Oh, he was very smooth in his modem-mouth fashion, this Wismer Stroock. He commenced a disquisition about Croker Global Foods and its wholesale food distribution centers and about “emerging pockets of regional restaurant strength” and “food deflation” and “dampened margins” and “the enhanced pricing of crop packs” …

  Harry let Stroock have his head until he said, “Anyway, what we’re really looking at here is the prospect of a significant uptick in cash flow over the next two quarters. This is not a stagnant situation by any means. All we really need is a temporary freeze on these big principal payments, and—”

  “Whoa!” said Harry with a grating whine, “whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I hear the word freeze?” Then he looked at Charlie Croker. “Mr. Croker, did Mr. Stroock just say something about freezing the principal payments?”

  He kept staring at Croker with his chin lifted and his head cocked, as if his credulity was being put to a severe test. “Let me tell you two gentlemen something about loans. A loan is not a gift. When we make a loan, we actually expect to get paid back.”

  “Nobody’s talkin’ about not payin’ you back,” snapped Croker. “We’re talkin’ about something very simple.” Sump’m veh simple.

  “Simple I like,” said the Artiste. “I’d like to hear some simple proposals as to how we’re gonna get paid back. Simple, no assembly necessary, batteries included.”

  Peepgass noticed that the first little dark crescents of sweat were beginning to form on Croker’s shirt, beneath his arms.

  “That happens to be precisely what we been showin’ you,” he said.

  “All I’ve heard so far are some projections concerning office leasing in Atlanta and the American food service industry,” said the Artiste. “We’re talking about half a billion dollars here.”

  “Look,” said Charlie Croker, “you may recall that one of your own people, Mr. John Sycamore, assured us over and over again that if—”

  “Mr. Sycamore’s no longer on the case.”

  “That may be, but—”

  “Mr. Sycamore is no longer a factor here.”

  “Yeah, but the fact is, he was your representative, and he practically got down on his knees and—”

  “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes—”

  “—begged us to take that last $180 million loan and assured us—”

  “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes—”

  “—if any situation arose regarding the payback schedule, he—”

  “Mr. Sycamore’s hopes and dreams, whatever they were, no longer exist so far as the obscene mess we have now is concerned. They disappeared down the memory hole.”

  Charlie Croker stared, steaming. Peepgass smiled to himself, albeit morosely. If John Sycamore had any sense, he was at this moment busy sending out resumes. A dapper and ebullient little fellow, Sycamore had been the salesman, the line officer, who had opened the door to Charlie Croker and Croker Global’s half a billion dollars’ worth of debt. At the time that had made Sycamore a star, a real “first-tier” operator, to use the PlannersBanc parlance. Back then big loans were spoken of as “sales,” and hotshots like Sycamore worked for the “Marketing Department.” Now that the huge debt had gone bad, Sycamore’s career at PlannersBanc was a shambles. He was officially a shithead, too.

  Seeing that Croker was once again speechless, Harry chose this moment to take off his jacket. He stood up and removed it very slowly. Peepgass knew what was coming. This was always a great touch.

  In the process of taking his jacket off, the Artiste thrust his thick chest forward. Running down it were a pair of suspenders. They were broad and black, these suspenders, and even at the other end of the table you couldn’t miss the motif embroidered on them in dead white: the skull and crossbones, repeated over and over.

  As for Charlie Croker—the shitheads, Peepgass had observed, always pretended they hadn’t noticed the damnable death’s-head suspenders; although later, if they were in any mood to reminisce, they would invariably ask about the suspenders and inquire if this had been a calculated gesture on the Artiste’s part or if he just happened to be wearing a pair of skull-and-crossbones suspenders. Croker did the usual. He tried to act as if he hadn’t noticed. He looked away and scanned the room … but of course there was no relief there, just more of the cheap and seedy details, the Streptolon carpet, the synthetic furniture, the NO SMOKING signs, the glare, the dying dracaena, the vile cinnamon-Cheddar coffee buns on the paper plates …

  The little crescents of sweat under the tycoon’s arms, Peepgass now noticed, had become full half-moons.

  An elaborate practical joke! Yet none of it was designed simply to humiliate the shitheads and punish them for their sins. What would be the point of that, when you needed them to help you recover hundreds of millions of dollars? No, this was boot camp, in Harry Zale’s formulation. The main purpose of a boot camp, like the Marine boot camp at Parris Island—Harry had been in the Marines during the war in Vietnam—the main purpose of a boot camp was psychological conditioning. The idea was to strip away the recruit’s old habits, soft comforts, and home-turf ties and turn him into a new man, a U.S. Marine. Well, your typical shithead was a business executive who arrived at a workout session with bad habits, creature comforts, regal ties, a layer of fat, and an ego that would have made the Sun King flinch. The word tycoon, from the Japanese, meaning “mighty ruler,” might be a cliché, but it was no exaggeration in the case of your typical chief executive officer of an American corporation here at the turn of the century. He was surrounded by people who jumped whenever he crooked a finger or cut a glance. They performed all onerous chores for him, no matter how slight. Your typical big shithead like Charlie Croker had not had to stand in line at an airport, walk through a metal detector, or utter his name to someone at a counter for years, unless it was to board the Concorde. He lived a life of private planes, private elevators, hotel suites, Lucullan meals, golf weekends, ski weekends, ranch weekends, and cutie-pie weekends, as in “boffing bimbos in the Caribbean,” which was one of Harry’s favorite phrases. A “big boffster” like Charlie Croker was an executive who used the company airplane to go boffing bimbos in the Caribbean and kept the executive offices positively awiggle with cutie pies, such as the pair who were seated with him at this very table right now. To see this shithead go on in these magazine articles about what a son of the Down Home sod he was was ludicrous.

  At the outset, Peepgass had to admit, PlannersBanc had only made things worse. In the quest for “big sales,” line officers like John Sycamore had catered to the tycoon’s every lordly vice. The bank had treated Croker to enough food at the PlannersClub, up on the fiftieth floor of the PlannersBanc Tower, and at the dining room of the Ritz Carlton Buckhead to keep half of Ethiopia alive for a year. And Cap’m Charlie, no dummy, had buttered up his lenders as well. A real “first-tier” officer was one who maintained a close personal tie with the big borrower. So when Charlie Croker had telephoned Sycamore to say he had an extra ticket to the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Sycamore had risen from his dying mother’s bedside at Piedmont General Hospital and left her a number at the clubhouse where she could reach him if she felt she was departing this trough of mortal error for good. In those, the palmy days, when Croker visited PlannersBanc, he was taken straight to the executive floor, the forty-ninth, where there was a reception room with a $270,000 custom-made rug the size of a tennis court, and he had sat only at conference tables of mahogany with fruitwood bandings, amid walnut-paneled walls and more custom carpeting, and was served only viands by the in-house chef and coffee from New Orleans in bone chinaware bearing PlannersBanc’s logo (a highly stylized Creative Director’s phoenix with outstretched wings) beneath white ceilings fitted with pinhole spotlights that lit up pictures so baffling they were bound to be worth a fortune. And beyond the glass window walls, always exquisitely curtained against glare, all of Atlanta, with its new glass towers rising up like the Emerald City of Oz, was laid out before him. (It’s all yours, Charlie.)

  There was one more thing about the shithead’s relationship with the bank … something Peepgass never talked about to anybody at the bank, even though he was sure that plenty of his colleagues were aware of it and felt it. There were believed to be—he knew very well what people outside banking thought, had known it ever since his days at the Harvard Business School—there were believed to be two kinds of males in American business. There were the true Male Animals, who went into investment banking, hedge funds, arbitrage, real estate development, and other forms of empire building. They were the gamblers, plungers, traders, risk takers; in short, the Charlie Crokers of this world. And then there were the passive males who went into commercial banking, where all you did was lend money and sit back and collect interest. At Harvard the only thing considered duller, safer, and less adventurous than working for a bank was working for some old-line can’t-miss industrial firm like Otis Elevator, which only needed caretakers. The Charlie Crokers were convinced that if they got in a tight corner, they could always manipulate the banking types—such as Raymond Peepgass. Using their stronger wills, greater guile, and higher levels of testosterone, they could always get them to roll over their out-of-control loans, restructure them, refinance them, or otherwise push trouble off into an open-ended future.

  But lo!—somewhere in the shallows of the PlannersBanc hormone pool the bank had found the likes of Harry Zale, the workout artiste, the bank’s own Marine drill instructor. Harry was here to make the shitheads pop to, to render the fat, melt down the ego, separate the soul from its vain props, and create a new man: a shithead who actually focuses on paying back the money.

  Still standing, Harry took a deep breath, which thrust his chest out and flaunted the skull-and-crossbone suspenders even more flagrantly. Then he sat down and raised his big chin and looked down his nose once more and gave Charlie Croker another lingering stare and said:

  “Okay, Mr. Croker, we’re all waiting. The floor is now open for concrete proposals for paying back money. As I said, simple we like, no assembly necessary, batteries included.”

  It was probably the Artiste’s infatuation with this little metaphor of his that finally did it. Croker had been no-assembly-necessary’d, batteries-included’d, why-are-we-here’d, dead-dracaena’d, coffee-burned, lectured at, and trifled with long enough. He leaned forward with his huge forearms on the table and the testosterone flowing. His shoulders and neck seemed to swell up. He thrust his own square jaw forward, and the lawyers and the accountants all hunched forward with him; and so did Peaches.

  A small and ominous smile was now on Croker’s face. His voice was low, controlled, and seething: “Well now, friend”—frin—“I wanna ask you sump’m. You ever been huntin’?”

  Harry said nothing. He just put on a smile exactly like Croker’s.

  “You ever headed out in a pickup truck early inna moaning and lissened t’all’ose’ol’ boys talking about alia buds ’ey gon’ shoot? People, they shoot a lotta buds with their mouths onna way out to the fields … with their mouths … But comes a time when you finally got to stop the truck and pick up a gun and do sump’m with it … see … And down whirr I grew up, in Baker County, theh’s a saying: ‘When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops.’”

  He eyed Harry even more intently. Harry just stared back without blinking, without altering his little smile so much as an eighth of an inch.

  “An’eh’s been a certain amount a bullshit in ’is room ’is morning,” Croker continued, “if you don’t mind the introduction of some plain English into these proceedings. Well, now the tailgate’s dropped. We’re here with a serious business plan and a serious proposal for restructuring these loans and straightening out this situation. But we’re not here for a lecture about the nature of loan obligations … see … I’m not sure who the hale you think you’re talking to, but—”

  “I know exactly—”

  “—you need to be straightened out—”

  “I know exactly—”

  “—on a coupla things, my—”

  “I know exactly—”

  “—frin, because—”

  “I know exactly who I’m talking to, Mr. Croker.” Croker’s voice was low and strong, but Harry’s high grinding whine cut through it. “I’m talking to an individual who owes this bank half a billion dollars and six other banks and two insurance companies two hundred and eighty-five million more, that’s who I’m talking to. And you know, there’s an old saying here in Atlanta, too, and that saying is ‘Money talks, and bullshit walks,’ and the time has come to talk with money, Mr. Croker. All I’m telling you is what’s already obvious. All I’m telling you are some home truths in the privacy of this room. You wanna throw this thing open to all seven banks and the two insurance companies and have a real workout session? We can do that! Happens all the time. It’ll have to be in an auditorium. Nine different lenders? We’re talking about more than a hundred people sitting in an auditorium, with an audio system and microphones, and it’ll be incumbent upon every one of those lenders to pick up a microphone and tell you something over the wall speakers that I’m gonna tell you right now, very quietly, in this little room, across this table, on behalf of only one lender, PlannersBanc, and it’s this, Mr. Croker …” Seeing that Croker was suitably stunned by his belligerence, the Artiste paused for maximum effect and then said in a menacingly calm voice, “This is one of the worst cases of corporate mismanagement … one of the grossest violations of a fiduciary obligation … I’ve ever seen … And in my job I look down the gullet of mismanagement and malfeasance every day. You and your corporation have taken five hundred million dollars from this bank, Mr. Croker, and treated it like your own private Freaknik, like you could take five hundred million dollars from us and do anything you wanted with it, go hog-wild, go Freaknik, because nobody could touch you, because this was Freaknik time for Croker Global and the town was yours. Well, I got news for you, Mr. Croker. This ain’t Saddy night no mo’. Freaknik’s over, baby. You know what I’m sayin’?” Peepgass’s heart was pounding. He couldn’t tell whether Harry was imitating Croker’s Down Home accent or a black accent or both. “This here’s the morning after, bro, and Croker Global’s got the biggest hangover in the history of debt defalcation in the southeastern Yew-nited States.”

  Now Peepgass’s eyes were fastened on Charlie Croker. Croker looked as if his breath had been knocked out. He no longer looked furious. The smoke was no longer coming out of his ears. He still stared at Harry, but his stare was frozen and opaque.

  The Artiste! Oh yes, this was artistry!

  It wasn’t that the Artiste was tougher than the tycoon, more of a man, and had dominated him in a fair fight. No, it was the tone, the stance the Artiste dared assume, the insolence he so cavalierly brandished as his natural prerogative, the way he lifted his big chin and looked down his nose and, with every twist of his body and his grating whine, announced: “Behold! Nothing but another shithead.” With a few arcs of that chin he had knocked the vain props out from under the great man, ripped away the insulation and the princely protocol, and left him sitting white and plump in his birthday suit, a sinner, a debtor, a deadbeat minus his dignity, naked before an unsparing dun.

  Peepgass noticed that the tycoon’s half-moons had begun to enlarge and had spread across his shirt along the curves on the underside of his mighty chest muscles.

  Harry began speaking in a softer, lower voice. “Listen, Mr. Croker, don’t get me wrong. We’re on your side here. We don’t want this to turn into a free-for-all with nine lenders, either. And we wouldn’t particularly look forward to the press coverage.” He paused to let that terrorist threat, the press, stalk the room. “We’re the agent bank in this setup, and that gives us the privilege of looking out for PlannersBanc first of all. But we gotta come up with something concrete.” He extended his right fist up in the air as high as it would go and said, “Where’s the money gonna come from? It ain’t gonna come … poof!.”—he sprung his fist open—“from outta the air! Mr. Stroock assures us you got a lot of sound assets. Okay … good. The time has come to make them liquid. The time has come to pay us back. The time has come to sell something. I’m with you—the tailgate has dropped.”

  At that point young Stroock jumped in, evidently to give his boss, Croker, time to get his breath back and his battered wits together. Just “selling something,” said Stroock, was not such an easy proposition. Croker Global had considered this particular option. But in the first place there was a complex of interlocking ownerships. Certain corporate structures within Croker Global’s real estate portfolio actually owned certain independently structured divisions of Croker Global Foods, each of which was a corporation in its own right, and—

  “I’m aware of all that,” said the Artiste. “I’ve got your organization chart. I’m entering it in the Org-off.”

  “The Org-off?” said Wismer Stroock.

  “Yeah. That’s a contest we have at PlannersBanc for the worst-looking organization chart. I thought nobody was gonna be able to beat Chai Long Shipping, out of Hong Kong. They got three hundred ships, and each ship is a separate corporation, and each corporation owns a fraction of at least five other ships, and each ship has a color code, and the chart is ten feet long. Looks like a Game Boy semiconductor panel, blown up. I thought Chai Long was a sure thing in the Org-off until I saw yours. Yours looks like a bowl of linguine primavera. You just gotta untangle it and sell something.”

  “Unh-huh. I see. Do you mind if I finish?”

  “No, I don’t mind, but why don’t we entertain a few modest proposals first.”