versatility. As an all-purpose expression of deep fatherly disappointment it worked just as well for a prep-school report card as it did for a disastrously leaked presidential briefing document set to splash on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post.
The old man breathed a shallow, weary sigh and stood at his place, looking every bit as elder-statesmanly as he did in the portrait that loomed over the main lobby downstairs. That oil painting was the closest that most of D &M’s four-hundred-odd employees ever got to their company’s patriarch. When he wasn’t traveling he kept to his office, and his office had an elevator all its own.
“Actually, Mr. Gardner, I think the team would be well served by reviewing-”
“Who spoke?”
Noah’s father hardly ever expressed his anger directly anymore. Not like the olden days; his legendary temper had refined with age and in the past ten years it was a rare thing to hear him even raise his voice. The venom was all still there, but it had been distilled and purified to the point that its victims often failed to notice the sting of the lethal injection. “Who spoke?” was uttered with genuine wonder, as though the old man had been addressing a cage full of laboratory rats when suddenly one in the back had raised his little pink paw with a question.
The room fell dead silent.
“I did.” It was an older man at the far side of the long table, positioned in the power seat on the client side. Nice suit and a fresh, careful haircut, a touch of a rosy blush now rising in his cheeks.
“Stand up.”
The man leaned back a bit in his chair, grinned sheepishly, and then let it fade away. He glanced around, seeking moral support from the others in his party, but no one met his eyes.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said feebly.
Arthur Gardner answered only with a slight upward motion of his open hand, reminding the man that he’d been clearly directed to get up onto his feet. A few long seconds crawled by before he complied.
“To put your busy mind at ease,” the old man said, “let me assure you that the trifling problem you brought us today is already put safely to bed. The story in the Post has been spiked, an eager team of computer sleuths is tracking down the source of your leak, and the memorandum itself is now being thoroughly and plausibly denied by its authors and blamed on an overzealous local bureaucracy somewhere in the barren Midwest. Who will be the culprit again, Noah?”
“Illinois National Guard,” Noah said.
“There. Crisis averted. All neatly handled before ten a.m. this morning by my son. Noah is a brilliant boy, if I do say so myself, though I’m sure he would agree that he hasn’t yet inherited his father’s taste for blood. Even so, he’s more than a match for such a minor predicament.”
In the midst of a sip of coffee, Noah raised his cup in mock acknowledgment of the faint praise. From the corner of his eye he saw the standing man over on the client side raise a curt index finger for attention.
“With all due respect, Mr. Gardner, that may very well be, but-”
“Enough!”
With surprising vigor for a man of seventy-four, Arthur Gardner suddenly swept the heavy binder from the table and sent it crashing into the wall. The government man stopped talking, his eyes a little wider, the rest of his face suspended in mid-syllable. Before the released papers finished fluttering to the carpet, a set of interns quietly scurried from the shadows like Wimbledon ball boys to spirit the wreckage away.
“A columnist in the Wall Street Journal once wrote”-Noah’s father straightened his cuffs from the preceding exertion as he spoke-” that I had more money than God. I can’t attest to that. I don’t believe in God, and like a growing number of the world’s other major economies, I no longer believe in the dollar, either. Only two things are sacred to me now. One is my time, and I’ll caution all of you not to waste another second of it. The other is my legacy. It had been my wish today to present you with an opportunity to share in that, but these interruptions are making that nearly impossible. Now, if there are no further objections to deviating from your faxed agenda, I would love to continue.”
No one said a word, and he nodded.
“Very well, then. In my review of that unfortunate document, along with your wider state of affairs, I was reminded of two significant events in my life. The first occurred in early 1989, when a coalition of businessmen came to me with a challenge.
“Their predecessors had sweated out a tidy little hundred-million-dollar market over the preceding century or so, and these men were happy with the success they’d inherited, but they wanted a tiny bit more. Maybe just three to five percent domestic expansion on an annual basis. So they came to me, hats in hands, and asked if I thought such a heady level of growth might somehow be within their reach. And they brought a binder with them, much like yours, full of their fears and worries and their modest little hopes and dreams.”
He turned to directly address the other man still standing across the room. “Mr. Purcell, isn’t it? A very slowly rising star, I understand, in our mighty Department of Homeland Security?”
A tight little nod, nothing more.
“You were so eager to guide me along earlier. A virgin whiteboard awaits there along the wall, freshly erased, with a new set of colorful markers all at your disposal. I believe we can even muster a laser pointer to help you direct our rapt attention around your fascinating illustrations. So, would you like to lead this meeting now, or will you indulge me to continue?”
A muscle tensed in Purcell’s jaw but he didn’t speak. After a moment he moved to return to his chair but was stopped by the slightest tic of the old man’s hand. It was the sort of unspoken cue that a dog trainer might give to a spirited bitch on her first session off the choke chain.
“Stay another moment, Mr. Purcell. Help me. Ask me what it was that these men were selling, and I’ll show you the path to a whole new world in which everything you want is laid out before you, ripe for the bountiful harvest.” The old man walked around to the other side of the table, until the two were nearly toe-to-toe. He nodded, encouraging. “Go ahead, ask me.”
When Purcell finally spoke his voice was weak and low. “What was it?”
Arthur Gardner let a smile touch the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, nothing of any value. Only water.” The old man put his hand on Purcell’s shoulder, gripped it warmly, and then motioned for the bewildered man to resume his seat, which he did. “Forgive me, everyone. Our colleague Mr. Purcell has graciously assisted me in a demonstration, the point of which we will return to shortly.”
Projection screens began to hum down from the ceiling, gradually covering the paneled walls of the wide, round room. As the screens clicked to their stops in unison the lights dimmed to half brightness. All that remained was a circle of soft illumination that dutifully followed Arthur Gardner as he made his way back to his place.
“I’ll tell you all what I told those bottled-water men, twenty years ago in this very room. If that binder is the limit of your ambitions, then you’ve come to the wrong place. Both sides of Madison Avenue are lined with hucksters and admen, the most backward of which can deliver such a minor achievement for an insignificant fee. Go in peace if that’s all you want. But they stayed, as I hope you will, and I led them to where they stand today, with their goals not only realized, or doubled, or quadrupled, but in fact multiplied a thousandfold. And I can do the same for yours.”
A bookish younger woman in the client party hesitantly raised her hand just a bit above the edge of the table, as though volunteering for a solo frontal assault on the guns of Navarone. She spoke, but only after a nod of permission from the man at the podium.
“I’m not sure we understand what you mean, Mr. Gardner,” she said. “Our goals?”
“Your goals, yes. Your future. The future of the government you serve. Which is to say, the future of this country, and the urgency to act on her behalf. And that brings us to my second story, which strangely enough continues our watery theme.
“A while ago I was vacationing abroad in Sri Lanka-what year was it now? Ah yes, 2004, just after Christmas. A servant girl came to me and woke me from the most wonderful dream. She was breathless, the poor young thing, and told me an urgent message had arrived, word of an earthquake near Sumatra, and that we needed to leave as soon as possible. Well, I had my breakfast brought in as my things were packed and an aircraft was chartered, and we all dressed for travel and then went up to the roof to await our departure.
“A wave was coming, you see. This earthquake had released the energy of half a billion atomic bombs under the ocean and a tsunami was spreading out from the epicenter at five hundred miles per hour in all directions.”
He took a moment to sample his tea and then set the cup back carefully onto its saucer.
