“What the fuck does that matter now, Ahmed?” I answered angrily. “We’re looking for—”
“No, of course you don’t know, Jack, all you fucking do is push around tiny pieces of paper in your office. Tiny pieces of toilet paper. You guys do not have any idea of what the real world is. This is not one of your magazines with a woman prostituting herself on the cover. This is ninety-five thousand square feet and we are going to check every single foot, if necessary. You do not understand how hard I have worked.” He stared at me, his anger done for at least a moment, almost haggard in exhaustion. “I have got three Japanese bankers and they are very hard, only agree to a revocable mortgage. They want to take their money back to Tokyo, buy land while it is cheap now. Better investment, maybe. I have to kiss their asses every week. Nice kisses. I cannot lose time, I cannot lose money.”
Inside, Ahmed opened a huge electrical panel and began switching on power and lights throughout the building, and as we paced over the first floor, looking hurriedly under tarps and within unfinished closets and air vents, it became apparent from the watchman’s story that the intruder had entered from the rear of the building. He had encountered the smaller of the two dogs on the second-floor landing of the interior fire stairs. The rottweiler had stuck her head between the steel stair railings, Ahmed surmised, barking at the intruder. From below, on the way up the steps, the intruder had clubbed the dog with one or more blows—with a motion like a tennis overhead smash. A section of pipe was nearby, one end sticky with blood. The dog had collapsed, paws and nose hanging over the edge of the stair, blood dripping from its muzzle to a small, sticky pool below. Her open eyes, clouded now, stared at me like a gargoyle’s, seemingly apologizing for failing to halt the man’s attack on Dolores. What kind of man, I agonized, could kill a trained rottweiler?
“She was a very good watchdog and she was worth at least a thousand dollars,” Ahmed said. “So do you know who this man is? This man that wants this woman? He must want this woman very badly,” he goaded me. “All my men say she is very beautiful. Oh yes, she must be very beautiful. A great lover. With a cunt like butter, a cunt as hot as—” He spun toward me and spoke with bitter sarcasm. “You have at least fucked her, have you not, Jack?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, and with the translator leading the way, we raced up each set of stairs, hurriedly checking every room and wall space, past veins of joint compound on the walls and electrical wires snaking through ceilings. We found nothing, only open doors. Ahmed grabbed my biceps like a demented schoolmaster, intent that I witness the destruction done to his precious renovation, but I shook free and ran ahead, calling Dolores’s name. There was no response. Then, on the top floor, the stairs ended and I stood facing a bank of arched ten-foot-high windows framing a view north, past Washington Square and up toward the Empire State building, ever imposing and magnificent. Each window had been shattered.
“Oh no,” Ahmed said from behind me. “Every one a thousand dollars!”
Then we rushed to the penthouse apartment where Dolores and Maria had been staying. The door was open, the wall next to it hacked and broken open with a hole the size of a pumpkin. Just large enough for a man to wriggle through. Broken plaster was sprinkled whitely over the rug.
“He couldn’t get the fucking Medeco lock open so he has busted through the wall to get in,” Ahmed analyzed aloud. “That is five hundred dollars of damage, that hole alone.” We pushed open the door. I was sick with apprehension that we were about to come upon a body. A woman’s hairbrush lay in the middle of the floor, next to a pair of pink, cotton bikini underwear, inside out, with the usual stains. Where were they? I glanced past a mattress in one corner, a phone, and a few other rudimentary items. A dozen or so crayons lay scattered across the carpeting, bright sticks of color, a few broken and crushed underfoot. Then I saw something that made me stop: the same jar of water as had been in Dolores’s crummy hotel room, half-full, set out purposefully atop an overturned box. I didn’t understand.
“The apartment’s empty,” Ahmed said, pushing me along.
Then we heard Sanjay calling us.
“Mr. Ah-med! Mr. Ah-med!”
“He’s on the roof ladder,” Ahmed instructed.
We hurried up the ladder to the tarpaper roof, plunging outside into a brilliant morning sky. Ahmed picked up a woman’s shoe that was missing its heel; it matched the one he had found earlier on the street below.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Where are they?”
We quickly scanned the large roof. Ahmed’s men were in the midst of tearing up perhaps half a dozen layers of ancient tarpaper, crackly underfoot, and replacing it with new firm asphalt paper that they cemented into place with hot tar. Amid the big metal cans and flapping rolls of supplies, brushes, tar trowels, work gloves, shovels, and canisters of material, there stood an immense wheeled cauldron, thickly dripped over the sides with dried tar.
“Here!” Sanjay cried, showing us that the huge cauldron leaked whiffs of sulfurous smoke. “The big pot is very little bit hot. Very little bit,” he said excitedly. “See, there is no fuel, Mr. Ahmed. No fuel is left.” He pointed at the rippled surface of the tar inside the cauldron. My fingers started to shake. “Look! It is the madam. Or her daughter.”
We saw hair thickly clotted with tar on the surface of the oily black stuff.
“Pull her out!” Ahmed commanded.
Sanjay immediately cowered in fright, as if he were being accused of the act himself.
“No!” I argued, not willing to see what was inside. “The police should do this.”
“Get her out! Sanjay! Pull her out of the tar!” Ahmed screamed. “We must get her out of this building.”
The small man was shaking his head, terrified. Ahmed pointed at me.
“You do it!” he said. “You must do it.”
Sanjay ventured a finger against the black surface, then pulled it back. “The tar is too cold, Mr. Ahmed,” Sanjay cried. “Too cold.”
“Then get the gas, Sanjay.”
He hurried to the side of the roof, whistling down the face of the building to the street below. Then he threw a heavy rope over the side and ran it through a pulley. Ahmed walked the perimeter of the roof in agitation, inspecting for further damage. I stared at the clotted black hair at the surface of the hardened tar; the cauldron was just big enough to hold a woman and a child.
I couldn’t bear it. “Ahmed, you can’t do this,” I screamed at him. “It’s wrong.”
He paced back toward me. “Japanese bankers are very cautious. They have many little clauses. If there is a body found, every dollar in my account goes back to Tokyo. They make one call and ten minutes—”
“I have it!” came Sanjay’s voice and we both turned our heads. Yanking the rope hand over hand, Sanjay secured a canister of propane. He set it beneath the burner, fiddled with a knob, lit a match in a small tube, fiddled with the knob some more, and then the burner jetted to life, the blue flame burning loudly. I stared, fascinated with the process but unable to stop it. The tar warmed quickly, the dull skin on top exuding swirling steam until it liquefied into a glossy liquid black. The mass of oily hair eased below the surface.
“Are you going to get this woman out?” Ahmed demanded of me.
“No. I’m calling the police. Don’t touch her.”
Sanjay looked back and forth at us.
“I cannot have anybody here, we have business to do.”
“That’s your problem, Ahmed,” I said firmly. “The police should do everything.” I wasn’t going to help him but neither was I foolish enough to try to stop him. He saw this.
“Fuck!” Ahmed hollered, pushing me back. “All right!” And then, in his Armani suit and leather shoes, he leapt angrily upon the machine and balanced each foot on the two-inch edge of the cauldron. He took off an immense gold Rolex and thrust it into his pants pocket. “Give me those,” he ordered Sanjay, and he put on the thick leather gloves that went halfway to the elbow. He squatted c
arefully, ready to use his powerful legs. Then he thrust his hands into the viscous black mass up to his forearms, grasping blindly until his fingers found something. His eyebrows arched in realization. His arms tensed and he pulled against the thick resistance of the tar. In one great, groaning effort, Ahmed slowly straightened his legs and back and yanked from the tar the long-haired hindquarters of the missing female German shepherd and then the rest of the dog high into the air, the head turned upward in grotesque stiffness, its eyes tarred over and dead, mouth locked in a dripping, black grin.
The three of us stared for several shocked seconds.
“Look at this, Jack! Look at this!” Ahmed screamed, furious and demented. He swung the dog out and she dropped with gruesome heaviness onto the roof. He jumped down and thrust the sticky, blackened gloves to my throat. “Look at me, Jack, you will face me! You do not know who you are dealing with, right? No fucking idea!” The black tar stung against my throat and I saw that he was terrorized by the sudden mystery of what had happened. “This woman has not told you some things! You do not know many things! Is that not right?”
SIX
THE NEXT TWO DAYS WERE A TORMENT. DOLORES DID NOT call. I anxiously remembered the bright crayons scattered and crushed on the floor of Ahmed’s apartment. My stomach was particularly bad and I spent too many hours watching the sun move across my desk, edges of paper cutting shadows. At lunch I loitered in the newsstand in the lobby of the Corporation building and flipped through the grimy pages of the Daily News for a story of an assault or murder involving a woman and her small daughter, but there were no stories like that, though just about every other possible mayhem occurred in the city, including a child who was thrown out of a window and impaled on a fence. I could not tell anyone about my worry, not even Helen. If it was discovered that I was intimately connected to the demise of some unfortunate homeless woman; if, say, Dolores turned up dead with my business card in her purse, then I’d have a lot of explaining to do inside the Corporation. Yet although whatever had happened to Dolores and Maria was not my burden, it seemed likely that only I knew they were in trouble. And this made me uneasy. I considered going to the police and insisting that a young woman and her small daughter were missing, but what would I be able to tell them? In New York City, the threshold for disaster is higher. I couldn’t prove that Dolores and Maria were missing. But I did call the hotel manager, old Mr. Clammers, who remembered me from the fifty dollars I’d given him. She hadn’t returned, he said. No, he didn’t have a forwarding number. “Hey, fellah, take it from an old man who seen a lot of things,” he told me. “I seen things. You’re a clean young fellah and you gave me fifty bucks, so here’s fifty bucks’ worth of advice. Steer clear of this woman. She ain’t your kind, you know? Not for you.” I did not like his presumptuousness but, nonetheless, it seemed emotionally prudent to try to forget Dolores Salcines and her daughter. Forget it, I told myself, you never knew them. Maybe I was luckier to be done with her, maybe the past week had only amounted to a deviant splice in the quiet life of Jack Whitman.
Meanwhile, the Volkman-Sakura executives arrived from Bonn in the warm rain of early May—five Germans in five cuffed and tailored suits who spoke impeccable English and set themselves up in a fifth-floor business suite at the Plaza Hotel. The Chairman had disappeared again, this time to his compound in the Caribbean, according to Mrs. Marsh, so I insisted to Morrison that I should attend the first meeting that Thursday morning.
“What’s he doing down there, working on his tan?” Morrison said irritably. “You should be spending time with him every day now, if possible. I don’t care how you get in there. You need to work the relationship around to the point that you can really press.”
“I think you have to assume he knows what’s going on. All the signals the other night were that he’d gotten wind of the deal and wasn’t having any.”
“He’d do that even if he did like the idea. As soon as he’s back, you escalate.”
“Fine.” I was surprised at Morrison’s view that the Chairman was utterly hapless. “But the Volkman-Sakura guys are here now and I want in to that meeting.”
Morrison contemplated the question.
“There’s no reason I can’t be in that meeting.”
“Jack—”
“No good reason,” I told him. “Unless—”
“Today,” Morrison broke in. “Just today. The Chairman is back tomorrow, so that will be it.”
So later that morning I traveled to the Plaza, listening to the rain slash against the windows of my taxi. The Corporation team arrived in twos and threes, just to be sure that the business media didn’t pick up on the negotiations too quickly. We gathered and waited on the fifth floor outside suite 565—the bankers, the lawyers, Samantha, Beales, Morrison, a few others. A secretary greeted us and led us into the suite. The Volkman-Sakura team had a whole office set up—phones, faxes, copier machines. She led us into a plush conference room with a big table and Otto Waldhausen stood at the door and greeted each one of us with remote politeness. He was surprisingly short, maybe five feet four. Very unusual to be that short and have such power. His hair was sparse and brushed flat against the sides of his head, as if flattened down by the velocity with which he moved. And then we sat down, and the rest of the V-S team was introduced. Nodding and nervous smiles.
“We are very glad to be in this room,” Morrison suddenly announced in his cheesiest ambassadorial voice, trying to get the energy of the talks started, “and it occurs to me that perhaps the best place to start, Otto, is to express our genuine admiration for your company. We have spent many months studying your operations and markets and products and I must say that we are full of admiration. Full of it.” He smiled his smoothest smile all around. Morrison was in that false second youth that rich men often come into after having worked hard for twenty or thirty years—fit, barbered, in a new suit; he looked more youthful than ever, though not, of course, young. “I think I said this to you on the phone the other day, that we’re very much looking forward to these talks. My sense of the way we might proceed is based on a recognition that your company does many things very, very well, as does ours, and that these elements have value.” He was beginning to impose a format of negotiation. “Your cable operations in Australia, for example. Or our music division. Whatever. We have some values we’ve calculated for each of these elements—”
“Perhaps we should discuss an operating structure first,” Waldhausen broke in. He sucked in his lips, and I knew that Morrison’s hearty jocularity annoyed him. “It is a question of philosophy of management, no? We should begin with this very important question. Let us work out the values of divisions later. Now I would like to discuss our viewpoint, our way of thinking. Yes? Americans and Germans think differently in many respects.” He paused to indicate his firmness. “This will need to be discussed first, because without this in discussion, there can be no agreement on details. I am suggesting that we attempt a meeting of the minds, that is an American expression, no?”
“It absolutely is, Otto,” Morrison said. “And I certainly respect your sense that a philosophy of management is crucial. It is crucial. But—”
It went badly from there on. We tried to get started. Others chimed in. The five V-S officials had that British inflection and European reserve that Americans suspect as haughtiness. Morrison struggled to inject items that we might agree on. Waldhausen asked for a detailed joint operating plan to consider. This was too fast; we weren’t ready to give it to them until we sized up their intent, since the plan contained valuable marketing information—the keys to the Corporation’s kingdom. The Germans seemed aloof, contemptuous, uninterested in seeking common ground. I wondered if Morrison had seduced them across the Atlantic without understanding the degree of their interest; I wondered if we’d been fooling ourselves.
And by the end of the morning it was clear that the two companies were starting from scratch. Waldhausen appeared more interested in making plans to attend the curre
nt Broadway shows than in listening to a bunch of investment bankers babbling about second-quarter profits and independent syndication values of old TV sitcoms, the debt-reduction schedule, and so on. When we all sat down for lunch, I noticed Morrison stabbing his tiny shrimp with a heavy silver fork. “You get the picture,” he said to me, his small teeth grinding the pink pieces of shrimp efficiently. “They sent us a bunch of killers.”
“They’re stalling.”
“Of course,” Morrison said, “he’s not here”—meaning the Chairman—“and they don’t know if we’re the guys who catch the whales or dig the worms.” He glanced around the room. “You have to start banging harder on the Chairman’s door, Jack.”
Waldhausen had been sitting next to Samantha during lunch, and after the coffee was served, he unexpectedly called for an early break in the talks, apologizing and saying his group was tired from the travel and they would prefer to reconvene the next morning. Morrison responded with endless generosity. “Of course,” he said, “we will be more than pleased to do that.” But he nodded ever so subtly to Samantha.
So, three useless hours after we’d arrived, the entire Corporation negotiating team left the Plaza, again in twos and threes, leaving Samantha still talking with Waldhausen, leaning forward with her legs crossed as he sat in an overstuffed armchair. The rain had stopped, with the sun cutting through a heavy, clouded sky. I wanted to walk back to the office but Morrison found it painful to struggle on his prosthesis more than about a few blocks. So Beales and I took the cab with Morrison.
“You shouldn’t have let her go off with him,” Beales complained from the front seat, shooting his cuffs in irritation. “It’s an insult to the other guys. It puts the whole thing on a different footing from the start! It makes it unstable by definition. We’re set for what, ten days, two weeks of negotiation, right? It takes a couple of days to warm up, to get used to the accents and everything. This is supposed to be all of us sitting down, not Samantha and—”
Bodies Electric Page 12
