"Destroyer 021 - Deadly Seeds.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"What?" said the negotiator, suddenly revived.
"I'm not sure yet," said Fielding. "Tell them it looks as if we're going to shut down but I may work out something by this evening."
"I've got to know what, Mr. Fielding. I can't raise their hopes without something concrete."
"Well, then, don't raise their hopes," said Fielding and left with his corporation counsel for dinner in a small El Paso restaurant he favored. They dined on clams oreganato, lobster fra diavolo, and a warm runny custard called zabaglione. Fielding showed his corporation counsel pictures he had taken of the famine in India as part of his famine study for the Denver chapter of Cause, a worldwide relief agency.
His meal ruined, the corporation counsel asked Fielding what he gave one of the children he saw, a child with protruding ribs, hollow eyes and starvation thick belly.
"A fiftieth at f/4.5 on Plus-X film," said Fielding, dunking the crisp golden crust of fresh-baked Italian bread into the spicy red tomato sauce of his lobster fra diavolo. "Aren't you going to eat your scungilli?"
"No. No. Not now," said the lawyer.
"Well, considering the starvation in the world, you ought to be ashamed of yourself wasting food. Eat."
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"I-I-"
"Eat," ordered Fielding. And he watched to make sure his corporation counsel ate every last bit of his dinner for the sake of the starving children in India whose pictures he left displayed on the table.
"Look," he said. "I'm suffering too. I've had stomach pains for weeks. Going to see my doctor tonight back in Denver. But I'm eating."
"You're going home tonight?" said the lawyer. "Then you don't have a plan for the workers?"
"I do have a plan. In a way," said Fielding.
When they arrived at the factory, the low whitewashed building was lit and buzzing with families packed lathe to drill press. Children stuck fingers in lathes and mothers yanked them back. Union men talked among themselves in that low choppy talk of men who know that all has been said and anything more is a waste of time. Their lives were out of their hands.
When Fielding entered, the main factory building hushed as if someone had turned simultaneous dials in nearly a thousand throats. One child laughed and the laughter stopped with a loud motherly smack.
Fielding led four white-coated men wheeling carts with round tubs on them to a raised podium in front of the factory. Smiling, he took the microphone from the nervous union negotiator.
"I've got good news for you all tonight," he said and nearly five hundred families exploded in cheers and applause. Husbands hugged wives. Some wept. One woman kept yelling, "God bless you, Mr. Fielding," and she was heard when the cheering subsided and that energized more cheering. Fielding waited with a big warm smile on his face, his right hand tucked into his
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gray vest, safe from the grubby Teachings of union officials. The corporation counsel waited by the door, looking at his feet.
Fielding raised both arms and was given quiet.
"As I said when I was interrupted, I have good news for you tonight. You see the gentlemen with white coats. You see the tubs on the carts. Ladies and gentlemen, children, union officials, there's free ice cream tonight. For everyone."
A woman up front looked to her husband and asked if she had heard correctly. In the back row families buzzed in confusion. At the door, the corporation counsel blew air out of his mouth and stared at the ceiling.
Fielding assumed the sincere concerned expression he had perfected earlier in the day before the silverframed full-length mirror in his dressing room.
"That's the good news. Now the bad news. There is no way we can continue operations of Fielding Conduit and Cable."
At a main lathe fifty yards back, a middle-aged man in a red checked jacket cleared his throat. Everyone heard him.
"Ow," said the union negotiator. And everyone heard him too.
Fielding nodded to a white-jacketed busboy that he might start serving the ice cream. The boy looked at the crowd and shook his head.
A man in the front row jumped up onto his seat. His wife tried to tug him back down but he freed the arm she held.
"You ever own a plant in Taos, New Mexico?" yelled the man.
"Yes," said Fielding.
"And did you shut down that one too?"
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"We had to," said Fielding.
"Yeah. I thought so. I heard about this ice cream trick you pulled hi Taos. Just like tonight."
"Gentlemen, my counsel will explain everything shortly," said Fielding and leaped from the little platform at the front of the factory and made his way quickly to the door before the rush of workers could get at him.
"Tell them about our tax structure," yelled Fielding, pushing his lawyer between himself and the surging workers and just making it out the door. He ran to the car and made a leisurely mental note that he should phone the El Paso police to rescue the lawyer. Yes, he would call. From his doctor's office in Denver.
At the airport, Oliver was waiting in the Lear jet. It had been checked out and readied by airport mechanics.
"Everything turn out satisfactorily, sir?" asked Oliver, holding out the suede flying jacket.
"Perfectly," said James Orayo Fielding, not telling his manservant about the stabbing pains in his stomach. Why give Oliver any joy?
If he did not have the appointment that evening, he would have taken the slower Cessna twin-engine prop job. With that one, he could leave the fuselage door open and watch Oliver clutch his seat as the wind whipped at his face. Once, during an Immelman turn, Oliver had passed out in the Cessna. When Fielding saw this, he leveled the plane and undid Oliver's safety strap. The manservant recovered, saw the unbuckled strap, and passed out again. James Orayo Fielding loved his old propeller plane.
Doctor Goldfarb's office on Holly Street shone like three white squares against a dark checkerboard of
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black square windows. If any other patient had asked for this evening appointment, Dr. Goldfarb would have referred him to someone else. But it was James Orayo Fielding who had asked for that specific appointment to get the results of his every-six-months physical, and that meant that Fielding had no other free tune. And what else could be expected of a man so fully occupied with the world's welfare? Wasn't Mr. Fielding chairman of the Denver chapter of Cause? Hadn't he personally visited India, Bangladesh, the Sahel to see famine firsthand and come back to Denver to tell everyone about it?
Another man with Fielding's wealth might just have sat back and become a playboy. But not James Orayo Fielding. Where there was suffering, you would find James Orayo Fielding. So when Mr. Fielding said he was only free this one night of the month, Dr. Goldfarb told his daughter he would have to leave just after he gave her away at the wedding ceremony.
"Darling, I'll try to be back before the reception is over," he had told her. And that was the easy part. The hard part was what he was going to tell Mr. Fielding about the checkup. Like most doctors, he did not like telling a patient he was going to die. But with Mr. Fielding, it was like being part of a sin.
Fielding noticed immediately that the runty Dr. Goldfarb had trouble telling him something. So Fielding pressed him on it, and got the answer.
"A year to fifteen months," said Dr. Goldfarb.
"There's no operation possible?"
"An operation is useless. It's a form of anemia, Mr. Fielding. We don't know why it strikes when it strikes. It has nothing to do with your diet."