The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  I reassembled the iron, sat it in the upright position and plugged it into an outlet which had a dedicated fifteen-amp circuit to run the bench and the basement lights.

  I had two large screwdrivers with plastic handles. I wrapped them with old scraps of inner tube to provide an extra layer of insulation. I held one screwdriver to the logo plate and brought the other to the base of the iron.

  Pop.

  Even with the insulation, fifteen amps was enough to jolt my arms clear of the iron, and make a noise loud enough to set off Eddie. In the gray diffuse light from the basement windows I could see smoke curl out of the vent holes at the base of the iron.

  I unplugged the iron, lit a cigarette and drank some of my coffee. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light.

  I threw the breaker back on and went upstairs. Then I went outside to hit a few more tennis balls around for Eddie. A hurricane somewhere out in the Atlantic was sending twenty- to thirty-knot winds across the East End. The Little Peconic was a roiling stew pot of gray-black water and off-white foam. The winds were warm and smelled of their tropical origins, all wrong for the autumn light and red-yellow days of October. A windsurfer was out on the bay skimming across the chop like a lunatic water bug. I envied his foolish abandon.

  That afternoon I took a long run. I needed the oxygen, and the endorphins. And whatever blessings the windswept Peconic was willing to bestow.

  SIX

  THE COMPANY I worked for created wealth out of thin air. We owned giant processing plants that sucked in atmosphere and pumped out freight cars full of pure oxygen, nitrogen and helium. We made hydrogen from water. Fertilizer from natural gas. Converted crude oil into gasoline additives, road surfaces and plastic housings for TV sets and microwave ovens. Though fundamental in our use of natural resources, we needed highly refined technology, research scientists and applications engineers to maintain a competitive advantage over the other monstrous corporations who made the same stuff we did. This technical support was so vast and sophisticated that the managers of the corporation began to view it, correctly, as a valuable product in its own right. We began by licensing proprietary processing and manufacturing technology. Then technical services and on-site support. Eventually we unbundled almost everything we did and peddled it to anyone who didn’t directly compete with our core operating divisions. The cross-pollination of ideas was an unexpected side benefit. While we were selling them ours, we’d pick up a few of theirs. This further strengthened our ability to develop new technology for the home front and stimulate development of products our operating divisions could never imagine, much less produce. We sold instruments, robotics, software, training programs and combustion-efficiency enhancers like the SAM-85. And a lot of sheer technical know-how. I kept a small stack of CDs in my right-hand desk drawer that held data people paid $100,000 just to look at on my laptop. If they wanted the disc, that was another $900K.

  This was my part of the corporation. It wasn’t a simple job, but they paid me a lot of money to do it.

  Eventually, people began to notice our division had gone from overhead expense to self-funding enterprise to major profit center. Even better, we proved that a hundred-year-old company living off God’s own air, water and light sweet crude could also be in the vanguard of high technology. Since I’d helped conjure all this, I was one of the few in the company who knew how to do it. This gave me a healthy share of cachet. That was a good thing for people’s careers in our company. Many had far more cachet than me, though they’d often caused the company more harm than good. That was because you could acquire cachet through means other than producing profits or good will for the firm. This is often called corporate politics, but the truth is bigger than that. It’s something more essential to the chaotic dynamics of large-scale social behavior.

  Some people tried to share the success of our division by association. Others undermined us at every opportunity. Most of the people in upper management who weren’t threatened found a way to slip under the halo. A sidebar article in Fortune gave us a little outside validation and caught the attention of the board of directors.

  An elderly woman who’d been handling appointments for each successive Chairman of the board since the early fifties wrote to me through interoffice mail. Never e-mail. She said I was on the agenda for the monthly board meeting at 7:30 a.m., Tuesday. This stood as an invitation. The boardroom was on the top floor of corporate headquarters on Seventh Avenue. At that altitude, you could literally conduct business among the clouds.

  After passing through a metal detector, you took a special elevator run by a man who pushed the floor button for you. He wore a tiny earphone and a blank expression. The inside of the elevator cab was lined in stainless steel so you had to look at a vaguely distorted image of yourself as you took the long ride up. Vivaldi was playing through the speaker overhead. I could feel the acceleration collect around my feet, then lift up through my body as we came to a soft stop. The operator ushered me into a foyer with a dark gray carpet and wine-colored walls trimmed out in hand rubbed and oiled Honduran mahogany. Somehow they got the Vivaldi up there, too. There were a few recognizable Impressionists on the walls and two gigantic vases decorated with dragons and nicely dressed Chinese people. A very tall, very white young woman with dark hair cinched up at the back of her head appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said sure and she disappeared again. The elevator operator was still there waiting with his elevator, one hand on the open button, the other resting comfortably just inside the front of his sports jacket. I wondered if they were playing Vivaldi through that earphone. There was no place to sit, so I paced the foyer until the woman showed up with a crystal mug filled with café noir. After I took a sip, she turned on her heel and I followed her down a long hall to the waiting area directly outside the boardroom. I settled into a chair and she took her position at the ornately carved four-by-eight table that served as a reception desk. A field of green inlaid leather covered the surface. She had a charcoal gray phone consul and a matching laptop, flipped open. No more Vivaldi. It was so quiet a pin drop would have hurt your ears. I tried to hear her heart beating from across the room, but all I could hear was my own. I unbuttoned my suit jacket and leaned back in my chair so my head could rest on the wall, and closed my eyes. I tried to fill my mind with somniferous images of sports cars, tropical waters and women I wanted to see without their clothes. It worked well enough to put me to sleep. I bathed in the soothing, narcotic effect of sudden REM sleep. My dreams were frantic and incoherent, but not disturbing. I heard someone call my name, “Sam,” several times, and when I snapped open my eyes I was looking across an acre of Persian rug at the double doors leading into the boardroom. One of the guys was standing there holding the doors open and calling out my name with a calm, amused insistence.

  “We keeping you awake?” he asked as I walked past him into the boardroom.

  “Seven-thirty is kind of barbaric,” I said to him.

  He actually slapped me on the back.

  “Always the comeback,” he said in the avuncular way a professor talks to a favorite student, which in a way it was.

  The boardroom had floor-to-ceiling glass walls on three sides. If you walked straight into the room you’d be at the end of a long table facing the chairman, George Donovan, who sat a mile or two down at the opposite end. To either side were all the inside directors and the few outside directors who thought they ought to show up for form. In front of each was a maroon leather folder, closed. Inside was the agenda they’d covered before I came into the room. They looked at me with the benign disinterest of recently fed carnivores. I fought the urge to give my name, rank and serial number.

  “Hiya there, Sam,” said George.

  “Hi, George.”

  “Why don’t you find yourself a chair and sit down. They get you coffee?”

  “Thanks. All set.” I held up my half-empty cup.

  I walked around to the right and sat in the first chair I came t
o. Louise Silberg, VP, Finance & Administration, was on my right. Jason Fligh, president of the University of Chicago and the only black man on the board, on my left. They both shook my hand and smiled pleasantly. I liked Jason; Louise was very scary. Even split.

  “How’s Abigail?” George asked.

  “She’s good. Thanks.”

  “Lovely girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  Big time corporate guys are geniuses at this—remembering the names of your wife and kids. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about his wife, assuming he had one. I didn’t ask about her. He didn’t care.

  “We’ve been reviewing quarterly figures,” he said, and on cue all the board members flipped open their maroon folders and pulled out a single spreadsheet. “Before the meeting I asked Joe Felder’s people to do a lookback of the last twelve quarters, and run comparisons of the performance of Technical Services and Support against the adjusted norms of the other divisions.”

  He looked up at me over the top of his plastic-rimmed half glasses.

  “Wanna guess how you did?” he asked, and looked around the room to see if anyone was ready to chance a position. Nobody bit. I could hear Jason making humming noises to himself, as if struck by a revelation. I didn’t think George wanted me to say anything, so I waited him out.

  “A helluva lot better,” he said, sitting back to take another look around the room. “Forget the percentages. Let’s just say it’s a hell of a lot better.”

  A few of the inside directors ran divisions of their own—massive enterprises more like city-states than business ventures. They were the landed gentry of the corporation. Survivors of the big hike up the ladder. Obsolete, but secure for the balance of their working lives. Even so, they’d all made runs at me when it looked like my little division was generating a decent flow of cachet. None successful. Their faces were neutral.

  “It helps to be small,” I said to the group at large. I was trying to tell the operating guys that George was doing this all on his own. I wasn’t looking to bite any elephants on the ankle.

  “Yes, of course,” said the Chairman, “but profitable. Extremely. We like that.”

  Assent burbled around the table. I took a sip of my coffee and sat back in my chair. It was late summer and a witches’ brew of auto exhaust, industrial fumes and sea-borne mist lay like a hot towel over the city. I looked at it through the tall walls of glass. As high as we were, there were even higher buildings that broke up what would have been a perfect view of the Hudson. Beyond the river, New Jersey was a distant, hazy lump.

  Everyone down on the street was stripped down and crabbier than usual, forcing their way through the dense, malodorous air with stern, unforgiving faces. Along the horizon charcoal-gray clouds threatened thunderstorms. Against the dark backdrop a 747 making its approach to Newark stood out like a brilliant white bird.

  “Sam, did you hear what I said?” George was asking me.

  “About our profitability. Sure. It’s been pretty good.”

  “No. About the opportunity.”

  “Opportunity? No, I guess I didn’t hear that part.”

  George frowned up at the ceiling.

  “How’s the hearing there, Sam?”

  “I guess not what it used to be.”

  George dropped a stack of reports down on the table with a disdainful flourish.

  “Well, that’s what we’re talkin’ about here, Sam. An opportunity. For the company. For you.”

  “Ah.”

  “No better way to impact shareholder value,” said Mason Thigpin, our corporate counsel, who was sitting across the table from me.

  I tried to imagine Mason as a teenager, or even a college undergrad. He was about five years younger than me, but looked much older. His hair had retreated from most of his scalp, leaving behind a monkish ring of curly gray fuzz. He was at least thirty pounds overweight, which actually smoothed out some of the lines of his face before adding back a lot of extra years. He wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses. This intrigued me. I imagined him at the optometrist, picking out these glasses from thousands of possibilities, choosing, helplessly, the one pair that would most clearly confirm his allegiance to the soulless aridity of his calling.

  I struggled to concentrate on what George Donovan was saying.

  He was explaining to me the future of my division. It was expressed as an option, a possible course, as yet undecided, though everyone in the room understood the language well enough to recognize a done deal. Our corporate management was patterned after the early English monarchy. George needed the general support of the nobility, but each individual decision was unilateral and absolute.

  They all smiled at me. All but Mason. They were pleased. I had accomplished great things. Recognition had been bestowed. A royal gift was being given. George folded his arms and leaned out over the table to receive my approval pro forma so he could move on to the next item on the agenda.

  Jason gave my shoulder an affectionate, congratulatory squeeze. Louise smiled with her lips pinched together. The tall woman who’d greeted me at the elevator came in with a tray of fresh coffee, causing a minor disturbance, so George asked me to speak up.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, “I guess my hearing’s going south, too. What’d you say?”

  Whatever I said, I said it again, but still not loud enough for Donovan to hear at the other end of the room. I wasn’t speaking to him anyway, but to Mason Thigpin on the other side of the conference table. He said something back, which I don’t remember either, though I think it’s in the DA’s file. I do remember lurching across the table and grabbing Mason by the fat Windsor knot he had cinched up around his throat. I remember pulling back my right fist and hearing Louise Silberg yelping in my ear.

  It actually wasn’t that hard to find Jackie Swaitkowski’s place in the oak groves above Bridgehampton. You just had to count the driveways down from the big oak tree with the giant scar halfway up the trunk. I worked my way down the long dirt and gravel driveway and pulled the Grand Prix next to her pickup truck. I grabbed my coffee, tucked my cigarettes in my pocket and rang her time-off bell.

  Marijuana smoke, Nirvana and Jackie Swaitkowski poured out the front door. A firm grip on the doorknob was the only thing that kept her from being propelled into my arms. I spilled some of my coffee getting out of her way. She jerked up her head and tried to focus on my face.

  “Oh.”

  “Hi Jackie. Got a minute?”

  “Holy shit that door opens easy.”

  “Sorry I didn’t call ahead.”

  She scooped up a handful of blond mane and tossed it back over her head.

  “You didn’t?”

  “Can I come in?”

  She swung back into the room without letting go of the doorknob, almost closing the door in my face.

  “Sure.”

  I eased through the opening and followed her into the living room. She was wearing an extra large flannel shirt, blue jean shorts and bare feet. She moved with deliberate care over to the stereo stack and stared for a few moments before finding and turning down the volume. Now it was barely audible, though it made the atmosphere in the house a little less demented.

  She spun around and got a bead on where I was standing.

  “What can I getcha?”

  I held up my cup.

  “Brought my own.”

  “A roadie?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Cool.”

  She took a few steps and launched herself over the big coffee table, clearing the mountains of papers and catalogs and landing butt down on the couch. It was too difficult a maneuver to have been unrehearsed. I took the land route and came around to sit next to her. She slapped my thigh.

  “So, how you been? Still full of bullshit?”

  “I guess. How’s your case?”

  She slumped deeper into the couch.

  “It’s going really well, goddammit.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “I’ll have to keep working
on it. Killed by my own competence.”

  She pulled herself back out of the cushions and searched the tabletop with her eyes.

  “Ha.”

  She found a slender, tightly rolled joint and stuck it in her mouth. When she spoke it jumped up and down between her lips.

  “You want a hit?”

  I took out a cigarette and a pack of matches.

  “I’m fine with this.”

  I lit us both up. Jackie consumed about half the joint on the first pull, her eyes and cheeks squeezed tight. The smoky aromas commingled and billowed around us on the couch. I wondered how much sin the atmosphere of a single room could absorb.

  “So’s this a social call or you still diggin’ around?” she asked me, once again languidly composed within the depths of her fluffy cushions.

  “I was wondering about Milton Hornsby.”

  “Def’nately not social.”

  “How was he to work with?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I told you, man. A stiff.”

  “As a lawyer.”

  “Aw, Christ, don’t make me think.”

  I sat back into the overstuffed cushions to give her more breathing space.

  “Did you know Bay Side Holdings was a WB subsidiary? The old plant sitting on the property?”

  She rolled up on her right side and looked at me over the top of a cushion.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No I won’t talk about it.”

  “You knew all along.”

  “Can’t go there.”

  “Or at least figured out along the way.”

  “You got an imagination,” she said.

  “You spin a good story.”

  “Works on judges.”

  “Not so well on engineers.”

  “No imagination?”

  “Too analytic.”

  “I need a good analyst.”

  “So you say.”

  “Need my head examined.”