by Brian Hodge
Was Granvier as deserving of a humbling taste of failure in his life as Andrew Jackson Mullavey, as bankrupt inside his soul? Would he try to rebuild his business? How many millions invested had been lost? And how would he be treated in weeks, months, years to come, by banks or potential investors? Repercussions of media coverage, derogatory racial and homeland smears implied or explicit … the linkage between businessman and poisoner: One Haitian might be just as crazy as another. So sorry, a bad risk; you understand it’s nothing personal.
So what of Christophe Granvier? Justin figured he would never know. Just as well, really. Justin Gray, bearing the weight of the world and every brain imbalance on his shoulders? Forget it. He had enough problems trying to keep his own life and its direction in some semblance of order. And then came the phone call.
A Wednesday evening, early November, home from work for two hours, half of that spent watching April at her easel with a palette of oils. When the phone rang, she grinned at him with relief only half-feigned, as if he were the harshest critic she would ever face.
He answered.
“Justin? Justin?” A rattle of paranoia in his ear, the sound of his name spoken with brittle edges; he automatically turned away so April wouldn’t hear him speak. This caller was a breeding ground of problems, then—
“Leonard? Is that you?”
“We — we need to talk.” Leonard’s voice didn’t even belong to him anymore. It was the voice of a junkie going off cold turkey, arterial ice water seeping through chilled pores. Justin could feel him trembling even over the phone.
“What is it?”
“Not over the phone.” His voice became a savage rasp. Then a harsh gulping breath. “And not tomorrow fucking morning, either! I need to see you tonight, right the fuck now, do you understand me? Understand?”
There was no question but that he would go. In the worst agency crises of time and money and lost accounts, he had never heard Leonard Greenwald sound this frayed.
“Where are you?”
“Hyde Park Village. Phone booth. I — I — I’ve been walking around down here for about twenty minutes, just thinking, just thinking—”
“Are you close to J. B. Winberie?”
“Yeah, I am. Yeah.”
“Then grab a sidewalk table, and I’m out the door right now. Okay?”
“Yeah yeah yeah. You’ll hurry, right? Hurry? I’m about ready to explode inside, Justin, just get here.”
He found himself nodding vigorously. Leonard’s need like a greedy black hole over that phone line, sucking another life into God only knew what sort of mess. Like trying to talk a jumper back in off a ledge only to realize his grand design is to take you along for the fall.
He knew the feeling. He had fallen before.
Knew that he was, no matter how hard he tried, just one of those guys destined to keep bouncing.
Andrew Jackson Mullavey’s working world was sixteen floors aloft. New Orleans down below, streets simmering with the legacy of her every vainglorious excess. Where in not-so-distant past, everything had a price — from blood and honor to liberty and life — and it was a price that someone, somewhere, could always afford.
How little things changed, in some quarters. How little things changed when change was resisted. The underbelly of their existence, alive with the age-old commerce of life and death and animal cunning. There thrived no society so civil that these more base members did not have their place of honor. And their uses.
Wednesday evening, and Andrew Jackson Mullavey dropped his head to his desktop and forgot to breathe. He could still hear the footsteps of Ty Larkin receding down the hallway, and if Mullavey had only had the guts to do it, he would already have reached in that bottom drawer, pulled out the gun, and put a bullet in the younger man’s back himself.
Precautionary measures could sometimes take drastic form.
To work late, long after most of the corporate office staff had gone home, was de rigueur. It was quieter after-hours anyway, more conducive to the ordering of life and power. Twelve-hour days were common, and as recently as five minutes earlier everything in the world was still in its designated place.
Enter Ty Larkin, Vice President of Promotion, with news as cheery as Sherman’s march to the sea, and nearly as devastating. Larkin hadn’t had to say a word. Everything about that amiably bland young face cried trouble. Mullavey had steeled himself to hear the worst. Preparing to activate whatever damage control would prove necessary.
“We’ve got a problem.” Larkin’s voice had been a tenor vibrato.
“I can tell that much, Ty, now out with it.”
A trembling lip, a throwback to childhood. In the strata of corporate power, let an underling fuck up and he was never far removed from a child confessing to a fearsome school principal.
“It’s my fault.”
And from the magnitude, Mullavey knew it could pertain to only one thing. Caribe Coffee Bags; cyanide; one small act of industrial sabotage. But now? With its scapegoat dead and buried, case closed? This could not be.
“About a half hour ago … I got a call from Tampa. From Leonard Greenwald.” Larkin was sweating, face wet, a dark sodden crescent spreading beneath each jacket arm. Mullavey could smell liquor across the desk, carried on the breath of desperation. “He’d found … an irregularity. He was wondering what it was. I tried, I tried telling him it was nothing … but I don’t think he believed me…
“Mr. Mullavey, I think he knows. Or suspects, at least.”
Mullavey had sat there listening, and the whole office tower, tons of steel and glass and concrete, seemed to roar around him. He could have a coronary here at his desk, and at this particular moment would not mind in the least. Like some Japanese fellow committing hara-kiri at the helm, death before dishonor. Except for that to hold true, now wouldn’t he have to put that bottom-drawer pistol to his own head and pull the trigger?
It would never happen. No one would ever convince him that putting a bullet through your own brain was quick and painless. Mullavey knew it would feel like an eternity waiting for the bullet to penetrate the skull alone.
That he could not do. Not even when Ty Larkin had unfolded the document in question from his pocket, the paper fresh from the laser printer in his office.
Mullavey glanced it over once, groaned, and immediately ran it through the shredder.
“I’ll make a call,” whispering but not meaning to. A victim of a voice as weak as a buckled knee. “Tyson? You tell me, now, how this has come to be.”
And with great shame, Ty Larkin explained what must have happened. With a great aversion to meeting Mullavey’s eyes. Silence, the office as chilly as a funeral parlor.
Then, “Maybe — maybe he’ll ignore it, maybe, ummm, I was reading too much in his voice, I think that’s possible, that’s entirely possible…”
And Mullavey had sat there, elbows on the desk, his face feeling loose and heavy. As if his splayed fingers were the only thing to keep his cheeks in place. Listening to Larkin attempt to convince himself of an optimistic outcome, sweating so much you could take the boy’s shirt collar and wring it.
“He wouldn’t report this,” Larkin said hopefully, shuffling feet on the carpet. “Would he? You don’t think…?”
All at once Larkin drew himself together with a composure that bordered on the eerie. As if knowing that the best way out of his role as coconspirator in the Caribe poisonings was to confess. Corroborate whatever story Leonard Greenwald might come forth with. Or be the first, possibly? It was all there in a second’s flicker of his eyes, then gone, hidden. But the telltale eyes had spoken, betraying the traitor heart.
“I’ll take care of it,” Mullavey had said. Reaching for the phone. “Go home. It’s not your problem anymore.”
Ty’s footsteps receded down the hallway. Irregular, starting and stopping, as if every few paces he paused to eavesdrop. He was a nervous man and had every right to be, and damn him for his carelessness in the first place. Mullavey
gave him a full minute to vacate and get out of earshot.
The telephone. The number for Charbonneau’s, Nathan’s private line. It was still prime dinnertime, and Mullavey had Nathan’s undivided attention in moments. Nathan called back minutes later from a pay phone, his being the more likely to be tapped. They both hated discussing topics like this on the phone at all — you could never be wholly guaranteed privacy — but in emergencies like this, you gambled. Mullavey explained all. Then:
“How quickly can you put Eel on this?” Mullavey asked.
“Immediately.”
“This distance, he’ll have to take care of Greenwald himself, you understand. Better have him delegate Ty to someone else, and right the hell now. He’s scared enough, I think he’s ready to cozy up to anybody who’ll offer him anything that sounds remotely like immunity.”
Nathan made a small grunt of sympathy. “What about getting those files back? You can’t just have them lying around loose down there.”
“I’ve got an idea for that, I’ll take care of it.”
“Should I do anything about the other guy from the agency you had flown up? Greenwald’s partner?”
“Justin Gray.” Mullavey notched the phone between ear and shoulder, began rummaging through desk drawers. Antacids, anything. Something had to surface. “Couldn’t get what Eel needs that weekend, not from Gray. He was a peculiar one, Nathan. Turned down that whore, and she couldn’t even catch him asleep.”
“We’d have to send somebody down, then. Or contract it.”
“And that’d look bad, either way, him right after Greenwald like that. If we do him too, where do we stop in that agency? Everybody who worked on the account?”
“You think Greenwald would even talk to any of them?”
“I don’t know.” Mullavey sighed into the phone. “Just make sure Eel doesn’t give him a chance.”
This was how the Nazis must have felt, those who had survived the war to witness spectacles such as the Nuremberg trials. Those who had overseen and implemented the processing facilities at Auschwitz, Treblinka, elsewhere. They had their excuses.
Just following orders.
To hell with this, hell with Mullavey Foods, A. J. Mullavey himself, that one-time Haitian dignitary and his money, to hell with it all. It wasn’t worth doing a stretch in prison, and given the way the feds felt about cyanide in foodstuffs, for sure Ty Larkin would be counting his time in increments of decades.
Unless, of course, he cooperated. Unless he armed himself with documentation and made the first move, showed up someplace characterized by a lot of uniforms, saying, “You’re not going to believe what I’ve got to tell you…” Oh, but they would, wouldn’t they? He would make somebody’s career in the state’s attorney’s office, though he wouldn’t do it lightly. No. Federal Witness Relocation and immunity from prosecution, for these he would hold out — but once guaranteed, he would work and play well with others to a degree they would find astounding.
They would grant him these concessions. Because what had he done, really? Nothing more than he’d been doing for years. The procurement of information on a competitor. Had he brainwashed an immigrant? Supplied him with poison for his workplace? Had he even come up with this scheme in the first place? None of it. Larkin had, at most, been guilty of a breach of ethics.
Every edge in business was market share gained. And in the six years he’d worked for Mullavey Foods, he had cultivated numerous sources of expertise in the acquisition of marketing and manufacturing plans of competitors. From on-premises industrial espionage to penetration of computer systems. In the case of Caribe Coffee Bags, Carrefour Imports’ computer files had been electronically pilfered to learn the planned packaging days for the almond-flavored coffee.
What Mullavey and the others did with that information was their own business. Surely, to nail them, federal prosecutors would be willing to let the simple messenger go free. Any sort of profit-together/hang-together outlook was strictly an anachronism, and not in Ty Larkin’s best interests at all.
His office was a floor below Mullavey’s aerie of and the boardrooms, and he came down directly after dropping the bombshell news on his boss. Larkin locked himself in, did not turn on the light; softly drew the draperies — he could be seen from other towers. What a target his back must have presented every time he sat at that desk. One clear shot across the urban canyon was all it would take.
And in the darkened office, he sat bathed in the soft, surreal unlight from his computer monitor. Fingers on keyboard, a nimble dance of salvage, and the first thing he did was activate his lockout software, keep whatever he did between himself and this terminal. No one elsewhere, linked via the mainframe — no one, say, a floor above — could take an electronic peek at what he might be doing.
He called up the data stolen from Carrefour Imports, started to shuffle through these electronic files, then decided forget it, he would take them all. Popping blank after blank into the disk drive, copying everything. Waiting while each filled, soft arrhythmic hum of data etching itself into portable form.
The strangest of commodities, information. It was completely amoral, caring neither who possessed it nor used it, nor to what purposes. It simply was. Power, just waiting for a hand to come along and wield it.
He shut down when he had everything, turned off the computer and realized he would likely never again feel its button click beneath his fingers. Everything in this office, desk, chair worn to his precise body contours … it all had to be jettisoned. A stateroom on a sinking ship; look at it that way and he felt better, because others he would be leaving to drown.
Larkin slipped the handful of disks into the pocket of his long topcoat, then moved to the door. Listening, breath held at bay, and if only his heart might not give him away.
Late midweek evening; while the offices weren’t entirely deserted, the ranks were few. Overachievers logging desk time, sales reps planning for the next day’s forays. Deserted hallways, though, and lobby areas lying fallow, receptionists and secretaries long gone, and for the time being, Larkin envied them their lives of mundane simplicity. To worry about nothing more than making ends meet, or some kid’s crooked teeth, sounded highly appealing.
With the slow care of raising a coffin lid, he unlocked and opened his office door. One dilated eye to the widening crack — anybody there? — and he saw no one.
Larkin decided to forsake the elevator in favor of the stairs.
Fifteen floors, but downhill all the way. He’d been meaning to get more exercise in his life as it was. Dissembling now, even to himself, and of course he recognized this for the blind rationalization it was. But logic held: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, hah hah.
And just what had been meant by that peculiar dim gleam of disappointment in Mullavey’s eye, whose existence Larkin was trying so hard to convince himself had been imagination?
Leather soles in the stairwell, his heels and their crisp clicks on concrete steps, the cold rough glide of handrail under his palm. The spiral descent, and with every floor that passed he found himself getting weaker in the knee.
Stupid, stupid man. He was utterly alone.
Mullavey would simply want to keep an eye on him, that was all. It was Leonard Greenwald who had the real problem, now wasn’t it? Greenwald was the one walking around privy to something he was never supposed to know. Larkin’s own fault, but what was done was done. And if he was planning this defection out of self-interest, it was still the proper thing to do.
He was winded by the time the stairwell’s bottom door emptied him into the parking garage. Low gray overhang, like a smooth cave roof overhead. A humid acid bath of earlier exhaust lingering for tender lungs; the distant rebound of squeaking tires, never as close as they sounded.
And why was he hurrying for his car all of a sudden?
His footsteps seemed to multiply, clicking along after him like phantom runners. The hundred-yard dash for truth, justice, and th
e Witness Protection Program, and all of a sudden he was lighter and swifter than he had ever felt upon leaving work. Of course, his briefcase was still in his office: For once he was unencumbered, unless he were to count conscience and soul. But these were trifles.
The idea came as soon as he saw the kid through the tinted window of the limousine. Mullavey’s car, backed into its labeled space; his driver killing time, bored. Napoleon something-or-other.
If anybody were to be looking for Ty Larkin leaving this place — purely a hypothetical conjecture — no doubt they would be looking for him behind the wheel of his Audi. Not so, in Mullavey’s car. This reeked of brilliance.
Larkin quick-stepped over, was about to rap a knuckle against the window, wake Napoleon out of his head-back, eyes-closed slump when the kid seemed to sense him there. Straightening in a fingersnap. He smiled broadly, and the window lowered in a smooth purr.
“Yah, Mr. Larkin!” His hand reached to lower the volume of the tape he had been playing and cut the reggae by two-thirds. “How you—”
Larkin cut him off as quick as the fall of a cleaver. “Mr. Mullavey’s loaned you to me for a half-hour. I’ve got a dead battery.”
“He’s said nothing to me.” Napoleon’s tone was apologetic, and Ty wanted to slap the kid into compliance. Napoleon’s hand dropped for the cell phone cradled above the bulge of the transmission. “I’ll call him, won’t take thirty seconds, and then we’re out of here, hey?”
Larkin blinked one eye furiously, in its corner a stinging ball of sweat. “No, no, where’s your head? He’s here this late, you think he’s got time to bother with some piddlyshit thing like this?” Angry swipe at that stubborn eye, and how little good it did, his whole hand was wringing wet. “Just unlock the door.”
And he was falling apart. Cool in the boardroom, but this was far beyond his league, and now, finally, he could actually feel remorse for the dead.
