A man in full, p.8
A Man in Full, page 8
Wismer Stroock was seated facing him. Between the two of them was Charlie’s pride and joy, a desktop that had been custom-made out of a slab of tupelo maple from Turpmtine Plantation and cantilevered from the G-5’s wall by stainless-steel supports. The Wiz was only thirty-two, but he had a bony neck and a bony jaw and sunken cheeks and cadaverous cheekbones from getting up every morning, every morning, before dawn and running six miles through the streets of a Dunwoody subdivision called Quail Ridge. The rectangular titanium frames of the Wiz’s eyeglasses made his eyes look like a pair of bar-code scanners. At this moment the bar-code scanners were aimed out the window, as if the Wiz were absorbed in the process of takeoff or the G-5’s distinctive white wing with its rudder-like upturned tip. In fact, Charlie could tell that his young chief financial officer was embarrassed for him and didn’t want to humiliate him any further by even so much as contemplating his face. That meant he must have really looked bad over at PlannersBanc.
The head remained in profile, but the two bar-code scanners rotated toward him for an instant, and so Charlie decided to put an end to the tension.
“Okay, Wiz, got any good ideas?” He tried to boom his voice out over the noise of the engines.
Now the Wiz looked straight at him and opened his mouth, but no words came out. Instead, he held his fingertips up to his ears, as if it was too noisy to hear, and looked away again.
So Charlie looked away, too, and tried to buck himself up by considering the glories of his surroundings, namely, the G-5 and its wonderful appurtenances. The cabin’s dozen seats were big as thrones and upholstered in the richest tan leather imaginable and placed at conspicuously wasteful intervals, like chairs in a club lounge. There were curtains and carpeting woven with Croker Global’s navy-and-gold globe logo and custom-made consoles with the logo carved on the doors in relief so deep people couldn’t resist running their fingers over it. There were SkyWatch screens they could see from any seat they sat in … as a tiny white airplane shape moved across an electronic map and showed them precisely where they were flying, anywhere in the world.
But what really got them was Charlie’s desktop. It had been fashioned from a single slab of wood, four or five inches thick, cut from the knee of a black tupelo maple tree from Jookers Swamp at Turpmtine, the knee being the part of the tree that swelled out just above the waterline. The desk retained the irregular shape and rugged edge of the slab as it was originally cut, although it was all highly polished and the top was like glass, with the burled swirls of the grain creating an extraordinary design. The desk was actually the brainchild of Ronald Vine, the decorator Serena had insisted he bring down to Atlanta from New York to do the G-5’s interior; but Charlie loved that desk so much, there were days when he believed the original idea, the germ of the inspiration, must have been his. He loved it so much, he had had Ronald—Charlie had actually grown to admire and enjoy the guy—make a much larger version of it as a dining table for the new hunting lodge at Turpmtine, the Gun House, that Ronald had designed and built last year … at a cost (to Croker Global Foods) of $3.6 million by the time it was all over. Ronald had also paneled the bulkheads of the G-5 with tupelo maple. It was lighter and warmer and livelier than the usual stiff-necked mahogany. On the bulkhead facing Charlie, the one right behind the Wiz’s seat, Ronald had affixed the ornate gold frame of the greatest work of art in the history of the world, so far as Charlie Croker was concerned, and Charlie was staring at it right now.
It was a painting by N. C. Wyeth of Jim Bowie rising up from his deathbed to fight the Mexicans at the Alamo. Wyeth had done it in reds, oranges, tans, blacks, and whites as the frontispiece for Lone Star, a child’s history of Texas that was the only book, the only book, Charlie could remember his father and mother ever possessing. The day in 1986 when he bought that painting, the one he was staring at right now, for $190,000 at an auction at Sotheby’s up in New York City had been one of the happiest days of his entire life.
And this was already one of the worst days of his entire life, and it was only twelve noon. Humiliation … well, let’s face facts. The whole thing had been humiliating, from start to finish. That sonofabitch Zell or Zale, or whatever his name was, the smart guy with the big chin, had humiliated him in a whole room full of people, including eleven of his own people, from his own office. He had given him the finger! He had called him a prick! He had compared him to some drunk fool peeing in the street during Freaknik! And he had had to grit his teeth and take it!
On the way out, gimping along on his bad knee like an old man, he had annihilated this Zell or Zale four or five times. On the elevator going down he had thrown both hands up toward the sonofabitch’s face in a feint, and when the sonofabitch had lifted his own hands in defense, he had grabbed him around the waist in a bear hug and squeezed with every ounce of the strength of his mighty arms and his massive back—I’ve got a back like a Jersey bull—until the sonofabitch’s backbone cracked and he started whimpering for mercy—
Lost four fingers in the war, did you, you pansy, you cow, you gladiola! Now how about a little joke about losing your very life—
Between PlannersBanc’s marble mausoleum of a lobby and his car, which was in the tower’s parking garage, he had destroyed the sonofabitch three or four more times in various ways, until he ran out of ideas for committing homicide with his bare hands; and truly, if the sonofabitch had been so unwise as to turn up at that moment, something violent surely would have taken place.
As soon as he and Wismer Stroock reached the car, Charlie had decided not to go back to the office and, instead, told the Wiz to get on the telephone and call the office and have Marguerite get hold of Lud and Jimmy and Gwenette and have them get the Gulfstream ready to fly to Turpmtine immediately and call Durwood to pick them up at the landing strip and have lunch ready in the Gun House. He wanted to get away to someplace quiet to work out a little strategy with the Wiz. Or that was what he told the Wiz—and, for that matter, himself. He insisted on doing the driving out to PDK himself, even though it hurt his knee just to press his foot on the gas pedal. He didn’t want the Wiz—or himself—to think he was a totally helpless case. On the way out on the Buford Highway, heading for PDK, he put the car on cruise control as much as he could. His knee hurt that much.
And so now, as the aircraft roared and strained to gain altitude, Charlie concentrated on the painting of Jim Bowie and tried to draw strength from it, as he had so many times before in moments of stress. The knee was aching so goddamned much—oh, he was like a lot of old football players … It had been great and glorious stuff, playing football for Tech, for the Ramblin’ Wreck back in the fifties and early sixties … and now he was a worn-out arthritic wreck himself … But that wouldn’t have stopped a Jim Bowie. In the painting, Bowie, who was already dying, lay on a bed with a cheap metal bedstead, an old-fashioned infirmary bed. He had propped himself up on one elbow. With his other hand he was brandishing his famous Bowie knife at a bunch of Mexican soldiers who had burst into the room with rifles and bayonets and were heading for him. It was the way Bowie’s big neck and his jaw jutted out toward the Mexicans and the way his eyes blazed, defiant to the end, that made it a great painting. Never say die, even when you’re dying, was what that painting said. Charlie always wished he could have met N. C. Wyeth and shaken his hand. He stared at the indomitable Bowie and waited for an infusion of courage. Instead, he felt some sort of disturbing electrical field forming beneath his sternum, around his heart. For an instant he didn’t know what it was—but then he did. Its name was panic.
The ship had taken off to the northeast, and the two pilots, Lud Harnsbarger, the captain, and Jimmy Kite, the co-pilot, were executing a big lazy turn to the northwest in order to head back south for the trip down to Turpmtine. Gwenette, the stewardess, must have already gotten up from her seat in the rear, because Charlie heard a refrigerator cabinet or the microwave, or something, slam shut back in the galley. Gwenette probably figured she ought to move fast, since it didn’t take much more than thirty minutes’ flying time to reach the plantation.
In the distance the sun was exploding off the towers of Downtown and Midtown Atlanta and the commercial swath on the eastern side of Buckhead. Charlie knew them all by sight. He knew them not by the names of their architects—what were architects but neurotic and “artistic” hired help?—but by the names of their developers. There was John Portman’s seventy-story glass cylinder, the Westin Peachtree Plaza, flashing in the sun. (Portman was smart; he was his own architect.) There was Tom Cousins’s twin-towered 191 Peachtree. There was Blaine Kelley’s Promenade Two, with all the little neon fins on top. There was Lars Gunsteldt’s GLG Grande Tower. There was Charlie’s own Phoenix Center; and, over there, his MossCo Tower; and over there, his TransEx Palladium. (Palladium! What an innocent time the 1980s had been!) There was Mack Taylor and Harvey Mathis’s Buckhead Plaza. There was Charlie Ackerman’s Tower Place. Downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead were like islands rising from an ocean of trees. Many was the time that the view from up here in the G-5, looking down upon the towers and the trees, had filled him with an inexpressible joy. I did that! That’s my handiwork! I’m one of the giants who built this city! I’m a star! Total strangers used to say hello to him in restaurants, in malls, at sports events, with a certain glistening look in their eyes, because they knew he was … the fabled Charlie Croker!—which made it all the more unbelievable, this thing that had just happened at PlannersBanc … Saddlebags! Such contempt!
He looked away from the buildings and out over the ocean of trees. Since Atlanta was not a port city and was, in fact, far inland, the trees stretched on in every direction. They were Atlanta’s greatest natural resource, those trees were. People loved to live beneath them. Fewer than 400,000 people lived within the Atlanta city limits, and almost three-quarters of them were black; if anything, over the past decade Atlanta’s population had declined slightly. But for the past thirty years all sorts of people, most of them white, had been moving in beneath those trees, into all those delightful, leafy, rolling rural communities that surrounded the city proper. By the hundreds of thousands they had come, from all over Georgia, all over the South, all over America, all over the world, into those subdivided hills and downs and glens and glades beneath the trees, until the population of Greater Atlanta was now more than 3.5 million, and they were still pouring in. How fabulous the building booms had been! As the G-5 banked, Charlie looked down … There was Spaghetti Junction, as it was known, where Highways 85 and 285 came together in a tangle of fourteen gigantic curving concrete-and-asphalt ramps and twelve overpasses … And now he could see Perimeter Center, where Georgia 400 crossed 285. Mack Taylor and Harvey Mathis had built an office park called Perimeter Center out among all those trees, which had been considered a very risky venture at the time, because it was so far from Downtown; and now Perimeter Center was the nucleus around which an entire edge city, known by that very name, Perimeter Center, had grown. Taylor and Mathis had proved to be geniuses.
Edge city … Charlie closed his eyes and wished he’d never heard of the damn term. He wasn’t much of a reader, but back in 1991 Lucky Putney, another developer, had given him a copy of a book called Edge City by somebody named Joel Garreau. He had opened it up and glanced at it—and couldn’t put it down, even though it was 500 pages long. He had experienced the Aha! phenomenon. The book put into words something he and other developers had felt, instinctively, for quite a while: namely, that from now on, the growth of American cities was going to take place not in the heart of the metropolis, not in the old Downtown or Midtown, but out on the edges, in vast commercial clusters served by highways. The commercial part of Buckhead, which not so long ago had seemed like the suburbs, was precisely that: an edge city, Atlanta’s first. Then came Perimeter Center. Then Don Childress developed the Galleria out where Highways 75 and 285 crossed, and Frank Carter developed the Cumberland Mall, and another edge city grew up around them. All the edge cities were north of Downtown and Midtown Atlanta, and they were being built deeper and deeper into the immense ocean of trees. Already a new edge city was forming around Spaghetti Junction and another one northeast of there, out in Gwinnett County, known as the Gwinnett Place Mall. Already Forsyth County, farther north still, had turned from a sleepy Redneck Redman Chewing Tobacco rural outback into Subdivision Heaven, and one of the three fastest-growing counties in the United States. Bango! Charlie had envisioned a new edge city, due west of Forsyth and north of the Galleria, in Cherokee County. It would be an edge city bearing his name: Croker.
Did he dare open his eyes and look down? He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself. Just as he feared, the G-5 was in the perfect spot for an aerial view of Croker Concourse. There it was, the tower, the mall, the cineplex, the hotel-and-apartment complex, the immense swath of asphalt (conspicuously empty) for parking—a preposterously lonely island sticking up out of that ocean of trees. Croker’s folly! Had to leapfrog the future, didn’t you, Charlie! A few years down the line somebody would make a fortune off what he had put together there, once the outer perimeter highway was built, but for now—too far north, too far from the old city, Atlanta itself. For now—
Saddlebags! His shirt felt sopping wet against his skin all over again, and his eyes, although he tried to avert them, stayed fixed upon Croker Concourse. Had to build a tower, didn’t he … had to take the name Croker soaring up forty stories into the sky … with a dome to top it all off. You couldn’t very well miss it, the dome, out in its splendid leafy loneliness … The dome contained a planetarium and housed the Cosmos Club. Atlanta was big on private dining clubs in fancy high-rises, but there had never been one quite like this one. Into the club’s domed ceiling he had put a state-of-the-art astronomical light-show apparatus developed by the Henry Beuhl, Jr., observatory at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh … Croker Global … Croker of the Cosmos … He had sunk $8.5 million into the thing, but it had turned out that nobody wanted to drive all the way out to Cherokee County for lunch and look up at a bunch of fake stars twinkling in the blackness of space while they ate their grilled yellowfin tuna on a bed of kale and Moroccan couscous or whatever it was GreaterAtlanta yuppies ate for lunch. The Cosmos Club had been a hideously expensive bomb. Cosmos Club … cosmic pinnacle of the great Croker Concourse … And there it was, right down there …
When the G-5 finally completed its turn and cleared the city and headed south over the green woods and farmlands of the Georgia Piedmont, he wasn’t sorry. There was no more joy in looking down at Atlanta and its edge cities. Saddlebags! That they would have the gall, the temerity, the audacity to treat him, Charlie Croker, with such—such—such—
Wismer Stroock was no longer looking out the window but straight at him, through his titanium frames. Charlie sighed and gave him a resigned smile, as if to say, “You know what’s going through my mind, and I know you know it.” And then, aloud:
“Like I was saying, Wiz, got any good ideas?”
Thanks to the G-5’s exquisitely muffled engines, a soft surf of sound, nothing more, enveloped the aircraft. The Wiz didn’t even have to raise his voice. When he became intense, his voice didn’t go up; instead, a ditch formed down the middle of the forehead of his gaunt face. Wismer Stroock was of the new breed of financial officers who came out of the business schools. Technogeeks was what Charlie called them. But the Wiz could “run the numbers” and he was a genius at the “cross-functional integration” of the different divisions of the Croker Global Corporation—two expressions he used all the time—and Charlie had become highly dependent on him.
“Good ideas vis-à-vis who, Charlie? Or vis-à-vis what?”
That was another thing Wiz said all the time, “vis-à-vis.” You never could figure out why.
“How do I deal with these people?” said Charlie. “How do I approach them? Before, there was always Sycamore, who was a reasonable human being. But these people …” He gave his hands a little upward toss. “When I think of all the money we spent on Sycamore, all the times we flew him to Turpmtine on this goddamned airplane, all the ball games, that weekend in Augusta, all the dinners we treated him to … him and Peepgass, for that matter. Peepgass—” He decided not to finish the sentence. He grew silent.
“I’m afraid that’s a sunk cost, Charlie,” said Wismer Stroock. “At this point the whole paradigm has shifted.”
Charlie started to remonstrate. Most of the Wiz’s lingo he could put up with, even a “sunk cost.” But this word paradigm absolutely drove him up the wall, so much so that he had complained to the Wiz about it. The damned word meant nothing at all, near as he could make out, and yet it was always “shifting,” whatever it was. In fact, that was the only thing the “paradigm” ever seemed to do. It only shifted. But he didn’t have the energy for another discussion with Wismer Stroock about technogeekspeak. So all he said was:
“Okay, the paradigm has shifted. Which means what?”
“Except for Peepgass,” said the Wiz, “those were the bank’s workout people, Charlie. Peepgass is a loan officer, and Sycamore was in marketing. In marketing they’re incentivized to think of charm and customer satisfaction as value-adding strategies, but not in the workout department. What we’re dealing with now is a division of the bank that has a very narrow niche focus.”
Niche focus? But he got the drift of it.
“At the end of the day they know they’re going to be judged by only one thing: how much money they recover for the bank. Their orientation is post-goodwill. Down in Texas after the oil crash and all the bankruptcies, the workout people the banks sent in were so niche-focused on that one thing, they started getting death threats. They’d call them up at their hotels in the middle of the night and threaten to execute them.”
A tired smile. “Do any good? Worth trying?”
“I don’t think it was a value-creating exercise,” said the Wiz.
