28

Except when it was raining, Charley didn’t use his car and driver, which rolled along silently four feet behind him so that he could listen for the cellular telephone as he walked to the office, leaving Sixty-fourth Street at 6:45 in the morning and arriving at the Barker’s Hill building at 7:04. Once he was delayed en route because he had to beat up a mugger who had obviously mistaken him for a mark, so most mornings he left the house with Al Melvini, the reliable strongarm. Seven hours sleep was enough, Mary Barton had explained to him, and he had to stay on top of the new job, hence the shocking hour of departure from the house. She had organized everything, at the office and at home, so that no sweat was involved. Each night before he left the office, he called for different files to take home. He didn’t read them at home, but he had them at his desk early the next day because Mary Barton had drilled into him that he must look busy at all times. Miss Blue had been told that no one was to enter his private office unannounced, so that, whenever people did need to come in, she would sound the warning button under her desk with her knee, and they would find Charley poring over papers.

In the first three weeks on the job, he held meetings with all of the senior executives in the home office, fifty-four specialists, granting them a half-hour each and receiving the next one at sixty minutes after the first one left. This allowed him to listen to four executives a day (in alphabetical order of their fifty-four names) and allowed fifty-five minutes for lunch and one hundred and thirty-six minutes for telephone calls from around the country and the world. Allowing for time in the john and in front of the mirrors swearing vengeance against whoever had vandalized the don’s memory, that gave him approximately nine hours and eleven minutes in the building each day, which was four hours and three minutes longer than Edward S. Price had spent, Mary Barton told him.

“Well—yes,” Charley said, responding to the Price erg rate. “But Eduardo didn’t have to see four executives a day at such fixed periods and he probably had his lunch in the office.”

“Eduardo never ate lunch in his office, Charley.”

Mary Barton had laid down a fixed routine for Charley to follow at each individual senior executive meeting. He would ask them to explain their jobs as they saw it in ten minutes. Halfway through the explanation, Charley would spray a little fear over them, engendering fright mixed with guilt in some cases, and, in the guilty cases, they would begin to backtrack on what they said, helping him to judge them. The method let Charley winnow out the reliable from the flaky, to mark at least two of them for transfer overseas, one of these to the company’s spice manufactory on Devil’s Island.

The second ten minutes were given over to suggestions from the men for streamlining or generally improving their operations. Charley stared at them implacably throughout these recitations, nodding at rare intervals. In the last decant of the meeting, the men were encouraged to bring their problems to Charley, which he would then ask them to repeat in memorandum form and to have the memo on his desk within twenty-four hours.

As the memoranda came in, Charley would turn them over to each of his two executive assistants, Chandler Sestero and Carleton Garrone, requiring that they return with a written answer to the problem by the end of the day. When the operational answer was on his desk, Charley called the senior executive who had raised the matter as a problem and gave him the solution, verbally, never in writing in case the recommendation turned out to be faulty. It was standard operating procedure in the corridors of power, whether in business or politics, a ponderous system that Mary Barton had soon made more effective by insisting that individual computer work stations be installed at each senior executive’s desk so that the solutions could go out from a central computer in the Office of the Chief Executive to each work station, eliminating palaver and conserving Charley’s time. As time went on she brought the Omaha-based Cray 3 supercomputer into it so that Charley—or someone delegated by Charley—could issue instantaneous solutions to policy problems directly to desks of the senior Barker’s Hill executives in 74 cities in the continental United States, then, later, via satellite, to the individual stations in the 117 Barker’s Hill offices in the world.

During the first year of Charley’s leadership, Barker’s Hill raided then took over eleven large companies worth $14.2 billion, instantly earning $4.7 billion by the raids. Working through its four brokerage house/investment banking firms on Wall Street, BH made $317 million from insider trading made possible by the foreknowledge of the takeover transactions. Its junk bond flotations and leveraged buyouts had further increased earnings by means so shady as to have made Charley flinch if no one else in the firm. Its enormous Department of Defense contractors, who remained fixed in place no matter what heinous revelations were made concerning the shoddiness of their products or the towering amounts of profits they made on the unit prices charged, showed an annual increase, under Charley’s leadership, of $5.1 billion. Through it all, he made all the Barker’s Hill companies toe the line and was gratified that they delivered an increase of 17.3 percent over the yields produced by Edward Price’s stewardship.

Throughout all of Charley’s first year on the bridge at Barker’s Hill, the company’s superb public relations department, the 117 people of the Community Affairs division, concentrated on establishing Charley in the minds of the American people as one of the greatest business leaders of history. The public relations department of Barker’s Hill, like that of Ronald Reagan, could be compared to the Lords of Shouting of the Old Testament, consisting of 1,550 angels “all singing glory to the Lord.” It is written that, because of the chanting of the Lords of Shouting, “judgment is lightened and the world is blessed.” Charley, like Ronald Reagan, left golden footprints wherever he walked amid the hosannahs that confirmed his glory.

Charles Macy Barton showed up on the evening news rotating across the five networks, about three times every month. His byline over his recorded opinions on absolutely everything that was the currency of the day seemed to live on the op-ed pages of the great American newspapers. No Sunday morning was complete for the American family without seeing and hearing Charles Macy Barton and his breathtaking tailoring on the talk shows. Sam Donaldson beamed upon him. William F. Buckley, Jr., purred over him. If there was a national crisis of any kind, McNeil-Lehrer called him before their inquisitors. He made pronouncements regarding acid rain, the strength of the dollar, urged a close economic alliance with Japan providing it was brought to its knees, discussed cures for stuttering, took a stand on surrogate motherhood, abortion, and school prayer, condemned the Soviet while praising glasnost to the skies, and, through it all, his PR people never stopped selling him as the greatest organizer of American history. Over and over again this image of Charley reappeared in the print and electronic media of the world, until his name became a household word. Charley was instantly recognizable to the American people, and universally known, as the Great Organizer. The business schools of great universities used case histories in which Charley’s towering judgment dominated: he was the sublime model of the American business executive as reflected in the claims made by his PR people. It was the American way because it revered the holy Bible. The Lords of Shouting had returned to bring salvation to the pious.

A growing amount of time, usually on Saturday morning or at the Sixty-fourth Street house at odd hours, whenever the president wanted advice or information, Charley (and Mary Barton) would need to turn their attentions to that set of problems. Not altogether slowly, Franklin M. Heller and Charley had built an intimate relationship in that election year of 1992. Heller had convinced himself that Charley had vital information at his fingertips and could get it faster than the White House staff could get it, on certain issues such as Republican Party strategies.

When the White House had to have instant information on projected Republican moves, Charley would call Pop at the laundry in Brooklyn. Pop would call Eduardo wherever he was; then Eduardo would turn the matter over to his principal campaign adviser, Carter B. Modred, former national chairman of the Republican party, to get the information in all partisan innocence. Eduardo would call Pop with it. Pop would pass the word immediately to Mary Barton, who would tell Charley. Charley would then call the delighted president.

If the Republicans planned a major offensive relating to international trade or planned evasive tactics to avoid vitally necessary increased taxation, before they could announce it, the White House was able to call in the media and lay down a superseding program of its own. The same happened in all the major campaign areas: foreign policy, defense positions, and election year promises on the support of the Freedom Fighters no matter where they were bleeding for democracy in the world.

“I don’t know how you do it, Charley,” Heller said every time. “The opposition is absolutely emasculated. Your information is always better than the stuff my staff gets and twice as fast.”

Two months after the breaking-in period in New York, Charley and his personal staff of seventeen troubleshooters took to the road in the wide-bodied company jet to attend the get-acquainted meetings Mary Barton had insisted be organized in fifteen key cities, drawing an average of five Barker’s Hill field office senior executives into the key cities of their region. The procedure was fixed: Charley took over the office of the head BH honcho in each key city and received delegations of up to twelve senior field executives to whom he gave a short talk that had been prepared by Mary Barton and that drove home the new quotas and raised objectives of the new headquarters management. It was a short talk allowing just enough time for Charley to spray a light steam of fear over those attending the meetings; then he would leave the meeting to the home-office executives concerned with the assembled divisions and go off to look at the branch’s computer installation, its squash courts, and its Jacuzzis.

In California he had the chance to renew his old friendship with the lieutenant governor, Arthur Shuland. Not that he was able to reveal the basis of their lifetime friendship, when he had been Charley Partanna. He was the new head of Barker’s Hill Enterprises. That was enough. Shuland was so pleased to take Charley’s call in Sacramento that he flew to Los Angeles at once for a closed door luncheon meeting in Charley’s hotel.

“I’m gonna make my pitch for the Senate,” Arthur said. “State politics are all right, but the national arena is where the money is.”

“You need money?” Charley asked with surprise.

“I’m not hurting. And someday my grandfather has to leave me a bundle. But that could be twenty years from now. In the meantime, I’ll stick to politics for a living.”

“Say the word, Governor,” Charley said, “and we’ll surround you with a couple of thousand PACs. But don’t move too fast. Give me till after this election. I might have something very nice for you.”

Charley had arrived late at the hotel in Detroit and had to wait more than twenty minutes in the lobby until he could get into his suite, greatly enraging his entourage, who fell just short of beating up on the hotel manager. By some thoroughly rotten mismanagement, Charley’s suite had been rented to one of the greatest rock stars of the international culture. While Charley’s people battled it out with the manager, Charley went to the newsstand and bought a selection of magazines to carry him through the off-hours and to sharpen his conversational gambits. Twenty minutes later he was eating his room service dinner in the Presidential Suite, with his security detail, when, one after another, two blips flickered across the far right of his peripheral vision.

“Somebody just went into the bedroom,” he said to Al Melvini, the security man in charge of the detail.

“I didn’t see nobody, boss,” Melvini said.

“Get in there!” Charley snarled, trying to eat a medium-rare cheeseburger.

Melvini took out his piece and went into the bedroom. Within five minutes, he came out again, herding two middle-aged women ahead of him.

“How about this?” Melvini said. “They were hiding behind the drapes. They hoped they would get lucky with the singer.”

“Ladies!” Charley said, shocked. “You are old enough to be his mother!”

Melvini kept them moving toward the front door. “The great man was moved outta here because he didn’t belong here,” he told the women. “This is our suite.” Just before they passed out of view one of the women turned and faced Charley, pointing a quivering finger at him. “If they put Little Caligula out of this suite for him, who is he? Who is he?”

“I am Charles Macy Barton,” Charley said simply.

The woman blanched, then lunged toward him. “My God!” she moaned. “The Great Organizer!”