Текст книги "The Villiers Touch"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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9. Steve Wyatt

By the time Steve Wyatt tooled the open-topped XKE Jaguar into George Hackman’s street and squeezed it into a space across the road, the party had sprawled out into the front and back lawns. Wyatt walked around the car to open Anne Goralski’s door. She smiled up at him, twisted her rump to stretch her pert legs to the grass, and let him take her arm. “What a lovely ride.”

He gave her his warmest smile and steered her toward the house, threading knots of people on the lawn. As they approached, he saw Mason Villiers emerge from the front door, saying something to a gorgeous young woman who had a tousled, slightly rumpled look; the woman had a sad smile. Villiers nodded at something she said and came down the two steps, his glance traveling over the crowd. Wyatt knew Villiers had seen him, but he left it to Villiers to make the first sign of recognition, and Villiers went right by without a glance. All right, if that’s the way you want to play it, Wyatt thought, a little surprised to have seen Villiers here at all-the man hadn’t struck him as the partying type. A diminutive chauffeur popped out of a Cadillac limousine and trotted around to open the door for Villiers, who got in without a word to anybody; the limousine slid away, crunching bits of gravel on the asphalt. The sad-faced young woman at the door kept her eyes on it until it disappeared; she turned then and said, “You must be Steve Wyatt. George told me to expect you-I’m Ginger Hackman.”

Wyatt introduced Anne Goralski and let Mrs. Hackman direct him, in an absent, distracted way, toward the bar. He took Anne that way, making small talk in her ear while his alert eyes prowled the place to gauge the party’s pulse. This one was obviously uptight, everybody self-consciously trying to prove what a good time was being had. Grim jocularity, forced festivity, all of it overlaid with sexuality and determined anxiety. Husbands and wives roved the shadows, on the make. A wooden salad bowl on the fireplace mantel brimmed with machine-rolled marijuana sticks, and as Wyatt approached the bar he could hear George Hackman in his hearty bellow complaining about the middle-class difficulty of scoring grass: “Christ, we can’t just walk into an East Village discotheque, they take one look at you and figure you’re fuzz. It’s tough to make a connection. I finally got an in with one of the faggot kids in our building, but the bastard made me come across with forty bucks an ounce for the stuff. Hey, there, Steve, gladdaseeya, boy!” Hackman bounded forward enthusiastically to pump his hand and beam at Anne. “Who’s this?”

Wyatt introduced the girl, privately amused by the way Hackman stripped her naked with his eyes; but when he saw discomfort in her face he steered her to the other end of the bar arid said, “I told you he throws wild parties.”

“Then let’s have fun,” she said, twinkling. She reached for a potato chip and scooped it into a bowl of onion dip.

Soon after, he found she had been separated from him in the shuffle-and George Hackman plowed forward. “Drink, Steve-o?”

“Martini,” Wyatt said, following Anne with his eyes until she disappeared from view. Hackman poured a glass of gin, anointed it with a few drops of vermouth, and passed it across the bar to him; Hackman leaned close and said confidentially, “Women are okay as long as you keep them on generalities. That’s the secret. Never talk to a woman about specifics. See? That’s the secret of successful marriage, kid-you marry them for their charm, not their brains, and you only get yourself in trouble if you let yourself get to arguing with them about tomorrow night’s supper menu or how much she paid for some Goddamn dress. No woman can make any sense about specifics. If you get trapped in that kind of argument, you just can’t win it. So, see, the trick’s to keep it all generalities-if you got to argue with her, argue about the future of the welfare state and the black-power movement and the kids trying to burn down the universities, but never fight about the price of a Goddamn pair of high-fashion shoes.”

Wyatt nodded his head an inch, gave a brief cool, polite smile, and edged away; he heard Hackman say to the man at his elbow, “Now, that’s what I call a dry martini. That kid sure plays it close to the chest, don’t he?”

Steve Wyatt cruised through the house, passing knots of people. On the couch a blonde was sprawled back with her shoes off and her head in the lap of a man, not her husband; the man had his hand casually cupped over the blond’s breast as he spoke to a woman standing beside the couch. He was talking loudly about his divorce.

Wyatt moved on toward the back of the house, searching for Anne. He could see a group in the kitchen and went that way, but found his path blocked by a knot of drunks in the crowded hall; one of them was a middle-aged man with a beard, talking in a strident wail: “… trying their Goddamnedest to grind all their husbands into mincemeat. Carry out the trash, pay the mother-fucking bills, mow the lawn, listen to my complaints, come on we’ll be late, stop yelling at the kids, what’s happened to us, why don’t you love me like you used to, Harry’s a hell of a lot better in bed than you are darling…” There were thunders of laughter; Wyatt squeezed through the crush and made his way out of hearing as quickly as he could.

Coming into the kitchen, he found Anne propped on a step stool with a pale drink in her hand, talking animatedly with an attractive young couple who stood side by side with their hips and shoulders touching and their fingers twined together. When Wyatt made his appearance, Anne gave him a deep, luminous smile. She looked lidded and dreamy-not drunk, but languid and at ease; when she smiled at him, there was nothing held back. She made introductions; he shook hands with the young couple, and for quite a while the foursome made desultory conversation, after which the young man bounced his car keys in his fist and exchanged glances with his girl; he said cheerfully, “Been a large evening,” and took the girl away with him.

People drifted in and out of the kitchen. Wyatt moved close against Anne’s side and put his arm around her, fingers against her breast; she tipped her head back to give him an intimate smile, and pressed his hand against her with her inner arm. There was a flurry of activity when a covey of wives entered the kitchen to brew coffee, a sure sign the party was running down. Finally he took Anne toward the front of the house and found that half the guests had left. The living room was littered with cigarette butts and burns on the carpet, and spilled drinks, and someone had vomited into an ashtray and rinsed it imperfectly, leaving a strong smell in the room. Stale cigar butts and half-empty tumblers added to the maculose aura. A man and a woman somewhere in the house were having a bitter shrieking quarrel. He eased Anne past a couple in the front door and walked her out to the car, not bothering to hunt up the host or hostess to say good-bye. When he stopped by the side of the car, Anne snuggled against him. Her head was at his shoulder. Wyatt slid his hand down the front of her dress and stroked her with feather-light fingers. She made a small sound and closed her eyes. He kissed her gently at earlobe, throat, lips, then deeply into her mouth.

He felt cool and detached; it was a campaign well planned. He put her in the sports car, walked around to the driver’s seat, and got in; and drove out fast. Going down the Saw Mill Parkway, the wind was in the girl’s hair and Wyatt’s gently caressing hand was on her thigh. He said idly, “There’s a flask in the glove box,” and smiled to himself when she took the hint. It was an hour’s drive to the city, and he didn’t want her drunk, but he did want her to keep the easy glow of soft, uninhibited intimacy. It was almost midnight; he had been with her, almost without interruption, for seven hours. Over drinks before dinner he had been easy with her, bantering and teasing; during dinner he had quietly muted the tone to one of soft, dreamy, candlelight romance. The ride to Hackman’s, along the tree-lined parkway, had done its work, and the loose, hearty atmosphere of the party, with its unceasing and singleminded emphasis on sex, had done the rest. He had artfully stimulated her with all the sensory devices of the game-the attentiveness that made her feel exciting and important, the nuances of pose and voice, the attitude of deferential assurance, the seemingly inadvertent touch, the quick smile of shared private amusement at things observed, all designed to create a seductive aura of closeness.

In the elevator going up to his apartment she stood in the circle of his arm with her head thrown back against the front of his shoulder; his hand rubbed her belly and breasts, and she murmured drowsily. He guided her into the frankly sybaritic apartment and flicked a wall switch, which turned on one softly glowing lamp and a stereo tape deck which filled the apartment with the music of soft strings. Anne went through the apartment with him, giving the place a lidded look of approval, and when they stopped in the bedroom, she turned in his arms and looked up and smiled.

He said quietly, “How does a nice girl like you find herself in a place like this?”

She grinned at him. They stood quietly face to face, his hands against her waist and rib cage; he lifted his thumbs and wiggled them against the taut, erect nipples of her breasts.

He murmured, “What would you like to do?”

She only smiled.

He said, “Say the word,” and nibbled at her ear.

He felt her shudder.

Anne felt the heavier, faster rhythms of her breathing, the sense of body flush, all the intimate sensations of arousal that had been stirring in her all night. She had wanted this, she had planned it, but now she was afraid.

She had watched him for months, wondering; today, at last, he had made the move. All night she hadn’t been able to take her mind off him, his easy athletic grace, his good masculine face. But she had only really known him these few hours, and now, knowing it was the sheer desire to sate body lust that coiled in her, she felt chilled by uncertainty. Was it nothing more than epidermal passion? She was neither a virgin nor a prude; but she put a value on herself, she didn’t want it to happen if afterward it would mean nothing at all. Now she had to ask herself at each moment’s interval if she should stop or let it continue.

She felt the press of his thighs, the movement of his soft-caressing hands from the back of her neck to her buttocks; she uttered little gasps with every touch of his hands, and she knew if it went beyond here she would not be able to stop it.

He was pulling her against him. He sucked her tongue into his mouth, and she savored the intoxication of sweet wantings. She wanted to be loved; she hated the doubts in her mind that kept trying to push desire away, hated the uncertainty that held pleasure back.

He was slipping her clothes off, her dress and bra. She felt the cups drag free where she was pressed against him; he touched the sudden softness of her naked breasts, massaging the rubbery tips of her nipples with fiery lances of delicious pain. He had shrugged off his jacket; she picked at the buttons of his shirt and pushed fear and doubt into the back of her mind. Craving, excited, trembling, she breathed against his ear, “Yes-oh, yes!” Hurry, please hurry. She wanted to fill up with him. She helped him strip off his clothes; she felt swollen and flushed, short of breath. He took her hand and placed it on his-penis, she thought. Cock, pecker, prick. What the hell. Big son of a bitch. She laughed with an open throat, feeling healthy and girlish. She ran her fingertips along it and felt it grow and throb. The pain in her was exquisite, bursting into flame at the touch of his fingers. She fell back on the bed, spreading her thighs, tugging him down. She felt his great rigid organ touch the twitching moist heat of her, felt it thrust into her alive and throbbing. She thought, in a curiously distant way, All right, then, I’m getting laid-not for the first time, anyway. Isn’t that what it’s all about? She wanted to suck him in, lock him forever inside her. Her head swirled dizzily. She heard a broken groan in her own throat, and then he was sliding into her white-hot agony, rolling and twisting. The charging, plunging rhythm drove her uncontrollably toward a peak of anguished urgency. They flailed slick together, writhing; she uttered pulsing grunts of ecstasy, rising to a crescendo of heat that grew in her to a scalding high hot wonderful flame that drenched her in sweet anguish, reached height after height, reverberated and echoed through all the halls of her quivering flesh, and at last shattered in an agonizing flash of hot joyous triumph and the slow wonderful draining away of frenzy.

She felt sated, yet still excited. When he lifted himself from her she lay naked and grinned absurdly at him. He held her close against his side, not speaking, softly rubbing her arm. She closed her eyes and felt a slow gentle kind of regret, not unpleasant.

She was smiling softly; she opened her eyes and turned her head on the pillow to look fondly at him.

His face was kind and gentle. He reached out to touch the tip of her nose. “You’re a girl after my own heart.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “I am after your heart, Steve. Be warned of it.”

He picked her up, laughing quietly, and carried her across the room. They showered together, and as his hands rode over her body with soap, as he toweled her gently afterward, she felt the stirrings of desire welling again between her legs. Still damp, they clung together and made love on the bed again; and afterward she said to him in a panting whisper, “I can’t get enough of you-I can’t fill up with you!”

He came awake sometime in the night with the girl, curled against him like a child. He had been dreaming, but he couldn’t remember the dream. He could see her shape faintly in the darkness, the high rounded mound of her hip, the curve of breast and shoulder. She was all right, he thought drowsily. But as he came more clearly awake, he remembered she was Claiborne’s secretary and there was a purpose to all this. He had to have her hooked-he had to make it like a drug she couldn’t stay away from-and so, stirring gently at first, he rubbed her body with his open hands until she awakened. She blinked fuzzily and smiled; she moaned with loosening sensuality-she was easy to arouse. Her nipples came erect before his hands touched them. He brought her to a peak of desire with easy languor, but when at last he penetrated her and began to satisfy her craving need, he battered her roughly, with powerful plunging strength, not cruel but heavy and brutal, and brought her to a pitched screaming climax beyond anything she could have experienced ever before.

Afterward he took her into the shower again and brought her partway to desire again with his hands and his body under the tingling pin spray of water; but he left her unsatisfied this time; he was shaving at the bathroom mirror when she reluctantly went back to the bedroom alone.

He dried his face and splashed on after-shave cologne. He scratched his belly and stood in front of the mirror with his lips peeled back, inspecting his strong, even white teeth.

When he came into the bedroom she was dressed. She wore a look of anxiety and strain. “This is terrible,” she said. “My mother and father-it’s almost five o’clock! I’ve got to run.”

“What for? Can’t you tell them you spent the night at a girl friend’s?”

“You don’t know them-you don’t know my father. I’ve got to go.”

He said, “I’ve got to see you again-and I don’t mean in the office today. I don’t know if this meant anything to you besides a few hours’ fun and kicks, but I-”

“Oh, God, no,” she breathed, her eyes wide and moist. “Steve, this-”

“I’ve got to see you tonight,” he said, putting heavy urgency in his voice. “Darling, I’ve got to have you to keep.”

She swayed against him, turned her face, and spoke with her mouth muffled against his chest. “Oh, yes-yes. I need you, Steve darling.”

All the tired old slick-magazine dialogue, he thought petulantly; he had probably spoken these lines more often than any Hollywood screen actor. “Not half as much as I need you,” he said, making his voice tremble with sincerity, nuzzling her hair.

“I trust you,” she whispered. “Let’s make it forever, Steve darling-I don’t want to spoil it, ever.”

She kept talking, and he began to chafe; he responded automatically-her lines were as easy to parry as a third-rate tennis player’s strokes-and finally, to his relief, she drew away from him with her eyes moist and said miserably, “I really have to go.”

He headed for his clothes. “I’ll drive you.”

“No-the subway’s much faster, and I have to try to sneak in before they get up. I’ve got to run, darling-kiss me?”

He gave her a long, lingering kiss that left her pulse pounding visibly in her throat when she backed away, snatched up her handbag, and ran out.

Steve heard the door slam. He walked slowly into the bathroom and grinned at himself in the mirror.

Brian Garfield

Villiers Touch

10. Russell Hastings

Wide awake, Russ Hastings lay on his side with his legs scissored like a running man’s, listening with dismal resignation to the racket of trucks that thundered up from the street below his window. Oh, God, of all the stupid, asinine hang-ups. He kept having the feeling Carol was just behind him and all he needed to do was look around into her smiling eyes, reach for her hand, and pull her close, hearing her low laugh, feeling her soft warmth. Whore bitch. Garbage trucks, unspeakably ear-splitting, squatted at the curb with their machinery grinding, gears whining, steel cans clanking. The modern urban sound barrage was enough to induce premature hearing loss and sufficient emotional stress to cause ulcers, heart attacks, mental aberrations-a public-health doctor had said so the other day in the Times. Hastings had spent an hour, sometime between two and six, composing in his mind a furiously worded indignant letter to the mayor concerning noise pollution; but as his fantasies folded and blended and blurred, the letter became a plaintive cri de coeur, a compound of sticky sentimentality and desperate outrage, addressed sometimes to Carol and sometimes to Diane.

He rolled over, cursed, flung himself upright, and batted into the bathroom to slam the door and drown out the racket under the shower. When he came out again, with a trace of shaving lather still drying by his ear, the jackhammers had started at the construction job half a block away across the street. His face closed down; he tried to ignore it, pawed through his drawers, and finally ripped open a string-tied bundle of ironed laundry that had sat untouched on the dresser for a week-he had been here for months but had yet to develop a bachelor’s efficient tidiness; he still all but lived out of suitcases. It had taken three weeks before he had been able to unpack at all: the divorce had stunned him; for a long time his mind had jumped the orderly straight track of his thinking and wandered through a melancholy mist in which decisions, even small ones, paralyzed him. He had had trouble deciding what dish to select from restaurant menus, choosing which sock to put on first, remembering how to spell familiar simple words. In time he had drawn himself up, got a grip on himself; but it was still uphill, like slogging through molasses-decisions still came hard.

He put a pot of water on to boil and swept the room with a bleak glance. It was undistinguished-convertible couch, dreary coffee table, an old TV, a chair with a ruffled slipcover, anonymous gimcracks on the walls. It revealed no personality, not even that of the fat landlord who had rented the place to him, furnished, for three times its value. Russ Hastings had matured with a highborn indifference to tangible possessions and rarely paid attention to his surroundings. It was a trait Diane had rarely understood-except once, he recalled. Early on in the marriage she had said with her lovely laugh, “Fashions and styles-I know it’s all superficial sham, Russ, but I can’t help it, I like it.” Sometimes she would come home exhausted after a lustful fury of shopping and insist he pay attention while she paraded before him her new clothes or antiques or paintings. Even when he feigned enthusiasm, his want of real interest had always incensed her.

He poured his instant coffee and sat down with it, feeling wrung out and angry because he was still going back over it, beating the dead horse, unable to dismiss her. So much of it kept flooding back every time she came to mind.

He had been so sure of himself. He had stalked her patiently for months, bemused by her determined private ambitions, confident they represented only a stage, convinced she would get tired of it, discard it, submit in the end to his masculine domination. With hindsight it was bitterly easy to see how he had deceived himself every step of the way. The time of decision had been the day she had opened her first art gallery. She had a compulsion, which excluded him, to succeed on her own; it had taken him a long time to realize that much, and still longer to know that only in a bad marriage did one’s success mean the other’s failure. The more Nuart grew, the more she regarded his accomplishments with weary boredom. She had begun to patronize, then to avoid, until the competitiveness between them became transparent and they separated into their distinct worlds. When they did meet it was with a cool sense of withering estrangement that made them overpolite with each other, hearty with forced cheer in public, straining for hurried smiles, a pair of actors speaking memorized set-piece speeches to outsiders and speaking to each other hardly at all.

Nothing as intimate as sex could remain unaffected by the drying up of their emotional wells. Gradually Diane had discovered a growing fear and distaste for lovemaking. She had suffered it, more and more, with trembling limbs and clenched teeth. She had tried-he had to give her that credit-she had tried with increasing desperation. But finally she had stopped trying. One night she had stood by the bed and slipped out of her robe, looking away, not at him. Without speaking, she settled down on her back and spread her legs out neatly, not disturbing the sheets, looking mindlessly at the ceiling and waiting with a flat, lifeless expression that promised she would resign herself to doing her sweaty functional duty but she could no longer pretend to like any part of it.

Filled with sudden revulsion, he had put his clothes on and walked to the door. Looking back, seeing the pain in her eyes, he had felt viciously glad: it showed, at least, that it was still in his power to hurt her.

Force of habit was stronger than love; they had kept up the outward pretense of marriage for a time. But one day he had stepped into the elevator, and it had hit him, unmistakable, the scent of her perfume. She must have just gone up to the apartment. He had left the elevator at the third floor and walked down the fire stairs to the lobby, gone to a hotel, and telephoned her. That was how it had ended.

He shrugged into a seersucker jacket and glanced in the mirror; he looked, he thought, like a burned-out reporter, a young-old man with deep creases bracketing his mouth, hair starting to gray, eyes puffy and bloodshot. On his way down to the sidewalk he was thinking of Carol McCloud. My trouble is, I’m just horny, that’s all. But he couldn’t shake her image. He went along Thirty-fourth Street and had a meager breakfast at a lunch counter; stopped afterward to paw through a sidewalk bin of old books. He found nothing but a layer of dirt on his fingers. Suddenly he turned into the street between two parked cars and hailed a downtown-bound taxi, got in, and gave the driver Saul Cohen’s address.

Saul Cohen’s office was in a small brown old building of almost colonial vintage that squatted cringing next to one of the tall Wall Street slabs checkered with glass, steel, and concrete-a nondescript new structure of the kind he had once heard Elliot Judd scorn: “I don’t intend to be put in a box like that until I’m dead. This city complains of vandals and they’re tearing down historic buildings to make room for that!” The new buildings weren’t even ugly; they were only boring, as inhuman as digital computers, and as cold.

But Saul Cohen inhabited the overshadowed little building next door. It was a dark, pleasant place, carved and ornamented, with aged woodwork and a brass-cage elevator that took him slowly but comfortably to the third floor. The office was small but homey and elegant-there was an elaborate Tabriz carpet swirling with vivid birds and animals, an Etruscan figurine on a wooden pedestal, and beyond a walnut rail fence with a swinging gate in it, an old man sitting at a huge antique desk in the corner.

Saul was the room’s only occupant; the secretary’s desk was unoccupied. There were tickers and a Quotron; phone wires were tangled on the old man’s cluttered desk.

Saul got up from his chair spryly. “Russ, my boy.” When the old man grinned, his eyes wrinkled up until they were almost shut. He walked forward to the rail, held the swing gate open, and shook hands. “How are you? Come and sit-come and sit.”

“I was hoping I’d catch you here this early. But if I’m taking up work time-”

“Nonsense. For you I make all the time you want. Sit.”

Saul Cohen was a crickety, bookish, gentle little man with a harsh simian face, tangled eyebrows, prominent nose, gray hair cropped close to the little round skull. His voice was rapid, scratchy, impatient. His expression, painted on indelibly, was that of a man who smelled something distasteful; it made his face seem a repository for the anguish of the ages. Hastings had never been able to look at that suffering face without seeing the old man as torment personified.

He took the proffered chair. “I need some wisdom.”

“That I don’t sell. Only stocks and bonds. I made a couple of good trades last week in your account and your father’s. Do you need cash? Is that why you come to me with such a long face? To ask me to sell your investments for cash?”

“Nothing like that.”

“I’m happy, then. But wisdom? The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. Ecclesiasticus, thirty-eight: twenty-four. What can I tell you? I’m a businessman all my life. I’m seventy-six years of age, and I’m still working, only because what else do I know how to do? I never learned the wisdom of spending money, all I can do is play the game here. I own a seat that’s fifty years old, I bought it for a few thousand, and now it’s worth a small fortune-what can I tell you?”

“You can give me the impossible, Saul. A Wall Street education in one lesson.”

The old man smiled gently. He was a Wall Street gadfly, a keen-eyed gnome with a clever mind salted away behind his indulgent cracker-barrel philosophizing. He said, “Instant knowledge. What everybody wants nowadays. Ah, my young friend, you’ll never get that outright. But what you can get, if you’ve got the right brain, is two here and two there, to put together with the two you’ve already got, to make six. You’ve gone to work for the Securities and Exchange since I’ve seen you last.”

“That’s right. Word gets around, doesn’t it?”

“As I said, I keep in touch. Besides, I’ve known you since you were so young you’d be embarrassed to be reminded. I actually did bounce you on my knee. Naturally I’d be interested to follow your career.”

“Such as it is,” Hastings said, smiling. “My problem’s an odd one. I’ve picked up vague hints that something may be going on out of sight in the market. But I’m too new to this business to be sure of myself. The problem is-”

The old man held up a hand, palm out, and grinned, full of mischief. “We will wait to hear what the exact problem is. You come to me as a neophyte, and the opportunity to lecture is too great for me to pass up. I will tell you about this Street, and then you will ask your questions.” He settled back, steepling his fingers, with a deep breath and a manner that instantly identified him as an in-training long-distance talker. Hastings smiled fondly. Watching Hastings from the pained depths of his eyes, Saul Cohen said, “Do you read Freud? No? You should. Freud observed that Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe; Darwin removed man’s uniqueness, and made him but a link in a chain; and Freud himself removed the illusion that a man is his own master. But most of us still cherish that illusion-and you see evidence of it here in Wall Street. Everybody thinks he can control his own destiny by working out a logical investment policy and making himself a millionaire overnight. They make a mistake, of course-they should read Freud. There’s no such thing as a logical man, there’s no such thing as a logical investment policy. The market isn’t any more logical than the men who make it. It operates out of greed, fear, rumors, hints, intuitions-and for your first lesson I can tell you that selecting investments by throwing darts at a list of stocks is the best method of beating the market. You see?”

Hastings began to smile, but Cohen shook a knobby finger at him. “I meant it seriously, young man-it’s quite true. It is a plain bare fact, beyond argument, that more people lose than win in the stock market. If you buy one share of every share listed, across the board, you’ll end up losing. To be specific, you’ll lose about seven and a half percent on your investment. Because in the end all we do in Wall Street is shift piles of manure from one corner of the barn to another, and we brokers charge a commission for the service of shifting it back and forth.”

“But facts like that don’t matter to the public. They see a stock start to shoot up, and they don’t own it, so they get greedy and they buy. Profit fever-they start to think of themselves as manly cannibals in this meat market. The fact is, they’re jackasses, following carrots on sticks. All you’ve got to do is keep them supplied with carrots.”