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Chapter One

The hammering in the sky grows louder. A large Sikorsky helicopter marked "United States of America" and bearing the presidential seal appears out of the fog cloaking the summit of Little Round Top and settles smoothly onto the National Park Service helipad. The nearside cabin door is flung open, an Air Force noncom starts to climb down but is gently edged aside by a square-built, sharply dressed man who looks to be in his late fifties. The new arrival drops to the tarmac, instinctively crouching to avoid the slashing arc of the main rotor, looks back up at the cockpit and snaps a firm salute to the pilots. Then, still bent, like an infantryman charging a pillbox, he hurries across to the two people waiting at the edge of the helipad while the noncom assists the other passengers: a strikingly handsome, suavely tailored although somewhat overweight African-American man in his late thirties or early forties, followed by a stoutish, matronly woman who juggles an assortment of file folders and datebooks and tries simultaneously to keep the prop wash from blowing apart her tightly pinned gray coif and chasing her full skirt about her neck.

As the chopper winds back up, greetings are silently mouthed and hands shaken, then everyone looks on silently as the chopper lifts heavily into the air, gains altitude and with a clattering roar banks into the fog and is gone from sight. Soon it is no more than a distant ruckus in the mist.

For a half minute or so, as people regain possession of their senses, no one says anything. Then the new arrival plucks a brightly figured silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and vigorously wipes his face.

"Noisy devil, that," he observes to no one in particular. Heads nod.

"Terrible weather, eh?"

He's right about that. It's a dull, dank, warmish, dirty yellowish morning that feels more like early September than late November, the week before Thanksgiving. The earth is steaming. Overhead, a bleak sun strains to cut through a pearl-hard overcast. The thick mist lying low across the rolling Pennsylvania hills is just beginning to break up.

"Good flight, sir?"

The new arrival nods vigorously. He has what people used to call "a noble head": with a deep broad brow surmounting sharp, clever, ruddy features--a strong, pointed nose; cool, direct blue eyes under eyebrows like charcoal slashes; an imposing mane of thick lustrous black hair, dramatically grayed at the temples, thick at the nape, swept back in Augustan curves. It's a head you'd expect to find in a nineteenth-century statehouse portrait of a legislator or orator famous in his time, a wise solon gazing out over great, timeless, visionary landscapes, one hand tucked in his frock coat, the other resting on a fat volume of Seneca in a pose that dangerously skirts the nearmost littorals of pomposity.

He's flashily dressed: floridly striped shirt with a white collar and French cuffs, a vividly patterned Ferragamo necktie, an aggressively tailored light-colored grayish-fawn suit, cut close to the body with unstylish high double vents. Natty in an old-fashioned way that rejects the understated style preferred by most executives. Less a sartorial ensemble than an aggressive declaration of independence. Nobody--no trend, no person, no convention--is going to tell me what to wear, these clothes proclaim--or tell me much else, for that matter.

He takes another look at the sky.

"Well, my bonny lads and lasses, looks like it's going to fairly piss rain."

"Not as badly as the Street's going to piss on this deal if the numbers aren't there," says the younger of the two women in the group. "I just got off the phone with Fidelity. I played them `America the Beautiful,' but what they still want to know: have we--have you--lost our--your--mind? Actually, my guy there used a kind of interesting adjective before `mind,' but knowing how you feel about bad language, I've deleted it."

The new arrival doesn't answer. There's a beat or two of uneasy silence before the young woman continues in tones that leave no doubt that she knows herself to be speaking in front of colleagues she can trust to keep a confidence. Nevertheless, one or two glance reflexively over their shoulders in the direction of the two drivers conversing idly beside the vehicles parked a few dozen yards off, at the edge of the helipad, matched Chrysler vans painted in improbable bumblebee stripes of black and yellow.

"Lest you forget," she adds in a cool, precise voice that carries just a hint of a Down East upbringing, "Fidelity Magellan just went up to six million shares last quarter and until we announced this deal three weeks ago, they were talking about adding to the position. There's a million at Salomon that'll sure as shootin' shake loose if Buffett bails out. Anyway, here we are. I don't smoke and I hate blindfolds, so I guess I'll just grit my teeth and try not to cry."

She's a slim, good-looking young woman, in her early thirties, with narrow, finely drawn features that are in keeping with her voice. She might not be what everyone would call "a beauty," but she's certainly handsome enough by most people's standards; very pulled-together, almost severe, nothing out of place, inside or out. The sort for whom "the tailored look" is created: in her case a deep gray Bill Blass suit. The narrow oval of her face is accentuated by a smooth, helmetlike pageboy of dark blond hair; her eyes are frank, her gaze steady from behind large, round, faintly tinted lenses set in punitively expensive high-tech metal frames.

Her name is Lucy Preston. She is the senior vice president for investor relations of GIA, the $45 billion corporation of which John P. Mannerman, the new arrival, is chairman, president and chief executive officer. She is the third-ranking member of Mannerman's "Gang of Four," as the legendary CEO's closest confidants are called inside the giant, and as they proudly call themselves.

"Are you finished your wee diatribe, my bonny young lass?"

Mannerman looks around at the others, grins and shrugs. The gesture says: what're we going to do with this one? It's a gesture he's so often made, and they've so often acknowledged, that by now it's reflexive for all parties.

"If you do your job, Lucy m'girl, Fidelity'll come to love this acquisition so much they'll double their position, will they not?"

The young woman pushes her glasses down her nose, and studies her boss with relish.

"Aye, that they may," she says, good-naturedly mocking the Scottish usages Mannerman uses within his inner circle, the affectation by which he tries to conceal his South Boston upbringing, as if Scots Catholic is somehow more couth than Irish, as if the Gaelic rather than the Celtic strain will make more respectable his overweening loyalty to Rome, which among American laymen can count on no son more true, more passionately devoted and more powerful. Sometimes Lucy wonders what voice Mannerman uses when closeted with the Cardinal--or with His Holiness himself. The man's a chameleon. That's his charm, that's his magic. He can sense a change in the wind or the color of the day a galaxy off, and alter accordingly. Lucy's not put off by this. She recognizes it for the strength it is, and besides, she spends most of her time among people--including herself--reinvented by force of circumstance or will, so who's she to complain?

"They may," she says a second time, "but if they do, you'll have to throw in a couple of those," and casts a flashing, look-yonder glance over her shoulder at the pair of vans.

"Great sainted Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, what in heaven's name might those be?"

"Those, Peerless Leader, are courtesy cars furnished by our hosts and your soon-to-be vassals. Yellow and black--as in bee. As in BEECO, get it? It's kind of a visual pun. Bzzz, bzzz."

BEECO stands for Baker Extractive Engineering Corporation, which is scheduled by the end of the morning to be bought by GIA for approximately $300 million.

This will be the ninety-sixth acquisition to be closed in the course of Mannerman's reign. The consideration to be received by the Baker family, which after more than a century has decided to sell out, will be payable in GIA common stock. Three hundred million dollars may sound like a lot of money, but the sum in fact represents less than one-half of 1 percent of the aggregate market value of GIA, based on this morning's opening trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Mannerman looks affectionately at the young woman with the expression an indulgent father reserves for a favored if mischievous daughter, a child who knows to a psychological millimeter exactly how far she dare push it.

"As regards this morning's business," he says at length, "I'll thank you to keep in mind that the heart has its reasons, which no one should know better than you, you flibbertigibbet trifler with men's passions. Am I not right, Grover, my lad?"

The African-American aide snaps to smartly.

"Yassuh, boss!" he exclaims. He touches a hand to the brim of an imaginary cap and executes a deft shuffle while mimicking the wailing skirl of a bagpipe.

"Down, boy," Mannerman says. "What must our hosts be thinking?"

His grin doesn't change. It's a famous grin, familiar from a dozen cover stories, including one on Time, showing the gleaming teeth which Barron's has described as "the biggest, whitest and sharpest since Little Red Ridinghood's Granny."

It's obvious that these are licensed impertinences, and that these people are comfortable in a way that belies the reputation for a prickly disposition that has caused their boss to be known up and down the Fortune 500 as "Cactus Jack" Mannerman.

"All right now," he says, more seriously. "I assume the lawyers have all in readiness, from soup to nuts, one-two-three, quick as Billy-be-damned? I've got to be out of here no later than two or someone's going to turn into a jack-o'-lantern! I'm expected in Los Angeles for dinner, and it's a date I really can't--won't--miss."

At this, Lucy, Spuds and Grover exchange significant looks. "Los Angeles" is a nervous-making mantra, even for Grover and Roy "Spuds" Spuddacker, who have some concrete idea of what's going on. Lucy's not in the loop yet, which is fine with her. Until whatever's going on is set in concrete, more or less, she'd prefer not to know. It makes it easier for her mirror to tell her she's dealing with Wall Street on the absolute up-and-up. This way, she and the Street are on the same side of the table, privy to rational but uninformed speculation and rumor, and no more than that.

"You'll be coming, too, Lucy, did I tell you? No? Ah, well, such is the lot of the career woman. You can buy what you need at Magnin's, I daresay, or that awful place on Rodeo Drive with the yellow awning you frequent when you think I'm not looking. Now, now, Spuds m'boy, don't look so glum. I need you, but ye've other fish to fry. It's in New York that you'll be serving the cause this very night--to get Mrs. Mannerman through ... what's it in aid of this time, Marie?"

"Bright's disease, sir."

"Ah, yes, Bright's disease. A noble cause, and close to my dear lady wife's heart because of her sweet mother, may the good Lord bless and keep her. Ah, well, no time like the present, is there? Shall we be on our way?"

Everything should go smoothly, Lucy thinks. The legal foot soldiers--in-house lawyers and a platoon of attorneys from GIA's outside counsel, along with GIA's and BEECO's accountants, and the proxies and representatives for various other parties in interest, principally family charitable trusts--have been in Bakerton for three days. Last night, a formal rehearsal was held, with an attentiveness to detail and protocol that would suit a royal wedding, and it went off without a hitch.

Mannerman starts to turn away, then stops. "Lucy, Spuds, you two should know that Grover and I had a very interesting visit with the Speaker this morning. Very interesting--the Speaker is a man whose genius is in the details; he and I understand each other to a T."

A crossed T, Lucy thinks, and then can't help adding: a double-crossed T.

"Afterward, we dropped by the White House and found the President in very good form, very good form indeed. Wasn't it grand of the Chief Executive to give us the use of his flying machine? Anyway, I'm bound to say that everything seems to be on the Yellow Brick Road, if you get my meaning."

Now he bounds across the helipad, yanks open the front door of the nearest van, then says over his shoulder, "Marie, I'll be needing you to ride with me. We've work still to do! Now when am I expected in Berlin, and did you talk to the Honorable Secretary at Muirfield about arranging a tee time for our friend Yoshi-san?"

With Grover and Spuds, Lucy climbs into the second van. They ride in silence. These are BEECO drivers, and one never discusses GIA business in front of strangers.

Well, well, well, she thinks: so the Speaker of the House and the President--to put them in proper order--have both signed off on our projected voyage to the Wonderful Electronic City of Oz, ticket largely to be paid for by the taxpayer. This morning's closing will pay off the Speaker; she's sure he's been promised that there'll be no "lean and mean" at BEECO, no cutbacks or layoffs before the next election, when the House leader presumably intends to trade up to a six-year Senate term as a springboard to the White House. Lucy wonders what the President's price was. The Catholic vote perhaps? A pat on the back from Rome?

TK will know, she thinks, but TK's out in Seattle, working with the Microsoft people on the joint-venture announcement.

TK is Tom Kennerly, senior vice president and director of communications and media relations, second-ranking of the Gang of Four. "Spuds" Spuddacker, whose title is senior vice president, community relations, has the most time in the outfit. He's been with Mannerman for almost twenty years, starting as a gofer back at American Standard, before Mannerman put himself on the map at Ford. Spuds takes care of Peerless Leader's personal PR: the Rome/Vatican/Papal Knight angle, the charity commitments, the gossip spin, which is fortunately light, since Mannerman's private life is above reproach.

Grover Furlong, riding up ahead with the boss, is the baby of the gang in point of service and perhaps the most powerful. Still shy of forty, like Lucy, he came to GIA just four years ago after stints with Billy Graham, the Murdoch organization and Ron Brown's Commerce Department. As senior vice president for public policy, Grover watches over Washington, with occasional statehouse forays. More important, he's the self-styled "Keeper of the Golden Faucet," the man to see about GIA political dollars.

The mainstream (nonfinancial) media, and lately the Internet, the Web and the wonderful world of "on-line," is TK's responsibility. Naturally, there's some overlap: if a story affecting GIA is being worked on by The New York Times or CBS, for example, TK and Lucy will team up--whereas if it's Fortune or Barron's or Bloomberg, she'll handle it herself. In addition, she runs her own update page on the GIA Web site.

Organizationally, the Gang occupies the box at the very top right on the company organization chart, the one designated "Executive Information Services Group" and connected directly--without passing "Go"--to the box at the center top marked "Chair/Pres/CEO." Within GIA, everyone but the Gang of Four has to make an appointment to see the CEO; even to speak with Mannerman on the phone. Only the firm's dozen outside directors, the board and board-committee members who are his true power base, enjoy comparable access.

PL's door is guarded by a round-the-clock phalanx of administrative assistants, many convent-educated, who have to sign off before either Marie, who travels with him, or Betty--in New York--or Jean-in St. Louis--is even approached for final clearance to enter the presence. The vice-chairman and the executive VPs for operations and finance need to go through channels, as do the various group and divisional chiefs. But not the Gang of Four. To Lucy and Spuds, Grover and TK, Jack Mannerman is available without notice and without knocking, because they are the keepers of his and the company's image, and these, next to his family, rate highest in Mannerman's scheme of things.

When it comes to damage control, everyone grabs an oar. Fortunately, so far there's been no need for that. As Spuds has noted, the raw material they're working with isn't exactly second-rate. "Take any four great men you care to think of," he's fond of saying, "eliminate their weaknesses and peccadilloes--imagine Jack Kennedy without the nooky chasing, say, Churchill without the booze or Brando without the chow--and who've you got? John P. Mannerman."

For which, thinks Lucy, thanks be to God. PL's the ultimate control freak. She hates to think how he might react to a public relations disaster.

"Someone remind me," says Spuds, "where the hell's TK?"

"In Seattle, talking to the Microsoft people about on-line alliances."

Spuds looks like hell, Lucy thinks. When she left him in the taproom at the Bakerton Inn last night, he was just switching to stingers. This morning his capillaries are glowing like neon.

"Whatever the hell those are," Spuds comments. Mentally, he's a citizen of an earlier, simpler order of being.

Twelve minutes later, the two vehicles pass through tall iron gates and a guard post, all painted in the same striking alternating stripes of black and bright yellow. They follow a winding drive a half mile through open meadows and draw up in front of a low, handsome building which Lucy knows was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 after the present Baker generation's father was knocked off his feet by Fallingwater, the house Wright built in 1939 for the Kauffman family.

Looming beyond the executive offices is a complex of long-roofed, hulking assembly sheds, dominated by the mountainous bulk of the test pad and surmounted by a hundred-foot pylon wearing the same striping. As the vans come to a stop, the door of the low building opens and a welcoming party comes out, led by a tall, tweedy man about the same age as Mannerman. At that moment, the sun breaks through for the first time in a week. It seems a good omen for the business to come.

Mannerman darts from the first van, still talking rapidly over his shoulder to his secretary, who's cheerfully and deftly juggling the two electronic personal information managers, car phone, car fax, portable Bloomberg stock quote device and cellular pager which travel in the custom-designed Hermes case that meets PL wherever he alights.

As the reception committee approaches, Mannerman speaks urgently to Grover: "Grover my lad, best perhaps you skip the meet `n' greet part and hit the phone. Lest the significance of this noble occasion be lost on the Hill, this being the Speaker's district. Let's not have it that the world little know nor long remember what we're about to say here, eh? So hold your hour and have another, my boy, and then rejoin us in time to hear the second-best short speech ever delivered in these parts. You'll not want to miss that, seeing as you're the lad who wrote it!"

This is the main reason for Mannerman turning up at the closing of a deal this small. Typically, his participation is limited to wooing and winning. He leaves the final dotting and crossing and bean counting to the technicians. Today, however, at the request of the Baker family, and because BEECO is a resonant name in the home district of a Washington politician crucial to Mannerman's grand design, the GIA chief executive will deliver a short speech welcoming the BEECO workforce to its new adoptive family. The former is understandably apprehensive at being handed over, after long generations--indeed, more than a century--of paternalistic family ownership, to a management reputed to suffer no fools and take no prisoners. A company that, some think, defines the popular current management philosophy known as "mean and lean." Many present, Lucy knows from past experience, will be wondering if they're being sold into bondage. It is not a question to which she is anxious to give an honest answer.

"OK, m'lassies and lads," Mannerman murmurs, "game faces, please!" Then he turns and enthusiastically greets the tall man leading the welcoming committee: H. A. Baker, chairman and chief executive of BEECO.

Spuds nudges Lucy as Mannerman grasps the much taller Baker's right hand with both of his, stroking as much as shaking it. It's a technique he learned back in the days when, just out of business school, he briefly worked for Nelson Rockefeller.

"Ever the consummate pro," Lucy mutters in reply to Spuds's poke. "PL's at concert pitch today. Look at him! You know what he reminds me of?"

"A pit bull about to chomp a greyhound?"

"Actually, I was thinking of The Surrender of Breda."

"The surrender of what?"

"Don't be such a philistine, Spudsy. It's a painting. One of the most famous in the world. By Velazquez."

Spuds presses his fingers against his temples and screws up his large fleshy features in mock dismay. "Velazquez, Velazquez? Who's he? One of those Dominican shortstops? Who'd he play for?"

Spuds is a man of few interests. His devotion to Mannerman sops up his mental energies like a sponge. For the rest, he drinks late and deep and worries the night away.

"He was a Spanish painter. Born 1599, died 1660. The Surrender of Breda, also known as The Lances, which he painted in 1652, is one of his masterpieces. One of the all-time great paintings ever painted anywhere by anyone, period. It's the best depiction ever of how to make and receive a surrender graciously, how the victor should accept the vanquished party's sword without gloating, how the loser can hand it over without looking beaten. PL damn near plotzed when I took him to see it in Madrid last year. A transaction between gentlemen. You know how he is about style in all things. I think he's been practicing in his mirror."

"When were you guys in Madrid?"

"Last year, when we were screwing around with that Spanish bank that Herby Lamond tried to suck us into, the one he finally persuaded the Mellon to buy."

"Oh, that one. Which has so far eaten the Mellon's lunch for, what, two hundred big ones?"

"Closer to three hundred, actually. That's according to a guy I know at Salomon who follows the Mellon. Another Lamond blue-plate special! Anyway, I persuaded PL to steal a couple of hours and do the Prado with me. When he saw the Velazquez he literally wanted to climb into the picture, become part of it."

"The man likes his fantasies." Spuds looks at Lucy, smiles and makes a tiny gesture of benediction with his right forefinger. She grins back at the old, shared joke.

"Well," she adds, "you can say this for PL: he seems to know how to make 'em come true."

Spuds says something in reply, but Lucy doesn't catch it; her attention is drifting despite herself, drawn almost magnetically to H. A. Baker. A gorge-clenching shiver of unease courses through her. He's one of "them," she's thinking, and in the next mental flash tells herself to quit it! It's an old response, and she hates it, a reaction she's thought she'd suppressed.

Lucy grew up in a Maine coastal town with a very upscale summer colony. She was a slim, blond, handsome, well-spoken child, identical in most outward aspects to the slim, blond, handsome summer children, except that she lived in Paster's Point year-round while they lived in places like Shaker Heights and Chestnut Hill and came north only between July 4 and Labor Day. A "townie," in other words, who spent too many of her young summers taking orders, not giving them, until she couldn't help thinking of herself as coming from the wrong side of the tracks--or, more properly, the wrong side of the grill at the yacht club where she worked through high school.

Not the wrong side, the other side! It wasn't easy, not for a young person. Now that she's older, she understands how it was, how she was, but young people think reality's what they want it to be--that's the beautiful brief illusion of childhood--while grown-ups have to accommodate themselves to what it is. In Paster's Point, the summer colony was where the money came from that paid for the other ten months of the year, a truth as obvious to the town's adults as it seemed inexplicable to their children. Childhood notions can die hard, and it's taken Lucy a long time to teach herself to say "other" and not "wrong," almost as long a time as it's taken her to realize that she's one of "them" now herself, with her fancy job, big-city life, money and clothes and the acquaintanceship of people who are by anyone's standards rich, famous and powerful.

But she's not entirely rid of the old bruises, she knows--to her immense irritation. A really perfect specimen of the type, as H. A. Baker seems in bearing and appearance to be, still produces a faint recurrence of that combination of abashed resentment and inferiority which eighteen summers ingrained.

"Earth to Luce, Earth to Luce," Spuds says.

"Yes?"

"I was saying, Velazquez, schmazquez! This isn't an unconditional surrender, this is a goddamn merger closing!"

"Oh, is it now?" murmurs Lucy. Well, we shall see.

Baker's right out of a Sargent portrait, she thinks. Or an Eakins. To the manner born. Or rather: born to the manor--which he's about to sell to Jack Mannerman.

More Sargent than Eakins, she concludes. Art history remains Lucy's principal frame of descriptive reference, even after her years in corporate life. It's not just descriptive. She doesn't say as much, except to her looking glass, but the fact is that Lucy feels her art historical training connects her to a past in many ways more honorable, more elevated than the present.

Art history's what got her here. A little over seven years earlier, after taking an art history BA from Bowdoin, followed by a three-year stint at the Portland Museum, she came to New York to work in the development office of the Metropolitan Museum, thanks to a trustee who was a summer resident of Paster's Point. She had a plan. The Met was to be a way station, a place to pull down a check while working for an M.A. or Ph.D. at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, a few blocks south off Fifth Avenue, and--more important--a place where she could make connections that would open up the glamorous sectors of the art world: a job with a top dealer or at one of the big auction houses, or a corporate art advisorship. She had never wanted to end up as a junior curatorial or development-office church mouse. Whatever she might think of them, the Paster's Point summer people seemed to come from a bigger life, a larger world pregnant with excitement, action, self-realization. Lucy took the Met job as a springboard into that life.

Unfortunately, however, the Met seemed to be a dead end. The job was the yacht club snack bar all over again, although now the menu was denominated with three or four more zeros, and instead of a candy-striped apron and T-shirt from a Portland uniform shop, she manned her station in something the museum borrowed from "Oscar" or "Bill," as she referred to them in conversations with herself. She was still on the wrong--other--side of the counter. Not flipping hamburgers anymore, but poised prettily with her lists in front of towering flower arrangements whose cost would have bought her father's house ten times over.

Instead of "Two cheeseburgers rare, side of fries," or "What would you like to drink?" it was "Good evening, Mrs. Wrightsman, you're at Table Three with Sir John. Mrs. Heinz, you're at Table Six, next to Ambassador Annenberg."

This was not what she planned, but she seemed stuck. She began to wonder if the other side of whatever was forever to be her fate.

And then Jack Mannerman entered her life.

It was two years after GIA's banks and directors, reeling under hundred-million-dollar losses, imported him to St. Louis from Ford, where he had been senior executive vice president for international operations, and gave him carte blanche. Because he collected Scottish and Irish paintings in a small way, he was on the museum's national business committee, whose minutes Lucy was responsible for keeping. He liked her style at once, saw in her a kindred mind.

"You give great clipboard," he told her.

He'd seen right away that she shared his obsession with painstaking attention to detail, his love of exactitude, his enthusiasm for planning, his hatred of surprises. In Mannerman's philosophy, "winging it" was unacceptable. Targets were established in a manner that optimized the likelihood that they'd be met. Financial statements were scrutinized down to the tenth part of the tenth part. It helped that Mannerman could glance at a twenty-column spreadsheet footed to the billions and pick out a half-million-dollar anomaly. Spuds said PL had "an eye for financial detail like a housewife's for dust."

In this, Mannerman resembled her father, so she knew she could handle it. Chief Preston's methodical approach was a holdover from his FBI days, and he had passed it on to his daughter. One made sense of one's life and vocation, he taught Lucy, through microscopic attention to detail, by making lists and checking them off item by item by item, by respectful compliance with procedure and routine. "No shortcuts, no setbacks," is the Chief's way of putting it. "Battles are won before they're fought," says Mannerman. Her father and her boss are about the only two men Lucy knows who read the directions immediately after opening a box.

Six months after they met, he called Lucy from St. Louis and offered five times what the Metropolitan was paying her, along with the promise of excitement. She had what it took, he said; he could tell from the way she soft-soaped the Wall Street types who dominated the Met's board. The Met was a great product to pitch, he told her, but in GIA he'd give her an even bigger one, because at the end of the day, to the big shots on its board the Met was only a hobby, whereas a great investment story hit the big boys deep down where they lived: in their wallets.

"The Street'll be your beat, Lucy," he told her. "I speak globally, of course. Every market that prints a quotation. Lenders, stockholders, traders--they're all yours, from Toledo to Tokyo. Your job is to see they get with our program. That they come to love us with a consuming infatuation that only deepens with time and rising profits."

For years she's stoked that infatuation, and so far so good. At times, Lucy thinks of herself as a stylish bright spider paid a lot of money--more money than she once thought existed in the universe--for weaving a web of perceptions whose golden, seductive strands irresistibly draw in investors. Basically, however, she's at peace with what she does. At peace and proud: she's good--to last with Mannerman, you have to be. The man won't stand for a misstep, not so much as a mis-tiptoe. But it's getting harder. As GIA grows, as its CEO spreads himself more thinly, as investors and stockholders expect more, the tightrope gets narrower and narrower, there's less margin for error, the need--the pressure--for constant watchfulness intensifies.

PL and I really are brother and sister under the skin, she thinks uneasily, watching her boss converse with Baker. Mannerman is the world-famous chief executive of a services and industrial conglomerate doing $60 billion a year worldwide, and Baker merely the pro tem chairman of a venerable but limping capital-goods company doing barely $150 million, but a skilled reader of body language wouldn't have any trouble discerning who between that pair feels inferior to whom. Baker may not be worth a damn as a manager--the evidence is certainly there in the numbers--and he may represent a dying breed, the heartland WASP patriciate she used to read about in the dog-eared copies of Town & Country that constituted the library of the Paster's Point Yacht Club, but something about him sets him apart, something neither she nor Mannerman will ever attain. Something in his bearing, the way he dresses and speaks, the way he wears his life.

It's been quite a life, she knows from the FBI-quality workup Mannerman insists be done on the people on the other side of every deal GIA looks at.

Hobart Alexander Baker is within weeks of his fiftieth birthday, some seventeen years older than Lucy (in the way of women, she's noted that he's a Sagittarius and speculated how that might dovetail with her own Capricorn temperament). He's named after the legendary Princeton athletic star and military hero "Hobey" Baker, a classmate of his maternal grandfather's and a distant cousin. Baker himself would star in hockey at Princeton a half century after his namesake. Lucy's mental card file includes the usual biographical boilerplate of schools and clubs. There had been a young, childless marriage that failed after three years. The firm that GIA used for deep background checks has turned up an intermittent, long-running affair with a Chestnut Hill and Hobe Sound divorcee, although it seems to have petered out.

The man's passions are the great outdoors and painting. He's listed in Boone & Crockett, which keeps the official North American big-game records, and for a dozen years had conducted a "hunt `n' fish" column in Outdoor Sportsman. Prominent in ecological and wildlife causes, he also served on the board of the National Rifle Association until a well-publicized dispute over the assault-rifle ban ended with his resignation.

A gifted artist, he's won the painting prizes at every school he attended. A knee torn up playing college hockey rendered him unfit for military service, but through a classmate's father he wangled an assignment as a Life combat artist, and he went straight from the pleasant shaded alleys of Princeton to the bleeding marshes of Vietnam, where he won a special commendation for noncombatant valor. On his return, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for two years.

Until just a year ago, when his brothers perished in a plane crash, Baker's relationship to the family company was essentially tangential and nonexecutive. The BEECO annual report listed him as vice president for sales promotion. His degree from Princeton was in mechanical engineering, but basically Baker was BEECO's "Marlboro Man."

As a fabricator of images herself, Lucy could see how he was effective. On paper and in person, he projects the right qualities. Mining equipment is a high-end "guy stuff" kind of business. Expensive, complex, rugged, dependable. There's a kind of heroic, he-man aspect to it. Having a well-known sportsman making the sales pitch while on safari or fishing in blue water can only help.

The proof is in the company's boardroom. The past month, when the terms of the buyout were being settled, Lucy paid her only previous visit to Bakerton to get a feel for the new acquisition. In the boardroom, where the lawyers are now waiting with the merger agreement and the checks, she saw to her surprise that the walls sported rows of fish and game trophies instead of the usual photographs of past products and past presidents. A seven-foot stuffed polar bear menaced from a corner; an arching marlin surmounted a sideboard.

The BEECO functionary who took Lucy around--Baker himself was out of the country--called her attention to a tall Sheraton bookcase filled with row upon row of identical photo albums bound in heavy, rough linen. They contained professionally mounted and labeled photographs of shotgun-wielding Japanese clad in unlikely plus fours, stolid rifle-bearing Russians in parkas, rawboned Texans in jeans and vests holding bows and arrows, suspicious Frenchmen in tropical shorts brandishing fishing tackle, along with fishing guides, loaders, gun bearers, Sherpas, bush pilots. The photos showed a great variety of boats, aircraft, helicopters and all-terrain vehicles. All the pictures had two elements in common. Standing off to one side would be a tall, tanned man in an Indiana Jones fedora, smiling in an offhand, somewhat detached way, whom the aide identified as H. A. Baker. In the center foreground, stretched out on the ground or hanging from a hoist, would be a large, dead animal, reptile, fish or amphibian.

As for the paintings in the boardroom, they consisted of a series of large, well-framed naturalistic outdoor scenes, signed "HAB" in tiny copperplate letters, executed in flawless drybrush watercolor, the technique made famous by Brandywine painters like Andrew Wyeth. Each depicted a BEECO machine at work in a different terrain. Lucy fancies she has a reliable eye for what is "art." This work impressed her. It was closely observed, the underlying drawing confident and accurate, the medium applied with craft and skill.

At the narrow end of the room hung a pair of portraits: large full-face pen-and-gouache likenesses of Baker's two late brothers, the men who until their death had actually run the company. Baker was no mean portraitist either. He had an incisive grasp of feature that conveyed the whole of a personality: the brothers' careless, lazy intelligence and, equally evident, their boundless self-regard, the male equivalent of a woman's house pride. The sort of people who believed that name and reputation was all it took to get you through--because in fact that was how it used to be all over this part of the world. But now Bakerton was in the midst of an industrial graveyard. Like headstones, empty flyblown plants and sullen sooty towns memorialized the noble names with which the region was once dotted. Great names, symbolic of American industry triumphant, portents of the American Century.

Up ahead, Mannerman slings a comradely arm across Baker's shoulders, rising on the balls of his gleamingly shod feet to do so, and the two men make for the hangarlike indoor test pad where the GIA chief will address the BEECO workforce.

If Grover has clone his typical clever wordsmithing, Lucy reflects, and TK has properly prepped the media, Peerless leader's words will receive wide exposure. It won't hurt that Bakerton, Pennsylvania, not only lies in the Speaker's home district but is also right down the road from where Abraham Lincoln gave the most famous short speech in American history.

At least until today.

God, how I hate this deal! she thinks.

II

Inside the hangar, Lucy positions herself inconspicuously at the back of the crowd and looks around.

The sheer volume of the building is amazing. It's here that BEECO's machines are put through their paces for prospective customers from around the world. Today, a number of the largest machines, forty-ton cranes, chain loaders the length of an America's Cup yacht, shovels that can gulp up a house-size chunk of earth at a single bite, all painted in the company colors, have been drawn up at either end like a guard of honor.

As she generally does on these occasions, Lucy tries to gauge Mannerman's new subjects' emotional temperature. From the general pitch of the buzz, she senses these people want to be receptive. They're floating on hope, and you hear it in their voices.

Mannerman's presence here today will help. It's clear to Lucy that his appearance is part of whatever deal he and Grover have cut with the Speaker's people. She figures the trade-off must go something like this: GIA will make what sounds like a significant investment to the voter and man in the street: $300 million to buy BEECO plus x million in future capital expenditures, training, etc. These future expenditures are "subject to ..."--lawyerspeak for loopholes and outs large enough to drive a forty-ton dragline through. In his remarks, Mannerman will make it all sound like a ringing endorsement of the Speaker's ballyhooed New American Agenda, a call for renewal and rejuvenation of America's heartland industrial might. In other words: GIA's putting its money where the Speaker's mouth is, about which Lucy's had to do some heavy explaining.

And the quid pro quo? Lucy's guess is that the Speaker is committed to deliver the legislative easements needed for Yellow Brick Road, Mannerman's code name for his projected transformation of GIA into an enterprise whose massive feet will be planted firmly--and by the year 2000 almost wholly--in cyberspace. The amount of capital required will be humongous--the number Lucy's heard is $50 billion--which means Mannerman will have to go offshore to get it, probably through a series of "strategic alliances" that will effectively transfer the ownership of huge blocs of America's media to GIA's foreign associates.

Considered strictly as a public relations or political outlay, $300 million is on the rich side, Lucy admits, but the pot of gold at the end of the Yellow Brick Road is likely to be enormous. What matters is that BEECO serves both Mannerman's business objectives and the Speaker's political/ideological agenda, which is a lot of bang for not much buck.

Everyone at GIA knows the company is buying more history than earning power, but just now history is an easy sell. The text of the Speaker's "Declaration of Renewal" reads like a high school syllabus. In the sale of BEECO to GIA, one of the best-known of American industrial birthrights will change hands after a hundred and seventeen years in the hands of its founding family. Even in a commercial society whose real connection to its past--as opposed to lip service--seems to be melting away as rapidly as the morning mist on the surrounding hills, a tradition of twelve seamless decades of community-minded family ownership is worth a gesture. Grover and TK have worked hard to engineer the perception that Jack Mannerman's personal appearance is his way of paying homage to that history, that involvement, that leadership.

In its day, BEECO was a fine company, no doubt of that, worthy of its slogan: "The Name Industry Can Count On!" For more than a century, the company's equipment has gnawed, bored, reamed and gouged the earth to bring forth, on every continent, in every climate and from every kind of terrain, minerals susceptible of being converted into human wealth. The primitive dragline jury-rigged back in the 1880s by a young mining engineer named Caiphas Baker to deal with a recalcitrant seam of Youghiogheny anthracite has fathered a family of giants: monstrous augers and excavators, drilling cranes, draglines, backhoes and shovels, mobile and fixed-platform water jets, chain loaders. The trademark yellow-and-black honeybee striping in which the nacelles, booms, engine housings and fuselages are painted is recognized the world over.

The pride and ambition of five generations of Bakers have overseen the company's development and kept BEECO alive and thriving in Bakerton, where jobs at "The Plant" are still routinely passed down through families. The early years were bloody: there were strikes, lockouts, broken heads, even three killings, including one family member. But as the company grew and prospered, peace settled on BEECO and Bakerton, and right through the first two postwar decades, when America had all the money in what was called the free world, it seemed that everyone involved with BEECO, from the family to the factory hands, could take a rising of comfort and convenience for granted.

Now things have changed. The world is less friendly, less compliant, more expensive and tricky to do business in, more competitive. Profits are no longer adequate to support the technical investment and experimentation necessary to keep BEECO state-of-the art and competitively abreast of larger, state-subsidized European and Asian enterprises, not to mention domestic rivals which have moved their manufacturing operations overseas to cheaper labor markets. Last month, BEECO lost out to Komatsu on the $125 million ten-year contract to supply waterjet equipment to a giant copper project that Mobil is joint-venturing in Zambia. The news hit Bakerton like a bomb; for eighty years, if ground anywhere south of the Sahara was broken on a major hard-rock mining project, it's been a given that BEECO machines are "specced" by the consulting engineers.

The workforce is still reeling from the setback. And now, in the plant and the town, it's rumored that layoffs may be coming. People are starting to look shiftily at one another, wondering who among them, if cuts are made--the first since 1937--will be the first to go. Fingers are inevitably pointed. The "official" (from the top) explanation for the company's competitive difficulties is lack of investment; knowledgeable local scuttlebutt attributes it to lack of management. If only Laddie and Dick Baker hadn't been killed in that USAir crash, goes the gossip, if only they hadn't disregarded inviolate company policy about flying together, it'd be the Japanese pulling the long faces on the Zambian project. H.A. blew the bid: that's what people are saying, according to GIA's intelligence. If he'd moved quicker to bring in someone from Euclid or Caterpillar, BEECO wouldn't have lost out.

The buzz suddenly intensifies in pitch. The crowd shifts its attention to the front of the hangar. Baker leads Mannerman up the steps to the dais, joined by a number of other dignitaries identified in Lucy's poop sheet as Bakerton's mayor, the Pennsylvania Commissioner of Industrial Development (the governor's in Washington and the lieutenant governor is under indictment), and representatives of various local and regional commercial and booster organizations. As the men arrange themselves, Lucy feels the emotional barometer in the hangar drop sharply, the atmosphere turn thick with apprehension. Then there's a hum and squawk as the public-address system kicks in, and Baker comes forward to the microphone.

He looks around the hangar, as if to get the measure of his audience's mood, and then says quietly, "I don't have to tell you how emotional a moment this has to be for all of us in the Baker family. We've been together a long time. A hundred seventeen years. A long time."

His voice carries well and clearly. No "uhs," Lucy notes approvingly. He's a well-taught public speaker. Prep school did that for you, all that rote memorizing and debating-society stuff. She'd had a fling one teenage summer with a boy who was a senior at Loomis-Chaffee. Dumb as a box of rocks, he was, but he could quote half of Hamlet by heart, which had sufficiently impressed Lucy--once, and once only--to permit him to venture inside her bra.

"What's kept us together, kept BEECO moving forward," Baker is saying, "is a tradition of trust. We looked out for each other, and out of that built a great company. People were always our first concern here at BEECO. As Vince Lombardi should've said, in the BEECO family people aren't everything, they're the only thing!"

This draws a quick little ripple of amusement from the audience. They're not really buying this, Lucy thinks. It's Mannerman they want to hear. The Baker family is yesterday's news.

"When Jack Mannerman approached me about combining our two companies," Baker continues, "my first concerns had to do with people, with that heritage of trust. A mutual understanding, affection and respect that's taken a hundred seventeen years to build isn't something I could hand over lightly. But in Jack I saw someone who thinks as we do when it comes to people, but who also understands how to reconcile the new with the old, to bring the tried and true into line with the times. Jack understood the way we do things here immediately and instinctively. Jack respects tradition. He knows that it isn't necessary for us to throw out our traditional values to make ourselves market-worthy. Most important, he knows how we can make ourselves market-worthy. I think we all realize that times and markets have changed and that to maintain our place in the sun, we need access to resources and know-how that are no longer easily available to companies our size.

"I'm not talking about survival, mind you, which I know some people have been saying. They said the same thing about our friends at Chrysler and look at them! We've got the resources to keep going, and going well, but there's a tradition of pride around here, pride in the way we do things, in the way we treat each other, and pride, by God, in being the best damned producer of heavy mining equipment anywhere! With Jack, and with GIA, I am confident that all those proud traditions, what we think of as the BEECO way of doing things, will be well and honorably served. It's a big change, I know, and change always brings a spot of trepidation--but change is also the way the world works, and in this case I'm so absolutely convinced that this particular change is so much in everyone here's best interests that a year from now we'll all be wondering why we didn't think about doing something like this before."

On a scale of one to ten, Lucy grades Baker at perhaps a six. This speech is a deft piece of track covering, but despite all the "we" and "us" riffs, there's an invisible, impenetrable curtain separating speaker and audience. It's clear the workforce likes Baker well enough personally; GIA's intelligence is that he's admired for his sporting and artistic accomplishments and no one doubts his sincere interest in the community's well-being, but he's not really one of them, and they're willing to go down the road with him in charge only so far.

"You don't need to hear from me anymore," Baker says. "To everything there is a season, and ours--my family's--is over."

Ecclesiastes, thinks Lucy. At funerals and merger closings, which aren't all that different, come to think of it, someone always quotes Ecclesiastes. Just as nowadays you can't go to a wedding, of any denomination, without someone reading the Song of Songs at you.

"We've had a damn good run together," Baker is saying. "A hundred seventeen years. But the world's changed and we have to recognize that. I've done what I'm positive is best for all of us. If my brothers were still here, perhaps it might be different, but I can tell you with all my heart I doubt it. So now let's turn over that new leaf. Of course, I'll be around to help out wherever and whenever Jack and his people think I can be useful, but it's his show now, or it will be in about an hour, so let's give him a big Pennsylvania welcome. Jack Mannerman, it's all yours."

The applause from the audience is loud, but something is lacking, Lucy's experienced ear decides. It lacks certainty. You're going to have to earn your money with this crowd, she thinks, watching Mannerman take the rostrum. Six weeks from now, H. A. Baker will be off on some mountain shooting something, the immediate postmerger high will have evaporated as surely as the bubbles from the celebratory champagne now cooling in the BEECO boardroom, and the new regime will be calling the shots. These people can read, Lucy knows, they watch CNN, they own mutual funds, they're hip.

But they're also in a state of denial you could cut with a knife. It's like a second layer of smog lying heavily upon this region, this valley, this town, this plant. If they're applauding Mannerman at all, it's because they're praying that wishing will make it so, that he'll repay their enthusiasm by keeping things the way they've always been.

Fat chance. It's all very well for these people to bitch about feckless management, or lack of investment, or Japanese price cutting, or technological shortfall, but what no one talks about is BEECO's high-wage, high-job-security, overpaternalistic employment practices. They're the real killers. This is a spoiled workforce, accustomed to higher-than-union pay scales, easy no-default mortgages from the friendly company-owned savings association, a medical plan more generous than anything at GIA. She can imagine that the GIA staff charged with mopping up and regularizing the ancillaries and fringes at acquired companies is licking its collective lips.

BEECO's workers have surely heard about "lean and mean." They've got to have heard how tough Mannerman is on productivity and financial targeting. It's common knowledge that GIA moved its own Pittsfield turbine assembly operations to Guadalajara the day after the President signed the NAFTA legislation. Many probably have a friend or a relative somewhere in the rust-pitted Pennsylvania industrial belt who's been laid off, probably the first of his or her family since the Depression to be on the unemployment line, thanks to the labor economies which have raced like firestorms across office and factory floors in the 1990s.

In the matter of jobs, guilt seems to be the central element in the Baker family's management philosophy, as if to make up for the bloodshed and acrimony of early times. Indeed, H. A. Baker tried to insist on a jobs-protection clause in the terms of the merger; for a minute, it looked like a deal breaker, until Baker's investment banker, Herby Lamond, talked him out of it and persuaded him to rely on Jack Mannerman's word as a gentleman.

Which is a laugh, Lucy thinks. Unlike the proverbial duck, Jack Mannerman may look like a gentleman, he may walk like one, he may even sound like one (thanks to an immersion course from the speech expert Dorothy Sarnoff), but a gentleman he is not. Nor does he wish to be.

"Gentlemen, like nice guys, finish last." She's heard him say that fifty times if she's heard it once. It's a quotation, more or less, of some baseball player Lucy's never heard of, another of the arcane sports references with which Mannerman studs his conversation. Mannerman uses Vince Lombardi too, but spins it differently than Baker had. "Return on capital isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Lucy herself can't remember--has never seen--a world in which people do deals on handshakes. She's had an earful on the subject from the few Street old-timers she occasionally indulges with a couple of Bankers Club martinis and a half hour's worth of attention just to keep her hand in, but privately her guess is that this dream world never existed outside their gin-soaked memories. The world she knows is one in which ten lawyers are hired to count the fingers on each hand, and then ten more to keep an eye on the first lot.

One thing Lucy's certain of: Mannerman will not mention the word "jobs." "Jobs" is a "people word," as Grover puts it, it's implicitly rich in human resonances and expectations, and as such it's fraught with potential problems. What PL will emphasize is how pregnant with renewed commercial possibility this merger is, thanks to GIA's investment and technological resources, how access to GIA's bottomless coffers will put BEECO back in the competitive forefront, and permit it to combine its updated technology with GIA's ability to offer prospective customers a total financing package. In other words, Baker has just talked about people, but Mannerman, more closely attuned to, indeed virtually incarnating, the spirit of the age, will talk about money. The trick, Lucy knows from her own spin-doctoring, is to sell the two as synonymous. At least for just as long as it's going to take to get from liftoff to destination.

From the beginning of the merger talks, on the table if ultimately not in writing, has been an undertaking that GIA will pump a substantial amount of new capital into BEECO. The figure which everyone seems to have settled on is $75 million, although Lucy, who's seen this a dozen times, knows that if you ask first one side of the table how firm the commitment is and then the other, you'll get two diametrically opposed answers. A skilled negotiator like Mannerman, ever mindful that beauty lies in the beholder's eye, will have a genius for translating verifiable ambiguity into perceived certainty.

Lucy knows it doesn't matter one way or the other. If she can't talk her way around $75 million, she doesn't deserve to keep her job. Even assuming Mannerman goes ahead with it, that kind of money is peanuts, even on top of the $300 million GIA is laying out to buy BEECO. The negative feedback from the Street--has Jack Mannerman lost his goddamn mind, buying goddamn mining machinery?--is strictly kneejerk.

That is, so long as BEECO is a one-shot deal and not the harbinger of a new direction. GIA now derives more and more of its profits from products and services smacking of high-tech. What's turned investors on is their perception of an Internet-driven future of fiber optics, digital compression, cellular communications, computer-driven financial services--business sectors into which GIA has diversified since Mannerman came in. If Yellow Brick Road gets implemented, the mix will be even more drastically weighted away from industrial production. The trick for Lucy is to make her "prize mullets"--GIA's biggest, most convinced stockholders--understand, without exactly saying so, that BEECO is no more than a political payoff on behalf of Yellow Brick Road.

To some people, a single zit on Venus's face is enough to ruin the goddess's beauty entirely. When the BEECO deal was announced, one of the Soros fund managers kicked out a block of close to a million shares and GIA made the most active list, down three-quarters of a point. Lucy doesn't want any more cyber-lemmings rushing for the exit. She needs to engineer a countervailing perception--which is tough, since she's not tree to discuss what's really going on, other than in the spin doctor's symbolic vocabulary of shrugs and lifted eyebrows--that the BEECO deal is, in plain English, a $300 million bribe to a politician.

Lucy sees her world as defined by Price and Perception. She has a very precise mental image of how it works. It came to her a couple of years back when she and Mannerman were in Edinburgh wooing the Scottish investment trusts. On the way to lunch at a famous French restaurant in Gullane, about fifteen miles east of the Scottish capital, they happened to pass a flock of sheep being moved to new pasturage by a herdsman and a pair of Border collies. That herdsman, that's me, Lucy thought, noting the way the dogs responded to the virtually imperceptible commands of their master. Price and Perception are my dogs, and together we drive the market before us like a herd of sheep.

The herd is not always tractable. Certain of the Street's more finely tuned antennae, people with their own spies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, have sensed that's something's afoot that's a hell of a lot bigger than BEECO. They're not buying what Lucy's limited to selling: really far-out technical synergies, mostly involving highly contingent applications of BEECO's water-jet know-how, the smooth way BEECO can be folded into GIA's Industrial Products and Services Group. Certain big hitters--the ones enthroned at the key interstices of Lucy's carefully crafted and polished filigree of insiderness--aren't fooled by this at all: they keep asking: What's really going on? They see what Lucy sees: the BEECO acquisition lacks a readily graspable logic; it's too much of a stretch. They're free to ask. She's not free to answer. She hates being at a disadvantage. She hates this deal!

She can live with the numbers. She's studied the analysis prepared by Mannerman's "gravediggers," the internal analysts who construct the worst-case scenarios on acquisitions. The gravediggers' spreadsheets show that not much can be milked out of operations as they stand, although some current savings can be generated by folding BEECO's indulgent health-care plan into GIA's managed-care HMO. But if the plug has to be pulled, then after a decent interval BEECO can probably be broken up and sold off in pieces, with a maximum hit to GIA's bottom line of no worse than $100 million, including the $75 million new-investment hickey--and a loss this small can be hidden away in pockets stitched here and there on GIA's balance sheet by clever tax lawyers and accountants, and the net perceptual effect will be minimal.

The real problem Lucy's looking at--worst case--would he the effect on PL's image of infallibility. And that--for a company like GIA--could be a very big problem indeed. She would have preferred it if PL had left today's closing to a subordinate--say the senior executive VP--so that when BEECO craters, she'd have someone else at whom to help the Street aim its pointing finger. Mannerman's personal participation implies his personal sponsorship; she can only assume this is something the Speaker's people insisted on.

She watches as Mannerman acknowledges Baker and the other noble presences seated on the platform, and looks out at the crowd, playing his presence over it like a spotlight. He can be counted on to give a virtuoso performance. He's got the best, most instinctive sense of an audience Lucy's ever seen, whether he's chatting one-on-one or speaking to a large crowd like this, on a factory floor, or a black-tie VIP group in a bouquet-bedecked grand ballroom. Grover, a would-be actor himself, calls it "natural-born stage genius," a set of instincts its owner probably doesn't fully understand, which may account for Mannerman's ability to connect with concerned human beings despite being as cold-blooded and calculating as anyone Lucy's ever known. He sees life as a series of equations derived from the known facts--which, by his definition, includes living, breathing, feeling "facts," several hundred of whom are now gathered expectantly at his feet. In his calculus, Lucy might be x and BEECO might be y with the Fidelity Funds being z; you combine them with factors 1, 2, and 3--say, various market patterns--and by Mannerman's calculation you will get--with Einsteinian certitude--result [alpha] or [beta].

"It would be easy to describe what Mr. Baker and I are going to do later this morning as just another business arrangement," Mannerman begins, "and the fact is, it was business common sense and a feeling of business community that caused us to find each other across a crowded room. But underneath all the papers and the lawyering, he and I want you to know, is a real commitment by the two of us to all of you, and for all of you, for all of us, that with this . . . well, this exchange of vows, you might call it, we're going to light a small but brilliant torch that's going to light the way for the resurgence of American competitiveness in the global market for industrial machinery!"

Here he pauses, measures his audience, obviously likes what his oratorical telemetry is feeding him, and continues in a softer voice.

"Now I know what's foremost on your minds," he says. "The same things are on my mind too. The economy, the political situation, GIA. My guess is you've probably been exposed to the conventional wisdom about us: that we're strictly a high-tech outfit. I can't blame you for that, because no matter how hard we try, and believe me we try, the goshdarn media are going to paint us the way they see us."

Nice touch, that "gosh-darn," thinks Lucy, very down-home, just right for a pious, praying community where Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms hangs back of the diner's cash register. She shoots a teasingly knowing look at Grover at the very back of the shed, but he's muttering into a cellular phone and doesn't catch it.

And a nice twist, too, for the CEO of a company that spends roughly $10 million a year to see that the media paint it just so, to complain about how it's painted.

"So naturally you're wondering," Mannerman continues, "where in tarnation an outfit like yours will find its place with us, given what you've probably been told about our high-tech bias. It's true we do have some meaningful interests in that area, but you should also know that we have important heavy industry commitments of our own, and not just as a matter of history, any more than is the case right here in Bakerton!"

He doesn't seem to raise his voice to make the point, but his words carry clearly to all corners of the cavernous building, and take on an added ring.

"The fact is," he continues, "man doesn't live by digits alone."

This is a breathtaking bit of hypocrisy, Lucy knows, but the crowd doesn't know that. Mannerman now flashes his famous smile, and draws from his audience a nervous small laugh which ripples briefly around the test pad. The man's sheer force of personality is extraordinary and undeniable. Spuds has sworn to Lucy he's seen Mannerman literally charm a thirty-foot putt into the cup.

He's beginning to reach them, Lucy thinks. She looks around. People are standing easier, facial muscles are relaxing.

"Another fact is," Mannerman says, moving his eyes right to left, left to right, sweeping the room, but now and then pausing on a single listener to give his remarks a tighter, more personal focus, "another fact is that you know, and I know, and Mr. Baker here and his family know, and certainly the Speaker of the House knows, at least that's what he told me last night when I stopped off in Washington on my way up here from Atlanta, that without a strong capability in heavy industry, this country of ours will go straight to the dogs. . ."

He lets his words trail off, holds the silence a beat, looks around the audience, and then above and past it, as if addressing a higher power, and then pushes a button guaranteed to detonate his listeners' frustrations and uncertainties. ". . . or straight to the damn Japanese and Koreans!"

Us against "them," thinks Lucy. Blame and anger are the straws that stir the Molotov cocktail of national politics. Once you get your audience's mind tuned onto the resentment frequency, Mannerman and his presenters know, all other transmissions are drowned out. Your listeners won't listen carefully to what you may, ever so subtly, be saying about something else.

As she looks around, now only half attentive, her eye lights on a large, well-lit opening cut into the shed's west wall about two stories up. It reminds Lucy of the GIA skybox in Madison Square Garden. This must be the booth from which BEECO's customers, like prospective bidders at a bloodstock auction, are shown the great machines in operation.

Today the booth is occupied by two women. "The Widows of Bakerton," Lucy guesses, H. A. Baker's sisters-in-law, the wives of his late brothers. Between them, they control 23 percent of the voting stock. It's they who have relentlessly pressed Baker to sell the company. From what Lucy's heard, Medea could've taken lessons from this pair. As Grover puts it: "BEECO's only one witch short of the first scene of Macbeth."

She studies them briefly. Cookies from the same cutter, she decides. WASP to the last centimeter, right out of the Talbots catalogue--until the check clears, after which it'll be: Paris, here we come! What's on their minds is clear on their faces; Lucy's seen that expression on the faces of many sellers' wives and girlfriends. Psychologically, they're already outta here: on the high road for Palm Beach or Southampton or Newport or wherever they think their own personal golden highways lead.

Standing with them is a man Lucy recognizes from long acquaintance. Herbert Lamond, investment banker and merger specialist, has represented BEECO in the negotiations with GIA. Give credit where it's due, this is Lamond's deal, a monument to his opportunism. He picked up on a casual remark of PL's and got his people to run a computer screen on every company in the Speaker's district that GIA could use as a vehicle for its grandstand play. BEECO stuck out; Lamond brought it to Mannerman's attention; GIA ran its own deep background checks, then gave Lamond the green light to churn the waters. As it happened, Lamond knew one of the Baker widows from East Hampton, where they both rented houses in August. Through her, he was introduced socially to H. A. Baker, and planted the seed that GIA was looking to add a few choice marques to its heavy industry group, price no object. A couple of weeks later, Baker signed up Lamond to explore the matter with GIA. In the final negotiations, Lamond represented BEECO and its selling stockholders; when the deal closes, that's what Lamond & Co.'s celebratory "tombstone" ad in The Wall Street Journal will surely say. It's the sellers, after all, who pay the lion's share of the fees in any deal.

Still, it's a nice point, Lucy thinks, as she contemplates the investment banker, whose sallow, rodentlike face and trademark unruly winglets of stiff gray hair are practically quivering with anticipation. One man's buyout is another's sellout. Only Herby Lamond knows whom he thinks he represented: was it BEECO and the Baker family, or was it GIA, with whom he hoped to have an ongoing relationship? Or was it the deal itself?

One thing is certain: without Herbert Lamond, there wouldn't be a deal. He persuaded Baker to pull back on a whole bunch of potential deal breakers: not only the job-security gurantee but also written commitments by GIA regarding future capital investment, fringe benefits, corporate "lifestyle" and so on. Once or twice, when Baker seemed ready to walk out, Lamond kept him at the table. No wonder he's beaming like the cat who swallowed the canary. More like the Rat who swallowed the Golden Goose, Lucy decides, considering that once all the signatures are on the contract of sale, he stands to earn a fee of $10 million for his part in the transaction. That is a large fee for a deal this size, but Lucy knows how investment bankers think: It's one thing to get paid x for "representing" one side of a deal but if in fact you end up "representing" both, why shouldn't you get 2x?

At her back, she's aware of the looming presence of the great machines drawn up at the rear of the hangar. They're arrayed in a rank which spans the building's entire vast width. Fleshly painted, polished and oiled, they're like everything else about BEECO: spick-and-span. You could eat off the floor, and Lucy senses it's this way every day. She wonders what these plant-proud workers would think if they got a look at GIA's Guadalajara turbine plant, where a week's pay is coffee money in Bakerton. Or the heavy cable facility near New Delhi, where skilled foundrymen make a third of what maquilladora workers do.

Mannerman is "pedal to the metal now," moving full-bore from buzzword to buzzword, from concept to concept. As he arrives at a riff about "the GIA family," he makes a characteristic gesture, one Lucy's sure he's probably unaware of by now. He opens and spreads his arms, as if to take his audience into a welcoming, sheltering embrace.

He's mentally back in Rome, Lucy knows. Back on the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square on Easter morning, standing in the shadows behind the Pope. Hell, he probably thinks he is the Pope!

The greatest thrill of his life, that was. Two Easters ago, when Pope Leo XIV overruled his Curia and invited Mannerman to stand behind him, to get a sense of what it was like to command an audience of over a half million people crammed in the curving embrace of the colonnades of St. Peter's Square.

It was the Pope's way of saying thanks. His Holiness Leo XIV is, some claim, in Jack Mannerman's pocket. The two men met a decade ago, when Mannerman first became involved in Save Venice and raised huge amounts for ecclesiastical restorations dear to the heart of the present pontiff, who was then merely His Eminence the Cardinal-Patriarch of Venice. By the time the old Pope's interminable last illness drew to its end, Mannerman, now at GIA, had seen to it that promises had been made to other influential princes of the Church concerning projects close to their hearts. On the third ballot of the College of Cardinals, the smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney puffed white for the man from Venice.

The relationship between the two men remains close. Mannerman's commitment to Rome is deep, genuine, visionary, doctrinal. He's a true son of the Church, born in South Boston, raised in the very shadow of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, the only child--thanks to postparturitive complications--of parents who between them supplied their son with five uncles who were priests and three aunts who were nuns. Mannerman Senior held a political appointment as assistant postmaster of Worcester, thanks to excellent Boston and statehouse connections (he was on familiar terms with a chief aide to "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Rose Kennedy's father, and a cousin worked for Mayor Curley).

It had been Mannerman's mother's wish to farrow a brood of strong sons to carry the colors of the Church Triumphant, but Jack Mannerman would twice be a vessel for her disappointment. His maternal uncle Ted, Monsignor Theodore Macdougal, S.J., was treasurer of Fordham. An intimate of the worldly circles centering on Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, he was in a position to further his nephew's career after ordination, but ironically it was Uncle Ted who diverted the promising lad's steps from the priestly path. According to Mannerman, what pulled the switch had been a story his uncle liked to tell about His Eminence, an anecdote he'd invariably repeat on his thrice-yearly visits to Worcester. He'd been driving up Fifth Avenue with the Cardinal, back in the era when the great thoroughfare ran both ways, when Spellman had looked out the limousine window at the Plaza Hotel and commented that Conrad Hilton had gotten himself quite a deal. Then he'd turned to the young priest beside him, placed an avuncular hand on Father Theodore's knee, and observed with considerable pride, "You know, Ted, I'm quite sound on doctrine, but what really counts is that I know everything about Manhattan real estate!"

It's a story Mannerman likes to tell. Lucy's probably heard it a dozen times. Mannerman never tells it without setting the scene, which he does with evocative relish, painting a word picture of a murmurous Sunday late afternoon in his parents' parlor, the dinner dishes done and put away, the blackberry cordial going round and round while the reflected sheen of the great dome nearby turns the motes in the fading drowsy sunbeams into gleaming nuggets. It's the only occasion when Lucy can honestly say she hears something like nostalgia in the voice of a man who lives exclusively in the present and future.

As Mannerman tells it, he was fascinated that something so worldly as real estate should absorb one of the lordliest princes of the Church. So he asked his uncle, who set about teaching him the ways of finance--Father Theodore's specialty was long-term corporate bonds--and found him such an apt pupil that money was located in a slush fund to pay for a scholarship to Fordham and thence to the Harvard Business School job, with the understanding that the call to Holy Orders could come later.

The rest was history, ecclesiastical as much as secular: today Mannerman is acknowledged by everyone from Time to Commonweal to be the most influential lay Catholic in the United States, possibly the world. Holder of every papal honor there is, including--highest of all--the ear of the Holy Father himself, whom Mannerman serves as principal unofficial advisor on economic issues. When the Pope came, twice, to the White House, the ceremonial photographs showed Mannerman between the President and the Holy Father.

The papal connection will hit the spot with this crowd, Lucy guesses. The preacquisition study made by GIA's demographers shows almost 30 percent of BEECO's workforce to be Catholic. Poles and Italians mostly, with a smattering of Croats. Fourth, fifth generation. Yearners after the old ways. Loyal, proud, trusting. People who instinctively cross themselves, always sing the national anthem, go to mass and confession.

Mannerman's going along nicely now, talking about American renewal. Across the way, Grover, face intent, has his cellular phone jammed so tightly against his head the tip of his ear is white. Even unbuttoned, his Burberry looks as tight as a sausage casing. You're getting overweight again, Lucy thinks. Well, it goes with the territory: the checks Grover picks up aren't for sprouts and tofu; Capitol Hill only trades its soul for prime rib and caviar.

Of the Gang of Four, TK--absent today--has the hardest job, in Lucy's opinion: Mannerman is a hardnose who has reduced all existence to a procrustean calculus but TK must project him as Mr. Average, a regular guy who puts on his Superman suit one leg at a time, a kindly fifty-eight-year-old softie, married to the same woman for thirty-six years, father of five, grandfather of two, golf nut, Cardinals and Rams fan (at Ford, it had been the Tigers and Lions), collector of microbrews, recondite malt whiskies and nineteenth-century beer steins from his paternal grandparents' native Bavaria.

It's all true, but who's going to believe it? That's TK's gripe.

Lucy sees Mannerman's wife perhaps once a month. She shows up at most big GIA functions, the stockholders meeting, the annual board get-together at Cypress Point, the pro-am banquet at the GIA St. Louis Open golf tournament at Bellerive, and she waves the right charity flags in New York and Washington. Mainly, however, she stays at home: spring and fall in a smart exurb of St. Louis, where she gardens and plays bridge; summer and winter on Fisher's Island, New York, and Boca Grande, Florida, respectively--old-money, old-blood resorts where she plays tennis and bridge and the grandchildren come to visit. Mannerman goes home religiously every weekend--touching ground by dinnertime Friday, aloft again after an early Sunday supper. With a life like that, it's a wonder he hasn't played around, but there's never been a whisper of scandal; certainly he's never come on to Lucy.

The fact is, it's true what someone said: "lack Mannerman's a monk for Mammon." His commitment to the money god's earthly cathedral--GIA--is priestlike and total. The man, in his way, is unreal. But then, you can't run something like GIA, or at least run it well, and allow more than 10 percent of yourself to be standard-issue human--at least, so people think. The fact is, the 90 percent that sets Mannerman apart isn't some publicist's fabrication, it's just something he's got.

When she has to, Lucy can conceptualize and subliminalize with the best in the business, but she knows that the trick is to have a genuinely superior product to begin with, and that she has. "Investor relations" are no use at all unless the investors are already halfway converted. In GIA's case the quotient is close to 90 percent. This company is run 110 percent for its stockholders. Not for its executives, not for its employees, and only as necessary for its customers. Investors know that, and they believe. Mannerman's yet to shake that belief.

They say a shark can sniff out a micron of blood in a million parts of seawater. Mannerman's like that. He has a sixth sense of where he has to take GIA for the market to keep loving him to death, and to keep expressing that love by buying more stock. It's an infatuation which over the past six years has quadrupled GIA's stock price even as the company passed through one after another level of critical mass or financial sound barrier, benchmark quanta of sales, assets and profits beyond which sheer size is supposed to impede growth. With that kind of record, Mannerman and GIA are a ridiculously easy sell. That's why there isn't an investor relations honcho in any other Fortune 500 company who doesn't envy Lucy and her colleagues.

Mannerman cracks a little joke, and a ripple of friendly laughter courses easily through the BEECO hangar. Lucy looks quickly over at Grover. He's smiling. We're home free, she thinks. She wonders how these foursquare folks would react if they knew they were nothing more than a short-term down payment on Yellow Brick Road. As the laughter subsides, Mannerman turns up the intensity knob. Lucy returns her full attention to the platform.

"Stretching back over these hills and fields," Mannerman says, "I see the long parade of all those souls who've made this company what it's been and what it is. Standing before me, I see the living folks who're going to make it what it's going to be."

He's very solemn now, very focused, very--well--presidential.

"To achieve that goal, you have my undertaking that we at GIA will do what's necessary and appropriate to help get you there. To keep BEECO right at the forefront. Competitive and innovative and--as your company motto puts it--the name that industry can count on. A proud place to work. A great company.

"The last few years have been hard, we know that. Global markets are more competitive than ever. In the four corners of the earth are people--skilled people, hungry people--willing to work for less than it takes to put a good meal on the table here in Bakerton. Technology is moving ahead on winged feet; just to keep pace has become enormously costly. And for the last few years there've been people in Washington who frankly haven't seemed all that interested in the lives and livelihoods of working Americans."

By now, you could hear a pin drop.

"These are concerns we at GIA feel as much as you. Despite what certain naysayers in the media may say, `lean and mean' hasn't been our style. We want productivity, we need it, but people are still our most important product. Fortunately, we have the resources and we have the commitment to make our people as productive as they can possibly be by putting the very best tools in their hands. That goes for our involvement here at BEECO, assuming things work out as we foresee, and frankly we can't see any reason why they shouldn't, especially now that, at long last, there are good people running things in Washington--people like your congressman, my friend the Speaker of the House, people whose concerns are the concerns of every working American. The grand BEECO parade that's marched on steadily for a hundred and seventeen years. Now we at GIA look forward to joining it and marching shoulder to shoulder with you! Together we'll consecrate ourselves to making BEECO a light for all American industry to follow, a triumph of its people, by its people, for its people!"

He turns away abruptly and sits down, leaving the audience hanging.

It's a hoary public-speaking trick that never fails. For a beat, there's silence, then the applause breaks out. At first tentative, then full-palmed, enthusiastic, convinced, relieved. The Pennsylvania commissioner bounds out of his folding chair and crouches at Mannerman's knee, pumping his hand. Then Baker and Mannerman shake hands while a photographer clicks away. The applause ripens and swells. Lucy turns and stares at Grover. He's grinning like a banshee.

It's all in the eye of the beholder, she thinks. What PL has just said about "lean and mean" is a lie. It's that simple. In the last four years, GIA has eliminated nearly five thousand jobs at all levels. The average job "haircut" for new acquisitions averages nearly 20 percent. But if it's a lie, who's going to call Jack Mannerman on it? These days, nobody thinks twice about lying. Facts mean nothing, and truth is a relative thing that people like her are paid big money to "position." Job seekers lie to employers, scientists lie to colleagues, politicians lie to the voters, financiers lie to everyone. It's the way it is. It runs against her Yankee grain, but what are her alternatives? At least, she can tell herself, she hasn't gone as far as many people she knows in accepting this state of affairs. She does her damnedest not to lie outright. And she's resisted the current gospel that claims that if everyone's lying, no one is.

So far.

III

"You really have got the balls of a brass monkey," Lucy says to Grover as they trail PL and Baker toward the executive building. The closing will shortly be held there, followed by a ceremonial lunch. "`Of its people, by its people, for its people,' my sweet Aunt Fanny!"

"Cut the strap, Luce. You think with Gettysburg just a half hour over the hill I was about to leave that out? Anyway, you think they bought?"

"I do. Hook, line and sinker. So tell me. What's the deal with the Speaker? How long do we have to sit with this one before we hook up the euthanasia tubes! The Street is not happy with this acquisition and they haven't seen the gravediggers' report--which I have. This patient is terminal. How long before we can tell the family and call the undertaker?"

Grover looks at her with amusement.

"Lucy, Lucy, Lucy," he says in a creditable imitation of Cary Grant, "whatever makes you think such things?"

"Anyway," Lucy says, proffering her hand, "congrats. It was a great speech. I thought they'd be more hostile, especially after those Westinghouse layoffs last week over in Lancaster. But you won 'em over. You got them by the short hairs of their hopes."

"Ah, hope," Grover says in a musing tone. "Hope--hope--hope: it's the spackle that smooths out the surface of the mind for the whitewash of credulity."

"Who said that?"

"I did," Grover replies. "I'm just waiting for the right chance to use it. I wasn't about to waste an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde on this bunch of bohunks."

Lucy scowls at him. "I didn't hear you say that," she says sharply.

"Well, ex-cuse me! I didn't realize I was speaking with little Miss PC."

"Cut the crap, Grove. You know what I mean."

Actually, Lucy's not sure he does, because she's not sure she does. It has nothing to do with political correctness. She feels something about this Baker deal and these people. They never had a chance. Only a year or so from now, when they're trying to figure out what hit them, will some of them see that. Between H. A. Baker's naivete and the duplicity ranged against him on the other side of the table, BEECO was dead on delivery. Perhaps this is one reason she dislikes this deal all out of proportion to its significance. Maybe at long last, the job is getting to her.

"As you wish," Grover responds, sounding not the least bit apologetic. "The Baker guy leading off the way he did really set the old man up. I gather he's kind of a jerk when it comes to nuts and bolts, but I got the feeling these folks trust him."

"In my opinion, it's the Baker name they trust."

"Whatever. You may be right. With these dipshit little companies, family pride counts. Anyway, the bottom line is, they aren't going to let themselves think, not for a minute, that Baker'll do a deal with anyone he doesn't think'll play by the rules and do right by them, which makes them grist for our rhetorical mill, if you will."

You've got a point, Lucy thinks. It was a clever, well-turned little speech that Mannerman delivered, but it was H. A. Baker's credibility that put it over. Grover's right: the BEECO workforce are "Baker people" not simply because of his heroism, his style, his dash. They trust his loyalty to them because he's part of a family whose devotion has always been--literally--bankable. The problem is, even the most bankable commodity can be overdrawn, and there's powerful evidence that's been the case here at BEECO.

When they reach the door of the executive building, Lucy tries again.

"You still owe me an answer on Washington, Grove. I don't need you to cross all the i's and dot all the t's, but anything I can say about what you've got going with the Speaker will help soothe the Street's savage breast. What's the arrangement? We're talking strictly broad-brush, of course. Some kind of recip--we'll do this for you, Mr. Speaker, and you'll see to it that we get pick of the litter when the next lot of frequencies and channels is parceled out? That there'll be no problem with foreign ownership if we team up with, say, Berlusconi to go after one of the webs? Something like that?"

Grover places his forefinger against his lips. "Luce, what's done is done. Time now for the coup de grace. And I can really use a drink. C'mon."

Inside, it takes less than forty minutes to end a century-plus of Baker family ownership. Mannerman and Baker sign and shake hands. At a nod from the presiding attorneys, aides on cellular phones trigger pre-formatted wire transfers and share releases. The sisters-in-law depart, each richer by several tens of millions, as do the representatives of the Baker Extractive Enterprises Employee Profit-Sharing Fund, and the lawyers for the various schools and hospitals sharing in the liquidation of the Baker Charitable Trust. When only the principals and their chief courtiers remain, the champagne is opened and poured, and while the table is cleared of documents and signing paraphernalia and is set for lunch, people stand around sipping bubbly and making the conversation people make when their minds have already moved on, like nomads leaving one oasis to search for another.

At lunch, Lucy finds herself placed next to H. A. Baker. She suspects it's PL's doing: Mannerman's always flinging men at her.

The fact is, however, she's secretly pleased. Baker intrigues her. Of his High WASP type, he strikes her as an unusual and interesting specimen, several cuts above the usual Racquet Club run that she's encountered in her travels. He's the real thing. Compared to Baker, Spuds, who spends about $50K a year at Ralph Lauren to create the impression he went to Yale and belongs to Piping Rock, looks like the impersonator he is. Baker's tweed jacket seems of a piece with the man; Spuds is merely draped in something he's bought.

She likes his looks. Nearing his sixth decade, he seems the proverbial ten years younger, not that an age difference has ever bothered Lucy. His profile is aquiline, his skin reddish dark and weather-roughened, although with his sort it doesn't have to be weather. She finds herself wondering how much he drinks. His eyes are hazel running to green, his gaze shrewd and cool. His hair is thick and dark, with not much gray; people like him let life and nature take their course, it's one of their seemlier virtues. There's something about the man that hints of Indian blood, of the heroes of the James Fenimore Cooper novels Lucy's father--something of an outdoorsman himself, a keen pistol shot and foul-weather sailor--used to read to her. Baker must have been really handsome when he was young, she thinks, not that he's going to seed now.

When he holds her chair for her, she feels those familiar uneasy resonances of her Maine girlhood, but as lunch progresses, these fade away. Baker doesn't talk to her right away. At first he sits, subdued, studying his plate, trying to focus on whatever the Philadelphia attorney on his left is saying and obviously not succeeding.

Lucy can't escape the feeling that he's in fact homing in on her. Almost to her astonishment, the notion detonates a shivery little thrill.

Say something, she thinks. Go on, make your move. If you wait for him to initiate things, you'll be here until the year 2000. She's experienced the notorious WASP reticence with other men--"reticence" if you're feeling charitable or open-minded, "emotional strangulation" if you're not. By whatever name, a pain in the psychological keister. Why is she thinking this way?

There's something straight and forthright and substantial about him, she thinks, the quality in a man that an English friend calls "bottom." None of that country-club crap and swagger. She likes his half-rueful expression. She tells herself it means he's a caring person.

Baker's probably having second thoughts, she says to herself, those "staircase thoughts" many sellers have, wondering if one's done the right thing, when the sheer weight of the zeros in the bank account hasn't really hit home, hasn't quashed once and for all the awareness of ghosts at the banquet--all those people whose lives and efforts paved the gleaming pathway leading to this hour and this wealth. A pensive frisson that'll fade soon enough, she guesses. Why should Baker be different? Still, it's nice at least to sense it even briefly. Nowadays, most sellers just take the money and run.

Maybe I'm making this all up, she tells herself. Still, when she looks at him she sees a different kind of value system from the one she and Spuds and Mannerman represent. A different America, for that matter, a country of open space and open faces, of straightforwardness and hope, the America pictured in her current favorite paintings: the nineteenth-century American landscapes at the Met and in the Brooklyn Museum, images very like what Lucy can see through the wide windows across the room, where the sunlight seems to caress the softly contoured hills and the world seems at peace.

Innocence isn't the right word for what Baker seems to project. "Purity" is more like it. A freshness of spirit uncontaminated by hustle, or by money, or by calculation. Galahad in buckskin. Rough-worn and unspoiled. Compared to a man like this, the people in her world seem old in spite of their youth; they seem jaded and cynical. Unless something carries a gigantic price tag, they shrug their shoulders and ask: Why bother? Theirs is a desiccated world without ideals, and living in it is like living in a desert.

Hey, hey, hey, she tells herself, breaking into her own riff. Down, girl! No more wine for you! And at just that moment, Baker turns in his seat and says to her "Well, Miss Preston it seems you've brought good weather. We can use it. Let's hope it's a good omen for the future."

She likes his voice. It has a well-bred confident quality smooth and precise but without the pursed vowels some Ivy League types affect.

"So it seems" she says and smiles back. "At GIA contentment is our most important product."

"See that white object at the top of the hill over there, to the right?" he asks gesturing beyond the window with a forkful of smoked salmon. "That's the Tomb of the Known Executive my great-granduncle Abel Baker--no pun intended. Shot dead in his carriage in 1887 on his way home from work. Our only martyr."

"Who shot him?"

"Someone whom he locked out. During what we call the Difficulties."

"Labor strife?"

"Precisely. Great-granduncle Abel had the idea of bringing in Central European workers to replace the Irish, who were getting all sorts of terrible ideas about workingmen's rights from the Molly Maguires out in the western part of Pennsylvania. There were walkouts and lockouts. Then Abel was killed. Three men were hanged for it. A local version of Saco and Vanzetti, you might say. To this day, no one knows if they were guilty, but those were retributive times and someone had to pay. Abel's brother wanted to do what Frick had done at Homestead: call in the Pinkertons and slaughter the lot. Anyway the monument's a useful reminder that this company wasn't built simply with capital and ingenuity. A hell of a lot of bloodshed and anger also went into it."

A hell of a lot of guilt forever after, Lucy thinks. "Has that made a difference in the way later generations have run the company?" she asks disingenuously. The guilt coddled the workforce into thinking of its pay envelope as an entitlement.

"I suppose it has." Baker doesn't want to speak of this. He takes another mouthful of the starter course. "Say, this salmon's pretty good."

"It ought to be," Lucy comments, "it's from `21.'"

"Is it really? My goodness--`21.' It's been five years--no, more--since I darkened the doors there, although in my wild, rambunctious youth, about a hundred years ago, it seems, I practically lived in the place. How is it these days? Probably like everything else: not what it used to be. Nothing is."

Oh, please, thinks Lucy, not one of those. Spare me. She's had her fill of people whining about how great everything used to be.

"Actually," she says, "it's still pretty good."

She should know. Every Thursday without fail, in rain or shine, war or peace, she eats there with Mannerman and one invited guest. Same time, same table, same food. The sameness appeals to PL, adds a pinpoint of continuity to a life that's a whirlwind of flux, change, new faces, new circumstances.

She doesn't want to pursue this line of talk any more than Baker wanted to talk about BEECO. "Now that your time is your own, Mr. Baker, what are your plans?"

"To tell you the truth, I haven't gotten that far. Africa, I suppose, after a little R and R at my place in the Adirondacks, alone with nature and the Internet."

Lucy looks at him curiously, drawing a chuckle, and Baker asks, "Is your expression saying you're surprised that I'm--as they say--computer-literate?"

She smiles, looks vague and encouraging.

"Well, even an old goat like me has to make some concessions--as few as possible, believe me--to the times one finds oneself living in. And the Internet, computers in general, reduce one's dependence on others. Anyway, I think I'll hole up at Two Moose until I get used to the idea that I don't have a job anymore, and then sometime after the turn of the year, I'll pack up my kit and head for the Dark Continent. It all depends on whether this cease-fire in Rwanda holds."

Lucy tries for flattery. "I know we're all supposed to know, so promise you won't tell anyone I'm asking, but where exactly is Rwanda?"

"In East Africa. that's my beat. Rwanda and Burundi and the country west of Lake Victoria. The wildlife there is taking a terrible beating from the tribal wars and from total social chaos. The poachers have been given virtually a free hand. Something has to be done, and some of us are trying to do something about it. A number of species, the giant yellow crocodile of Lake Kivu, to name one, could be facing extinction."

"I take it you're what they call an animal person."

"I'm becoming one. On the whole, I do find animals preferable to man, certainly to modern man. They're more dependable and trustworthy, thy, they display superior family values and they're seldom predatory just for the sake of it."

He smiles at Lucy. She can't tell if he's kidding. She thinks about asking why, if he's such an animal lover, the walls of this room are studded with the heads and horns of beasts he's killed.

"And you, Miss Preston," he says, "what about you? A city girl born and bred, I suppose?"

"Actually, I come from a small coastal town in Maine. My father was the chief of police there; he's retired now. But I guess you could call me a city girl--person--now. Ten years in New York will do that to you. The place takes you over."

"I suppose it does. Outside of New York, what's your favorite city?"

"That's easy. Venice."

This elicits a strange reaction from Baker, a look almost of pity. He studies her for a moment, then asks, "Do you know it well?"

Lucy shakes her head. "I've only been there twice. Once right after college, one of those nine-countries-in-eight-days tours, and once again in a more civilized way, two--no, three--years ago."

"Alas, you never knew Venice when it was really Venice."

Oh, please, thinks Lucy again. "I guess not." It's her guess that people have been saying that about Venice for centuries. Self-styled old-timers say it about New York. Everyone says it about everywhere.

Baker shakes his head slowly, as if he's having trouble accepting what he's thinking. "You know," he says with a touch of bitterness, "twenty-five years ago, perhaps only twenty, before the damn Japanese took over the world, if you'd asked me that question I'd've answered Venice too. It was my favorite place. My God, I can still taste the Bellinis at Harry's Bar! Bellinis, the cuttlefish risotto and afterward a few Titians to remind one that this too shall pass. There was nothing like it." Again he shakes his head. He speaks with surprising vehemence. Lucy can't help thinking that Mr. Reticence has a certain anger simmering down there under the surface.

"But the place has been ruined, Miss Preston, ruined!" he continues, face and voice slightly flushed. "Tourism--tourism and greed, that's what's done it!"

He looks around and drops his voice. "Look, I know your boss is a leading light in Save Venice, but if you knew it as it was when I first went there with my parents in the 'fifties, when it really looked like the Queen of the Adriatic, not a ten-thousand-lire puttana, and compare that with what Venice has become, you'd organize a reverse charity called Sink Venice, because nowadays it's nothing but a tourist trap! You know what the problem is, Miss Preston? Too many people! In Venice, everywhere! Too damn many people in the world! The earth is strangling on its own population. How anyone can oppose birth control is beyond me!"

Lucy cocks an eyebrow at Mannerman. Baker catches the hint and lowers his voice. "Don't worry, Miss Preston, I may hate the Pope and his Church and his scheming priests, but I'm not stupid enough to raise the subject with Jack. It's just that it breaks my heart to think I'll never take the Bellini walk again!"

"Bellini as in Harry's Bar?" Lucy has a vision of Baker, tanked up on Prosecco and peach juice, stumbling along an intricate route that winds along fuming canals and through narrow alleys from Harry's Bar to God knows where.

"No, no. Bellini as in the painter. He made a series of great altar-pieces, each in a different church in a different part of town, in which you can trace his development. He's my favorite Venetian painter. Who's yours, Miss Preston?"

"Titian, I guess."

"And which is your favorite Titian in all the world?"

Lucy thinks for a moment. "I guess Rape of Europa in the Gardner Museum in Boston."

"Here's mine," says Baker. From a pocket he produces a small sketch pad and a draftsman's pen. He works furiously for less than a minute, then rips the sheet from the spiral binding and hands it to her.

Considered simply as a parlor trick, the drawing's quite something, but it's better than that. She doesn't recognize the painting--the subject's obviously an Annunciation--but Baker's sketch itself is fine indeed: livelier, richer and more essential than an artistic parlor trick has any right to be.

"I don't know this picture," she says. "Where is it?"

"It's in the San Salvador, just on the San Marco side of the Rialto Bridge. If you didn't know the picture was there, you wouldn't give the church half a look."

They talk about Titian and Venice and art for a while, then he switches the conversation to his sporting life. It seems that, come spring, when he returns from Africa, he has a date with a sheep in the Sonora Desert of Mexico.

"A sheep?"

"Well, not just any sheep. A desert ram, to be exact. To complete my grand slam."

"Your grand slam?"

There are four North American trophy sheep, he explains: the bighorn, stone, desert and Dall rams. Baker lacks only the desert, which is now hunted exclusively in Mexico. Hunting permits are issued by lottery. It's been ten years since he last won one, and even then he never got a shot.

"It's not cheap," he tells her, "not that cost seems to matter anymore, not after today, but I'm going to get a desert ram or go bust trying."

"You sound compulsive."

"On some things, I suppose I am. The fact is, I'm a nut on completeness, I can't help it. Once I make a list, I don't sleep until everything on it's checked off. See those mounted fish up there? The ones with the spots? Those are the six salmon of British Columbia. All of them. It took me ten years to complete the set. If I get a ram in Mexico, it'll have been twenty-one years end to end, twenty-one years since I got my first ram, a bighorn in Alaska."

He seems ready to go on, but hunting and fishing bore Lucy, and there's a question she's dying to ask.

"Tell me, Mr. Baker, how do you think it went back there?"

"Back where?"

"In the hangar. The boss's speech. Your people must've been pretty anxious to see what kind of folks we are."

Baker considers his answer. "I think it went all right," he says finally, but his voice is not exactly teeming with conviction. "I wish he'd been a bit more specific. About jobs and investment, I mean. These people are nervous, especially after what happened this summer up the pike at Owens Corning. Two thousand jobs just disappearing when they closed down. Not just at the plant. It was the ripple effect. Stores closed. Service stations laid off. You couldn't have damaged the community worse if you'd dropped a bomb on it."

He pauses, takes a sip of the wine, flashes that half-rueful little smile and shakes his head at some thought before continuing. "On the whole, though, I think my people are happy to be with GIA. You're obviously pros. You know how to make things happen in a way that I don't. My brothers had what it takes. I never learned. Funny: the people here don't really trust me to manage them--I'm sure you could sense that--but they do count on me, my family, to look out for them. Just last night I woke up shivering, wondering whether it wasn't wrong of me not to have insisted on written guarantees on employment and investment, on sticking to my guns and having it all spelled out in the contract, not just taking Jack's word for it. Everyone tells me that handshakes aren't what they used to be."

"I don't know about handshakes, Mr. Baker, but Mr. Mannerman is a man of his word."

"Can I take your word for that?"

"You can." Lucy's voice is firm, but the declaration makes her uneasy. Another twenty minutes, she thinks, and they will all be out of here, Baker and all this will be just another file folder.

"I hope so," Baker says gravely. "In a way, that's my word he gave too. He has to live up to it for both of us."

There's movement at the end of the table; Mannerman pushes his chair back and stands.

As Baker pushes his own chair back, he smiles at Lucy and says, "I don't go to New York very often. As I get older, city life seems too wearing. But if I do, I'll call you. Perhaps you can guide me through the dangers of the new `21'?"

"It'll be my pleasure," says Lucy.

IV

GIA's No. 1 jet, a spanking new Gulfstream IV with only fifty hours of airtime, has been done up by the old-line decorators McMillen in various permutations of pale gold and deep green that give the cabin the cool, still feeling of a private chapel. Affixed to panels on the teak-veneered bulkheads on either side of the narrow passage leading to the cockpit are gifts from the Pope: on the left, a fifteenth-century bronze plaquette depicting the Crucifixion, attributed by some scholars to Donatello's workshop. It formerly belonged to the cathedral treasury of an ancient village in the Veneto. Across the way hangs an eleven-by-fourteen photograph, in a fine Renaissance frame, of His Holiness blessing a model of the aircraft. Lest these accoutrements prove off-putting to VIP passengers whose sympathies with or commitment to Rome are not as deep as Mannerman's, the panels to which they are attach swivel smoothly to reveal a TV monitor permanently tuned to CNN and an array of instruments displaying the aircraft's position and progress.

The front cabin seats ten: four on a long, leather-covered settee along the port side, four individual seats grouped opposite, configured for a confab or a bridge game, and up forward, separated by a half-bulkhead with an instrument display that shows the plane's course and progress, facing seats in which Mannerman conducts private audiences.

A galley administered by an Armani-uniformed attendant is located amidships. Next is a telecommunications cubicle that rivals the setup on Air Force One. The rearmost cabin is partitioned into a lounge with settees that make up into beds for long flights, a dressing room and a fully outfitted head with shower.

The $40 million plane is used exclusively by Jack Mannerman and invited guests from the world outside GIA. Lesser lights in the corporate constellation make do with the twenty other aircraft, ranging from choppers to a pair of G-IVs, that constitute "Air Mannerman."

Now and then Lucy asks herself how investors might react if they knew that she and her three colleagues are the only GIA employees who travel regularly on the CEO's flying sanctum sanctorum. Would they latch on to the symbolic irony that in what is unarguably the best-managed major company in America, according to the price of the stock and a dozen major cover stories a year, the only executives who can claim the CEO's immediate, urgent attention are his personal flacks!

GIA is run on the same principles as the late Communist Party, divided into autonomous, discrete administrative cells and subcells scattered around the world: groups and subgroups organized according to whatever makes the most managerial sense to Mannerman: line of business, geography or language, market, technology. Only Finance and Law in New York City have anything approaching an overview. BEECO, for instance, will he run out of Industrial Products Services headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, although its "ancillaries"--the credit and thrift unions and the First State bank of Bakerton--will be taken over by GIAFin, the separate $20 billion finance and insurance subsidiary, along with the benefit and medical plans.

The operating groups keep out of each other's hair and each other's business. Mannerman alone has the whole picture. Every Thursday he spends the morning in New York reviewing the present state of affairs with Finance, which will have pulled together current operating figures, sees if Law has anything pressing on its plate and then has lunch at "21" with Lucy and a Wall Street guest. Afterward, he returns to Finance, this time to go over the future. What Finance's dry spreadsheets and layouts indicate, it's Lucy's job to translate into something that will play on the Street. Essentially, she's the point woman for a perceptual juggernaut which, based on today's closing quote, is valued by investors at something over $52 billion.

They're now three hours out of Hagerstown, about halfway to Los Angeles. From the time the Gulfstream attained cruising altitude, Mannerman has been on the phone. Now he's finally off. For a moment he lays his head back and closes his eyes--he has a yogi's ability to put himself into a quick and rejuvenative trance--then snaps awake and beckons Lucy to the seat opposite his. She and Marie, busy back in the telecommunications cubicle, are the only passengers on this flight.

"Now wipe that surly expression off your pretty face, my dear girl," he tells her, "or did you have a heavy date in New York?" If so, my advice is to reorient your heart, lass, because you're going to be spending a great deal of time in California. How about a wee dram?"

"Nothing for me," Lucy says sullenly. She thinks she knows what's coming. "No blindfold either."

"As you wish. Feel free to change your mind at any time."

Mannerman presses a button on his armrest. Moments later, the cabin attendant arrives with a silver tray bearing a stem glass half filled with Tullamore Dew, the Irish whisky which is PL's favorite, although in public in keeping with his image, he drinks single-malt scotch. Using small silver tongs, Mannerman extracts a single ice cube from a crystal bowl engraved with the GIA logo and deposits it in the whisky. He twirls it briefly with the tip of a perfectly manicured forefinger, then takes a deep, savoring swig. Smooth as the whisky is, it still bites. PL harrumphs and gives his chest a series of quick soft punches.

"Nothing like the Dew to soften the catarrh, I always say." He leans forward and speaks in a confiding tone, not that there's anyone around to overhear, but it's his style when he wishes to be emphatic. "I suppose you'd like to know why you've been shanghaied?"

"I can guess. Los Angeles means Hollywood. Hollywood means movie stars and shiny cars--and you-know-who who's been observed sneaking into your suite at the Waldorf Towers at odd hours of the day and night."

"My dear, you make it sound positively illicit! Like a love triangle!"

"Well, it is, isn't it? You--the Speaker--and he whose name I dare not speak. Plus, given one or two things I've heard, what you're up to may be not only illicit but illegal, given whom the gentleman is said to number among his more influential friends."

Mannerman grins. "Gracious," he says with a chuckle, "such passion!"

"I'm just telling you, PL. First there's this Baker deal, which has the Street pulling a long face. And now--if I get your message--we're off to cloud-cuckoo-land. Telecommunications, cyberspace, the Internet, even cable--they're OK. There I can walk the walk and talk the talk. But Hollywood? That's a no-no! After what's happened to Sony, I hate to think how they'll take it if they get a whiff that we may be looking at motion pictures. The day's long past when anyone, us included, can peddle the notion that a film made by some neurotic ditz at sixty million over budget can somehow be classified as software!"

"I can assure you, my sweet darling, Yellow Brick Road has absolutely nothing to do with films."

"What does it have to do with, given that Robert Carlsson's been seen riding up the back elevator of the Waldorf Towers? Mr. Carlsson is not exactly known as a prime mover in the area of heartland industrial renewal! I believe Time called him quote the king of Tinseltown deal-makers unquote."

"Aye, and so they may have, but there's more to Bob than his film interests. The picture shows are what he uses to pay the overhead. As you said, my lass, they're not for us. It's indeed the Information Society that we're going after. The Internet, the World Wide Web. Global telecommunications. Satellite and fiber-optic broadcasting."

He reels off all the buzzwords as if he really believes in them. "A lot of people think this is all so much BS, but you and I know it isn't. There's a reality out there, and I want GIA to be a major player. It's going to take money, to get money requires confident investors, true believers, and that's your job. Now that most of the money in the world is outside our own fair land, much of what we'll be needing will have to come from overseas, which raises certain legislative perplexities, let's call them, but those are for Grover and me to deal with. Correct me if I'm wrong, dear heart, but over eighty percent of our shares are owned onshore, isn't that so? The Street must get with the program, which is, of course, your responsibility. And there will be larger perceptual rows to hoe, as you'll see, and those will be your responsibility as well. You're to be our principal liaison to Robert Carlsson and his principal conduit to us, as I'll not have it perceived that our signals are being called by a Hollywood agent! So welcome to showbiz, my dear!"

"I'm honored. Would you press that button and tell Melanie to uncork a bottle of the Widow? I think I could use it."

"A pleasure. Now, Luce, tell me true. You seem to know who Carlsson is, but do you know the man himself?"

"No. All I've heard is that he's a genius professionally and an animal personally." Melanie appears with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a Baccarat champagne flute, and puts them on Lucy's tray-table.

"Ah, the familiar stereotype, complete with casting couch, no doubt?" asks Mannerman.

"That, too." The champagne is cool and fizzy. Go to my head--quickly--Lucy thinks.

"Well, I can see you're in for quite a surprise. From what I've heard, the man has as little time and taste for hanky-panky as I do; perhaps that's why he and I seem to get on well, although, of course, I'm not privy to his private moments, and he is a bachelor. About such men, there's always gossip, and I've heard it about Bob, but never with a name put to it, and thereby, in my own humble experience, lies the tale--or lack thereof. The man I know is extremely focused and retentive, does not suffer fools gladly, but then only fools do, and we've no time for fools in our enterprise, do we? He has made a great career and name for himself not merely by being brilliant and deft and quick, but by realizing that great visions, like my dear lady wife's prize roses, need careful tending and time to blossom. He's a patient man, Bob is, attentive to the smallest detail in the largest picture. It's for those qualities that I've retained him--for quite a pretty penny, may I say, indeed for several billion pretty pennies--to hold our hands as we venture off on the highway that'll take us to the wonderland of cyberspace and our destiny in the stars."

"In other words, he's going to honcho Yellow Brick Road for you?"

"For us, dear, for us. For our stockholders. Not honcho, m'dear. He'll simply be an advisor, a consultant."

Lucy nods, but she isn't buying this--not quite yet. Robert Carlsson, technically an agent, is the reigning power in Hollywood, although "Hollywood" is too narrow a term for the scope of his influence. When it comes to the multibillion-dollar interfacing of entertainment and telecommunications, he's become the man to see. Since Yellow Brick Road will bet the entire $50 billion GIA store on Mannerman's conviction that media-entertainment-telecommunications-financial services is where it's going to be, to be a player on the scope he intends dictates that he involve Carlsson or quit before he starts.

"I want you to liaise with Carlsson," Mannerman repeats, "and we'll channel his fee through you guys as a PR advisory. Think of some title to shut up the accountants. As for what we'll be working on with him, I don't want that getting around the company and making our--well--more traditional sectors antsy. Don't want 'em feeling that we've lost our hearts to a flashier sort of lass."

Lucy's read perhaps ten profiles of Carlsson in everything from Vanity Fair to Business Week. She's seen him in the flesh at a couple of screenings. He scares her. He has a cold, glittering, reptilian eye. He may have a Harvard PhD in Romance languages, a point the profiles always like to emphasize, but the word is that his rapacity and cynicism make Rupert Murdoch look like Pollyanna.

"I think you'll like working with Carlsson," Mannerman continues.

"Really?"

"In my few meetings with him, I've found Bob to be the soul of civility and cultivation. He went to Harvard, as a matter of fact. Just your type, I should think. He quotes Dante and Petrarch as readily as the weekend grosses. A truly smart man."

In other words, Lucy thinks, just lie back, close your eyes and think of Tuscany. "Street smart or smart smart?" she asks.

"Is there a difference?"

Lucy thinks there is. Smart smart is about absolute values; it's about truth and beauty; it produces art, philosophy, poetry, science. Street smart is entirely relativistic; it's about hustle, about working the system, about what plays right now. Einstein, who discovered relativity, was smart smart. PL is street smart; Lucy's lost somewhere in between.

"I've also heard that Mr. Carlsson's name wasn't always Carlsson, and that he owes his present eminence to certain connections in Sicily."

Mannerman shrugs. "Everyone must come from somewhere. Only a fool doesn't take advantage of his birthright."

Don't play innocent with me, Lucy thinks. Carlsson shot to prominence by arranging a bailout for Goldscreen Productions. It was said the money came from a big French bank, but the word on the Street was that the real source was Colombia via Palermo cleared through Rome.

"Be that as it may, you'll find him a regular fountain of erudition and judgment. Who knows, you might fall under his spell yourself. You must be about ready to give love another try, dear heart. How long has it been since the last one? Don't think I didn't see you trying Mr. H. A. Baker on for size back there. Lipscombing again, are we?"

"Cut that out!" Lucy says sharply, but she smiles in spite of herself and shakes her head. "Lipscombing" is Mannerman's catchphrase for the serial character of Lucy's so-called love life, a staccato parade of fluctuating, inconclusive involvements that prance onstage with a peal of angelic brass and--in most cases--limp off with a whimper after a couple of months. Like so much of Mannerman's rhetoric. "Lipscombing" derives from his sports-besotted boyhood. There was a professional football player named "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, he told Lucy, a legendary defensive tackle in the National Football League in the 1960s. As Mannerman tells the story, Big Daddy was once asked to give his theory of playing defense. He thought for a moment, then replied, "I tackles 'em all, and then I goes through 'em 'til I find the one with the ball, and I keep him!"

Lucy's gone through a lot of them, no doubt of that, and has yet to find the one with the ball, but she's still optimistic, still consoles herself that it's only a matter of time, has to be only a matter of time. As each involvement peters out or blows up, she consoles herself with pride in her patience and discrimination, with the supposition that with every failure she's learning a bit more about herself, that every "Sayonara," "Let's be friends" or angry exit nudges open the door of possibility a little bit wider for the prince who will someday come through it.

"OK," she says, "if you want me to do this right, you have to put me in the loop, so I know when to take and when to swing. Yellow Brick Road is going to take a whole bunch of foreign money, right?"

"I'm talking to people. Lining up a few strategic affiliates."

That's all she needs to hear. "Strategic affiliations" is PL-speak for heavyweight foreign partners who'll put up the money and let him run the show. That involves cutting a deal with Washington just so, a deal that'll let the overseas money in, but only provided it works through Mannerman, to give the appearance of domestication. Lucy can guess who PL's "people" will be: overseas holders of huge quantities of badly depreciated dollars--Koreans and Taiwanese, maybe Japanese, maybe Chinese, people in Europe and South America, Russians, possibly, via Zurich.

She can begin to see how Grover must be working it on Capitol Hill. Right now. foreign ownership of U.S. broadcasting's a no-no. For someone seeking a congressional by-your-leave for a really big media play involving a foreign partner, it'll help to have flown the flag for American industry. We tried, Mannerman'll be able to say, but it didn't work, it's too late in the day, all the money is overseas and you've got to cut us loose to go where the money is. To get back all those dollars that went overseas when Americans bought Toyotas and Italian pasta and Swedish furniture and Chinese everything else.

"I dig," she says.

"Good. So it's on your way to Hollywood, you are. Now primp, and straighten your seams, and give us a big smile." Mannerman looks away, snatches up the armrest phone and punches out a number. As far as he's concerned, the conversation is over.

Lucy sips her champagne, starting to feel the buzz. She gazes out the window and asks herself: Are we going to Hollywood, PL, or just "going Hollywood"?

She feels really beat. The mere idea of having to liaise with Robert Carlsson is tiring. I need a vacation, she thinks. Maybe I need a total change. Seven years of never quite telling the truth has worn me down, seven years of dealing in deflections and obliquities. I need some R&R A pause to smell the moral roses.

It amazes Lucy that she gets away with what she does. If the public could ever really understand how life's ultimate arrangements came to be, how wealth was "created," there'd be no end to the outrage. But thanks to hundreds like her, and thanks most of all to television, which has acclimated people to thinking in sound bites and flash bits, the rich keep getting away with it. And she keeps her job. At what cost? Who knows? What does a pennyworth of soul look like?

Somewhere over Nebraska, she dozes off. When she wakes, it's still light outside, but the sky is deeper in color and the brilliant orange of the declining sun makes the leading edges of the wings appear on fire. Her mouth feels dry, her mind dull. She goes to the galley and pours herself a cup of coffee.

When Lucy returns, she sits herself down across from Mannerman and asks a question that's taken on new significance for her since lunch: "How long are you going to give those people back there?"

"Who? Back where?"

She nods toward the rear of the plane, in the direction of the eastern night they're trying to outrun. "The people at BEECO. Remember? The company we paid $300 million for just five hours ago?"

"Of course I remember! What about them?"

"C'mon, PL, you and I know they won't hit their CRONI. Not in a million years!"

CRONI stands for Cash Return on Net Investment. It's the sum of all things at GIA; it's the company mantra, credo, First (and only) Commandment. It's the inflexible standard by which every line of business. every individual, every particle and atom of the great corporation is judged. CRONI is to GIA what the Code is to the Marine Corps. You don't screw with it. One rule for all; no exceptions after the grace period--which means that two strikes and you're out. It'll be OK for Mannerman to cut BEECO a little slack, but not so much that he risks letting the word get around that some people get to play by different rules. You either hit your CRONI or your head rolls. Only Jack Mannerman can grant a stay of execution, and he seldom does.

At present, CRONI is set at a 15 percent rolling average return--pretax--on assets. BEECO hasn't done anything close to that in a decade. On the numbers Lucy's seen, the new acquisition's pro forma CRONI would be on the order of 10 percent, tops.

"Why would you be asking that question now, Luce? Have you suddenly taken a special interest? It's that Baker fella, isn't it? You were trying him on for size, you little Lipscomber, you! I knew it!"

"Forget Baker, boss. That's your fantasy, not mine. But you did all but promise those people back there that we're in for the duration."

"Promises, promises. . ." Mannerman rolls the word over thoughtfully. "Well, you know how it is," he says finally, "you told me so yourself. Remember? You said, `Anyone can make promises, but it's Wall Street that decides which ones get kept!'"

Lucy says nothing, watches him closely.

"If I cut them some slack, Luce, the Street'll have to go along, right? CRONIwise, that is. Those people have taken at face value our assertions about internal financial discipline. If I make one exception, allowing for a reasonable turnaround period, they'll take that as a sign of weakness. And that doesn't even address what would happen elsewhere in the company if it got around that certain animals are less equal than others."

"What do you think is a reasonable turnaround period?"

Mannerman looks at her curiously. Why are you asking me this? his face says. It's a question she can't answer. "Normally a year, but in this case let's say two," he says.

"That's a long time." A very long time, she thinks, to ask the Street to ignore its misgivings about GIA's going into the mining business. A two-year respite before the CRONI ax descends on BEECO? Before budget scalebacks, investment reductions, layoffs, facility shutdowns, asset sales, spin-offs--actions that amount to a confession of error but also a stiff-spined willingness to cut losses soon and mercilessly? Once the news gets out--and somehow it will, it always seems to--investors will want to know why BEECO got a special deal.

"Well. . ." Mannerman lets his thought trail off. He looks faintly embarrassed. Finally, he shrugs and says, "Well, there's an election to consider. Let's leave it at that. Do your best," he continues. "Play the usual cards, the old synergy ploy, what's there that BEECO hasn't taken advantage of, what we bring to the table. The boys in Tech-Ops report there may actually be something to this water-jet stuff--that's an angle you can do something with. We'll give it a jazzy new name. Something that starts with `hydro' and ends with `ic.' Then there's always the financing angle, how GIA Credit will help BEECO penetrate new markets, tailor financing packages, blah-blah, efficiency through new plant investment, et cetera and so on, blah-blah-blah."

Everything, in other words, thinks Lucy, except what BEECO's business really is. Lousy.

"Besides," Mannerman adds, "Baker's nothing. We'll tighten it up, get the credit union current, replace their medical plan with our HMO--"

"Have you seen their plan?" Lucy interrupts. "It is not exactly managed care."

"That's their problem, not ours. As for CRONI, we'll eat the shortfall. As we project, it's nothing to our bottom line. If it gets out of whack, Finance can bury it in the reserves."

I don't know, she thinks, something here is bothersome. Maybe it's the cynicism. But she feels a kind of partisanship for this little company she hasn't felt for any other GIA acquisition she's shilled for.

The phone on Mannerman's armrest buzzes. He listens for a moment, then says, reluctantly, "OK, you might as well put him through."

For an instant he listens, then winks at Lucy and says, in a voice just a half-tone too loud, "Good to hear your voice too, Herby! Say, old man, your efforts on your client's behalf were much appreciated. By our good selves perhaps even more than him. Et tu, Herby, eh, what, et tu? . . . No, no--just kidding!"

He winks at Lucy again. Lucy finds the arch tone unbecoming. To joke about Herby Lamond's duplicity is to endorse it, to co-conspire, to be smeared with Lamond's own slimy values.

After a pause during which Mannerman silently shakes his head at whatever's being proposed, he finally nods dubiously. "OK, Herby," he says, barely disguising his impatience, "I get the picture. But that's one I think we better back-burner for the moment. Tell you what, though, what say we get together, chew it over. How about breakfast next Thursday? I'll buy. The Gorse Club OK with you? I'll get a room, you bring whoever you want from your shop and I'll have one or two of my planning people in tow. So you check with your secretary if Thursday's OK and she can get back to Jean in St. Louis.... What? You are? Really? . . . Sure we will. Of course we'll take a table. What're you going to talk about? . . . You don't say!"

When Mannerman hangs up, he grins at Lucy. "Try this on for size. The Council for Morality in Business has named as its Man of the Year none other than H. Herbert Lamond! He's to receive the award at a grand whoop-de-do at the Pierre in January. He wants us to take a twenty-five-thousand-dollar table."

"And we will."

"Aye, that we will. In f;act, we'll take two. One for you to preside over and one for Spudsy. You'll find it enlightening. Herby's amazing, how he can pound the pulpit with the same virtuous hand he uses to endorse his merger-fee checks. Some people call it hypocrisy, but to me it's nothing shy of sheer genius!"

Lucy will deal with this vexation when the time comes. Her mind's elsewhere.

"Just one thing," she says absently.

"Yes?"

"If I were you, I'd be careful on this one," says Lucy.

"Which one? Herby Lamond?"

"BEECO."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I think Mr. Baker and his people believe we really are in for the whole nine yards."

"Ah, come now, Lucy, that may be today, but tomorrow's another day, as Rhett Butler's estranged wife notoriously remarked." His tone is flip and confident. "And who's to say Mr. Baker won't see it the same as others have? As a fine fair morning full of joy and opportunity for a lad with coin in his pocket and the past a way, way back in another country. It never fails, lass."

Suddenly it seems terribly silent in the cabin. The only noise is the smooth roar of the Gulfstream's engines. Lucy looks out the window. They're descending now. Up ahead lies the great sparkling earthbound galaxy of the Los Angeles basin, a vast bowl lined with velvet the color of twilight in which a million twinkling diamonds nestle. She studies the shadow-ravined foothills fleeing under the wing and tries to sort out her thoughts.

When she turns back, Mannerman has another glass of whisky on the tray-table in front of him, and he's peering into it as if hoping to find revealed in its amber depths the answer to a troubling question.

"Look, PL," she says, "about BEECO. Don't get your guts in an uproar. I just want you to be aware that I think you're looking at a real throwback: an old-fashioned duty, honor, country guy who really believes all that. I know the type. I've got one for a father."

Mannerman looks at her, then picks up his glass and raises it. "I thank you for your support," he declares. "And now, here's to Hollywood, and the Yellow Brick Road!" He clinks his glass to hers.

As they drink, it occurs to Lucy that this is the first time she can recall PL having a second whisky.