Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 17

Kendall didn't understand exactly. It couldn't be that complicated, but he was unclear on a few points.

"But the invoices won't be for anything. Won't that be obvious?"

"When's the last time Jimmy checked the invoices? He's eighty-two, for Christ sake. He's out in California taking v.i.a.g.r.a so he can bang some hooker. He's not thinking about the invoices. His mind is occupied."

"What if we get audited?"

Here Piasecki smiled. "I like how you say 'we.' That's where I come in. If we get audited, who handles that? I do. I show the I.R.S. the bills and the payments. Since our payments into the dummy company match the bills, everything looks fine. If we pay the right taxes on income, how is the I.R.S. going to complain?"

It wasn't all that complicated. Kendall wasn't used to thinking this way, not just criminally but financially, but as his executive pour went down, he saw how it could work. He looked around the bar, at the businessmen boozing, making deals.

"I'm not talking about that much," Piasecki was saying. "Jimmy's worth, like, eighty million. I'm talking maybe half a million for you, half for me. Maybe, if things go smooth, a million each. Then we shut it down, cover our tracks, and move to Bermuda."

Piasecki leaned forward and with burning, needy eyes, said, "Jimmy makes more than a million in the markets every four months. It's nothing to him."

"What if something goes wrong? I've got a family."

"And I don't? It's my family I'm thinking of. It's not like things are fair in this country. Things are unfair. Why should a smart guy like you not get a little piece of the pie? Are you scared?"

"Yes," Kendall said.

"Listen to me. I'll be honest. If we do this, you should be a little scared. Just a little. But, statistically, I'd put the chances at our getting caught at about one per cent. Maybe less."

For Kendall it was exciting, somehow, just to be having this conversation. Everything about the Coq d'Or, from the fatty appetizers to the Tin Pan Alley entertainment to the faux-Napoleonic decor, suggested it was 1926. Under the influence of the atmosphere, it seemed to Kendall that he and Piasecki were leaning conspiratorially together, foreheads almost touching. They'd seen the Mafia movies, so they knew how to do it. Kendall wanted to laugh. He'd thought this kind of thing was over. He thought that because of the rise of postmodern irony the durable street rackets and shady backroom dealing had gone out of style. But he was wrong. Kendall was so smart he was stupid. He'd figured criminality was like academia, progressive, built on one movement succeeding another. But the same scheming that had gone on eighty years ago was going on now. This was especially true in Chicago, where even the bar decor colluded to promote an underworld effect.

"I'm telling you, we could be in and out in two years," Piasecki was saying. "We do it nice and easy and leave no trail. Then we invest our money and do our part for the G.D.P."

What was an intellectual but a guy who thought? Who thought instead of did. What would it be like to do? To apply his brain to the small universe of money instead of the battle between Jefferson and the Federalists?

This made Kendall contemplate how Stephanie would view all this. He would never be able to tell her about it. He'd have to say he'd been given a raise. Simultaneous with this thought was another: renovating your kitchen wasn't a red flag. They could do the whole house without attracting attention.

In his mind he saw his fixer-upper all fixed up, a gleaming, wood-polished house, a stop on the Oak Park landmark tour, and, sliding down the bannister, into his providing, fatherly arms, Eleanor.

Wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity . . .

The full enjoyment of it . . .

"O.K., I'm in," Kendall said.

"You're in?"

"Let me think about it," Kendall said.

That was sufficient for Piasecki for now. He lifted his gla.s.s. "To Ken Lay," he said. "My hero."

"What sort of business is this you're opening?"

"It's a storage facility."

"And you're?"

"The president. Co-president."

"With Mr."-the lawyer, a squat woman with thatchlike hair, searched on the incorporation form-"with Mr. Piasecki."

"That's right," Kendall said.

It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Kendall was in downtown Oak Park, in the lawyer's meagre, diploma-showy office. Max was outside on the sidewalk, catching autumn leaves, staring up at the sky with hands outstretched.

"I could use some storage," the lawyer joked. "We've got three kids and our house is stuffed."

"We mainly do commercial storage," Kendall said. "We don't have a lot of little storage lockers but just a few big ones. Sorry."

He hadn't even seen the place, which was up in the sticks, outside Kewanee. Piasecki had driven up and leased the land. There was nothing on it but an old, weed-choked Esso station. But it had a legal address, and soon, as Midwestern Storage, a steady income.

Great Experiment, since it sold few books, had a lot of books on hand. In addition to storing them in their usual warehouse, in Schaumburg, Kendall would now send a phantom number of books up to the facility in Kewanee. Midwestern Storage would charge Great Experiment for this service, and Piasecki would send the company checks. As soon as the incorporation forms were filed, Piasecki planned to open a bank account in Midwestern Storage's name. Signatories to this account: Michael J. Piasecki and Kendall Wallis.

It was all quite elegant. Kendall and Piasecki owned a legal company. The company earned money legally, paid its taxes; the two of them split the profit and claimed it as business income on their tax returns. That the warehouse was a broken-down gas station, that it housed no books-who was ever to know?

"I just hope the old guy doesn't kick," Piasecki had said. "We've got to pray for the health of Jimmy's prostate."

When Kendall had signed the required forms, the lawyer said, "O.K., I'll file these papers for you Monday. And that's all there is to it. Congratulations, you're the proud new owner of a corporation in the state of Illinois."

Outside, Max was still whirling beneath the falling leaves.

"How many did you catch, buddy?" Kendall asked his son.

"Sixty-two!" Max shouted.

Kendall, copies of the papers tucked under his arm, looked up at the sky to watch the leaves, red and gold, spinning down toward the earth. The air smelled of autumn, of leaf raking, of the dependable and virtuous Midwest.

And now it was a Monday morning in January, start of a new week, and Kendall was on the train again, reading about America: "There is one country in the world where the great social revolution that I am speaking of seems to have nearly reached its natural limits." Kendall had a new pair of shoes on, two-tone cordovans from the Allen Edmonds store on Michigan Avenue. Otherwise, he looked the way he always did, same chinos, same shiny-elbowed corduroy jacket. n.o.body on the train would have guessed that he wasn't the mild, bookish figure he appeared to be. No one would have imagined Kendall making his weekly drop-off at the mailbox outside the all-cash building (to keep the doormen from noticing the deposit envelopes addressed to the Kewanee bank). Seeing Kendall jotting figures in his newspaper, most riders a.s.sumed he was working out a Sudoku puzzle instead of estimating potential earnings from a five-year C.D. Kendall in his editor-wear had the perfect disguise. He was like Poe's purloined letter, hiding in plain sight.

Who said he wasn't smart?

The fear had been greatest the first few weeks. Kendall would awaken at 3 a.m. with what felt like a battery cable hooked to his navel. The current surged through him, as he sweated and twitched. What if Jimmy noticed the printing, shipping, and warehouse costs for the phantom books? What if Piasecki drunkenly confessed to a Ukrainian barmaid whose brother was a cop? Kendall's mind whirled with potential mishaps and dangers. How had he got into something like this with someone like that? In their transforming bedroom, with Stephanie sleeping beside him, unaware that she was bedding down with a criminal, Kendall lay awake for hours, jittery with visions of jail time and perp walks and the loss of his children.

It got easier after a while. Fear was like any other emotion. From an initial pa.s.sionate stage, it slowly ebbed until it became routine and then barely noticeable. Plus, things had gone so well. Kendall drew up separate checks, one for the books they actually printed and another for the books he and Piasecki pretended to. On Friday, Piasecki entered these debits in his accounts against weekly income. "It looks like a profit-loss," he told Kendall. "We're actually saving Jimmy taxes. He should thank us."

"Why don't we let him in on it then?" Kendall said.

Piasecki only laughed. "Even if we did, he's so out of it he wouldn't remember."

Kendall kept to his low-profile plan, too. As the bank account of Midwestern Storage slowly grew, the same beaten-up old Volvo remained in his driveway. The money stayed away from prying eyes. It showed only inside. In the interior. Kendall said the word now. He said it every night, inspecting the work of the plasterers and carpenters and carpet installers. He was looking into additional interiors as well: the walled gardens of college-savings funds (the garden of Max, the garden of Eleanor); the inner sanctum of a sep-i.r.a And there was something else hidden away in the interior: a wife. Her name was Arabella. She was from Venezuela and spoke no English. She'd cried with true alarm upon seeing the mountain of laundry in the master bedroom for the first time. But she'd hauled it away to the bas.e.m.e.nt, load by load. Kendall and Stephanie were thrilled.

At the all-cash building, Kendall did something he hadn't done in a long time: he did his job. He finished abridging "Democracy in America" and Fed-Exed the color-coded ma.n.u.script to Jimmy in Montecito. He buried Jimmy under a flurry of new reprint proposals, writing one up every other day and shipping the nominated texts west. Instead of waiting for Jimmy to call the office, Kendall called Jimmy daily, sometimes twice a day, pestering him with questions. Just as Kendall had expected, Jimmy had at first taken his calls and then begun to complain about them and finally had told Kendall to stop bothering him with minutiae and to deal with things himself. Jimmy hardly called the office at all anymore.

Swamping Jimmy with work had been a clever idea. You could learn a lot about human nature, it turned out, from reading books.

The train deposited him at Union Station. Coming out onto Madison Street, Kendall could smell snow. There was a graininess to the air, which had itself warmed and grown windless, as it always did before a storm. Kendall took a cab (paying with untraceable cash) and had the driver let him out a block from the all-cash building. From there he trudged around the corner, looking as though he'd come on foot. With Mike, the doorman on duty, Kendall exchanged a proletarian greeting (they both worked here, after all) on his way to the gilded elevator.

The penthouse was empty. Not even a maid around. Pa.s.sing the Jade Room, Kendall stepped in to admire the lighted display cases. He pulled open a custom drawer and found a horse's head. He'd thought jade was meant to be dark green. But that wasn't so. Jimmy had told him the best jade, the most rare, was light green in color, almost white. As was this equine example. For a moment, the beauty of the thing hit Kendall with full force. A thousand years ago, an artisan had carved this horse from a single piece of jade, rendering the animal in sinuous, pythonic form. Being able to appreciate an object of this kind was what Kendall had always appreciated about himself. What had counted as true riches.

The windows of his office showed the storm moving in across the lake. In front of the building, the sky was still blue. On Kendall's desk sat "The Pocket Democracy," just back from the (real) printer. It was as small and sleek as an iPod, easily slipped into a pocket: a concealed weapon of a book. Kendall was staring at it for the hundredth time, with disquiet, when the telephone rang.

"How's the weather up there?" It was Jimmy.

"Tolstoyan," Kendall said. "Snowstorm coming in."

"You like that sort of thing, right? Invigorating."

Soon Jimmy got around to business. "The 'Pocket Democracy,'" Jimmy said. "Just got it. I love it. Nice job."

"Thank you," Kendall said.

"What do the orders look like?"

"Good, actually."

"I think it's priced right. What about getting some reviews?"

"It's difficult getting reviews for a two-hundred-year-old book."

"Well, we should do some advertising then," Jimmy said. "Send me a list of places you think would be best. Not the f.u.c.king New York Review of Books. That's preaching to the converted. I want this book to get out there."

"Let me think a little," Kendall said.

"What else was there? Oh yeah! The bookmark! That's a great idea. Let's print bookmarks with the Great Experiment quote on them. Put one in every book. Maybe we can do posters, too. We might sell some books for once."

"That's the idea," Kendall said.

"If this book does as well as I hope it will, I tell you what," Jimmy said. "I'll give you health insurance."

Kendall hesitated only an instant. "That would be great."

"I don't want to lose you, kiddo. Plus, I'll be honest. It's a headache finding someone else."

The light in the room changed, dimmed. Kendall turned to see the wall of cloud approaching the sh.o.r.eline. Snow flurries swirled against the windows.

This late generosity wasn't grounds for reappraisal and regret. Jimmy had taken his sweet time, hadn't he? And the promise was phrased in the conditional. No, let's wait and see how things turn out. If Kendall got insurance and a nice raise, then maybe he'd think about shutting Midwestern Storage down.

"Oh," Jimmy said. "One more thing."

Kendall waited, looking at the snow. It was like being in a submarine pa.s.sing through a school of fish.

"Piasecki sent me the accounts. The numbers look funny."

"What do you mean?"

"What are we doing printing thirty thousand copies of Thomas Paine?" Jimmy said. "And why are we using two printers?"

At congressional hearings, in courtrooms, the accused C.E.O.s and C.F.O.s followed one of two strategies: either they said they didn't know, or they said they didn't remember.

"I don't remember why we printed thirty thousand," Kendall said. "I'll have to check the orders. I don't know anything about the printers. Piasecki handles that. Maybe someone offered us a better deal."

"The new printer is charging us a higher rate."

Piasecki hadn't told Kendall that. Piasecki had become greedy and kept it to himself.

"Listen," Jimmy said, "send me the contact info for the new printer. And for that storage place. I'm going to have my guy out here look into this."

The smart thing was to act nonchalant. But Kendall said, "What guy?"

"My accountant. You think I'd let Piasecki operate without oversight? No way! Everything he does gets double-checked out here. If he's pulling anything, we'll find out. And then Mr. Piasecki's up s.h.i.t's creek."

Kendall sat up straighter in his desk chair, making the springs cry out.

"Listen, kiddo, I'm going to London next week," Jimmy said. "The house'll be empty. Why don't you bring your family out here for a long weekend? Get out of that cold weather."

When Kendall didn't reply, Jimmy said, "Don't worry. It's a nice house. I'll hide the p.o.r.n."

Kendall's laugh sounded false to him. He wondered if it sounded false to Jimmy. Far below, in the storm's wash cycle, a faint glimmer revealed rush-hour headlights along the Drive.

"Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Blew me away."

In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a pa.s.sage of "Democracy in America." It was the pa.s.sage they were putting on the bookmarks. Out in Montecito, bald, liver-spotted, in a tank top and shorts probably, the old libertine and libertarian crowed out his favorite lines: "In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man," Jimmy read, "and it was there, for the first time, that theories. .h.i.therto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past."

Snow pummelled the gla.s.s. The lakefront was obscured, the water too. Kendall was enclosed in a dark s.p.a.ce high above a city rising from a coast engulfed in darkness.

"That f.u.c.king kills me," Jimmy said. "Every time."

Richard Ford.

UNDER THE RADAR.

On the drive over to the Nicholsons' for dinner-their first in some time-Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he-Steven-would not be mad about it and could go on with life.

At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.

Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car-a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights-off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp gra.s.sy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.

They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twenty-eight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren't rich, but they'd been lucky. Steven's job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He'd been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they'd never quite owned-blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company-his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.