Brightness Falls (22 page)

"I'm not a mind reader, but offhand I'd say that either you want to fuck me or you want to buy a company."

Russell actually blushed.

She shook her head and laughed. "You sly dog. So you want to buy out your publishing house, am I right?"

He shrugged ruefully.

"And you don't have any money. So what do you have, big guy? You know, there are a hundred boys and girls like me out there hunched over computer screens searching for takeover prospects. It's open season, Russ, and publishing's hot lately. How come nobody's nailed Corbin, Dern before now? Why hasn't it been put into play? And keep your voice down, will you, because if you don't, the company
will
be in play. This afternoon."

"I have information that doesn't show up on the balance sheets."

"Wait a minute, doesn't the family control the stock?"

"Forty-one percent."

"That makes it almost impossible." She watched him during this interrogation, leaning close enough to feel his coffee-scented breath. His eyes were a very inviting, light cerulean shade of blue. Easier to read than dark eyes. "—Unless you've got someone in the family behind you."

"If I tell you everything now, what do I have left?"

"Maybe you have a deal. You're Mr. Inside."

"That's a beautiful suit," Russell said, looking obliquely down the front.

"Someone bought it for me."

"He's got good taste."

"And he types."

"Keep him."

"I will." She dipped a large pink crescent of prawn into the cocktail sauce and bit it in half, perfectly content to leave a false impression about the male in question.

"What else have you got, Russell?"

"Real estate. The office building is paid off and it disappeared from the books years ago. It's worth ten at least."

"We could sell it and lease back a few floors. That's good, but you wouldn't be the first to have picked that up. Any hidden receivables?"

"Half a dozen big paperback sales that won't show up on the books till next year, year after."

The waiter arrived with platters of meat.

"You'd have to sell off some of your divisions to pay down the debt."

"I've got the figures here for you," he said, lifting a leather portfolio and dumping his water glass all over the table.

"It's fine," she said. "I'm barely wet."

"Now you know why my family called me Crash."

"Not everybody's favorite word in my line of work. Anyway, what about this racial stuff? This protest?"

"I think it could work to our advantage," he said, mopping up the mess with his napkin. "Depresses the price of the stock."

"Maybe we can rock & roll," Trina said, half an hour later, dropping the steak knife on her empty plate. "It's beginning to sound doable."

"You're a very dainty eater," Russell observed facetiously, having given up halfway through his sole.

"I work it off."

"In the gym?"

"The office. My exercise routine involves sleep deprivation and adrenaline production."

"Seems to work for you."

"So how about Corrine? You two still together?"

"We're hanging in there. She's fine. She's a broker for Wayne, Duehn."

"Is she really? Well, that's nice," Trina said in her thickest southern accent. She'd never liked Corrine Makepeace, and the fact that she was a retail broker did nothing to improve her opinion. Retail was chickenshit. Cold-calling rubes. You might as well sell Amway door to door. "Have you told her about this?"

"Yeah, of course. She helped me with the numbers."

"She wouldn't pass on any of this information to her clients, would she?"

"Trina, she's my wife."

"My boss, Nicholas Aldridge, has been married for five years—don't ask me how he found time for the ceremony. He's on the road about two hundred days a year. And when he calls his wife from the road he doesn't say where he is or who he's seen or when he'll be back. That's the nature of the business."

"Corrine already knows."

"Be a little circumspect, even with Corrine. If we go ahead you simply can't tell her everything. I like secure, leakproof channels of communication on a deal." She was laying it on a bit thick, but she wasn't about to have Corrine Makepeace looking over her shoulder. She smiled at Russell. "All I'm saying is, you don't have to tell her everything, do you?"

"I guess not."

The waiter came to tell her there was a phone call. She excused herself and took the call at the captain's stand, handing her credit card to the waiter. Aldridge needed her immediately. She signed the check and hurried back to the table.

"Sorry, gotta fly. Let me look this over and we'll get together next week to talk about it, okay?" She kissed him on both cheeks and bolted for the door.

Trina met with Russell and Leticia Corbin the following Saturday. She put together a proposal for her boss, but it was almost a week later before she finally had a chance to discuss it with Aldridge. Having slept an average of three hours a night between Monday and Thursday, when she finally sat down in Aldridge's office Saturday afternoon she felt the righteous, energizing exhaustion of accomplishment. Sleep deprivation had become a fix, like runner's high, like the high-yield junk bonds in an investment portfolio. She was ready for another deal.

Although the offices occupied the top floor of a brand-new glass tower in midtown, Aldridge's lair resembled the headmaster's study at an old New England prep school such as the one Aldridge himself had attended. The most conspicuous feature of the decor was his collection of model ships. An incredibly detailed scale replica of the USS
Constitution
circa 1812 was drydocked on his Hepplewhite desk; miniature clipper ships, sloops and galleons were becalmed on the polished mahogany Sargasso of an Early American sideboard. Some of the models were gifts from clients, inscribed with the date and name of the deal they commemorated as well as the name of the ship.

In his association with old wood, sail canvas, Moroccan leather and Cuban tobacco, Aldridge declared his descent from the merchant bankers of the old school. Trina's admiration for his style was compromised by a certain impatience. His caution would prevent him from ever being the biggest player on the street.

Trina had brought Chip Rockaby, a junior associate who'd helped with the numbers, along to the meeting. He was a real bird dog, even looked like a golden retriever—big blond head and dumb, happy blue eyes. Once he sniffed a deal he wouldn't let go until you ripped it out of his mouth and slapped him silly.

"I can see why you like this deal," Aldridge said, sucking air, head tilted skyward as he fired up a Montecristo, cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie's.

Trina braced herself for the antistrophe.

"The numbers are pretty good..."He paused and removed the cigar m his mouth, and examined it as if he was pleased to know there were some things in life you could still count on. "Even if they aren't very big."

"We think this could be a no-brainer," Chip offered. "A slam dunk."

Go get him, boy. Woof woof. Find the birds, Chipper.

The phone buzzed. "Hold on a sec."

Grunting monosyllables into the receiver cradled on his shoulder, Aldridge began to twirl his cufflinks, tasteful gold lozenges with mon-ograms. The boys around the office considered Aldridge a sartorial role model. His shirts and suits, handmade in England, had a limp, fluid quality that reminded Trina of much-handled dollar bills. His cuffs were French, his collars spread or fastened with stickpins. The patterns on his ties, when patterns they had, were nearly invisible to the naked eye. Rockaby wore the junior version of the company outfit: Brooks Brothers button-down shirt in white or blue, single-breasted wool suit in blue or pay, and rep ties from the same source. Today was a blue shirt and gray suit day. No one ever said so, as far as Trina knew, but it would be unseemly for Chip, who was only twenty-five, to show up at the office in a bespoke suit or with a pair of cuff links. That would have to wait until he made partner. With the internationalization of the business you saw some guys at other firms going in for the braces and those clownish Turnbull & Asser striped shirts with high white collars, but you'd never make partner here with that kind of wardrobe. Trina herself stuck with tailored suits from the more conservative designers and kept the hemline around the knee, showing just enough leg to remind them which restroom she patronized.

Having reinserted the cigar between his teeth after he hung up, Aldridge invigorated himself with a lungful of smoke and sighed.

"You think this is doable," he asked Trina.

"Absolutely."

"I grant you it looks fine on paper. But it's not just a question of financials. This kid Calloway is totally unproven as a manager. We'd be losing senior management."

"Deadwood," Chip said.

"He's good," Trina said. "They've been grooming him for editor in chief."

"Maybe. But this is a relationship kind of business. We could capture the town only to find that the gold and the grain and the girls have disappeared."

Here it comes, Trina thought. Parable time.

"In this case let's call the authors the girls. Let's call the business relationships with other publishers and agents... the grain, and let's call the good name of the firm the gold. All those things could disappear overnight if we undertake a hostile takeover. "

Aldridge drew extra hard on his cigar, like a reluctant diver preparing to submerge. "I've talked with the executive committee. We're going to have to pass on this one, Trina. I know you like it. You could be right. And we appreciate you bringing it in. But you know how we feel about hostiles. We don't want to jeopardize our relations with clients... particularly for such a small deal."

He unmoored his cigar and examined his watch. "Cripes, I'm getting out of here, go have a drink at the Racquet Club."

"When are you going to put me up for membership?" Trina demanded.

Aldridge smiled lamely. It was an old joke, but one that still unsettled him; women weren't allowed to join the Racquet Club. He laughed sheepishly, muttered, "Sorry ..."

"You will be sorry," Trina opined, a few minutes later, in the safety of the ladies' room. "Old fart."

15

"What exactly does this fellow Parker want," Trip Corbin asked, his tan brow furrowed in puzzlement, as far out of his element as the salmon mounted on the wall above his head.

Steal your car and rape your women, Washington wanted to say, but he saw that his white audience was extremely uptight. And so was he, for that matter. Here in Corbin's office, under the accusing glass eyes of stuffed birds and beasts, Washington shared the tufted, cracked leather sofa with Harold and Kleinfeld, desperately trying to smother an incipient fart, hoping to sound more confident than he was feeling.

"First thing, he wants publicity. Dude's like a plant, heliotropic, he gets bigger every time a flash bulb goes off. This is political theater, okay? He needs to slap us around some. He needs his people to
see
him slap us around. Eventually he'd love patronage—a few jobs for the brothers, a little money for his organization. But the exposure's the sure thing."

Although press coverage of the protest against Corbin, Dern had subsided for the moment, and Parker himself appeared infrequently, a small contingent of his followers maintained a vigil with placards behind the police barricades outside the building. Rasheed Jamal, wearing a neck brace, had filed a civil suit against the two security guards who had ejected him, and against the publishing house. Partly as a result, Corbin, Dern stock had dropped from fifteen to twelve and a half in over-the-counter trading.

"How do we get rid of the asshole?" Kleinfeld demanded.

As the only black person in the room, Washington was apparently supposed to know these things—to interpret the drumbeats coming from the jungle for the white sahibs. But right now he was preoccupied with the idea that none of them would say anything if he cut one; they'd be thinking, Yeah, those Negroes, they eat a lot of black-eyed peas and shit.

"We wait him out," Washington proposed, "or we sit down to talk with an open checkbook."

"Why don't we just tell him to fuck himself," suggested Kleinfeld.

"Because we have a tremendously valuable reputation to protect," Harold said testily. Though not a complete idiot along the lines of Whitney III, Kleinfeld could be, in Harold's view, a flaming philistine.

"And Parker knows it," Washington said loudly, clenching his lower abdominal muscles. "Which is one of the reasons he picked us. He figured out we'd hate to lose our liberal intellectual cred."

"What do we know about Parker's private life?" Kleinfeld wondered out loud. "I mean, is he vulnerable? Can we get anything on him?"

"Jesus Christ, Jerry," Harold snapped. "Let's just schedule a meeting to hear them out."

"We'll have to shake a few bills at them," Washington said.

"Well, that's what it costs to play nice," Kleinfeld explained, glaring at Harold. "Washington, you wanna set this up?"

"It's got to come from one of you. Sending me on the errand is exactly the wrong way to go."

"All right, all right," Kleinfeld agreed.

"For Christ's sake," said Corbin, in the tone of a man whose patience, and attention span, have been sorely tried. "Granddad used to have Ralph Ellison out to the Connecticut house when I was a kid."

Washington could contain himself no longer.

It being nearly noon already, Washington decided to drift off toward his lunch date at Lola, allowing time to stop at a cash machine since he hadn't done his expense report in several months, hence hadn't been reimbursed, hence might not be fully paid up and operational on his plastic.

At the cash machine he was trapped in a long line. When it was finally his turn, Washington slipped his card into the slot and punched in his code. Waiting for the computer, he felt everybody else waiting behind him, all the white bodies pressing toward him. He could read their minds:
Hope this colored boy doesn't hold us up. Not that I'm prejudiced but it's like they always walk slow on the sidewalks when you're in a hurry
—
something left over from slave days when they didn't get paid for working, or from Africa, because it was so hot, but right now I don't care, I'm in a hurry, goddamnit, us white people have work to do.