The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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Las Vegas - July 21, 2008
Alone at the conference table Marc-Alexandre Brandeau inhaled deeply. In a moment of thought-gathering, he dropped his arms to his sides, his eyes closed. His still-brown eyebrows and tonic skin made it seem that his grey hair was some bizarre trick of nature. He looked like a man in his prime, not past sixty. A man in his prime who took exercise.
This was the best moment. The calm afterwards. His adrenaline level was slowly starting to drop now. His buddy Boka had taught him to notice and enjoy this twenty years ago. He had been the only white man Boka had liked; the only one to go on his safaris. Boka'd created a special law allowing him to.
On the wall behind Brandeau hung the four company panels: 'Buying and Selling,' 'Investing and Finance,' 'Leasing and Management,' and 'Development and Construction.' As CEO, he'd flown the Board of Directors and the Internal Auditor here to Las Vegas on the excuse that Nevada promised to be the next real estate development site for Golden Palmetto Inc. He knew—as did his daughter Suzanne—that the Las Vegas market was in fact destined to get worse with the economic crisis at hand, but it wasn't necessary to admit as much to the other three on the Board—they were ses cochons—his pigs. Figureheads who knew how to practice petty fraud and return favors for this liberty. They owed everything to him and would go along with anything he said because, they said, he always had 'excellent reasons.' To repay such loyalty he was letting them go to it this weekend—gambling, whoring, and drinking to their hearts' content. Why not? It was all a cover anyway. Covers went with rewards—better if crass. When they were men you gave them pussy. There had been a visiting Japanese investment director once who'd been so drunkenly horny and adamant that they'd had to pressure (brow-beat and threaten) one of their secretaries into giving him a blow job. Rule of the business world. But that worked with men. Today he was worried about Martina van Buren, the internal auditor. A member of that tiny elite of older female managers, and, on top of that, long-faced (if reasonably attractive) and unsmiling (in his company, anyway), she refused to be buttered up in any way he could conceive of. Ms. Cheesehead, as Brandeau sarcastically called her on account of her Dutch heritage, was the one thorn in his side at Golden Palmetto. He was sorry he'd agreed to hire her as Senator Frank had asked. Fuck you, Frank. He'd even had to promise never to let Ms. Cheesehead know about it. Which meant he would never have the satisfaction of showing her how rotten her snowy white world really was. Because the real estate development business was just a cover for the low-rent-for-votes set-up for Senator Frank, which was in turn Brandeau's guarantee that there would be no FBI-Justice Department trouble for his well, let's just say, his 'artefacts.'
He opened his eyes. Frank was arriving at the hotel this afternoon, and he and the senator have a lot to discuss, so it was important to get this meeting started. He snapped his fingers at Fumihiro standing in the doorway with two of his thugs, the sign he should summon the others. He was confident he would be able to keep himself from strangling van Buren.
"You're in splendid form, I see, Daddy-o."
"Hello dear."
It was a pleasure to set eyes on her during these occasions. Raven-haired Suzanne, always in her 'office uniform': the high heels and the tight dress—the sort tango dancers like, with a slit on the side—for which the drooling weaklings went gaga. Suzanne was the only exception to the rule he had learned that life was not worth living as a child or a woman. Sometimes he'd had the impression that even Ms. Cheesehead was unnerved by Suzanne's appeal. His daughter knew how to let you know that, dressed or undressed, she was a strong, healthy female animal—and of course more. The complete opposite of her mother—Anne the prude...by God, meek and dull as they came except when she wanted to remind him that her father had launched him. Immediately after the wedding he'd had serious doubts about whether he could stay with her and still keep his sanity. Fortunately, one evening, still early on in their marriage, he had walked into their bedroom to find her sitting on the edge of their bed with her legs crossed, visibly squirming in her pants at the porn magazine that she'd taken from his drawer without permission. He'd pawned her clothes off and had her immediately. She'd sobbed afterwards, content-like, he thought. The next night, and then on and off again for years, he'd read bits of Juliette and Justine by the Marquis de Sade to her. She lay there under the sheets, timid and with her eyes closed, and listened to Justine the teenager being raped by the nun and Juliette in the orgy with the ferocious Charvil with a passion for killing off young men. By the third page, Anne was out of the sheets, naked and her pelvis thrusting. They'd had their kids that way. Three for the record. First son a failure—and now he was dead anyway like her; second son a rebellious runaway. The only thing Anne had done right as a mother was giving birth to the third one, to Suzanne.
"I see you have a spot on your cuff, Daddy…" Suzanne said, scratching out the brownish dot with a fingernail. Then she gave him a kiss on the forehead.
On both sides of the table, approaching in two rows their padded armchairs but too timid to sit down yet, the company's board offered him enthusiastic greetings.
"Looking great, Alex."
"Fine to see you."
And all that drivel.
At his nod, they took their places. The drooling fools had company report booklets in front of them that looked clean and untouched, whereas Van Buren's copy had been folded and refolded and annotated. Scribbling instead of knowing this is a farce and finding herself a stallion. He peered at them ceremoniously, without a word, his signature greeting, and then, clearing his throat roughly (another trademark) made some opening comments about how last year had been a satisfactory one for Golden Palmetto. This, in spite of the dollar's lower exchange rate.
"Frankly, I wasn't aware that we were buying or paying rent on property in euro or in yen," said Van Buren.
Glaring, he replied: "In spite of the weaknesses in the U.S. economy, Golden Palmetto saw an increase in its turnover and earnings. Golden Palmetto's new strategy, in fact, is designed to lead over the next three years to the successful completion of its repositioning itself on the market, by buying up struggling or smaller real estate groups, and--."
"There are figures in this report—"Martina rapped her pen on it—"that seem completely incomprehensible to me. We expect you to explain to us how, for instance, you calculated the growth-in-operating result."
The damned bitch had to get to the figures at once.
"And then there's something that I really want to know something about," she continued. "We have spent a conspicuous sum for a certain project, which is costing us too much."
She was alluding to what he to himself called the low-rent-for-votes plan. Of course he wanted to snap that he'd studied a scheme that had worked in England for a while and perfected it, but knew better not to.
"Remember, Van Buren," he said warningly, "that we have a swarm of sellers ready to sell us their homes. People who have been strangled by impossibly- high mortgage rates. We need to take advantage of this moment. It makes only good business sense to do so." He looked at his three stooges and continued, "We also happen to offer these people a good way out of an intolerable situation."
"Since when, Mr. President, has charity become one of our main objectives? The rents paid by these individuals don't cover our debts incurred for having bought up their mortgages. On top of that, we buy for cash upfront but then receive our rents in monthly instalments. These rents reap us very little. Coming back to our company, the long and short of it is that very shortly we will be obliged to start paying off the banks."
"It seems, Ms. Van Buren, you're looking to become a director."
He surveyed his cochons. Mel Podesta, the one in the group who kissed his ass best, winked at him.
"That's the furthest thing from my mind," Van Buren was saying. "This is a company that is heavily in debt. Where does it think it can find funds to cover the hole that's being created? Let me correct myself. How can it cover the hole that you, Marc-Alexandre Brandeau, are creating, now that… your African friend has died?"
The gall of this bitch.
"As majority stockholder, I have always put up my share of equity," he thundered.