20

While he flew in the company DC-10, the Ronald Reagan, or rode in the limousine between campaign appearances, or stretched out, exhausted, on some motel room bed after he had finished a day’s endless campaigning, for as long as he could stay awake, Eduardo thought about his father’s letter of intent that would allow him to inherit only 20 percent of the Prizzi fortune, as represented by the capital assets of Barker’s Hill, $14 billion (and 20 percent of $14 billion was only $2.8 billion), after he had spent his life, from the day he had left Harvard, building Barker’s Hill from a paper Delaware corporation into one of the great industrial colossi of modern times. He thought about it when he showered in the morning and during the two deep massages he got during the day between campaign appearances. He thought about it immediately after the time he had alloted to thinking about Claire Coolidge. It was deeply resentful thinking, which corroded his soul and violated his well-being.

He could hardly believe that Charley Partanna, the son of a sweaty immigrant (which could have been true because Angelo Partanna had landed in New York from Sicily in late July and could not have escaped perspiring), would—for doing absolutely nothing—inherit the helm of Barker’s Hill Enterprises, while he, the man who had built all of it, had been cut down to a 20 percent share. He thought it all through carefully, considering what he would need to do to win some fraction more than the 20 percent, if only a token amount to prove that he cared.

Because he was conditioned by his lifetime of training under his father, part of the problem was winning back some token amount of that money tax-free. The depression that had fallen upon him after being told he would be cheated out of his own money stayed with him for so long that he was simply unable to receive Charley Partanna for as much as a lip-service interview in advance of handing over the direction of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. Instead, after the Macy Bartons had moved overseas, when Eduardo announced his candidacy for the presidency after he had been running for seven months and had spent $5.25 million of campaign funds to establish that he hadn’t decided whether he would run or not, pressed by his father, almost as an afterthought, he named Charley as his successor.

Eduardo had always patronized Charley, naturally feeling the contempt that a law-abiding citizen has to feel for a fellow of Charley’s sordid origins, but, on the other hand, he felt enormous gratitude to Charley for having given him Miss Claire Coolidge almost at the instant Charley had perceived how important Claire was to him. He knew that Charley had not sacrificed himself because of his indifference to her—no one could be indifferent to Claire. Charley had done it for the greater good of the family, Eduardo was certain of that. Charley had not hesitated. It had been an incomparably generous thing to do, but all of that gallantry notwithstanding, Eduardo was not going to receive Charley Partanna at Barker’s Hill headquarters until the complete physical overhaul had transformed him into Charles Macy Barton and he was able to enunciate like a human being and not like a Brooklyn Italian wop.

Anyway, he knew it wasn’t Charley sticking in his craw and it certainly couldn’t be his nephews, Conrad Price Barton and Angier Macy Barton, on whom he had never set eyes. It was the injustice of that 20 percent that his father had thrown to him as feed is thrown before chickens. He would not go against his own father, dead or alive, but he knew that if he thought about it long enough he would find a way to better the odds.

It was a prerequisite of presidential campaigning, despite the attention span of the voters, to spend as much money as the candidate could lay his hands on before the January of the election year so that whatever was expended could receive matching funds from the government. He was almost at the bottom of the money barrel because he didn’t intend to use any of Barker’s Hill money. The early money had been readily forthcoming from leaders of business and from various associations of his father’s, but he was facing the final year of the campaign with only the financial support of the forthcoming matching funds from the government. Nonetheless, he was more confident than he had been when he started. “I am certain of my candidacy now,” he said to the Los Angeles Times. “I am reasonably confident of victory next year.”

When he campaigned in California, there was a special bonus, utterly unexpected by press and public alike. During a layover weekend, he spent a considerable amount of time with Arthur Shuland, the lieutenant governor of the state, his nephew, the son of Amalia Sestero. He set Arthur right on the basics. “Charles Macy Barton, who has succeeded me at Barker’s Hill, is a friend and a friend of the friends.”

“That figures.”

“If he calls on you, consider it a part of the general plan, your grandfather’s plan.”

“I am at his orders, Uncle.”

“While you’re at it, do you think you can do anything for my campaign in the state?”

“I’ll think of a way.”

Three days before the Republican presidential primaries, the popular Democratic lieutenant governor of California backed into a safe endorsement of Edward S. Price. He said, “Although, as a loyal Democrat, I am one hundred percent behind our great president, Franklin M. Heller, because as God knows there is no more staunch member of the Democratic party than I, I have to say that Edward S. Price is just as stalwart a Republican who deserves every vote of every real Republican at the polls on primary day.” Shuland’s support for Ned Price was put down to the fact that he was, after all, a Californian, a crossover politician in a crossover state and that he must have some local reason that only a Californian could figure out, because he had certainly delivered over $400,000 in PACs to the Heller campaign funds.

Edward S. Price was a maniacally persistent man who, aside from his father’s constant counsel and the most extraordinarily tax-free cash flow in the history of capitalism, had successfully established a complexity of interwoven businesses and industries that represented an enormous empire. His experience and knowledge of inner politics and administration, as well as his arrogance, were profound. Also, he had complete access to the secret files of S. L. Penrose, famed Washington lawyer who was the Washington lobbyist for the fratellanza, a fellow Sicilian whose family name had been Scriverosa. Sal’s files would have enough on the necessary majority of members of the House and Senate to assure his success as president. For almost fifty years he had grown addicted to his own continually expanding ripples of power until, in terms of absolute power, the presidency would have been the only way to go if only it were possible for him to take Claire Coolidge along with him.

He would put his mind to solving that problem after he had been elected, he thought. Claire was so lissomely beautiful, so effortlessly and poetically sexual, that despite the fact that he was in his seventies and despite his deplorable affliction, Peyronie’s Plaque, which, when in erection, caused his penis to bend at the middle, then curve drastically downward, which would have rendered it useless to any other woman, Claire was still able to engineer practical responses to what had been an utterly impossible situation for him for the past ten years. Somehow, miraculously, she had designed and then had attained what would have been an impossible position, except for a ballerina in training, and had actually contrived to place him within her, somehow bring it all off in an upside-down backward placement that was so much more like pyramiding than the old-fashioned missionary position. How had she ever learned the sexual eccentricities she understood, he had wondered over and over again. She was so learned about sex—so caring.

He worried about losing her every moment he was on the campaign trail. He had thought of marrying her, but the media would make short work of the candidacy of a man in his seventies marrying a ballerina who was almost forty-five years his junior.

He had received Charley briefly, on Charley’s return from Europe, in his tower at Barker’s Hill headquarters, wearing his statesmanlike, visionary Woodrow Wilson dentures. Eduardo had had several sets of variously shaped dentures designed for wearing at the right place at the right time. To dominate board meetings he always wore either his Von Hindenburg dentures, which gave him heavy authority and served up the sounds from his larynx as if they had been placed on large Chincoteague oyster shells, or, if the assembly were a hostile one, his Sicilian dentures, which narrowed his face threateningly, having narrow high teeth and deadly incisors. For meetings with his father, to indicate his total submission, he wore a copy of George Bush’s teeth, made from photographs taken on the day the Iran-contra scandal had broken.

He wiped from his mind any idea of Charley Partanna, a vulgar street boss and professional executioner, having any connection whatsoever with this elegant, extremely well-spoken, indefectibly tailored gentleman now before him. Charley Partanna was dead and in his grave, but, were it even figuratively possible to stand the two men face to face, he knew that Charles Macy Barton would have turned away in distaste, if not dismay. Being able to think like that proved that Eduardo would make a great president, the first Sicilian president the nation had ever had.

He counseled Charley at the two-hour meeting. “Never give an answer to a direct question. Tell whoever it is who asks that you will get back to him, then seek a consensus within the professional density of vice-presidents in the Office of the President. They are capable men in their fields who know, when you ask them a direct question, not to answer immediately but to seek a consensus from the trained people under them. Within a short enough time you will have a good idea of the answer to give to the man who asked you the question in the first place.”

“Doesn’t that eventually put a terrific burden on the office boy?” Charley asked.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I ask the vice-presidents, then they cull through the options of whoever is under them, who naturally ask the more broadly experienced people under them. Eventually, doesn’t the whole burden fall upon the office boy?”

Eduardo ignored that, thinking Charley wasn’t capable of listening to what he was saying. “If you aren’t sure,” he said, “go over the whole matter with Maerose. She has been with me for over ten years and she knows every procedure. Most CEOs I know well go over these things with their wives anyway.”

He did his best to dominate Charley with his heavy, penetrating gaze and his wavy, blue-white hair. “Our policy decisions have a failsafe factor built into them so that even if, despite all the consensuses, you have made the wrong decision, the PR people and the accounting department will get signals almost immediately and you will know automatically to reverse your course and cut your losses, shift the blame to an underling, and no matter what happens, look good under any circumstances.”

“I’ll ask Mae,” Charley said.

No one in the media would admit to never having heard of Charles Macy Barton because Edward S. Price and the Barker’s Hill board, who were the leaders of America, had chosen him and because the fact sheet on him that accompanied the handout was one of the most distinguished business biographies any of them had ever read. The newspaper stories referred to Barton as “a private person” who “preferred the background,” saying that he was known as “the Lone Ranger of international finance” who “worked out of his mansion on East Sixty-fourth Street to avoid the traffic congestion that a daily trip to Wall Street would entail” but who was “the personification of the American dream”: success without effort.

The New York Times wrote: “Indeed, Mr. Barton is best known as a defensive specialist. When corporate America became paranoid about takeover raids, Mr. Barton built up a monumental business protecting his clients from unwanted acquisitions. Over a period of a few years, Mr. Barton, who has a reputation for doggedness, had signed up more than 140 corporate clients who did not want to be taken over, each of whom paid him a fee of $110,000 a year for the service and each of whom was successfully defended from raids through quiet strategies devised by Mr. Barton.”

“He is a bona fide star,” said one lawyer who specialized in takeover business. “I don’t think there is an investment banker who wouldn’t talk to Charley Barton if he wanted a job.”

The Wall Street Journal marveled that Charles Macy Barton had never been even remotely involved in insider trading. He was one of the three living people working in the financial center who had never been so named (the other two, however, had been charged and convicted of gross embezzlement). And the Journal went on to say that he was “perfectly cast” as the CEO of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. “There is a strong rumor,” the newspaper wrote, “that Mr. Barton has just returned after personally having closed for the purchase of the Republic of Ireland whose stock and bond issue he will underwrite on world exchanges.”

Mary Barton had worked hard with Charley, drilling the biographical information into his memory. It had been the technical absorption of Charley’s overall background story that had kept them in London for more than four months.

When the announcement story broke, Charles and Mary Barton were at sea on the maiden transatlantic voyage of the new luxury motorship, Thuringia. Mary Barton said to her husband, “When we land, it is really going to hit the fan. They’re going to ask you a lot of questions. All you have to do is remember that you are our Democrat and Eduardo is our Republican. You admire and support him, but you oppose with all your might what he stands for politically.”

“Will that work?”

“Of course it’ll work. It’s been working for over two hundred years.”

“But, ginger! Suppose they ask me some posers? How will I know what to say?”

“You’ll be wearing this miniaturized radio receiver in your ear. It’s almost invisible. I will pick up the questions they ask in the bedroom and, if I see you are stuck for an answer, I’ll tell you what to say and you’ll say it.”

“Godfrey! Isn’t modern science the Dad-blamedest?”

“It was developed by CIA scientists for Ronald Reagan’s press conferences so you know it is state-of-the-art.”

When the ship landed in New York, it was overrun with reporters, photographers, and the network TV cameras that showed up everywhere. Charles Barton granted a formal media audience in the living room of his suite aboard the liner.

“What can I tell you?” he said in part when the photo opportunity period was over. “Ed Price is a Republican, I am a Democrat. I wish him well and urge him to recall the great presidents the Republican Party has given to the people of the United States—every one of them an outstanding manager, a tried veteran of the complexities of corporate administration—Warren Harding, a handsome man; the great waver, Ronald Reagan; and the others, such as Calvin Coolidge, who knew what it was to work a two-hour day. National politics aside, I shall carry on Edward S. Price’s tradition at the helm of Barker’s Hill as a simple surrogate for the man who is being called by his people to make his attempt at achieving the highest office in our land.”

Mrs. Barton entered the room to end the interview and surreptitiously distributed metal-point roller pens inscribed with her uncle’s campaign slogan: “Price is RIGHT!” after her husband had retired to a salon across the companionway to accommodate the television people.

After Semley and Switzerland, the Bartons had stayed on in London for four months in a flat overlooking the Mount Street Gardens to give Charley time to get used to wearing hats and neckties while he was briefed and reprogrammed by Dr. Ciccio Ciaculli, a Sicilian neuropsychiatrist who had formerly been in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency. Professor Ciaculli used hypnosis, biofeedback, and state-of-the-art brainwashing techniques.

Dr. Ciaculli was assisted by Mary Barton and, indeed, in a semiconscious way, by Charles Macy Barton himself, who wandered around the flat under the heavy influence of various grades and selections of psychotropic drugs wearing an electronic headset during the months the prepared tapes were continually being played back to him on an endless loop. The purpose of the tapes and the drugs was to impress upon his psyche, for automatic response to any casual or formal future inquiries, the elaborate cover story that Mary Barton had fabricated in the form of a 237-page, 75,200-word biography of her husband’s illusory past: where he was born, the highly placed and distinguished records of his forebears, names of boyhood friends (now deceased); schools, colleges, and graduate schools attended (Rosay, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the London School of Economics); the various high Episcopal churches at which he had worshipped and the history of his militant support for universal ecumenism; honors (including the equivalent of a Thai knighthood and an eternal place as an honorary lama in Lhasa, Tibet; athletic achievements (Olympic archery championship; discovery of Pele, the soccer great); experiences and anecdotes relative to his successes as a lawyer, as an arbitrageur and investment banker; war record (high in the councils of Combined Allied Intelligence Services and credited with cracking the code that led to the Eskimo revolt from German weather-tracking services in the high Arctic); illnesses (a severe cold in 1978 that confined him to bed for two days and a full night; his slow recovery from amnesia after an automobile accident in 1976, which left him with an irregularly recalled memory of his life before the accident, but which had impaired him in no functional way …

Before the Bartons left England for America, this biographical precis had been distributed among three publishing houses in New York discreetly owned by Barker’s Hill Enterprises. On the day the Bartons sailed for the United States, an “auction” of the publication rights was in progress, and the first two bids had exceeded $700,000, excluding world serial rights and translation rights. There were published reports that Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been maneuvering to acquire the film rights to the Barton story, but Charles Barton’s innate modesty had precluded any such deal. He had brushed the possibility aside with the comment to The New York Times bureau in London, “Sylvester Stallone is a magnificent actor, but to me, as a bone-bred Yankee, he is too Italian-looking.”

No one had the time or energy to check out all of the details of the Barton story, but, if some nosey Parker did rumble around among the accepted facts, he would soon discover that Charles Macy Barton (or a stand-in) had indeed run the course, but that the invisible stand-in had soon afterward passed away at Corrado Prizzi’s suggestion.

Charles Barton had been exhaustively documented with birth and marriage certificates, Social Security registration, tax receipts going back for twenty-five years, driver’s licenses, club memberships, and a subscription to W magazine that had been predated back to the founding issue, together with all of the other scraps of proof-of-being litter that any sensible community requires.

The headset he wore day and night also fed Charley the jargon of his milieu, imbedding into his memory such doctrinaire acronyms of big business as TIA, CPM, AQL, PERT, ROI, and ZBB, which stood for trend impact analysis, critical path method, acceptable quality level, performance evaluation and review technique, return on investment, and zero-based budgeting. Charley and Mary Barton breakfasted each morning while exchanging those and other buzzwords that businessmen used to bring mystery to the art of buying cheap and selling dear. After two months of it, Charley could use key buzzwords and phrases effortlessly, in easy-flowing sentences—mobicentric management, adhocracy, horizontal integration, zero-sum game, change agent, futurists, Delphi technique, break-even analysis, span of control, interface, and suboptimization—at will, without seeming to need to think about it. He acquired equal conversational authority on the arts, where his vocabulary and imagery-within-tradition were prodigious. Conceptions such as enchainement de grand jetes en tournant while discussing ballet, and punching out melodic lines, or Diz jamming, were a part of the new language to Charles Macy Barton. He knew album-oriented rock from mainstream pop, but it was his mastery of the jargon of the high, modern, and pop graphic arts that took the breath away, and his conversational prejudices for opera and the concert hall were equally impeccable. Verbal responses to modern painting were the most difficult for Charley to master. He felt, with considerable justification, what can one say about a Motherwell or a Warhol that has not already been said?

These expanding successes impressed upon him day and night the need to remain au courant with all argots related to the most remote of his interests as winespeak and dressmakerspeak. For seven hours every weekend, when other people were dawdling in McDonald’s or looking at television or exploring sex, Charles Macy Barton sat quietly in the biofeedback position with the headset strapped on and the tapes containing the last trendinesses of American speech being absorbed by his relentlessly retentive mind.

Charley liked being respectable. The written record of his never-never life struck deep chords within him. Their repetitions through the feedback had the chords growing into something more complexly logical than J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” The very sonorities of respectability, so various, so new to Charley, filled his central ego with new aromas as if, at Thanksgiving time, a deep-breasted turkey had been roasted, then stuffed with an exotic dressing that was redolent of new, exotic flavors.

Since he had graduated from high school, he had yearned for recognition for himself, not just for his work (as legendary as it had become throughout the Honored Society), which, by social insistance, had to be shrouded in anonymity. A vindicatore could be recognized in song and story by his peers, but where was the vigorish when that could be incriminating among the straights? He wanted recognition from the world at large: a W interview, a Rolling Stone cover, a Horatio Alger award, the admiration of the masses. He took pride in his new clothes, new face, new dental arrangements, and in the stately bearing these brought to him. He was perhaps too overweeningly proud of his education, as recorded in the biography that Mary Barton had written, and he found incalculable fulfillment in the way Maerose—that is, Mary—looked at him when he commanded a table from the maitre d’hotel at the hotel restaurant across Mount Street in London. They ate Italian food only at home now, were never seen entering an Italian restaurant.

Charley appreciated the jigsaw puzzle of modern trendiness and of the many-layered culture that had made his instant acceptance possible. His wife had assembled a totality of new meaning within him, which had brought with it a bottomless faith in all instant labels. As each day went over the abyss to fall into the bottomless past, he became deeply set within his new carapace and more certain of his right to be cloaked in all things respectable.

But also, for the first time in his life, he was enjoying himself. No more dull routines of being expected to set the street prices for cocaine and pot every Monday morning. No more the depressing responsibility of zotzing his fellow men. He had the feeling that he could almost see over the horizon. His life, which, before the great changes, had been like being locked inside a junked refrigerator that had been dumped into an abandoned empty lot in the South Bronx, had suddenly become limitless, open, and admirable. Everything felt right. He could spend his money without being indicted by the IRS. He was a Rolls-Royce owner. He rarely had to hose fear on anyone in the new life. Women, who were sensitive to grotesque amounts of money and power, got the hots for him whenever he walked into a room. Nobody pressed him into the rut that had been his old life, and he thrilled to the freedom to expand endlessly outward like a musical note from an oboe to seek the edges of the (known) universe. Instead of the old routine—the conversations about how the Mets were playing nice ball and the monotonous daily demands of what he should shop for to make his own dinner—he had travel, the sort of food cultured people ate, even though what they were eating cost an arm and a leg, and he was somebody.

An expression of Mary Price Barton’s long-deceased mother, “It is fiddly work making houseflies, said the Lord,” had been constantly on Mary’s mind as she had struggled through Charley’s metamorphosis, but, at last, Charley was re-created: a walking dichotomy, a man who was capable of being nostalgic about two different pasts, like the way, in America, white people viewed the blacks. As Charley assimilated his new character and culture, she felt power as she had always dreamed of feeling the force of power. Even her grandfather would be in awe of what she was about to become.

Mary Barton was just a tad more than seven months pregnant, far along enough to have allowed the sonogram technician at the Princess Grace Hospital in London to tell her that she was going to have male twins. She carried the cargo well, as tall women can. She looked portly but not wheelbarrow pregnant. Charles Barton was made solemn and thoughtful by the news.

“Jehoshaphat, Mae,” he drawled behind an outthrust chin, after grabbing her and kissing her with his new, wider mouth, “I am fifty-four years old, almost fifty-five, but I have made double of what most other people usually make.”

“Twins come down through the female line,” Mary explained. “My grandmother had twins.”

“Blow my shirt!” He looked as if he did not really believe anyone else could have twins. “What shall we name them?” He spoke with those unflawed phonetic stresses whose doom was the burden of money, his jaw clenched shut in the Locust Valley manner because, when he lapsed, his wife kicked him in the ankle.

“I thought we should call them after the don and your father—Conrad Price Barton and Angier Macy Barton.”

He stared at her in awe. “Conrad? Is that what the don’s name is in English?”

She nodded. “But we’re going to call him Rado. That will be his nickname.”

“The o at the end. Isn’t that a little Italian?”

“Italian? Good heavens no. It’s very, very jet set.”

“But what is Angier?”

“It’s the French-American aristocratic equivalent of Angelo, which derives from the Sanskrit angiras, a divine spirit, and from the Persian angaros, a courier. In Greek it is angelos, meaning ‘a messenger.’ In Arabic the word is malak—Hebrew loan word. Angelos was first used as a personal name in Byzantium, whence it spread to Sicily, where there was a thirteenth-century saint of the name.”

“Interesting,” Charley said.

When the Bartons returned to New York, they brought with them eleven wardrobe trunks; the enormous Rolls; Danvers, a driver/valet, who had matriculated at the Rolls school at Crewe and who had studied pressing and sponge cleaning at the Tailors’ & Cutters’ in London; and a Sicilian lady’s maid, Enrichetta Criscione, a woman with sewing skills who spoke no English and doubled as a waitress. She had never been off her native island before the Honored Society had graciously found her for Mary Barton. The Bartons had also acquired a housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan; a Swiss chef, Ueli Munger; a Chinese butler of enormous dignity named Yew Lee; and a Patek-Philippe watch that automatically registered the date change at each leap year and that had cost Mary Barton, as an Arbor Day gift to her husband, $27,812. All of these, and the Bartons, occupied a triple-front house on East Sixty-fourth Street, which had a seventeen-foot statue by Henry Moore in the garden and four enormously valuable paintings by James Richard Blake inside (two of these from the inexpressibly breathtaking Prism collection).

Before they had set the horizontal living quarters trend, requiring that the strivers within the nouvelle society abandon the concept of vertical housing to try to achieve horizontal housing within an extremely limited metropolitan demographic area, the record price of a triplex condominium had been $5.2 million, set by some Fort Worth people. The quadriplex of four private houses on East Sixty-fourth Street, redesigned and reconstructed into one magnificent dwelling with twenty-foot ceilings, had cost $9.6 million. It had a ballroom, an indoor jai alai court, a large quoits facility, and nursery air-filtering systems that circulated the scents of newly mown hay and deep green forests; nannies’ quarters with wall-to-wall television and conveniently placed, handheld electronic tickers for the stock and commodity markets; a nursery kitchen and a large walk-in vault for toys. Mary Barton, herself, after all, a former professional decorator, had conceived all the interior designs for the house from Switzerland and England, had approved or rejected, from photographs, all of the breathtaking Georgian furniture (and what Architectural Digest was to call “an important collection” of antiques); had fingered swatches of materials, wallpaper, and carpeting before they were installed, bringing off many startling effects such as the “living rug” in the main salon, which was an illuminated, channeled wall-to-wall transparent glass water tank that covered the entire floor, filled with tropical flora and brilliantly colored tropical fish that moved through the maze of invisible glass-walled channels and that would also continually divert guests from asking dopy questions about Charley’s past.

When people were favored with invitations to attend the Macy Bartons’ housewarming on May 30, 1992, four months after the birth of the twins, they came from the capitals of Europe, from Texas, from Hollywood, and from Washington, the proud elite of the old guard of New York’s nouvelle society, to pay homage to an old friend, Mary Price, once New York’s favored decorator (but hardly to be considered as only a fournisseur), the niece of Edward S. Price, front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Indeed, Mary Price Barton had made her place in New York’s nouvelle society long before her brilliant marriage to the puissant Charles Macy Barton.

Charley was amazed to observe that, if anyone were asked a direct question about him, people got very nervous. It was the sort of nervousness that overwhelms any American group when a new person entering the group is said to control an insane amount of money. The most socially stable and sensitive people became unpoised and mechanical when they entered Charley’s or Mary Barton’s presence, harboring wild dreams of either of them suddenly behaving utterly irrationally, such as seeing the visitors’ true value and bestowing a large-hearted sum of money on them.

As an ingrained Sicilian, Charley knew that the opposite side of the coin of hope is fear. Instinctively, he worked that edge. In a relatively short time, with the exception of very few people, including Mrs. Colin Baker, the arbiter of every crisis in the real society, no one would answer direct questions about Charles and Mary Barton until Mary Barton had cleared the questions.

On the third day in New York, although Eduardo was campaigning in caucus and early primary states, Mary Barton told her husband that the time had come for him to make his first appearance in the offices of Barker’s Hill Enterprises as the company’s CEO.

“How do you mean?”

“You go there and meet the people—your people.”

“Alone?”

“I can’t go looking like the Goodyear blimp, Charley. I typed out a few cards for little comments you can make at different occasions during the visit. There is nothing to it.”

“What if they ask me questions about what they should do about running the business?”

“I have typed out safe, standard answers on the little file cards. Fahcrissake, Charley! Eduardo told you he never answered a direct question.”

“How will Eduardo feel about me going in and just taking over?”

“Eduardo is out kissing babies in the heartland. And he personally named you as his successor.”

Charley went to the Barker’s Hill offices in the Barker’s Hill building, which dominated a slight rise in the Avenue of the Americas, a rise that two full-time PR men and a professional briber were working to have officially designated as Barker’s Hill on the city maps. Danvers guided the Rolls into the especially private parking space under the building, a perquisite no one else enjoyed, which was five feet three inches from Charles Barton’s private elevator to his offices at the top of the tower sixty-eight stories above the street.

Charles Barton rose to the command deck and accepted introductions to Miss Blue, his personal secretary, and to one Sestero and one Garrone, who had been Eduardo’s personal vice-presidents. Not one of them recognized him, and they were people who had known him since he had come back from Nam in ’67.

He was shown around the executive suite. He appreciated the private bathroom, dressing room, and shower, but he ordered the removal of the sauna and the whirlpool bath. “They breed germs and cause infections,” he said sternly, consulting a palmed file card. “I could get hypersensitivity pneumonitis from breathing the contaminated air. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is rampant around hot tubs and whirlpool spas. Put a billiard table in here instead.”

Edward Price’s former office was furnished in the same austere PR “plain as an old shoe” style as the company’s DC-10: harsh, uncushioned, country furniture; a rolltop desk, spittoons, all of it on uncomfortable, unpolished plank floors, with photo portraits of Enrico Caruso, Pope Pius XII, Arturo Toscanini, and Richard M. Nixon on the walls in stark gilt frames.

“What in tarnation!” Charley said, peeking at a palmed file card as he surveyed the room. “Where are we? On a movie set? Who thought this up, some press agent?” He ordered that the large, six-windowed, corner office be redecorated, telling Miss Blue to call his wife for instructions. “In the meantime, I’ll use your office,” he said to Carleton Garrone, who had been introduced as his general assistant.

He had lunch in the company’s executive dining room, attended by its black-coated waiters, who themselves looked like bank presidents, with twelve of the thirty-one vice-presidents within the Office of the President, receiving them four at each course, in alphabetical order, greeting them warmly, and listening gravely to their immediate problems, promising early solutions. A vice-president named Kent Black, who was in charge of the Mass Communications Division, which was subordinate to Community Affairs, kept pressing Charley for solutions to his alleged problems to the point where Charley had to snarl at him to wait his turn, then hose him with the fear. The others at the table froze.

Everyone, except the dumbstruck Black, urged the Luxury Hamburger on him, a creation of Edward Price’s. It was made with ground, inch-thick, New York sirloin strip steak with sterlet caviar used as a stretcher. Charley gagged on it. “What in tunket is this?” he said, choking on the food. Shocked by Charley’s lèse-majesté, for the caviarburger was Edward Price’s favorite dish, but greatly impressed by his palate, the four vice-presidents then at the table explained the hamburger’s ingredients.

“It is not only garbage,” Charley exploded, throwing the fear over them, “it is a sacrilege, mixing fish eggs with good meat. Take it off the menu.” The incident took its place in the company’s legends around the world.