Slow Sculpture (33 page)

Joe Trilling, who had slogged through college and medical school like a hodcarrier, grunted enviously. “I’ve seen one or two like, that. Everybody marvels, nobody sees how easy it was for them.”

Karl shook his head. “Wasn’t quite like that with Cleve Wheeler. If anything was easy for him it was because of the nature of his equipment. He was like a four-hundred horsepower car moving in sixty-horsepower traffic. When his muscles were called on he used them, I mean really put it down to the floor. A very willing guy. Well—he had his choice of jobs—hell, choice of careers. He went into an architectural firm that could use his math, administrative ability, public presence, knowledge of materials, art. Gravitated right to the top, got a partnership. Picked up a doctorate on the side while he was doing it. Married extremely well.

“Mister Lucky,” Joe said.

“Mister Lucky, yeah. Listen. Wheeler became a partner and he did his work and he knew his stuff—everything he could learn or understand. Learning and understanding are not enough to cope with some things like greed or unexpected stupidity or accident or sheer bad breaks. Two of the other partners got into a deal I won’t bother you with—a high-rise apartment complex in the wrong place for the wrong residents and land acquired the wrong way. Wheeler saw it coming, called them in and talked it over. They said yes-yes and went right ahead and did what they wanted anyway—something that Wheeler never in the world expected. The one thing high capability and straight morals and a good education doesn’t give you is the end of innocence. Cleve Wheeler was an innocent.

“Well, it happened, the disaster that Cleve had predicted, but it happened far worse. Things like that, when they surface, have a way of exposing a lot of other concealed rot. The firm collapsed. Cleve
Wheeler had never failed at anything in his whole life. It was the one thing he had no practice in dealing with. Anyone with the most rudimentary intelligence would have seen that this was the time to walk away—lie down, even. Cut his losses. But I don’t think these things even occurred to him.”

Karl Trilling laughed suddenly. “In one of Philip Wylie’s novels is a tremendous description of a forest fire and how the animals run away from it, the foxes and the rabbits running shoulder to shoulder, the owls flying in the daytime to get ahead of the flames. Then there’s this beetle, lumbering along on the ground. The beetle comes to a burned patch, the edge of twenty acres of hell. It stops, it wiggles its feelers, it turns to the side and begins to walk around the fire—” He laughed again. “That’s the special thing Cleveland Wheeler has, you see, under all that muscle and brain and brilliance. If he had to—and were a beetle—he wouldn’t turn back and he wouldn’t quit. If all he could do was walk around it, he’d start walking.”

“What happened?” asked Joe.

“He hung on. He used everything he had. He used his brains and his personality and his reputation and all his worldly goods. He also borrowed and promised—and he worked. Oh, he worked. Well, he kept the firm. He cleaned out the rot and built it all up again from the inside, strong and straight this time. But it cost.

“It cost him time—all the hours of every day but the four or so he used for sleeping. And just about when he had it leveled off and starting up, it cost him his wife.”

“You said he’d married well.”

“He’d married what you marry when you’re a young block-buster on top of everything and going higher. She was a nice enough girl, I suppose, and maybe you can’t blame her, but she was no more used to failure than he was. Only he could walk around it. He could rent a room and ride the bus. She just didn’t know how—and of course with women like that there’s always the discarded swain somewhere in the wings.”

“How did he take that?”

“Hard. He’d married the way he played ball or took examinations—with everything he had. It did something to him. All this did
things to him, I suppose, but that was the biggest chunk of it.

“He didn’t let it stop him. He didn’t let anything stop him. He went on until all the bills were paid—every cent. All the interest. He kept at it until the net worth was exactly what it had been before his ex-partners had begun to eat out the core. Then he gave it away. Gave it away! Sold all right and title to his interest for a dollar.”

“Finally cracked, hm?”

Karl Trilling looked at his brother scornfully. “Cracked. Matter of definition, isn’t it? Cleve Wheeler’s goal was zero—can you understand that? What is success anyhow? Isn’t it making up your mind what you’re going to do and then doing it, all the way?”

“In that case,” said his brother quietly, “suicide is success.”

Karl gave him a long penetrating look. “Right,” he said, and thought about it a moment.

“Anyhow,” Joe asked, “why zero?”

“I did a lot of research on Cleve Wheeler, but I couldn’t get inside his head. I don’t know. But I can guess. He meant to owe no man anything. I don’t know how he felt about the company he saved, but I can imagine. The man he became—was becoming—wouldn’t want to owe it one damned thing. I’d say he just wanted out—but on his own terms, which included leaving nothing behind to work on him.”

“Okay,” said Joe.

Karl Trilling thought,
The nice thing about old Joe is that he’ll wait. All these years apart with hardly any communication beyond birthday cards—and not always that—and here he is, just as if we were still together every day. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important; I wouldn’t be telling him all this unless he needed to know; he wouldn’t need any of it unless he was going to help. All that unsaid—I don’t have to ask him a damn thing. What am I interrupting in his life? What am I going to interrupt? I won’t have to worry about that. He’ll take care of it
.

He said, “I’m glad I came here, Joe.”

Joe said, “That’s all right,” which meant all the things Karl had been thinking. Karl grinned and hit him on the shoulder and went on talking.

“Wheeler dropped out. It’s not easy to map his trail for that
period. It pops up all over. He lived in at least three communes—maybe more, but those three were a mess when he came and a model when he left. He started businesses—all things that had never happened before, like a supermarket with no shelves, no canned music, no games or stamps, just neat stacks of open cases, where the customer took what he wanted and marked it according to the card posted by the case, with a marker hanging on a string. Eggs and frozen meat and fish and the like, and local produce were priced a flat two percent over wholesale. People were honest because they could never be sure the checkout counter didn’t know the prices of everything—besides, to cheat on the prices listed would have been just too embarrassing. With nothing but a big empty warehouse for overhead and no employees spending thousands of man hours marking individual items, the prices beat any discount house that ever lived. He sold that one, too, and moved on. He started a line of organic baby foods without preservatives, franchised it and moved on again. He developed a plastic container that would burn without polluting and patented it and sold the patent.”

“I’ve heard of that one. Haven’t seen it around, though.”

“Maybe you will,” Karl said in a guarded tone. “Maybe you will. Anyway, he had a CPA in Pasadena handling details, and just did his thing all over. I never heard of a failure in anything he tried.”

“Sounds like a junior edition of the great man himself, your honored boss.”

“You’re not the only one who realized that. The boss may be a ding-a-ling in many ways, but nobody ever faulted his business sense. He has always had his tentacles out for wandering pieces of very special manpower. For all I know he had drawn a bead on Cleveland Wheeler years back. I wouldn’t doubt that he’d made offers from time to time, only during that period Cleve Wheeler wasn’t about to go to work for anyone that big. His whole pattern is to run things his way, and you don’t do that in an established empire.”

“Heir apparent,” said Joe, reminding him of something he had said earlier.

“Right,” nodded Karl. “I knew you’d begin to get the idea before I was finished.”

“But finish,” said Joe.

“Right. Now what I’m going to tell you, I just want you to know, I don’t expect you to understand it or what it means or what it has all done to Cleve Wheeler. I need your help, and you can’t really help me unless you know the whole story.”

“Shoot.”

Karl Trilling shot: “Wheeler found a girl. Her name was Clara Prieta and her folks came from Sonora. She was bright as hell—in her way, I suppose, as bright as Cleve though with a tenth of his schooling—and pretty as well, and it was Cleve she wanted, not what he might get for her. She fell for him when he had nothing—when he really wanted nothing. They were a daily, hourly joy to each other. I guess that was about the time he started building this business and that, making something again. He bought a little house and a car. He bought two cars, one for her. I don’t think she wanted it, but he couldn’t do enough—he was always looking for more things to do for her. They went out for an evening to some friend’s house, she from shopping, he from whatever it was he was working on then, so they had both cars. He followed her on the way home and had to watch her lose control and spin out. She died in his arms.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Mister Lucky. Listen: a week later he turned a corner downtown and found himself looking at a bank robbery. He caught a stray bullet—grazed the back of his neck. He had seven months to lie still and think about things. When he got out he was told his business manager had embezzled everything and headed south with his secretary. Everything.”

“What did he do?”

“Went to work and paid his hospital bill!”

They sat in the car in the dark for a long time, until Joe said, “Was he paralyzed, there in the hospital?”

“For nearly five months.”

“Wonder what he thought about.”

Karl Trilling said, “I can imagine what he thought about. What I can’t imagine is what he decided. What he concluded. What he determined to be. Damn it, there are no accurate words for it. We
all do the best we can with what we’ve got, or try to. Or should. He did—and with the best possible material to start out with. He played it straight; he worked hard; he was honest and lawful and fair; he was fit; he was bright. He came out of the hospital with those last two qualities intact. God alone knows what’s happen to the rest of it.”

“So he went to work for the old man.”

“He did—and somehow that frightens me. It was as if all his qualifications were not enough to suit both of them until these things happened to him—until they made him become what he is.”

“And what is that?”

“There isn’t a short answer to that, Joe. The old man has become a modern myth. Nobody ever sees him. Nobody can predict what he’s going to do or why. Cleveland Wheeler stepped into his shadow and disappeared almost as completely as the boss. There are very few things you can say for certain. The boss has always been a recluse and in the ten years Cleve Wheeler has been with him he has become more so. It’s been business as usual with him, of course—which means the constantly unusual—long periods of quiet, and then these spectacular unexpected wheelings and dealings. You assume that the old man dreams these things up and some high-powered genius on his staff gets them done. But it could be the genius that instigates the moves—who can know? Only the people closest to him—Wheeler, Epstein, me. And I don’t know.”

“But Epstein died.”

Karl Trilling nodded in the dark. “Epstein died. Which leaves only Wheeler to watch the store. I’m the old man’s personal physician, not Wheeler’s, and there’s no guarantee that I ever will be Wheeler’s.”

Joe Trilling recrossed his legs and leaned back, looking out into the whispering dark. “It begins to take shape,” he murmured. “The old man’s on the way out, you very well might be, and there’s nobody to take over but this Wheeler.”

“Yes, and I don’t know what he is or what he’ll do. I do know he will command more power than any single human being on Earth. He’ll have so much that he’ll be above any kind of cupidity that you or I could imagine—you or I can’t think in that order of magnitude.
But you see, he’s a man who, you might say, has had it proved to him that being good and smart and strong and honest doesn’t particularly pay off. Where will he go with all this? And hypothesizing that he’s been making more and more of the decisions lately, and extrapolating from that—where is he going? All you can be sure of is that he will succeed in anything he tries. That is his habit.”

“What does he want? Isn’t that what you’re trying to figure out? What would a man like that want, if he knew he could get it?”

“I knew I’d come to the right place,” said Karl almost happily. “That’s it exactly. As for me, I have all I need now and there are plenty of other places I could go. I wish Epstein were still around, but he’s dead and cremated.”

“Cremated?”

“That’s right—you wouldn’t know about that. Old man’s instructions, I handled it myself. You’ve heard of the hot and cold private swimming pools—but I bet you never heard of a man with his own private crematorium in the second sub-basement.”

Joe threw up his hands. “I guess if you reach into your pocket and pull out two billion real dollars, you can have anything you want. By the way—was that legal?”

“Like you said—if you have two billion. Actually, the county medical examiner was present and signed the papers. And he’ll be there when the old man pushes off too—it’s all in the final instructions. Hey—wait, I don’t want to cast any aspersions on the M.E. He wasn’t bought. He did a very competent examination on Epstein.”

“Okay—we know what to expect when the time comes. It’s afterward you’re worried about.”

“Right. What has the old man—I’m speaking of the corporate old man now—what has he been doing all along? What has he been doing in the last ten years, since he got Wheeler—and is it any different from what he was doing before? How much of this difference, if any, is more Wheeler than boss? That’s all we have to go on, Joe, and from it we have to extrapolate what Wheeler’s going to do with the biggest private economic force this world has ever known.”