The Giftie

By Max Halley

In his mid-forties, a great man’s protégée, Chief Executive Chauncey Applegate senses an impending crisis of identity. When his firm falls to the venal Krieg Corporation, he bolts to the sanctuary of a run-down farm in order to re-engineer his life. But corporate politics dog him in exile and Chauncey is driven into a personal wilderness from which the only escape is locked in the past

• Language: English
• Publisher: Max Halley
• Release date: May 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9780987321305

Max Halley

Max Halley was born in England. He studied Philosophy at University College London before taking an MBA at Cranfield. After a career in multi-national firms, he now divides his time between writing and executive mentoring. He is married with two daughters and now lives in New South Wales. The Giftie is his first novel. A second is in preparation.

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The Giftie

By Max Halley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Max Halley

ISBN: 9780987321305

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And would some power the small gift give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us

Robert Burns – To a louse, 1786

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To Myrtle

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Contents

Prologue

Part 1 An Ox in a Ditch

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Part Two In Strength, Light

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty One

Twenty Two

Epilogue

About the Author

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Prologue

By the standards of past Annual General Meetings, things were becoming wretched. Executive flannelling had surpassed itself and the usual bemusement had hardened into a relish for gladiatorial bloodletting. Even The Loyal, those whose family trusts had been invested in Amalgamated from the first and had held their shares through a world war and five recessions were seen to be rising from their seats.

Given the theatre then, it was no surprise that three latecomers limping and panting into the overflow at the rear of the auditorium were not immediately noticed. It took a halt in proceedings and an irritable plea by the speaker to some placard wielders to retake their seats before the whispering began. Flattened against the back wall like sharp suited reptiles, they might have stepped straight from a Governors meeting at the Bank of England, or from the Gambino family’s black limousine.

On closer examination, one of the three, built like a piece of military ordnance and wiping his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief, could be seen surveying the speaker intently. Only those nearby would have heard what he then smugly wheezed into his shoulder. It was, ‘Applegate’s up to his neck in shit.’

The second of the three men, thinner, his chest heaving inside a suit that hung from his shoulders like a slack spinnaker, had made his own surveillance. ‘And Heffernan’s got a bug up his ass about it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The big guy at the table, Ty. That’s Heffernan. The man himself.’

‘How about the chesty bluehair next to him,’ Ty snapped back.

The question was flipped down the line to the third man. ‘George, who’s the woman?’

George unfurled Amalgamated’s annual report. It had pictures, biographies, charts, and so on. ‘Shit, you should read this stuff Ty.’

‘Her name, c’mon,’ Ty said, pocketing his handkerchief.

‘Margaret Sylvia Swift, 59, over forty years with Amalgamated,’ George said incredulously.

‘Fish in a barrel,’ Ty said, looking approvingly at the clamour building around him.

They were shushed as another questioner from the floor was handed the microphone.

Up on the stage, Donald Heffernan, a low-browed ox of a man with a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill, raked his skull and pushed out heavily from behind the directors’ table. He could taste the lobster he had eaten for lunch, the sauce being a little lively, and he lingered on the turn to pass some gas. As he made for the podium, there was a cocky roll in his step. Albert Wansford, Amalgamated’s founder and Heffernan’s boss for his entire working life, was dying.

‘Look,’ he said, wrenching the podium’s flexible microphone from Chief Executive Applegate, ‘If I’d had a hot meal for every rumour of takeover or merger I’ve heard of over the past forty years, I’d be as big as a house.’ Dotted amongst the derision about Heffernan’s bulk, there arose a couple of supportive grunts from the odd retired dentist or apple-cheeked widow, which Heffernan duly acknowledged. ‘All this talk of a takeover is hot air,’ he added. ‘It won’t happen on my watch.’

A squeal of feedback from the P.A. system heralded another giant-killer, dressed in taupe slacks and a zip jacket. ‘You’re not fit to blacken Albert Wansford’s boots,’ he yelled over the tip of an accusatory finger. Heffernan recognized this piece of work, the retired councillor who agitated annually for his resignation from the Amalgamated Board. He closed his fist around the microphone and turned to Applegate, who was hovering at his elbow. ‘I want you to ban that bastard,’ he hissed, but in lending an ear to Heffernan, Chauncey Applegate had brought his lapel microphone into range, and Heffernan’s aside was flung to the crowd by 400 watts of amplification. A tsunami of booing erupted, and the Outraged rose en mass for the third time that afternoon. In the front row, a woman, in haute couture and a racing carnival hat was on her toes calling Heffernan a lying gobshite.

Heffernan hardened like quenched steel and focussed on better things, mentally prising undone the legs of a woman fanning herself with an agenda in the fourth row. Belligerence was a justifiable weapon in his professional armoury. He was not going to dignify the rats and mice of the share register with an apology. Besides, there wasn’t five per cent of the company’s equity amongst the whole sorry lot of them, and looking at their ages, any damage done would be mopped up by death and hard times soon enough.

Meanwhile, Chauncey Applegate, the dispossessed speaker, remained marooned on the stage, a stale bottle of piss floating in his Chairman’s wash, just like last year and the year before that, his speaking notes orphaned at the lectern and six weeks gilding of his company’s lily in limbo on the huge screen above him. As a matter of some indifference, he shrugged an appeal to his fellow directors at the flower-bedecked table upstage. Rather than meet his eye, they obliged him by making too much of topping up already-full glasses of mineral water or unwrapping another mint, none wanting to increase their chances of figuring in Heffernan’s inevitable post mortem by offering succour. Only Margaret Swift, tugging her skirt firmly down to her knees in the absence of a modesty curtain around the table, acknowledged the chief executive’s discomfort, and even then it was only to offer her own condolatory shrug in return. You know what he’s like, it said.

Meanwhile, Heffernan was buttoning his blazer in preparation for the fray, an annual war of attrition prosecuted in a hundred small skirmishes. Soon, he would be incommunicado, beyond the reach of cautionary voices. His lumpy head would bob up and down, nutting the weasels back down their holes until, a satiated ogre, he would stomp back to his panelled office to have his personal assistant spray his bile into memos, suggested firings and other forms of corporate evisceration.

Applegate had a fantasy about Heffernan, which went like this: One day, Heffernan would meet himself for the first time. There was, out there somewhere, one less-deferential weasel who, when hit, would spring from its seat and shoot the bastard. It need only be a small-calibre bullet, he thought – just powerful enough to puncture his new Chairman’s girth where it could do no real harm. The important thing was to drop Heffernan like a moose and have him fear for his life. Only a remedy that alarming and desperate could do the trick. Only the shock of realizing that someone would risk a life behind bars for the greater good of truncating Heffernan’s life would do the job. It was all about fracturing the adamantine that Heffernan was made of and hoping that some redeeming essence, a thousand times more palatable than the reality, oozed from the fissure.

Then again, he reflected, it might all backfire. Heffernan might increase by it, turn it to his advantage, counter with his own internal headline: ‘Ingrate takes potshot at the (one-time) 35th most influential businessman in the country. Don Heffernan confirmed indestructible.’

For present purposes, however, the irony was that Heffernan was not lying, not this time at least. The anger and mistrust that might fuel such an attempted murder and was now boiling the auditorium dry was truly misdirected. The fat man knew no more about an imminent takeover of the company he now chaired than his accusers.

Truth was, it had been Applegate who had received the call. About a week or so ago, close to midnight, he recalled, just as he had entered his apartment after a particularly soporific day. He had just flipped his shoes off and was drinking the dregs from last night’s bottle when the phone rang. ‘Is there anyone else in the room with you?’ the caller had asked, and then, taking his silence as affirmation, ‘Are you aware that you are being sounded out by powerful third parties?’

At first he had thought it was a foreign head-hunter, bamboozled by time zones perhaps, but a germ in the man’s patter began to work against this hypothesis. There was an inappropriate pallyness in his manner, as if they regularly swapped risqué jokes, visited the same escorts, lit each other’s cigars with banknotes, and so on. It was an error of judgement that spoke volumes about the ineffectiveness of the caller’s so-called sounding-out. Chauncey Applegate was not that sort of businessman, a fact anyone who had walked into one of his ad-hoc rants on capitalist idiocy would have taken some pleasure in revealing.

‘How did you get my unlisted number?’

‘You’ve heard of Kriegcorp?’ the caller said.

‘I once saw a television documentary about its president, Dan Krieg. I thought it failed miserably to work him up into the megalomaniac that the ratings would require. Now, how did you get my number?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Well what do you want?’

‘I’ll get to that.’

After more wheel-spinning, it emerged that the man’s name was Armbruster. He spelt his name out, right there over the phone – A-R-M-, etcetera.

‘You’ve heard the rumours?’ this Armbruster said.

Applegate had taken a second or so to assemble his answer. ‘Look, if you’re from the newspapers, you’re speaking to the wrong man. Call our PR people in the morning. I’m bloody tired.’

‘I’m calling on behalf of Dan Krieg himself,’ Armbruster said.

Now Applegate really did want this Arm-buster to shut his mouth, because whatever Arm-bruiser was about to say would mean more work, and Applegate already had more work than his constitution was designed for. What with trying to keep Heffernan’s knife out of his back whilst fronting a company whose every zig brought calls for a bigger dividend and every zag for his head on a plate, he had his hands full. More work demanded more stamina, and he had no more stamina to draw on. His stamina had peaked years ago, about the same time as self-respect had begun its transformation into self-loathing. ‘Well, come on man, get to the point.’

‘Kriegcorp,’ Armbruster had said, as if he was fishing for a confession.

‘Yes, I know. Fast-money corporation du jour. Now, tell me what you want so I can tell you who to speak with.’

‘I want to speak to you.’

‘With me. You want to speak with me, not to me. It’s just a small point of grammar.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake man.’ Always with tiredness came petulance. To him, it spoke volumes about his immaturity, about his unsuitability for what he did for a living. Besides, he knew well enough what this Armbruster was calling about. There was only one issue in the history of the known world that had connected a conservative, mid-cap, blue-chip like Amalgamated with a brash leverage operator like Kriegcorp, and he wanted no part of it.

‘If you have any sense, you’ll take the cheese out of your ears,’ Armbruster said stiffly.

Not up to the fight, Applegate turned on the speaker phone, fell back into his couch, and put his feet up on a pile of unread reports. What he then heard took the form of a proclamation.

Didn’t Kriegcorp have the jump on Amalgamated, and hadn’t they secretly secured options on a full half of its issued stock. Weren’t the fund managers and institutional shareholders fed up with Amalgamated’s lousy yields and ready to fold their hand at a minutes notice? Wasn’t Dan Krieg – no doubt from a private jet continuously circling the globe, Applegate fancied – within a spit of going public and calling in the options and mopping up the remaining stock? The whole spiel smacked of the terms of surrender, the gist of which was, according to Armbruster, that Amalgamated would fall to Kriegcorp within seven days and now was the time for Applegate to switch sides, bang heads amongst Amalgamated’s Board of Directors and avoid the stigma of losing a hostile takeover. Why? Because first, Dan Krieg didn’t suffer fools gladly, second, Dan Krieg rewarded his friends, and third, bad publicity helped no-one, particularly Dan Krieg.

Afterwards, Applegate had felt numbed with indifference. It was an all too familiar response, and he often hated himself for it. In the old days, when Albert still came into the Tower five days a week and Heffernan could be kept in check, he’d still had an appetite for intrigues, but lately, and by lately he meant the last ten years or so, he had entered a dreary place, a place where he preferred sleep to wake, solitude to company and a sly smoke at the bar across the street to the tedium of pontificating from the corner office.

Nevertheless, he had tried to do the right thing. ‘Look, Mister Armbruster, you’re bucking protocol here, and you damn well know it. With Albert Wansford in the hospice, Donald Heffernan has been appointed to the Chair. I’m just one of his minions. Why don’t you get Krieg to call Heffernan directly, and I’ll forget this conversation ever happened.’ There was a short but telling silence, during which Applegate weighed the futility of his instruction.

‘Heffernan is a dead man walking,’ Armbruster said, as though he intended to knock Applegate’s head clean off his shoulders with the violence of it.

Applegate may have snorted. It was always on the cards. But having, by his own and increasingly cynical demeanour, effectively banned corporate hard-talk and jargon from the executive floor, Armbruster’s threat sounded faintly ridiculous. He could barely mask his amusement. How could anyone take the banality of business so bloody seriously as to talk that way, to confound the simple ousting of an overbearing oaf like Heffernan with electric chairs, gallows and lethal injections?

Not unnaturally though, Armbruster’s sentence on Heffernan held an attraction for Applegate, and it sent him burrowing into his funk. Frankly, after twenty-five years of doing right by Albert while Heffernan practiced knotting nooses behind his back, he no longer cared who he worked for; Armbruster, Krieg, Heffernan or Uncle Tom Cobbley. Working with such a repetitive script day after day, the supporting cast was almost irrelevant. But what had truly made him bug-eyed and sparky after Armbruster had rung off, what had made him break out the Blue Label and smoked salmon at two in the morning was the unexpected solace of knowing that even Dan Krieg’s stooges shared his opinion of Heffernan, who according to Armbruster was ‘a pig-headed piece of shit,’ and Dan Krieg didn’t want a bar of him.

In the auditorium, Applegate, his hands clasped together like a penitent, lingered behind Heffernan, trying to look as if he was part of the performance. Truth was, however, Heffernan had forgotten he was there, and was consumed with potting the weasels two at a time now, each snipe from the floor being returned with a volley of rhetoric that got more explosive with each combatant. It had the poor trouser-suited matron charged with placing the microphone in meltdown as Heffernan spurred her back and forth across the hall.

Out there, in all those faces and beyond, both fore and aft of today, Applegate suspected there is a crisis brewing for him. What’s more, it was a crisis he was owed. Not because he had spurned Armbruster and the omnipotent Krieg’s terms of surrender, or because Albert would soon be dead and he would be terminally exposed to Heffernan’s buffoonery, but mainly, he thought, because his acquiescence had caught up with him.

Seeing Albert dying in the hospice had brought a lifetime of self-examination and lassitude to a reckoning. There was something about Albert’s morphine-blasted body arcing up at the outrage of what was happening to it that had him by the balls. A corpse was different, silent, and he could have dealt with that, but an expiring body, particularly one harbouring the glowing coals of Albert Wansford, was a physiological lunatic striving to persist. It was blind, loud and otherworldly. It was as if Albert’s atoms, aware of their imminent dispersion, were loath to relinquish the once-in-an-eternity opportunity to be something other than space dust. It occurred to him at his bedside that it – a life that is – might constitute some kind of privilege for people like Albert, one that came with an imperative not to waste it or give it up without a fight.

Margaret had said that the death of the father can sometimes release the son to become his own man, to find out who his father had erstwhile prevented him from becoming. Corny perhaps, but was that what was welling up inside of him now? Was the anticipation of release from his debt to Albert making him indifferent and careless, an apologist for his own inaction? Perhaps lurking in Armbruster’s threat was his release back into the wild. Perhaps that was why he had made no attempt to warn Heffernan about Krieg.

At the back of the hall, the three svelte reptiles peeled themselves from the wall, formed a circle and mumbled down at their shoes.

‘So what do you think?’

Ty Armbruster jerked his head toward Heffernan, who was welded to the podium. ‘Well, what do you think?’

‘He could be bluffing,’ the thin one said.

‘Nope, that flaky SOB Applegate has blanked him, told him nothing.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Who cares, it’s his funeral.’

‘Dan won’t like it.’

‘You got the press locked in?’

The other two nod in concert.

‘Then let’s get out of here.’

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Part 1

An Ox in a Ditch

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One

Margaret Swift hesitated in her dialling, her indignation arrested over the cordless phone. Was she absolutely sure about what she had heard? Moreover, was the Krieg man worth ruining what remained of this of all days? Slowly and with some relief, she let the phone fall to her side and returned to stroking her pearls. Through a gap in the curtains, she could see that there was a break in the showers. A little air would do her good, and so she stepped out onto the balcony, slid the heavy glass doors closed behind her and moved out of earshot of the television and that awful man. It was much cooler than she had imagined, and she breathed quickly and deeply of the damp air while running a finger along the safety rail. The rainwater was cold and bright and dripped over the edge, sending little sparkling globes into the blackness. Over the city, a shy new moon was rising between inky clouds, and its greenish glow could be seen at work in the creases of the street opposite, illuminating the tiny chapel, the failing elms in the cemetery, and even the bench where she had stopped to massage her bunions on the way back from the service that afternoon. They could bury her over there, she thought, in the little overgrown cemetery. She wouldn’t mind the tangle. They could put her between Alice Something’s Celtic cross and Ezra Toomey’s fallen Angel (‘My beloved, the world was never enough’). It would be a fine plot with a view of the river. Any further down the hill and the traffic clattering over the bridge would prove intolerable, and then there were the orange lights from the overpass and the drunks along the riverbank. The riverbank. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and dusted her nose. It was all so distressing. The service had broken up with Albert’s ashes becalmed on the water, no more than a grey stain on the glassy surface. She had been embarrassed for him. Fact was, they had all been a bit edgy about leaving them that way, Donald and the other Amalgamated directors, Chauncey, the managers and the staff – at least those who had bothered to turn up. Even the Mayor and all the other stuffed shirts from Albert’s time were anxious to get away after that. The stain was still there when she was the only one left, congealed among the litter and wreaths by then, a mucky little island of remembrance spinning in its own defiant eddy just under the bridge.

She looked back through the glass doors at the television. They were still interviewing the Krieg man. He was getting the works this time; a whole ten-minute potted history of big money and nastiness. It was too much. She raised the telephone to her ear again, quickly completed dialling the number and re-grasped her pearls. It was only when she heard him pick up and his usual grunt that the silly words tumbled out. Higgledy piggledy they fell. She didn’t quite know why, but she was so tired of it all. ‘If the dead could only speak,’ she heard herself say, ‘I wouldn’t know where to put my face.’

Across town, Donald Heffernan gratefully pinched his collar button free, whipped the black tie from his person and bounced his bulk along the settee to the speaker phone. ‘Albert is so much potash on the tide now Maggs, besides, he wouldn’t have given a damn.’

‘If you say so, Donald,’ she said, looking up at Albert beaming down from the new moon.

Heffernan stood, drained his glass and crunched the ice. ‘You’ve seen Krieg on the television news then?’

‘I still can’t believe it,’ she replied, her gaze wandering back to the tiny graveyard.

‘The world’s full of lowlifes like Krieg,’ Heffernan said. ‘Now listen. The beach house, Maggie. I’m thinking of taking a run up for the weekend. I’ve had somebody in to tidy up. We’ll come back fresh on Monday and deal with Krieg.’

Given another life, there would be no Donald Heffernan or Amalgamated to turn her hair white. She’d not the belligerency for business, or the men that it bred for that matter. As to what that alternative life might be…well. ‘For heaven’s sake Donald,’ she cried, ‘I’m not one of your divorcees.’

Heffernan grunted and took soundings in the settee for last night’s cigar stump. In his usual haste, he accidentally hit the remote control, and now a filly in chef’s whites whinnied at him to ‘hold the knife perfectly flat and slide it gently under the flesh.’ She had replaced the gibbering skull boxed in by ticker tape and stock charts to which Heffernan had been addressing a running harangue since returning from Albert’s cremation.

‘Besides which, Donald,’ she continued, ‘you should show a little more respect for poor Albert,’ after which, and with a degree of righteousness, she turned her filmy eyes back to the little chapel. The truth be told, she was wobbly, a little lost now without Albert somewhere in the world, and the ambiguity in what remained of her life frightened her. Perhaps if the Almighty consulted us about what awaited us, she thought, then we could take steps to negotiate the worst of it; be better equipped, less a hostage to the future, less obsessed with falling at the hurdles, better, calmer people. That’s what she would like next time; a little road map to set things out. Just the major features; the people, places and ideas that she would have to navigate her way through. Then perhaps she could avoid that fearful dread of having, through ignorance, taken a wrong turn somewhere long ago, of having her days weighing increasingly upon her, feeling her bones ache with the burden of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Heffernan shrugged, schlepped his cigar to the gas ring and lit up under the housekeeper’s nose. ‘I’ve given the papers their weekend copy,’ he bellowed back at the speaker phone. ‘What do you think? To quote, Krieg’s grab for Amalgamated Industries is opportunistic, derisory and just a slap in the face for those who hold Albert Wansford’s memory in high regard.’ For some reason, the beach house idea suddenly seemed to