Nothing but Gossip (17 page)

“Not at the moment, thanks.”

“Maybe later?”

“I don’t think that’s going to be possible, thanks.”

“Russian very good hokey-pokey.”

“Thanks anyway. But no.”

“You see. I very, very good hokey-pokey. Very big. Like bear.”

“No.”

“You vote yes or you sorry.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

“You vote yes and you come Russia. We hokey-pokey.”

I looked at Wade, who was smiling. “Can you believe this guy?” I asked.

“Russian women aren’t exactly what you’d call liberated,” he answered.

“No kidding. Listen, Boris. No hokey-pokey, ever. Understand?”

Six pretty young women in matching navy suits with Rutherford logos on their breast pockets appeared out of nowhere, and each took one of the Russians’ arms. “Time for the meeting to start, gentlemen,” one girl said, and the six Russkis went meekly, their eyes sparkling with anticipation.

These men were funny because of their provincialism, but they were not funny. Like bears, they were determined, and because they and their countrymen were hungry for food and money, they were dangerous. They had eaten their own before, and, if they had to, they’d do it again. But they’d rather try to eat us first.

More company public-relations staffers urged stockholders to go in and be seated as quickly as possible, since the meeting was about to start. But there was a bottleneck by one of the doors because Edith Rutherford was handing out her ballots, and saying loudly over and over again, “My name is Edith Rochester Rutherford and I live in the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, California. My suit is a Galanos. All these people said yes.”

“Does she do this every year?” I asked Wade.

“Every year like clockwork. Last year her slate included O. J. Simpson, Paula Barbieri, and Yasir Arafat. She’s very ecumenical.” As he watched her, he rolled and unrolled a thick annual report into a tube between his wide, flat hands, which had turned black with rubbed-off ink. “Looks like your whole family’s here.”

“Just my parents, I think,” I answered. “Elias should be here any minute.”

Before they disappeared through the door, I watched my mother, who looked just sharp as could be in navy and camel Chanel, whisper, “Paste” to my father, referring to Edith’s golf-ball ring and jeweled oil-derrick pendant. Daddy studied the Xeroxed ballot, slapped
out a quick laugh, folded the sheet in thirds, and slid it into his jacket pocket. “Michael Jordan,” he said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit with me?” Wade asked. The lights flashed twice, and a man’s voice came over the sound system asking people to take their seats because the meeting would start on time.

“No, I’m fine, thanks.”

What I wanted to know was, where the hell was Elias? I waited on the far side of the lobby, watching for him until they began to close the doors. I punched the speed dial. He answered immediately. “Yo.”

“Where are you?”

“On my way. Got a lot to tell you. Big scandal. The neighbors said that Alma used to beat up Wade—always had black eyes and his jaws wired and stuff. But he never fought back because she’s so much bigger. Another guy said he has all those injuries because he gets into bar fights all the time. And then another guy said Mercedes was always rushing up there pretending to meet with Wade, but it was just a cover to meet with Duke. They don’t seem to have much else to do in Billings except gossip, and they sure do hate Alma.”

“Where’d you hear all this, Elias?”

“Bar at the Northern. But here’s the good part: After I’d drunk eight hundred thousand cups of tea with her, Duke Fletcher’s housekeeper …” The transmission broke up.

I called him back, but he was somewhere out of range. It was 10:01. My stomach turned up the burner, the sort of aggravation that, when I was on the street, could be salved by a couple of glazed doughnuts, a cup of old coffee, and a handful of cigarettes. Now all I could do was suffer. No doughnuts. No cigarettes. And coffee by itself just made it worse. God, I wish I could smoke again. Sometimes the urge entered and tempted
me so much I wanted to scream. To make a deal with the monkey. To throw all the research and facts out the window, believe they were wrong. Forget it. All roads lead to heart disease, cancer and death.

I entered the convention hall.

T
he
William Tell
Overture thundered from one corner of the darkened hall to the other. But this was no Saturday-morning movie, no Lone Ranger and Tonto racing faster than was earthly possible across the screen. Instead, a video began with a dramatic high-speed shot of a threatening and empty North Sea, spinning fast across heaving, murky whitecaps until, far in the distance, a small speck appeared and grew into a derrick, a white-metal tower, an offshore rig with the Rutherford Oil name stretching around its cement base. Men in red hard hats, yellow slickers, high rubber boots, and life jackets with lifelines that connected them like leashes to rigging bars, waved at the chopper as it circled and then landed on the rolling deck.

A narrator’s voice—it sounded like Gene Hackman—boomed above the music as the video proceeded at full volume from one Rutherford oil, gas, and coal project to another—Indonesia, California, Texas, Egypt, Venezuela, West Virginia, Wyoming.

I edged my way along the paneled wall, stopped
about a third of the way forward, and leaned there, waiting for my beloved brother, whose neck I looked forward to breaking. He had something. Something big. I stood motionless in the dark, and my chest tightened as I began to feel the unmistakable rumblings of danger. It draped the hall in sticky, wet, invisible cobwebs. I couldn’t see it, or hear it, but I could taste and smell it. My antennae searched the way giant receiving dishes listen blindly for sounds from space. Where would it come from? Where was Elias? It was 10:10.

The music blasted and the room grew darker as we descended into a coal mine. You could feel the damp and cold as the elevator sank deeper into the earth. It made my hair stand on end. Suddenly an after-shave-soaked bulk materialized next to me and a meaty hand grabbed my breast and squeezed. Hard. I was so shocked I didn’t make a sound. I just instinctively turned and smashed my knee, hard and fast, into the man’s crotch. It was one of the Russians! Mr. Red-on-White. The provincial oil minister from Watchahoochee or whatever. He sank to his knees, groaning, and, as he crawled away, the tension drained out of my chest and I started laughing to myself. I was probably overreacting, looking for trouble. I took a deep breath. I needed to relax.

Finally the video ended and the lights came up slightly, enough to see my Russian intruder slumped in his seat. Mercedes, flanked by two gray-suited men, ascended three steps to the stark dais and took her place at a draped banquet table in front of the big screen. She’d pulled her shoulder-length hair back into a severe chignon, and her charcoal suit coat absorbed the stage lights like a blotter. I tried again to picture her and Johnny Bourbon groping each other in the powder room while someone was shooting Alma, and all I
could see were Tarzan and Jane. The Gorilla and the Lady. A real hanging-from-the-chandeliers deal. One big jungle yell and a lot of chest-pounding before you snap that girdle back on and return to the boardroom. This lady was all business.

The table was bare except for pitchers of ice water, three glasses, and a gavel. A large stack of thick binders sat on the floor next to one of the men, whom I took to be the secretary of the corporation. The other was the general counsel.

Mercedes stepped to the podium and banged the gavel. “The Annual Meeting of the Rutherford Oil Company is officially open. We will first have the report from the secretary of the corporation.”

“Madame Chairman. Madame Chairman.” Edith Rutherford stood in the aisle waving her sheaf. Her voice was nails on a blackboard. “Madame Chairman. I demand to be recognized.”

“You will be recognized in the Other Business section of the agenda, Ms. Rutherford,” Mercedes said evenly. “We will now have the report from the secretary of the corporation.”

While the gray suit droned on about the minutes of last year’s meeting and a lot of other dreary corporate stuff—punctuated every sixty seconds by Edith’s demands to be recognized and Mercedes’s evenly repeated answer—I made my way farther forward to look over the audience and see who was there.

The board of directors, corporate executives, and their spouses all were seated in the front rows, staring straight ahead like West Point’s long gray line, ready to leap to their feet and take a bullet for the cause. I recognized a number of them: chairman and CEO of U.S. Airways; chairman and CEO of AT&T; chairman and CEO of Sumitomo, Japan’s largest shipbuilder; chairman
and CEO of the First National Bank of Roundup—my father (he and my mother, the senior members of the team); former U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick; former senator Fletcher, whom I could not accept as a turncoat; and next to him a gray, humorless man I took to be the head of the SIBA Fund, Penn Holland, Mr. Bottom-Line-at-Any-Cost.

Financial charts, spreadsheets and budgets appeared on the giant screen as the treasurer delivered his report. I glanced at my agenda; election of the officers was next. This was when Edith really went to town. She had made it halfway through her slate of nominees when the general counsel, with his thinning hair and tortoise-shell glasses and regimental tie, interrupted her.

“Mizz Rutherford,” he said condescendingly, “I would have thought by now that you would have been well acquainted with the bylaws of this corporation as they pertain to the nomination of candidates for the board and officers of the corporation. But since you seem not to be familiar with them, I feel it is important to enlighten you, once again, of the rules and regulations governing this meeting.”

He droned like a fly on a lazy summer afternoon, around and around and around until, finally, God bless her, Edith held her hands in the air in a T-sign, like a referee at a football game calling for time and shouted, “Okay, Frankie. What’s your point?”

The point was that she had neglected to register her slate with the corporate secretary within the mandated period of time and therefore could not enter her nominees onto the ballot.

“You people are all the same,” Edith groused. “You got no style. No panache.” For once, I agreed with her.

Next came the Siberian venture, exploration and exploitation. Mercedes outlined the company position to
the accompaniment of the Russians trying to shout her down, and then Siberian Associates’ own Penn Holland, with constant interruptions for applause by the Russians, took the podium to present the opposition view. Finally the secretary took over and the voting began. It was similar to being on the floor of the House or the Senate or the Chicago Commodities Exchange, constant motion and noise, people lobbying each other right to the last second, shouting into cell phones. Giddy, tense excitement swamped the room as the roll was read, and one at a time, stockholders shouted over the din to cast their votes. The company was winning. The air boiled up and started to steam like a fragrance counter at Bloomingdale’s.

Elias finally appeared.

“Speak,” I said as my eyes dragged from one end of the hall to the other. Deep down, I could not shake the feeling that we were reenacting the opening scene from
The Manchurian Candidate
, that some Russian was behind the air vent over our heads with an Uzi trained on someone.

Elias had no more than gotten his mouth open, said, “Okay, here’s what it looks like in Billings,” than we both watched in horror as our mother stood up and trampled across half a row of people to join us.

“Oh, no,” I said under my breath. “What does she want?”

“What are you two doing standing over here?” Her suit had a sort of shawl affair held in place on her shoulder by a large pearl-and-gold brooch. Her voice had an accusatory sound to it. “Elias, isn’t that the same tie you wore last night?”

“We’re working, Mother,” I whispered.

“On what?” she whispered back. “Alma’s attacker?”

I nodded.

“Oooh.” Mother’s eyes sparkled. “Do you think he’s here?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure.” I didn’t bother to point out to her that the “he” could be a “she.”

She grinned conspiratorially, and her whole face lit up. “Is there anything you want me to do?” Snoop Sisters on patrol.

“Nope. I think we’ve got it pretty well under control.”

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, emerging from the dark behind the video screen, I saw a movement. And then the quick, dull glint of light on blued metal.

D
uck!
” I screamed, as I fell on top of my mother and a round exploded into the mahogany wall directly behind us, shattering and splintering the wood like a thin sheet of ice. But what coated my face wasn’t ice. It was blood.

I raised up on my elbows and looked at my mother. Other than looking fairly squashed, she didn’t seem to be wounded. And then, in all the thundering chaos, I heard a moan. It was Elias. The wound was enormous. A giant shell had smashed through beneath his collar-bone, leaving a gaping, jagged hole. Blood from a severed artery geysered into the air, drenching everything within a three-foot radius. I didn’t even think about it. I reached right into the wound and pinched the artery closed as Elias lost consciousness and my mother stroked his forehead and held his hand, murmuring to her firstborn, “Just hold on there, darling. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.” He got whiter, and whiter, and whiter.

I dug my phone out of my pocket, hit the emergency
button, and when 911 answered I told them there was an officer down and to get the hell over here right away. Who knew how long it took? It took forever. It took seconds. Later, people said they’d never seen a call answered so fast, but I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen one answered so slowly.

“Goddamn it, Elias,” I said to him as we waited. I was sure he could hear, sure he was faking it. “If you die, I’ll kill you.”

When the paramedics finally arrived and relieved me of sealing his throbbing artery, he was still breathing. I stood up and backed away. My brother was the chalky gray of death. I was red with his blood. It covered my face, my hair, my clothes. It was in my mouth and my eyes and I didn’t care. He was my brother, and he would not die. I would not let him. Mother was still holding his hand as they raced the stretcher up the aisle, and I scrambled for the door closest to where the gunman had appeared.