The Despicable Mr. Rice

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.