Paranoia (23 page)

In fact, Domicile was delivering all the furniture when the doorman, Carlos, called up to me to tell me that I had a visitor downstairs, a Mister Seth Marcus. I told him to send Seth right up.

The front door was already open for the delivery people, but Seth rang the doorbell and stood there in the hall. He was wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt and ripped Diesel jeans. His normally lively, even manic, brown eyes looked dead. He was subdued—I couldn’t tell if he was intimidated, or jealous, or pissed off that I’d disappeared from his radar screen, or some combination of all three.

“Hey, man,” he said. “I tracked you down.”

“Hey, man,” I said, and gave him a hug. “Welcome to my humble abode.” I didn’t know what else to say. For some reason I was embarrassed. I didn’t want him to see the place.

He stayed where he was in the hall. “You weren’t going to tell me you were moving?”

“It kind of happened suddenly,” I said. “I was going to call you.”

He pulled a bottle of cheap New York State champagne from his canvas bicycle-courier bag, handed it to me. “I’m here to celebrate. I figured you were too good for a case of beer anymore.”

“Excellent!” I said, taking the bottle and ignoring the dig. “Come on in.”

“You dog. This is great,” he said in a flat, unenthusiastic voice. “Huge, huh?”

“Two thousand square feet. Check it out.” I gave him the tour. He said funny-cutting stuff like “If that’s a library, don’t you need to have books?” and “Now all you need to furnish the bedroom is a babe.” He said my apartment was “sick” and “ill,” which was his pseudogangsta way of saying he liked it.

He helped me take the plastic wrap and tape off one of the enormous couches so we could sit on it. The couch had been placed in the middle of the living room, sort of floating there, facing the ocean.

“Nice,” he said, sinking in. He looked like he wanted to put his feet up on something, but they hadn’t brought in the coffee table yet, which was a good thing, because I didn’t want him putting his mud-crusted Doc Martens on it.

“You getting manicures now?” he said suspiciously.

“Once in a while,” I admitted in a small voice. I couldn’t believe he noticed a little detail like my fingernails. Jesus. “Gotta look like an executive, you know.”

“What’s with the haircut? Seriously.”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you think it’s, I don’t know, sort of fruity?”

“Fruity?”

“Like all fancy looking. You putting shit in your hair, like gel or mousse or something?”

“A little gel,” I said defensively. “What about it?”

He squinted, shook his head. “You got cologne on?”

I wanted to change the subject. “I thought you worked tonight,” I said.

“Oh, you mean the bartending gig? Nah, I quit that. It turned out to be totally bogus.”

“Seemed like a cool place.”

“Not if you work there, man. They treat you like you’re a fucking
waiter.
”

I almost burst out laughing.

“I got a much better gig,” he said. “I’m on the ‘mobile energy team’ for Red Bull. They give you this cool car to drive around in, and you basically hand out samples and talk to people and shit. Hours are totally flexible. I can do it after the paralegal gig.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Totally. Gives me plenty of free time to work on my corporate anthem.”

“Corporate anthem?”

“Every big company’s got one—like, cheesy rock or rap or something.” He sang, badly: “
Trion!—Change your world!
Like that. If Trion doesn’t have one, maybe you could put in a word for me with the right guy. I bet I’d get royalties every time you guys sing it at a corporate picnic or whatever.”

“I’ll look into it,” I said. “Hey, I don’t have any glasses. I’m expecting a delivery, but it hasn’t come yet. They say the glass is mouth-blown in Italy—wonder if you can still smell the garlic.”

“Don’t worry about it. The champagne’s probably shit anyway.”

“You still working at the law firm too?”

He looked embarrassed. “It’s my only steady paycheck.”

“Hey, that’s important.”

“Believe me, man, I do as little as possible. I do just enough to keep Shapiro off my back—faxes, copies, searches, whatever—and I still have plenty of time to surf the Web.”

“Cool.”

“I get like twenty bucks an hour for playing Web games and burning music CDs and pretending to work.”

“Great,” I said. “You’re really getting one over on them.” It was pathetic, actually.

“You got it.”

And then I don’t know why I came out with it, but I said, “So, who do you think you’re cheating the most, them or yourself?”

Seth looked at me funny. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, you fuck around at work, you scam by, doing as little as possible—you ever ask yourself what you’re doing it for? Like, what’s the point?”

Seth’s eyes narrowed in hostility. “What’s up with you?”

“At some point you got to commit to something, you know?”

He paused. “Whatever. Hey, you want to get out of here, go somewhere? This is sort of too grown-up for me, it’s giving me hives.”

“Sure.” I’d been debating calling down to the hotel to send up a cook to make us dinner, because I thought Seth might be impressed, but then I came to my senses. It would not have been a good idea. It would have sent Seth over the edge. Relieved, I called down to the valet and asked them to bring my car around.

It was waiting for me by the time we got down there.

“That’s
yours?
” he gasped. “No fucking way.”

“Way,” I said.

His cynical, aloof composure had finally cracked. “This baby must cost like a hundred grand!”

“Less than that,” I said. “Way less. Anyway, the company leases it for me.”

He approached the Porsche slowly, awestricken, the way the apes approached the monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey,
and he stroked the gleaming Basalt Black door.

“All right, buddy,” he demanded, “what’s your scam? I want a piece of this.”

“Not a scam,” I said uncomfortably as we got in. “I sort of fell into this.”

“Oh, come on, man. This is
me
you’re talking to—Seth. Remember me? Are you selling drugs or something? Because if you are, you better cut me in.”

I laughed hollowly. As we roared away, I saw a stupid-looking car parked on the street that had to be his. A huge blue-silver-and-red can of Red Bull was mounted on top of a dinky car. A joke.

“That yours?”

“Yep. Cool, huh?” He didn’t sound so enthusiastic.

“Nice,” I said. It was ridiculous.

“You know what it cost me? Nada. I just gotta drive it around.”

“Good deal.”

He leaned back in the supple leather seat. “Sweet ride,” he said. He took a deep breath of the new-car smell. “Man, this is great. I think I want your life. Wanna trade?”

39

It was totally out of the question, of course, for me to meet again with Dr. Judith Bolton at Wyatt headquarters, where I might be seen coming or going. But now that I was hunting with the big cats, I needed an in-depth session. Wyatt insisted, and I didn’t disagree.

So I met her at a Marriott the next Saturday, in a suite set up for business meetings. They’d e-mailed me the room number to go to. She was already there when I arrived, her laptop hooked up to a video monitor. It’s funny, the lady still made me nervous. On the way I stopped for another hundred-dollar haircut, and I wore decent clothes, not my usual weekend junk.

I’d forgotten how intense she was—the ice-blue eyes, the coppery red hair, the glossy red lips and red nail polish—and how hard-looking at the same time. I gave her a firm handshake.

“You’re right on time,” she said, smiling.

I shrugged, half-smiled back to say I got it but I wasn’t really amused.

“You look good. Success seems to agree with you.”

We sat at a fancy conference table that looked like it belonged in someone’s dining room—mine, maybe—and she asked me how it was going. I filled her in, the good stuff and the bad, including about Chad and Nora.

“You’re going to have enemies,” she said. “That’s to be expected. But these are threats—you’ve left a cigarette butt smoldering in the woods, and if you don’t put them out you may have a forest fire on your hands.”

“How do I put them out?”

“We’ll talk about that. But right now I want to focus on Jock Goddard. And if you take away nothing else today, I want you to remember this: he’s
pathologically honest
.”

I couldn’t help smiling. This from the chief consigliere to Nick Wyatt, a guy so crooked he’d cheat on a prostate exam.

Her eyes flashed in annoyance, and she leaned in toward me. “I’m not making a joke. He’s singled you out not just because he likes your mind, your ideas—which of course aren’t your ideas at all—but because he finds your honesty refreshing. You speak your mind. He likes that.”

“That’s ‘pathological’?”

“Honest is practically a fetish with him. The blunter you are, the less calculating you seem, the better you’ll play.” I wondered briefly if Judith saw the irony in what she was doing—counseling me in how to pull the wool over Jock Goddard’s eyes by feigning honesty. One hundred percent synthetic honesty, no natural fibers. “If he starts to detect anything shifty or obsequious or calculating in your manner—if he thinks you’re trying to suck up or game him—he’ll cool on you fast. And once you lose that trust, you may never regain it.”

“Got it,” I said impatiently. “So from now on, no gaming the guy.”

“Sweetheart, what planet are you living on?” she shot back. “Of
course
we game the old geezer. That’s lesson two in the art of ‘managing up,’ come on. You’ll mess with his head, but you have to be supremely artful about it. Nothing obvious, nothing he’ll sniff out. The way dogs can smell fear, Goddard can smell bullshit. So you’ve got to come across as the ultimate straight shooter. You tell him the bad news other people try to sugarcoat. You show him a plan he likes—then you be the one to point out the flaws. Integrity’s a pretty scarce commodity in our world—once you figure out how to fake it, you’ll be on the good ship
Lollipop
.”

“Where I want to be,” I said dryly.

She had no time for my sarcasm. “People always
say
that nobody likes a suckup, but the truth is, the vast majority of senior managers
adore
suckups, even when they know they’re being sucked up to. It makes them feel powerful, reassures them, bolsters their fragile egos. Jock Goddard, on the other hand, has no need for it. Believe me, he thinks quite highly of himself already. He’s not blinded by need, by vanity. He’s not a Mussolini who needs to be surrounded by yes-men.” Like anyone we know? I wanted to say. “Look who he surrounds himself with—bright, quick-witted people who can be abrasive and outspoken.”

I nodded. “You’re saying he doesn’t like flattery.”

“No, I’m not saying that. Everyone likes flattery. But it’s got to feel real to him. A little story: Napoleon once went hunting in the Bois de Boulogne with Talleyrand, who desperately wanted to impress the great general. The woods were teeming with rabbits, and Napoleon was delighted when he killed fifty of them. But when he found out later that these weren’t wild rabbits—that Talleyrand had sent one of his servants to the market to buy dozens of rabbits and then set them loose in the woods—well, Napoleon was enraged. He never trusted Talleyrand again.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time Goddard invites me rabbit hunting.”

“The point
is
,” she snapped, “that when you flatter, do so
indirectly.
”

“Well, I’m not running with rabbits, Judith. More like wolves.”

“There you go. Know much about wolves?”

I sighed. “Bring it on.”

“It’s all laid bare. There’s always an Alpha male, of course, but what’s interesting to keep in mind is that the hierarchy’s always being tested. It’s highly unstable. Sometimes you’ll see the Alpha male wolf drop a fresh piece of meat on the ground right in front of the others and then move away a couple of feet and just
watch
. He’s outright
daring
the other ones to even sniff at it.”

“And if they do, they’re supper.”

“Wrong. The Alpha usually doesn’t have to do anything more than glare. Maybe posture a bit. Raise his tail and ears, snarl, make himself look big and fierce. And if a fight does break out, the Alpha will attack the least vulnerable parts of the transgressor’s body. He doesn’t want to seriously maim a member of his own pack, and certainly not kill anyone. You see, the Alpha wolf
needs
the others. Wolves are small animals, and no individual wolf is going to bring down a moose, a deer, a caribou, without help from a pack. Point is, they’re
always testing.
”

“Meaning that I’m always going to be tested.” Yeah, I didn’t need an MBA to work for Goddard. I needed a veterinary degree.

She gave me a sidelong glance. “The point, Adam, is that the testing is always subtle. But at the same time, the leader of a wolf pack wants strength on his team. That’s why occasional displays of aggression are acceptable—they demonstrate the stamina, the strength, the vitality of the entire pack. This is the importance of honesty, of
strategic candor
. When you flatter, do it subtly and indirectly, and make sure that Goddard thinks he can always get the unvarnished truth from you. Jock Goddard realizes what a lot of other CEOs don’t—that candor from his aides is vital if he’s going to know what’s going on inside his company. Because if he’s out of touch with what’s really happening, he’s history. And let me tell you something else you need to know. In every male mentor-protégé relationship there’s a father-son element, but I suspect it’s even more germane in this case. You likely remind him of his son, Elijah.”

Goddard had called me that a couple of times by mistake, I recalled. “My age?”

“Would have been. He died a couple of years ago at the age of twenty-one. Some people think that since the tragedy Goddard has never been the same, that he got a little too soft. The point is, just as you may come to idealize Goddard as the father you wish you had”—she smiled, she
knew
about my Dad somehow—“you may well remind him of the son he wishes
he
still had. You should be aware of this, because it’s something you may be able to use. And it’s something to watch out for—he may cut you some undeserved slack at times, yet at other times he may be unreasonably demanding.”