Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 11

Trade is at once the most carnal and abstract of human activities. Look hard at trade and all the animals creep out of its abstraction.

Hector Zeta, Manifesto for Spirits

A FANCY, GLITTERING PLACE on the fifteenth floor of a downtown building, Louis Brenneman's office had thick carpeting and stainless-steel furniture. The walls were white. It had a bank of rain-spattered plate-glass windows that looked out on the city, which was dusky under the gray sky. The accountant was there, Julia Rose, whom Louis had hired for Lafleur and Blaylock. Blaylock had become malleable on that issue. The accountant was thirty or so, pretty and tired-looking. The tiredness gave her the appearance of fragility. She sat to one side, caged in a fancy chrome-plated chair with black Naugahyde cushions. A slender briefcase, exactly the same auburn as her hair, stood on the carpet at her side.

Louis was in his fifties, soft-skinned, well-fed, and aggressive. He told Lafleur that he'd found out that Blaylock had cloned the excavation company. When Lafleur asked what he meant, Louis said, “Cloned it. Duplicated it. He's shrunk one and started another just like it. And…” Louis leaned heavily over his glass desk top, “he's using the same stock for both, the same equipment.”

“Can he do that?”

Louis chuckled. “He is doing it.”

“On paper, Louis. Can he do it?”

“Is it legal? Not exactly, not when somebody else owns part of the property. It's murky. The equipment's more than half his right now. His partner's an absentee. It's a hell of a deal, actually, very slick. It's illegal only if somebody calls him on it. If nobody calls him…” Louis's voice trailed off and he shrugged.

Lafleur didn't share Louis's admiration for the adventure. “So?” he said.

“You've called him,” Louis said. He nodded at Julia Rose. “We've got the figures here, the new contracts. He's agreed to sign.”

“Hell, Louis, I mean what do you advise?”

“You're in pretty deep to be asking for advice.”

Lafleur ran his palms along the slippery steel arms of his chair. “Is he trying to hide the duplicate company, or does he figure I'll know about it?” It was important to Lafleur that he understand what Blaylock willingly divulged and what he did not.

Louis shook his head. “He didn't try to hide it.”

“What happens to the duplicate?”

Louis smiled. “Just what I asked him. He says he'll diversify it into concrete or something, and divest it of excavation.”

Lafleur looked down and smiled despite himself. “Often, concrete is what you pour into holes.”

“Even I figured that out,” Louis said, chuckling. “He may want to merge them. If he does, he has to have your agreement, and you've got first option on up to fifty percent.”

“Fine,” Lafleur said, though he doubted he'd want to be drawn any deeper into these financial convolutions, dense, it seemed, as brain. “And the property? The equipment in the old partnership? The tools?”

“Everything goes back. He owes you, or you and Gus, for the use of equipment in the past year. We'll set that against the losses the company's taken, which will help, even if it still doesn't quite make you come out ahead.”

“Then he has the old partnership, which we're in arrears to him for, and the other company, too. It's hard for him to lose.”

“Damn near impossible,” Louis said. “And he has more. He's a rich man. He's got interests in about six other outfits. For a dirty old mechanic he's awfully slick.” Louis glanced at Julia Rose and smiled at her. “He left grease smudges all over the papers.” Lafleur looked at Julia. She stirred in her chair and smiled faintly back at him. “Look,” Louis said. “You can still sue him, which would supplement my income for a few years, but what you'd get wouldn't hold a candle to what Gus put in the company.” He wrestled loose the knot in his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. “Personally, I think you're going to be a lot better off going ahead and gaining some ground on him. You see? It's tactics, that's all. Legally, sure, you've probably got him cold right now, but financially your position isn't strong, not if you want to make a living and support your family and get ahead and get that income going back to Gus and Jewel.” Louis held out his hands. “So?”

“And that's what Ned's gambling on,” Lafleur said.

“What? That you won't take him to court?”

“Yes.”

“Are you considering it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. He's not gambling. If you go to court everybody loses. We'd have to be morons not to figure that out and he knows it. He's set it up beautifully. He may look like a slug, but in there somewhere is an intelligent sonofabitch.”

“Okay,” Lafleur said. He knew that Blaylock was crafty, but he'd never exactly considered him intelligent. He thought about that and let it stretch way back to the beginnings. It put things in a different light. The man his father had hooked up with years ago was an intelligent sonofabitch.

“Best of all is to dig in and make a go of it, though you're certainly going to have to mix it up with him once in a while,” Louis said. “To tell you the truth, I think Blaylock wants you in.”

“Seems like he was counting on it,” Lafleur said.

“Sure,” Louis said, smiling faintly. “He gets you in there to run that company for him, which he knows you can do…will do. The fact that you've come to me, had me check it all out, hired an accountant, everything you've done is telling him that when you take a job on you do it right. He knows who you are, for Christ's sake.” Louis leaned back, making his calibrated stainless-steel swivel chair click. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “That's another thing,” he said. He looked at Lafleur out of the corners of his eyes. “Gus was in on this, the changeover in the company.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you asked him about it?”

Lafleur frowned. He felt a quizzical and mystified expression pinch his face. He'd been over to see Gus and Jewel several times in the last week. He didn't know what went on in his father's head, or what half of the croaks that came out of the old one's mouth meant, or if Jewel really knew, either. “He can't talk,” he said.

“I see,” Louis said softly. He lowered his chair and leaned on the desk again. “They were getting on. They were moving toward general contracting. More management and less labor for them. More money. It's logical.”

“This new contract is a general contract.”

“Right,” Louis said.

“It'd probably be a good idea to make damn sure that contract's been written by the partnership.”

Louis stared at him for an instant, then picked up a pen and wrote himself a note. He glanced over at Julia and said, “We'll double-check it.” He leaned back and stroked his belly. “It's just laying there, Hank.”

“I know.”

“And that bothers you.”

Lafleur grunted and looked down at the carpet.

Louis chuckled resonantly, then said, “You can make it work. If you decide to pull out later, that'll work too. The only way this can fail, financially speaking, is if the whole ship goes down.”

“And that's the bottom line?”

“In private partnerships like this there is no bottom line, not until everybody's kicked off or the sole survivor sells off the leavings. Look, I know what the situation is. Julia knows.” He tipped his head toward her. “We'll watch it.”

“Good.” Lafleur had finally got what he wanted most from Louis: a judgment call, a voice from the outside that echoed some of his own conclusions, and by that mounted a triangulation—the lines from Louis's perspective and from Lafleur's converging upon the obscure point, Blaylock. The conjoining of perspectives established angulation and defined the field. It was a survey.

“I haven't told you anything you didn't know, right?” Louis said.

“The duplicate company. The other six he has an interest in. I wondered. I figured he had something running on the side, but I didn't know for a fact.”

“Do you want me to check them out?”

“You're offering?”

Louis smiled. “For you, fifty bucks an hour.”

Lafleur pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and wrote: H. Lafleur, P.O. Box 19, Rome, Oregon. He passed it across the desk.

Louis looked at it, then up at Lafleur, and laughed softly. “You've already got an address out there?”

“Yeah.”

“You're as slick as your partner.”

“No,” he said, although it was true that things had been moving fast in the last two weeks. He'd given notice at work, and the bid on the project in Rome—a tiny place on the other side of the mountains, deep in the southeastern Oregon desert—was virtually finalized. He'd been in touch with a man named Victor Sabat, the owner's representative for the project. He'd called yesterday from a booth on a street corner, in the rain at dusk, and he got through first to a woman with a crisp, professional manner that jarred with his mental image of the barren, wind-scoured place. The connection was clear, exact even, and the woman sounded like a television announcer. By the time she passed him on to Victor Sabat, Lafleur had conjured up a whole imaginary, meticulously turned-out person perched behind a desk to go with the smooth voice.

At first, Sabat was chatty about payment schedules, Lafleur's arrival time, Lafleur's lodging, and about a host of details concerning the project. Lafleur bent over the counter in the booth and made copious, confused notes on tiny slips of paper. He didn't understand who was funding the construction. His set of plans had no government stamps, but instead the name of a corporation called International Data. When he asked about that Sabat abruptly become terse: “It's a storage facility.”

“Storage?” Lafleur had said. “I understood a prison.”

“Yes,” the voice said. “Storage.”

Lafleur said, “It is a public institution.”

The voice turned ice-cold: “We'll fill you in as soon as you get here.”

He'd pocketed his slips of paper and ducked through the rain to his pickup. By the time he got back to the toolshed, his paranoia had a grip on him. He shoved the clutter off a bench, spread out the plans, and worked through them. There was no question but that it was a prison design: the concrete, the walls reinforced with steel mesh, the security fence imbedded in more concrete, the razor wire, the controlled traffic patterns, the emphasis upon visibility, the observation decks, and the sheaves in the plans devoted to state-of-the-art electronics: lights on, lights off, lock-ins, lockouts, lockdowns, lights and outlets triggered in phases, electrified security grids, computerized electric eyes, and laser-operated alarm systems. He wondered if he had violated decorum with Sabat, somehow, or if it was just a question of semantics, of euphemism…storage.

He had a box of books and among them a dictionary, which he dragged out. He blew off the dust and came backward in it, seeking his bearings through the definitions that now, in Louis's office, he remembered this way:

Storage:

A supply, put in safekeeping.

A place for storing goods.

The components of a computer designed to accept, store, and recall information.

Prison:

A place for confinement.

From the Latin prehensio, as with the tail of a monkey adapted for seizing or grasping by wrapping around something.

Penitentiary:

A place for persons convicted of serious crimes.

For penance.

Latin poena, penal, punishment, pain, penance a sacrament for sin.

The words had spooked him in the toolshed, which pooled with darkness at its edges and under the benches. A bristling blackberry limb drooped over the bench and swayed in the breeze. The stove pipe hummed. A tree rubbed against an eave, and the hairy, excrement encrusted tail of a monkey looped down and twisted like a snake. He jerked back. The monkey tail vanished, and something strange came out of the words, then, the phantom, and out of Sabat's tone of voice on the phone another phantom. The two phantoms intertwined and encircled Lafleur:

The project was corporate.

But beyond the obvious, he didn't understand what that meant.

Here in Louis's fancy office the same prehensile tail seemed about to twist at him, but he forced himself back out into the light, saying, “Not slick at all. If you ask me, I'm pretty damn knobby.” Louis chuckled. Julia smiled. Lafleur said, “I wanted to hear this from you, that's all. Thank you.”

“Sure,” Louis said.

Lafleur remembered that he had a letter from Sabat in his pocket. He found it, ripped off the letterhead, which had both the Rome address on it and a Los Angeles address and the name of the client company, International Data. On this he wrote the name Clinton U, and underlined Sabat's name. He passed it to Louis. “If you run into anything concerning that company or those two guys, let me know, too.” Louis took the scrap and looked at it, then placed it on top of the other scrap of paper. Lafleur said, “This project's a prison.”

Louis nodded. “Right. Big.”

“I think it's a private project, though.”

Louis was unfazed. “They're doing that.”

“It bothers me that I didn't know out front, that Ned didn't tell me, avoided telling me, I think.”

“Call him on it.”

“Yeah. It still might bother me. I don't want to be Blaylock's or anybody else's Trojan Horse.”

“No,” Louis said. His face steadied and he gazed directly at Lafleur, as if he were searching for what went on beneath the surface. Then he said, “Investigation's not my bag, really.”

“I know. It's just in case you bump into something. The question is…” Lafleur stopped cold, uncertain as to what question he meant. He changed tack and said, “They're talking about incentives, too. For supervising.”

“That's good,” Louis said.

“Maybe, but for what? I'd rather just be paid for the work.”

Louis smiled. “Do you want to be your dad's Trojan Horse? Is that it?”

“I don't mind that.”

Louis murmured, then said, “Yes, you would, if that's all it turned out to be. You should be your own Trojan Horse.”

“Maybe,” Lafleur said. His mind locked up on a picture of himself hidden inside himself disguised as an ostentatious gift.

“Do you have enough doubts to not sign the papers?”

“No.”

Louis stood up. “Maybe it's pre-nuptial jitters.”

“Maybe.”

Louis went out to dictate a letter, leaving Lafleur with Julia Rose. The two of them moved to a table against a wall. She popped open her auburn-colored briefcase, removed a sheaf of papers and began showing him totals: what the company owned, what it owed and on what, what it owed Lafleur and his father, what they owed it, how much cash would pass to his father and Jewel. There were investments. There would be a bank note, a huge one with balloon payments to finance the Rome project, that cast everything into arrears. The tip of Julia's pencil trembled as she guided it down the columns to the totals.

It was just the woman's fatigue, Lafleur supposed, that made her hand do that, but he wondered what caused the fatigue: young children at home, excessive hours spent trying to get ahead, personal trouble…. In a few minutes Louis returned and plopped down in the swivel chair behind his desk. He revolved the chair and tipped it back. It clicked. Lafleur glanced back and forth between him and the papers. Louis had removed his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He picked his nose and stared contemplatively out his windows at a highrise that was going up a couple of blocks away. When Lafleur had first come in he'd looked at the twenty-story concrete slab. There was a crane poised on top and to the side a second crane mounted on its own derrick, scaffolding all up and down the slab, plastic sheeting to aid in curing the freshly poured concrete, and wet, everything wet and glossy under the dark gray sky. Tattered swathes of sheeting that had been used to close in the girders during winter fluttered from the sides of the slabs. Tiny men worked on top. Union carpenters and welders in yellow slickers dotted the scaffolding, where they built new forms and took down the old and worked on the weld plates. There were more men on the ground, where cement trucks steadily came and went, emptying their loads into the canisters that the cranes raised and lowered.

Louis no doubt knew what the building was for, who was financing it, what zoning regulations and political resistance had been battled and overcome in order to break the ground in the first place. Maybe that was what he thought of as he watched it go up—his world interlacing with what he saw—while Lafleur in one glance had read in an intricately interfaced schedule of work, of deliveries and routing slips, of change orders, of labor hired and released according to stages. He saw the weather slowing everything down, and the danger—in the height, in the slick surfaces—and a labyrinth of specifications, numbers, dates, and personalities compelled into a pattern. He watched Julia's pencil and tried to concentrate on the numbers she recited. He half listened to her, half dreamed. He became lulled by her soft voice and nearly hypnotized by her wavering pencil tip. She wore a sharp-smelling perfume. Then he realized that the voice had stopped and that the pencil no longer followed the columns. He felt her gazing at him. She had finished.

“I see,” he said, looking back at her.

The gaze between them grew searching, the meeting of their eyes deepening to contact. Her eyes, streaked in the whites, took him in, and for an instant the female creature that was in there behind the fatigue, the worn voice, and the numbers touched him, and triggered his desire for a woman, his ache.

Louis swiveled his chair around abruptly and landed with his elbows on his desk. “Ready?” he said.

“I don't think there's any question about the new project being written from inside the partnership,” Julia said.

“Ah,” Lafleur said. “Good.”

She passed a pen to him, brushing his fingers. He began signing the papers, sheet after sheet. Some of the totals were affixed to years: fifteen, twenty, thirty. In thirty years he'd be pushing seventy. He came to a sheet that listed his equipment: backhoe, bulldozer, and dump truck, even his pickup truck, and valued them at $ 110,000, of which he owed over $70,000. The same bank still held the titles, but under a different account number now, tucked into the numberings for Blaylock and Lafleur, Incorporated. He stopped there, alarmed, holding the pen poised above the paper. He was about to sign away his dream of going independent, of skimming the waters of finance with a streamlined outfit (and of returning to his children in the evening), of staying light and solvent day to day (and of being with his woman at night, their feet touching between the sheets, the blankets pulled up to their chins, the moon hanging in the window).

Suddenly, the idea that anything had ever been his seemed foolish—not the machines he'd carried like the image of a woman, not those machines he'd internalized: bearing, ball joint, armature, shaft, bucket, blade and track. He had dreamed them, how they moved and yielded, how they drew him and how they resisted, as he might dream a woman. All this was about to pass away and leave him in the shadowland of uncertain, functional possession and endlessly shifting numbers that he would wear always, irritating and hot like a set of Mormon underwear.

He stared at the list of machines. The print fuzzed in his vision. He wished not to see the numbers, not to understand them. His personal debt would be plowed into the company. What he had paid on his machinery would be set against a much greater indebtedness. He would be in debt to the company in which he was a partner. He would be in debt to himself. What had been his would be the company's, and paying off the debt would not be an alternative. The only way he would ever be free was to sell his indebtedness, his share, or to liquidate. He would never see the titles to his machines, and never own half the company, not any more than he could bend over and eat out his liver.

He felt the silence around him, Julia and Louis looking at him. He didn't raise his head but signed the sheet, and he felt a knot in his belly, then almost frantically he signed again and again to the right of the red X marks. He finished and looked up at Julia. She tapped the papers into a neat stack. Her face smiled at him. She placed the ballpoint in the center of the top sheet. He felt his body going rigid. He felt the way Mrs. Good's Abyssinian jackass had looked.

Julia turned her head and looked toward Louis. Lafleur didn't move, though he understood that her gesture was meant to refer him to Louis. He rejected her act of deference. Louis was either looking at him or he and Julia were exchanging a look of concern. It occurred to Lafleur that besides manipulating numbers the purpose of an accountant was to try to keep clients at a distance from the totals that had the air of finality to them, and then to defer obligations. Julia was trying to escape him. He stared furiously at her. She didn't respond. He thought that one should also keep one's distance from accountants, and not ever jostle their masks, because they were in a class along with lawyers, doctors, priests, insurance agents, and morticians, those who service death in its various aspects. He wondered if what wore Julia Rose down was always having to keep her eye on her escape route while she tended the portals to other people's horrors.