Recessional: A Novel Read Free Page A

smile that signaled: I don’t take myself too seriously. Taggart knew that he had been a successful medical doctor of great ability who had fallen on bad times and had left his profession. Zorn was available to direct a major health institution and Taggart wanted to hire him, but needed to know what kind of man he was after the buffetings he’d taken.
    Indicating that Zorn should take the preferred seat, the one that looked out on Lake Michigan, he said: “Have you had breakfast?” When Zorn nodded yes, he said: “Good. So have I, but I’ll bet we could each profit from some fresh-squeezed orange juice.” Pushing a button on his desk intercom, he ordered the drinks, and before they arrived he went directly to the heart of the problem that had brought them together.
    “We need each other, Zorn. From what my men tell me, I judge that you’re fed up with Chicago—especially on a day like this.”
    “Maybe better said, Chicago’s fed up with me.”
    “Could be.”
    When the orange juice arrived, Taggart took the glasses from the waiter and personally served his guest, then returned to his chair behind the desk and sat staring at his own glass. Holding his hands together, he lifted his elbows parallel to the floor and flexed his muscles three or four times in an isometric exercise that ended with his pulling his extended fists sharply back and into his chest, as if he were trying to knock himself out. He then took a long drink.
    “Dr. Zorn. You were on your high school track team. Always good for a man to have been an athlete. Teaches him about winning.” He stopped to stare directly at the doctor: “And the game I’m in and which you seek to join is about how we win, and why others lose, and how we turn their losses into our wins. It’s about nothing else—not money, not health, not retirement. It’s about winning, and don’t you forget it.”
    He led Zorn to an alcove whose walls were lined with charts and displays that summarized Taggart Enterprises. One wall was dominated by a huge aerial photograph of a cluster of buildings surrounded by well-kept real estate, another by a large map of theUnited States decorated with more than fifty stick pins, each ending in a glass bead in one of three colors—red, blue, black. They were well dispersed across the United States but seemed a bit more heavily concentrated in New England and the areas adjacent to Seattle.
    “How many, do you judge?” Taggart asked.
    “Well over fifty.”
    “Eighty-seven. And do you notice how they’re differentiated?”
    “I see the three colors. Am I missing something?”
    “How about the three forms to the pins?” and when Zorn looked more closely he saw that regardless of the pin’s color, its head could be either round or square or triangular. “What you see summarized here is our entire operation. If you’re to work with us, you must make yourself familiar with it, especially the physical forms, which aren’t so easy to see or understand.” Picking up a handful of pins from a tray on the table, he handed them one by one to Zorn as he explained: “Square, we own the entire operation, we bear the loss, we bank the profit. Round, we own the place fifty-fifty with local financiers. Triangle, local people own at least ninety percent, we own ten or less, but they give us a profitable managerial contract.” He paused, then tapped his desk as he slowly enunciated each word, “for—as—long—as—we—show—a—profit.” Leaning back, he stared at Zorn again: “Three months’ losses in a row, they can abrogate the contract—and they do.”
    Juggling the remaining pins in his hand, he asked: “What have I just told you?” and Zorn apparently pleased him with his short reply: “You own some outright. You’re co-partners on others. You have only a managerial contract on others.”
    “That isn’t what I said.”
    Zorn, well aware of the shortcut he’d taken, said: “Even on the triangles you do retain a small