Edsel (30 page)

“John.” Zed took a seat. He seemed only mildly surprised to see him, an achievement. Bugas almost never took part in conferences, poking his bowsprit beak outside the circle of home, private office, and liquid luncheons only in times of crisis. It was generally assumed that whatever repercussions Reith’s leaving might have had were settled.

Ford didn’t sit but leaned a forearm against the back of the chair left vacant for him and sipped from his glass; bourbon, if my nose could still be trusted. His big face was flushed. The effect was that of a debauched minister supporting himself on the pulpit. “Mead tells me you rounded up Crosby and Sinatra for
The Edsel Show
,” he told Zed. “Congratulations.”

“Congratulate Connie. It was his idea.” Zed seemed relieved. So it was to be a butt-patting session after all.

“We’re pre-empting Ed Sullivan October thirteenth,” I said, when the Chief looked at me. “Ed Krafve okayed the expenditure.” Krafve headed the Edsel division and had assumed some of Reith’s duties at Mercury.

“Ed’s a good man. If the Edsel flies at all it will be his doing. And yours, of course,” Ford added, taking us both in with a pontifical swing of his basketball-size head.

That
if
banged around the office for a long time, like a ricocheting bullet. Since I had joined the firm it had not been a word in the local lexicon. Zed noticed it too, flinching a little as if grazed. Ice cubes collided in his glass as he helped himself to a drink.

Ford was still talking. “Jack, what was that break-even figure for the first year?”

“Two hundred thousand units.” Bugas was watching Zed.

“What about it, Izzy? Are we going to make it?”

“No doubt about it, Hank,” Zed piped up. “Let me tell you what we’ve—”

“Please don’t call me Hank. I’ve always hated it.” Ford spoke gently.

“Oh—sure.” Confusion. “Connie and I are negotiating with NBC to buy a cowboy show, lock, stock, and gunbarrel, an old-fashioned sponsorship like on radio, every ad a spot for the Edsel. Chevrolet wants it too, but I’ve got an inside track with the producer. It’s a
color
western, imagine that, about this rancher and his three grown sons, good family stuff, only with plenty of shoot-ups for the action fan. It will be the best example of product identification since
Lux Radio Theater
.”

I worked on keeping my jaw from dropping during this spurt. He was starting to sound like a huckster. It was Ford who brought it out, Ford and his habit of leaving silences into which people around him felt compelled to pour words. The quiet years in Henry I’s shadow had been excellent training ground. Zed, whose education during the same period had been filled with campaign rhetoric and the language of diplomacy, words embroidered around meanings, was completely unprepared for so passive an assault. He was literally burying himself with his mouth.

Ford drank but didn’t speak until his cubes stopped clanking. “Well, you can leave all that with Connie. I’m sure he knows what to do.”

“I—” Belatedly, Zed seemed to have recognized the peril in talking without thinking. He shut his mouth, leaned down to set his glass on the carpet, and straightened, resting his palms on his knees. “I don’t think I understand your meaning, Hank. Chief.”

“I think you do. You’re not dense. If I thought you were I wouldn’t have hired you out from under the Dewey campaign in the first place. I have an aversion to deadwood, as Jack here can tell you. By the time that program airs, with or without Ford sponsorship, you won’t be here to see it. You’ll be home watching it in your living room. You’re out, Izzie.”

“Fired?” The political arena had trained him well. You had to have been watching him closely to spot the greenish cast behind his face, which remained immobile.

“No one fires anyone these days, you know that. They accept their resignations with regret. I’ve saved you the trouble of typing one up. It’s there on the desk. All you have to do is sign it.”

Zed went fishing. “If this is about the push-button transmission on the fifty-seven Dodge, that leak wasn’t in my department. You should be asking the boys in Design.”

“Jack?”

Bugas smiled shyly at the man opposite him. “How long did you think you could get away with it? Were you in politics so long you thought this institution would harbor a corrupt simply because he was good at his job?”

“What did you call me?”

“Shit.” Ford drained his glass, pushed off from the back of the chair, and trampled back to the bar for a refill. “I didn’t bounce that felon Bennett to put another one in his place. I’ve got better reasons than you or anyone else to hate Walter Reuther’s guts. That doesn’t mean I want to see them splattered all over the floor of the kitchen in his own house. His own house!” He bellowed the last three words. Bottles rang.

The lull that followed was a vacuum. After two beats, certainly not as many as three, Zed turned his face on me. I knew at that moment that those same spies who had told him I had been to see Reuther had been keeping tabs on me ever since. He knew what I knew at the time I knew it. I wondered then, and I wonder now, why it should have come as so much of a surprise to have it flung in his face there on Olympus. Maybe Bugas was right; maybe the year’s delay between the time I had dumped all I had learned at Bugas’ feet and the time Ford kicked it back at Zed had confirmed his belief that the company would swallow any pill, no matter how large or bitter, rather than acknowledge the corruption in its bowels.

I, in my turn, looked at John Bugas. Obviously he had told his friend and superior a highly simplified version of the story, editing out Frankie Orr in favor of Walter Reuther’s original suspicion, that someone high up in the Ford organization had authorized the attempts on his life and his brother’s in order to promote a union official whose interests coincided with Ford’s. And in that moment my general disapproval of J. Edgar Hoover lightened a shade. Small wonder that organized crime should have uncoiled its tentacles into every corner of American life, with the attention of the nation’s top cop distracted by reports filed by subordinates who chose not to take up the director’s time with details.

In answer to my look, Bugas went on smiling his shy smile and looking harmless. It wasn’t a pose; or if it was, he had held it so long he was no longer aware of doing so.

“This is absurd,” Zed broke in. “Who told you this? Minor? He’s been after my job from the beginning. This ridiculous story only proves the lengths he’ll go to in order to get it.”

Ford, at the bar, raised his eyes in my direction from the stick he was swizzling. “What about it, Connie? Do you want Izzie’s job? It pays sixty thousand.”

I hated him then almost as much as Zed. I had never at any time considered that the position would be offered me, so I had no answer ready. Ford, obviously thinking otherwise, had tossed it at me at that moment, confident I’d turn it down in the face of Zed’s accusation. And I knew then that attempted murder meant nothing twelve floors above Dearborn, beyond a bargaining chip. In a malicious flash I thought of accepting, just to see his expression change. But it was too late to start playing his game by his rules, and besides, I didn’t want the job. I wouldn’t have lasted a week in that tank of piranhas.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick with the ulcers I have.”

Ford smiled at Zed, who stood.

“I have a contract,
Hank
; and by God I’ll make you stick to it if it means five years in court.”

“I don’t think so. I’d just have to state my reasons.”

“A charge like that requires evidence.”

“Well, if you force me to defend myself in court I’ll just have to come up with some. Meanwhile you’ll be branded a murderer in every paper and broadcast in town, and probably the country. Of course, you might have enough socked away not to have to worry about working ever again. That will leave you plenty of time to worry about the union hotheads who might not be as civilized as us when it comes to dealing with past mistakes. A lot of them are pretty Old Testament.”

Without moving, Zed smoothed himself. Big and broad-shouldered in his tan double-breasted, he had looked for a moment as if he might take a swing at his tormentor. Now he seemed almost amused. “These aren’t the thirties, and you aren’t the man who built a company on a piece of machinery he put together in his backyard. Who are you to show me the door?”

Ford drank, savoring the taste of the bourbon. He was one alcoholic who truly seemed to enjoy his vice. “When you’re outside the building, which you will be in five minutes under someone else’s power if not yours, you might take a look at the sign out front. That’s my name. Those four letters say I can do anything I want.”

“It’s because I’m Jewish, isn’t it? You’re just as anti-Semitic as your grandfather.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m the opposite of my grandfather in everything that counts. I fought a war to end that shit you’re talking about. A lot of the guys I fought it with were Jews. Some of them weren’t very good Jews, as a rabbi might see it; they sneaked a ham sandwich now and then, and I doubt many of them had spent more than ten minutes with the Talmud since their bar mitzvahs. But they were better Jews than you, for all your
tchotchkes
and that black beanie. I know damn well they were better men. Don’t forget to sign that letter on your way out.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then you won’t have to sue me to start the ball rolling.”

Zed wrestled with it. Then he went over to the desk, read the letter of resignation, and snatched a silver-barreled pen from the set. “This is under duress.” He signed his name.

“It always is, Izzie.”

So far as I know, those were the last words that passed between them. Israel Zed left without another word. Three or four years later I heard he took a post as currency advisor to the military junta that deposed Juan Perón in Argentina, and died in a hotel fire in Buenos Aires. The North American obituaries were respectful.

After the door closed, Ford winked at Bugas, who nodded back. “How are things in promotion, Connie?” the Chief asked then. “Need anything?”

I hesitated. “No, sir.”

“Good. Keep us posted on this horse opera thing, will you? I’m nuts about westerns since I was a kid.”

It was a dismissal, and I took it out. From then until the day I left his employ he never referred to Zed or that meeting in my presence, and he was always politely interested in how I was getting on. Now as then my thoughts on Hank the Deuce are all mixed up with varying parts apprehension and admiration. I guess I’m not alone.

O
N
D
ECEMBER 27, 1957, ACTING ON
a discovery by a shaken ice fisherman named Dierdorf from Highland Park, police in St. Clair Shores dragged a body out from under four inches of lake ice at the foot of Liberty Street. The corpse was so badly decomposed that no immediate identification could be made, even from fingerprints, after which the laborious process began of checking the teeth against the dental records of persons reported missing within the last six months. At the end of three weeks, the remains were identified positively as those of Jerome Winstead Pierpont, a licensed private investigator with an office in Detroit and an Inkster resident whose landlady had reported his disappearance in June. Despite a flurry of press speculation when it was revealed that at the time of his demise he had been investigating the 1948 shotgun assault on Walter Reuther, nothing on the body indicated foul play, and for lack of evidence to the contrary the cause of death was listed as accidental. Pierpont was known as a man of nebulous habits who kept no notes and took off on mysterious leads without telling anyone where he was going or why. Neither his files nor his safe deposit box in the downtown office of the National Bank of Detroit contained anything vaguely sensational.

It could have been an accident. He was an old man by just about anyone’s standard—the newspapers couldn’t agree whether he was born in 1894 or 1895—and he might have had a stroke or a heart attack while walking along one of the canals and fallen in, snagging in the weeds or under a dock until the currents tore him free. His wallet was never found, so it might have been a simple mugging. But for a long time I wondered what became of the photos and documents pertaining to the Edsel that he had dangled under my nose like a piece of meat on a stick. And that opened a string of possibilities from Reuther to Carlo Ballista to John Bugas that I didn’t care to contemplate.

I couldn’t think of a good thing to say about the man, except perhaps that once he was paid to do something he never let go until either it was finished or he was. You know?

On April Fool’s Day 1958 I was jamming the last of a dozen cartons into the Citation’s capacious trunk when a car pulled into the curb behind me. It was a loading zone belonging to the furniture store down the block from the house I had been renting for two years, so I assumed the driver was a customer and didn’t bother to look.

“Taking it on the lam, eh, Minor?”

The female voice was familiar. I turned. Janet Sherman was sitting behind the wheel of a five-year-old Nash sedan, the turtleback Ambassador, built like a tank with a chromed front like the baleen of a killer whale. There were piles of rusty snow on the sidewalk, but she had the window down on the driver’s side and her short arm resting on the ledge. Wearing a red cloth coat with black tabs on the lapels and with her black hair tied back, she made me think of a figure in a hunting print.

“How do you like it?” She inclined her head toward the long hood. “It’s the first car I’ve actually owned. Paid cash for it.”

“It needs its own area code. The least Ford could have done when they laid you off was let you use the company car for a while.”

“I didn’t ask. Anyway, I wasn’t laid off. I quit. You can’t keep ’em down in the secretarial pool after they’ve seen the twelfth floor. I’m on my way back to Toledo. I’ve got an interview for a job next week. The pay’s no good, but it includes classes in engineering.”

“Congratulations.” I meant it. Awkwardly: “I’m sorry about Zed.”

She closed her eyes wistfully. Her cheeks reddened a little, but there was a stiff breeze. “He should’ve known better than to get so close to Jack Reith. You can’t make friends at that level.” That was the company line. She seemed to have decided to accept it. “What about you?”