claimed he could aim and shoot a shotgun with one hand. “Everybody knows that. That’s why we’re at this point. You saw how it could be done.”
Beales would take credit for everything, slip in there, offering sage banalities. “You’d be handing it off—”
Morrison put his palms up in front of his chest, as if pushing on a wall. “But you, more than anyone around here, are qualified to argue with the Chairman. And you like to argue, Jack. You’re doing it now, for Christ’s sake. I haven’t talked with him in weeks. The man is some old guy in a golf hat, so far as I’m concerned. He said nothing last month in the board meeting. I carried the whole thing. I mean it. Nothing! Things change. Cuba is going to blow and the Chairman’s going to ride off into the sunset. You’re part of this, Jack. We all have a role, a job. We can do it, we can run up the wall with this thing. I don’t know what he even reads anymore, the memos and reports. He’s always going somewhere in the helicopter. Where, I don’t know. Mrs. Marsh won’t tell anybody. So you got to get in there. Talk. I only know the overview, the others know the pieces. You’re the only guy around here with a good enough memory to have the whole deal in your head—”
I could feel the disgust on my face. “Beales could do it. He’s perfect for it.”
“No he isn’t. And I need him for other stuff, showing Waldhausen and these guys around. And, dammit, you haven’t even heard what I want you to do, Jack.”
“Okay.”
“The thing is that we can’t get the board all whipped up. The merger idea has to be presented in such a way that they can overrule the Chairman’s objections, if necessary, and feel they are brilliant and terrific and smart. A bunch of wise men. They have to see the logic of it for themselves.”
“Look themselves in the mirror the next day, not feel guilty,” I said.
“Right. But if the board finds out we did this behind the Chairman’s back, they’ll clean my clock with a pipe cleaner.” This was true. The average age of the board of directors was about sixty-two; men with multiple houses, wives and former wives, and expensive hobbies such as fly-fishing with their mistresses in Alaska by guide. Their faces revealed that they knew, with a visceral certainty that a younger man like myself could only conjecture, that in five or ten years there would be a new game for them to play and it was called cancer of the prostate or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. They were in no mood for cheap turmoil on the thirty-ninth floor. “So I’m going to try to avoid that,” Morrison said. “I going to try to do this the easier way, by assigning you to stick with the Chairman. Go to whatever meetings he still—”
“I really don’t want to do this.”
“—he’s got something in Washington next Monday,” Morrison went on. “Go with him. Find his head. The mood. The deep mood. It requires a certain touch. How aggressive we should be. Should we force a confrontation in front of the board or flatter him into thinking he should present them with the deal? Maybe he’s looking for a swan song, a chance to hit a home run in the ninth inning of the World Series and then retire. Feel him out on the question, Jack. Go to the parties. He tends to throw down the sauce. See what he says then. Remind him what decade it is. Okay? This is just a couple of weeks, tops.”
I glimpsed the Chairman only now and then, for he had his own elevator from the parking garage below street level and spent much of his time away from the office, content to let Morrison run the day-today operations. On rare occasions he decided against his limo or even a taxi and took himself to work in an old Mercedes. But he drove so infrequently now that the Corporation’s parking garage attendants kept a small can of custom apricot-colored paint that matched the tint of the car. After he arrived, they could be seen dabbing the
ir brushes on the new dings and scratches. Occasionally I passed Mrs. Marsh’s office as she typed using a foot-operated Dictaphone, and the Chairman’s voice, disemboweled, started and stopped, started and stopped, over and over and over. His absence created a presence. It suggested his power. The Chairman was certain to resist the merger plan. Even if I could jimmy my way into his schedule, there was no reason that he would necessarily listen to me; he had seen dozens of Jack Whitmans. Meanwhile Beales would be glad-handing on the inside with the V-S executives. I didn’t like it. In fact, I hated it.
But what could I say? Outside Morrison’s window, a piece of paper floated on an updraft in the perfect blue, a white sheet lazily lifting and tumbling, over and over. Above the buildings and cars and noise, the clouds inched across the horizon, mocking the petty strivings of men such as me. And men such as Morrison, who pushed people around on a board in his head.
“You know I don’t want to do this,” I said finally, the acid rasping my throat.
Morrison looked at me, then skipped his gaze toward the rest of the day’s schedule. I was dismissed.
“I mean, I really don’t want to do this,” I said firmly.
“Yes.” Morrison raised his eyes. He had seen the heads of men explode. “But I don’t care.”
Fuck him, I thought, fuck his certainty that I will do what he tells me. And fuck me for doing it.
THREE
AND OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, WHILE WE WAITED FOR THE Volkman-Sakura team to arrive, what happened that would winch tragedy in my direction? Well, nothing—nothing apparent. The Chairman was out of the city, having skin cancers removed, so I would have to wait for him to return, too. The hours were mundane in a lulling sort of way; they suggested constancy and security and order. One would never have known that events were ripening from mere unlikeliness. My pharmacy raised the price of a twelve-ounce-size bottle of Extra Strength Maalox Plus, mint creme flavor, to $4.99. I thought about Dolores Salcines while lying in bed. My stockbroker called to pitch a company that makes little television cameras that goggle around like an eyeball on the end of a wire. Surgeons send the device through the rectum up into the lower gastrointestinal tract. “America’s getting old!” my stockbroker exclaimed. “Everybody is going to need it!” I bought two hundred shares. Samantha and I put together a little fifty-million-dollar deal for the Corporation. Someone pawed through the garbage cans outside my house, leaving a chicken carcass sucked clean of every shred of meat. Beales spent a lot of time in Morrison’s office, which worried me. It rained, I read the newspapers. The Norway maple in my garden leafed out. Morrison stumped past my office door from time to time, barking orders. At lunch one day, I spied an attractive woman and followed her for a block, for the hell of it. She changed sides of the street. I read more newspapers. The circus came to town. Then, on that Friday, I was standing at my big office window talking on the phone to one of our marketing people when I noticed several tiny handprints smeared faintly on the glass—crisscrossed, translucent streaks like a single character of an unknown alphabet. The janitor, unaccustomed to looking for the messes of children, had missed them. There was a ghostliness to the marks; I felt beckoned. I cut the conversation short and called Mrs. Triscott.
“How’s Dolores Salcines doing on the job?” I asked.
“Fired her,” came a voice of irritation. “Can’t concentrate. I had to get her work rekeyed. She’s too tired to work under pressure. I told her to go home this morning. Can’t worry about one person, got a thousand pages have to be input today—”
“You fired her?”
“That’s what I said.”
Mrs. Triscott was fearless. “This woman has a child,” I said.
“So do a lot of people, Mr. Whitman.”
“You should have called me first before firing her. This woman doesn’t have any resources, any money—”
“Look, Mr. Whitman, you gotta understand something, okay?” It was the nasally, exasperated voice of a woman who survives in the lower bowels of corporate bureaucracy hating every minute of work. “I’m just doing my job. You’re up there on thirty-nine and it’s all the same to you. These gals have to be fast. Fast and no mistakes. I get a memo every week on productivity. Efficiency. You wouldn’t hire a lousy person, why should I?”
She gave me a number for Dolores Salcines and hung up. I wasn’t sure I should call. She might feel embarrassed at being fired, but it seemed I’d set her up in a job she couldn’t handle and therefore owed her an apology. I dialed. On the fifth ring a male voice answered and I asked for Dolores.
“Well, she might be here and then again she might not be,” the man’s voice echoed strangely.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know who all’s livin’ here, bud. I hain’t been here two weeks myself.”
“What place is this?” I asked.
“This a hotel, bud.” The voice coughed out a laugh. “At least that’s what they call it.”
“What’s the name?”
“I don’t know. ‘The something.’ ”
“Where is it?”
“Uh, lemme think about that—” I heard the gurgle of the man putting a bottle to his lips. “Ann, uh, all right, I’m pretty sure we’s exactly and precisely approximately near the corner of Forty-third and Eighth Avenue.”
Not far from Times Square—no doubt one of the aging buildings catering to the transient population of drifters, drunks, runaways, enlisted men on leave, and so on. Big waxed Cadillacs and limos nose their way through these streets in the off hours, and two or three avenues to the west the prostitutes do a stupendous business at night—where the morning light falls across certain paved-over lots to reveal a great littering of used rubbers, flattened and translucent, many of them ringed with lipstick halfway down from the tip. “Listen,” I said, “you’d remember this woman if you saw her. She’s got a child with her.”
“She black?”
“She looks Hispanic, maybe a little black as well. I don’t know, exactly.”
“Well, is she hot, man?” the voice cackled. “Lot of fuckin’ hot babes around here, man. See them titties bouncin’ around, an’ I want to touch them nippies . . .” The voice devolved into garrulous, hacking laughter. I listened as Helen came in and placed several letters to be signed in front of me.
“I’m just asking you if you think you’ve seen her.”
The laughter stopped abruptly. “Who the fuck knows?”
“Could you just look around, maybe? Ask around?”
Helen stared at me and then left.
“You want somebody around here, you gotta come go knockin’ yo’self. I can’t just go fuckin’ banging on some people’s door—you can get yo’self shot.” The voice disappeared and the line went dead. I called back. No answer. I stood up and took my coat out of the closet. On the way out I told Helen I’d be gone for a while.
“Where’re you headed?” she asked.
“Just out. Walk around, talk to God.”
She looked at me with patience, which was one of the reasons I’d hired her. “Mrs. Marsh sent over all this stuff for you to read for your trip to Washington on Monday.”
“I’ll get to it,” I promised.
“Jack, do you really have the time—”
“Hell, how much is it?”
She handed me a folder five inches thick, a good six or seven hundred pages of memos, letters, reports.
“Who does Morrison expect I am?” I asked her.
Helen looked at me, her eyes watering slightly, as if she knew things I did not. She was smart, she saw things coming, and she ate lunch with other executive assistants; they had their own grapevine of gossip and back-door information, they typed the confidential letters and important documents, they knew who was calling whom.
“Mrs. Marsh said his car will meet you. She said that you should by no means expect him to have read the file.”
“I’m covering his ass?”
“She just said that this was the complete f
ile and that—”
“Yes, fine,” I interrupted. “You know Morrison yanked me off the negotiating team?”
She nodded. I put the folder in my briefcase. “Helen, you have any theories about what they’re doing with me?”
“No.” She looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”
“Let me know if you do,” I told her. “I need some interesting theories.”
In the hallway I spied Asad Ru Adoo, the in-house investment consultant, who was occasionally seen scuttling fatly into a back office on thirty-nine carrying two double-wide lizard-skin briefcases with digital locks and his name embossed in swirling script. He wore a dark blue turban and sported a tremendous paunch that he pushed ahead of him like a wheelbarrow full of gold, and his self-importance meant that he spoke to almost no one.
“Hello, Asad,” I said as he passed.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered darkly behind his beard, without looking at me. “Thank you.”
He was paid something like a million dollars a year to play the Corporation’s cash against the dollar by moving into and out of deutsche marks, yen, Hong Kong dollars, pounds, Eurodollars, Swiss francs—whatever currency would give the best return. But no one seemed to know exactly what he did, except sit in his office late into the night, consulting Tokyo, New Delhi, Kuwait City, Hong Kong, Seoul. There were rumors that he had virtually assaulted a quiet secretary on the floor below when she refused to date him; the secretaries down there, some of whom were from the streets of Harlem and knew a thing or two about men’s egos, had nicknamed him Boo-Boo, and after he had paraded past them trailing the stink of French cologne, they had been seen to go wobbly on their high heels and weep with laughter. I had no doubt that Adoo was involved in Morrison’s machinations in some way, finding ways to hide a couple of hundred million in cash from Volkman-Sakura if necessary in all sorts of low-to-the-ground deals, and I wondered frankly if Morrison attached too much importance to Adoo’s swagger and thickly mysterious accent, the Kissinger of the Corporation. Like the others, like me I suppose, there was something wrong with him—that was the only way he could work on thirty-nine. Another freak. The floor was full of them, myself included.
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