He looked at me blankly.
"That's Junior, right?"
"Huh?" It took him a few seconds to remember he was wearing a NASCAR cap.
"Dale Earnhardt Jr.," I said.
He nodded, turned away, looked straight ahead.
"Junior crossed the finish line a fraction of a second ahead of Tony Stewart," I said. "Yeah, I remember that one. Seven or eight cars just wiped out. Michael Waltrip's car must have flipped over three times."
He gave me a quick sidelong glance. "I was there, man."
"You're kidding me."
"Also saw his daddy get killed there three years before."
I shook my head. "Crazy sport. I think a lot of people tune in just for the crashes. Like maybe they'll get lucky and see someone die."
He gave me a longer look this time, didn't seem to know what to make of me. One of the snotty rich executives who followed NASCAR? It didn't compute. I guess I was doing a decent job pretending to care.
"Nothing like the old days," he said. "NASCAR used to be like bumper cars. Drivers used to race hard. A demolition derby. The old bump-and-run."
"Reminds me of that line from a movie," I said. "Rubbin's racin'."
"Days of Thunder, man!" He was suddenly enthusiastic, his smile like a child's. "My favorite movie of all time. How's it go again? 'He didn't slam you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you-he rubbed you. And rubbin', son, is racin'.' That's it, man."
"That's it," I said, nodding sagely. Bond with the guy. Connect. "Sometimes a driver's just gotta shove another car out of position. Spin the other guy out. Wreck his car. Trade a little paint. But that's all changed now."
"Exactly. Now you race too hard, they sock you with a penalty. Everyone's got to stay in line."
"NASCAR got sissified."
"They turned it into a corporation, see."
"Damn straight."
He gave me another quizzical look. "How come you're so much younger than the rest of the guys?"
"I just look younger. I eat right. Saw-tooth palmetto."
A smile spread slowly across his face. "Saw palmetto. You some-one's assistant or something?"
"Nah, I'm just a ringer. A substitute."
"That why you're not on the original guest list?"
So he does have a guest list. From Hammond? It could just as well be someone who works at the resort. Someone who doesn't have the most up-to-date information.
No, it had to be a source inside Hammond: How else could he know so much about Ron Slattery's personal life?
He has an inside source: but who?
"I was a last-minute replacement."
"For Michael Zorn?"
Interesting, I thought. He's keeping track. "Right."
"What happened to Zorn?"
So his information was at least a day or two old. Also interesting: He knew a lot about money laundering and offshore banks, about kidnap-and-ransom insurance, yet he didn't know everything about Hammond's finances. Not, at least, what he needed to know.
"Mike had to go to India for some client meetings," I said.
"So how'd they choose you?"
"I have no idea."
He nodded slowly. "I think you're full of shit."
"Funny, that's what my last quarterly performance review said."
He smiled, turned his penetrating gaze away.
"But if I had to guess, it's because I know a lot about our newest airplane."
"The H-880. You an engineer?"
"No, but I think I met one once."
He chuckled.
"I'm the assistant to the guy who's in charge of building the SkyCruiser. I'm like a glorified traffic cop. Actually, forget the 'glorified' part."
"Any of that traffic include money stuff? What do you know about the payments system-how money's moved in and out of the company?"
"I know that my paycheck gets deposited into my bank account every two weeks. That's about it, though. As much as I need to know. I'm the low man on the totem pole here."
He thought for a while. "That doesn't mean what you think."
"What doesn't?"
"'Low man on the totem pole.' The lower part of a totem pole is actually the most important part, see, because it's what most people look at. So it's usually done by the chief carver. He has his apprentices do the top part."
"Thanks," I said. "Now I feel better about it."
"Of course, the other guys don't know about totem poles. So they treat you like shit."
"Not really."
"I see things."
"I guess I don't. Though they do like to rub it in about how much money they have. Fancy restaurants and golf-club memberships and all that."
"That's 'cause they're not men. They're soft."
"Or maybe it's just that they know I just don't come from their world."
"Well, it's pretty obvious you're nothing like them. They're all a bunch of pussies and sissies and cowards."
He was playing me, too, but why?
"Not really. Some of them are serious jocks. Pretty competitive-Alpha Male types. And they all make a lot more money than me."
He hunched forward in his chair, pointing a stern finger. He spoke precisely, as if reciting something he'd memorized. "Someone once said that the great tragedy of this century is that a man can live his entire life without ever knowing for sure if he's a coward or not."
"Huh. Never thought about that."
He glanced at me quickly, decided I wasn't being sarcastic.
"You know what's wrong with the world today, bro? The computers. They're ruining the human race."
"Computers?"
"You ever see elks mate?" Russell said.
"Never had the pleasure."
"Every fall the female elk releases this musk in her urine, see. Tells the bull elks she's ready to mate. The bull elks can smell the musk, and they start fighting each other over the female. Charge at each other, butting heads, locking antlers, making this unbelievable racket, this loud bugling, until one of them gives up, and the winner gets the girl."
"I've seen bar fights like that."
"That's how the females can tell which bulls are the fittest. They mate with the winners. Otherwise, the weak genes get passed on, and the elks are gonna die out. This is how it works in nature."
"Or the corporate world."
"No. That's where you're wrong." The stern lecturer's finger again. "My point. Doesn't work like that with humans anymore. Used to be, a human who was too slow would get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Natural selection, right?"
"Didn't the saber-toothed tiger go extinct?"
A darting look of irritation. "These days, everything's upside down. Women don't mate with the better hunter anymore. They marry the rich guys."
"Maybe the rich guys are the better hunters now."
He scowled, but I had a sense that he didn't mind the fencing. Maybe even liked it. "It's like Darwin's law got repealed. Call it the rule of the weak."
"Okay."
"You think women can tell which men are the fittest anymore? They can't. You see a guy who's really cut and buff and wearing a muscle shirt to show it off, and you can figure he spends all his time in the gym, but you know something? Odds are he's a faggot."
"Or a WrestleMania champ."
Another flash of annoyance; I'd gone too far. "I mean, look at these guys." He waved at the wall, at the hostages on the other side. "This country was made by guys like Kit Carson, fighting the Indians with knives and six-shooters. Brave men. But that's all gone now. Now, some pencil-neck geek sitting at a computer can launch a thousand missiles and kill a million people. The world's run by a bunch of fat-ass wimps who only know how to double-click their way to power. Think they should get a Purple Heart for a paper cut."
"I like that."
"Their idea of power is PowerPoint. They got headsets on their heads and their fingers on keyboards and they think they're macho men when they're just half wimp and half machine. Nothing more than sports-drink-gulping, instant-message-sending, mouse-clicking, iPod-listening, web-surfing pussies, and God didn't mean for the likes of them to run this planet on the backs of real men."
A knock at the door, and Verne came in with a mug, which he handed to Russell.
"Finally. Thank you, Verne," Russell said.