And there was something else hidden in his house: a wife. Her name was Arabella. She was from Venezuela and spoke little English. On her first day, confronted by the mountain of laundry in the master bedroom, she had shown neither shock nor horror. Just hauled load after load to the basement, washed and folded the laundry, and put it in their drawers. Kendall and Stephanie were thrilled.
At the lakefront co-op, Kendall did something he hadn’t done in a long time: he did his job. He finished abridging Democracy in America. He FedExed the color-coded manuscript to Montecito and, the very next day, began writing proposals to bring other obscure books back into print. He sent two or three proposals per day, along with digital or hard copies of the texts in question. Instead of waiting for Jimmy to respond, Kendall called him repeatedly, and pestered him with questions. At first, Jimmy had taken Kendall’s calls. But soon he began to complain about their frequency and, finally, he told Kendall to stop bothering him with minutiae and to deal with things himself. “I trust your taste,” Jimmy said.
He hardly called the office at all anymore.
The train deposited Kendall at Union Station. Coming out onto Madison Street, he got into a cab (paying with untraceable cash) and had the driver let him out a block from the all-cash building. From there he trudged around the corner, looking as though he’d come on foot. He said hello to Mike, the doorman on duty, and made his way to the elevator.
The penthouse was empty. Not even a maid around. The elevator let you off on the lower floor, and as Kendall was going down the hall, on his way to the circular stairs to his office, he passed Jimmy’s Jade Room. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked. And so he stepped in.
He had no intention of stealing anything. That would be stupid. He just wanted to trespass, to add this minor act of insubordination to his much larger, Robin Hood–like act of rebellion. The Jade Room was like a room in a museum or an exclusive jewelry store, with beautifully carpentered walls filled with built-in shelves and drawers. At evenly spaced intervals lighted display cases contained pieces of jade. The stone wasn’t dark green, as Kendall expected, but a light green. He remembered Jimmy telling him that the best jade, the rarest, was almost white in color, and that the most prized specimens were those carved from single pieces of stone.
The subjects of the carvings were hard to make out, the shapes so sinuous that at first Kendall thought the animals depicted were snakes or serpents. But then he recognized them as horses’ heads. Long, tapering horses’ heads enfolded upon themselves. Horses tucking their heads against their bodies as though in sleep.
He opened one of the drawers. Inside, on a bed of velvet, was another horse.
Kendall picked it up. Ran his finger along the line of the horse’s mane. He thought about the artisan who’d fashioned this thing, some guy in China, sixteen hundred years ago, whose name no one knew anymore and who had died along with everyone else alive during the Jin Dynasty, but who, by looking at a living, breathing horse standing in a misty field somewhere in the Yellow River valley, had so seen the animal that he’d managed to render its form into this piece of precious stone, thereby making it even more precious. The human desire to do something useless like that, something exacting and skilled and downright crazy, was what had always excited Kendall, until it ceased to excite him because of his inability to do it himself. His inability to keep up the necessary persistence and to accept the shame of pursuing such a craft in a culture that not only didn’t prize the discipline but openly ridiculed it.
Yet somehow this jade carver had succeeded. He would never know it, but this pale white somnolent horse that had lived long ago was still not dead, not yet, for here it was in Kendall’s hand, softly lit by the recessed halogen bulbs in this jewelry cabinet of a room.
With something like veneration Kendall returned the horse head to its velvet drawer and closed it. Then he let himself out of the Jade Room and went upstairs to his office.
Shipping boxes filled the floor. The first editions of The Pocket Democracy had just come back from the printer—the real printer—and Kendall was in the process of sending copies to bookstore buyers and historical museum gift shops. He had just sat down at his desk and turned on his computer when his phone rang.
“Hey, kiddo. I just got the new book.” It was Jimmy. “Looks fantastic! You did a helluva job.”
“Thank you.”
“What do the orders look like?”
“We’ll know in a couple of weeks.”
“I think we’ve got it priced right. And the format is perfect. Get these next to a cash register and we can up-sell these babies. The cover looks terrific.”
“I think so, too.”
“What about reviews?”
“It’s a two-hundred-year-old book. Not exactly news.”
“It’s news that stays news. OK, ads,” Jimmy said. “Send me a list of places you think can reach our audience. Not the fucking New York Review of Books. That’s preaching to the converted. I want this book to get out there. This is important!”
“Let me think a little,” Kendall said.
“What else was I going to—? Oh yeah! The bookmark! Great idea. People are going to love this. Promotes the book and our brand. You giving these out as promotional items or just in the books themselves?”
“Both.”
“Perfect. What about making some posters, too? Each with a different quote from the book. I bet bookstores would use those for a display. Do some mock-ups and send them to me, will you?”
“Will do,” Kendall said.
“I’m feeling optimistic. We might sell some books for once.”
“Hope so.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Jimmy said, “if this book does as well as I think it will, I’ll give you health insurance.”
Kendall hesitated. “That would be great.”
“I don’t want to lose you, kiddo. Plus, I’ll be honest, it’s a headache finding someone else.”
This generosity wasn’t grounds for reappraisal and regret. Jimmy had taken his sweet time, hadn’t he? And the promise was phrased in the conditional. If, not when. No, Kendall thought to himself, just wait and see how things turn out. If Jimmy gives me insurance and a nice raise, then maybe I’ll think about shutting Midwestern Storage down. But then and only then.
“Oh, one more thing,” Jimmy said. “Piasecki sent me the accounts. The numbers look funny.”
“Excuse me?”
“What are we doing printing thirty thousand copies of Thomas Paine? And why are we using two printers?”
At congressional hearings, or in courtrooms, the accused CEOs and CFOs followed one of two strategies: they either said they didn’t know or they didn’t remember.
“I don’t remember why we printed thirty thousand,” Kendall said. “I’ll have to check the orders. As far as printers go, Piasecki handles that. Maybe someone offered us a better deal.”
“The new printer is charging us a higher rate.”
Piasecki hadn’t told Kendall that. Piasecki had become greedy, jacked the price, and kept it to himself.
“Listen,” Jimmy said, “send me the contact info for the new printer. And for that storage place up in wherever it is. I’m going to have my guy out here look into this.”