Fire Sale (11 page)

“When Jesus talks about the steward who has misused his master’s gifts, He is talking to us all. We are all His stewards, and to those whom the most is given, from them is the most expected. Heavenly Father, You have bestowed on this company, on the family who owns it, very great gifts indeed. We beseech You in Your Son’s name to help them remember they are Your stewards only. Help everyone in this vast company to remember that. Help them to use Your gifts wisely, for the betterment of all who work for them. Your Son taught us to pray ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ The success of By-Smart leaves much temptation in its path, the temptation to forget that many who labor are heavy-laden, that they will present themselves to Your Son with many, many tears for Him to wipe away. Help everyone who works here in this great company to remember the lowest in our midst, to remember they have the same divine spark, the same right to life, the same right to a just return for the fruits of their labor—”

A loud clatter startled me. Mr. Bysen had pushed himself out of his chair, shoving his walking stick so that it had bounced on the floor. One of the gray men at the table jumped to his feet and took the old man’s arm, but Bysen shook him off angrily and pointed to the stick. The man stooped for it and handed it to Bysen, who stumped toward the exit. The skillet-faced woman quickly slid the gold portfolio under her arm and followed him, catching up with him before he reached the door.

In the audience, everyone had woken up and was sitting straighter in the uncomfortable chairs. A buzz went through the room, like wind through prairie grasses. Marcena, who’d jerked awake at the commotion, nudged me and demanded to know what was going on.

I shrugged in incomprehension, watching the man who’d retrieved Bysen’s stick: he was having an angry conversation with Billy the Kid. Pastor Andrés stood with his arms crossed, looking nervous but belligerent. Billy, scarlet-faced, said something that made the older man fling his arms up in exasperation. He turned his back on Billy and told the rest of us that the service had been going on longer than usual.

“We all have meetings and other important projects to attend to, so let’s end by bowing our heads for a minute, and asking God’s blessing on us as we try to face the many challenges we encounter. As Pastor Andrés reminds us, we are all only stewards of God’s great gifts, we all carry heavy burdens, we all can use divine help on every step of our journey. Let us pray.”

I bowed my head dutifully with the rest of the room, but glanced at Aunt Jacqui from under my eyelashes. Her head was lowered, her hands were still, but she was smiling in a secretive, gloating way. Because she wanted Billy to be on the hot seat with his grandfather? Or because she enjoyed turmoil for its own sake?

We sat silently for about twenty seconds, until the gray-haired man announced “Amen,” and strode to the exit. As soon as he was gone, the rest of us burst into excited conversation.

“Who was that?” I asked the woman on my left, who was checking her cell phone as she got up to leave.

“Mr. Bysen.” She was so astonished I didn’t know that she sat back down.

“Not him. The man who finished the service just now, the one arguing with Billy the—with young Billy Bysen.”

“Oh—that’s young Mr. William. Billy’s father. I guess he wasn’t too pleased with the minister Billy brought up from the South Side. I see you’re a visitor—are you one of our suppliers?”

I smiled and shook my head. “Just an acquaintance of young Billy from South Chicago. He invited me here today. Why was Mr. Bysen so upset by Pastor Andrés’s remarks?”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Are you a journalist?”

“Nope. I coach basketball at a high school on the South Side.”

Marcena was leaning across me to listen in on the conversation, her nifty little fountain-pen recorder in her hand; at the journalism question, she gave a wolfish smile and said, “I’m just a visitor from England, so the whole thing was confusing to me. And I had trouble understanding the pastor’s accent.”

The woman nodded condescendingly. “You probably don’t get too many undocumented Mexicans in England, but we see a lot of them here. Anyone could have told young Billy that his grandfather wouldn’t enjoy hearing that kind of message, even if the pastor had delivered it in plain English.”

“Is he Mexican?” I asked. “I wasn’t sure from the accent.”

Marcena kicked my shin, meaning, they’re giving us information, don’t get their backs up.

Our informant gave a meaningless laugh. “Mexico, El Salvador, it’s all the same thing; they all come to this country thinking they have a right to a free lunch.”

A man in front of us turned around. “Oh, Buffalo Bill will get that nonsense out of Billy’s system fast enough. It’s why he sent the Kid down to South Chicago.”

“But what nonsense?” Marcena looked and sounded hopelessly ignorant; she was almost batting her eyelashes. What a pro.

“Didn’t you hear him talking about workers and the fruits of their labors?” the man said. “Sounded a lot like union organizing, and we won’t stand for that at By-Smart. Billy knows that as well as the rest of us.”

I looked to the front of the room, where Andrés was still talking to Billy. With his short, square body, he did look more like a construction worker than a minister. I suppose he could have been a union organizer: a lot of the little churches on the South Side can’t support a pastor, and the staff have to work regular jobs during the week.

But would Billy have really tried to bring an organizer into Buffalo Bill’s prayer service? The impression I’d gotten last Thursday had been that Billy loved his grandfather, that he thought only the best of him.

Billy clearly also was attached to Andrés; as the room cleared, he’d stayed next to Andrés, and his posture suggested embarrassment and apology. As I watched, the pastor put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and the two of them made their way out.

I suddenly remembered my own mission with Andrés. Calling out that I’d be back in a minute, I threaded my way through the chairs and sprinted after them, but by the time I got to the far exit they had disappeared into the maze. I ran down the hall, checking different turns, but I’d lost them.

When I got back to the meeting room, a couple of janitors were folding up the chairs, stacking them on pallets along the wall. When they’d finished with that, they opened a door and began pulling out exercise mats. A woman in leotard and tights carried in a large boom box; Aunt Jacqui, who’d disappeared when I was trying to find Andrés, came back into the room in her own exercise gear and began doing stretches that emphasized the smooth curve of her buttocks.

The man who’d told us By-Smart wouldn’t allow unions followed my amazed gaze, his own resting on Jacqui’s rear end as she bent to the floor. “Aerobics meet here next. If you and your friend want to work out, you’d be welcome to stay.”

“So By-Smart does it all,” Marcena laughed. “Prayers, push-ups, whatever employees need. How about physical sustenance? Can I get breakfast? I’m famished.”

The man put his hand in the small of her back. “Come to the cafeteria with me. We all get a little hungry on church mornings.”

As we followed our guide back through the maze, we could hear the boom box begin an insistent beat.

11

Home on the Range

“B
ut, Grandpa, I wasn’t trying—”

“In front of the entire workforce. I never thought you would have so little respect. Your sister, yes, but you, William, you I thought appreciated what I’ve spent my life building up here. I won’t have it torn down by some welfare cheat who doesn’t have the backbone to support himself and his family, so he needs to steal from me and mine.”

“Grandpa, he’s not a welfare—”

“I understand how it happened: like everyone else in the world, he saw how good-natured you are and took advantage of it. If that’s what goes on at that church, that Mount Ararat, it should change its name to Mount Error-rat, and you, my boy, should stay as far away from them as possible.”

“But, Grandpa, it really isn’t like that. It’s about the community—”

I was in the antechamber to Bysen’s office, the room where the secretaries guarded the great man’s gate. One of the inner doors wasn’t completely shut; Buffalo Bill’s bellow carried easily through the crack, as easily as it rode over young Billy’s efforts to explain himself.

The big desk in the middle of the room was empty and I was heading toward the sound of battle when someone called to me from the corner. It was a thin, colorless woman at a small metal desk, doing things on a computer, demanding my name and business in the pinched nasal of the city’s old South Side. When I said that Billy had arranged a meeting for me with his grandfather, she flicked a nervous glance from the inner office to her computer screen, but answered the phone before responding to me.

“I don’t see you in the book, miss, for having an appointment with Mr. Bysen.”

“Billy probably thought he could take me directly to his grandfather after the service.” I smiled easily: I’m not threatening, I’m a team player.

“Just a second.” She answered the phone again, putting her hand over the mouthpiece to speak to me. “You’ll have to talk to Mildred; I can’t authorize you to see Mr. Bysen without her say-so. You can sit down; she’ll be back in a minute.”

The phone kept ringing. Her eye on me, the assistant said in her prim, nasal voice, “Mr. Bysen’s office…It really was not a big serious event, but if you need to talk to Mr. Bysen, Mildred will get back to you to set up a phone meeting.”

I strolled around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. Unlike most corporate offices, there wasn’t any art to speak of, just photographs of Bysen. He was greeting the president of the United States, he was laying a cornerstone for the thousandth By-Smart emporium, he was standing next to a World War II–vintage plane. At least, I guess it was Bysen—it was some young man in a leather helmet and goggles with his hand resting on one of the engines. I gazed at him intently, straining to hear the argument in the inner office.

“Billy, there are a million sob stories and a million swindlers out there. If you’re going to take your place in this company, you’re going to have to learn how to recognize them and deal with them.”

This time the speaker was the reedy, petulant baritone who’d dismissed us from the prayer service: Mr. William, dealing sternly with his impulsive son. I looked longingly at the crack in the door, but the woman in the corner appeared primed to leap up and tackle me if I made a false move.

I wanted to go in before Marcena finished breakfast and joined me—I didn’t want her urge for an interview with Bysen to get in the way of my own agenda. And she was too skillful at getting people to notice her for me to have much hope of keeping Bysen’s attention once she’d joined us. She’d shown that again, when I left her in the cafeteria a few minutes ago—she’d persuaded the guy we’d been talking to to join her for a full cooked breakfast. Just as she had with the girls on the basketball team, Marcena understood how to make the guy (just call me Pete; I’m in procurement and whatever you want I can get it for you, hah, hah, hah) feel she was the perfect empathic listener. As they stood in front of the scrambled eggs, she had already gotten him to start talking about By-Smart’s history with union organizers. I could learn something from her about how to conduct interrogations.

I’d looked wistfully at the eggs, but picked up a carton of yogurt to eat as I hunted for Buffalo Bill’s office: not only did I want to see him alone, I also wanted to get to him while young Billy was still on the premises. I was hoping that Grandpa would have enough tenderness for his grandson to overlook the regrettable lapse made by the preacher, and I knew I’d do better with the old man if the Kid were with me.

From the sound of things, today was not going to be a good day for putting the bite on Grandpa. If a pastor preaching about fair labor practices was a welfare cheat, I hated to think what a bunch of girls who couldn’t afford their own coach would be called. However, the reedy baritone’s attack on Billy seemed to calm down the old man; I heard him rumble, “Grobian can put some backbone into Billy; that’s why he’s down in the warehouse.”

“That doesn’t make it any better, Father. If he’s so naïve that some preacher can take advantage of him, he shouldn’t be out on his own in the field,” Mr. William said.

At that point, so many voices jumped in at once that I couldn’t make out any individual sentences. Behind me, the phone kept ringing; the fracas at the service was apparently setting off seismic shocks around the company. As the assistant repeated her insistence that the sermon hadn’t been a big deal, a couple of men strode into the office.

“Mildred?” the taller, older one called.

“She’s in with Mr. Bysen, Mr. Rankin. Good morning, Mr. Roger. Do you want some coffee?”

“We’ll go on in.” The shorter, younger one, Mr. Roger, was clearly another Bysen—unlike Mr. William, he looked strikingly like Buffalo Bill: the same stocky body, the same thick eyebrows and pincer-shaped nose.

When the pair pushed open the door to the inner office, I followed them, ignoring a flustered protest from the corner. Bysen was standing in front of his desk with Billy, young Mr. William, and Mildred, the skillet-faced woman from the meeting. Another man, tall and thin like Mr. William, was with them, but the two I’d followed ignored everyone but Bysen and Billy.

“Good morning, Father. Billy, what in hell were you thinking, bringing a rabble-rouser into the prayer meeting?”

Again an attack on Billy by one of his grown sons made Bysen rise to the Kid’s defense. “It’s not as bad as all that, Roger. We’ll have to spend the morning putting out fires, is all—half the board has heard about it already. Bunch of silly old women: the stock dropped two-fifty on the rumor that we’re letting in the union.” He cuffed his grandson on the head. “Just a couple of guys with more zeal than fore-thought, that’s all. Billy says this spi—Mexican preacher isn’t a labor leader.”

Billy was bright-eyed with emotion. “Pastor Andrés only cares about the welfare of the community, Uncle Roger. They have forty percent unemployment down there, so people have to take jobs—”

“That’s neither here nor there,” William said. “Really,

Father, you let Billy get away with murder. If Roger or Gary or I did something that drove the stock down that far, you’d be—”

“Oh, it will come back up, it will come back up. Linus, you get onto the corporate communications staff? They good to go? Who is this? One of the speechwriters?”

Everyone turned to look at me: the skillet-faced woman, who was standing next to Bysen’s desk with a laptop open in front of her, the two sons, the man named Linus.

I smiled sunnily. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Morning, Billy.”

Billy’s face relaxed for the first time since his grandfather had stormed from the meeting. “Ms. War-sha-sky, I’m sorry I forgot about you. I should have waited for you after the meeting, but I wanted to escort Pastor Andrés to the parking lot. Grandpa, Father, this here is the lady I told you about.”

“So you’re the social worker down at the high school, hnnh?” Buffalo Bill lowered his head at me like a bull about to charge.

“I’m like you, Mr. Bysen: I grew up on the old South Side, but I haven’t lived there for a long time,” I said easily. “When I agreed to fill in as a basketball coach for the girls’ team, I was truly dismayed by the terrible changes in the neighborhood and at Bertha Palmer. When were you last in the school?”

“Recently enough to know that those kids expect the government to hand them everything. When I was in school, we worked for—”

“I know you did, sir: your work ethic is extraordinary, and your energy is an international byword.” He was so surprised at my riding over his harangue that he stared at me, openmouthed. “When I played on the Bertha Palmer team, the school could afford to pay a coach, it could afford to pay for our uniforms, it had a music program where my own mother taught, and boys like you got to go to college on the GI bill.”

I paused, hoping he’d make a tiny connection between his own government-funded education and the kids on the South Side, but I didn’t see a dawning light of empathy in his face. “Now the school can’t afford any of these things. Basketball is one of the things—”

“I don’t need a lecture from you or anyone, young woman, on what kids need or don’t need. I raised six of my own without any government help, hnnh, hnnh, and without any charity, hnnh, and if these kids had any spine, they’d do just like I did. Instead of littering the South Side with a bunch of babies they can’t feed, and then expecting me to buy them basketball shoes.”

I felt such an impulse to slap his face that I turned my back on him and jammed my hands into my suit jacket pocket.

“They’re really not like that, Grandpa,” Billy said behind me. “These girls work hard, they do the jobs they can get down there, at McDonald’s, or even at our store on Ninety-fifth, a lot of them work thirty hours a week to help their families besides trying to stay in school. I know if you saw them, you’d be really impressed. And they’re crazy about Ms. War-sha-sky, but she can’t stay on coaching down there.”

Crazy about me? Was that what the girls at Mt. Ararat were saying, or was this Billy’s interpretation? I turned back around.

“Billy, you keep sticking your naive nose into things you don’t know jack shit about.” The man who’d been in the room with Mr. William spoke for the first time. “Jacqui told me you had this insane idea that Father would bankroll your pet project; she says she warned you that he wouldn’t be the least bit interested, and now, on today of all days, when you’ve done your best to destroy our good name with our shareholders, you waste more valuable time by encouraging this social worker to come up here.”

“Aunt Jacqui wouldn’t even listen to Ms. War-sha-sky, Uncle Gary, so I don’t know how she can figure out whether it’s a good proposal or not. She threw her copy out without even taking one look at it.”

“It’s okay, Billy,” I said. “Do your folks understand I’m not a social worker? I’m doing volunteer work that I don’t have the skills for. Or the time. Since the government in the form of the Board of Education can’t hand the girls at Bertha Palmer the help they need, I’m hoping the private sector will pick up the slack. By-Smart is the biggest employer in the community, you have a history of helping out down there, and I’d like to encourage you to make the girls’ basketball team one of your programs. I’ll be glad to bring you down to one of our practices.”

“My own girls do volunteer work,” Bysen observed. “Good for them, good for the community. I’m sure it’s good for you, hnnh?”

“What about your sons?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“They’re too busy helping run this business.”

I smiled brightly. “My problem in a nutshell, Mr. Bysen. I own my own business, and I’m too busy running it to be an effective volunteer. Let me bring you down and show you the program. I know the high school would be thrilled if their most famous graduate came back for a visit.”

“Yes, Grandpa, you should come with me. When you meet the girls—”

“It would only encourage them to expect handouts,” Uncle Gary said. “And frankly, while we’re putting out the fire Billy created, we don’t have time for community work.”

“Can’t you shut up about that for two minutes?” Billy cried out, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “Pastor Andrés is not a labor organizer. He only worries about all the people in his congregation who can’t do stuff we take for granted, like buy shoes for their children. And they work hard, I know they do, I see them at the warehouse every day. Aunt Jacqui and Pat sit in that back room calling them names, but these people are working fifty and sixty hours a week, and we could do better by them.”

“It was a mistake to let you get so involved in that church down there, Billy,” Bysen said. “They see how good-hearted you are, so they’re playing on that, they’re telling you things about us, about the company, and about their own lives that are distortions. These people aren’t like us, they don’t believe in hard work the way we do, that’s why they depend on us for jobs. If we weren’t down in that community seeing they got a paycheck, they’d be loafing around on welfare, or gambling.”

“Which they probably do, anyway,” Mr. Roger added. “Maybe we should take Billy out of the warehouse, send him to the Westchester or Northlake store.”

“I’m not leaving South Chicago,” Billy said. “You all stand around acting like I’m nine, not nineteen, and you’re not even polite enough to talk to my guest, or offer her a chair or a cup of coffee. I don’t know what Grandma would say about that, but it’s not what she taught me all these years. All you care about is the stock price, not about the people who keep our company going. When we’re standing in front of the Judgment Seat, God won’t care about the stock price, you can count on that.”

He shoved past his grandfather and uncles and stopped briefly to shake my hand, and assure me that he would talk to me in person. “I do have a trust fund, Ms. War-sha-sky, and I really care what happens to that program.”

“You have a trust that doesn’t mature until you’re twenty-seven, and if this is how you behave we’ll make it thirty-five,” his father shouted.

“Fine. Do you think I care? I can live on my paycheck like everyone else on the South Side.” Billy stormed from the office.