week. I’ll give you another call when it’s all over. Maybe we’ll go railroading in California, just like the old days. There’ll be justice yet. Trust your old man.”
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The deal for the building had been particularly sweet be-
cause of Sloat’s willingness to do things himself. After he and Sawyer had negotiated the purchase of a short-term lease,
then (after a gunfire of lawsuits) a long-term lease, they had fixed their rental rates at so much per square foot, done
the necessary alterations, and advertised for new tenants. The only holdover tenant was the Chinese restaurant on the
ground floor, dribbling in rent at about a third of what
the space was worth. Sloat had tried reasonable discussions with the Chinese, but when they saw that he was trying to talk them into paying more rent, they suddenly lost the ability to speak or understand English. Sloat’s attempts at negotiation limped along for a few days, and then he happened to see one of the kitchen help carrying a bucket of grease out through the back door of the kitchen. Feeling better already, Sloat followed the man into a dark, narrow cul-de-sac and watched
him tip the grease into a garbage can. He needed no more
than that. A day later, a chain-link fence separated the cul-de-sac from the restaurant; yet another day later, a Health Department inspector served the Chinese with a complaint and a summons. Now the kitchen help had to take all their refuse, grease included, out through the dining area and down a
chain-link dog run Sloat had constructed alongside the restaurant. Business fell off: the customers caught odd, unpleasant odors from the nearby garbage. The owners rediscovered the
English language, and volunteered to double their monthly
payment. Sloat responded with a grateful-sounding speech
that said nothing. And that night, having primed himself with three large martinis, Sloat drove from his house to the restaurant and took a baseball bat from the trunk of his car and
smashed in the long window which had once given a pleasant
view of the street but now looked out at a corridor of fencing which ended in a huddle of metal bins.
He had done those things . . . but he hadn’t exactly been Sloat when he did them.
The next morning the Chinese requested another meeting
and this time offered to quadruple their payment. “Now
you’re talking like men,” Sloat told the stony-faced Chinese.
“And I’ll tell you what! Just to prove we’re all on the same team, we’ll pay half the cost of replacing your window.”
Within nine months of Sawyer & Sloat’s taking possession
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of the building, all the rents had increased significantly and the initial cost and profit projections had begun to look wildly pessimistic. By now this building was one of Sawyer &
Sloat’s more modest ventures, but Morgan Sloat was as proud of it as of the massive new structures they had put up downtown. Just walking past the place where he’d put up the fence as he came in to work in the morning reminded him—daily—
of how much he had contributed to Sawyer & Sloat, how reasonable were his claims!
This sense of the justice of his ultimate desires kindled
within him as he spoke to Richard—after all, it was for
Richard that he wanted to take over Phil Sawyer’s share of the company. Richard was, in a sense, his immortality. His son
would be able to go to the best business schools and then pick up a law degree before he came into the company; and thus
fully armed, Richard Sloat would carry all the complex and
delicate machinery of Sawyer & Sloat into the next century.
The boy’s ridiculous ambition to become a chemist could not long survive his father’s determination to murder it—Richard was smart enough to see that what his father did was a hell of a lot more interesting, not to mention vastly more remunera-tive, than working with a test tube over a Bunsen burner. That
“research chemist” stuff would fade away pretty quickly, once the boy had a glimpse of the real world. And if Richard was concerned about being fair to Jack Sawyer, he could be made to understand that fifty thousand a year and a guaranteed college education was not only fair but magnanimous. Princely.
Who could say that Jack wanted any part of the business, anyhow, or that he would possess any talent for it?
Besides, accidents happened. Who could even say that
Jack Sawyer would live to see twenty?
“Well, it’s really a matter of getting all the papers, all the ownership stuff, finally straight,” Sloat told his son. “Lily’s been hiding out from me for too long. Her brain is strictly cottage cheese by now, take my word for it. She probably has less than a year to live. So if I don’t hump myself off to see her now that I have her pinned down, she could stall long enough to put everything into probate—or into a trust fund, and I
don’t think your friend’s momma would let me administer it.
Hey, I don’t want to bore you with my troubles. I just wanted to tell you that I won’t be home for a few days, in case you
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call. Send me a letter or something. And remember about the train, okay? We gotta do that again.”
The boy promised to write, to work hard, to not worry
about his father or Lily Cavanaugh or Jack.
And sometime when this obedient son was, say, in his sen-
ior year at Stanford or Yale, Sloat would introduce him to the Territories. Richard would be six or seven years younger than he had been himself when Phil Sawyer, cheerfully crack-brained on grass in their first little North Hollywood office, had first puzzled, then infuriated (because Sloat had been certain Phil was laughing at him), then intrigued his partner (for surely Phil was too stoned to have invented all this science-fiction crapola about another world). And when Richard saw
the Territories, that would be it—if he had not already done it by himself, they’d change his mind for him. Even a small
peek into the Territories shook your confidence in the omniscience of scientists.
Sloat ran the palm of his hand over the shiny top of his
head, then luxuriantly fingered his moustache. The sound of his son’s voice had obscurely, irrelevantly comforted him: as long as there was Richard politely coming along behind him, all was well and all was well and all manner of things was
well. It was night already in Springfield, Illinois, and in Nelson House, Thayer School, Richard Sloat was padding down a
green corridor back to his desk, perhaps thinking of the good times they’d had, and would have again, aboard Morgan’s toy train line in coastal California. He’d be asleep by the time his father’s jet punished the resistant air far above and some hundred miles farther north; but Morgan Sloat would push aside the panel over his first-class window and peer down, hoping for moonlight and a parting of the clouds.
He wanted to go home immediately—home was only thirty
minutes away from the office—so that he could change
clothes and get something to eat, maybe snort a little coke, before he had to get to the airport. But instead he had to
pound out along the freeway to the Marina: an appointment
with a client who had freaked out and was on the verge of being dumped from a picture, then a meeting with a crowd of
spoilers who claimed that a Sawyer & Sloat project just up from Marina del Rey was polluting the beach—things that
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could not be postponed. Though Sloat promised himself that
as soon as he had taken care of Lily Cavanaugh and her boy
he was going to begin dropping clients from his list—he had much bigger fish to fry now. Now there were whole worlds to broker, and his piece of the action would be no mere ten percent. Looking back on it, Sloat wasn’t sure how he had tolerated Phil Sawyer for as long as he had. His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes. Mundane as it might be in light of the stakes he now played for, he could not forget that the Sawyers owed him, all right—indigestion flowered in his chest like a heart attack at the thought of how much, and before he reached his car in the still-sunny lot beside the building, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket and fished out a crumpled package of Di-Gel.