The Eye of Moloch

Chapter 19

You Can Lead a Horse to Slaughter,

but You Can’t Make Him Think

or

How I Spent My 16th Birthday

by Noah W. Gardner

Period 7, Mrs. Schantz

3/21/1997

Honors English

Introduction

How are a modern slaughterhouse and the field of public relations alike?

Last year, when a group of investors set out to build a new kind of meat-processing plant—far bigger and more efficient than ever—they didn’t go to an architect, or a stockman, or any general contractor experienced in the field. Instead they hired the world’s preeminent social engineer. So on my 16th birthday they came to 500 Fifth Avenue in New York City, and they sat down with my father, Arthur Gardner.

If it seems strange to you that the principles of public relations might apply so directly to the mechanics of a humane slaughterhouse, you’re not alone. I didn’t get it either, not until that Saturday morning when I watched this client presentation unfold.

My father took the men through his drawings and explained things as he went. A great deal of information was given, but the basic concepts behind his compassionate killing machine were as follows:

1.

The Overton Window.

There must be no straight lines-of-sight on that last mile leading to the long knives and electric saws. Gentle winding curves would obscure the forward view and break the distance down into an easy series of short and nonthreatening segments, each willingly taken, the animals nudged along to one point after the next. Safety and rest—not the butcher’s blade—must always seem to be waiting just beyond the next corner up ahead.

2.

Divide and Conquer.

Pigs and cattle and sheep are natural subscribers to the two-party system. They will blindly follow a kindred leader, and will tend to walk in the opposite direction to that traveled by a thing they distrust. Either or both of these instincts can be employed to march them peacefully to a place they would never otherwise choose to go.

3.

Misdirection and Media Control.

Lest fear should spoil the meat, along the path toward the kill-chute everything the animals see and hear must be crafted to lull them into a state of calm submission. Any whiff of the truth could interrupt progress and alert them to the danger they’re approaching.

4.

The Free Choice Illusion.

Throughout their final walk they should have just enough space around them to feel the comfort of false freedom. Even as the path constricts and their choices narrow, moving steadily onward must seem to be their own decision, right up until the moment when the hammer falls.

5.

The Rebel Gene.

A lone, independent agitator is the most dangerous animal in the herd. These rare individuals seem to be born with a sense of what’s to come and will endure harsh and repeated punishments as they attempt to warn the others. Provision must be made to remove and silence these unusual creatures the instant they step out of line.

For the men attending, this meeting was a huge success. By the time it was over they’d gotten everything they wanted and more. For my part, I was left with the troubling feeling that I had glimpsed behind the wizard’s curtain and learned things I’d rather not have known, both about my father, Arthur Gardner, and the industry he’d helped to pioneer.

There was a key difference, of course, between the herding and handling of that livestock and the crass manipulation of the buying, voting, and consuming public.

Once the animals were killed the goal was to squeeze every last bit of worth from the carcass: muscle, blood, bone, sinew, skin, and entrails; nothing should be left in the end. In the case of the American people the same sort of value extraction was being plotted, only they were to be systematically drained of all their worth

before

they died, not after.

The youthful rebellion on display in this prep school essay was quickly put down without a fight. Noah’s teacher valued her job and knew her place, so she reported to his father immediately and shredded all copies of the paper at the old man’s request. She then quietly gave her student a grade of D-minus on the assignment and that was the end of it, in more ways than one.

His naïve exposé would turn out to be the high-water mark of Noah Gardner’s adolescent protests against the establishment. He soon saw that it was a war he wouldn’t win, so there was nothing to be gained in resistance and so many comforts to be lost.

Likewise, his stand as a conscientious vegetarian lasted less than half a year. His idealistic quest to become an establishment-battling lawyer barely survived one tough semester at New York University. Several devil-may-care and fun-filled years later, Noah found that he’d done what he’d once sworn to himself and his dying mother that he never, ever would.

There was no particular point when he could say he’d sold out and turned that final, gentle corner, but one day not long ago—the day he’d met Molly Ross, in fact—he woke up to fully realize he’d become his father’s son.

Needless to say, that day didn’t turn out so well.

• • •

As he dreamed, Noah wasn’t reliving past days but only watching them file past in the dark, skipping parts he couldn’t bear and dwelling in others that had gone by too quickly. In the midst of a particularly fond memory he felt an itch and a soreness by his ear. He tried to move his hand to ease the discomfort and felt the cinch of the strap, found his wrist restrained, and opened his eyes.

A wave of body panic shot through him, the really urgent kind the primitive brain reserves for those times when you absolutely, positively must escape from something nearby that would kill you if you tried to hold your ground.

The door banged open, the overhead lights blazed on, and a nurse and two muscular orderlies rushed into the room to keep him down.

A needle popped under the skin of his arm. He tried to cry out but there was no voice to it. And he never took his eyes from the mortal threat in the shape of Arthur Gardner sitting without emotion in the chair across the room, not until the drugs took hold, his surroundings began to swirl and recede, and he felt himself drifting away.

• • •

This time there’d been no dreams at all.

When he woke again he was looking into a winsome and familiar face at the bedside. If their aim had been to put him at ease with the presence of someone he trusted, they’d actually chosen pretty well. It was Ellen Davenport—now Dr. Ellen Davenport—his closest friend from their younger, country-clubbing years.

“Hi there,” Ellen said, as if nothing whatsoever were wrong.

“What are you doing here?” Noah asked. His hands were no longer restrained though she was holding both of them in hers. “And where the hell are we?”

Her smile seemed forced and very professional, more a tool of patient management than a genuine expression. “We’re at a clinic outside of Denver. You were injured and flown here by medevac, but that’s been a little while ago now.”

“How long?”

“Several days.”

“Several days?”

“I just found out, and I dropped everything when I got the call. That’s all I know. And I’m here for you because your father called and said you needed me.”

“My father.”

“He wants to talk to you, Noah.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk to him.”

She sighed, released his hands, and adjusted his covers. “Look, I know all about your issues with your dad—”

“Actually, I’d bet your debt to Johns Hopkins that you don’t have any idea.”

“Let me finish. He’s changed, Noah. He told me that he had, and I’ve seen it. If you’d heard him when he called me—no, listen—if you’d heard him you’d know that whatever’s gone on between you, letting him in here now is the right thing to do.”

“He’s why I’m here, Ellen. He did this, no one else. He’s why all this has happened to me. When I came to you for help back then, remember? I’d gotten wrapped up with this girl named Molly Ross. She was just using me in the beginning, trying to expose what my father was doing, but in the end I really tried to help her. When he saw I’d turned against him he almost killed me for it, and then he had me locked up in some godforsaken government work camp, and—”

“Okay, okay, just relax.” By her gentle tone and the look on her face Ellen was recalling her training on how to deal with a psychotic in the grip of a delusion. In any case, when she’d calmed him down that line of conversation was tabled for the moment. She stood, fussed a bit with the IV pump, lightly checked his bandages, and put a cool hand to his forehead as if to calm him as she gauged his temperature. “You’ve got some lacerations and some burns and a mild concussion. How do you feel?”

“Groggy.”

“You must be. The chart says you’ve been in and out since you got here, but mostly out. They’ve been overdoing the sedation for some reason. I’ve put a stop to that, and as long as you don’t get physical with the staff again, my orders should stand.”

He laid his head back, thinking. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “Now, if I raise the bed a little so you can sit up and have a visitor, do you think you can handle that?”

“Sure. But not him.”

“Look at it this way,” she said. “He’s here, and he won’t leave until he sees you. I’m going to put my career and my normal relationships and my fine life in the big city on hold and stay here to take care of you. Whatever else he’s done, he made that happen, too, Noah. And he’s assured me that whatever’s gone on since I last saw you in New York, everything will be different going forward.”

“Different? Is that how he put it? Because it’s like signing a pact with the devil when you’re dealing with him; you’ve got to analyze every damned word.”

“Better, then,” Ellen said. “Everything will be better. He promised me, Gardner, and I promise you.”

When she’d left, it seemed that whoever else was lurking outside the room felt it best to give him a few minutes alone. The quiet time didn’t help anything. Every second that passed only dripped more acid tension into his gut. By the time the handle turned and the door began to open, his fists were clenched so hard he felt the nails biting into his palms.

And then his father came into the room.

Something had diminished about the man, there was no denying it. He’d always seemed younger than his age, buoyed up from within by some boundless hamster wheel of manic energy. Now he was seventy-five, and for the first time that Noah could remember, every single year of it showed.

Arthur Gardner turned to look up into the ceiling-mounted camera behind a smoky glass dome near the corner. He made a motion toward it with his hand as if to order a pause in the surveillance, and he waited to see it comply. That little red light just continued its steady glow. After a time he relented the effort and seemed to accept the fact that whatever he was going to say or do here, it would be watched.

There was a physical difference in his walk as he came on forward, maybe a weakness of one side that required a compensation.

“Stop right there,” Noah said.

The old man halted so abruptly he had to brace himself with one hand on the footboard.

“Son,” he began. But nothing more followed.

“Ellen told me you had something to say. Let’s get on with it.”

He nodded, and took a little while to begin. “When I last saw you—”

“When you last saw me?” Noah interrupted. “We’re starting there? Because when you last saw me you were supervising my torture and interrogation. Then you put me into a white-collar prison job, and that went from white-collar to blue-collar to no-collar to an involuntary ride-along with a pack of mercenaries who were hunting people that I actually care about. That was your doing, and it almost put an end to me more than just this once. Hey, there were a lot of times that I actually could have used a fatherly visit in the last six months, but no, there wasn’t a peep out of you then. Now, if I’m reading your signals properly, you actually came here to say you’re sorry after all this time, and all you’ve put me through. Your apology is so unbelievably not accepted. If that’s all you’ve got, you might as well shuffle out of here right now and piss off.”

Arthur Gardner endured the onslaught of these words and again, quite out of character, he made no attempt to counter. He only took a small step closer before seeming to recall that he’d been told to stay right where he was.

“Son,” he tried to begin again, “it may be very important—no—it is, very important, that you attempt to put the old feelings between us aside for now and do what I ask. Important for everyone, not only me. This concerns the young woman, Molly Ross.”

Noah frowned. “What about Molly?”

“It’s as simple as this.” Arthur Gardner stole a glance toward that camera again. “If you’ll do what I ask, she can live.”

When listening to a man who’s spent his career constructing deceptions so perfect as to shape entire cultures for his profit, it’s a good idea to think hard before buying into his lines. Noah didn’t speak, and the old man continued.

“More than that, son; you can have a future again. Back in New York, or in London, or Geneva, or Zurich, or the south of France. Anywhere, or nowhere if you’d prefer to disappear and put me and everything else you’ve ever known behind you forever. I’ll arrange that myself, with Charlie Nelan. You’ll trust Charlie; I can’t blame you for doubting me but you must know he wouldn’t let you down. He can set you up for life in a way that no one could ever undo it.”

“Sounds just great,” Noah said. “You know I had most of those options already, don’t you? Before you took them away.”

“Now you listen.” And there it was, low and menacing, a venomous hiss from the real man had momentarily escaped containment. “The past is gone, son. There’s a change coming, and soon. Our failure last year only delayed it, but the storm is gathering again. This offer I bring will cost me more than you’ll ever know. But it will buy a life for you, a good life, and one for her, if that matters to you more than your own.”

“It does,” Noah said, and he was more than a little surprised to hear himself admit to that. As his mind raced to find the old man’s hidden angle—because there was always at least one of those—he couldn’t see how it could hurt to hear the proposal. “So what do you want from me?”

“I’d like to sit.” He’d pulled a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket and was dabbing at his neck and his brow.

“Be my guest.”

His father took a seat at the foot of the bed. He seemed unusually weary and short of breath when he spoke again.

“We’ll bring someone in to meet with you,” he said, “an investigator whose honor and integrity you’ll know you can rely upon. She’ll ask you what you know, and then she may require that you make contact with Ms. Ross and arrange a meeting, and you’ll do that. Through this interaction she’ll be brought into custody. She’ll stand trial for a minor felony and spend as little time as we can bargain in a minimum-security federal penitentiary.”

“And what about her people?”

“They don’t matter at all without her. They’ll scatter and soon be forgotten, and they’ll be left alone.”

It hurt to do it but Noah brought himself up to an elbow, a little closer to his father and on a more eye-to-eye level. “So that’s it?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, that’s all? I just have to rat her out, and set her up, and then we all live happily ever after?”

His father didn’t respond to this latest snide rejoinder because he must have known by then that he didn’t have to. There comes a time in a sales transaction, right before the close, when the mark’s been reeled in and both the salesman and his victim know the deed’s already done. When it’s over and everyone knows it, you stop the pitch, slide the contract across the table, and you wait.

It went without saying that Noah didn’t believe a word of this, but he thought for a moment before he spoke again. Maybe there was something to be gained by playing along.

If he declined this deal he’d only be shut out while they continued to pursue her. They’d find her before too long and then they’d do whatever they wanted: kill her, humiliate her, publicly destroy her work, and erase any good she’d ever tried to do. Probably all of the above. As an afterthought they’d no doubt do the same to him.

But, if he said yes, he might retain some form of leverage and at least remain in the game. That way there was a chance that he could buy them both a little time.

“You know what?” Noah said. “Fine. You win, as usual. I’ll do it.”