Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

They shuffled me down another corridor. We stopped and I heard the men whispering and then an unfamiliar woman’s voice, blurting from an intercom. There was a clicking noise and the sound of a large glass door whooshing open. We entered. We turned left and then right and then they stopped me and sat me down in a chair. I felt leather soft on my palms, smelled cigar smoke.

The pillowcase came off.

A man sat against the front of a desk, his legs crossed, facing me. He leaned slightly forward, his shaved head pale as a winter moon. Smoke wafted from a cigar in an ashtray to his right.

His black T-shirt clung tight to his flat belly and muscled chest. The shirt was emblazoned with the silhouette of a woman wearing a fireman’s helmet and swinging on a pole; a logo encircling

her read, THE PUMP ROOM. SOUTHGATE. REDFORD. MOUNT CLEMENS.

The man tilted his head to the left, sizing me up. I saw the crescent scar on the side of his neck. I recognized the man who had ushered Gracie-yes, it was Gracie, I was certain now-to her seat at that Wings playoff game. And perhaps the man who had killed her, as well as the young woman in Sarnia.

Prickles of heat skittered down the back of my neck.

Michele Higgins had been right.

The man smiled and scratched his chin.

“You know,” he said, “you look like her.”

How is Mr. Ron Wallman?” Jarek Vend said.

“Fine,” I said.

Vend had introduced himself with a handshake, offered me a cigar that I declined, and, without asking, set a glass of Scotch with ice on a small table next to my armchair. Crater Face and his two partners had hovered behind me until Vend told them, “Leave us. I will call when you are needed.”

I wished he had said “if” rather than “when.”

The low lighting made it hard to see, but the office was as big as any I’d ever been in, and I had done interviews in the offices of the chief executives of every auto company in Detroit and two in Europe. Except for the twin sculptures of naked women-one marbled white, one polished bronze-standing on opposite ends of Vend’s desk, the office could have been that of anyone running a company that made designer jeans or tractor axles or cell phone accessories.

“I am sure he is doing fine,” Vend said. He paced as he spoke, slowly circling his desk, using his cigar to gesture. I noticed that when he moved to his right, he unconsciously dropped his left shoulder slightly, like a goalie might, if he was left-handed. “Fine is not good enough for me.”

As he passed the window that spanned most of one wall, I tried to peer through it to get an idea of where we were, but the vertical blinds were closed tight. He circled behind his desk and stopped at the bronze sculpture, gazing at me through eyes half hidden by his heavy lids.

“Excuse me-wouldn’t you like to write down what I say? Isn’t that why you traveled all the way down here? To hear what I have to say?”

“I don’t really know, to be honest.”

“Ah, well, an honest journalist.” He picked his own glass up and took a sip. He smacked his lips. “So refreshing. Please. Take notes. As you can see”-he laid one hand atop the sculpture-“I have nothing to hide.”

I pulled out my pen and notebook.

“Now, concerning Mr. Wallman,” he said. He spoke with a trace of a Polish accent. But his “ows” came out sounding more like “oohs,” like the Canadian he was. “Let me tell you a story. I attended a chamber of commerce luncheon, oh, a year ago, maybe two. I assume Mr. Wallman has many customers, or prospective customers, in that gathering. I see him walking through, a beer in one hand, always with the beer, shaking hands and clapping this one and that one on the back. They are all his long-lost friends.”

“That’s Wally.”

“And I see him even shaking hands and clapping on the back men and women who are also in the business of printing things-excuse me, why do you stop writing in your notebook?”

I was waiting for him to say something I cared about. “Just listening.”

“I am not going to harm you, Mr. Carpenter.”

Maybe you aren’t, I thought, but maybe Crater Face and those other guys are. “I appreciate that.”

“Good. So, Wally. As you say, he is a very good guy. He will never be a great businessman, though, because a great businessman cannot be friends with competitors. He cannot be friends with those who are trying to take bread and jam from the mouths of his children. He cannot slap them on the back and offer them a bottle of beer.”

I started to ask a question, but Vend held up a hand to stop me.

“Please. Do not patronize me with, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ ” He stuck the cigar in his teeth and talked over it. “I am well versed in the verities of the American businessman. They are lies.” As he said “lies,” his lips pulled back, baring his teeth.

He removed the cigar from his mouth, walked to my chair, and lifted one black loafer up on the arm. The mix of his cologne with the smoke smelled like black licorice.

“The true goal of capitalism is monopoly,” he said. “That is all-total control of whatever market it is you choose to enter, so that you can do with it what you wish: raise prices, hire people, give to charity, fuck beautiful women. It is not about competition. Nobody wants competition. Only in textbooks do we want competition, not here”-he pointed the cigar at the floor-“in the fierce and arbitrary world of the real. Competition is angst and worry and hoping that your competitor is not so dumb that he takes you down with him.” He stepped back and spread his arms wide. Ropes of muscle spiraled along his forearms. “I know,” he said. “A paradox.”

“Not really. Stupid can be dangerous.”

“That is correct. And wealthy plus stupid, that is the worst of all.”

He reached back and pushed something on the surface of his desk. Five television screens that were sunk into the wall above and behind him burst into brilliant life. They were all tuned to the same station. The sound was off. On each screen, the same pretty young woman talked as a glowing skein of numbers scuttled across the screen beneath her. Then her five faces disappeared and the screens filled with graphs showing how the stock price of a company identified as GX had performed that day. I had never heard of GX. Its bumpy price line stretched from the lower left corner of the screen to the upper right.

The woman’s five faces then reappeared, all of them smiling.

Vend stood facing the screens. “I digress, Mr. Carpenter. But wouldn’t you love to fuck her?” He looked over his shoulder at me, grinning like we were teammates scoping out the talent in the bleachers.

“She’s all right,” I said. “But no, actually.”

“Oh, please. You would not like to fuck her? Right there on her desk while the little numbers go past?” He laughed and laid a hand across his heart. “Is it because you have someone back home that you love with all of your heart? Is that it?”

“What is your point, Mr. Vend?”

“You are a man of unusual discipline, Mr. Carpenter. But, as I said, I digress.”

He turned back to the TVs. “The committed capitalist, Mr. Carpenter, is bound to do everything in his power to eliminate or, at the very least, incapacitate every one of his competitors. Otherwise, like your friend Mr. Wallman, he is doomed. Otherwise, he will, in time, become no better than the rest of them. Look at the auto companies, how they squandered their advantage, how they frittered it away on businesses they knew nothing about. They ignored their competitors, but their competitors did not ignore them. And so we have Detroit.”

“There is no middle ground?”