The meeting about the music was set for one o’clock the next afternoon. The board of Acorn would consider the rollout of what would be their international signature for a decade or longer. Jules had reserved his room for three days afterward, in case there were adjustments, contract signings, complications – of which he now suspected there would be enough to overwhelm him until there would be none, and, worn down, he would give up. Then his flight back to Paris, like the room in the hotel, prepaid and non–refundable. Including what he had spent in Los Angeles, he had parted with an enormous amount of money. Ordinarily he would have been more than anxious that the nearly €40,000 would be a loss if, as seemed possible, he would not be reimbursed. That amount could have gone a long way in regard to Luc, and was a substantial portion of what he could give to Cathérine were he to give her everything. He would do precisely that of course, but it wasn’t enough. Still, he wasn’t anxious. Acorn owed him the money, and without the vaguest idea how, he was confident that he would get it and – if Acorn proved difficult, dishonest, and dishonorable – more than what he was owed, as either interest or penalty. He wondered why he thought this, because he had no basis for doing so. How could Jules Lacour even accounts with Acorn?
For almost twenty-four hours, he slept a deep sleep, deeper than any since his twenties. In Los Angeles he had swum every day. Now he would run, and on a blue, autumnal morning, having studied the running map supplied by the hotel, he set off for Central Park. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had the perfect place to run, with the Seine below to the east, gardens and forest to the west, and a gravel path that was straight, level, and lonely. There was no better place in the world. Here, he had to dodge taxis and pedestrians, and when he got to the park weave his way on unfamiliar paths, cross roads stuffed with fat, aggressive automobiles, and leap over potholes and patches of mud. For many years in Saint-Germainen-Laye he had puffed along, swift only for a man his age. Long before, he had gotten used to people passing him: even children. But now in New York no one passed him. For the first time in many years he ran as if he had no weight, and as the run progressed, instead of slowing down, he sped up.
Attributing this to the long sleep, he knew that he would not tire, and that by one o’clock he would be even stronger and more clear-headed. So he ran faster and faster, slowing of course on Heartbreak Hill just south of Harlem, but racing down the west side of the park on the home stretch. He even leapt low fences, something he hadn’t done in decades.
In his room, which often was above the clouds, he showered luxuriously in a Niagara of hot water, put on a suit and the $300 deep blue tie he had bought in Beverly Hills, and left for the meeting, having breakfasted and had a haircut while still in running clothes. In Los Angeles his suit had been a prisoner of the closet. Now, on 57th Street, it happily met the cool air, and his dress shirt glowed like snow in sunshine.
THE ACORN TOWER was so high that in strong winds the top swayed like a pendulum. If they turned pale enough, visitors to the executive floor at the very top were given air-sickness bags. Much smaller Acorn buildings had sprouted around the tower as if it were an oak, because the multitrillion-dollar behemoth had set grafted limbs to grow until they themselves had to scatter their own Acorns to office parks or glass plinths: in Connecticut (for the criminal trading of derivatives), London (insurance and re-insurance), Washington (pensions, public relations, legislative bribery), Boston (art), Philadelphia (old money), Short Hills (financing new-money monstrosities with one-hundred-car garages, faux mine shafts, and master-bedroom, in-wall, gold-plated popcorn machines), to mention just a few.
The efficiency and wealth of this organization became immediately apparent upon realization that whereas its two-or-three-hundred-thousand-and-change employees managed its trillions, the Federal government mismanaged not much more than twice the sum with four million civilians and military on staff. Of course, Acorn didn’t send rockets to Mars or have a navy. It was just a great money machine. Like a whale, it cruised the markets, sweeping up cash in its baleen. Like a clam, it sat amidst constantly mobile currents and strained them for things of value. It produced no wool, wheat, or flax, no lawn-mower engines, apples, or fedoras. It was solely conceptual, the purely intellectual construction of statistics, fears, gambling, demography, predictions, assurances, numbers, and lies. Three things happened in its labyrinthine, magnificently decorated offices. Numbers were sliced, diced, churned, whirled, wiggled, and juggled. Payments came in. Once in a while, payments went out, too, but it was the job of the actuaries, auditors, adjusters, and lawyers to keep these to a minimum. All in all, a happy situation for Rich Panda, who with time kept getting richer and richer – like the rosewood in the boardroom that with time also kept getting richer and richer. But whereas the wood was a rich red, Rich Panda was a rich butter color.
His glasses, which he wore for appearance rather than to correct his vision, were a rich butter color. His hair was a rich (thinning) butter color. His skin, unlike Shymanski’s, which was sallow to the point of taupe, was a rich butter color, tinged with a rich, buttery red. His suit, of the softest, richest, most glowing wool in the world, was a rich butter color – anything but black and white. His tie – it need not be said. All in all, he resembled the sun setting over Napeague Inlet as it turned from white to a rich butter color. He was very heavy but not jolly; as round as the man in the moon and as deeply menacing, because you could not quite see him. Not because he was blinding like the sun, or hidden in a briar patch of flounces and curls like Louis XIV, but because you could not even vaguely sense, despite his smile, what was going on behind his cold, sled-dog-blue eyes.
When Jules stepped from the elevator and into a reception area adjacent to a most spectacular boardroom, he was met by a stunningly attractive woman standing beneath a huge Picasso. She greeted him and brought him to his seat.
Jules noted the members of the board, their faces, and how they were attired. Three women – one perhaps in her thirties, two certainly over fifty – were dressed expensively and elegantly, with expertly done hair and makeup. Lightly but noticeably bejeweled, they sat with backs as straight as ramrods, and each one had purses and portfolios of extremely expensive leather in which various electronic slabs were discreetly hidden. He could smell their perfume. They were pretty. But although these women had every attribute of femininity – delicacy, beauty, grace, and more – they were patently unfeminine merely because they chose to be. Suspicion, aggression, self-assertion, and the sense that they were crouched to spring radiated from them quietly but unmistakably. Perhaps they felt that these qualities were necessary in what had formerly been a man’s world, but Jules was as repelled by their aura as he was by that of the men around the table, from whom radiated the same suspicion, aggression, and self-assertion. As a board, they were supposed to have been guiding the company with its best interests in mind. To the extent that they did this, it was to advance their own standing. They spoke either to show off or to discredit their colleagues without leaving fingerprints. They gobbled at success just as tensely as fancily dressed people in a fancy restaurant.