made our compromises with you,” Lafleur said. “No more.”
That seemed to stop Blaylock for a moment. He picked up his glass and finished off his whiskey, then his face jerked and he looked at Lafleur with his dead eyes. “We've got a bid out,” he said.
“I heard.”
“If we get it you'll have to supervise. But it's on my say-so.” Blaylock reached back, grunting heavily as his thick body twisted. He pulled out a three-foot cardboard tube, then stopped, holding the tube up in the air. “Do you understand? It's my say-so. Nobody else's. Not yours, not yet, no matter how free a hand you think you want. And not Clinton U's say-so, neither.”
“U?” Lafleur said.
Blaylock gazed at him and in the gaze—in the lifeless eyes and heavily folded flaps of skin below the chin, the jaw that despite the flab of flesh looked powerful enough to shake something to death, and the bony, darkened nose and broad face formed by trouble, work, predation, and whiskey—was a steadiness, perhaps the only steadiness Blaylock knew, that of distrust. Lafleur understood. “You can call him off,” Blaylock said.
Something kept Lafleur from saying that U had tried to contact him. Instead, he said, “I don't know Clinton U.”
Blaylock kept looking, distrusting and measuring. “Maybe not,” he said. He extended the end of the tube toward Lafleur.
Lafleur took it. “Blueprints?”
“Preliminaries. Keep them.” Blaylock picked up his cigar and relit it. “We should be moving on it in a week, so get ready.”
Lafleur placed his half-empty glass on the edge of the desk and caught Blaylock eying it. He thought Blaylock was going to pick it up and finish off the whiskey, but instead he slopped a little more into his own glass from the bottle. Lafleur set the end of the tube on the floor and balanced it with his fingertips. There was a muffled thumping sound from the direction of the hallway at Lafleur's back. It was Blaylock's wife, he guessed, chopping at something on a block in the kitchen. Lafleur asked, “Who is Clinton U?”
“Another fucking lawyer.”
“Why should I know him?”
“Maybe they want you on this project.”
“Me?” Lafleur said. “Who?”
“The owners,” Blaylock said, barely moving his lips. “U represents them.”
“Why?” Lafleur said. Blaylock stared at him. Outside, the rain hissed. “Why me?” Lafleur said.
Blaylock held his blank, brute gaze. “Fuck, I don't know,” he said.
Lafleur gazed back, measuring Blaylock.
“But you can't get the whole picture, especially of what you don't know, of what's not coming into the picture, or of how much there is of what you'll never know in a damn afternoon, or in a week, or in a year. You got to break in.”
That was true enough, Lafleur thought, but it was also an evasion. “You mean you told them I might be coming on the project.”
Blaylock blinked slowly. “Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe you would.”
“Okay,” Lafleur said. “Okay,” he repeated, still not understanding. He let it lie. He turned the tube up to the light and looked at the label. It had one word printed on it—ROME. He had an absurd image of ground littered with shattered wine bottles, and hordes of cats in the shadows, torn parasols, monkeys climbing through thick vines that draped the crumbling walls of a ruin, and a blue, exotic Mediterranean sky. “A little out of the way, isn't it?”
“Oregon. Rome, Oregon,” Blaylock said. “Ever been there?”
Lafleur shrugged. “Desert.”
“Yeah.”
“It's a government project, right?”
“A prison.”
“Ah,” Lafleur said, pausing. “It's what—a county facility?”
“Hell, no,” Blaylock said. “It's a sixty-million-dollar project.”
Lafleur turned the tube in his fingers, hefting it. It was heavy. It made him a little afraid. “You've got the excavation contract?”
“No, son,” Blaylock said. “We've got the whole ball of wax.”
“Ah,” Lafleur said, startled.
Blaylock smiled and blew a thick cloud of smoke. The smoke twisted under the lamp like a snake, then spread and floated above the cat. Blaylock's head hung in the smoke above the cat, whose golden irises looked like O-rings around its pupils. Blaylock's smile deepened to a grimace. “I'm doing this for your mother and for Jewel. Not for you and not for that old fart. Don't you ever forget that.”
Lafleur stared in amazement. He set the end of the tube back onto the floor and ran his fingers lightly down to its center. Blaylock leered. His head looked disembodied as if it were hanging from the ceiling by a rope. “It's the ladies,” Blaylock said. “They suffer. God knows mine does.” He laughed eerily, then said, “Gus and me planned this expansion for three years, then he folded up just when we were ready to move. Now he's whining. Now I've got all the ducks out in the water and he wants to deal Henry in. Okay. Let's see if Henry can cut the mustard.”
Lafleur didn't speak. He revolved the tube slowly in his fingers. He was angry, but as fast as his anger grew it dissipated into a functional anger, not real, exactly. It made him feel dry. His mouth was dry with anger. His chest felt hollow with a lack of anger. He understood now why Blaylock was starving the company, why Gus was so anxious to insert his son into the company. Everything was pitched to a fundamental shift the old ones had devised. He imagined his father beside Blaylock, the one taken to the edge of death, burned clean and dry and all that remained in the shell the pure dust of his life, and the other, in fair if abused health, walking, talking, an obese, dangerous spirit. Outside, the rain hissed. The gray cat nuzzled Blaylock's chin and purred while Blaylock caressed its throat with his fingertips. Then he extended his hand across the desk. “Partners?” he said. Lafleur did not move for a moment, wondering how long he could live with anger that was not real, with emotion that was to be traded like coin, with this new kind of complicity. Blaylock leered at him again, widening his dead eyes until they looked like two fried eggs.
4
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