Conspiracy Theory(17)

“I know, I know. Crap. The logic of this escapes me. Does the logic of this escape you?”

“Not really,” David said. “It’s not the 1950s anymore. People have more money. They don’t want to buy discounted crap all the time—”

“Some of them must. Not all of them have more money. We’ve got, what, nearly fifty million people who can’t afford health insurance? They have to buy their clothes somewhere. They can’t be going to Laura Ashley to do it.”

“There’s Wal-Mart. And Kmart. And Kmart has been in trouble for a long time. If you bring the prices down low enough to matter, you don’t have the margin you need to make any money. If you don’t bring them down, the people you need to draw never come into the store. And the ones who can buy Laura Ashley won’t come in just because your prices are a little higher than Sam Walton’s.”

There was a long, exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. David felt the elevator bounce to a stop at the lobby level. The doors opened. He walked out. The security guard was on duty in front. Nobody else was around. He had worked past everybody else’s quitting time, again. He sat down on the edge of the big marble planter in the foyer’s center and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“Tony?”

“I’m here. Sorry. Charlotte is having some kind of tantrum about the ice swans. Ice swans. Never mind. How the hell does a company lose thirty million dollars in eight months and not even have a record of where it went? How can anybody be that disorganized? And now we’ve got—what? Is it just layoffs? Are we going to have to push for closings?”

“I think so. I don’t have a complete plan just yet. That’s going to take till the middle of next week. But at the minimum, I think they’re going to have to close down at least a fifth of their stores, maybe a quarter. Anything in direct competition with Wal-Mart, certainly. Maybe some of the smaller places that aren’t doing much volume.”

“Anything right here in Philadelphia or on the Main Line?”

“I don’t know for sure. Off the top of my head, I’d say yes. There’s going to be trouble with all the city stores. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Hartford. They’ve all got the same problem, which is terrific overhead. The real estate taxes alone are crippling.”

“Crap again. So they lay off eight to fifteen thousand right before Christmas, and those heavily concentrated in central cities where there’s practically no other work for their people to find. I can see the headline in The Nation now.”

“Yes, I know. But I don’t see that there’s anything else we can do.”

“Maybe not. But you’re not the one who’s going to be called an ‘Apostle of Greed’ by David Corn. Or maybe, God help us, Gore Vidal.”

“Yes. I know. We need to get this done over the weekend if we can. It would be best if we could do it informally. Do you want me to make the phone call, or will you?”

“No, I’ll make it. It’ll give me another excuse to avoid the ice swans. Are you coming out to this thing?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“I would. Forget it. I’ll talk to you here. We’ll disappear into the cloak room for half an hour and I’ll read through the sheets. Crap, crap, crap.”

“Yes,” David said again, but Tony had already hung up. David shut off the cell phone and folded it up and put it back in his pocket. Suddenly, the world just outside the bank’s tinted glass doors looked worse than cold. It reminded him of that Robert Frost poem: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. He had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. He hadn’t paid much attention to literature classes when he was at Exeter. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything in all the long years of his education, not at Exeter, not at Yale, not even at the Harvard Business School. He was beginning to think he should have.

“Here’s the deal,” Annie had said, hunching over the big plate of linguine with white clam sauce that she hadn’t even touched. “Once you’ve started asking yourself questions, you’ve only got two choices. Either you do what Tony does and learn to live with the alienation, or you get out. I don’t think you’re the kind who can learn to live with the alienation.”

“I don’t think I’m the kind who can get out,” he’d said—and then he’d downed his entire glass of wine in a single gulp.

He got off the marble planter and went out the bank’s front doors, into the cold that was even more frigid than he had been expecting it to be. If there had been any moisture in the air, it might have snowed. He couldn’t remember a time when it had snowed this early in November. He stuck his gloved hands in his pockets and stepped off the curb to hail a cab.