A Foolish Consistency Read Free Page B

didn't help that I mentioned I graduated summa cum laude on a full ride scholarship.  If I had known he put himself through night school at the City University of New York, and that it had taken him seven years to get the position I landed straight out of college, I never would have said it, but there it was. 
    "The name's William," I said.
    "Oh, right, right."  He picked up my nameplate and squeezed it like a stress reliever.  I imagined the obsidian rock screaming for mercy.  "Look, I hate to do this to you, it being your first week and all, but the Board wants somebody in Legal to take care of this."
    Behind the yellow lenses, his eyes glinted, and I could tell he was suppressing a smile.
    "Well, I'll do whatever I can, sir."
    "Oh, I am sure you will, Harvard.  I'm sure you will.  And this isn't a job I relish giving to anyone, but someone with your talent, well, I thought it would be a good test."
    It took all of my willpower to sit there calmly.  Since I started, Gordal had been doing his best to bury me with a series of tests .  My first day he had me delivering two dozen time-sensitive legal documents all over New York even though I had only lived there two weeks.  I got it done.  The second day he gave me a thousand pages of a recent lawsuit and told me there was something missing, and that they needed to know what it was by five o'clock.  I found the memo with three minutes to spare.  The third day he didn't see me at all, and let me smolder in the basement by myself.  I didn't make a peep. 
    I would suffer any indignity he could throw at me because I knew one day soon, if I played it straight and narrow, I would be Gordal's boss because I had more talent in the cuticle of my pinkie than he had in his entire sauerkraut body.  I had a future, a future of prestige and power, and I wasn't going to let some pork chop with a weakness for Italian food make me lose sight of it. 
    At least that's what I thought until he told me what I had to do.
    "It's like this," he said.  "The Board wants to give the old man his pink slip.  And they want you to do it."
    I must have looked like a man who just found out his 401K had been reduced to zero due to a computer glitch, because Gordal chuckled.
    "They want . . . " I began, and then, shaking my head, said, "You're talking about Rodney Biggs?" 
    "That's right, Harvard.  El supremo.  The head honcho.  The Magic Man himself."
    I couldn't believe it.  Biggs was the reason I had chosen to work for the company.  I had always admired him.  "Why?"
    "Oh, come on, kid, you know why.  The old man always makes an ass of himself with his stupid magic tricks and his crude jokes.  They've let him float along for a few years in his big office up there while he slowly goes senile, but the suits from Japan want a fresh start."
    "Can they do that?"
    "Can they do that?  You did go to Harvard, didn't you?"
    I didn't answer.  The truth was, I knew Rodney Biggs currently owned only thirty-five percent of Biggs Enterprises.  He had owned fifty-one percent a few years earlier, but when he reached the age of eighty he started liquidating his shares.  He had done it to give the money to charity, but there had been an unintended side effect:  a massive Japanese conglomerate had seen a way to pick up a bargain.  It hadn't taken them long to buy a controlling share from people wanting to make a quick buck.
    Now Biggs, who once performed to packed theatres under the headline of The Magic Man , was out.  And I was going to tell him.
    "I'm not sure about this," I said.
    I was going to say I'm not sure I can do this, but I knew that's what Gordal wanted me to say.  He leaned forward, his tongue flicking out and wetting his bottom lip.  He leered at me like some juvie fresh out of prison who just found another cat to douse with gasoline. 
    "Are you saying you refuse? " he said.
    I could see it clearly in his ravenous expression:  he desperately wanted an excuse to toss my Ivy