"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

I pulled the documents out of Davids's manila envelope and spread them in front of me, my mind
fixated on one point in particular.
In all the time I was growing up, I was aware of one thing about my father. He was a businessman.
That was what he did and who he was. He was Homo sapiens businessmaniens. He got up in the
morning and shoved off to do business, and he came back in the evening having by-God done some. My
parents never talked about their early life, and rarely about anything of consequence, but I knew about
UnRealty. He'd worked for a number of years at a local firm, then one night took my mother out for a
fine dinner and told her he was going it alone. He actually used those words, apparently, as if appearing
in an advertisement for bank loans. He had talked to a few people, made some contacts, engaged in all
the textbook corporate heroics that entitled you some day to stand at the bar of a country club and say 'I
did it my way'. It can't have been easy, but my father had a certain force of will. Car mechanics and
plumbers, meter maids and check-in clerks, all took one look and elected not to fuck him around. When
he walked into a restaurant, the word went round the staff that it was time to stand up straight and stop
spitting in the soup. His company, and its history, was the most real thing I understood about him.
And yet, in his will, he had stipulated that UnRealty be wound up. Instead of leaving it to his son to
make the decision, he had calmly imploded twenty years' work.
As soon as Davids had told me this, I knew it could only mean one thing. My parents hadn't wanted
me to take over the business. In many ways this was explicable. I have sold many, many things, shifted
many and varied commodities, but never an expensive house. I knew about them, however. Did I ever. I
knew about Unique Homes magazine, about the DuPont Registry and Christie's Great Estates. I knew
about conservation easements and dude ranches, was familiar with the value of old-world craftsmanship,
views of the 15th fairway, end-of-the-road privacy where serenity abounds. I couldn't help but be. It had
seeped into my blood. I even did two years of an architecture degree, before I sidestepped out of college
via an unfortunate incident and into a different line of work. And yet he either hadn't wanted me, or hadn't
trusted me, to take over the business. The more I thought about it, the more hurt I got.
I kept drinking, to see if things got any better. They didn't. I kept drinking anyway. The bar remained
quiet throughout the early part of the evening. Then at ten o'clock there was a sudden influx of men and
women in suits, sprung from some ball-breaking corporate flipchart-fest. They milled about in the centre
of the bar, networking rabidly, excited as children at the prospect of going berserk and having a couple
of Lite beers. By this stage my brain felt very heavy and cold. The noise started loud and got worse, as if
I was surrounded by people shovelling pebbles.
I held my ground in my booth, glaring virulently at the invaders. A couple of the men rakishly removed
their jackets. One fellow even loosened his tie. Underlings sidled up to their bosses and hung about like
sandpipers, pecking for Brownie points. I'd cope. I'd weather the storm. These people might know how
to run spreadsheets and asset-strip, but if it came to a bar endurance test, they were wearing water
wings. I was confident. I was in the zone. I was also, in retrospect, even more drunk than I realized.
Three men came in the door. They stopped, looked around.
The next thing I knew there was screaming, and the suits were diving for cover. At first I felt
frightened, and then I realized it was me they were running from.
I was swaying in the middle of the floor, clothes wet from upturned beer. I had a gun in my hands and
was pointing it straight at the men in the doorway, barking a long, incoherent series of contradictory
instructions at them. They looked scared out of their wits. This was probably because when a man points
a gun at you, you want to do what he asks. But it's difficult when you can't make out what he's saying.
Eventually I stopped shouting. The men in the door briefly became six, then resolved into three again.
The room was quiet around me, but my heart felt like it was going to melt down. Everybody waited for
things to either get better or worse.
'Sorry,' I muttered. 'Misunderstanding.'
I put the gun back in my jacket, swept the papers up off the table, and lurched out. I got halfway
across the lobby before I fell over, taking a table, a large vase and a hundred bucks' worth of flowers
down with me.