'Don't give me that bull.'
'Hey, Jake. Practice makes perfect. You passed. Okay? Give us both a break.'
'You're all right. You know, after my performance last time -1 got sick. I thought to myself, A cop, for Chrissake. You talk like that to a guy who was a
His look said everything. Us pals. Us guys. That smug fraternity thing Jake over the years has never lost. His life now is country-club golf courses and screwing around behind the back of his third wife, but there, twenty-one years before, I could see I'd restored the central faith of his life: we were special people who could outwit harm if we stuck with each other. I wanted to spit in his eye.
'Forget it, Jake,' I said. 'Everything.'
'Never,' he answered.
And I knew it was a curse.
B. Your Investigator Visits Herbert Hoover's America
Waiting for Jake, I sat in reception on 44, TN's Executive Level, feeling inferior. There is a jazzed-up air of self-importance here that routinely deflates me. Someday someone will explain to me why this system of ours that is supposed to glorify diversity and individual choice becomes instead the vehicle by which everybody ends up choosing the same thing. With its airlines, banks, and hotels, TN did business last year with two out of every three Americans who make more than 50 g's. Many of those folks think of TN as nothing better than a kind of flying bus, but in a mass society it turns out that even a trivial connection to twenty-five million lives, especially prominent ones, imbues an institution with an extraordinary aura of grandiosity and power.
Jake's secretary steered me back and His Handsomeness rose to make me welcome. The office is so vast that when I walked in he actually waved. Once we were alone, Jake sat on the corner of his desk, one foot on the rich carpet. You could not help thinking it was a pose he'd seen in some ad in a magazine. He had his jacket on. His hair was perfectly combed. To fill air time, Jake usually likes to talk to me about the old neighborhood, guys from high school, our place among the generations. But today he came to the point directly. As I'd feared, he had Bert on his mind.
'Look, old chum, I have to admit I'm playing catch-up. What in God's name is going on down there?'
'I wish I could tell you, Jake.'
'And you,' he went on. 'You're not helping much. I understand you went to see Neucriss.' Word travels fast.
'He was on the phone to me before your elevator had reached the ground floor,' said Jake, 'wanting to know what was wrong. Can I ask what in the world you were doing?'
'Hey,' I said amiably. I never offend Jake. I had all those years watching my old man kiss the fire captain's ring. 'You know, I'm playing hunches. We can't figure what the hell Litiplex is. Maybe the plaintiffs know. I didn't realize that Martin had already tried the same thing with Peter.'
Jake took that in levelly. He was assessing me. 'Yes, but he had. And when you showed up, you really began ringing bells. We can't have this kind of fumbling.'
Neucriss, on the phone, had obviously had a great time: These klutzes you employ at three hundred an hour. Get a load of this. Two of them busy forwarding the mail. Ho, ho, ho. Jake had felt the needle and I was paying the price.
'Look, Mack, my friend, let's review the bidding.' Jake is a master of these phrases, the corporate idiom, one more style he is on top of. It softens the edges, but he's still as ham-fisted as his father and I knew him well enough to see that no matter how fashionably, he was about to be coarse. 'He' — Jake pointed to the door of the chairman's adjoining suite; he had lowered his voice — 'the Polish gentleman next door. He likes me, he doesn't like me. Who knows day to day? Let's assume he's not president of the fan club. All right? Let's say he thinks I use the wrong lawyers and I pay too much to the ones I choose. All assumed. But he's going to put up with me. Do you know why?'
'The board?'
'The board, that's right, the board. Because there is a faction there, a number of members who believe I fly without wings. And do you know why that is?'
'Why?'
'Because I — and the lawyers I chose — handled a $300 million disaster for this company, a litigation mess where we'd reserved $100 million to pay for our share and we — I, your firm, Martin — we handled that and actually
I nodded. 'Sure,' I said. I had to sit still for this, tutored like a child, simpering and pretending he was inventing cold fusion.
'Now let's look at this supposed business with Bert. Very disturbing. Frankly, personally, I don't even believe it. If I did, I'd be more alarmed. But in the end, if we're patient about getting to the bottom of it, perhaps review the accounting, I think it may develop that something else is going on. But it appears as it appears — Fine, investigate. Look into it. That's the responsible thing to do. But, old man, let's keep our eye on the ball. If you go out and rile up the plaintiffs' lawyers so that they want a bean counting before we distribute next month — if you do that and fellows like Neucriss catch wind of the fact that we're running a surplus, they're going to do their utmost to lay hands on every dime. Not to mention our co-defendants. So no matter what you think has happened with Bert, all that would be far, far worse for us all. Okay? So let's move ahead carefully. I told you the other day.
More or less on cue, Tad Krzysinski, Board Chairman and CEO, poked his head through the side door. In a perfect world, this guy would be somebody you could comfortably hate, a prig like Pagnucci, a wild fucking success drunk on ego. He is nothing like that. No more than five foot four, he is a sunny little fellow, and in every room he enters it feels as if somebody has suddenly installed a compact nuclear reactor, a force so vital you half expect to be blown back through the walls.
'Hack,' he greeted me, and advanced to pump my hand. He is a musclebound former gymnast with an engaging eye. I took a moment to wonder, as usual, about what gave between Brushy and him, but he always seems so goddamn cheerful there is no way to tell.
'Tad,' I said. The guy holds no brief for proprieties, never anything but who he's first to tell you he is, the son of a plumber, one of eight kids, now with nine of his own, a three-hours-of-sleep guy who by his own admission cares only about his family, his God, and increasing the wealth of the people who've put their faith in him by plunking down their dough to buy TN's common shares. You could see that just nodding and shaking hands he scared Jake to death. They were the two sides of ethnicity, the Americans, once excluded, who since the sixties have found their way in corporation land — Jake, a deracinated wimp who aspired to everything vain the upwardly mobile envisioned, and Krzysinski, who accepted like Holy Writ all that stuff the immigrants believed about hard work, fortitude, and the capacity to alter the face of the world. I stood there uneasily between them, with a sudden recognition that this was an impossible match. Jake had powerful boosters on TN's board, but Krzysinski had to hate him. Which was what Jake meant about the 397 surplus being his lifeline.
'Well, I see you here, Hack, we must be in trouble again.' Tad pounded my shoulder good-naturedly and laughed at his own joke and then talked to Jake about a problem they had in Fiji. TN of course owns hotels everywhere. Tokyo. Paris. But they got to the Far East ahead of everybody else, which in these lean times means those operations have become particularly important. Many days Tad is far more concerned about Prime Minister Miyazawa than Bill Clinton. Somebody ought to sit down and think about this, because your corporate types are soon going to be a stateless superclass, people who live for deals and golf dates and care a lot more about where you got your MBA than the country you were raised in. It's the Middle Ages all over again, these little unaffiliated duchies and fiefdoms, flying their own flags and ready to take in any vassal who will pledge his life to the manor. Everybody busy patting himself on the back because the Reds went in the dumper is going to be wondering who won when Coca-Cola applies for a seat in the UN.
As Tad at last disappeared, Jake darted a nettled look at his back.
'Let's take a walk.' Jake headed down the hallway and I followed, acknowledging the people I knew. For me, a visit up here called for a lot of glad-handing, trying to remind folks on the counsel's staff I was neither drunk nor dead. When we reached the elevator, a messenger, one of the members of that minimum-wage cavalry that slams
