The
Despicable Mr. Rice
A
short story by Jack Frayne-Reid
“Do you understand
how business works? Let me explain something to you; the press has spoken, the
‘nobodies,’ as you say, have spoken – and they don’t want you. So we don’t
either. How could we gain capital with an ailing enterprise under our wing? No
sooner were we to buy you out, would a piece appear in the Financial Times
detailing your own precarious recent
history, and with you sitting there on the Board of Directors, they start to
question my integrity. A chain of
events then ensues, as you will have seen many times before, in which our
shares invariably plummet. That is
why we no longer feel comfortable in purchasing seventy per-cent of the
company.”
Colin Rice
wiped his brow as if he were brushing
aside his fringe. He let his pen slip from his mouth and drop upon the
table with a conspicuous tap as he envisioned bringing each fist down upon the
elderly chairman’s head, one after another, the left hook catching his fall as
he collapsed from the pugilistic force of the first hit. He picked up the
ballpoint again, an image now forming in his head in which that of Anthony Z. Fox
was forcefully penetrated by the stationary item, rigidly held in Rice’s own
outstretched, propulsive palm. This all happened in an instant; it felt
imperative to kill, or at least seriously wound Fox. Yet, he knew that the
impulse that seemed so paramount in that moment was one he would never act
upon. He could already see the
headlines.
***
The contents
of a wastepaper basket were joined, at the hour of four in the afternoon, by a
ballpoint pen that now served merely as a reminder to Rice of the emotions that
bubbled within him yet, somehow, were not
him. To the decorated Colin Rice, a ballpoint pen was something to be used in
the course of navigating lucrative successions of Machiavellian business deals;
selling, accumulating, finding the time to donate a portion of his wealth to a
worthy cause. In truth, he primarily used the ballpoint for signing an array of
cheques, which had always been a talent. It was certainly not emblematic of the
lumbering mutilation of a corporate rival.
***
It grew dark
and Rice found himself alone at the hotel bar, lamenting the company
expenditure that it had taken to dispatch him to the mountainside headquarters
of ZoxCorp, and how there would be so little of it in future. His ‘Get Out of
Jail Free’ card had not arrived; an irony, he thought, as in his youth he had
frequently dominated the Rice family Monopoly board. (His tactic had entailed
purchasing the less expensive properties – the murky browns, the light blues –
and, within minimal rounds, reaping the benefits of the cheap hotels their
modesty afforded.)
“Say, what
beer you got there?” purred a husk of a voice; like a scratchy delta blues
record, still half-whispering toward the crossroads.
“Lügenheißer.”
Rice was distracted by a Wall Street Journal piece on private sector urban
renewal, which he read via Blackberry internet. “...I guess it’s German.”
“Heidegger;
he was German.”
“Uh-huh?”
“His deal
was, I think, the present has a meaning
only insofar as it opens to a possible future. Lügenheißer,” He enunciated, nodding at the barmaid.
“Thankyouthankyou...It might’a been some other guy. But that was what he said;
consequence is man’s great concern.”
His
existence having been defined by the limitations of prosaic thought, Rice
sensed that the time was right for a pleasantry; he introduced himself, hand
outstretched.
“I’m
Anderson.” He had a tight grip.
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Whadda you
do, Anderson?”
“I...”
Anderson paused, finally looking up from his drink and into Rice’s eyes,
breathing heavily, forming his words carefully as a sickening grin flickered
across his lips. “I’m into insider trading.”
“Well, I
know how it feels to have so many relying upon you.” Huffed Rice. Curious of
the deep Midwestern brogue, he asked; “Are you on Wall Street?”
“Summinlikethat.”
Grinned Anderson. Rice waited, but his acquaintance did not elaborate.
“Sorry, I’ll
leave you t-“
“You ever
shoot a bear?”
***
Although, as
a long-time party donor, he had been known to shoot fox, “No, I have not.” said
Rice.
“When a bear
dies at your hands, it’s like you’ve conquered
nature.”
“Right–“
Look at the majesty of the bear. If you’re goin’ bear-shootin’, best bring your
highest-calibre clip, because you gotta pump a-plenty so’s these...hirsute motherfuckers go down.”
“I don’t
have a gun.”
“You might
wanna think about changin’ that, too.
Get a bear good, you wanna get it in the shoulder, ‘wise it can lower its own
heart-rate; no blood, not as much anyway, you got no haemorrhage. And what the
fuck you got if you got no haemorrhage? No, no, no. Shoot a bear in the
shoulder, the bullet goes deep, and it just drops. A life ended, a huge,
imposing physical force, shut down by the free will of mankind. That’s my shit. Consequence, consequence; The bear doesn’t know consequence. All he’s known is a string of moments, and to
kill him is to take away an essence that has never sought a goal beyond food, has never been adulterated in any way by the concerns
of aspiration.”
Rice, finishing
his Lügenheißer, asked; “Why do you want to conquer nature?”
“Why do you wanna conquer nature?” he tapped him
on the chest. “Asshole. Every man wants to conquer nature. It’s not like we
asked to be born, don’tchathink?”
“I-“
“Right from the
fuckin’ day we’re ripped, screaming, from the abyss!”
“...the abyss...?”
“ First, we
do not exist, and then we do, all of
a sudden, and there’s a lotta complications that come with that, lotta baggage.
If we want, we can choose not to exist again. It’s a fight, right? Isn’t that
what you’re gettin’ at with all this Randian shit?”
“I thought
you were into insider trading?”
“I’m into a
lotta things.”
Rice found
Anderson, with his gravelly demeanour and curiously blackened fingertips, a mildly
disconcerting presence. He felt fit to squirm as he was regaled with tales of
blood-soaked hunting expeditions and existentialist philosophy. Anderson’s
manner did not alter as he would drink, of which there was plenty, and it was a
drunkard’s sincerity that led Rice confide in
him of the myriad catastrophes that had preceded the failed buyout; the offshore
investment, the misplaced finances,
the hasty avoidance of responsibility. Although Anderson, loath to see somebody
plagued by as superfluous an emotion as guilt, attempted to reassure him that
he was not truly responsible unless others perceived him to be so, Rice was
beside himself, wondering how he could reconcile his misdeeds with any form of
morality.
“Kill a
bear.” He said. “When you plug it, Colin, imagine consequence...imagine the future doesn’t matter. Look it in the
eyes and walk away.”
***
By a
pineland creek, Colin Rice set his sights upon a Brown bear. It had been easy
enough to obtain a firearm, and he was anxious to discover – not the full, but
surely a substantial – extent of his capabilities as a man. Rice aligned the
scope of his hunting rifle with the shoulder of the creature, lumbering nearby
on the other side of the water. A wisp
of recollection passed by; “...responsible only to yourself, if you can live
with that.” He shuddered, and this seemed to pull the trigger for him. The
bear’s mournful eyes met his as the round hit its shoulder, and he felt blinded
by the spectacle of his crime – no, his victory
against nature. The bear bucked and howled like a ship coming to port, its blood
seeping through thick bristles of fur. Rice threw up into the bush by his side
and fired another shot.
***
The call
came through on a biscuit-aided rest-stop, Rice seated idly upon a boulder .
“There is interest,” whispered his secretary “in
the ownership equity,” and Rice regretted not entertaining the idea that there
may have been Blackberry signal further down the mountain.
Having
established that; yes, it was seventy per-cent and; no, it was not yet common
knowledge in the offices, he was poised to hang up in order to maintain a brisk
pace, his breathing pattern unhindered by the irregularities of speech, when
the thought hit him that behind money, there must too be an identity. The
investor, he was told, was the noted tycoon Roland L. Anderson, of whom the LSE
Encyclopaedia of Economics writes; “with his public appearances in the last
four decades limited to the funerals of friends, Anderson is a veritable Howard
Hughes.”
***
It was not inconceivable that Anderson wished to
purchase the business; more so that an industrialist of his stature would perform
their own headhunting work. Nor was it inconceivable that, with well-timed
flights, he would be in the UK by now. Would Rice be able to fly with the gun,
he wondered? He found it rather fetching, and there would certainly be no time
to return it to its owner – why couldn’t he
own a firearm, like the Americans do? Anderson probably had lots of guns. Rice
pictured his arsenal – stacked like the company warehouses; weapon upon weapon,
from the pistol to the shotgun, sunlight seeping through a crack in the
shuttered blinds to reflect off a
polished Kalashnikov. Perhaps he had grenades, also. So
many thoughts turned over in his mind that Rice did not sleep on the plane, and
he flew into Gatwick watching the dawn with the flickering eyes of insomnia’s
madness.
Waiting in
the lobby was not his usual chauffer. Politely beckoning Rice into a Buick 1948
hearse that was at once handsome and morbidly anachronistic, a gaunt-faced man
of an uncertain demographic slipped him a letter. It bore a blood-red wax seal,
on which an ‘A’ was circled by
spindly vines;
‘Next,’ it read ‘-the rats.”
***
It is arguable
that, in the bear, Colin Rice had killed a creature of true nobility, and that rats
have no such qualities. They were almost not worth his time. Nevertheless, he
understood that this was a necessity, were he to see through the process that
Anderson had set into motion. Consequently, he directed the driver to the Soho
apartment of Bill Brion, who had joined the organisation as an intern and
steadily risen in the hierarchy until he could no longer work alongside certain
members of the executive body. Rice admired Brion’s work ethic, but thought
that this supposed integrity – how
much of it a visage, he did not know – was what kept him firmly in the realm of
the nobodies.
“Wait here,”
he told the driver. “I won’t be twenty minutes.”
Seventeen
minutes hence, he was once more inside the Buick. He held a suspicion that,
were it not for Brion - who opened his door with as much of a frown as he could
muster through his baby-face - his
company would not have been described
by the IMF (of all people!) as ‘rife with
practises that reflect the failings of the British financial sector.’ The
charming Mr Rice had expressed conciliatory sentiments, and a desire to talk
over the very nature of their culture, but all the while he eyed the fire-poker
that peaked out from Brion’s coal basket.
Cloaked in the hiss of the kettle, Rice stepped into the kitchen with
soft footsteps, raising the blunt iron at the informant’s innocuously turned
skull.
The line
between company and man was dissolving in front of him, just as Anderson – grin
simmering upon his haggard face – appeared to be materialising in his eye-line.
Just as there was a free market, there was a free will. In Brion’s absence, the
money-shaped hole could be plugged by Anderson’s, no longer leaking salacious
drops of information, and nobody would lose face, nobody would go to prison,
nobody would face consequence - least of all the immaculate Colin Rice. Champagne
glasses clinked to the flow of bloodshed, and he felt no feelings of inner
complication. It was not psychopathy, but lifestyle preservation. Consequence had
been rendered insignificant by Anderson’s 70% stake in his existence – his
actions had become something bigger than just himself. After all – corporations
are people too.
