Till the Butchers Cut Him Down Read Online Free Page A

around.” He jerked his thumb at his chest.
     “Me.”
    I reached into my bag and took out my minicassette recorder. Might as well have the conversation on tape, in case I decided
     to take him on as a client. “Do you mind?” I asked.
    He shook his head, waved it away. “Nothing I say goes on somebody else’s tape. Nothing.”
    I shrugged, put the recorder away. “Go on.”
    “Okay, the turnaround man—me—comes on board. There aren’t all that many of us—maybe nine, ten, tops, in the country—who’re
     first-rate. The board pays maximum dollar, maximum options and non-cash perks to get me. They agree to let me call all the
     shots. I’m a dictator with a license to kill—and that’s exactly what I do. The first step is the bloodbath.”
    Interesting how Suits, who had always claimed to embrace the values of peace and love, described his profession with such
     violent metaphors.
    “Okay,” he went on, “here’s how it goes down. You find a sacrificial lamb. Doesn’t have to be the guy responsible for what’s
     wrong, just has to be somebody with high visibility. You find him and you crucify him. Bang! He’s gone. You’ve shown everybody
     how ruthless you are, and people’re nervous now. Hell, you do it right, you’ve got them running to the can seventeen times
     a day.”
    “Nice.”
    “Hey, it has to be done.”
    “You’ve changed, Suits.”
    His eyes met mine, level and candid. “Haven’t we all, Sherry-O?” he said mildly.
    I acknowledged the implication with a rueful grimace.
    “Okay, the bloodbath’s over, for the most part. Next you bring in your own people. I’ve got a permanent staff in my L.A. office,
     but they’re just administrative. For my on-site people I draw on a talent pool from all over the country: a finance guy in
     Chicago; a marketing guy in Dallas; a statistician in L.A.; an operations guy in Atlanta. These people come in. They’ve got
     high visibility, they’ve got authority. And they show they know how to kick butt.
    “Now’s the time when you clear out more deadwood. You clean things up, trim things back. You make your deals with the moneymen—the
     banks and investors. You make your deals with the creditors. People’ll cut you any amount of slack if they think they’ve got
     a chance of getting their money back. So basically what you do is get things stabilized. That can take about a year.”
    “Is that why you’ve been too busy to buy furniture?”
    He grinned. “You got it.”
    I was still troubled by the tone of what he was telling me. The Suitcase Gordon I’d once known had been short on the social
     niceties and often crassly insensitive, yes. But he’d never been cruel.
    As if he’d heard my thoughts, he touched my hand gently with his forefinger. “Sometimes, Sherry-O, you’ve got to cause pain
     to accomplish something worthwhile. The people who get hurt in the bloodbath generally’re the ones who contributed to how
     bad things are. Or they’re people who’ll be better off out of there anyway. And the bloodbath and stabilizing stages lead
     to what I call the visionary stage. That’s when you can really make things happen.”
    I moved my hand away, reserving judgment and wishing he’d stop calling me Sherry-O. “What kind of things?”
    Suits’s gray eyes began to take on a glow; his pale skin became suffused with color. My unease deepened. I’d seen that expression
     before on the faces of zealots—and madmen.
    He said, “Revolutionary things. Sweeping changes that reach far beyond the corporation. You can change the course of every
     life you hold in your hands. You can change the course of a nation. You can completely alter history.”
    Zealot, I decided.
    Suits sat up straighter, fixed his burning eyes on mine. “What I’m offering you,” he announced, “is the chance to help me
     alter the course of the history of San Francisco. But first you’ll have to find the bastard who’s trying to kill me.”
    No, I thought.