Killer Instinct

1

Okay, so I’m an idiot.

The Acura went into a ditch because I was trying to do too many things at once. Radiohead’s “The Bends” was playing, loud, while I was driving home, too fast, since I was late as usual. Left hand on the wheel, while with my right hand I was thumbing my BlackBerry for e-mails, hoping I’d finally nailed a deal with a huge new customer. Most of the e-mails were blowback from the departure of our divisional vice president, Crawford, who’d just jumped ship to Sony. Then my cell phone rang. I dropped the BlackBerry on the car seat and grabbed the cell.

I knew from the ring that it was my wife, Kate, so I didn’t bother to turn down the music-I figured she was just calling to find out when I’d be home from work so she could get dinner ready. She’d been on a tofu kick the last few months-tofu and brown rice and kale, stuff like that. It had to be really good for you, since it tasted so bad. But I’d never tell her so.

That wasn’t why she was calling, though. I could tell right away from Kate’s voice that she’d been crying, and even before she said anything I knew why.

“DiMarco called,” she said. DiMarco was our doctor at Boston IVF who’d been trying to get Kate pregnant for the last two years or so. I didn’t have high hopes, plus I didn’t personally know anyone who’d ever made a baby in a test tube, so I was dubious about the whole process. I figured high tech should be for flat-screen plasma monitors, not making babies. Even so, it felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

But the worst thing was what it would do to Kate. She was crazy enough these days from the hormone injections. This would send her over the edge.

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“They’re not going to let us keep trying forever, you know,” she said. “All they care about is their numbers, and we’re bringing them down.”

“Katie, it’s only our third try with the IVF stuff. It’s like a ten percent chance or something per cycle anyway, right? We’ll keep at it, babe. That’s all.”

“The point is, what are we going to do if this doesn’t work?” Kate’s voice got all high and choked, made my heart squeeze. “Go to California, do the donor egg thing? I can’t go through that. Adopt? Jason, I can barely hear you.”

Adoption was fine with me. Or not. But I’m not totally clueless, so instead I focused on turning down the music. There’s some little button on the steering wheel that I’ve never figured out how to use, so with the thumb of my driving hand I started pushing buttons, but instead the volume increased until Radiohead was blaring.

“Kate,” I said, but just then I realized that the car had veered onto the shoulder and then off the road. I dropped the phone, grabbed the wheel with both hands, cut it hard, but too late.

There was a loud ka-chunk. I spun the steering wheel, slammed on the brakes.

A sickening metallic crunch. I was jolted forward, thrown against the wheel, then backwards. Suddenly the car was canting all the way down to one side. The engine was racing, the wheels spinning in midair.

I knew right away I wasn’t hurt seriously, but I might have bruised a couple of ribs slightly. It’s funny: I immediately started thinking of those old black-and-white driver-ed shock movies they used to show in the fifties and sixties with lurid titles like The Last Prom and Mechanized Death, from the days when all cops had crew cuts and wore huge-brimmed Canadian Mountie hats. A guy in my college frat had a videotape of these educational snuff flicks. Watching them could scare the bejeezus out of you. I couldn’t believe anyone learning to drive back then could see The Last Prom and still be willing to get behind the wheel.

I turned the key, shut off the music, and sat there for a couple of seconds in silence before I picked the cell phone off the floor of the car to call Triple A.

But the line was still open, and I could hear Kate screaming.

“Hey,” I said.

“Jason, are you all right?” She was freaking out. “What happened?”

“I’m fine, babe.”

“Jason, my God, did you get in an accident?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I’m totally-I’m fine. Everything’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”

Forty-five minutes later a tow truck pulled up, a bright red truck, M.E. WALSH TOW painted on the side panel. The driver walked over to me, holding a metal clipboard. He was a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a scruffy goatee, wearing a bandana on his head knotted at the back and long gray-flecked brown hair in a kind of mullet. He was wearing a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket.

“Well, that sucks,” the dude said.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

“No worries,” Harley said. “Let me guess. You were talking on your cell phone.”

I blinked, hesitated for a microsecond before I said sheepishly, “Yeah.”

“Damn things are a menace.”

“Yeah, totally,” I said. Like I could survive without my cell phone. But he didn’t exactly seem to be a cell phone kind of guy. He drove a tow truck and a motorcycle. Probably had a CB radio in there along with his Red Man chewing tobacco and Allman Brothers CDs. And a roll of toilet paper in the glove compartment. Kind of guy who mows his lawn and finds a car. Who thinks the last four words of the national anthem are “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

“You okay?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

He backed the truck around to my car, lowered the bed, hooked the winch up to the Acura. He switched on the electric pulley thing and started hauling my car out of the ditch. Fortunately, we were on a fairly deserted stretch of road-I always take this shortcut from the office in Framingham to the Mass Pike-so there weren’t too many cars whizzing by. I noticed the truck had a yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbon sticker on one side and one of those black-and-white POW/MIA stickers on the windshield. I made a mental note to myself not to criticize the war in Iraq unless I wanted to get my larynx crushed by the guy’s bare hands.

“Climb in,” he said.

The cab of the truck smelled like stale cigar smoke and gasoline. A Special Forces decal on the dashboard. I was starting to get real warm and fuzzy feelings about the war.

“You got a body shop you like?” he said. I could barely hear him over the hydraulic whine of the truck bed mechanism.

I had a serious gearhead friend who’d know, but I couldn’t tell a carburetor from a caribou. “I don’t get into accidents too often,” I said.

“Well, you don’t look like the kinda guy gets under the hood and changes the oil himself,” Harley said. “There’s a body shop I know,” he said. “Not too far from here. We’re good to go.”

We mostly sat there in silence while he drove. I made a couple of attempts to get a conversation started with Harley, but it was like striking a wet match.

Normally I could talk to anyone about anything-you name it, sports, kids, dogs, TV shows, whatever. I was a sales manager for one of the biggest electronics companies in the world, up there with Sony and Panasonic. The division I work for makes those big beautiful flat-panel LCD and plasma TVs and monitors that so many people lust after. Very cool products. And I’ve found that the really good sales reps, the ones who have the juice, can start a conversation with anybody. That’s me.

But this guy didn’t want to talk, and after a while I gave up. I was kind of uncomfortable sitting there in the front seat of a tow truck being chauffeured around by a Hells Angel, me in my expensive charcoal suit, trying to avoid the chewing gum, or tar, or whatever the hell it was stuck on the vinyl upholstery. I felt my rib cage, satisfied myself that nothing had broken. Not even all that painful, actually.

I found myself staring at the collection of stickers on the dashboard-the Special Forces decal, a “These Colors Don’t Run” flag decal, another one that said “Special Forces-I’m the Man Your Mother Warned You About.” After a while, I said, “This your truck?”

“Nah, my buddy owns the towing company and I help out sometimes.”

Guy was getting chatty. I said, “He Special Forces?”

A long silence. I didn’t know, were you not supposed to ask somebody if they were in the Special Forces or something? Like, he could tell me, but then he’d have to kill me?

I was about to repeat the question when he said, “We both were.”

“Huh,” I said, and we both went quiet again. He switched on the ball game. The Red Sox were playing the Seattle Mariners at Fenway Park, and it was a tight, hard-fought, low-scoring game, pretty exciting. I love listening to baseball on the radio. I have a huge flat-panel TV at home, which I got on the friends-and-family discount at work, and baseball in high-definition is awesome. But there’s nothing like a ball game on the radio-the crack of the bat, the rustling crowd, even the stupid ads for auto glass. It’s classic. The announcers sound exactly the way they did when I was a kid, and probably sound the same as when my late father was a kid. Their flat, nasal voices are like an old pair of sneakers, comfortable and familiar and broken-in. They use all the well-worn phrases like “high-fly-ball!” and “runners at the corners” and “swing and a miss.” I like the way they suddenly get loud and frenzied, shouting things like, “Way back! Way back!”

One of the announcers was commenting about the Sox pitcher, saying, “…but even at the top of his game, he’s never going to come close to the fastest recorded pitch speed of one hundred point nine miles an hour, thrown by…? Jerry, you must know that one.”

And the other guy said, “Nolan Ryan.”

“Nolan Ryan,” the first guy said, “very good. Clocked at Anaheim Stadium, August the twentieth, nineteen-seventy-four.” Probably reading off the prompter, some research fed him by a producer.

I said, “Wrong.”

The driver turned to me. “Huh?”

I said, “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about. The fastest recorded pitch was Mark Wohlers.”

“Very good,” Harley said, nodding. “Mark Wohlers. Hundred and three.”

“Right,” I said, surprised. “Hundred and three miles per hour, in nineteen-ninety-five.”

“Atlanta Braves spring training.” Then he smiled, an easy grin, his teeth even and white. “Didn’t think anyone else knew that,” he said.

“Of course, the fastest pitcher ever, not in the major leagues-”

“Steve Dalkowski,” said Harley. “Hundred and ten miles an hour.”

“Shattered an umpire’s mask,” I said, nodding. “So were you a baseball geek when you were a kid, too? Collection of thousands of baseball cards?”

He smiled again. “You got it. Those Topps gum packs with that crappy stale bubble gum inside.”

“That always stained one of the cards in the pack, right?”

He chuckled.

“Your dad take you to Fenway a lot?” I said.

“I didn’t grow up around here,” he said. “Michigan. And my dad wasn’t around. Plus we couldn’t afford to go to games.”

“We couldn’t either,” I said. “So I listened to games on the radio a lot.”

“Same here.”

“Played baseball in the backyard?” I said. “Break a lot of windows?”

“We didn’t have a backyard.”

“Me neither. My friends and I played in a park down the street.”

He nodded, smiled.

I felt like I knew the guy. We came from the same background, probably-no money, no backyard, the whole deal. Only I went to college and was sitting here in a suit, and he’d gone into the army like a lot of my high school buddies did.

We listened to the game for a bit. Seattle’s designated hitter was up. He swung at the first pitch. You could hear the crack of the bat. “And there’s a high fly ball hit deep to left field!” one of the announcers crowed. It was headed right for the glove of a great Red Sox slugger, who also happened to be a famously clumsy outfielder. And a space cadet who did things like disappear from left field, right in the middle of a game, to take a leak. When he wasn’t bobbling the ball.

“He’s got it,” said the announcer. “It’s headed right for his glove.”

“He’s going to drop it,” I said.

Harley laughed. “You said it.”

“Here it comes,” I said.

Harley laughed even louder. “This is painful,” he said.

A roar of disappointment in the ballpark. “The ball hit the back of the glove,” said the announcer, “as he tried to slide to make the play. This is a major-league error right here.”

We groaned simultaneously.

Harley switched it off. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, as we pulled into the auto body shop parking lot.

It was a kind of scuzzy place that looked like a converted gas station. WILLKIE AUTO BODY, the sign said. The manager on duty was named Abdul and probably wouldn’t have an easy time getting through airport security these days. I thought Harley would start off-loading the carcass of my poor Acura, but instead he came into the waiting room and watched Abdul take down my insurance information. I noticed another “Support Our Troops” sticker on the wall in here, too, and a Special Forces decal.

Harley said, “Jeremiah at home?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Abdul. “Sure. Home with the kids.”

“This is a friend of mine,” he said. “Make sure you guys take care of him.”

I looked around and realized the tow truck driver was talking about me.

“Of course, Kurt,” Abdul said.

“Tell Jerry I was here,” Harley said.

I read an old copy of Maxim while the tow truck driver and Abdul walked back to the shop. They returned a couple of minutes later.

“Abdul’s going to put his best master tech on your car,” Harley said. “They do good work here. Computerized paint-mixing system. Nice clean shop. Why don’t you guys finish up the paperwork, and I’ll get the car in the service bay.”

“Thanks, man,” I said.

“Okay, Kurt, see you,” said Abdul.

I came out a few minutes later and saw Harley sitting in his tow truck, engine idling, listening to the game.

“Hey,” he said, “where do you live? I’ll drop you off.”

“It’s pretty far. Belmont.”

“Grab your stuff out of the car and jump in.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I get paid by the hour, buddy. Not by the job.”

I got my CDs off the floor of the car and my briefcase and baseball glove off the backseat.

“You used to work in a body shop?” I said when I’d gotten back into the truck.

The walkie-talkie started blaring, and he switched it off. “I’ve done everything.”

“How do you like towing?”

He turned and gave me an Are you out of your mind? look. “I take whatever work I can get.”

“People don’t like to hire soldiers anymore?”

“People love to hire soldiers,” he said. “Just not ones with DDs.”

“What’s a DD?”

“Dishonorable discharge. You gotta put it down on the application, and as soon as they see that, you’re out the door.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry I asked. None of my business.”

“No big deal. It just pisses me off. You get a DD, you don’t get any VA benefits or pension. Sucks big-time.”

“How’d it happen?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

Another long silence. He hit the turn signal, changed lanes. “Nah, I don’t mind.” He paused again, and I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. Then he said: “The CO of my Special Forces A-team ordered half of us to go on this suicide mission, this broke-dick reconnaissance mission in Tikrit. I told the CO there was a ninety-nine percent chance they’d get ambushed, and guess what? The guys got ambushed. Attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. And my buddy Jimmy Donadio was killed.”

He fell silent. Stared straight ahead at the road as he drove. Then: “A good kid, just about finished with his tour, had a baby he’d never even seen. I loved that guy. So I just lost it. Went after the CO-head-butted the bastard. Broke his nose.”

“Wow,” I said. “Jesus. I can’t blame you. So you got court-martialed or something?”

He shrugged. “I’m lucky they didn’t send me to Leavenworth. But nobody in the command wanted to draw any attention to what went down that night, and they sure as hell didn’t want CID looking into it. Bad for army morale. More important, bad PR. So the deal was, dishonorable discharge, no time.”

“Wow,” I said again. I wasn’t sure what CID was, but I wasn’t going to ask.

“So are you, like, a lawyer or something?”

“Salesman.”

“Where?”

“Entronics. In Framingham.”

“Cool. Can you get me a deal on a plasma TV?”

I hesitated. “I don’t sell the consumer line, but I might be able to do something.”

He smiled. “I’m kidding. I couldn’t afford one of those anyway, even wholesale. So, I noticed the glove you got back there. Sweet. Rawlings Gold Glove, Heart of the Hide. Same as the pros use. Looks brand-new. Right out of the box. Just get it?”

“Um, about two years,” I said. “Gift from my wife.”

“Oh. You play?”

“Not much. Mostly on my company’s team. Softball, not baseball, but my wife didn’t know the difference.” Our team sucked. We were on a losing streak that resembled the Baltimore Orioles’ historically pathetic 1988 season. “You play?”

He shrugged. “Used to.”

A long beat of silence.

“In school or something?” I said.

“Got drafted by the Detroit Tigers, but never signed.”

“Seriously?”

“My pitch speed was clocked at ninety-four, ninety-five miles an hour.”

“No way. Jesus!” I turned to look at him.

“But that wasn’t where my head was, at that point. Enlisted instead. I’m Kurt, by the way.” He took his right hand off the wheel and gave me a firm handshake. “Kurt Semko.”

“Jason Steadman.”

There was another long silence, and then I had an idea.

“We could use a pitcher,” I said.

“Who?”

“My company’s team. We’ve got a game tomorrow night, and we sure could use a decent pitcher. How would you like to play on our team tomorrow?”

Another long pause. Then: “Don’t you have to work for the company?”

“Guys we play have no idea who works for us and who doesn’t.”

Kurt went quiet again.

After a minute, I said, “So what do you think?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He was staring at the road, a half smile on his face.

At the time it seemed like a fun idea.

2

I love my wife.

Sometimes I can’t believe that a woman as intelligent and sophisticated and, oh yeah, unbelievably beautiful, settled for a guy like me. She likes to joke that our courtship was the greatest job of salesmanship I ever pulled off. I don’t disagree. I did close the deal, after all.

When I walked in, Kate was sitting on the couch watching TV. There was a bowl of popcorn in her lap and a glass of white wine on the coffee table in front of her. She was wearing faded old gym shorts from her prep school, which nicely set off her long, toned legs. As soon as she saw me come in, she got up from the couch, ran over to hug me. I winced, but she didn’t notice. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’ve been so worried.”

“I’m fine, I told you. The only thing that got hurt was my pride. Though the tow truck driver thought I was an idiot.”

“You’re totally okay, Jase? Were you wearing a seat belt and everything?” She pulled back to look at me. Her eyes were a great shade of hazel green, and her hair was full and black, and she had a sharp jawline and high cheekbones. She reminded me of a young, dark-haired Katharine Hepburn. Endearingly enough, she considered herself plain, her features too sharp and exaggerated. Tonight, though, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. She’d obviously been crying a lot.

“The car just went off the side of the road,” I said. “I’m fine, but the car got messed up.”

“The car,” she said with an airy wave, as if my Acura TL were a wad of toilet paper. I assume she inherited these aristocratic gestures from her parents. You see, Kate comes from money, sort of. That is, her family was once very rich, but the money never made it to her generation. The Spencer fortune took a big hit in 1929, when her great-grandfather made some really dumb investment decisions around the time of the Crash, and finally got finished off by her father, who was an alcoholic and only knew how to spend money, not manage it.

All Kate got was part of an expensive education, a cultivated voice, a lot of rich family friends who now felt sorry for her, and a houseful of antiques. Many of which she’d jammed into our three-bedroom colonial house on a quarter acre in Belmont.

“How’d you get back?” she said.

“Tow truck driver. Interesting guy-ex-Special Forces.”

“Hmm,” she said, that not-interested-but-trying-to-fake-it noise I knew so well.

“Is that dinner?” I said, pointing to the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel like cooking tonight. You want me to make you something?”

I could visualize the brick of tofu lurking in the refrigerator, and I almost shuddered. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just grab something. Come here.” I hugged her again. Braved the pain without wincing this time. “Forget about the car. I’m worried about you.”

All of a sudden she started crying as I held her. She kind of crumpled. I felt her chest heave and her hot tears dampen my shirt. I squeezed her tight. “It’s just that I really thought…this one was going to work,” she said.

“Next time, maybe. We just have to be patient, huh?”

“Do you not worry about anything?”

“Just stuff I can do something about,” I said.

After a while, we sat down together on the couch, which was an uncomfortable but no doubt really valuable English antique as hard as a church pew, and watched some documentary on the Discovery channel about bonobos, which are apparently a species of monkey smarter and more highly evolved than us. Seems the bonobos are a female-dominated society. They showed footage of the female bonobo trying to seduce a male, spreading her legs and putting her butt up to the male’s face. The announcer called that “presenting.” I suppressed a remark about our own conjugal relations, which had become just about nonexistent. I don’t know if it was the fertility treatments or what, but our sex life lately had turned into a kind of bed death. I couldn’t remember the last time Kate had “presented.”

I took a handful of popcorn. It was air-popped and lightly spritzed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It tasted like Styrofoam peanuts. I couldn’t politely spit it out, so I finished chewing and swallowed it.

The female bonobo didn’t seem to be scoring, but she kept at it. She stretched out an arm and beckoned at the male with upstretched fingers like a silent film star playing a harlot. But the guy was a dud. So she went up to him and grabbed his balls, hard.

“Ouch,” I said. “I don’t think she’s read He’s Just Not That Into You.”

Kate shook her head and tried not to smile.

I got up and went to the bathroom and swallowed a couple of Advil. Then I went to the kitchen and served myself a big bowl of ice cream, Brigham’s Oreo. I didn’t bother to ask Kate if she wanted any, because she never ate ice cream. She never ate anything remotely fattening.

I sat back down and dug into the ice cream while the narrator said, “The females kiss and hug and rub their genitals together with their special friends.”

“So where are the male bonobos, anyway?” I said. “Sitting on the couch with the remote control?”

She watched me tuck into the ice cream. “What’s that, babe?”

“This?” I said. “Fat-free tofu ice-milk substitute.”

“Sweetheart, you know, you might want to lay off the ice cream at night.”

“I never feel like it at breakfast.”

“You know what I’m saying,” she said, and touched her perfectly flat belly. I, on the other hand, was already developing a potbelly at thirty. Kate could eat anything she wanted and not gain weight. She just had this incredible metabolism. Women hated her for that. I found it a little annoying myself. If I had her metabolism, I wouldn’t be eating bulgur and tempeh.

“Can we watch something else?” I said. “This is getting me too horny.”

“Jason, that’s disgusting.” She grabbed the remote and began flipping through the hundreds of channels until she stopped at a show that looked familiar. I recognized the actors who played the beautiful high-school-age brother and sister and their divorced father, himself a divorce lawyer. This was that Fox show S.B., about beautiful rich high-school kids and their broken families in Santa Barbara-proms, car crashes, divorce cases, drugs, cheating moms. It had become the hottest TV show of the season.

And it was created by my brother-in-law, Craig Glazer, the hotshot TV producer who was married to Kate’s older sister, Susie. Craig and I pretended to get along.

“How can you watch that crap?” I said, grabbing the remote and switching the channel to some old National Geographic-style show about a primitive Amazonian tribe called the Yanomamo.

“You’d better deal with that hostility before Craig and Susie come next week.”

“Without my hostility, what’s left? Anyway, they have no idea how I feel about him.”

“Oh, Susie knows.”

“She probably feels the same way about him.”

Kate cocked a brow provocatively but said nothing.

We watched some more of the nature show, sort of listlessly. The narrator said in a plummy British accent that the Yanomami were the most violent, aggressive society in the world. They were known as the Fierce People. They were always breaking out into wars, usually over women, who were scarce.

“I’ll bet you like that, huh?” I said. “Fighting over women?”

She shook her head. “I studied the Fierce People in one of my feminism classes. The men beat their wives too. The women think the more machete scars they have, the more their husbands must love them.” There was always some book about feminism on Kate’s bedside table. The latest was called something like This Sex Which Is Not One. I didn’t get the title, but luckily there wasn’t going to be a quiz.

Kate had gotten interested in obscure African and South American cultures in the last few years because of her job, I think. She worked for the Meyer Foundation for Folk and Outsider Art in Boston. They gave money to poor and homeless people who made paintings and sculptures that looked like they could have been done by my eight-year-old nephew. But they didn’t give much money to their employees. The foundation paid Kate eight thousand dollars a year and apparently believed she should be paying them for the privilege of working there. I think she spent more in gas and parking than she earned.

We watched the show some more. Kate ate popcorn and I ate Oreo ice cream. The narrator said that Yanomami boys proved their manhood by “blooding their spear,” or killing someone. They used axes and spears and bows and arrows. And blowguns carved from bamboo that shot poison darts.

“Cool,” I said.

The Yanomamo tribe cremated their dead and mixed the ashes into plantain soup and then drank it.

Maybe not so cool.

When the show was over I gave her the latest news about how the divisional vice president, Crawford, had just left the company for Sony and took six of his top guys with him. Which left a huge, gaping hole in my department. “It sucks,” I said. “Huge mess.”

“What are you talking about?” Kate said, suddenly interested. “It’s terrific.”

“You don’t get it. Entronics just announced they’re acquiring the U.S. business of this Dutch company called Meister.”

“I’ve heard of Meister,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “So?”

Royal Meister Electronics N.V. is an immense electronics conglomerate, one of our biggest competitors. They had a unit based in Dallas that sold the same things we did-the LCDs and the plasma screens and the projectors and all that.

“So Crawford’s getting the hell out of Dodge. He must know something.”

Kate sat up, drew her knees to her chest. “Listen, Jase, don’t you realize what this means? This is your chance.”

“My chance?”

“You’ve been stuck at the level of district sales manager for years. It’s like you’re frozen in amber.”

I wondered whether she was dealing with the bad pregnancy news by throwing herself into my career. “Nothing’s opened up.”

“Come on, Jase, think about it. If Crawford’s gone, along with six of his top guys, the sales division has no choice but to backfill some of those slots from inside, right? This is your chance to get into management. To really start climbing the ladder.”

“Greasy pole, more like it. Katie, I like my job. I don’t want to be a VP.”

“But your salary’s basically capped out right now, right? You’re never going to make much more than you do now.”

“What do you mean? I’m doing pretty good. Remember how much I made three years ago?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on mine, like she was weighing whether to say more. Then she said, “Honey, three years ago was a freak. Plasma screens were just coming out, and Entronics owned the market, right? That’s never going to happen again.”

“See, Kate, here’s the thing. There’s this corporate egg-sorting machine for guys around my age, okay? It starts dropping the eggs into the Large and Extra Large and Jumbo cartons, right?”

“So what are you?”

“I’m not going into Jumbo. I’m just a sales guy. I am what I am.”

“But if you get into management, baby, that’s when you start making the real money.”

A couple of years ago, Kate used to talk to me about how I should focus on climbing the corporate ladder, but I thought she’d given that up. “Those guys in upper management never leave the office,” I said. “They have to put a LoJack on their ankles. They turn fishbelly white from being in meetings all the time. Too much sucking up, too much politics. It’s not for me. Why are we talking about this?”

“Look. You become the area manager and then a DVP and then a VP and general manager and pretty soon you could be running a company. In a couple of years, you could be making a fortune.”

I took a deep breath, wanting to argue with her, but there was no point. When she got like this, she was like a terrier that wouldn’t let go of its Nylabone.

The fact was, Kate and I had very different ideas of what a “fortune” was. My dad was a sheet-metal worker at a plant in Worcester that made ducts and pipes for air-conditioning and ventilation systems. He rose as high as shop foreman, and he was pretty active in the Sheet Metal Workers Local 63. He wasn’t a very ambitious guy-I think he took the first job that came along, got good at it, stuck with it. But he worked really hard, did overtime and extra shifts whenever possible, and he arrived home at the end of the day wiped out, unable to do anything more than sit in front of the TV like a zombie and drink Budweiser. Dad was missing the tips of two of the fingers on his right hand, which was always a silent reminder to me of how nasty his job was. When he told me he wanted me to go to college so I didn’t have to do what he did, he really meant it.

We lived on one floor of a three-decker on Providence Street in Worcester that had asbestos siding and a chain-link fence around the concrete backyard. To go from that to owning my own colonial house in Belmont-well, that was pretty damned good, I thought.

Whereas the house Kate had grown up in, in Wellesley, was bigger than her entire Harvard dorm building. We’d once driven by the house. It was an immense stone mansion with a high wrought-iron fence and endless land. Even after her boozer father had finally killed off what remained of the family fortune with some lame-brained investment, and they’d had to sell their summer house in Osterville, on Cape Cod, and then their house in Wellesley, the place they moved to was about twice as big as the house she and I lived in now.

She paused, then pouted. “Jason, you don’t want to end up like Cal Taylor, do you?”

“That’s a low blow.” Cal Taylor was around sixty and had been a salesman with Entronics forever, since the days when they sold transistor radios and second-rate color TV sets and tried to compete with Emerson and Kenwood. He was a human cautionary tale. The sight of him creeped me out, because he represented everything I secretly knew I was in danger of becoming. With his white hair and his nicotine-yellowed mustache, his Jack Daniel’s breath and his smoker’s hack and his never-ending stock of stale jokes, he was my own personal nightmare. He was a dead-ender, a timeserver who somehow managed to hang on because of a few tenuous relationships he’d built over the years, those he hadn’t neglected anyway. He was divorced, lived alone on TV dinners, and spent almost every night at a neighborhood bar.

Then her face softened and she tipped her head. “Honey,” she said softly, almost wheedling, “look at this house.”

“What about it?”

“We don’t want to bring up kids in a place like this,” she said. There was a catch in her breath. She suddenly looked sad. “There’s no room to play. There’s barely a yard.”

“I hate mowing the lawn. Anyway, I didn’t have a yard growing up.”

She paused, looked away. I wondered what she was thinking. If she was expecting a return to Manderley, she sure married the wrong guy.

“Come on, Jason, what happened to your ambition? When I met you, you were this totally fired-up, sky’s-the-limit kind of guy. Remember?”

“That was just to get you to marry me.”

“I know you’re kidding. You’ve got the drive, you know you do. You’ve just gotten”-she was about to say “fat and happy,” I’ll bet, but instead she said, “too comfortable. This is it. This is the time to go for it.”

I kept thinking about that documentary about the Fierce People. When Kate married me, she must have thought I was some Yanomami warrior she could groom into a chieftain.

But I said, “I’ll talk to Gordy.” Kent Gordon was the senior VP who ran the entire sales division.

“Good,” she said. “Tell him you demand to be interviewed for a promotion.”

“‘Demand’ isn’t exactly my style.”

“Well, surprise him. Show him some aggression. He’ll love it. It’s kill or be killed. You’ve got to show him you’re a killer.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “You think I can get one of those Yanomami blowguns on eBay?”

3

“We’re screwed, man,” said Ricky Festino. “We are so screwed.”

Ricky Festino was a member of what we called the Band of Brothers, a fellow salesman for Entronics USA’s Visual Systems unit. Salesmen are supposed to all be outgoing and affable, backslappers, hail-fellows-well-met, but not Festino. He was an outlier. He was dour, cynical, bitingly sarcastic. The only thing he seemed to get into was contracts-he’d dropped out of Boston College Law School after a year, and contracts was the one course he liked there. That should tell you something about him.

As far as I could tell, he hated his job and didn’t much like his wife and two little kids either. He chauffeured his younger boy to some private school every morning and coached his older boy’s Little League team, which would theoretically make him a good dad, except for the fact that he was always complaining about it. I was never sure what motivated him except fear and bile, but hey, whatever works.

I couldn’t figure out why he liked me so much either. To Ricky Festino, I must have seemed cloyingly optimistic. I should have made him seethe with contempt. Instead, he seemed to regard me like the family pet, the only one who really understood him, a happy-go-lucky golden retriever he could bitch to while he took me out for a walk. Sometimes he called me “Tigger,” referring to Winnie-the-Pooh’s bouncy, irrepressible, and basically retarded friend. If I was Tigger, he was Eeyore.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“The acquisition, what do you think? Crap,” he muttered as he squeezed out a glistening dollop of antibacterial hand cleaner from a tiny bottle he carried with him everywhere. He rubbed his hands together violently, and I could smell the alcohol. Festino was an out-of-control germophobe. “I just shook hands with that guy from CompuMax, and he kept sneezing on me.”

CompuMax was a “system-builder,” a company that assembled and sold low-end no-name computers for corporations. They were a lousy client, mostly because they didn’t spend money on name-brand components, and Entronics was too name-brand for them. Festino was trying to sell them a bunch of LCD monitors that Entronics didn’t even make, that we got from some second-rate Korean firm and just put our logo on. He was trying to convince them that having the Entronics name on at least one of their components would make their systems seem classier and thus more desirable. A good idea, but CompuMax wasn’t buying. My guess was that Festino didn’t know how to pitch it, but I couldn’t get too involved-it was his deal.

“I’m starting to get why the Japs think we Westerners are so unclean,” Festino went on. “He was, like, sneezing into his hands over and over, then he wanted to shake. What was I going to do, refuse to shake his filthy hand? Guy was a human petri dish. Want some?” He offered me the tiny plastic bottle.

“No, thanks, I’m good.”

“Is it my imagination, or is your office a lot smaller than mine?”

“It’s the décor,” I said. “Same size.” Actually, my office was starting to look smaller all the time. The Entronics USA Visual Systems sales division took up the top floor of the Entronics building in Framingham, about twenty miles west of Boston. It’s by far the tallest structure in town, surrounded by low-rise office parks, and the locals fought it bitterly before it went up ten years ago or so. It’s a handsome building, but everyone in Framingham considers it an affront. Some wit had dubbed it the Framingham Phallus. Others called it the Entronics Erection.

He sank back in the visitor chair. “Let me tell you something about this Royal Meister deal. The Japanese always have a master plan. They never tell you what it is, but there’s always this long-range master plan. We’re just those little round game pieces-what’s that strategy game the Japanese play?”

“Go?”

“‘Go,’ right. ‘Go.’ Go take a leap. Go screw yourself.” I could see dark sweat stains under the arms of Ricky’s blue button-down shirt. The Entronics offices were kept at a steady sixty-eight degrees, summer or winter, and if anything they were too cold, but Ricky sweated a lot. He was a couple of years older than me and was going to seed. He was paunchy, a potbelly more advanced than mine hanging over his belt, a roll of neck fat spilling over the collar of his too-tight shirt. He’d started coloring his hair a couple of years ago, and the Just For Men shade he used was too black.

I sneaked a glance at the time on my computer screen. I’d told the guy at Lockwood Hotel and Resorts that I’d call him before noon, and it was 12:05. “Hey, uh, Rick…”

“See, you don’t get it. You’re too nice.” He said it with a nasty curl to his lips. “Entronics acquires Royal Meister’s U.S. operations, right? But why? You think their plasma screens are better than ours?”

“Nope,” I said, trying not to encourage him.

I’d tell the guy at Lockwood that I was closing a huge deal, that’s why I couldn’t call him earlier. I didn’t want to lie to the guy, but I’d hint around about a rival five-star luxury hotel chain I couldn’t name that was also putting plasma-screen TVs in all their guest rooms. If I hinted right, maybe I could make him think it was the Four Seasons or something. Maybe that would light a fire under him. Then again, maybe not.

“Exactly,” Ricky said. “It’s their sales force. They kick our ass. The boys in Tokyo are sitting on their tatami mats in the MegaTower rubbing their hands at the prospect of buying a sales force that’s more high-test than we are. So what does that mean? It means they get rid of all but the top ten percent, maybe, and move them to Dallas. Consolidate. Real estate in Dallas is a lot cheaper than Boston. They sell this building and throw the rest of us under a bus. It’s so totally obvious, Jason. Why do you think Crawford went to Sony, man?”

Festino was so proud of his Machiavellian genius that I didn’t want to let him know I’d already come up with the same theory. So I nodded and looked intrigued.

I noticed a slender Japanese man passing by my office, and I gave a casual wave. “Hey, Yoshi,” I said. Yoshi Tanaka, a personality-free guy with thick aviator-frame glasses, was a funin-sha, an expatriate Japanese, transferred to the U.S. to learn the ropes. But he was more than that. Officially, his title was Manager for Business Planning, but everyone knew he was actually an informer for the Entronics management in Tokyo who stayed at his office late into the night and reported back by phone and e-mail. He was Tokyo’s eyes and ears here. He spoke just about no English, though, which couldn’t have been good for his spying.

He scared the shit out of everyone, but I didn’t mind him. I felt bad for him. Being posted in a country where you didn’t speak the language, without family-at least, I assumed he had family back in Tokyo-couldn’t be easy. I couldn’t imagine working in Japan and not speaking Japanese. Always being a beat behind. Never getting it. He was isolated, ostracized by his colleagues, all of whom distrusted him. Not an easy gig. A hardship posting, in fact. I never joined the others in Yoshi-bashing.

Ricky turned, gave Yoshi a smile and a wave, and as soon as Yoshi was out of range, muttered, “Goddamned spy.”

“You think he heard you?” I said.

“Nah. Even if he did, he wouldn’t understand.”

“Listen, Rick, I’m late calling Lockwood.”

“The fun never stops. They still dicking you around?”

I nodded ruefully.

“It’s over, man. Forget it. Stop pursuing them.”

“A forty-million-dollar deal, and you’re telling me to forget it?”

“The guy just wants Super Bowl tickets. Any deal that takes this long is dead in the water.”

I sighed. Festino was an expert on deals that were dead in the water. “I gotta call him.”

“You’re like a hamster on a wheel, man. We’re all hamsters. Any second now the guy in the white lab coat’s gonna come and euthanize us, and you’re still running around the wheel. Forget it, man.”

I stood up to encourage him to do the same. “You playing tonight?”

He got up. “Yeah, sure. Carol’s already pissed at me for going out with clients last night. What’s one more night in the doghouse? Who’re we playing tonight, Charles River?”

I nodded.

“Gonna be another ignominious defeat for the Band of Brothers. We got no pitching. Trevor sucks.”

I smiled, remembering the tow truck driver from last night. “I got a pitcher.”

“You? You can’t pitch for shit either.”

“Not me. A guy who almost went pro.”

“What are you talking about?”

I filled him in quickly.

Rick’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time this morning, he smiled. “We tell the Charles River boys he’s the new stockboy or whatever?”

I nodded.

“A ringer,” Rick said.

“Exactly.”

He hesitated. “Pitching softball’s different from baseball.”

“Guy’s obviously an incredible athlete, Rick. I’m sure he can do fast-pitch softball.”

He cocked his head to one side, gave me an appraising look. “You know, Tigger, under that simpleton façade, you’ve got hidden reserves of craftiness. Never would have expected it. I’m impressed.”

4

The Lockwood Hotel and Resort Group was one of the largest chains of luxury hotels in the world. Their properties were a little mildewed, though, and in need of an overhaul. Part of management’s plan to compete with the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton was to put Bose Wave Radios and forty-two-inch flat-panel plasma TVs in every room. I knew they were talking to NEC and Toshiba too.

I’d been the one who’d pushed for a bake-off, and I arranged to send one of our screens to Lockwood’s White Plains, New York, headquarters, for a head-to-head comparison with NEC and Toshiba. I knew our product performed at least as well as the other guys’, because we were still in the running. But the Vice President for Property Management at Lockwood, Brian Borque, couldn’t seem to make a decision.

I wondered whether Ricky Festino was right, that Borque was stringing me along just for the Super Bowl and World Series tickets and the dinners at Alain Ducasse in New York. I half wished he’d just put me out of my misery already.

“Hey, Brian,” I said into the headset.

“There he is,” Brian Borque said. He always sounded happy to hear from me.

“I should have called you earlier. My bad.” I almost gave him the lie about the other hotel chain, but I didn’t have the heart to go through with it. “Meeting ran long.”

“No worries, man. Hey, I read something about you guys in the Journal this morning. You getting acquired by Meister?”

“Other way around. Entronics is acquiring Meister U.S.”

“Interesting. We’ve been talking to them too, you know.”

I hadn’t known. Great, another player in this endless negotiation. It reminded me of this old movie I once saw in college called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, about marathon dancers who dance until they drop.

“Well, that’ll mean one less competitor, I guess,” I said, keeping the tone light. “How was Martha’s birthday? You take her to Vienna, like she wanted?”

“Vienna, Virginia, more like. Hey, I’ve got to be in Boston next week-you feel like catching a Sox game?”

“Sure.”

“You guys still get those amazing seats?”

“I’ll do what I can.” I hesitated. “So, listen, Bri.”

He heard the change in my tone and cut me off. “I wish I had an answer for you, buddy, but I don’t. Believe me, I want to do the deal with you guys.”

“Thing is, Brian, I’m getting a lot of pressure from senior management on this thing. The deal’s been on the forecast-”

“Come on, man, I never said you could forecast the deal.”

“I know, I know. It’s Gordy. He’s really been pressuring me. He wants me to set up a meeting with your CEO.”

“Gordy,” Brian said in disgust. Kent Gordon was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Sales for Entronics USA, a Six Sigma black belt, the most aggressive guy I’d ever met. He was ruthless and conniving and relentless-not that there’s anything wrong with that-and my entire career lay in his hands. Gordy was in fact leaning on me hard to do this deal, since he leaned on everybody hard to do every deal, and it was entirely plausible that he’d want me to set up a meeting between him and the CEO of Lockwood Hotels. But it wasn’t true. Gordy hadn’t asked for that. Maybe it was only a matter of time before he did, but he hadn’t yet. It was a bluff.

“I know,” I said, “but, you know, I can’t control what he does.”

“I don’t recommend you do that.”

“My bosses really want to do this deal, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and…”

“Jason, when I was on your side of the desk I tried that old trick plenty of times,” Brian said, not unkindly.

“Huh?” I said, but I didn’t have the heart to carry the bluff all the way through. I touched my bruised rib cage. It was hardly painful anymore.

“Look, I wish I could tell you what’s going on with this deal, but I’m out of the loop. The bake-off went great, your price points are fine. I mean, I probably shouldn’t say it, but your price points are more than fine. Obviously there’s stuff going on upstairs that I’m not privy to.”

“Someone up there’s got a favorite or something?”

“Something like that, yeah. Jason, if I knew the whole story, I’d tell you. You’re a great guy, and I know you’ve worked your ass off on this deal, and if the product didn’t measure up, I’d be straight with you. Or if the numbers didn’t work. But it’s not that. I don’t know what it is.”

A beat of silence. “I appreciate your honesty, Brian,” I said. I found myself thinking about the egg-sorting machine again and wondering how they worked, exactly. “What day next week you coming up?”

My immediate boss was a woman, which, in this business, is unusual. Her name was Joan Tureck, and she was an area manager in charge of all of New England. I didn’t know much about her personal life. I’d heard she was gay and lived with a woman in Cambridge, but she never talked about her partner or brought her to company events. She was a little dull, but we liked each other, and she’d always supported me, in her low-key way.

She was on the phone when I came by. She was always on the phone. She wore a headset and was smiling. All the Entronics offices have narrow windows on either side of the doors so everyone can always see inside. There’s really no privacy.

Joan finally noticed me standing outside her office, and she held up a finger. I waited outside until she beckoned me in with a flick of her left hand.

“You talked to Lockwood Hotels this morning?” Joan said. She had short, curly, mouse brown hair with wisps of gray near the temple. She never wore any makeup.

I nodded as I sat.

“Nothing yet?”

“Nothing.”

“You think maybe it’s time to call in some reinforcements?”

“Maybe. I can’t seem to get to score with them.” I immediately regretted the sexual metaphor until I remembered that it was actually a sports term.

“We need that deal. If there’s anything I can do.” I noticed she looked unusually weary, almost beaten down. She had reddish brown circles under her eyes. She took a long sip of coffee from a cat mug. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“No, something else,” I said. “You have a couple of minutes now?”

She glanced at her tiny wristwatch. “I’ve got a lunch any minute, but we could talk until my lunch date shows up.”

“Thanks. So, Crawford’s out of here,” I said.

She blinked, not helping me at all.

“And his whole posse,” I went on. “You’re probably moving up to the DVP job, right?”

She blinked, hesitated. “Bear in mind that, with the Meister acquisition, we’re going to be cutting back. Anyone who isn’t a top performer.”

As I thought, I bit my lower lip. “Should I start packing up my desk?”

“You don’t have to worry, Jason. You’ve made club four years in a row.” “Club,” or Club 101, was made up of those reps who’d outperformed, made 101 percent of their revenue numbers. “You’ve even been salesman of the year.”

“Not last year,” I pointed out. Last year the oily Trevor Allard got it and won a trip to Italy. He took his wife and then proceeded to cheat on her with some Italian chick he met at Harry’s Bar in Venice.

“You had a bad fourth quarter. Everyone misses a quarter now and then. Bottom line is, people buy from people they like, and everyone likes you. But that’s not what you came in to talk about.”

“Joan, do I have a chance at the area manager slot?”

She looked at me with surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“Trevor’s already put in for that, you know. And he’s lobbying pretty hard.”

Some of the guys called him Teflon Trevor, because he always got away with everything. He kind of reminded me of the unctuous Eddie Haskell in the old Leave It to Beaver TV show. I guess you can tell I waste a lot of time watching old reruns on TV Land.

“Trevor would be good. But so would I. Do I have your support?”

“I-I don’t take sides, Jason,” she said unhappily. “If you want me to put in a word for you with Gordy, I’m happy to do so; but I don’t know how much he listens to my recommendations.”

“That’s all I ask. Just put in a word for me. Tell him I want to be interviewed.”

“I will. But Trevor is-maybe more Gordy’s type.”

“More aggressive?”

“I guess he’s what Gordy calls a meat-eater.”

Some people called him other things that weren’t so nice. “I eat steak.”

“I’ll put in a word for you. But I’m not going to take sides. I’m staying completely neutral on this.”

There was a knock at her door. She made her little beckoning sign with her fingers.

The door opened, and a tall, handsome guy with tousled brown hair and sleepy brown eyes stood there and flashed her a perfect grin. Trevor Allard was long and lean and muscled and arrogant, and he still looked like the crew jock at St. Lawrence he’d been not too long ago. “Ready for lunch, Joan?” he said. “Oh, hey, Jason. I didn’t see you.”

5

Kate was already home from work when I got in. She was lying on Grammy Spencer’s rock-hard couch reading a collection of Alice Adams stories. She was reading it for her book group, nine women she’d gone to school and college with who got together once a month to discuss “literary” novels written by female authors only.

“I’ve got a game tonight,” I told her after we’d kissed.

“Oh, right. It’s Tuesday. I was going to try this tofu recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, but I guess you don’t have time, right?”

“I’ll just grab something on the way to the field,” I said quickly.

“How about a Boca Burger?”

“No, I’m fine. Really. Don’t bother.”

Kate wasn’t a great cook, and this new tofu kick was really bad news, but I admired her for cooking at all. Her late mother didn’t even know how. They’d had a full-time cook on staff until the money disappeared. My mom would come home from a long day working as a clerk-receptionist at a doctor’s office and make a big meal for Dad and me-usually “American chop suey,” which was macaroni and hamburger meat and tomato sauce. I’d never even heard of anyone who had a cook, outside of the movies.

“So I told Joan that I want to be interviewed for the job,” I said.

“Oh, honey, that’s terrific. When’s the interview?”

“Well, I don’t even know if Gordy will interview me for it. I’m sure he wants to give it to Trevor.”

“He has to at least interview you, doesn’t he?”

“Gordy doesn’t have to do anything.”

“He’ll interview you,” she said firmly. “And then you’ll let him know how much you want the job and how good you’ll be at it.”

“Actually,” I said, “I am starting to want it. If for no other reason than to keep Trevor from becoming my boss.”

“I’m not sure that’s the best reason, sweetie. Can I show you something?”

“Sure.” I knew what it was. It had to be some painting she’d discovered at work done by some impoverished “outsider” artist in some totally primitive style. This happened at least once a month. She would rave about it, and I wouldn’t get it.

She went to the entrance hall and came back with a big cardboard package out of which she pulled a square of cloth. She held it up, beaming, her eyes wide. “Isn’t it amazing?”

It seemed to be a painting of a huge black tenement building with tiny people being crushed beneath it. One of the tiny people was turning into a ball of blue flame. Another one had a bubble coming out of his mouth that said, “I am oppressed by the debt of the capitalist society.” There were oversized hundred-dollar bills with wings floating against a baby blue sky and on top of everything the words, “God Bless America.”

“Do you see how brilliant this is? That ironic ‘God Bless America’? That phallic building representing debt, crushing all the little people?”

“That looks like a phallus to you?”

“Come on, Jase. That massive physical presence, the engineering prowess.”

“Okay, I see that,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

“This is a painted story quilt by a Haitian artist named Marie Bastien. She was a really big deal in Haiti, and she’s just moved to Dorchester with her five kids. She’s a single mom. I think she could be the next Faith Ringgold.”

“That right?” I said. I had no idea who she was talking about.

“The luminosity of her colors reminds me of Bonnard. But with the raw, simple Modernism of a Jacob Lawrence.”

“Hmm,” I said, glancing at my watch. I picked up the American Express bill from the coffee table and opened it. “Very nice,” I said. I looked at the bill, and my eyes widened. “Jesus.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said.

“I am oppressed by the debt of the capitalist society,” I said.

“How bad?” Kate said.

“Bad,” I said. “But you don’t see me turning into a ball of blue flame.”

6

You could hardly collect a more competitive bunch of guys than the sales team of Entronics USA. We were all recruited for our competitiveness, the way certain species of pit bulls are bred to be vicious. The company didn’t care if its sales reps were particularly smart-there sure weren’t any Phi Beta Kappas among us. They liked to hire athletes, figuring that jocks were persistent and thrived on competition. Maybe used to punishment and abuse too. Those of us who weren’t jocks were the outgoing, naturally affable types, the social chairman in college, frat guys. That was me. Guilty on all counts. I was on the Happy Hour Committee at U. Mass, which we called Zoo-Mass.

So you’d think that, for all the jocks on the sales force, our softball team would be formidable.

Actually, we sucked.

Most of us were in lousy shape. We took clients out to lunch or dinner all the time, ate well, drank a lot of beer, and didn’t have time to exercise. The only guys who’d stayed in shape were Trevor Allard, our pitcher, and Brett Gleason, our shortstop, who was your classic big dumb jock. Allard and Gleason were good buddies who hung out together a lot, played basketball together every Thursday night.

It was considered uncool to be too serious about our softball games. We had no uniforms, unless you count the ENTRONICS-BAND OF BROTHERS T-shirts that someone had made and that hardly anyone ever remembered to wear. We all chipped in to pay an umpire fifty bucks, whenever he was available. There’d be occasional arguments over whether someone was safe, or whether a ball was foul, but the disputes ended pretty quickly, and we got on with playing.

Still, no one likes to lose, especially dog-eat-dog types like us.

Tonight’s game was against the reigning champions of our corporate league, Charles River Financial, the behemoth mutual fund company. Their team was almost all traders, right out of college, and they were all twenty-two years old and over six feet tall, and most of them had played on the baseball team at some Ivy League college. Charles River hired them young, chewed them up and spit them out, and by the time they hit thirty they were gone. But in the meantime, they fielded one hell of a softball team.

The question wasn’t whether we’d lose. It was how badly they’d mop up the floor with us.

We played every Tuesday evening at the Stonington College field, which was carefully maintained, far better than we needed or deserved. It looked like Fenway. The outfield grass was turquoise and lush, perfectly mowed; the red infield dirt, some kind of clay and sand mix, was well raked; the foul lines were crisp and white.

The young studs from Charles River arrived all at the same time, driving their Porsches and BMWs and Mercedes convertibles. They wore real uniforms, white jerseys with pinstripes like the New York Yankees, with CHARLES RIVER FINANCIAL stitched across the front in looping script, and they each had numbers on their backs. They had matching Vexxum-3 Long Barrel aluminum-and-composite bats, Wilson gloves, even matching DeMarini gear bags. They looked like pros. We hated them the way a Sox fan hates the Yankees, deeply and irrevocably and irrationally.

By the time the game got under way, I’d forgotten all about the tow truck driver. Apparently he’d forgotten too.

It got ugly fast. Allard allowed seven runs-four of them a grand slam by Charles River’s team captain, a bond trader named Mike Welch who was a Derek Jeter look-alike. Our guys were visibly uptight, trying too hard, so instead of aiming for base hits they kept swinging for home runs and inevitably got pop-ups instead. Plus there was the usual parade of errors-Festino collided with a fielder, which was an out, and a couple of Allard’s pitches were ruled illegal because he didn’t have his foot on the rubber.

According to our rules, if a team is ten runs ahead after four complete innings, they win. At the end of the third inning, the Charles River studs were ahead, 10-0. We were discouraged and pissed off.

Our manager, Cal Taylor, sat there drinking from a small flask of Jack Daniel’s poorly concealed in a well-used paper bag and smoking Marlboros and shaking his head. I think he served as manager only to have company while he drank. There was the roar of a motorcycle nearby, coming closer, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Then I noticed, in the waning light, a tall guy in a leather jacket with a mullet walk onto the field. It took me a few seconds to recognize the tow truck driver from last night. He stood there for a few minutes, watching us lose, and then during the break I went up to him.

“Hey, Kurt,” I said.

“Hey.”

“You here to play?”

“Looks like you guys could use another player.”

Everyone was cool with it except, of course, Trevor Allard. We called a time-out, and we all huddled around Cal Taylor while Kurt hung back a respectful distance.

“He’s not an Entronics employee,” Trevor said. “You can’t play if you don’t have a valid employee number. That’s the rules.”

I wasn’t sure whether Trevor was just being his usual priggish self, or he’d heard that I’d put in for the promotion that he probably figured had his name on it.

Festino, who enjoyed twitting Trevor, said, “So? If they challenge him, he just says he’s a contract employee and didn’t know he wasn’t eligible.” He took advantage of the break to furtively slip the little bottle of Purell out of his pocket and clean his hands.

“A contract employee?” Trevor said with disgust. “Him?” As if a bum had just wandered onto the field from the street, reeking of cheap booze and six months of body odor. Trevor wore long cargo shorts and a faded Red Sox cap, the kind that comes prefaded, which he wore backwards, of course. He had a pukka shell necklace and a Rolex, the same kind of Rolex as Gordy had, and a T-shirt that said LIFE IS GOOD.

“You ever ask the Charles River guys for their photo IDs?” said Festino. “How do we know they don’t have their own ringers, from the Yankees farm team?”

“Or some guy named Vinny from the mailroom,” said Taminek, a tall, scrawny guy who did inside sales. “Anyway, Hewlett-Packard uses ringers all the time.”

“Yo, Trevor, you’re not objecting because this guy’s a pitcher, are you, dude?” Gleason razzed his buddy. He was an overdeveloped lunk with Dumbo ears, a lantern jaw, a blond crew cut, and bright white choppers that were way too big for his mouth. He’d recently grown a bristly goatee that looked like pubic hair.

Trevor scowled and shook his head, but before he could say anything further, Cal Taylor said, “Put him in. Trevor, you go to second.” And he took a swig from his paper bag.

All anyone had to say was “new hire,” and there were no questions asked. Kurt didn’t look like a member of the Band of Brothers, but he could have been a software engineer or something, as far as the Charles River team knew. Or a mailroom guy.

Kurt was assigned to bat third in the lineup-not fourth, like in a real baseball team, but third, because even in his Jack Daniel’s stupor, Cal Taylor understood that three batters would probably mean three outs, and we wanted to give the new guy a chance to show his stuff. And maybe save our asses.

Taminek was on first, and there was one out, when it was Kurt’s turn at bat. I noticed he hadn’t been warming up but had instead been standing there quietly, watching the Charles River pitcher and captain, Mike Welch, pitch. As if he were watching tapes in the clubhouse.

He stepped up to the plate, took a few practice swings with his battered old aluminum bat, and hammered a shot to left-center. The ball sailed over the back fence. As Taminek, and then Kurt, ran home, the guys cheered.

Kurt’s homer was like an electric shock from those ER paddles. All of a sudden we started scoring runs. By the top of the fourth, we had five runs. Then Kurt took the mound to pitch to a big, beefy Charles River guy named Jarvis who was one of their sluggers. Kurt let loose with a wicked, blistering fastball, and Jarvis swung and missed, his eyes wide. You’d never think a softball could travel so fast.

Kurt threw an amazing rise ball, then a change up, and Jarvis had struck out.

Festino caught my eye. He was grinning.

Kurt proceeded to strike out two more guys with a bewildering and unhittable assortment of drop curves and rise balls.

In the fifth inning, we managed to load the bases, and then it was Kurt’s turn at bat. He swung lefty this time, and once again drove the ball somewhere into the next town, trimming the Charles River lead to one.

Kurt struck them out, one two three, in the sixth, and then it was our turn at bat. I noticed that Trevor Allard was no longer complaining about our ringer. He hit a double, Festino singled, and by the time I struck out, we were up by two. Finally, in the bottom of the seventh, Kurt had struck out their first batter and allowed two hits-only because of our lousy fielding-when their guy Welch hit a slow grounder. Kurt scooped it up, fired to second, where Allard caught it, stepped, and threw to first. Taminek caught it and held it high for the third out. A double play, and we’d actually won our first game since prehistoric times.

All the guys thronged around Kurt, who shrugged modestly and gave his easy smile and didn’t say too much. Everyone was talking and laughing loudly, exuberantly, narrating instant replays, reliving the double play that ended the game.

The inviolable tradition after each game was for our opponents to join us for food and beer and tequila shots at a nearby bar or restaurant. But we noticed that the young studs from Charles River were heading sullenly for their German cars. I called out to them, but Welch, without turning around, said, “We’re going to pass.”

“I think they’re bummed out,” said Taminek.

“I think they’re in a state of shock,” said Festino.

“Shock and awe,” said Cal Taylor. “Where’s our MVP?”

I looked around and saw Kurt slipping out to the parking lot. I chased up to him and invited him to join us.

“Nah, you guys probably want to hang by yourselves,” he said. I could see Trevor, standing at his silver Porsche, talking to Gleason, who was sitting in his Jeep Wrangler Sahara, top down.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s totally loose. Believe me, the guys would love to have a drink with you.”

“I don’t drink anymore, man. Sorry.”

“Well, whatever. Diet Coke. Come on.”

He shrugged again. “Sure you guys aren’t going to mind?”

7

I felt like I’d brought Julia Roberts to audition for the high-school play. All of a sudden I was Mister Popular, basking in the reflected glory. We all gathered around a long table at the Outback Steakhouse, a five-minute drive away, everyone jazzed from our comeback-from-oblivion victory. Some ordered beers, and Trevor asked for a single-malt Scotch called Talisker, but the waitress didn’t know what he was talking about, so he settled for a Dewar’s. Kurt gave me a look that seemed to communicate secret amusement at what a dick Trevor was. Or maybe I was imagining it. Kurt didn’t know that Gordy drank single-malts too, that Trevor was just sucking up to the boss even though the boss wasn’t there.

Kurt ordered ice water. I hesitated, then did the same. Someone ordered a couple Bloomin’ Onions and some Kookaburra Wings. Festino went to the john and came back wiping his hands on his shirt. “God, I hate those scary cloth roller towels,” he said with a shudder. “That endless, germ-infested loop of fecal bacteria. Like we’re supposed to believe the towel only goes around once.”

Brett Gleason hoisted his mug of Foster’s and proposed a toast to “the MVP,” saying, “You don’t have to buy another drink in this town again.”

Taminek said, “Where’d you come from?”

“Michigan,” Kurt said, with a sly grin.

“I mean, like-you play in college or something?”

“Never went to college,” Kurt said. “Joined the army instead, and they don’t play much softball. Not in Iraq, anyway.”

“You were in Iraq?” said one of our top dogs, Doug Forsythe, a tall, slender guy with a thatch of brown hair and a cowlick.

“Yeah,” Kurt said, nodding. “And Afghanistan. All the hot tourist spots. In Special Forces.”

“Like, killing people?” asked Gleason.

“Only bad guys,” Kurt said.

“You ever kill anyone?” asked Forsythe.

“Just a couple of guys who asked too many questions,” said Kurt. Everyone laughed but Forsythe, and then he joined in, too.

“Cool,” said Festino, yanking at the tendrils of a fried onion and dipping the straws into the peppery pink sauce before gobbling them down.

“Not exactly,” said Kurt. He looked down at his glass of water and fell silent.

Trevor had his BlackBerry out and was thumbing the wheel, checking for messages as he sipped his Dewar’s. Then he looked up and said, “So how do you guys know each other?”

I flinched. The cell phone, the Acura wiping out in a ditch-the true story could inflict lasting damage to my reputation.

Kurt said, “Mutual interest in cars.”

I liked this guy more and more.

“Cars?” said Trevor, but then Cal Taylor looked up from his Jack Daniel’s-a freshly poured tumbler from the bar-and said, “In ’Nam, we called you guys Snake Eaters.”

“The closest you got to ’Nam was Fort Dix, New Jersey,” said Gleason.

“Screw you,” growled Taylor, finishing off his Jack Daniel’s. “I developed boils.”

“Is that the same as Navy SEALs?” asked Forsythe. He was greeted by a chorus of derision, and Cal Taylor began singing, in a slurred and warbling tenor, the “Ballad of the Green Beret.” He stood up, held out his glass of J.D., and sang, “One hundred men we’ll test today…But only one wins the Green Beret.”

“‘Only three,’” corrected Gleason.

“Sit down, Cal,” said Trevor. “I think it’s time to go home.”

“I haven’t finished my supper,” Cal growled.

“Come on, old man,” Forsythe said, and he and the rest of the guys trundled Cal out to the parking lot, Cal squawking in protest the whole time. They called him a cab and promised that someone would get his car back to his house in Winchester.

Kurt turned to me while they were gone, and said, “Why are you guys the Band of Brothers? Some of you guys vets?”

“Vets?” I said. “Us? Are you kidding? No, it’s just a nickname. Not a very imaginative one, either. I don’t even remember who thought of it.”

“All you guys in sales?”

“Yep.”

“You good?”

“Who, me?”

“You.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“I think you’re probably better than okay,” Kurt said.

I shrugged modestly, the way he seemed to shrug without saying anything. I do tend to unconsciously imitate whoever I’m around.

Then I heard Trevor say, “Steadman’s fine. He’s just not much of a closer anymore.” He sat back down at the table. “Right, Steadman? How’s that Lockwood deal going? Are we in the third year yet? This may be the longest negotiation since the Paris Peace Talks.”

“It’s looking good,” I lied. “How’s it going with the Pavilion Group?”

The Pavilion Group owned a chain of movie theaters that wanted to put LCDs in their lobbies to run trailers and ads for concessions.

Trevor smiled with satisfaction. “Textbook,” he said. “I did an ROI test for them that showed a seventeen percent increase in sales of Lemon Slushies.”

I nodded and tried not to roll my eyes. Lemon Slushies.

“Tomorrow I’ve got a meeting with the CEO, but it’s just a meet-and-greet formality. He wants to shake my hand before he inks the deal. But it’s in the bag.”

“Nice,” I said.

Trevor turned to Kurt. “So, Kurt, you guys skydive and all that?”

“Skydive?” Kurt repeated with what sounded like a little twist of sarcasm. “I guess you could call it that. We did jumps, sure.”

“How awesome is that?” said Trevor. “I’ve gone skydiving a bunch of times. Me and some guys from my frat did a skydiving trip to Brittany the summer after we graduated, and it was such a rush.”

“A rush.” Kurt said the word like it tasted bad.

“Nothing like it, huh?” said Trevor. “What a kick.”

Kurt leaned back in his chair, turned to face Trevor. “When you’re dropped off from a C-141 Starlifter at thirty-five thousand feet to do a jump deep inside enemy territory, doing a clandestine entry seventy-five kilometers east-northeast of Mosul, it’s not exactly a rush. You’re carrying a hundred seventy-five pounds of commo gear and weapons and ammo, and you’ve got an oxygen mask blinding you and your stomach’s in your throat and you’re falling a hundred fifty miles an hour.” He took a sip of water. “It’s so cold at that altitude your goggles can freeze and shatter. Your eyeballs can freeze shut. You can get hypoxia and lose consciousness in a few seconds. Sudden deceleration trauma. Death on impact. If you don’t hold your arms and legs just right when you’re free-falling, you might go into a tumble or a spin, and go splat. Maybe your chute malfunctions. Even really experienced soldiers break their necks and die. And that’s if you don’t find yourself under attack from SAMs and antiaircraft artillery. You’re scared shitless, and anyone who says they’re not is lying.”

Trevor blushed, looked as if he’d just been slapped. Festino gave me a sidelong look of immense pleasure.

“Anyway,” Kurt said, draining his water, “I’m sure Brittany was loads of fun.”

Kurt was a huge hit.

Forsythe said, “Hey, can you come back next week?”

“I don’t know,” Kurt said.

“We too Little League for you, that it?” said Taminek.

“Nah, not at all,” Kurt said. “It’s just that I work nights a lot.”

“Doing what?” Forsythe asked.

I braced myself-the tow truck, the Acura in the ditch…But he said, “I drive for a buddy of mine who owns an auto body shop.”

“We got to get this guy a job at Entronics,” Taminek said.

Kurt chuckled, and said, “Yeah, right.”

The rest of the guys eventually went home, leaving just me and Kurt.

“So,” he said. “Band of Brothers.”

I nodded.

“Good buddies?”

I shrugged. “Some of them.”

“Pretty competitive bunch, looks like.”

I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Can be,” I said. “At work, anyway.”

“That pretty-boy who sat across from me-what’s his name, Trevor?-seems like a real dickhead.”

“I guess.”

“Saw him driving over here in his Porsche. So, was your boss here tonight too?”

“No. Most of the guys here tonight are just individual contributors.”

“Individual contributors?”

“Sales reps. I’m a DM, a district sales manager, and so is Trevor, only we have different territories.”

“But he’s competing against you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s complicated. We’re both up for the same promotion.” I explained to him about the recent turmoil at Entronics and the AM job that had just opened up and the trouble I was having with the Lockwood Hotels deal. He listened without saying anything.

When I was done, he said, “Not easy to have unit cohesion when you’re all battling each other.”

“Unit cohesion?”

“See, in Special Forces, we’d work in twelve-man teams. Operational detachments, they call ’em. A-Teams. Everyone’s got his job-mine was eighteen charlie, engineer sergeant. The demolitions expert. And we all had to work together, respect each other, or we’d never be battle-ready.”

“Battle-ready, huh?” I smiled, thinking of the corporation as a battlefield.

“You know the real reason soldiers are willing to die in war? You think it’s about patriotism? Family? Country? No way, bro. It’s all about your team. No one wants to be the first to run. So we all stand together.”

“I guess we’re more like scorpions in a bottle.”

He nodded. “Look. So we were on this armed reconnaissance mission outside Musa Qalay, in Afghanistan, right? Going after one of the anticoalition militias. A split team, so I was in charge. We had a couple of GMVs. Nontactical vehicles, I’m talking.”

“GMV?” Military guys speak a foreign language. You need a simultaneous translator to talk to them sometimes.

“Modified Humvee. Ground Mobility Vehicle.”

“Okay.”

“Suddenly my GMV’s struck head-on by machine gun fire and RPGs.” He made a slight grimace. “Rocket-propelled grenades, okay? Shoulder-launched antitank weapon. It was an ambush. My vehicle was hit. We were trapped in a kill box. So I ordered the driver-my good buddy, Jimmy Donadio-to floor it. Not away from the ambush, but right toward the machine-gun emplacement. Told the guy on top to start firing off the.50 cal, just unload it on them. You could see the bad guys slumped over the machine gun. Then my GMV got hit with another RPG. Disabled it. The vehicle was in flames, okay? We were screwed. So I jumped out with my M16 and just started firing away at them until I was out of ammo. Killed them all. Must have been six of them.”

I just stared at Kurt, rapt. The scariest thing I ever faced in my line of work was a performance review.

“So let me ask you something,” Kurt said. “Would you do that for Trevor?”

“Fire at him with a machine gun?” I said. “I fantasize about that sometimes.”

“You get my point, though?”

I wasn’t sure I did. I poked at the Bloomin’ Onion but didn’t eat any. I already felt queasy from all the grease.

He looked like he was getting ready to leave. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“Go for it.”

“So when we were in country, our most important weapon by far was always our intel. The intelligence we had on the enemy, right? Strength of their units, location of their encampments, all that. So what kind of intel do you guys collect on your potential customers?”

This guy was smart. Really smart. “They’re not the enemy,” I said, amused.

“Okay.” A bashful smile. “But you know what I mean.”

“I guess. We gather the basic stuff…” I paused for a few seconds. “To be honest, not much. We sort of fly by the seat of the pants, I sometimes think.”

He nodded. “Wouldn’t it help if you drilled down? Like the way you’re getting dicked around by Lockwood Hotels-like, what’s really going on there?”

“Would it help? Sure. But we don’t have any way of knowing. That’s the thing. It’s not pretty, but that’s how it is.”

Kurt kept nodding, staring straight ahead. “I know a guy used to work in security for the Lockwood chain. He might still be there.”

“A security guard?”

Kurt smiled. “Pretty high up in corporate security, at their headquarters-New York or New Jersey, whatever.”

“White Plains, New York.”

“Lot of Special Forces guys go into corporate security. So why don’t you give me some names, some background. Tell me who you’re working with. I’ll see if I can find anything out for you. A little intel, right?”

Kurt Semko had already surprised me a couple of times, so maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched, I figured, that this tow truck driver who’d been kicked out of the Special Forces might be able to get the lowdown on Brian Borque, the Vice President for Property Management at Lockwood Hotels. It made sense that there’d be a network of ex-Special Forces officers who now worked in the private sector. Why the hell not? I gave him a bit of background and scribbled Brian Borque’s name on a napkin. Kurt had an e-mail address, too-I guess everyone does these days-and I wrote it down.

“All right, man,” Kurt said, getting up and putting a big hand on my shoulder. “No worries. I’ll give you a call if I find anything out.”

It was pretty late by the time I got home, driving the Geo Metro that Enterprise Rent-A-Car had brought over that morning. Kate was asleep.

I sat down at the computer in the little home office we shared to check my office e-mail, as I always did before I went to bed. Internet Explorer was open, which meant that Kate had been using the computer, and out of pointless curiosity I clicked on “Go” to see where she’d been browsing. I wondered whether Kate ever looked at porn, though that seemed awfully unlikely.

No. The last place she’d been was a website called Realtor.com, where she’d been looking at houses in Cambridge. Not cheap ones, either. Million-dollar, two-million-dollar houses in the Brattle Street area.

Real estate porn.

She was looking at houses we could never afford, not on my income. I felt bad, for her and for me.

When I signed on to my office e-mail, I found the workup I’d done on Lockwood, and forwarded it to Kurt. Then I scrolled quickly through the junk-health-plan notices, job listings, endless personnel notices-and found an e-mail from Gordy that he’d sent after hours.

He wanted me to “drop by” his office at 8:00 tomorrow morning.

8

The alarm went off at 5:00 A.M., two hours earlier than usual. Kate groaned and rolled over, put a pillow over her head. I got up as quietly as I could, went downstairs, and made the coffee, and while it was brewing I took a quick shower. I wanted to get into the office a good hour before my interview with Gordy so I could go over my accounts and get all the numbers in order.

When I got out of the shower, I saw the light in the bedroom was on. Kate was downstairs at the kitchen table in her pink bathrobe, drinking coffee.

“You’re up early,” she said.

I gave her a kiss. “You too. Sorry if I woke you.”

“You were out late.”

“The softball game, remember?”

“You went out for drinks afterward?”

“Yeah.”

“Drown your sorrows?”

“We won, believe it or not.”

“Hey, that’s a first.”

“Yeah, well, that guy Kurt played for us. He blew everyone away.”

“Kurt?”

“The tow truck driver.”

“Huh?”

“Remember, I told you about this guy who gave me a ride home after the Acura wiped out?” It wiped out by itself. I had nothing to do with it, see.

“Navy SEALs.”

“Special Forces, but yeah. That guy. He’s, like, the real thing. He’s everything Gordy and all these other phony tough guys pretend to be. Sitting in their Aeron chairs and talking about ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘killing the competition.’ Only he’s for real. He’s actually killed people.”

I realized I was telling her everything except the one thing I was most anxious about: my interview with Gordy in a couple of hours. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her. She’d probably just make me more nervous.

“Don’t forget, Craig and Susie are going to be here in time for supper tonight.”

“It’s tonight?”

“I’ve only told you a thousand times.”

I let out a half groan, half sigh. “How long are they staying?”

“Just two nights.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why just two nights?”

“Why are they coming to Boston? I thought L.A. was God’s country. That’s what Craig’s always saying.”

“He was just elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, and his first meeting is tomorrow.”

“How could he be on the Harvard Board of Overseers? He’s a Hollywood guy now. He probably doesn’t even own a tie anymore.”

“He’s not only a prominent alum but also a major contributor. People care about things like that.”

When Susie met Craig, he was just a poor starving writer. He’d had a couple of stories published in magazines with names like TriQuarterly and Ploughshares, and he taught expository writing at Harvard. He was kind of snooty, and Susie probably liked that, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to live in genteel poverty, and I think he figured out pretty quickly that he was never going to make it in the literature business. So they moved out to L.A., where Craig’s Harvard roommate introduced him around, and he started writing sitcoms. Eventually he got a gig writing for Everybody Loves Raymond and began making serious money. Then, somehow, he created this hit show and overnight became unbelievably rich.

Now he and Susie vacationed on St. Barths with Brad and Angelina, and Susie regularly fed Katie gossip about which movie stars were secretly gay and which ones were in rehab. They had a big house in Holmby Hills and were always out to dinner with all the celebrities. And he never let me forget it.

She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Susie’s going to take Ethan around Boston-the Freedom Trail, all that.”

“She doesn’t get it, does she? Ethan’s not into Paul Revere. Maybe the Salem Witch Museum, but I don’t think they show the real sicko stuff there that he’s into.”

“All I ask is for you to be nice to them. You and Ethan have some sort of great chemistry, which I don’t quite understand. But I appreciate it.”

“How come they’re staying here anyway?” I said.

“Because she’s my sister.”

“You know they’re just going to complain the whole time about the bathroom and the shower curtain and how the water from the shower spills out on the floor, and how we have the wrong coffeemaker and how come we don’t have any Peet’s Sumatra coffee beans-”

“You can’t hold it against them, Jason. They’re just accustomed to a higher standard of living.”

“Then maybe they should stay at the Four Seasons.”

“They want to stay with us,” she said firmly.

“I guess Craig needs to stay in touch with the little people every once in a while.”

“Very funny.”

I went to the cereal cabinet and surveyed its depressing, low-cal, high-fiber contents. Fiber One and Kashi Go Lean and several other grim-looking boxes of twigs and burlap strips. “Hey, honey?” I said, my back turned. “You’ve been looking at real estate?”

“What are you talking about?”

“On the computer. I noticed you were looking at some real estate website.”

No answer. I selected the least-disgusting-looking box, a tough choice, and reluctantly brought it to the table. In the refrigerator all we had now was skim milk. Not even one percent. I hate skim milk. Milk shouldn’t be blue. I brought the carton to the table, too.

Kate was examining her coffee cup, stirring the coffee with a spoon, though she hadn’t added anything to it. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” she finally said in her sultry Veronica Lake voice.

I felt bad for her, but I didn’t pursue the subject. I mean, what’s to say? She must have expected more from me when she married me.

We met at a mutual friend’s wedding when both of us were pretty drunk. A guy I knew from DKE, my college frat, was marrying a girl who went to Exeter with Kate. Kate had been forced to leave Exeter in her junior year when her family went broke. She went to Harvard, but on financial aid. Her family tried to keep everything a secret, as WASPs do, but everyone figured out the truth eventually. There are buildings in Boston with her family name on it, and she had to suffer the humiliation of going to public school in Wellesley her last two years. (Whereas I, a boy from Worcester who was the first in his family to go to college, whose dad was a sheet-metal worker, had no idea what a private school even was until college.)

At the wedding, we were seated next to each other, and I immediately glommed on to this hot babe. She seemed a little pretentious: a comp lit major at Harvard, read all the French feminists-in French, of course. She also definitely seemed out of my league. Maybe if we hadn’t both been drunk she wouldn’t have paid me any attention, though later she told me she thought I was the best-looking guy there, and funny, and charming, too. And who could blame her? She seemed amused by all my stories about my job-I’d just started as a sales rep at Entronics, and I wasn’t yet burned-out. She liked the fact that I was so into my work. She said that I was such a breath of fresh air, that it really set me apart from all her clove-cigarette-smoking, cynical male friends. I probably went on too much about my master plan, how much money I’d be pulling down in five years, in ten years. But she was taken by it. She said she found me more “real” than the guys she normally hung with.

She didn’t seem to mind my dorky mistakes, the way I mistakenly drank from her water glass. She explained to me the dry-to-wet rule of table setting, with the water and wine to the right of your plate and the bread and dry things to the left. Neither did she mind that I was a lousy dancer-she found it cute, she said. On our third date, when I invited her over to my apartment, I put on Ravel’s “Bolero,” and she laughed, thought I was being ironic. What did I know? I thought “Bolero” was classic make-out music, along with Barry White.

So I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Obviously Kate didn’t marry me for my money-she knew plenty of rich guys in her social circles-but I think she expected me to take care of her. She was on the rebound from an affair she’d had with one of her college professors right after she graduated, a pompous but handsome and distinguished scholar of French literature at Harvard, whom she discovered was simultaneously sleeping with two other women. She told me later that she considered me “down-to-earth” and unpretentious, the polar opposite of her three-timing, beret-wearing, silver-haired father-figure French professor. I was a charismatic business guy who was crazy about her and would make her feel safe, at least, give her the financial security she wanted. She could raise a family and do something vaguely artistic like landscape gardening or teaching literature at Emerson College. That was the deal. We’d have three kids and a big house in Newton or Brookline or Cambridge.

The plan wasn’t for her to live in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot Colonial in the low-income part of Belmont.

“Listen, Kate,” I finally said after a moment of silence. “I’ve got an interview with Gordy this morning.”

Her face lit up. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in weeks. “Already? Oh, Jason. This is so great.”

“I think Trevor has it sewed up, though.”

“Jason, that’s just negative thinking.”

“Realistic thinking. Trevor’s been campaigning for it. He’s been having his direct reports call Gordy and tell him how much they want Trevor to get the job.”

“But Gordy must see through all that.”

“Maybe. But he loves being sucked up to. Can’t get enough of it.”

“So why don’t you do the same thing?”

“I hate that. It’s cheesy. It’s also devious.”

She nodded. “You don’t need to do that. Just show him how much you want the job. Want an omelet?”

“An omelet?” Was there such thing as a tofu omelet? Probably. Tofu and scrambled eggs too, I bet. This could be nasty.

“Yep. You need your protein. I’ll put some Canadian bacon in it. Gordy likes his guys to be meat-eaters, right?”

9

On the way into work I popped a CD into the dashboard slot of the rented Geo Metro. It was one of my vast collection of tapes and CDs of motivational talks by the god worshipped by all salesmen, the great motivational speaker and training guru Mark Simkins.

I’d probably listened to this CD, Be a Winner, five hundred times. I could recite long stretches of it word for word, mimicking Mark Simkins’s emphatic, singsong voice, his nasal Midwestern accent, his bizarre, halting phraseology. He taught me never ever to use the word “cost” or “price” with a customer. It was “total investment.” Also, “contract” was a scary word; you should say “paperwork” or “agreement.” And never ask a prospect to “sign” an agreement-you “endorsed” the copies or “okayed” the agreement. But most of all he taught that you had to believe in yourself.

Sometimes I listened to the discs just to get myself fired up, to stiffen my spine, give myself a tequila shot of confidence. It was as if Mark Simkins were my personal coach, cheering me on in the privacy of my car, and I needed all the confidence I could get for my interview with Gordy.

By the time I got to Framingham, I was swimming in caffeine-I’d brought the extra-large travel Thermos-and totally pumped. I walked from the parking lot reciting like a mantra a couple of my favorite Mark Simkins lines: “Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you.”

And: “Expect good things to happen.”

And: “The only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. For the more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.” That one was like a Zen koan to me. I used to repeat it over and over trying to crack its wisdom. I still wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but I repeated it to myself every time I got dinged on a sales call, and it made me feel better.

Hey, whatever it takes.

Gordy kept me waiting outside his office for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes. He always kept people waiting. It was a power thing, and you just got used to it. I could see him through the window, pacing back and forth with his headset on, gesticulating wildly. I sat there at an empty cubicle next to his secretary, Melanie, who’s a sweet, pretty woman, very tall, with long brown hair, a couple of years older than me. She apologized repeatedly-that seemed to be her main job description, apologizing to everyone he kept waiting-and offered to get me coffee. I said no. Any more caffeine and I’d go into orbit.

Melanie asked me how the game went last night, and I told her how we’d won, without getting into detail about our ringer. She asked me how Kate was, and I asked her about her husband, Bob, and their three cute little kids. We made small talk for a couple of minutes until her phone started ringing.

At close to eight-thirty, Gordy’s door opened and he came barreling through. Both of his stubby arms were extended in welcome, as if he wanted to give me a bear hug. Gordy, who looks sort of like a bear cub, only not cute, is a very huggy person. If he’s not hugging, he’s got an arm on your shoulder.

“Steadman,” he said. “How’re you doing there, buddy?”

“Hey, Gordy,” I said.

“Melanie, get my buddy Steadman here some coffee, could you?”

“Already offered, Kent,” said Melanie, turning around from her cubicle. She was the only one in the office who called him by his first name. The rest of us had largely forgotten he had a first name.

“Water?” he said. “Coke? Scotch?” He threw his head back and brayed, a sort of open-mouth cackle.

“Scotch on the rocks sounds good to me,” I said. “Breakfast of champions.”

He brayed again, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me into the vast expanse of his office. In his floor-to-ceiling windows you could see turquoise ocean and palm trees, the waves crashing against the perfect white sand. Really a magnificent view, enough to make you forget you were in Framingham.

Gordy sank into his ergonomic desk chair and leaned back, and I sat in the chair across from him. His desk was a ridiculously large oblong of black marble, which he kept fanatically neat. The only thing on it was a giant, thirty-inch Entronics flat-panel LCD monitor and a blue folder, which I assumed was my personnel file.

“So, man,” he said with a long, contented sigh, “you want a promotion.”

“I do,” I said, “and I think I’d kick ass.”

Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you, I chanted silently.

“I’ll bet you would,” he said, and there was no irony in his voice. He seemed to mean it, and that surprised me. He fixed me with his small brown eyes. Some of us in the Band of Brothers-not Trevor or Gleason, who were famous suck-ups-referred to Gordy’s eyes as “beady” or “ferretlike,” but right now they seemed warm and moist and sincere. His eyes were set deeply beneath a low, Cro-Magnon brow. He had a large head, a double chin, a ruddy face that reminded me of a glazed ham, with deep acne pits on his cheeks. His dark brown hair-another Just For Men victim, I assumed-was cut in a layered pompadour. There were times when I could imagine him as the tubby little kid in school he must have been.

Now he hunched forward and studied my file. His lips moved a tiny bit as he read. As he flipped the pages with a stubby paw, you could see a flash of monogrammed cuff link. Everything he wore was monogrammed with a big script KG.

There was no reason for him to be reading my file right in front of me except to rattle me. I knew that. So I repeated to myself, silently: “Expect good things to happen.”

I looked around the office. In one corner of his office he had a golf putter in a mahogany stand next to an artificial-turf putting mat. On a shelf in his credenza was a bottle of Talisker eighteen-year-old single-malt Scotch, which he liked to brag was the only Scotch he drank. If so, he must have made a real dent in the world supply of it because he drank a lot.

“Your annual reviews aren’t bad at all,” he said.

From Gordy, this was a rave. “Thanks,” I said. I watched the surf crashing against the dazzling white sand, the palm trees swaying in the gentle breeze, the seagulls circling and diving into the azure water. Gordy’d had the latest Entronics QD-OLED prototype PictureScreen installed in his windows, and the resolution and colors were perfect. You could change the high-definition video loop to one of a dozen scenes, any of which was better than the view overlooking the parking lot. Gordy liked the ocean-he owned a forty-four-foot Slipstream catamaran, which he kept in the Quincy marina-so his background films were always the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Caribbean. The PictureScreen was a real breakthrough in display technology, and we owned it. It could be manufactured in any size, and the screen was flexible, could be rolled up like a poster, and there wasn’t a better, crisper picture available anywhere. Customers and potential customers who visited Gordy in his office always gasped, and not just at what a pompous jerk he was. It was strange, though, when you walked into Gordy’s office at seven or eight in the morning and saw midday Caribbean sunlight.

“You were Salesman of the Year three years ago, Steadman,” he said. “Club four years running.” He gave a low whistle. “You like Grand Cayman?”

The Cayman Islands was one of the trips the company sent the Salesman of the Year on. “Great diving,” I said.

“Diving for dollars.” He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, did a silent bray.

“I’m impressed you were able to sell UPS those self-keystoning projectors. They wanted compression technology, and we don’t do compression technology.”

“I sold them on future compatibility.”

“Booya,” he said, nodding.

That was Gordy’s way of congratulating people. He was being too nice, which made me nervous. I was expecting his usual frontal assault.

“Morgan Stanley?” he said.

“They’ve got an RFP on the street, but they won’t talk to me. Got to be an inside job. I’m just column fodder.”

“Sounds right,” he said. “They’re just specking the competition. Send ’em back their lousy RFP.”

“I’m not going to make it easy for them,” I said.

His smile twisted up at one end, making him look appropriately Mephistophelian.

“And it looks like FedEx hasn’t delivered yet, huh?”

“FedEx wants a bunch of LCD projectors for their logistics center, to display the weather and all that, twenty-four/seven. I demo’d it for them in Memphis.”

“And?”

“They’re jerking me around. They’re looking at Sony and Fujitsu and NEC and us. Doing a side-by-side shoot-out.”

“Deciding on price point, no doubt.”

“I’m trying to sell them on quality and reliability. Better investment in the long run, all that. I’d say we’ve got a thirty percent chance of winning it.” That was a complete hallucination.

“That high, huh?”

“That’s my take. I wouldn’t forecast it, though.”

“Albertson’s fell through,” he said, with a sad shake of the head. Albertson’s is the second-largest supermarket chain in the country. They own thousands of supermarkets, drugstores, and gas stations, and they wanted to put in digital signage in a bunch of their stores. That would have meant fifteen-inch flat-panel LCD screens at every checkout lane-I guess so you wouldn’t have to read the National Enquirer and then put it back in the rack-and forty-two-inch plasmas throughout the store. They were calling it a storewide “network” that would “provide our customers with relevant information and solutions during their visits to the stores.” Translation: ads. Brilliant idea-they wouldn’t even have to pay for the equipment. It was going to be installed by this middleman, a company called SignNetwork that bought and installed all this stuff in stores. The screens would run ads for Walt Disney videos and Kodak and Huggies diapers. I’d been dealing with both Albertson’s and SignNetwork, trying to sell them on the advantages of paying a bit more for quality and all that. No dice.

“They went with NEC,” I said.

“Why?”

“You want to know the truth? Jim Letasky. He’s NEC’s top sales guy, and he basically owns the SignNetwork account. They don’t want to deal with any other company. They love the guy.”

“I know Letasky.”

“Nice guy,” I said. Unfortunately. I wished I could hate the guy, since he was stealing so much of our business, but I’d met him at the Consumer Electronics show a couple of years back, and he was great. They say people buy from people they like; after we had a drink, I was almost ready to buy a bunch of NEC plasmas from Jim Letasky.

He fell silent again. “And Lockwood drags on like a case of the clap. You column fodder there too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not giving up on this one, though, right?”

“Give up? Me?”

He smiled. “That’s not you, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Let me ask you something, Steadman. Hope you don’t mind if I get too personal. You got problems in your marriage?”

“Me?” I shook my head, flushing despite my best efforts. “We’re great.”

“Your wife sick or something?”

“She’s fine.” Like: What the hell?

“You have cancer, maybe?”

I half smiled, said quietly, “I’m in good health, Gordy, but thanks for asking.”

“Then what the hell’s your problem?”

I was silent while I pondered the best way to answer that wouldn’t get me fired.

“Four years in a row you’re Club 101. Then you’re what? You’re Festino.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t close.”

“That’s not the case, Gordy. I was Salesman of the Year.”

“In a great market for plasma and LCDs. Rising tide floats all boats.”

“My boat floated higher.”

“Your boat still seaworthy? That’s the question. Look at the last year. See, I’m starting to wonder whether you’re hitting the wall. Happens, sometimes, to sales guys at this point in their careers. Lose that spark. You still have the fire in the belly?”

It’s called acid reflux, and I was feeling it right now.

“It’s still there,” I said. “You know, like they say the only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. The more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.”

“I don’t want to hear any of that Mark Simkins candy-ass crapola here,” he said. Busted. “He’s full of it. The more times you fail, the more accounts you lose.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means, Gordy,” I began.

“‘Expect good things to happen,’” he said, doing an unexpectedly good imitation of Mark Simkins, halfway between Mister Rogers and the Reverend Billy Graham, if you can imagine that. “Well, in the real world that we’re living in here, I expect a shitstorm every day, and I come prepared with my rubber poncho and galoshes, you get me? That’s how it works in the real world, not in Candy-Ass Land. Now, you and Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason want to do a side-by-side? See who drives a bigger piece of the number? See who’s up-and-coming and who’s history?”

History. “Trevor got lucky last year. Hyatt started buying big.”

“Steadman, listen to me, and listen good: You make your own luck.”

“Gordy,” I said, “you assigned him the better accounts this past year, okay? You gave Trevor all the good chocolates, and you gave me all the ones with the pink coconut centers.”

He looked up at me abruptly, those ferret eyes glittering. “And there’s a hole in the ozone layer, and you were switched at birth, and you got any other excuses while you’re at it?” His voice got steadily louder until he was shouting. “Let me tell you something. There is shit about to rain down on us from Tokyo, and we don’t even know what kind of shit it is! And if I promote the wrong guy here, it’s my ass on the line!”

I wanted to say, Hey, I don’t want this stupid promotion anyway. I just want to go home and have a steak and make love to my wife. But I’d suddenly realized that, damn it, I wanted the job. Maybe I didn’t want the job so much as I wanted to get it. I said, “You won’t be making a mistake.”

He smiled again, and I was really starting to despise his evil little smiles. “It’s survival of the fittest around here, you know that.”

“Hell, yeah.”

“But sometimes evolution needs a little help. That’s my job. I promote the fittest. Kill off the weak. And if you get this job, you’ve got to be able to fire people. Lop off the deadwood. Throw the deadweight overboard before it sinks us. Could you fire Festino?”

“I’d put him on a plan first.” A performance plan was the way the company told you to shape up or beat it. It was usually a fancy way to create a paper trail to fire you, but sometimes you could turn things around.

“He’s on a plan already, Steadman. He’s deadwood, and you know it. If you get the job, could you fire his ass?”

“If I had to,” I said.

“Any member of your team doesn’t perform, you don’t hit your numbers. One weak link, we all suffer. Including me. Remember: There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’”

I thought: Yeah, well, there’s an “I” in “idiot.” And a “U” in “stupid.”

But I just nodded thoughtfully.

“See, Steadman, you can’t be sentimental. You’ve got to be willing to push your grandmother under a bus to make your nums. Allard would. Allard’s got that. So does Gleason. How about you?”

Sure, I’d push Allard’s grandmother under a bus. I’d push Allard under a bus. Gleason too.

I said, “My grandmother’s dead.”

“You know what I’m saying. Motivating people to climb the hill for you isn’t the same as carrying a bag.” Carrying a bag-that was insider-speak for selling.

“I know.”

“Do you? You got the fire in the belly? The killer instinct? Can you level-set? Can you incent your team?”

“I know how to do what it takes,” I said.

“Let me ask you a question: What kind of car did you drive to work today, Steadman?”

“Well, it’s a rented-”

“Just answer the question. What kind of car?”

“A Geo Metro, but that’s because-”

“A Geo Metro,” he said. “A Geo. Metro.”

“Gordy-”

“I want you to say that aloud, Steadman. Say, ‘I drove a Geo Metro to work today.’”

“Right.”

“Say it, Steadman.”

I exhaled noisily. “I drove a Geo Metro to work today because-”

“Good. Now say, ‘And Gordy drove a Hummer.’ Got it?”

“Gordy-”

“Say it, Steadman.”

“Gordy drove a Hummer.”

“Correct. Is anything sinking in? Show me your watch, Steadman.”

I glanced down at it involuntarily. It was a decent-looking Fossil, about a hundred bucks at the kiosk in the Prudential Mall. I held out my left hand reluctantly.

“Take a look at mine, Steadman.” He flicked his left wrist, shot his cuff, revealed a huge, gaudy Rolex, gold and diamond-encrusted with three subdials on its face. Tacky-looking, I thought.

“Nice watch,” I said.

“Now look at my shoes, Steadman.”

“I think I get your point, Gordy.”

I noticed he was looking up at his door. He flashed a thumbs-up at whoever was outside. I turned around to see Trevor walking by. Trevor gave me a smile, and I smiled right back.

“I’m not sure you do get my point,” he said. “The top sixty percent of the sales force hit their OTEs.” OTE was on-target earnings. “Then there’s the overachievers, okay? The Club. And then there’s the high-octane, the best-in-breed. The meat-eaters. Like Trevor Allard. Like Brett Gleason. Are you a meat-eater, Steadman?”

“Medium rare,” I said.

“Do you have the killer instinct?”

“You have to ask?”

He stared at me. “Show me,” he said. “Next time I see you, I want to hear about how you closed one of your big accounts.”

I nodded.

His voice got quiet, confiding. “See, I’m all about BHAGs, Steadman.” He pronounced it bee-hags. It stood for “big hairy audacious goals.” He’d read an article somewhere that quoted from some book. “You have the ability to come up with a BHAG?”

“Very big and very hairy,” I said, just to let him know I knew what it meant. “Absolutely.”

“You playing to play, or playing to win?”

“To win.”

“What’s our company motto, Steadman?”

“‘Invent the Future.’” Who the hell knew what that meant? Like we sales reps were supposed to invent the future? They invented stuff in Tokyo, under the cone of silence, and shipped it over to us to sell.

He stood up to signal that our little meeting was over, and I stood up too, and he came around the desk and put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re a good guy, Jason. A really good guy.”

“Thank you.”

“But are you good enough to be on the G Team?”

It took me a few seconds to realize that G stood for Gordy. “You know I am,” I said.

“Show me that killer instinct,” he said. “Kill, baby, kill.”

Melanie gave me a sympathetic smile as I stumbled out of Gordy’s office into the natural sunshine. Well, actually, it was gray and cloudy and starting to rain outside. Much nicer in the Caribbean, but I liked the real world.

I switched my cell phone back on as I walked back to my office. My cell started making that fast, urgent-sounding alarm sound that indicated I had a message. I checked the calls received and didn’t recognize the number. I called voice mail and heard a message from someone whose voice I didn’t at first recognize. “Yo, Jason,” a gravelly voice said. “I got some information for you on that guy at Lockwood Hotels.”

Kurt Semko.

When I got to my office, I called him back.

10

“Guy’s name is Brian Borque, right?” Kurt said.

“Yeah?” I was still feeling kind of numb from being beaten about the head and neck with Gordy’s psychic rubber truncheon.

“My buddy’s still in corporate security at Lockwood, and he did some poking around for me,” Kurt said. “So dig this: Your man Brian Borque and his fiancée just came back from Aruba, right?”

“Yeah?” I vaguely remembered him saying he’d be out of the office for a week or ten days. “He said he took his wife to Vienna, Virginia, I remember.”

“First-class tickets there and back, five-star hotel, all expenses paid, and by guess who?”

“Who?”

“Hitachi.”

I was silent for a few seconds as it dawned on me. “Shit,” I said.

Kurt’s reply was a slow, husky chuckle. “Maybe that explains the runaround you’ve been getting.”

“I’ll say. And he’s been jerking me around for a year on this contract. Boy, that pisses me off.”

“Greedhead, huh?”

“I should have known. He was stringing me along for Super Bowl tickets and everything else he could get out of me, and all the while I’m just his chick on the side, because he’s in bed with Hitachi. He was never going to buy from us anyway. All right. Thanks, man. At least now I know.”

“No worries. So…what are you going to do about it?”

“Close it or kill it, that’s the rule around here. I kill it and move on.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see why you have to kill it and just walk away. See, there’s something else you may not know.”

“Like what?”

“Seems Lockwood Hotels has a policy on not accepting gifts greater than a hundred bucks from a customer or vendor.”

“They have a policy like that?”

“That’s why my buddy in corporate security knows about it.”

“Borque’s in trouble, that what you mean?”

“Not yet. A file’s been opened. That little trip to Aruba was worth a good five or six thousand bucks. I’d say that’s a violation of company policy, wouldn’t you?”

“What am I supposed to do with that? Blackmail the guy?”

“Naw, man. You help him out of his ethical dilemma. Lead him away from temptation. You…torque Borque.” He chuckled again. “Then you’re good to go.”

“How?” I said.

I called Brian Borque but got his voice mail and asked him to call me back as soon as he could.

In the meantime I checked my e-mail and plowed through the usual meaningless company crap, but one subject header caught my eye. I normally ignore all the job listings-after all, I already have a job, and anything in my department I hear about long before they post it. But this one was a notice for a Corporate Security officer that had just been posted today.

I skimmed it quickly. “Perform various duties such as ensuring the physical security of the facility as well as acting as first response to all emergencies including security, medical, bomb, and fire,” it said. “Qualified candidates must have: High School Diploma or GED, good communication skills, and physical security background.” It went on to say, Prefer: Recent Military experience such as Military Police…Demonstrated leadership and experience with handguns a plus.”

I remembered what Taminek said at the Outback: “We got to get this guy a job at Entronics.”

Interesting idea.

I saved the job listing as new in my e-mail in-box.

I was getting a little nervous waiting for Brian Borque to call me back, so I got up to stretch my legs. I took a quick walk down the hall to see the Technical Marketing Engineer, Phil Rifkin, to arrange for a demo I had to do in a couple of days.

Phil Rifkin was your quintessential audiovisual nerd, the Alpha Geek in our division. He was an engineer by training, was deeply familiar with all Entronics LCD projectors and LCD screens and plasma displays. He supported the sales force, answered stupid questions, taught us about the latest products, and arranged for the demos to go out of our repair facility. Sometimes he accompanied a sales rep on a demo if the rep was unsure how to operate one of our products or the customer was really high-profile. He was also our in-house technical guru when customers had questions we couldn’t answer.

Rifkin worked in what we called the Plasma Lab, even though it wasn’t just for plasmas. It was a long, narrow, windowless room. Its walls were covered with plasma and LCD screens. Its floor was a tangle of power cords and cables and huge spools, which everyone was always tripping over. I knocked on the lab door, and he opened it quickly as if he’d been waiting for me.

“Oh-hello, Jason.”

“Hi, Phil. I’m demo’ing the 42MP5 on Friday morning in Revere,” I said.

“So?” He blinked owlishly.

Rifkin was a small, thin guy with a huge mop of frizzy brown hair like a Chia pet. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and was partial to white short-sleeve dress shirts with two pockets and big collars. He kept strange hours, tended to work through the night, lived out of the vending machines.

Phil lacked all social skills. Fortunately he didn’t need them in his job. In his own little world he was vastly powerful, a veritable Czar of all the Plasmas. If he didn’t like you, there might not be a plasma display available to demo for your new customer. Or he might not have it prepped in time. You had to be nice to this guy, and I always was. I’m not an idiot.

“Can you make sure all the cables make it too?”

“Component cable or RGB or both?”

“Just component.”

“Make sure you warm the unit up for a couple of minutes first.”

“Of course. Do you think you could preadjust it? To full Rifkin standards?”

He shrugged, privately pleased but trying not to let on. He turned and I followed him in. He stood before a forty-two-inch mounted on the wall. “I don’t know what the big deal is,” he said. “Leave the sharpness at 50%. I like to jack up the reds and blues and tone down the greens. Contrast at 80%. Brightness at 25%. Tint at 35%.”

“Got it.”

“Make sure to show off the zoom feature-the scaling’s far superior to any other plasma out there. Much sharper. What’s this for, anyway?”

“The dog track in Revere. Wonderland.”

“Why are you wasting my time on this?”

“I leave nothing to chance.”

“But a dog track, Jason? Greyhounds chasing a mechanical bunny rabbit?”

“Even animal-rights abusers like good monitors, I guess. Thanks. Can you have this prepped and on the truck by eight Friday morning?”

“Jason, is it true that we’re all gonna have to pack up and move to the City of Hate?”

“Huh?”

“Dallas. Isn’t that what’s really going on with the Royal Meister acquisition?”

I shook my head. “No one’s told me that.”

“They wouldn’t, would they? No one ever tells people on our level anything. We always find out when it’s too late.”

Back in my office, my phone was ringing. Lockwood Hotels came up on the caller ID.

“Hey, Brian,” I said.

“There he is,” Brian said, sounding typically buoyant. “You got the Sox tickets, right?”

“That’s not why I called,” I said. “I wanted to circle back to you on the proposal.”

“You know I’m doing what I can,” he said, his voice suddenly flat and clipped. “There’s all kinds of factors in play here that are beyond my control.”

“I totally understand,” I said. My heart started beating fast. “I know you’re doing everything you can to work the system for me.”

“You know it,” Brian said.

“And you know Entronics will price-compete on any reasonable proposal.”

“No doubt.”

My heart was thudding loud and my mouth was dry. I grabbed a mostly empty Poland Spring water bottle and drained it. The water was warm. “Of course, some things we can’t match and won’t try,” I went on. “Like the trip you and Martha just took to Aruba.”

He was silent. So I continued, “Hard to compete with free, you know?”

He was still silent. I thought for a moment that the phone had gone dead.

Then Brian said, “FedEx me a fresh set of docs, will you? I’ll have ’em inked and on your desk by close of business Friday.”

I was stunned. “Hey, thanks, Bri-that’s great. You rock.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said quietly.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done-”

“Really,” he said, a note of hostility entering his voice. “I mean it. Don’t mention it.”

The phone rang again. It was a private caller, which meant it might have been Kate. I picked it up.

“These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise,” said a voice I immediately recognized.

“Graham,” I said, “how’s it going?”

“J-man. Where you been?”

Graham Runkel was a world-class stoner who lived in Central Square, Cambridge, in a first-floor apartment that smelled like bong water. We went to high school together in Worcester, and when I was younger and irresponsible, I’d from time to time buy a nickel bag of marijuana from him. Less and less often in recent years, though, but once in a while I’d stop by his apartment-the Den of Iniquity, he called it-and smoke a joint with him. Kate disapproved, of course, thought it was juvenile behavior, which it was. Ganja could do things to your brain. A couple of years ago, Graham had canceled his subscription to High Times because he’d become convinced that the magazine was in fact owned and operated by the Drug Enforcement Administration to lure and entrap unsuspecting pot heads. He once confided to me after a few bong hits that the DEA put a tiny digital tracking device in the binding of each issue, which they located by means of an extensive satellite system.

Graham was a man of many talents. He was always rebuilding engines, working on his 1971 VW Beetle in the backyard of his apartment building. He worked in a record store that sold only vinyl. He was also a “Trekker,” a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, which to him was the height of culture. Only the original series-Classic Trek, as they called it; everything else was an abomination, he thought. He knew all the plot lines by heart and all the character names, even the minor, nonrecurring characters. He once told me that his first big crush had been on Lieutenant Uhura. He went to a lot of Star Trek conventions, and he’d turned a scale model of the Starship Enterprise into a bong.

Graham had also done jail time, not unlike some of my other buddies from the old neighborhood. In his early twenties he went through a rough patch and broke into a couple of houses and apartments, trying to pay back a marijuana deal, and he got caught.

Basically, Graham had ended up where I might have ended up if my parents hadn’t been so insistent I go to college. His parents considered college a waste of money and refused to pay for it. He got pissed off and dropped out of high school at the beginning of senior year.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “It’s been real crazy at work.”

“Haven’t heard from you in weeks, man. Weeks. Come on over to the Den of Iniquity-we’ll do a spliff, get baked, and I’ll show you what I’ve done to the Love Bug. El Huevito.”

“I’m awful sorry, Graham,” I said. “Another time, okay?”

Around noon, Festino appeared in my office door. “You hear about Teflon Trevor?” There was a look of unmistakable glee on his face.

“What?”

He snickered. “He had an appointment with the CEO of the Pavilion Group in Natick to do a meet-and-greet, a handshake kind of thing, and ink the deal. CEO’s the kind of guy you don’t keep waiting five seconds, you know? Real control freak. So what happens? One of the tires on Trevor’s Porsche blows out on the Pike. He missed the meeting, and the CEO was totally pissed.”

“So? We’ve all had car trouble. So he calls Pavilion on his cell and tells them, and they reschedule. Big deal. It happens.”

“That’s the beauty part, Tigger. His cell phone died too. Couldn’t make a call. So basically the CEO and everyone else is sitting around waiting for Trevor and he never shows up.” He squeezed out a dab of hand cleaner and looked up at me with a smile.

“Hate when that happens,” I said. I told him about how I’d just turned the Lockwood deal around, about playing the Aruba card. You could see Festino looking at me in a whole new way.

“You did that, Tigger?” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No, I just mean-wow, I’m impressed, that’s all. Never thought you had it in you.”

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” I said mysteriously.

After Festino left, I called Kurt.

“Good work,” he said.

“Thanks, man,” I said.

“No worries.”

I clicked on my Entronics e-mail in-box. “Listen,” I said. “A job just opened up here. Corporate Security officer. It says they prefer recent military experience. Experience with handguns. You’ve got experience with handguns, right?”

“Too much,” he said.

“You interested? Pay’s not bad. Better than driving a tow truck, I’ll bet.”

“What does it say about background check?”

I looked at the screen. “It says, ‘Must be able to pass full criminal, drug, and employment background check.’”

“There you go,” he said. “They see the DD and they stop reading the application.”

“Not if you explain the circumstances.”

“You don’t get that chance,” Kurt said. “But I appreciate the thought, man.”

“I know the Director of Corporate Security,” I said. “Dennis Scanlon. Good guy. He likes me. I could tell him about you.”

“Not that easy, buddy.”

“Worth a try, don’t you think? Wait till I tell him about the softball game. We need to make you a legal Entronics employee. He’ll get it.”

“He’s looking for a Corporate Security officer, not a pitcher.”

“You saying you’re not qualified?”

“Qualified isn’t the point, bud.”

“Let me make a call for you,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Hey,” I said, “it’s the least I can do.”

I picked up the phone and called Dennis Scanlon, the Director of Corporate Security, and told him briefly about Kurt. How he was in Special Forces, was a nice guy, seemed smart. Got a dishonorable discharge, but not for any bad reason.

Scanlon was immediately interested. He said he loved military types.

11

I had nothing against my smarmy brother-in-law, Craig Glazer, and his social-climbing wife, Susie; but my heart really squeezed for their poor, brilliant, maladjusted eight-year-old son, Ethan.

Let’s start with the kid’s name. Ethan is what you name a kid who you fully expect, even before he’s born, to get beat up on the playground, his lunch money stolen, his glasses snapped in two, and his face pushed into the dirt. Then there’s the fact that Susie and Craig were at once overprotective of their son, in their high-strung way, and totally uninterested in him. They seemed to spend as little time with him as possible. When Ethan wasn’t being beat up in his fancy private school, or whatever they did to nerds in private schools, he was being raised at home, in isolation from other kids who might have helped drag him into the world of normalcy, by his nanny, a Filipino woman named Corazon. As a result, they were raising a smart and creative and messed-up little boy, and I felt for him. I always hated it when kids like that got picked on.

They say life is high school with money, right? You’ve probably known people like me in school. I was never the jerk who beat you up and took your lunch money. I wasn’t the quarterback of the football team who stole your girl. I wasn’t jock enough to make it on any varsity team. I wasn’t the brain who did your homework for you, and I sure wasn’t one of the rich kids. But there was another guy, remember?

If you were the nerd with the wrong sneakers and the too-tight jeans in the Dungeons & Dragons Club, odds were I didn’t hang with you; but unlike most of your classmates, I didn’t mock you either. I just said hi and smiled at you when you walked down the hallway. If the bullies started picking on you, I was the one who tried to defuse the situation by pointing out that we’d better start being nice to you, because in ten years, after you founded a behemoth software company, we’d all be working for you.

So despite my feelings for Craig Glazer, his son and I bonded. I much preferred conversing with Ethan, visiting his weird little world of medieval torture chambers-his current obsession-than listening to Craig tell me about how his new pilot blew everyone away at the “up-fronts” in New York.

On the way home I stopped at a Borders Books superstore located in a mall that also had a Kmart and a Sports Authority. I wanted to pick up a present for poor little Ethan. I parked the car and tried once again to call Kate. The last three times I’d gotten our voice mail. I knew she’d left work early today so she could be home when her sister and Craig showed up. I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t answering the phone, but maybe she was out shopping or something.

This time, though, she answered. “Hey, babe,” she said in a boisterous voice. “Are you on your way back? Craig and Susie just got here.”

“Oh, great,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. “I can’t wait.”

She got it but she was having none of it. “They can’t wait to see you too,” she said. I could hear laughter in the background and the tinkling of glasses. “We’re making dinner.”

“We?”

“Don’t sound so worried!” she said. A loud guffaw that sounded like Craig. “Susie just got certified in CPR.”

More laughter in the background.

“I got some really great Porterhouse steaks from John Dewar’s,” she said. “Inch and a half thick.”

“Nice,” I said. “So, listen. I had my talk with Gordy.”

“No, I’m just going to crack the peppercorns a little,” she said to someone. “Au poivre.” And to me: “Go well?”

“He reamed me out,” I said.

“Oh, God.”

“It was a nightmare, Kate. But then I found out something about that guy at Lockwood-?”

“Can’t talk now, babe, I’m sorry. Come on home. We’re all famished. We’ll talk at home.”

Annoyed, I clicked off and went in to the bookstore. I browsed quickly around the children’s section, moved on to teens, and found two possibilities. Ethan, like most boys, had gone through a dinosaur phase and a planets phase, but then he’d taken a sharp left turn into an obsession with the Middle Ages. And I don’t mean King Arthur and Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table and the Sword in the Stone. It was instruments of medieval torture that floated his boat. You had to wonder about his parents’ marriage.

So here I was, Uncle Jason, the enabler. I went back and forth between a book on the Tower of London and one on the Aztecs, and the Aztecs won out. Better illustrations and more gruesome.

On the way to the cash register I passed by the Business Self-Help section, and a book caught my eye. It was called Business Is War! The book jacket had a greenish camouflage look to it.

I remembered Gordy mocking Mark Simkins: Candy-ass crapola.

This wasn’t candy-ass. This book promised to teach the businessman “proven, effective secrets of military leadership.” It looked promising.

I thought of Kurt and the way he’d helped me turn around the Lockwood account with one hardball phone call.

Then I found another book, face out on the shelf, called Victory Secrets of Attila the Hun, and then another one, called Patton on Leadership, and The Green Beret Manager, and pretty soon I was holding a tower of hardcover books and CDs.

I gulped at the cash register-hardcover books cost a lot, and CDs cost even more, but I justified it as an investment in my future-and asked them to gift-wrap the Aztec book for Ethan.

The adults were gathered in our cramped kitchen, and young Ethan was nowhere to be found. They were laughing loudly and drinking from grotesquely large martini glasses, and having such a good time that they didn’t notice me enter. Even though Susie was four years older, she and Katie looked exactly like each other. Susie’s eyelids were a bit heavier, and her mouth tilted down just a bit. Also, the passage of time as well as life in the lap of luxury seemed to have changed her a bit too. Susie had more fine lines around her eyes and forehead than Katie, no doubt from all that time on the beaches of St. Barths. Her hair also looked like it was cut and highlighted once a week at some eight-hundred-dollar-a-visit Beverly Hills salon.

My brother-in-law, Craig, was gesturing with his free hand. “Concrete,” he was saying. “Forget granite. Granite is so eighties.”

“Concrete?” I said as I walked into the kitchen and kissed my wife. “My boss keeps trying to fit me for concrete boots. I can’t figure it out.”

Polite chuckles. Craig was once a Jeopardy! contestant, so officially he knows everything. He doesn’t like to talk about the fact that he wiped out on the easiest question in Jeopardy! history-the answer was “potato”-and his entire winnings were a year’s supply of Turtle Wax.

“Hey, Jason,” Susie said, giving me a sisterly peck on the cheek and a half hug. “Ethan’s so excited to see you I think he’s going to jump out of his skin.”

“Jason!” exclaimed Craig like we were old buddies. He threw his bony arms around me. He seemed to get skinnier every time I saw him. He was wearing a pair of brand-new-looking blue jeans and an un-tucked Hawaiian print shirt and white Converse All Stars. I also noticed he’d shaved his head. Obviously the minoxidil wasn’t working. He used to have a big mop of curly hair that was thinning on top and made him look like Bozo the Clown. Also, he had new eyeglasses. For years, when he was writing experimental short stories for literary magazines, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. When he hit it rich, he went through a contact-lens phase until he discovered he had dry eyes. Then he started wearing whatever glasses were cutting-edge. For a couple of years in a row he wore different versions of nineteen-fifties geek frames. Now he was back to horn-rimmed specs.

“New glasses,” I said. “Or old?”

“New. Johnny picked them out for me.” I happened to know he and Susie had recently vacationed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with Johnny Depp. Kate had clipped out the article from People magazine and showed it to me.

“Johnny?” I said, just to make him say it. “Carson? Isn’t he dead?”

“Depp,” Craig said, with a fake-bashful shrug. “Hey, a little too much of the good life, huh?” He patted my stomach, and I almost lost it. “A week at the Ashram, you’ll drop that weight easy. Hiking, Bikram yoga, twelve hundred calories a day-it’s a boot camp for celebs. You’ll love it.”

Kate saw me revving up to say something I might regret, so she quickly interrupted me. “Let me get you a martini.” She hoisted a silver martini shaker and poured into one of the giant glasses.

“I didn’t even know we had martini glasses,” I said. “From Grammy Spencer?”

“From Craig and Susie,” Kate said. “Aren’t they special?”

“Special,” I agreed.

“They’re Austrian,” said Craig. “The same glassworks that make those amazing Bordeaux glasses.”

“Careful,” Kate said, handing me a glass. “Hundred dollars a stem.”

“Oh, there’s plenty more where they came from,” said Craig.

“Did you notice Susie’s brooch?” Kate said.

I had noticed a big ugly gaudy misshapen thing on Susie’s blouse but I thought the polite thing to do was not to embarrass her by pointing it out. “Is it a starfish?” I asked.

“You like it?” Susie said.

Yep, it was a gold starfish covered in sapphires and rubies and must have cost a fortune. I’ve never understood why women like pins and brooches so much anyway. But this was a doozy.

“Oh, Suze, it’s fabulous,” Kate said. “Where’d you get it?”

“Craig got it for me,” Susie said. “Was it Harry Winston or Tiffany’s?”

“Tiffany’s,” Craig said. “I saw it and thought it was so Susie that I had to get it.”

“Jean Schlumberger,” Susie said. “I would never have spent that kind of money on a piece of jewelry. And it wasn’t even my birthday or our anniversary or any special occasion.”

“Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” Craig said, and he put his arm around her, and she gave him a kiss, and I wanted to puke.

I also had to change the subject as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t take any more, so I said, “Why were you guys talking about concrete?”

“They want us to put in new countertops,” said Kate. She gave me a quick, conspiratorial look.

“We just got rid of our granite countertops in our Marin County place after Steven had us over,” said Craig.

This time I didn’t ask whether he meant Steven Spielberg or Steven Segal. “Yeah, I’ve always wanted my kitchen to look like some socialist worker’s communal flat in East Berlin,” I said.

Craig flashed his Lumineer smile. He looked at me with kindly condescension, as if I were some Fresh Air Fund kid. “How’s the corporate world?”

“It’s okay,” I said, nodding. “Gets crazy sometimes, but it’s okay.”

“Hey, your boss, Dick Hardy, invited me to the Entronics Invitational last year at Pebble Beach. Nice guy. Man, I got to golf with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh-that was a blast.”

I got his point. He was a buddy of the CEO of my company, whom I’d never even met, and he got to hang with all the celebs because, well, he was a celeb. I couldn’t imagine Craig golfing. “Neat” was all I said.

“I could put in a word for you with Dick,” Craig said.

“Don’t waste your time. He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“It’s cool. I’ll just tell him to make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Craig. I appreciate the thought, though.”

“You work hard, man. I really admire that. I get paid all this insane money for basically playing, but you really work your ass off. Doesn’t he, Katie?”

“Oh, he does,” said Kate.

“I don’t think I could do what you do,” Craig went on. “The crap you’ve got to put up with, huh?”

“You have no idea,” I said.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told them I wanted to change out of my work clothes. Instead, I looked for Ethan and found him in the tiny guest room upstairs, which was supposed to be the future baby’s room. He was lying on his stomach on the blue wall-to-wall carpet reading a book, and he looked up when I entered.

“Hey, Uncle Jason,” he said. Ethan had a lisp-something else for his classmates to make fun of him about, like he needed anything more-and glasses.

“Heya, buddy,” I said, sitting down next to him. I handed him the gift-wrapped book. “You probably don’t need another book, right?”

“Thanks,” he said, sitting up and tearing right into it. “Oh, this is an excellent one,” he said.

“You have it already.”

He nodded solemnly. “I think it’s the finest in the series.”

“I was debating between this one and one on the Tower of London.”

“This was a good choice. I needed another copy anyway, for the Marin house.”

“Okay, good. But tell me something, Ethan. I’m still not clear on why the Aztecs were so into human sacrifice.”

“That’s kind of complicated.”

“I bet you can explain it to me.”

“Well, it was sort of to keep the whole universe moving. They believed that there was this kind of spirit in the human bloodstream, but mostly in the heart? And you had to keep giving it to the gods or the universe would just stop.”

“I see. That makes sense.”

“So when things were going really bad they just did more human sacrifice.”

“That happens where I work, too.”

He cocked his head. “Oh yeah?”

“Sort of.”

“The Aztecs cooked and skinned and ate humans, too.”

“That we don’t do.”

“You want to see a picture of the Chair of Spikes?”

“Definitely,” I said, “but we should probably go downstairs and have dinner, don’t you think?”

He stuck out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. “We don’t have to, you know. We can just tell them to bring it up to us. That’s what I do a lot.”

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet and lifting him up. “We’ll both go. Keep each other company.”

“I’ll stay up here,” Ethan said.

The adults had switched to red wine, a Bordeaux that Craig had brought. I’m sure it was extremely expensive, though it tasted like dirty sneakers. I could smell steaks in the broiler. Susie was talking about a famous TV star who was in rehab, but Craig interrupted her to say to me, “Couldn’t take any more torture, huh?”

“He’s great,” I said. “He told me that when things got really bad the Aztecs sacrificed more humans.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “He’ll talk your ear off. Hope he hasn’t discouraged you guys from having kids of your own. They don’t all turn out like Ethan.”

“He’s a good kid,” I said.

“And we love him to pieces,” Craig said in a rote voice, like a disclaimer in a drug ad. “So, I want to hear about your work life. I’m serious.”

“Oh, it’s boring,” I said. “No celebs.”

“I want to hear about it,” Craig said. “I’m serious. I need to know what regular people’s work life is like, especially if I’m going to write about it. I consider it research.”

I looked at him and mentally went through about a dozen really nasty and sarcastic replies, but luckily my cell phone went off. I forgot I’d still had it clipped onto my belt.

“There you go,” Craig said. “That’s got to be the office, right?” He looked from his wife to Kate. “His boss or something. Something has to be done right now. God, I love the way they crack the whip in the corporate world.”

I got up and went into the living room and answered the cell. “Hey,” a voice said. I immediately recognized Kurt.

“How’s it going?” I said, happy to be yanked away from Craig’s klieg lights.

“I catch you during dinner?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Thanks for talking to the Corporate Security guy. I downloaded the job application and filled out the form and e-mailed it back, and I got a call from the guy. He wants me to come in for an interview tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’re good to go,” I said. “He must be seriously interested in you.”

“Or desperate, I figure. Hey, so maybe I can grab you for a few minutes in the morning, talk on the phone. Get your take on Entronics and what the security problems are, all that. I like to be prepared.”

“How’s right now?” I said.

12

We met at a place in Harvard Square called Charlie’s Kitchen, where they have this excellent double-cheeseburger special. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner: Craig had pretty much killed my appetite, plus Kate had overcooked the steaks. Too many martinis. She didn’t look too happy at first about my abandoning her little dinner party, but I told her a work crisis had arisen, and that seemed to satisfy her. In fact, she seemed a little relieved, because she could see where the dinner was going, and it wasn’t pretty.

I didn’t recognize him at first, because his goatee and mullet were gone. He’d gotten a haircut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, but not military short. It was parted on the side, looked stylish. He was a good-looking guy, I realized, and now he looked like a successful business executive, only he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

Kurt just ordered his regular, a glass of ice water. He said that when he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, fresh, clean cold water was a luxury. You drank the water there, he said, you’d get the shits for days. Now he drank it whenever he could.

He said he’d already eaten supper. When my plate arrived-a big old double cheeseburger and a mountain of fries with a plastic tankard of watery beer-Kurt took one look and scowled. “You shouldn’t eat that shit,” he said.

“You sound like my wife.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might want to think about losing a little weight. You’ll feel better.”

Him, too? “I feel fine.”

“You don’t work out, do you?”

“Who has time?”

“You make time.”

“I make time to sleep late,” I said.

“We got to get you to the gym, do some cardio and some free weights. Don’t you belong to a gym?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I pay like a hundred bucks a month for a membership at CorpFit, so I figure I don’t actually have to go there.”

“CorpFit? That’s one of those pussy smoothie-bar Evian-water places, right?”

“Since I’ve never gone, I really wouldn’t know.”

“Nah. I got to take you to a real gym. Where I go.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping he’d forget we ever talked about working out, but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who forgot anything. I took a look at my mug of beer and called the waiter over and ordered a Diet Coke.

“You still driving that rental?” Kurt said.

“Yeah.”

“When are you getting your car back?”

“I think they said middle of next week.”

“That’s too long. Let me give them a call.”

“That’d be great.”

“You have your Entronics ID with you?”

I took it out and put it on the table. He examined it closely. “Man, do you know how easy it is to counterfeit one of these babies?”

“Never thought about it.”

“I wonder if your security chief ever thought about it.”

“You don’t want to piss him off,” I said, tucking into the burger. “You have a résumé?”

“I can throw one together.”

“In the right format and everything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell you what. E-mail me what you’ve got, and I’ll go over it, make sure it’s in good shape.”

“Hey, that would be awesome.”

“No problem. Now, if I had to predict, I’d say that Scanlon is a tough interview. Though he’ll probably ask you the standards, like, ‘What’s your greatest weakness?’ And, ‘Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to solve a problem.’ Like that. How you work on a team.”

“Sounds like I can handle that,” he said.

“Make sure you get there on time. Early, in fact.”

“I’m a military guy, remember? We’re all about punctuality.”

“You’re not going to dress like that for the interview, are you?”

“Any idea how many uniform inspections I had to endure?” he said. “Don’t worry about me. There’s no corporation in the world more uptight than the U.S. military. But I want to know some details about your access control system.”

“All I know is, you wave this card at one of the boxes and you go in.”

He asked me a bunch more questions, and I told him what little I knew. “Your wife doesn’t mind you staying out late?” he asked.

“I wear the pants in the household,” I told him with a straight face. “Fact is, I think she was glad to get rid of me.”

“You still duking it out with that guy Trevor for the promotion?”

“Yeah.” I told him about my “interview” with Gordy. “He’s not going to give it to me, though. I can tell. He’s just yanking my chain.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He says I don’t have the killer instinct. And Trevor’s a superstar. His numbers are always good, but they’re especially good this year. He’s just a top goddamned salesman. There’s also Brett Gleason. He’s kind of a lunk, but he has that animal aggressiveness that Gordy likes. Gordy says it’s going to be one of us three, but I’d put money on Trevor. He’s got a big demonstration before the big swinging dicks at Fidelity Investments on Monday, and if our monitors win the shoot-out-which they will-then he lands Fidelity. Which is huge. Means he wins. And I’m screwed.”

“Look, I don’t know anything about how things work in business, but believe me, I’ve been in my share of situations that looked hopeless. And the one thing I do know for sure is that war’s unpredictable. It’s volatile. Complex. Generates confusion. That’s why they talk about the ‘fog of war.’ You often can’t believe what you see, and you can never be certain about your enemy’s plans and capabilities.”

“What does that have to do with getting a promotion?”

“I’m saying the only way to guarantee a loss is if you don’t fight. You’ve got to go into every battle knowing you can win.” He took a long swig of ice water. “Make sense?”

13

In the morning I slipped out of bed quietly at six, before the alarm went off. After years of getting up at six, my body was programmed. I could hear Kate’s labored breathing, from too much booze last night. I went downstairs to make coffee, bracing myself to encounter Craig, me precaffeine and thus vulnerable, in case he was an early riser. Then I remembered that six in the morning was three in the morning California time, and he was likely to still be asleep, especially after a late night.

The kitchen and dining room were littered with the detritus of the dinner, dishes and serving platters and silverware heaped everywhere. Kate and Susie had grown up with housekeepers picking up after them, and Susie still had someone who cooked meals and cleaned up afterward. Kate…well, Kate sometimes lived as if she did. Not as if I had the right to complain about it, since I don’t have that excuse. I just hate doing dishes and am a slob by nature. A different excuse.

Wineglasses and martini glasses and Grammy Spencer’s cordial glasses cluttered the kitchen counters, and I couldn’t find the coffeemaker. Finally, I located it and put some coffee up to brew, accidentally spilling some of the ground coffee onto the green Corian countertop. Concrete, over my dead body.

I heard a clinking sound, and I turned around. There at the kitchen table, concealed behind a tall stack of pots and pans, was little Ethan. He looked small and frail and like the eight-year-old he was, not the scarily precocious kid he normally seemed to be. He was eating Froot Loops from a giant soup tureen he must have found in the china cabinet. The spoon he was using was a sterling silver soup ladle.

“Morning, Ethan,” I said, quietly so as not to wake the slumbering party animals upstairs.

Ethan didn’t reply.

“Hey there, buddy,” I said, a bit louder.

“Sorry, Uncle Jason,” Ethan replied. “I’m not really a morning person.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.” I went up to him, about to muss his hair, but stopped myself when I remembered how much he disliked people mussing his hair. Come to think of it, I never liked that much either. Still don’t. I gave him a pat on the back and cleared myself a place, pushing aside a stack of Grammy Spencer’s blue Spode china plates, slick with congealed grease from the overcooked steaks. “You mind if I share some of those Froot Loops?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s yours anyway.”

Kate must have bought them for Ethan when she went shopping yesterday. Her husband gets burlap flakes and twigs. I made a note to register a complaint later. I got a regular cereal bowl from the kitchen cabinet and poured out a generous heap of the carnival-colored little Os and doused it with some of the contraband whole milk from Ethan’s carton. I hoped there’d be some left after our guests were gone.

I went out to the porch to get the morning papers. We got two-the Boston Globe for Kate, and the Boston Herald for me, the one my dad always read. When I returned to the kitchen, Ethan said: “Mommy said you went out last night to avoid Daddy.”

I laughed hollowly. “I had to go out on business.”

He nodded as if he saw right through me. He jammed an immense spoonful of cereal into his little mouth. The ladle barely fit. “Daddy can be annoying,” he said. “If I could drive, I wouldn’t be home very much either.”

Ricky Festino intercepted me as I was about to enter my office. “They’re here,” he said.

“Who?”

“The body disposal team. The cleaners. Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction.”

“Ricky, it’s too early, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I switched on my office lights.

Festino grabbed my shoulder. “The merger integration team, asshole. The chain-saw consultants. They’ve been here since before I got in. Six guys, four of them from McKinsey, and two guys from Tokyo. They’ve got clipboards and calculators and handhelds and goddamned digital cameras. They just came from Royal Meister headquarters in Texas, and let me tell you, they left a trail of bodies in Dallas. I heard about it from a buddy there, called me last night, warned me.”

“Slow down,” I said. “They’re probably just here to figure out how to make the two organizations mesh.”

“Boy, are you living in fantasyland.” I noticed he was sweating already. His blue button-down shirt was soaked through under his arms. “They’re looking for redundancies, dude. Identifying non-value-adding activities. That means me. Even my wife says I don’t add value.”

“Ricky.”

“They say who stays and who goes. This is like corporate Survivor, only the losers don’t get to go on Jay Leno.” He took the little bottle of hand cleaner out of his pocket and began juggling it nervously.

“How long are they here for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, maybe a week. My buddy in Dallas told me that they spent a lot of time pulling up everyone’s performance reviews. The top twenty percent got invited to keep their jobs. Everyone else is deadwood to be lopped off.”

I closed my office door. “I’ll do what I can to protect you,” I said.

“If you’re here,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” I said.

“Because Gordy hates you?”

“Gordy hates everyone.”

“Except his butt boy, Trevor. If I still have a job and that douche bag becomes my boss, I swear I’m going to go Columbine. Come in here with an Uzi and do my own ‘performance review.’”

“I think you’ve had too much caffeine,” I said.

The day was long and exhausting. Rumors of impending disaster had begun to run through the halls.

At the end of the day, as I rode the elevator down to the lobby, the other passengers and I watched the flat-screen monitor mounted on the elevator wall. It showed sports news (the Red Sox were a half game ahead of the Yankees in the American League East standings), news headlines (another suicide bombing in Iraq), and selected stock quotes (Entronics was down a buck). The word of the day was “sapient.” Today’s “celebrity” birthdays were Cher and Honoré de Balzac. A lot of the guys find the elevator TV thing really annoying, but I don’t mind it. It takes my mind off the fact that I’m in a sealed steel coffin dangling from cables that might snap at any moment.

When the elevator doors opened at the lobby, I was surprised to see Kurt standing there, talking to the Corporate Security Director, Dennis Scanlon. Kurt was wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt, and striped silver rep tie, and he looked like a vice president. Clipped to his left lapel was a blue temporary Entronics badge. The Corporate Security area was off the lobby of the building-I guess because that’s where the Command Center and all the other security facilities were.

“Hey, man,” I said. “Why are you still here? I thought your interview was this morning.”

“It was.” He smiled.

“Meet our new Corporate Security officer,” said Scanlon. He was a small, froglike man with no neck and a squat body.

“Really?” I said. “That’s great. Smart hire.”

“We’re all excited to have him join us,” Scanlon said. “Kurt’s already made some very shrewd suggestions for security improvements-he really knows the technology.”

Kurt shrugged modestly.

Scanlon excused himself, and Kurt and I stood there for a few seconds. “So that was fast work,” I said.

“I start Monday. There’s an orientation and a boatload of paperwork to fill out, all that crap. But hey, it’s a real job.”

“That’s really great,” I said.

“Listen, man, thank you.”

“For what?”

“I mean it. I owe you one. You don’t know me very well, but one thing you’ll learn is, I never forget a favor.”

I joined Kate in bed after checking my e-mail one last time for the night. She was wearing her usual bedtime attire-extra-large sweat-pants and extra-large T-shirt-and watching TV. During a commercial break, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance last night to ask you about your interview with Gordy.”

“That’s all right. It went okay. As okay as an interview with Gordy could go. He basically taunted and threatened me and tried to pump me up and deflate me all at the same time.”

She rolled her eyes. “What a jerk. You think you’re going to get the job?”

“Who knows. Probably not. I told you, Trevor’s more the Gordy type-aggressive and ruthless. Gordy sees me as a wimp. A nice guy, but a wimp.”

A really annoying commercial came on, and she pressed the mute button. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. At least you tried.”

“That’s how I figure.”

“As long as you let him know you want it.”

“I did.”

“But do you really?”

“Want it? Yeah, I think I do. It’ll be more work and more stress, but I think if you keep your head down around there, you don’t go anywhere.”

“I think that’s right.”

“My dad always used to say that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

“You’re not your dad.”

“No. He worked in a factory all day and hated it.” I was lost in thought for a moment, remembering my dad’s hunched shoulders at the supper table, the missing fingertips on his right hand. His long silences, the defeated look in his eyes. Like he was resigned to whatever crap life handed him. Sometimes he reminded me of a dog whose owner beat him every day and cowered whenever anyone came near and just wanted to be left alone. But he was a good guy, my dad. He didn’t let me get away with cutting school, and he made sure I did my homework, and he didn’t want me to live the same life as him, and only now was I beginning to realize how much I owed the old man.

“Jason? You know, you’re really good with Ethan. I love the way you are with him. I think you’re the only adult who pays him any attention. And I really appreciate it.”

“I like the poor kid. I really do. He’s kind of warped, I know, but deep down-I think he knows his parents are jerks.”

She nodded, gave a sad smile. “You identify with him, maybe?”

“Me? He’s the polar opposite of me when I was a kid. I was Mister Outgoing.”

“I mean, you were an only child with parents who weren’t around much.”

“My parents weren’t around much because they worked their asses off. Craig and Susie are too busy going to Majorca with Bobby De Niro. They don’t want to be around their son.”

“I know. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” I looked at her.

There were tears in her eyes. “We’d give anything to have a baby, and they’re lucky enough to have one and they ignore him or treat him like…” She shook her head. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Am I allowed to tell them what I think about the way they’re raising Ethan?”

“No. It’ll just piss them off, and they’ll say, what do you know, you don’t have a kid. And it won’t make a difference anyway. Besides, the way you connect with Ethan-that’s what’ll really make a difference in the kid’s life.”

“But it would still be fun to tell Craig off.”

She smiled but shook her head again.

“Hey,” I said, “I got Kurt a job at Entronics.”

“Kurt.”

“Kurt Semko. The Special Forces guy I met.”

“Right, Kurt. The tow truck driver. What kind of job?”

“Corporate security.”

“Security guard?”

“No, the security guards in the building are rent-a-cops, contracted out. This is to do the inside stuff-loss prevention, monitoring the comings and goings, whatever…”

“You don’t really know what they do, do you?”

“I have no idea. But the security director was thrilled to hire him.”

“Well, then, you did a good thing for everyone. It’s win-win, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s win-win.”

14

The next morning I unwrapped the CD box of Business Is War! and popped the first disk into the CD player in the Geo Metro. The narrator sounded like George C. Scott as Patton. He was barking out orders about “your battle plan” and “the chain of command” and saying, “highly trained and cohesive units with good leadership suffer the fewest casualties.”

I was so totally pumped from listening to Old Blood and Guts, the four-star general, as I imagined the narrator-though he was probably, in reality, a paunchy little dweeb with thick glasses who hadn’t been able to make it in AM radio-that I was ready to barge into Gordy’s office and just demand the promotion. I was ready to kick ass and take names.

But by the time I got to the office, I’d come to my senses. Besides, I had to drive to Revere to demo a thirty-six-inch screen for the Wonderland Greyhound Park-the dog track. Though I didn’t think the guys who go to the dog track would care about the difference between a regular old TV monitor and a plasma flat panel. I didn’t return from Revere until midafternoon, which was just as well. Gordy tends to be in a better mood after lunch.

I dragged Festino into my office and had him read over a couple of contracts I was hammering out. No one was better than Festino at deconstructing a contract. The problem was, he didn’t sign too many of them. He reminded me of how Ethan, when he was a couple of years old, had memorized this potty-training DVD his parents constantly played for him. Ethan had every word and song memorized. He became an expert in potty theory. But for years he refused to use the potty. Festino was like that. He was a genius at contracts but couldn’t land one.

“Uh, Houston, we have a problem,” Festino said. “Paperwork says ‘FOB destination,’ but they need it shipped to Florida, right? No way in hell the equipment’s going to get to their loading dock before close of business.”

“Crap. You’re right.”

“Plus, I don’t think we want responsibility for the equipment in transit.”

“No way. But they’re going to flip if I tell ’em to change the paperwork.”

“Not a problem. Call ’em, tell ’em to authorize an override, change it to ‘FOB origin.’ That way they get the equipment six weeks earlier-remind ’em that ‘FOB origin’ orders go out the door first.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good work, man. You’re right.”

I was on my way to see Gordy when I noticed Trevor leaving Joan Tureck’s office. He looked uncharacteristically grim.

“How’s it going there, Trevor?” I said.

“Great,” he said in a flat voice. “Just great.”

Before I had a chance to express to him my deepest, most heartfelt condolences over his standing up the CEO of one of America’s largest movie-theater chains, he was gone, depriving me of the opportunity, and Joan was beckoning me into her office with a flick of her left hand.

I was immediately on alert. Trevor had looked like he’d been kicked in the family jewels. I suspected Joan had been the bearer of bad news and that I might be next in line.

“Sit down, Jason,” she said. “Congratulations on the Lockwood deal. I never thought you were going to close it, but I guess we should never underestimate you.”

I nodded, smiled modestly. “Sometimes you just have to say the right words, and it all falls into place,” I said. “I figure that ought to demonstrate my meat-eating credentials to Gordy.”

“Dick Hardy already put out the press release on the Lockwood deal,” she said. “I assume you saw it.”

“Not yet.”

Joan got up and closed her office door. She turned to face me. She heaved a long, loud sigh. Not a good sigh. The circles under her eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them before. She went back to her desk. “Gordy’s not going to move me into Crawford’s position,” she said wearily.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something about me Gordy doesn’t like.”

“There’s something about everyone that Gordy doesn’t like. Plus there’s the fact that you’re a woman.”

“And not one whose pants he wants to get into.”

“Call me naïve, but isn’t that illegal?”

“Yeah, you’re naïve, Jason. Anyway, it’s an age-old tradition, using consolidation as an excuse to shed the employees you don’t like.”

“He can’t be that blatant.”

“Of course not. Gordy’s smart. There’s always a way to justify laying someone off. I didn’t make my number because you guys didn’t make yours last quarter. The merger team thinks I’m an unnecessary layer of management anyway. Fat to be trimmed. They’ve decided to get rid of the AM job entirely. So Gordy’s just going to fill Crawford’s DVP slot. You or Trevor or Brett. Meaning that whoever gets the nod is going to be under a lot of pressure. That’s an awfully big job now.”

“He wants to lay you off?” Now I felt really bad. Here I was, angling for a promotion, and she was losing her job. “I’m so sorry.” Then the unworthy thought came into my head: I’d just asked her to speak up for me, and she had corporate cooties. Would it rub off on me?

“It’s fine, really it is,” she said. “I’ve been in talks with FoodMark for a while.”

“That’s the company that runs food courts in shopping malls?” I tried to say it neutrally, but I guess I didn’t succeed at hiding what I thought.

Her smile was wan and a little embarrassed. “It’s not a bad place, and it’s a lot less pressure than this job. Plus, Sheila and I have been wanting to travel more. Enjoy life together. It’s just as well, as it turns out. Plasma displays or burritos, what’s the difference?”

I didn’t want to express my condolences, but congratulations didn’t seem in order either. What the hell do you say? “I guess it’s all good, then.”

“Well,” she said. “Did I ever tell you I’m a vegetarian?”

“Maybe that’s the real reason,” I said, a halfhearted attempt at black humor. I thought of Kate’s steaks a couple of nights ago, which were unappetizing charred slabs, enough to turn anyone into a strict vegan.

“Maybe,” she said with a rueful smile. “Whatever. But you might want to go easy on Trevor Allard today. He’s had a tough break.”

“What happened?”

“He just lost the biggest deal of his life.”

“You’re talking about Pavilion?”

She nodded, compressed her lips.

“All for missing one appointment because of a flat tire?”

“Once would have been acceptable. But not twice.”

“Twice?”

“This morning he was on his way to the rescheduled meeting with Watkins, the CEO of Pavilion. Well, guess what? His Porsche died on the road again.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish. Electrical system malfunctioned. A real freak coincidence, his car dying two days in a row. He hasn’t even had a chance to get his cell phone replaced, so he couldn’t call Watkins’s office in time. And that was it. They’ve signed with Toshiba.”

“Jesus!” I said. “Just like that?”

“The deal was already factored into next quarter’s numbers as committed business. Which is a disaster for all of us, especially with the integration team poking around in every corner. All of you, I should say, since I’m out of here. Though I’m sure you’re more focused on what this does for your chances at the promotion.”

“No, not at all,” I protested lamely.

“The tables seem to have turned. Now it looks like you drive a bigger piece of the number than either one of them.”

“Temporarily, yeah.”

“Gordy’s all about momentum, and right now it’s on your side. Let me just say one thing, though. I know how much you want this job. But be careful what you ask for. You never know what you might be stepping into.”

Ten minutes later I was checking my e-mail, still feeling dazed, when I noticed Brett Gleason standing in my office doorway.

Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t good. “Hey, Brett,” I said. “I thought you had a presentation at Bank of America.”

“I lost the directions,” he said.

“To Bank of America? They’re on Federal Street, you know that.”

“Lot of floors. Lot of offices.”

“Can’t you just call your contact?”

“Guy’s new and he’s not listed on their website, and besides, I don’t remember his last name.”

“You don’t have the guy’s number?” Why, I wondered, was he in my office? Gleason talked to me as little as possible, and he sure never asked my help on anything.

“That’s gone too.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“You think it’s funny?”

“I’m not laughing, Brett. What are you talking about?”

“The Blue Screen of Death.”

“You had a disk crash or something?”

“Permanent and fatal error. Someone screwed with my computer.” He gave me a sidelong look. “Which also wiped out my Palm Pilot when I hot-synced it this morning. All my contacts, all my records-they’re all gone. The IT dweebs say it’s totally unrecoverable. Some prank, huh?” He turned to leave.

I thought, but didn’t say, that if Brett had printed out his schedule, he wouldn’t have had this problem, but I kept my mouth shut. “You don’t seriously think someone did this to you, Brett, do you?” I said to Gleason’s back.

But he kept going.

An instant message popped up on my computer screen. It was Gordy, and he wanted to see me immediately.

15

Gordy was wearing a crisp white button-down shirt with a big blue KG monogram on the pocket. He didn’t shake my hand as I entered. He stayed seated behind his desk.

“You locked in Lockwood,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Booya.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t know how you finally got ’em to sign on the dotted line, but I’m impressed. We needed the deal. Bad. Especially the way Allard and Gleason’ve been dropping balls lately.”

“Have they? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Please,” Gordy said. “Christ. Practice your bullshit on someone who doesn’t know better. Gleason blew off a presentation at Bank of America. Gave them some lame excuse about his computer getting wiped out or something. He’s roadkill, far as I’m concerned. And now Trevor.” He shook his head. “Fact is, I like golf as much as the next guy”-he gestured toward his putter-“but you don’t blow off a seventy-million-dollar client for nine holes at the Myopia Hunt Club.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, truly surprised. That didn’t sound like Trevor at all.

“I wish,” said Gordy. “He doesn’t know I know it, but I got the lowdown from Watkins at the Pavilion Group. I tried to turn it around, but Watkins wasn’t having any of it.”

“Trevor was playing golf?”

“He figured he’d get away with it. Stood up Watkins two days in a row claiming car trouble. One day he says he’s got a flat, the next day the alternator goes or something, and both days he says his cell phone isn’t working.”

“Yeah, but all that really happened,” I said.

“Uh-uh. And you know where the idiot calls Watkins’s office from? Right from the links. Number came up on the secretary’s caller ID.” He shook his head, disgusted. “I just can’t defend that. Of course he denies it, but…Well, anyway, I’m inclined to give Allard another chance. He’s a true meat-eater. But I got something for you.”

“Tell me.”

“Who’s that guy from NEC that everyone likes?”

“You mean Jim Letasky? The guy who owns the SignNetwork account?”

“Yeah, him. I want to land SignNetwork. Sounds like the only way is to get Letasky on our team. Think you’re high-test enough to recruit him? Steal him away?”

“From NEC? He lives in Chicago, got a wife and kids, plus he probably already makes good money.”

“Sounds like you’re giving up before you even start,” Gordy said. “I thought you wanted Crawford’s job.”

“No, it’s just-that won’t be easy. But I’ll try.”

“Try? How about, ‘Done, Gordy’?”

“Done, Gordy,” I said.

I wasted no time trying to reach James Letasky. I found his office phone number on the NEC website, but I wanted to call him at home-the more discreet approach, I figured. Letasky’s home number was unlisted, unfortunately. So I waited until Gordy had gone out for a meeting, and I stopped by his secretary’s cubicle. She kept his massive database of names and contacts, and I thought she might know how to get hold of Letasky’s home phone.

“Jim Letasky?” Melanie said. “Sure. Easy.”

“You sound like you know the guy.”

She shook her head. She jutted out her lower lip as she tapped at her keyboard, lightning fast. “Here you go.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Magic.”

“You have all the NEC salesmen’s home phone numbers?”

“Naw. Kent’s been trying to recruit Letasky for years. I’m always sending his wife flowers.” She looked innocent. She had no idea that her boss was pretending he barely knew who Letasky was. “But Letasky’s unmovable. You want the name of her favorite florist? I have it here, too.”

“No thanks, Mel,” I said. “I’m not going to be sending flowers.”

16

After work, I drove to Willkie Auto Body to pick up my Acura. On the way, I listened some more to Old Blood and Guts. He was growling something about how “The only way to survive an ambush is to return fire immediately and run right through the enemy shooters, forcing your enemy to take cover.”

I left the Geo Metro at the body shop, to be picked up by Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Luckily I checked the trunk, where I’d almost left the bag of corporate self-help books.

There’s one upside to getting into a car accident: When you get your car back from the shop it looks brand-new. The Acura looked like I’d just driven it off the lot. When I popped the General into the CD player, he sounded even more commanding on my Acura’s surround-sound system.

Then I called Kurt Semko on the cell phone and told him I was maybe five miles from his house-he’d told me he rented a house in Holliston-and I had a present for him. He said, sure, come on, stop by.

I found it easily. He lived in a suburban development, in a small raised ranch, red brick, white clapboard, black shutters, like you’d see in every single suburb in America. It was very small, and it was well cared for, recently painted. What was I expecting, an old Quonset hut, maybe?

I parked in the driveway, which was jet-black and obviously recently sealed. I took the stack of books from the trunk and rang Kurt’s doorbell. I’d finished reading them, and besides, I thought Kurt needed them more than me.

He came to the door in a white T-shirt.

“Welcome to the Fortress of Solitude.” He opened the screen door for me. “I’m upgrading the electrical service.”

“You’re doing it yourself?”

He nodded. “It’s a rental, but I got tired of the circuit breakers tripping all the time. Hundred amps just doesn’t cut it. Plus the wiring’s old. So I’m putting in a four-hundred-amp service panel. Figured I’d get rid of the old aluminum branch circuit wiring while I’m at it.”

He noticed the stack of books in my arms. “Those for me?”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

He scanned the stack. “Dog Eat Dog: Surviving the Business World,” he read. “The Take No Prisoners Guide to the Corporation. What’s all this?”

“Some books I thought you might find useful,” I said, setting them down on the hall table. “Now that you’re working in the corporate world.”

“Team Secrets of the Navy SEALs: The Elite Military Force’s Leadership Principles for Business,” he said. He seemed amused. “Corporate Warrior. This is all military, chief. I don’t need to read about it. Seen enough.”

I felt like an idiot. Here was a guy who knew all this stuff from real-world experience, and I was giving him a bunch of books for corporate armchair warriors. Plus, what if he was one of those guys who never read books? “Yeah, but, see, they’re all about how to apply what you already know to a world you don’t.”

He nodded and said, “I see. Got it.”

“Check ’em out,” I said. “See what you think.”

“I will, chief. I will. I’m all about self-improvement.”

“Cool. Hey, so, listen. I need a favor.”

“Name it. Come on in. I’ll get you a drink. Show you some of my war trophies.”

His house was just as neat inside as it was outside. Clean and orderly and plain. Almost a temporary look to it. His refrigerator had nothing in it except bottles of Poland Spring water, Gatorade, and protein shakes. I wouldn’t be getting a Budweiser.

“Gatorade?”

“Water’s fine,” I said.

He tossed me a little bottle of water, took one for himself, and we went to his bare living room-a couch, a recliner, an old TV-and sat down.

I told him a little about the race for the divisional vice president job, how Gleason had blown off an important presentation at Bank of America and Trevor had lost the Pavilion deal. But Trevor was doing a demo at Fidelity on Monday, I said. That would seal the deal. He’d be back in Gordy’s good graces.

Then I told him about how Gordy wanted me to recruit Jim Letasky from NEC. “It’s sort of like ‘Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West,’” I said.

“How so?”

“An impossible assignment. He’s setting me up to fail. So he can give the promotion to Trevor.”

“Why’re you so sure you’re gonna fail?”

“Because I found out from Gordy’s secretary that Gordy’s tried a bunch of times before, and the guy lives in Chicago with his wife and kids, and he has no reason to move to Boston and start a new job with Entronics.”

“You senior enough to recruit the guy?”

“Technically, I guess. I’m a district manager. But I’ve met the guy, and we like each other.”

“Know him well?”

“No, that’s the thing. Not well at all. I’ve done the usual research, made a bunch of calls, but I haven’t come up with anything I can really sink my teeth into. You don’t happen to know anyone in NEC corporate security, do you?”

“Sorry.” He smiled. “Why, you want a backgrounder on him?”

“Is that even something you can do?”

“All you gotta know is where to look.”

“Think you could find out what his exact compensation package is at NEC?”

“Betcha I can do a lot more than that.”

“That would be awesome.”

“Give me a couple days. I’ll see what I can throw together. Actionable intelligence, we used to call it.”

“Thanks, man.”

He shrugged. “No thanks required. You put it on the line for me, bro.”

“Me?”

“With Scanlon, I mean. You vouched for me.”

“That? That’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, Jason,” he said. “It’s not nothing.”

“Well, happy to do it. So what kind of war trophies do you have?”

He got up and opened the door to what looked like a spare bedroom. It smelled of gunpowder and other things, acrid and musty at the same time. Arranged on a long bench in neat rows were some strange-looking weapons. He picked up an old rifle with a smooth wooden stock. “Check this out. A World-War-II-vintage Mauser K98. Standard-issue infantry weapon in the Wehrmacht. Bought it off an Iraqi farmer who claimed he shot down one of our Apache helicopters with it.” He chuckled. “Chopper didn’t have a scratch.”

“Does it work?”

“No idea. I wouldn’t want to try it.” He picked up a pistol, showed it to me. He seemed to want me to handle it, but I just looked. “Looks like a Beretta Model 1934, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said with a straight face. “No question.”

“But check out the slide markings.” He held it close to me. “Made in Pakistan, see? In the hand workshops of Darra Adam Khel.”

“Who?”

“That’s a town between Peshawar and Kohat. Famous for making exact replicas of every gun in the world. Armourers to the Pashtun-the Taliban warriors in Stan.”

“Stan?”

“What we called Afghanistan. You can tell it’s a Darra special from how poorly the slide stamping is aligned. See?”

“It’s a fake?”

“Amazing what you can do with unlimited time, a box of files, and nine sons. And check this out.” He showed me a black rectangle with a bullet hole in the middle of it. “This is a SAPI plate. Small arms protection insert.”

“Either it’s used or it’s defective.”

“Saved my life. I’m standing in a tank turret on Highway One in Iraq, and suddenly I’m thrown forward. Sniper got me. Luckily I’d put this in my flak vest. You can see how the bullet pierced it. Even cut through my clothes. Gave me a nasty bruise. Missed my spine, though.”

“You were allowed to take all this stuff back with you?”

“Lot of guys did.”

“Legally?”

He gave a throaty laugh.

“Any of it work?”

“Most of them are replicas. Fakes. Not reliable. You wouldn’t want to use them. They could blow up in your face.”

I noticed a tray of tubes, like artist’s oil paints. I picked one of the tubes up. It was labeled LIQUID METAL EMBRITTLEMENT AGENT (LME)-MERCURY/INDIUM AMALGAM. It said UNITED STATES ARMY on it. I was about to ask him what it was when he said, “You know how to use a gun?”

“Point and shoot, right?”

“Uh, not exactly. Snipers study for years.”

“Morons who live in trailers married to their cousins seem to be able to use them without much training.”

“You know about recoil?”

“Sure. The gun bucks back. I’ve seen Bad Boys like twenty times. Everything I know I learned at the movies.”

“You want to learn how to shoot a gun? I know a guy, owns a firing range not too far.”

“Not my thing.”

“You should, you know. Every guy should learn how to use a gun. This day and age. You’ve got a wife to protect.”

“When the terrorists come for us, I’ll call you.”

“Seriously.”

“No, thanks. Not interested. I’m kinda scared of guns. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Why do I get a feeling you miss being in the Special Forces?”

“Changed my life, bro.”

“How so?”

“Lousy home life.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Grand Rapids. Michigan.”

“Nice town. I’ve done business with Steelcase.”

“Not the nice part of Grand Rapids. Wrong side of the tracks.”

“Sounds like my neighborhood in Worcester.”

He nodded. “But I was always in some kind of trouble. Never thought I’d amount to anything. Even when I got drafted by the Tigers, I figured I’d never make the majors. Not good enough. Then I joined the army, and I’m finally good at something. Lot of guys volunteer for Special Forces, but most don’t make it through. When I passed the Q Course, I knew I was hot shit. Two-thirds of our class didn’t make it.”

“The what course?”

“Q Course. Qualification Course. It’s all about weeding guys out-it’s constant torture, twenty-four hours a day. They let you have an hour of sleep, and then they wake you up at 2:00 A.M. to go to the hand-to-hand combat pit. Every time a guy quits, they play ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ on the loudspeakers, no matter what time of day or night.”

“I think I know where Gordy gets his management techniques.”

“You have no idea, man. The last part of the course is called Robin Sage, where they throw you into the middle of five thousand square miles of North Carolina forest to do land nav-land navigation. Not allowed to go on roads. You got to live off nuts and berries, and at the beginning they throw you some animal-a rabbit or a chicken-and that’s your protein. At the end of the week, you’ve got to hand in the hind legs. The guys who make it to the end are the ones who just don’t give up. That’s me.”

“Sounds like Outward Bound.”

He made a pfft sound. “Then if you’re lucky, you get to go to one of the real assholes of the universe like Afghanistan or Iraq. If you’re really lucky, like me, both.”

“Fun.”

“Yep. You’re in Iraq, in the middle of a sandstorm that just won’t end, the desert’s frickin’ cold at night, which you’d never expect, your hands are so numb you can’t make coffee. Your rations have been cut to one meal a day. There’s not enough water to bathe or shave. Or you’re in some damned camp in Basra, with sand fleas crawling all over you and biting, and there’s mosquitoes carrying malaria, and you’re getting red welts all over, and no matter how much insecticide you spray on yourself and in the air it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.”

I nodded, silent for a while. “Man,” I finally said. “You’re going to find your job kind of boring.”

He shrugged. “Hey, it’s nice to have a real job, finally. Make some money. I can buy a car now. Scanlon wants me to get one, for client meetings and all that. Might even get a new Harley. Save up to buy a house. And maybe someday I’ll meet some chick and decide to get married again.”

“Didn’t work out last time, huh?”

“Didn’t even last a year. Not sure I’m cut out for marriage. Most of the guys in SF are divorced. You want a family, Special Forces isn’t for you. So what do you want?”

“What do I want?”

“I mean, in life. At work.”

“Red Sox season tickets. Peace on earth.”

“You want kids?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

I shrugged, half smiled. “We’ll see.”

“Ah,” he said. “Big issue for you.”

“Not an issue.”

“Yeah, it is. You and your wife are struggling with it. Or you’re trying, and it’s not happening. I can tell from your face.”

“You got a crystal ball in that room too?”

“Seriously. You don’t want to talk about it-that’s cool-but I can read it in your face. You know what a ‘tell’ is?”

“Poker, right? Little signals that tell you if someone’s bluffing.”

“Exactly. Most people aren’t comfortable with lying. So when they’re bluffing, they smile. Or they get stone-faced. Or they scratch their noses. Some of us in SF took classes in facial expression and threat assessment with this famous psychologist. To learn how to detect deception. Sometimes you want to know if a guy’s going for his gun or just pulling out a stick of Wrigley’s.”

“I can always tell when Gordy’s lying,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep. He moves his lips.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He didn’t laugh. “So you want kids. You want a bigger house, a fancier car. More toys.”

“Don’t forget about world peace. And the Sox tickets.”

“You want to run Entronics?”

“Last I looked, I wasn’t Japanese.”

“You want to run some company, though.”

“Thought’s crossed my mind. Usually when I’m halfway through a six-pack.”

He nodded. “You’re an ambitious guy.”

“My wife thinks I’m about as ambitious as a box turtle.”

“She underestimates you.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I don’t, man. Said it before and I’ll say it again. I never forget a favor. You’ll see.”

17

Saturday morning I called Jim Letasky at home.

He was surprised to hear from me. We talked a bit. I congratulated him on snagging the Albertson’s deal away from us, then I got to the point.

“Gordy put you up to this?” Letasky said.

“We’ve had our eye on you for a while,” I said.

“My wife loves Chicago.”

“She’ll love Boston more.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. “Really. But I already turned down a job offer from Gordy twice already. Three times, come to think of it. No offense, but I love it here. I love my job.”

“You ever get up to Boston on business?” I said.

“All the time,” he said. “Once a week. It’s part of my territory.”

We agreed to meet in a couple of days when he was in Boston. He didn’t want to meet at the Entronics headquarters, where he’d see people he knew, and the word would get back to NEC. We arranged to meet for breakfast at his hotel.

Early Monday morning Kurt took me to his gym in Somerville. No beautiful women in Lycra bodysuits working out on brand-new elliptical trainers here. No smoothie bar with bottles of Fiji water.

This was a serious weight lifter’s gym that stank of sweat and leather and adrenaline. The floor was ancient splintery planks. There were racks for speed bags, there were medicine balls and heavy bags and double-end bags, and there was a boxing ring in the center of the room. Guys were jumping rope. They all seemed to know Kurt and like him. The toilet had an old-fashioned wooden cistern up above, and you pulled a chain to flush it. There was a NO SPITTING sign. The locker room was gross.

But I loved it. It was real, far more real than CorpFit or any of the other “fitness clubs” I’d belonged to and almost never gone to. There were a couple of old treadmills and stair climbers, and racks of free weights.

We were both on the bikes warming up, Kurt and I, at five-thirty in the morning. Ten or fifteen minutes of hard pedaling to get our blood pumping, Kurt insisted, before we went through the floor workout. Kurt was wearing a black Everlast muscle T. The guy had huge biceps, and delts that bulged out of his sleeveless shirt like grapefruit.

We talked a bit while we worked out. He told me he was going to initiate an upgrade of the building’s closed-circuit camera system to digital. “All the recordings will be digital,” he said. “Internet-based, too. Then I gotta do something about our access control system.”

“But we all have those proximity badges,” I said.

“So do the cleaning people. They can get into any office. And how much do you think it costs to bribe one of those illegal aliens to get their card? A hundred bucks, maybe? We gotta go biometric. Thumb-print or fingerprint readers.”

“You really think Scanlon’s going to sign on to that?”

“Not yet. He’s in favor, but it costs a bundle.”

“Scanlon talk to Gordy about it?”

“Gordy? Nah, Scanlon says it has to get approved at Dick Hardy’s level. He wants to wait a few months. See, no one wants to spend on security unless there’s a problem. Money flows only when blood flows.”

“You’re new,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t twist Scanlon’s arm too hard.”

“I’m not gonna twist his arm at all. You gotta know when to fight and when to retreat.” He smiled. “One of the first things you learn in the box. It’s in those books you gave me, too.”

“The box?”

“Sorry. In country.”

“Ah. Makes sense.” I was short of breath and trying to economize my words.

“Hey, I love those corporate warfare books. I get it, man. I really get it.”

“Yeah,” I panted. “Probably in a way…most corporate executives don’t.”

“Roger that. All these bogus corporate warriors with all their bullshit about killing the competition. It’s funny.” He jumped off the bike. “Ready for abs?”

After we’d showered and changed, Kurt handed me a folder. I stood outside on the street in the early morning sunlight, the cars roaring by, and read through it.

I had no idea how he’d done it, but he’d managed to get the exact dollar figure of Jim Letasky’s take-home for the last four years-salary, commission, and bonuses. He had the amount of Letasky’s mortgage, the monthly payment, the rate, and the balance remaining, plus what he’d paid for his house, in Evanston, and what it was worth now.

His car payments. The names of his wife and three kids. The fact that Letasky was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas. Kurt had noted that Letasky’s wife didn’t work-outside the home, as they say-and that his three kids were in private school, and what that cost. His checking account balance, how much of a balance he kept on his credit cards, what the major expenditures were. It was scary how much Kurt had found out.

“How’d you get all this?” I said as we walked to his motorcycle.

Kurt smiled. “That’s NTK, man.”

“Huh?”

“Need-to-know basis. And all you need to know is, you always wanna have better intel than the enemy.”

Since it was Kurt’s first day on the job, I offered to take him out to lunch to celebrate. But he was tied up with all sorts of paperwork and orientation sessions and the like. When Trevor Allard returned to the office from Fidelity, around noon-earlier than I’d expected-I strolled over to his cubicle, and said, as casually as I could, “How’d it go?”

We didn’t like each other very much, but we were good at reading each other, the way a couple of wolves size each other up in a few seconds. There was nothing outwardly competitive about the way I asked, but he got what I was really asking: Did you land the deal? You going to be my boss now?

He looked at me blankly.

“The demo,” I reminded him. “This morning. At Fidelity.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You were demo’ing the sixty-one-inch, right?”

He nodded, watching me the whole while, his nostrils flaring. “The demo flopped.”

“Flopped?”

“Mm-hmm. The monitor wouldn’t even turn on. Total dud.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, Jason, I’m not kidding.” His voice was cold and hard. “I’m not kidding at all.”

“Of course. Jeez, I’m sorry. So what happened-you lose Fidelity?”

He nodded again, watching my face closely. “Naturally. No one wants to spend ten thousand bucks per unit on a bunch of plasmas that are questionable. So, yep, I lost ’em.”

“Crap. And you forecast Fidelity as a ‘commit,’ right.” That meant as close to a sure thing as you could get in this world.

He compressed his lips. “So here’s the thing, Jason. Me and Brett, we’ve had a run of real bad luck recently. My car gets a flat tire, then some kind of electrical problem. Brett’s computer gets wiped out. Now I somehow get a bad monitor, after having it tested. Both of us lose major deals as a result.”

“Yeah?”

“What do Brett and I have in common? We’re both in the running for Crawford’s job. Against you. And nothing happens to you. So I can’t help but wonder how and why this is all happening.”

“You’re looking for a reason? An explanation? I mean, it sucks, and I’m sorry about it, but you guys have both been unlucky lately. That’s all.”

Maybe it wasn’t just a matter of bad luck. Two competitive guys, Gleason and Allard. Rivals for a job that paid a lot more and put them on the management track. Was it possible that they’d been sabotaging each other? Guys could be like that. Even buddies like those two. Scorpions in a bottle. Maybe it was like a frat hazing? Stranger things happened in high-pressure companies like ours. I made a mental note to start backing everything up, all my files, and taking copies home.

“Unlucky,” he repeated. His nostrils flared again. “See, I’ve always been the kind of guy who has great luck.”

“Oh, I get it now. You’ve been dropping deals all over the place, but it’s my fault. That’s sad. Listen to me, Trevor. You make your own luck.”

I was about to let loose-I was really fed up-when there was a scream from down the hall. We looked at each other in puzzlement.

Another scream, female, and then someone else shouted, and we both went to see what the matter was.

A small crowd had gathered outside the Plasma Lab. The woman who’d screamed, a young admin, was screaming even louder and clutching the doorjamb as if to keep from sinking to the floor.

“What is it?” I said. “What happened?”

“Meryl kept knocking and knocking, and Phil didn’t answer, so she opened the door to see if he was in,” said Kevin Taminek, the manager for inside sales. “I mean, he’s always there, and it’s late morning. And Jesus.”

Gordy came up, short of breath, shouted, “What goes on here?”

“Somebody call Security,” said another guy, who did inside sales with Taminek. “Or the police. Or both.”

“Oh, good God almighty,” Gordy said, his voice loud and trembling.

I came a few feet closer so I could see what they were all looking at, and I gasped.

Philip Rifkin was dangling in midair, hanging from the ceiling.

His eyes were open, bulging. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His mouth was partly open, and the tip of his tongue protruded. His face was dark, bluish. A black cord cut deeply into his neck, knotted at the back of his head. I recognized it as component cable, which he kept in giant spools. A chair was tipped over a few feet away. I could see that he’d removed one of the drop ceiling panels and had tied the other end of the cable around a steel joist.

“My God!” Trevor said, turning away, gagging.

“Jesus,” I breathed, “he hanged himself.”

“Call Security!” Gordy shouted. He grabbed the door handle and pulled it shut. “And get the hell out of here, all of you. Back to work.”

18

My muscles were burning, but Kurt wouldn’t let me stop. He had me running up and down the steps of Harvard Stadium. He called it the “Stairway to Heaven.”

“Time for a rest,” I said.

“Nope. Keep going. Body relaxed. Swing those arms all the way back, right up to your shoulders.”

“I’m dying here. My muscles feel like they’re on fire.”

“Lactic acid. Outstanding.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“Keep moving.”

“You’re not even winded.”

“It takes a lot to get me winded.”

“All right,” I said, “you win. I surrender. I confess.”

“Two more.”

When we were done, he made us fast-walk along the banks of the Charles River as a way to cool down. I thought a Starbucks Frappuccino would work better.

“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” I said, still gasping.

“Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” Kurt said, punching me lightly on the shoulder. “So you guys had an ugly incident up there yesterday, I hear. Someone took a swing, huh?”

“Horrible,” I said, shaking my head, panting.

“Scanlon told me he used a wire or something.”

“Yeah. Component cable.”

“Sad.”

“Scanlon tell you-if Rifkin left a note?”

Kurt shrugged. “No idea.”

We walked for a few minutes until I was able to talk almost normally. “Trevor thinks I’m trying to wrongfoot him. Screw him over. You know that big demonstration he had? In front of Fidelity-one of our sixty-one-inch plasmas? Thing was dead when he switched it on. Of course he lost the account.”

“Bad for him, good for you.”

“Maybe. But he thinks I sabotaged the monitor.”

“Did you?”

“Come on. Not exactly my style. Plus, I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to.”

“Couldn’t the monitor have gone bad on the truck?”

“Sure. There’s all kinds of ways a plasma monitor can go out of whack. Couple of months ago Circuit City said six of our flat-panel TVs came in dead. It turned out some dimwit janitor at our Rochester warehouse had been cleaning the toilets with some mixture of toilet-bowl cleaner and Clorox. Didn’t know it releases chlorine gas. Which corrodes the microchips or the printed circuits or something-totally fried the monitors. So it could have been anything.”

“All you can do is ignore the guy. No one’s going to take his accusations seriously, right? It just sounds like he’s trying to make excuses.”

I nodded. Walked for a bit. “I’m going to have to miss our workout Thursday morning,” I said. “I’m having breakfast with Letasky.”

“Gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse, huh?”

“Do my best. Thanks to you.”

“Glad to help. Anything I can do, just ask.”

I paused. “Listen, I read through the file you gave me. That intel is going to be a huge help. Huge.”

He shrugged modestly.

“And I really appreciate all the work you did to get it for me. Some of it-well, I don’t want to know how you got hold of it, but-you need to be really careful with that stuff. Some of that crosses the line. And if either of us is caught with it, we could get in some serious trouble.”

He was silent. The morning was starting to warm up, and his tank top was starting to soak through. My T-shirt was already dripping wet.

A minute went by in silence, then another minute. There was a flock of geese waddling along the riverbank by the Lars Anderson Bridge. A pair of early morning joggers, a man and a woman.

“You’re the one who asked me to get a backgrounder on Letasky,” he said, sounding almost defensive.

“I know I did. You’re right. But I shouldn’t have. I’m just uncomfortable with this.”

Another minute of silence. A car roared by along Storrow Drive.

“So I guess you’re not interested in another tidbit about James Letasky that just came in.”

I stared down at the sidewalk. Exhaled slowly. I wanted to say yes, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do so.

Kurt went on, without waiting for a reply. “Last couple of years the Letasky family’s spent their vacations camping. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, places like that. But the place James and his wife really love is Martha’s Vineyard. That’s where they honeymooned. They keep wanting to go back, but it’s too far from Chicago.”

“Interesting,” I said. Martha’s Vineyard was a lot closer to Boston than to Chicago. “How did you-” I saw Kurt’s expression, and stopped. “Right. NTK.”

Kurt looked at his watch. “We both got to get to work,” he said.

“You playing softball tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Kurt said.

19

The hotshot from NEC, Jim Letasky, was a plump, round-faced guy in his midthirties with blond hair cut in a pudding-basin, Franciscan friar haircut. He had a ready smile and couldn’t have been more charismatic and winning. He was blunt and straightforward-no mind games, no coyness-and I liked that. He knew we wanted to hire him, and he knew why, and he made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t much interested. Still, he hadn’t slammed the door shut, since after all he was sitting here at breakfast with me at the Hyatt Regency on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

We exchanged the usual chitchat about the business, and I congratulated him again on the Albertson’s deal, and he was suitably modest about it. I pried a little about his connection at that middleman company, SignNetwork, but he got a little evasive. Trade secrets and all that. We talked about Amarillo, Texas, his hometown, and I told him about my weakness for Big Red soda, which he loved too.

When he’d finished his third cup of coffee, Letasky said, “Jason, it’s always great to see you, but can we speak frankly? Entronics can’t afford me.”

“Top talent costs,” I said.

“You don’t know what I make.”

I tried not to smile. “Your comp package is only one small part of what we can offer you,” I said.

He laughed. “Not too small a part, I hope,” he said.

I told him what we’d offer. It was exactly twenty-five percent higher than he made at NEC, and it didn’t require him to bust his balls as much. I knew from his private complaints to his boss-Kurt’s dossier even included some of Letasky’s private e-mails-that he was trying to cut back on the travel, spend more time with his kids. Given the kind of numbers Letasky drove, and our bonus structure, Entronics would still end up ahead.

“See, we want our salesguys to have a life,” I said. That was so bogus, I couldn’t believe the words were tumbling out of my mouth. “The way the package is structured, you can make a lot more than you make now by working significantly fewer hours. I mean, you’d still be logging the miles and all, don’t get me wrong, but this way you get to watch your kids grow up. You get to go to Kenny’s hockey practice and the twins’ ballet recitals.”

“How do you know-?” he began.

“I’ve done my homework. I’m telling you, my orders are not to let you get up from this table until you say yes.”

He blinked, momentarily silenced.

“These are precious years in your kids’ lives,” I said. Just about word-for-word what he’d e-mailed his boss, in fact. “And they go fast. Sure, you’re the breadwinner, but do you really want to get home every night too late to tuck them in? I want you to think about what you’re missing.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he conceded in a small voice.

“See, you can make a better living and also be there for your wife and kids. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to spend three weeks in the Grand Tetons instead of one?” That one hit home, I knew. He’d e-mailed that to his boss too.

“Yeah,” he said, his brows jutting up, the smile gone from his face. “It would.”

“And why should you spend forty-five minutes commuting to work? That’s time you could be spending with your kids. Helping them with their homework.”

“We’ve got a great house.”

“Have you ever seen Wellesley?” I said. “Didn’t Gail go to school there?” Gail was his wife, and she’d gone to Wellesley College. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from Framingham, a straight shot down 135.”

“It’s that close?”

“For what you could get for your house in Evanston, you could be living in this house.” I took out a photo that I’d printed out from a Wellesley real estate website that morning. “Over two hundred years old. An old farmhouse that’s been added to over the years. Nice, huh?”

He stared at the photo. “Man.”

“Cliff Road is the most exclusive neighborhood in Wellesley. See the size of that property? Your kids can play in the yard, and you and Gail don’t have to worry about the cars. There’s a great Montessori school not too far away-don’t the twins go to a Montessori school?”

He exhaled. “The hassle of moving,” he began.

I slid another piece of paper across the table at him. “This is the relocation and signing bonus we’re prepared to offer you.”

He read the number and blinked twice. “It says the offer expires today.”

“I want you to have time to talk this over with Gail. But I don’t want you using this as leverage within NEC to negotiate a better package.”

“They’d never match this,” he said. I really liked his honesty. It was refreshing. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

“You’re not the top performer there. Here, you would be. So we’re willing to pay.”

“I have until five o’clock today to decide?”

“Boston time,” I said. “That’s four o’clock Chicago time.”

“Wow, man. I don’t-this is so sudden.”

“You’ve thought about it for quite a while,” I said. I knew he’d just turned down an offer from Panasonic. “Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.”

He looked at me, but his eyes were focused on some point in the middle distance. I could see he was thinking hard.

“Plus, do you know how close we are to the Vineyard?” I said. “A hop, skip, and a jump. Ever been there? Your family would love it.”

I suggested he go back up to his hotel room and call his wife. I told him I’d wait down in the lobby, making calls and doing e-mail on my BlackBerry. I told him I had all the time in the world, which wasn’t true.

Forty-five minutes later he returned to the lobby.

Gordy’s jaw dropped. I mean, you hear the expression, but how often do you ever really see someone’s jaw drop? Gordy’s mouth came open, and for a few seconds he was speechless.

“Holy shit,” he said. He kept looking at Jim Letasky’s signature on the agreement, and then back at my face. “How the hell did you do that?”

“You approved the package,” I said.

“I’ve offered him damn good packages before. What did you promise him?” he said suspiciously.

“Nothing you don’t know about. I guess we just finally broke down his resistance.”

“Well,” he said, “good job.” He put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed hard. “I don’t know how you did it, but I’m impressed.”

He did not look happy.

20

When I got back to my office after lunch on Friday, there was a voice mail from Gordy. He wanted me to come by his office at three o’clock.

I called right back, talked to Melanie, and confirmed.

Managed to get through an hour and a half of calls and paperwork, all the while replaying Gordy’s message in my head, trying to read his inscrutable voice, figure out whether it was bad news or good.

At a few minutes before three I walked down the hall to his office.

“Booya,” Gordy said. He actually stood when I entered his office. Next to him stood Yoshi Tanaka, eyes dead behind thick lenses. “The better man won. Our new Vice President of Sales. Congratulations.”

Gordy extended a hand and gave what seemed to me a pretty damned grudging shake. His giant gold monogrammed cuff links glittered. Yoshi didn’t shake my hand. He bowed, ever so slightly. He didn’t know how to do handshakes, but then again, I didn’t know how to bow. Neither man smiled. Yoshi apparently didn’t know how to do that either, but Gordy struck me as unusually subdued, as if someone had a gun to his back.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Sit down,” Gordy said. We all took our places.

“I wish I could say this is a tribute to your own success,” Gordy said, “but that’s only part of it. You’ve had some good wins. Some big wins. You really seem to be getting your shit together. Getting Letasky was a major coup, and I frankly didn’t think you could pull it off. But the main thing is, I can’t have a bumbler in this job. I need someone totally reliable. Not like Gleason, spacing out on appointments. Even Trevor, dropping the ball on Fidelity. Playing golf and blowing off Pavilion.”

“Well, I look forward to the challenge,” I said, which, when I heard the words come out of my mouth, almost made me barf.

“And challenge it will be,” said Gordy. “You have no idea. You’ll be doing Joan’s job and Crawford’s job now. Anyway, I think Yoshi-san wants to say a few words.”

Tanaka bowed his head solemnly. “My most congratulation-to you.”

“Thank you.”

“You have very-imposu-job to do.”

“What kind of job?”

“Imposu-impo-sent.”

“Important, yes.”

“Not good time for our-business.”

I nodded.

“Very-hard time.”

“I understand.”

“I think you not know how hard time,” Tanaka said quietly.

“Thank you, Yoshi-san,” said Gordy. “Now I’d like to discuss salary specifics with Steadman. Yoshi-san, maybe you could give us a little privacy.”

Tanaka rose, tipped his head in a parting bow, and walked out.

“Could you close the door?” Gordy called out. “Thank you, Yoshi-san.”

I was determined to seize the initiative, not let Gordy see me as a wimp. Kurt would be proud. “I have a pretty good sense of what my salary requirements are-” I began.

“Your requirements,” Gordy spit out. “Give me a break. We’re not negotiating. Your package is take-it-or-leave-it. I just said that to get the Jap out of the room.”

I met his eyes and nodded, waiting. No more Mister Nice Guy, I guess.

He told me what it was, and I tried not to smile. It was more than I’d expected. A lot more.

“You weren’t my top choice, I think you know that,” Gordy said.

Now I understand why Yoshi was there. He was the enforcer, making sure Tokyo’s will was done, or at least making sure Gordy remembered who called the shots. Gordy must have hated that-a guy who ostensibly worked for him, who barely spoke English, telling him what to do.

“I hope to prove you wrong,” I said.

He stared malevolently. “I already told you there’s shit raining down on us from the MegaTower in Tokyo. Well, let me tell you who’s doing the shitting. You know the name Hideo Nakamura, I assume.”

“Sure.” A couple of weeks ago a press release was e-mailed around that the president and CEO of Entronics, a guy named something-Ikehara, had been “promoted” and was being replaced by this guy Nakamura. No one knew anything about Nakamura-that was way up the stratosphere. But the word was that the old guy, Ikehara, had become what the Japanese call a madogiwa-zoku, a “window-watcher.” Basically that means getting put out to pasture. In Japan, no one gets fired; instead, you get humiliated by being put on the payroll with nothing to do except stare out the window. They literally give you a desk by the window, which, in Japan, isn’t a good thing the way it is here. In Japan, a corner office means you’re on corporate death row.

“I flew down to Santa Clara to meet this guy Nakamura, and he’s real polished. Real smooth. Speaks good English. Loves golf and Scotch. But this guy’s an executioner. Might as well been wearing the black hood and carrying a noose. They put him in because the very top guys in the MegaTower are real unhappy. They don’t like our numbers. That’s why they bought Royal Meister’s U.S. business-because they want to extend their reach into the U.S. market.”

“I see.”

“So we gotta show Nakamura what we’re made of. Can you do that?”

“I can.”

“Can you incent the guys to work harder? Crack the whip?”

“I can.”

“Can you pull a rabbit out of your hat?”

I almost said, I’ll do my best. Or, I’ll sure as hell try. But I said, “You know it.”

“I’m going to expect a lot out of you. I’ll be riding you mercilessly. Now, get out of here. We’ve got to prepare for the weekly conference call.”

I stood up.

He stuck out his hand. “I hope I haven’t made a mistake,” he said.

I tried not to smile. “You haven’t,” I said.

Melanie smiled at me as I left. “Say hi to Bob,” I said.

“Thanks. Hi to Kate.”

I made my way to my office. Coming out of the men’s room was Cal Taylor. He gave me a lopsided grin and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I knew he’d just had a little midafternoon cheer-his cubicle was too public. “Hey there,” Cal said, weaving toward me.

“Hey, Cal,” I said cheerfully, and kept walking.

“You look like the cat that got the cream,” he said. Even soused, which he was most of the time, he was scary perceptive.

I chuckled politely and gave him a friendly wave, and smiled all the way to my office. There I shut the door and pumped my fists into the air.

I called Kate’s cell. “Hey, babe,” I said. “You at work?”

“I’m just sitting here at Starbucks, having coffee with Claudia.” Claudia had gone to prep school and college with Kate, had an immense trust fund, and apparently did nothing but go out with her friends. She didn’t understand why Kate insisted on working at the foundation.

“I just saw Gordy.” I kept my voice neutral, a blank.

“And? You don’t sound so good. You didn’t get it?”

“I got it.”

“What?”

“I got the promotion,” I said, my voice louder. “You’re talking to a vice president. I want some deference.”

She let out a loud squeal.

“Oh, my God. Jason! That’s so wonderful!”

“Do you know what this means? It’s a huge boost in salary. Serious bonus.”

“We’ve got to celebrate,” she said. “Let’s go out to dinner. I’ll make reservations at Hamersley’s.”

“I’m kind of wiped out,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

“All right, baby. We’ll do something at home.”

The word got around pretty quickly. The reactions from the Band of Brothers were interesting and not entirely unexpected. Ricky Festino could not have been happier for me. He acted like I’d just been elected President of the United States instead of picked as some VP of sales. Brett Gleason did something totally out of character for him, which was to acknowledge my existence by saying “Have a good weekend.” Which was frankly kind of big of him, since he’d just been beat out of the job he wanted. Trevor Allard ignored me, which was basically what I thought he’d do, and which gave me endless satisfaction, because he was obviously really pissed off.

Everything felt good now. In the elevator, on the screen, the word of the day happened to be “felicitation,” which sounded like a positive thing. Entronics stock was up. Everyone in the elevator looked and smelled good.

I stopped in at Corporate Security on my way out of the lobby and found Kurt at his cubicle. I told him the good news.

“No way,” he said. “You’re it? You’re the man?”

“Yep.”

He stood up, gave me a manly hug. “You rock. You got your stripes, man. Bravo Zulu.”

“Huh?”

“Army talk. Congrats, bro.”

21

In the car on the way to the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, I listened to some more of Old Blood and Guts. “When you’re downrange and you come under attack,” he barked, “you’re gonna have to act immediately. The enemy can shoot you in the back when you’re running away just as easily as he can shoot you in the front running toward him. In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, one of your team members will die. So you’ve got to give an order, and fast. Don’t hesitate. Just make a goddamned decision!”

I was half-listening, half-daydreaming about my new job. How happy Kate was going to be, now that I was finally making money. We could move. Buy a house she liked for once.

I took the escalator up to Tiffany’s and asked to see the brooches. I’d never been inside Tiffany’s before, believe it or not, and I discovered that their jewelry isn’t organized by category, like necklaces in one case and earrings in the other, but by where you can afford to shop. On one side of the store are the things that regular well-off people can afford, mostly sterling silver and semiprecious stones. On the other side of the store are the gold and diamonds, where you don’t dare to tread unless you run your own hedge fund.

When I described which brooch I was looking for, the saleswoman escorted me over to the wrong side of the store, the high-rent district. I gulped. Then she went behind a glass case and took out the starfish and put it on a black velvet square and cooed over it.

“That’s it,” I said. I turned it over, pretending to look at the back but really trying to get a look at the price tag, and when I saw it, I gulped again. This was more than I’d spent on Kate’s diamond engagement ring. But I reminded myself that I’d just gotten a sizable salary increase, and I’d be getting a handsome bonus, so I put it on my Visa and asked her to gift-wrap it.

By the time I got home I was feeling pretty good about life. I’d just been promoted, and there was a tiny robin’s-egg blue Tiffany’s bag on the passenger seat next to me. Granted, the car was an Acura, and not a new one, but still. I was good, damn it, and I worked for a great company. I was a meat-eater.

Kate ran to meet me at the door. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, looked and smelled great. She threw her arms around me, kissed me right on the lips, and I kissed her back, and kept going. I was immediately aroused.

When you’ve been married for a while, that kind of spontaneous combustion doesn’t happen all that often, but I felt this surge of testosterone. I felt like the conquering hero returning home for some nookie. I was Og, Cro-Magnon man, returning to his woman in the cave, having speared a woolly mammoth.

I dropped my briefcase and the blue Tiffany’s bag to the carpet and slipped my hands under the waistband of her jeans. I felt her silky-smooth warm skin and began kneading her butt.

She gave a throaty giggle, pulled back. “What’s the special occasion?” she said.

“Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” I said, and I went back to kissing her.

I moved us into the living room, pushed her back onto Grammy Spencer’s rock-hard, chintz-covered couch. The floor would have been more comfortable.

“Jase,” she said. “Wow.”

“We’re allowed to do this without a plastic specimen cup, you know,” I said as I started to peel off her T-shirt.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” She wriggled free, went over to close the drapes so the neighbors didn’t get a free show and their little children wouldn’t have therapy bills for decades.

When she came back, I finished taking off her T-shirt. I hadn’t looked closely at her breasts in such a long time that I got as excited as I’d been the first time we did it. “You’re a beautiful woman, anyone ever tell you that?” I said, and I unzipped her jeans. She was already aroused, I was surprised to see.

“Should-think we should move to the bedroom?” she said.

“Nope,” I said, stroking her down there.

Just then my BlackBerry buzzed-it was clipped to my belt, somewhere in the heap on the floor-but I ignored it. I got on top of her and, without any more foreplay, slid into her slipperiness with delicious ease.

“Jase,” she said. “Wow.”

“Stay there,” she said afterward.

She ran to the bathroom and peed, and then went into the kitchen, where I could hear the refrigerator being opened and glasses clinking, and a couple of minutes later she emerged with a tray. She carried it over to the couch, naked, and set it down on the coffee table. It was a bottle of Krug champagne and two champagne flutes and a mound of black caviar in a silver bowl with a couple of tortoiseshell caviar spoons and little round blini. Also, a flat rectangular package wrapped in fancy paper.

I hate caviar, but it’s not like we had it very often, and she must have forgotten.

I said, with all the excitement I could muster, “Caviar!”

“Could you do the honors?” She handed me the cold champagne bottle. I used to think that when you opened a bottle of champagne you wanted a loud festive pop and a big geyser. Kate taught me that that really wasn’t the way it was done. I stripped off the lead foil and twisted off the wire cage and eased the cork out expertly, turning the bottle as I did it. The cork came out with a quiet burp. No geyser. I poured it into the flutes slowly, let the bubbles settle, and poured in some more. Then I handed her a glass and we clinked.

“Wait,” she said as I put my flute to my lips. “A toast.”

“To the classics,” I said. “Champagne and caviar and sex.”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “To love and desire-the spirit’s wings to great deeds. Goethe.”

“I haven’t done any great deeds.”

“As Balzac said, ‘There’s no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.’”

I clinked her glass again, and said, “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

“Rolling her eyes,” Kate said. “And sticking out her tongue.” She smiled. “Honey, do you realize what you’ve accomplished? How you’ve turned your whole career around?”

I nodded, couldn’t look at her. My dad had a job. I have a career.

And if she only knew what kind of help I was getting.

“Vice president. I’m so proud of you.”

“Aw, shucks,” I said.

“You really kick ass when you put your mind to it.”

“Well, you’re the one who gave me the push. The jump start.”

“Sweetie.” She took the package from the tray and handed it to me. “Un petit cadeau.”

“Moi?” I said. “Hold on.” I got up and picked up the Tiffany’s bag from the floor where it had fallen. I handed it to her. “Swap.”

“Tiffany’s? Jason, you are so bad.”

“Go ahead. You first.”

“No, you. It’s just a little nothing.”

I tore off the wrapping paper as she said, “Something new to listen to on the way to work.”

It was a CD of a book called You’re the Boss Now-So Now What? A Ten Point Plan.

“Oh, nice,” I said. I made it sound convincing. “Thanks.” I wasn’t going to tell her I’d already moved on to harder drugs-the four-star general.

I knew that my world was alien to her, and basically boring, and she didn’t quite get it. But if she was going to be married to a Yanomami warrior, why not a chieftain? So she’d make sure I had my face paint on right, at least. She didn’t really get into what I did all day, but damn it, she was going to make sure my buzzard-feather headdress was on straight.

“Hit the ground running,” she said. “And something to carry it in.” She reached under the sofa and pulled out a much larger box.

“Wait, I know what it is,” I said.

“You do not.”

“I do. It’s one of those Yanomami blowguns. With the poison darts. Right?”

She gave me her great, sexy knowing smile. I loved that smile. It always melted me.

I unwrapped the box. It was a beautiful briefcase in chestnut leather with brass fittings. It had to cost a fortune. “Jesus,” I said. “Amazing.”

“It’s made by Swaine Adeney Briggs and Sons of St. James’s. London. Claudia helped me pick it out. She says it’s the Rolls-Royce of attaché cases.”

“And maybe someday a Rolls-Royce to put it in,” I said. “Babe, this is incredibly sweet of you.

“Your turn.”

Her eyes shone, wide with excitement, as she carefully undid the blue paper and then opened the box. Then I saw the light in her eyes go dim.

“What’s the matter?”

She turned the gold, jewel-encrusted starfish over suspiciously, as if searching for the price tag the way I did at the store. “I don’t believe it,” she said, tonelessly. “My God.”

“Don’t you recognize it?”

“Sure. It’s just that I-”

“Susie won’t mind if you have one, too.”

“No, I don’t imagine she’d-Jason, how much did this cost?”

“We can afford it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I just got my stripes.”

“Your stripes?”

“Army talk,” I said.

She took a sip of champagne and then turned back to the coffee table. She spread some of the vile, oily black eggs on a cracker and offered it to me with a sweet smile. “Sevruga?”