Stealing Flowers

by Edward St Amant

  Hiro caught my eyes. “Maybe,” he said. “Bill, saw it first. I couldn’t see it at all. Neither could you at first. Maybe Jack is innocent. It’s a slow steady action that’s not overly greedy. I mean, considering the scale, it’s enormous, but whoever’s behind it, is being careful not to clean the register completely. Now what to do?”

  “Let’s go get them,” I said.

  “Don’t approach this like a cowboy,” Hiro said softly, “you’ll destroy the company. We could say that our Tappet wide audit is complete, but due to discrepancies it won’t be published. Instead we’ll redo it with both Jack and Bill under your guidance. That should take another year and a half.”

  “What does that solve?” I asked in a soft respectful voice, but also with some disappointment.

  “I think everyone, including your mom and dad will save face. The guilty parties will be warned and their unwanted behavior will cease. Some will quit in fear. After our second audit, we’ll privately disclose the culprits to Sally, Una, and your parents. Then, with their permission, we’ll dismiss or retire them one by one, but over a long period.”

  His logic was impeccable and he put the need of the company ahead of his own sense of justice. “I’ve so much yet to learn from you,” I said.

  Bill and I set up a meeting with Jack Denison and announced our plans for a second audit the week after. As far as I could tell, Jack didn’t suspect we were on to him.

  On Stan’s fifty-fifth birthday, Saturday, July 20, 1987, we had a party for him. Una ran it, and it was surprisingly formal. I shook hands and chatted casually to whomever caught my attention as I moved through the Tappets’ crowd, always watching Una, who planned the evening like a work of art. I wore dress pants and a new shirt. I had settled into one hundred and seventy-five pounds and my reflection didn’t bother me too much anymore. I’d quit my gym and joined Stan’s so I could work out with him which we tried to do everyday. I was in the best shape I’d ever been. It was just that my face troubled me. I seemed to have a look of being perpetually lost.

  The brightly lit room had been remodeled just for this celebration and the party surpassed my expectations. I’d heard Una tell Mary numerous times that these kinds of social events brought forth the ideas, and that the office only existed as a place to work out the details. Una wore a bright flowing red dress and had a crimson carnation in her hair. In the last while, she had lost weight, perhaps even up to thirty pounds, this had started when her mother had died. Sally had her long blond hair pulled back and it accentuated her beautiful angular face. The sleek dark-green business suit over her slender figure had an eloquent effect, and I knew Una had picked it out for her.

  Sally wore glasses in public now, but for appearance only. They made her look older, just like James Nasuko, but I didn’t like them on her. Stan was dressed similar to me, and when Hiroyuki arrived, he wore a suit so fine that I again felt underdressed. He was exceedingly dignified looking, better than a century’s-old Buddhist monk in a bright white robe and a whole universe away from The Family of Truth’s elder’s tie-dyed t-shirt and blue jeans.

  Ken Roxton, the President of Modal Oil wore a grey tuxedo, and tonight, this seemed to accentuate his age and his square face. Though robust and well-built, he normally looked much younger. It was his grey hair combined with his grey apparel that betrayed his age. I got drinks for Stan and Hiro and stood beside them. “Mary will be down in a moment,” Sally said when she joined us.

  “Hiro, how are you doing?” Graham Roberts, the head of Constant Batteries, said loudly, coming into our circle. His voice held some disdain.

  We all shook hands and smiled. Graham’s Slavic heritage wasn’t immediately obvious to the eye, even though after a few drinks, he talked with an accent. His face sported a moustache as white as his hair and his eyes always held a cruelness to me. Stan’s friend or not, from the beginning, I’d disliked him, but now that he was seemingly implicated in the fraud against Tappets, I was coming to despise him. “Still predicting a recession?” he asked Hiro glibly, almost sarcastically.

  “An economy in depression will stay there a long time unless government investments are made,” Hiro said. “I believe we are quickly becoming that type of economy. If spending for capital equipment falls, the contraction will continue, moreover private investment has an antagonist, that is, satiety, and as we all know, it spells shrinkage. This is why the deliberate undertaking of rapid government spending to stimulate the economy is so important.”

  Graham looked angry and was about to respond when Sally cut in. “Let’s say that your liberal views on paper money were implemented around the world,” she said. “What would happen to the current expansion?”

  “The Reagan administration’s recent decision to reduce the national capital gains tax looks good for business at first sight,” he replied. “Capital accumulation in the democracies, is essentially national hoarding by conservative policy. Risky investment in offshore or in third world countries, equals out the effect of keeping your money here and moving your factories offshore or to third-world countries to save on other state costs. A country like America is going to have state costs, you just can’t get around it, and the neo-conservatives can’t have it both ways.”

  “I think Germany and Japan have better production figures for reasons other than liberal fiscal policy,” Sally said in a confident voice. “For instance, for production reasons. Not all the better market performances in these two countries are for reasons that we could call entirely positive. They are recent democracies, even if they were ancient regimes, of course, if Japan’s a democracy at all yet.”

  I could see that this remark had a shocking effect, and that she’d tried to personally affront Hiro. I saw Mary had joined us; her and Una, I was sure in my heart, would be cheering for Sally. As for me, I was torn between Hiro and Sally. Her gown fit perfectly and she radiated happiness, or so I thought; this assessment, would later prove wrong, but she stood there so confident, beautiful, and magnetizing, that she seemed to become the center of the hall. “Some working habits of the past were better than the things which have replaced them,” Sally added. “If Germans are harder working people compared to us in America, should we necessarily follow their statist socialist policies or rather follow their work ethic, an ethic that they, as Lutherans, along with the Presbyterians, first created?”

  “I have a feeling that we are going to be subjected to your rather colorful and unusual views on fiscal policy,” Hiro said with a warm smile. His expression held an aura of benevolence and his soft voice had a distinctive feature of making every word appear to drop blessed from the skies. I was learning to admire him on all fronts. Even her insult hadn’t ruffled his feathers.

  “Current paper money policy,” he said, “led to an unbounded credit expansion in the sixties and seventies. Subsidized health care, food for school children, public housing, environment legislation, and many other valuable public services came into being, which couldn’t have developed with direct income tax alone. Now the Conservatives are floating their currencies and following the tight-fisted paper policy like those suggested by Milton Friedman, but if you’ve been watching, they haven’t stopped spending.

  “Our crisis, which before this expansion was inflation, is now debt. They’ve just invested in arrears. Reagan’s a perfect example of this, as is Thatcher. After all, even Friedman calls himself a Liberal, not a Conservative. Who wants to be a Conservative? Look at their tradition. They preach tolerance and Human Rights, but if you are a member of Amnesty International or some such organization, they brand you as a leftist. They talk tax cuts and spend like bandits on arms and war. And they preach against government expansion inside America, but mettle in everyone’s affairs abroad. To top it all off, I think they’re all hawks. We are aware of the growing death knells of communism around the world. Russia is broke. China’s markets are beginning a rapid deployment of capitalism. This is an admitted world-wide defeat to Marxism. A harsh money standard, as you sugg
est, Sally, such as gold, would serve to push all the communist countries out of the western grip. The Cold War isn’t over, yet.” Again he eyed his audience, this time as though he were a minority of one. “What? We’d rather fight them outright. We can’t seduce them if they won’t come to the party. We’d face increased tension everywhere. Indeed, we’d have to spend even more money than the absurd amount we are now spending on the military.”

  “I can’t see how you’ll compromise with dictatorships and keep your democracy?” Sally said in a voice, more harsh, I’m sure, than she meant.

  “You mean left wing dictatorships?” he asked critically .

  “I mean all dictatorships.”

  “The young are purists,” he responded, “gold is pure too. The young are optimistic as well, so they are the ones who become angry when they see the corruption of an ideal. That’s the reason why the Left cry, ‘The villainy of the Capitalist,’ ‘The greed of the Industrialist,’ and ‘The selfishness of the Financiers.’ This is natural and self-seeking in youth, don’t you agree, Sally?” He looked at everyone except Sally. “On the Right you cry, ‘The villainy of Lawyers, ‘The greed of the Socialist,’ and ‘The selfishness of Politicians.’”

  The crowd around us now stood at nearly the entire upper corporate structure of Tappets. “A gold standard would prevent the government from setting the price of paper for its own agenda,” Sally retorted hotly. “In effect, gold would be actual money. There would be no Federal Reserve Bank. Banks would have the actual gold and their paper money would represent the real actual value of gold. It would buy goods with the actual amount represented in gold, or even some other tangible standard. Governments couldn’t use money itself to expand, but would have to do so the hard, honest way, with going directly to the people with a tax on goods or income.

  “Printing money serves the interests of Liberals, there is no argument with you there, Mr. Nakamura, and furthermore, Milton Friedman calls himself a Classical Liberal, and that’s a world of distance from where you stand. Paper money has brought the free world to a crisis on several occasions. Many of the governments, who are printing money and inflating their economies, are Christian socialists. They’re diametrically opposed to the economic freedom of individuals in a market economy. Gold would at least prevent the Free World from being undermined by these unsavory types and other religious groups trying to seize the reigns of government, such as in the Arab countries. Today, the politicians can promise their way into power on spending, labor, or moral platforms, then once in power, they can covertly inflate their economies or go into debt delivering that promise. They’re like a pack of dogs, gold would be their muzzle.”

  This metaphor brought about a smattering of applause. Hiro sipped some red wine and knotted his features into a more stern expression. “Socialists used to call the capitalists, pigs,” he said softly, “now, here you are, one of the most famous young capitalists in America, calling socialists, dogs. We would be wise to change our approach. Harsh economic times are never popular, and in the democracies, the governments, no matter how good, are voted out of office by shortsighted unhappy citizens. In hard times poor people are victimized.”

  “In hard times,” she interrupted, “it becomes impossible for the government not to either inflate the money or to go into debt. Politicians are invariably only interested in re-election. They’re of the unanimous opinion that we can’t get along without them, but I say that the people of the world would be much happier without government at all, if this ever became feasible. At any rate, the ultimate happiness of the people, both rich and poor, isn’t such a mystery as the liberals or socialists indicate. We plan our lives according to available information, from the poor to the rich. A movement toward a conversion to a worldwide gold standard could make coin and currency the one constant among the many caprices of life. An individual’s economic plans could be counted on, at least with this one large variable, being constant. The ultimate happiness of the people over the whole world just happens to be a stable currency.”

  Hiro bowed. “Very clever, but I can assure you, young Miss Sally Tappet, that it takes more than a stable currency to bring about such a complicated thing as people’s ultimate happiness.”

  “I’ll tell you about happiness,” Una said in a booming voice and stepped into the circle of executives, “a fine dinner is now served.”

  With a round of laughter, the debate ended, and after the initial courses had finished and dinner was on its way, I rose and moved to the podium. “I want to tell you a story before my mother speaks to you on my father’s fifty-fifth birthday,“ I said. “You’ve been told by my father on probably too many occasions that he flew as a fighter pilot in Korea. On many days of the conflict, he flew in the midst of battle; twice shot down, he spent months in a POW camp, but his most serious injury didn’t occur in the sky nor on enemy territory. Dad was in a bar one night with some other pilots, when some GIs dropped in, and as you may know, the army and the air force don’t always treat each other with the love and respect they deserve. Bickering started between the two groups. Almost from the beginning, this stocky muscular private had been eyeing my father and he walked up to Dad, and without warning, sucker-punched him in the mouth. The force of the blow flattened Dad completely and he hit the floor with a resounding thud. On kneeling up, he spit out his four front teeth.

  “Regretting what he had accomplished in so brutally bushwhacking my father, the soldier rushed over and apologized profusely. My father, showing little anger, took the four teeth from the floor and one by one, as the GI held him steady, put then tentatively back into his mouth. My dad turned to this fellow and said, ‘Find me a two-by-four.’ Or something like that. ‘I know what has to be done.’ By now, they’d destroyed the bar, and this guy’s buddies knowing that the MPs were coming, urged him to leave, but the man refused and continued looking for a flat level piece of wood. My dad managed to find a bottle of whisky and started some heavy-duty drinking.”

  “Which hasn’t stopped to this day,” Ken Roxton shouted from one of the front tables.

  This brought laughter all the way to the back of the hall. I saw that Una readied the birthday desserts, to be served after the tables had been cleared and taken down. “The soldier comes back with a level piece of wood,” I continued, “and my dad, already having pushed back half the bottle, put the wood up against his four loose teeth and said to the guy, ‘This will do.’ By now, the military police have arrived and the fighting had completely stopped. Dad looks at this guy who has knocked out his four front teeth and says, ‘Drive them back in, buddy.’ ‘My God,’ the soldier says, ‘you can’t do that.’ Taking the man by the arm, my father mumbles, ‘I know I can’t. You’re going to!’ The soldier looks at my dad and big bright tears flicker in his eyes. He goes over to a couple of MPs and gets them to hold my father’s head steady. He took that piece of wood and pushed it for all he was worth against those four loose teeth as my father howled in pain and he did so until they were all level with my dad’s other teeth.”

  I saw that I’d impressed them with this enigmatic true story and could feel the emotion in the room. “My father still has those four teeth in his mouth today, although as he tells it, for years he couldn’t whistle without getting a headache. Anybody who has heard him whistle knows it isn’t conclusive where exactly the headache comes from.”

  Polite laughter followed. “Una wants to let you know that Dana Daniel Johnston has arrived. Coffee and desserts will be brought forth in the chamber where my father will speak. Tonight, Ms. Johnston will perform, Chopin’s, ‘Barcarole.’ It’s one of my father’s favorite pieces. Please then, stand and raise your glasses to my dear and wonderful dad, who we all love so much.”

  The crowd stood and raised their glasses. “To Dad,” I said full of emotion.

  “To Stan,” the crowd shouted. Stan stood, smiling and waving modestly from his table.

  I turned from the podium as though to step down, then I quickly doubled b
ack. I’d rehearsed this move with Una. “I forgot to tell you,” I said loudly. “The soldier who knocked out my dad’s four teeth is our own Ken Roxton.”

  I watched the smiles of disbelief, then Ken rose and walked up to the podium. He weighed more than Stan now, perhaps even by twenty-five pounds. “I confess I bopped the old guy,” Ken said casually with a genuine smile. “It’s all true, but I have to tell you, you can’t get to the top of Tappets that way anymore, now you have to work for a living.”

  The crowd clapped and Una came over to the microphone. “The concert will begin soon. If we can get you to the chamber, the bar in the other room is open, and then Mr. Stan will say a few words.”

  “Well done, Christian,” Una whispered, “and I’m very proud of you, and so are your parents.”

  “Imagine a world where all basic needs are easily met,” Stan said from the dais, before the famous pianist came out to perform, his voice reverberating into the hall. “I’ve said many times, the key to paradise on earth is abundance. To produce it, we must do a seemingly impossible task: We must be fiscally responsible, yet not stifle the imagination of employees. Recently, we’ve set out specific tasks for each of our divisions to accommodate Tappets’ mandate. The goals are realistic. We’ve achieved success by a deliberate strategy of relying on the choice for better value by consumers. They are our only judges! Over the years we’ve grown, not just survived. We’ve become a world leader, not just a competitor. For this, I must thank all of you. Mary has led us from summit to summit and we benefited greatly from it. This is true of my personal life as well and is why I love and admire her so much. She once told me, we did so well at Tappets because we are always smart enough to follow Una’s advice. After all this time, I think everyone can see that it’s true. Una is a business genius. So, Sally, Christian, Una, Mary, and all of you, I thank you for making me look smarter than I am.”