HardScape (19 page)

Chapter 17

As luck would have it, my first legitimate customers in a month knocked on the office door just as I was locking up to dress for dinner with the Longs. What I saw through the glass made me invite them in: a prosperous-looking late-thirtysomething couple driving a top-of-the-line Volvo with New York plates. They were for real, the fabled dream-house hunters who had kept their high-paying jobs and were ready to go bargain hunting, checkbook in hand.

We discussed what they were looking for and I recommended the Tilden place. I showed them the survey map and a few pictures and in minutes we were in the Olds, hightailing it out to a modest, well-maintained Civil War–era house on ten acres. The stolid Volvo told me they were smart enough to go for the land and expand the house later.

“It's not too built up here, is it?” the husband asked. Both of them had gone gaga for Main Street.

“Well, as we like to say around Newbury, Thank God for the Indians.”

I measured the home-hunters' reaction and saw I had read them right. Nervous furrows of the brow at the hint that something untoward would be said of Native Americans.

“Burial grounds,” I went on, reassuringly. “The Housatonic Indians buried their dead in Newbury, long before we were Newbury, buried them on raised platforms so wolves wouldn't eat them. When the Feds geared up to drive a four-lane interstate through the heart of them, we got together to protect the Indian sites as sacred ground. The valley's narrow. Thanks to the Indians, you'll never see an interstate within twenty miles of here.”

“I'll bet this two-lane road gets jammed up on weekends.”

“Worth it,” I said. “No condos, no subdivisions to speak of, plenty of open space. Which, of course, is what brings a certain sort of person here who's looking for peace and quiet and a solid investment only two hours from New York.”

“We made it in an hour and forty.”

“You did? Wow, you must have found a shortcut. You're natives already. Now, the Tilden place starts around here.” I slowed the car. “There's a big ash on this boundary.”

“How about that stone wall?”

“No, we must have passed the tree while I was talking. We're well within the property already.”

“Who owns the land on the other side of the road?”

“That could be yours too. Mr. Tilden's selling it separately, but he'd take a fair offer, save him a fight with the zoning.”

When I was good, I was good. They didn't give me a binder, but I went off to dinner sure they would make an offer.

***

Jack Long met me at his hobnailed door in a flannel shirt and jeans. He invited me into his soaring antique-wood-paneled skylit foyer, looked me in the eye, shook hands, recalled the land trust meeting, and apologized for not wearing a jacket and tie, as he so rarely got a chance to shed his business clothes.

I apologized for being late. “Last-minute customer.”

No problem, said Jack. Business was business.

Alex Rose had tagged him a little overweight; actually, I thought, Long was built more along burly lines, with a firm-looking barrel of gut straining his braided leather belt. His jeans were stiff and his shirt a muted red check—your basic country-life catalog ensemble mail-ordered by the wife of a guy too busy to shop. He wore a black mustache—the bushy sort you can get away with in business when you own the company—and funny running shoes.

“Oh, take off your tie,” Rita said as she breezed in from the kitchen. “Jack won't keep one in the house.” She looked lovely, with her hair swept back in a French roll and wearing the same silvery top she had shimmied out of the night I videoed her—a choice of garment I took to mean total forgiveness for my sins and a symbol of our conspiracy against her husband.

I unknotted my tie and opened a couple of buttons, and we rolled merrily toward the living room. Jack asked what I would like to drink. I looked to see what Rita was drinking. White wine in a near-empty glass. Jack had set a red wine, similarly drained, on the coffee table. But I wanted a few moments alone with Rita, whose sparkling hostess performance could have won admission to The Actors' Studio. So I asked for a bourbon old-fashioned.

Long covered his dismay and hurried off to the kitchen, muttering doubtfully about oranges and maraschino cherries.

I took the opportunity to ask my hostess, “How are you?”

“Oh, fine.”

“This is bizarre.”

“Go with it.” She led me deeper into the living room. For one horrible moment I thought she was going to sit on the couch where we had laid poor Ron's body—or, worse, direct me to sit there. But it was gone—shipped off for cleaning or seized by the cops—and a brand new silk-covered eight-thousand-dollar Henredon was in its place.

“What does Jack think you're thinking?”

“It's never concerned him before.”

“But this is—”

“Jack! Do you need help?” she called.

From the distant kitchen came an insincere, “I'm all right, darling.”

“Excuse me, Ben. He doesn't know where anything is.”

I had been at this party before. Who hasn't discovered their hosts half in the bag and anxious to kill each other? Such struggles behind a scrim of forced gaiety go with the matrimonial territory and usually abate with the arrival of the first course. But “kill” being the operative word tonight, the subtext was extraordinary.

Jack eventually returned from the kitchen, bearing my old-fashioned with a grim smile. Rita fluttered behind him, her eyes diamond-bright. I said, “Thank you.”

Rita said, “Jack, my glass is empty.”

Jack took it, finished his in a gulp, and plowed back to the kitchen, returning with both glasses inelegantly filled to their brims. I said, “Cheers.”

“
Schlange
,” said Jack, and Rita murmured, “Cheers.”

“How's the drink?”

“Remarkable.” It tasted a little of barbecue.

“So. How's the real estate business?”

Oh, it was going to be a wonderful night. I explained to this titan of technology that things were still a little slow in the real estate business. Surprise, surprise. I answered a half-dozen real estate questions and assured him that a unique home like theirs would always command top dollar from the right buyer. And how, I wondered, were things in the electronics business?

“Gangbusters!” said Jack.

“When's it going to filter down to the rest of us?”

“Don't hold your breath.”

“Oh, Jack. Don't be such a pessimist.”

“I'm not a pessimist,” he replied evenly, gazing at some spot in the air beside her left shoulder. “But Ben here's no fool, and with his background he knows damned well what I mean. Don't you, Ben?”

I took a second hideous swallow, wondering how he had screwed up an essentially simple cocktail, and demurred. “As a former ‘master of the universe' I'm afraid we enjoyed an overblown rep.”

“But you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about efficiency.”

“Ah,” I said. “Efficiency.”

“And I know you know the price of efficiency.” He seemed determined to enlist me against Rita in this stupid conversation.

I said, “Walter Reuther knew it forty years ago: Robots make lousy consumers.”

“Exactly,” Long enthused, with a triumphant glare at Rita, who looked a little pouty. I had the weirdest feeling that they had both forgotten Ron. But I soon discovered that I was wrong about that.

Long said, “My poor partner—former partner—the guy you found—had a big problem understanding that. His father had made his bucks in the fur trade and had long ago ditched his American factories. Ron just couldn't get that the employee you pay in Hong Kong is going to spend his paycheck in Hong Kong.”

I had yet to meet a successful entrepreneur who didn't sooner or later develop a deep philosophical explanation for what was wrong with the world. Although Jack Long's understanding of the economy dovetailed with my own, I couldn't resist asking, “Are you moving your operations back to the States?”

“Damned right.”

“I wish you luck.”

“Jack's very patriotic,” said Rita. “He met the President.”

“Patriotism has nothing to do with it,” her husband fired back. “A homegrown workforce spends its salary at home. That's why I don't mind the Japanese setting up car plants here. They make jobs. But the bind is that to compete with overseas labor you have to increase productivity, which
eliminates
jobs.”

Rita yawned. Jack Long didn't notice. He was ballistic by now. “See this?” He thrust out his left hand. He wore a pinky ring next to his wedding band. It held a tiny semiconductor chip where a diamond would have been. “See this? X-ray lithography. This chip can process more data faster than an entire IBM mainframe. IBM used to operate foundries, assembly plants, paint shops, wire machines—heavy industry—to build a computer. Today they mail you more capacity in an envelope. That's jobs, mister, jobs gone to hell.”

“Speaking of which, could I have a refill?” asked Rita.

Long's gaze locked on my old-fashioned glass, still three-quarters full.

“Wine?” Rita prompted.

“Jesus!” Long leaped to his feet. “Worcestershire sauce! I put Worcestershire sauce in your drink. It's supposed to be bitters, isn't it?”

“Traditionally,” I admitted.

“Jesus, I'm sorry. Let me fix you a new one.” He snatched up my glass. “Rita, you want some wine?”

“Oh, why not?”

And off Jack went, trailed by Rita's enigmatic gaze, which swung toward me when he disappeared through the door. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you're both doing a great job of pretending nothing happened.”

“That's not so strange.”

“It isn't?”

“It's how we live. We're both busy as hell. We hardly ever see each other, and when we do we've got business to discuss. The personal stuff gets pushed in the corner, particularly if it's stuff you don't want to talk about.”

“I see.”

“I am aware, Ben, that Ron's death is a lot more serious than the usual ‘personal' stuff. But this is the pattern. This is how we deal with things. And don't deal with things.”

“Rita. Ron was killed, here. You're charged with it.”

“Do you want me to cry, right here, now?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I read you wrong.” I got up and looked out the window. There was a thick autumn haze in the valleys, deep blue in the fading light.

“Just stop judging me.”

“You're the boss.”

“Don't be snide.”

“There's deer in your meadow.”

Rita jumped up, exclaiming, and joined me at the window. “Oh, beautiful—Jack! Come in here,” she yelled. “There's deer.”

Jack, bless him, just kept making my drink, and when he brought it in it was excellent. He watched intently as I tasted it. “How is it?”

“Excellent.”

“Good. Sorry about that. I really feel like an idiot. Hey, Rita, we gonna eat, or should I shoot one of those animals?”

“Very funny. We'll eat soon. Excuse me, Ben. I've got something on the stove.”

“Brace yourself,” Jack warned me, loud enough for her to hear. “Rita's taken up cooking. When we moved in she thought the kitchen was a test lab so I could work weekends.”

“You do your own engineering?”

“I like getting my hands dirty.”

“Rita told me you designed this house.”

“Rita exaggerates. She's got this idea that I should be artistic. Ever notice women are like that? They want their men to be everything.”

“Heroes,” I agreed, shamelessly milking our moment of secret chauvinism to keep him talking. Just as we've all attended parties with our hosts pie-eyed and contentious, so are we not unfamiliar with a wife simultaneously bolstering and taming her slob husband. Often as not it's exactly what the guy needs, though in Jack's case I doubted that he needed any bolstering.

“So who did design your house?”

“Rita did. From a picture in a children's book. I ran it through some architecture software and
voilà
! Jack's an artist.”

“Did you train as an engineer?”

Long smiled into a practiced routine he probably kept ready for interviews. “I'm an E.E. from M.I.T. But now that software's the hot thing, I'm a windjammer captain of a steamship, if you know what I mean.”

“Like a bowman with a shotgun.”

Long flashed me a fast, hard, you're-messing-with-the-wrong-guy look. It lasted about one millisecond—long enough to show he meant it, too brief to escalate to a big deal, like a battleship traversing a silent battery. “Speaking of shotguns,” he said bluntly, “what's your take on this mess?”

“I think from your wife's point of view it's a damned serious mess.”

“Which aspect? The law?”

“I wouldn't want to go to trial in her position.”

“What position is that?”

“You're outsiders. You're wealthier, by far, than any jurors they'll empanel. And, rightly or wrongly, you represent a world many local people find distasteful.”

“What world?”

I thought he was overdoing the ingenuousness, so I said, “Call it the Reagan 'Eighties.”

“They voted for the faker. Big in 1980. Bigger in '84. Even elected his pet turkey in '88.”

“In '80 Reagan promised them a fantasy that Vietnam never happened. In '84 he promised them cheap mortgages. Bush promised the good times weren't over. Today they're scared they'll lose it all. They blame people like you.”

“You were part of the 'Eighties, Ben.”

“I already had my trial. Besides, new president, new times, new rules, new standards. But you and your house remind them of a past they'd rather forget.”