Edsel by Loren D. Estleman Page B

said.”
    “Hank’s different. He could cross a picket line alone during a nasty strike and the worst he’d get would be a disapproving look. Part of it’s the family mystique; mostly it has to do with his firing more than a thousand of Harry Bennett’s stooges as soon as he took over. If he has a fault it’s his tendency to forget that everyone didn’t come down from Mount Olympus with him.”
    “Are you saying I’m in danger?” I didn’t ask the question with quite the sardonic quality I might have before the thing in Woolworth’s. The tape had been off my ribs for weeks but sometimes when I turned over in my sleep I still felt the pinch.
    “Some of our present employees were on the scene when Bennett’s bullies kicked Walter Reuther down the steps of the Miller Road overpass in 1938,” he said. “In any case it wasn’t so long ago they won’t think history will repeat itself. At the very least they’ll be curious and ask questions you might not be able to answer convincingly. At the most—well, we’re automating as fast as we can, but it’s still a physical business, maintained and driven by brute force.”
    “I thought we were all in the same boat.”
    “The same boat, yes. But there are a great many decks between steerage and the bridge.” He brightened. “Would you like to see the car you’re selling?”
    “You have one?”
    “Kind of. Let’s go back to the old building.”
    We took the elevator down, a proper one this time, although the shaft was still open and the fragile-looking cable arrangement that suspended the car exposed. I would never again ride one without picturing those slender threads. Zed’s big Lincoln Premiere was waiting, navy and chrome with tail fins and Turbo-Drive, and we boated away on its slightly soupy suspension. The front seat was comfortable and the interior smelled like a rich man’s office, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to turn around and see a coffin stretched out in back. Cars, like everything else in a nation that had once prided itself upon vertical growth, had begun to flatten and lengthen, which in turn led to lower, wider garages and houses to match. Having devoured the rest of the world with its military and industrial might, the whole country was stretching itself out like a lion in the sun. It was getting so the only place you could comfortably wear a hat was outdoors. More and more men and women seemed to be leaving them at home. Despite the ubiquity of Eisenhower in his sail-brimmed fedora and Ralph Kramden golf cap, we were starting to look like a society of shoe clerks.
    In the Schaeffer Road complex we walked down the corridor Henry II had stalked a decade before, poking his large round head into offices and firing men as he went, past Edsel’s old office where his son had holed up to plan his strategy to seize control of the company from the deranged patriarch who had built it, to the design department, a room the size of a gymnasium that always reminded me less of the creative branch of a world-class corporation than a kindergarten classroom, complete with blackboards and cork walls tacked all over with colored construction paper cut into exotic shapes and square yellow oak tables smeared with paint and dried modeling clay. The linoleum floor was littered with scissored scraps of paper and the air smelled of turpentine and library paste. The room contained a half-dozen young men and one woman dressed identically in dungarees with their shirttails out; the uniform of the generation coming to power. Two were seated at drawing boards with their chins in their hands. A third was sprawled on a burst green Naugahyde sofa folding an intricate paper airplane—I think it was a Supersabre—out of what looked like an inter-office memo. Two more leaned on the windowsill sipping from king-size coffee mugs and watching a nuthatch pecking at birdseed scattered on the other side of the glass, and one sat on a stool in the far corner with his hands