Killer Instinct

22

We found out Kate was pregnant two weeks later. She’d gone back to the IVF clinic with greater dread than usual to start going through the whole gruesome process all over again, the shots and the thermometers and the cold stirrups and the high hopes that would probably be dashed. They gave her the usual blood work, all this stuff I never quite understood about levels of some hormone that told the docs when her next ovulation would be. But I didn’t have to understand it. I just did what they told me to do, went in when they told me to and did my heroic duty. The next day Dr. DiMarco called Kate to tell her that an interesting complication had arisen, and there might not be a need for an IVF cycle after all. He seemed a little miffed, Kate told me. We’d gotten pregnant the old-fashioned way. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I had a secret theory, which I’d never tell Kate. I think she got pregnant because things had started to break my way. Call me crazy, but you know how some parents try for years to have a baby, then as soon as they adopt, boom, they get pregnant? Their biological roadblock gets blown away just by the decision to adopt. The relief, maybe. There are studies, too, about how men who feel good about themselves tend to be more fertile. At least I think I read something about this.

Then again, it’s possible that she got pregnant just because we’d finally had real sex, after months of my doing it into a plastic cup in a lab.

Whatever the reason, we were both elated. Kate insisted that we couldn’t tell anyone until we heard the heartbeat, around seven or eight weeks. Only then would she tell her father-her mother had died long before I met Kate-and her sister and all her friends. Both my parents were dead-smokers, the two of them, so they went early-and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to tell anyway.

I’d always had lots of friends, but you get married, and you start going out only with other married people, and the guys aren’t allowed to go out without their wives unless they’re wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, and then they have kids, and after a while you don’t have so many pals. There were some friends from college I still stayed in touch with. A couple of my frat brothers. But I wasn’t going to tell anyone until we heard the heartbeat.

Telling people wasn’t the main thing to me anyway. What was important was that I was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, and we were having a baby, and I was starting to feel really positive about my work. It was all good.

At the twelve-week point, I started telling the guys at work. Gordy could not have been less interested. He had four kids and avoided them as much possible. He liked to brag about how little he saw his family. It was a macho thing to him.

Festino shook my hand and even momentarily forgot about the Purell. “Congratulations on the death of your sex life, Tigger,” he said.

“Not totally dead yet,” I said.

“Yeah, well, just wait. Babies themselves are the best form of birth control. You’ll see.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, yeah. My wife and I do it doggie-style. I sit up and beg, and she rolls over and plays dead.”

I pantomimed a Borscht Belt rimshot in the air. “Thank you, you’re a wonderful audience, I’m here all week,” I said. “Try the veal chop, it’s great.”

“Wait till you’ve got the Barney song stuck in your head,” Festino said. “Earworm from hell. Or till the only TV show you’re allowed to watch anymore is The Wiggles. And when you go out to dinner, it’s Chuck E. Cheese’s at five o’clock. So when are you going to do an amnio?”

“Amnio?”

“You know, that test for birth defects.”

“Boy, you do look on the dark side, don’t you?” I said. “Kate’s not close to thirty-five.”

“It’s like what doctors always say. Prepare for the worst and all that.”

It seemed like a kind of personal question, but mostly I was surprised that Festino cared. “It’s ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,’” I said. “You left out the first part.”

“I was just cutting to the chase,” Festino said.

The pregnancy was the biggest thing to happen to us in the first couple of months after my promotion, but it wasn’t the only big thing. We moved out of the little house in Belmont and into a town house in Cambridge. We still couldn’t swing one of those houses on Brattle Street she’d been fantasizing about, but we bought a beautiful Victorian on Hilliard Street, just off Brattle, that had been renovated a few years ago by a Harvard professor who’d just been lured away to Princeton. There were things we wanted to change-the carpet on the steep stairs to the second floor was badly frayed, for instance-but we figured we’d get around to it sometime.

We probably underpriced the Belmont house, since Kate couldn’t wait to move to Cambridge. It sold within two days of our putting it on the market. So we were in our new house within two months. I hadn’t seen her happier in years, and that made me happy.

In the driveway-no garages in this fancy part of Cambridge, believe it or not-sat our two brand-new cars. I’d traded in my totally rebuilt Acura for a new Mercedes SLK 55 AMG Roadster, and Kate reluctantly traded in her tired old Nissan Maxima for a Lexus SUV hybrid, only because it was, she said, far more fuel-efficient and less polluting. My Mercedes just looked sweet.

It was all happening fast-maybe too fast.

Just about every morning I worked out with Kurt now, at his gym or at Harvard Stadium or running along the Charles River. Kurt had become my personal trainer. He told me I had to lose the paunch, had to become lean and mean, and once I started feeling better about myself physically, everything would follow.

He was right, of course. I dropped ten pounds in a couple of weeks, and after a couple of months I was down thirty pounds. I had to buy new clothes, which Kate was delighted about. She saw it as an opportunity to upgrade my wardrobe, get me out of those Men’s Warehouse suits and into some suits from Louis of Boston in confusing European sizes with unpronounceable names of Italian designers inside.

Kurt had strong feelings about how I ate-i.e., I was poisoning myself-and he had me eating high-protein and low-fat and only “good” carbs. Lots of fish and vegetables and stuff. I cut way back on the eggplant parmesan subs and the olive loaf sandwiches at lunch. I stopped visiting my stoner friend Graham, cut out the weed entirely, because Kurt had convinced me that it was a vile habit, that I needed to keep all my faculties sharp. Sound mind, sound body, all that.

He insisted I take the stairs at work at least once a week instead of the elevator. Twenty floors? I squawked. You’re out of your mind! One morning I tried it, and I had to change my shirt as soon as I got to my office. But after a while climbing (or descending) twenty flights wasn’t all that brutal. When you have an elevator phobia, you’ll put up with a lot of pain to avoid being trapped in the vertical coffin.

Kate was thrilled about my Extreme Makeover. She was determined to eat healthy throughout her pregnancy, and now I was along for the ride. She’d never met this guy Kurt, but she liked what he was doing for me.

She didn’t know the half, of course.

In my new, bigger office, I put up all these framed, military-themed, corporate motivational posters. One was a photo of a sniper in camouflage fatigues and camo face paint lying on the ground aiming his weapon at us. It said, in big letters, BRAVERY, and then: “It takes an extraordinary person to face danger and maintain composure.” Another one showed some guys on a tank and the words, “AUTHORITY: It is the strongest who prevail.” I had FORTITUDE and PATIENCE too. Hokey? Sure. But just looking at them got me pumped.

At work, especially, things just started clicking into place for me. It was as if every pitch I swung at was a home run, every putt dropped, every three-pointer swished, nothing but net. I had a hot hand. One good thing led to another.

Even buying the new Mercedes led to a major sales coup.

One morning I was sitting in the plush waiting room of the Harry Belkin Mercedes dealership in Allston, waiting for my new car to be prepped. I sat there for a good hour on a leather sofa, drinking a cappuccino from an automatic machine, watching Live with Regis and Kelly on their surround-sound TV.

And then I thought: how come they don’t have Entronics plasma screens in here, running features and ads on the latest Mercedes models? You know, beauty shots. Mercedes would pay for it. Then I started thinking, the Harry Belkin Company was the largest auto dealership in New England. They had BMW dealerships, and Porsche dealerships, and Maybach dealerships. Lots of others, too. Why not suggest the idea? Hell, supermarkets were doing it-why not high-end auto dealerships?

I did some research online and identified the right guy to talk to. He was the Senior Vice President for Marketing, and his name was Fred Naseem. I called him, pitched my idea, and he was immediately intrigued. Of course, the price was a concern, but isn’t it always? I pulled out my entire arsenal of tried-and-true sales tricks. I told him about how much added revenue the supermarket chains were generating using plasma screens to advertise at checkout lines. Waiting rooms are just like checkout lines, I told him. Everyone hates to wait. It’s a waste of time. But people like to be informed, to get new information. And be entertained. So entertain them and educate them-and sell them on the most exciting features of your new-model cars. Then I broke down the costs for him, only of course I never called it a “cost” or a “price” but an “investment.” Broke it right down to dollars per day invested versus what they’d generate. It was a no-brainer. Then I did the classic “yes-set” close-giving him a series of tie-down questions to which I knew he had to answer “yes.” Your customers are discerning, aren’t they? I’ll bet they appreciate the amenities you provide for them in the waiting room, like the coffee and the bagels, don’t they? They’d think the Entronics monitors looked cool up on the wall, don’t you think? Boom boom boom. Yes yes yes. Then: Is it accurate to say that your boss, Harry Belkin, would like to increase the average revenue generated in each of your auto dealerships? Well, what’s he gonna say? No? Then I moved in for the kill. Asked the Big Question: Are you ready to start making the additional profits that the Entronics monitors will surely generate for you?

The Big Yes.

When he wavered at the very end, as customers often do, I hit him with a couple of legendary closing tricks I’d picked up from my Mark Simkins CDs. I think it was the set called The Mark Simkins College of Advanced Closing. The sharp-angle close, where you maneuver them into making a demand you know you can meet. I told him that for this much inventory, delivery would probably be six months off. Well, now that he was all hot and bothered about getting those flat-screens into his dealerships, he wanted it all and he wanted it now. He wanted delivery in half that time. Three months.

That I could do. I could have done two months if he’d insisted. But I wanted him to demand something I could do. As soon as I agreed, I knew he as good as owned it.

Then I threw in the old “wrong conclusion” close. You say something you know is wrong so they have to correct you.

“So, that’s six hundred thirty-six-inch monitors and another twelve hundred fifty-nine-inchers, right?”

“No, no, no,” Freddy Naseem said. “The other way around. Six hundred fifty-nine-inchers and twelve hundred of the thirty-six.”

“Ah,” I said. “My mistake. Got it.”

He was mine. I loved the irony of selling to a guy who worked in auto sales. No one was safe.

He was stoked. In fact, this became his idea-that’s how I knew I had traction. He talked to Harry Belkin himself, called me back and said that Mr. Belkin was sold on the idea, and now it was only a matter of negotiating the price.

Sometimes I amaze myself.

A day later he called me back. “Jason,” he said, all excited. “I have some numbers for you, and I hope you have some numbers for me.” He told me how many plasma displays they wanted-huge ones for the walls of their forty-six dealerships, smaller ceiling-mounted ones. I didn’t get it. The number was a lot higher. And then he explained: it wasn’t just the BMW and Mercedes dealerships. It was the Hyundai and Kia dealerships too. Cadillac. Dodge. Everything.

I was almost at a loss for words. For me, this is unusual.

When I recovered, I said, “Let me put some numbers together for you and circle back to you tomorrow. I’m not going to waste your time. I’m going to get you the best price I can get.”

Everything seemed to be falling my way.

Except Gordy. He was still Gordy. The biggest drawback to my new job was that it was all Gordy all the time. He had me coming in at 7:00 A.M. and would regularly storm into my office with one complaint or another. He’d IM me, sounding urgent, summon me to his office, and it would turn out to be nothing. Notes for a presentation he wanted me to look at. A spreadsheet. Whatever trivial thing he happened to think was important at that second.

I did my share of complaining about him to Kate. She listened patiently. One night I came home after work and she handed me a white plastic bag from a bookstore. It held CDs for me to play to and from work: How to Work for Bullies and Tyrants at the Office and Since Strangling Isn’t an Option.

“Gordy’s not leaving,” she said. “You’re just going to have to learn to deal with him.”

“Strangling,” I said. “Now, there’s an idea.”

“Sweetie,” she said, “how come you never ask me about my day?”

She was right; I rarely did, and now I felt intensely guilty. “Because I’m a guy?”

“Jason.”

“Sorry. How was your day?”

When the Harry Belkin deal seemed to be far enough along, I stopped in to see Gordy and tell him the good news. He nodded, asked a few questions, didn’t seem all that interested. He handed me the monthly expense reports and told me to go over them. “Two months,” he said. “Two months till the end of Q2.” Entronics operated on the Japanese fiscal year, which sometimes got confusing.

I glimpsed at the expense report, and said, “Jesus, the Band of Brothers spends a lot on T &E, huh?” That’s Travel & Entertainment-hotels, travel, meals.

“See?” he said. “It’s crazy. I’ve been meaning to crack down on abuses of corporate credit cards for some time. But now that I’ve got one throat to choke, I want you to come up with a new T &E policy.”

He wanted me to be the bad guy. Why not you? I thought. Everyone hates you already.

“Got it,” I said.

“One more thing. Time to rank ’n’ yank.”

I knew what he meant-stack-rank everybody and fire the underperformers-but was he saying he wanted me to do it?

“You’re kidding.”

“No one said it was gonna be easy. You and I get to rate our guys on a five-point scale, and then you’re gonna get rid of the underperformers. Up ’n’ out.”

“The underperformers?” I said, wanting to hear him say it aloud.

“The C players get fired.”

“Bottom ten percent?”

“No,” he said with a fierce stare. “Bottom third.”

“Third?”

“We can’t afford ’em anymore. This is a Darwinian struggle. Only the toughest survive. I want Tokyo to see an immediate change in our numbers.”

“How immediate are we talking about?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then got up and shut his office door. He sat back down, folded his arms.

“So here’s how it’s going down, Steadman, and don’t you breathe a word of this to any of your Band of Brothers. By the end of the second quarter-that’s barely two months from now-Dick Hardy and the boys in the MegaTower are going to be making a decision. It’s either gonna be us or the Royal Meister sales force. Framingham or Dallas. Not both.”

“They’re going to winnow out all but the top performers,” I said, nodding. “Consolidation. Survival of the fittest.”

He gave his shark’s smile. “You still don’t get it, do you? They’re not cherry-picking. One lives, the other dies. It’s a bake-off. The one with the best numbers gets to survive. The other office gets shut down. A ‘soft quarter’ is not going to be shrugged off anymore. It’s a goddamned death sentence. We have another quarter like this one and everyone in this building gets their walking papers. Now, ready for the bad news?”

“That was the good news?”

“It’s all riding on you, buddy. You’ve got to pull a goddamned rabbit out of your hat in the next couple of months or everyone in the Entronics Framingham office, including you and your so-called Band of Brothers, gets shot. It’s all up to you. You cannot afford a single misstep.”

“Don’t you think we should let everyone know the stakes?” I said.

“No way, Steadman. Scared salesmen can’t sell. Clients can see the flop sweat. They smell the panic. Bad enough with all the rumors flying around the halls, the turmoil we’ve been seeing. So this is our little secret. You and me. You’re working directly for me now. And if you screw up, I’m gonna have to get my résumé printed up too. The difference is, I’m eminently employable. You, on the other hand, will be blackballed from here to Tokyo. I will personally see to it.”

I wanted to say something about how the flop sweat wasn’t good for managers either, but I stayed silent.

“You know,” Gordy said, “I didn’t want to give you this job at first. But now I’m glad I did. You know why?”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. “Why’s that, Gordy?”

“Because I like Trevor a lot more than I like you, and I wouldn’t wish this on him.”

On the way out of Gordy’s office, I passed Cal Taylor in the hallway. He’d just come from the restroom, and he was looking a little loopy. Ten in the morning, poor guy.

“Hey, there, boss,” he said. “Something wrong?”

“Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong.”

“You look like you just ate a bad clam,” Cal said.

You have no idea, I thought.

23

For the rest of the morning, I went over the T &E expenses and began to devise the tough new policy that Gordy wanted. I thought of this as my “no more Mister Nice Guy” memo. It was pretty hard-line, I have to admit. No more flying business class: economy all the way, unless you used your own frequent-flyer miles to upgrade. No more fancy hotels: now the limit was a hundred and seventy-five bucks a night. All business trips had to be scheduled at least seven days in advance, because it was cheaper; any last-minute trips had to be authorized in advance, by me. I lowered the per diem to fifty bucks a day, which was pretty harsh, but dealable, I thought. You couldn’t write off any meals beyond that unless you were taking a customer. And no more taking customers out for drinks unless there was food too. We spent way too much on off-site meetings, so I cut down on those too. A lot of money had been dumped on catering lunch meetings at the office, but no more. Now you had to bring your own lunch.

I did some number-crunching and figured out how much this new policy would save the company, and I e-mailed the memo to Gordy.

Right after lunch, he called and said, “I love it.”

I took a break, returned a bunch of calls, then I read over my memo again. Tried to soften the language a bit so that it didn’t sound quite so hard-ass. Then I e-mailed it to Franny to read over and double-check for typos and such.

Franny-Frances Barber-was the secretary I’d been assigned. She’d been with the company for over twenty years, and her only flaw was that she went out for a cigarette break every half hour. She sat in the cubicle outside my new office. Franny had a real no-nonsense look, a tight mouth with vertical lines above her upper lip. She was forty-five but looked ten years older, wore a strong, unpleasant perfume that smelled like bug spray, and was pretty fearsome if you didn’t know her. But we hit it off right away. She even began to reveal a bone-dry sense of humor, though it took a while.

She buzzed me on the intercom and said, “A Mister Sulu for you?” She sounded uncertain. Her voice was so cigarette-destroyed it was deeper than mine. “Though he doesn’t exactly sound Japanese. He sounds more like a surfer.”

Obviously she didn’t know Classic Trek. “Graham,” I said as I picked up. “Long time.”

“You sound kinda spun out.”

“Insane around here.”

“You been avoiding me, J-man? I’m starting to feel like a Klingon.”

“I’m sorry, Graham. I’m-well, I’m on this new regimen now.”

“Regimen? It’s Kate, isn’t it? She finally won.”

“It’s a lot of things. Kate’s pregnant, did you hear?”

“Hey, congratulations! Right? Or condolences. Which is it?”

“I’ll take the congratulations.”

“A baby Steadman. Blows my mind. Too weird. The pitter-patter of little Tribble feet, huh?”

“Tribbles didn’t have feet,” I said.

“You got me,” Graham said. “And I call myself a Trekker. Well, lemme cut to the chase. I’ve got some stellar shit here. Some killer White Widow.”

“That some kind of heroin?”

He answered in a Jamaican accent: “Ganja, mon. The only true worth is what comes from the earth, mon.” He added, “And not just any ganja, dawg. We’re talking Cannabis Cup first prize. Indica/Sativa mix, but more toward Sativa. A very energetic, social buzz. A legend, J-man.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on over to Central Square, I’ll roll us a big doobie or fire up the Starship Enterprise, and we’ll go for a ride in the Love Bug.”

“I told you, Graham,” I said firmly. “I don’t do that anymore.”

“Dude. You’ve never done White Widow.”

“I’m sorry, Graham. It’s just-things have changed.”

“This ’cuz of Little Jason coming along? The old ball-and-chain put her spike heel down?”

“Come on, man. It’s not that.”

His voice got small. “Okay, man, I think I get it. You’re a vice president, now, right? Says that on your company’s website. You got your own secretary, and a big fancy house. Guess you got to put a little distance between where you come from and where you are now, that it?”

“Does that sound like me, Graham?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not sure I even know who you are anymore.”

“That’s way harsh. Don’t do the guilt number on me, come on.”

“I call it like I see it, dude. Always did.”

“Cut me a little slack, will you? I’m over my head at work. As soon as I can, we’ll go out. Dinner’s on me. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Graham said sullenly. “I’ll wait for your call.”

“Graham-” I said, but he’d hung up, and now I felt bad.

Franny came into my office. “Uh, Jason,” she said, standing at the door awkwardly, adjusting her glasses. “You sure you really want to send this out?”

“Why not?”

“Because I was just starting to like you, and I don’t know if I’ll like the next guy as much.”

I smiled. “Gordy approved it,” I said.

“Sure he did,” Franny said, and she gave a little nervous laugh that turned into a smoker’s hack. “Had you put it in your name so you’d catch the flak, not him.”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,” I said, turning back to my computer.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to go out for a smoke and buy a bulletproof vest,” Franny said, and she went back to her cubicle.

I looked the memo over one more time. It was harsh. It was guaranteed to be unpopular, which meant it would make its author unpopular. It was something Gordy should have done himself, not me. It could only end badly.

I clicked send.

Then the shit hit the fan.

Rick Festino came flying into my office maybe five minutes later. “What the hell’s this?” he said. He wasn’t holding or pointing to anything.

“What’s what?” I said blandly.

“You know damned well what. This T &E shit.”

“Come on, Rick. Everyone’s abusing the system, and we’re trying to cut costs-”

“Jason. Hello? It’s me you’re talking to. You don’t have to bullshit me. We’re buddies.”

“It’s not bullshit, Rick.”

“You just nailed the ninety-six theses to the door, and to me it looks more like Gordy than Jason Steadman. What the hell are you doing?”

“I always thought it was ninety-five theses,” I said.

He stared at me. “Did Gordy make you put your name on this?”

I shook my head. “He approved it, but it was my work.”

“You trying to get assassinated? It’s not safe out there.”

“This is the way it’s going to be,” I said. “The new normal.”

“The beatings will continue until morale improves, huh? This is Captain Queeg stuff.”

“Captain who?”

“You never saw The Caine Mutiny?”

“I saw Mutiny on the Bounty.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. That’s what you’re going to be facing. You think Trevor and Gleason and all those guys are going to put up with staying at Motel Six and taking their clients to Applebee’s?”

“I didn’t say anything about Motel Six or Applebee’s. Come on.” He was exaggerating, but it wasn’t much better.

“The guys aren’t going to put up with this.”

“They’re not going to have a choice.”

“Don’t be so sure, kid,” Festino said.

I was getting ready to leave for the day-Kate wanted to go shopping for baby stuff, which was the last thing I felt like doing-when Trevor Allard stopped me in the middle of the cubicle farm on his way out.

“Nice memo,” he said.

I nodded.

“Brilliant strategy, taking away perks like that. That’s the way to hang on to your top talent.”

“You planning to take another job?” I said.

“I don’t need to. I just have to wait for you to fall on your face. Which seems to be happening even sooner than I hoped.”

“There’s no ‘I’ in team, Trevor,” I said.

“Yeah. But there’s a ‘Me’ in Messiah.”

On the drive over to BabyWorld, I was lost in thought about the damn memo I’d just sent out. Everyone was now calling it the Queeg Memo. Guys who didn’t even know who Queeg was were calling it the Queeg Memo. I wondered whether Gordy expected an immediate, enraged reaction like this. No wonder he wanted me to be the bad guy.

“Jason,” Kate said, interrupting my train of thought.

I looked over at her. She sounded somber. Her hair was pulled back in an elastic band. Her angular face had begun to fill out, her complexion was getting rosy. Pregnancy became her. “What’s wrong, babe?”

“I tripped on the stairs again.”

“What happened? You okay?”

“I’m fine, but I’m pregnant, remember? I have to be really careful.”

“That’s right.”

“The carpeting is worn through in places. It’s a real trip hazard.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t in the mood to talk about home improvements. I wanted to talk Gordy and Trevor and the Queeg Memo, but I knew she wasn’t interested.

“What does that mean, ‘Okay’? Can you do something about it?”

“What do I look like, the This Old House guy? Call someone, Kate.”

“Who?”

“Kate,” I said, “how the hell do I know?”

She stared at me for a few seconds, eyes cold. I was staring at the road, but I could feel her eyes on me. Then she shook her head sorrowfully. “Thanks for your help,” she said.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m just preoccupied with-”

“More important things. I know.”

“It’s Gordy again.”

“What a shock. Well, I hope you can keep your mind off your job long enough to pick out your baby’s crib.”

Sometimes I didn’t get my wife at all. One day she wanted me to be Napoleon Bonaparte. The next day she wanted me to be Mister Mom.

Had to be the hormones. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to say anything.

BabyWorld was supremely annoying. It was a giant fluorescent-lit warehouse stocked with only baby things, from low-end to high. Its slogan was “Isn’t your baby worth the best?” That was reason enough to walk out, but Kate was set on stocking the nursery. Plus, there was this creepy music playing over and over, their theme song, little kids’ voices and a xylophone. I started getting a headache.

She rolled through the departments like an Abrams tank, picking out a changing table, and a contoured changing pad, and a mobile that had farmyard animals dangling from it and played classical music, to help develop the baby’s cognitive skills.

Meanwhile, I kept furtively checking my BlackBerry and my cell phone. My cell phone said no service-another reason to hate BabyWorld-while my BlackBerry kept receiving messages. Different service providers, I guess that was the reason. There were a lot of e-mails on my BlackBerry complaining about the Queeg Memo.

Kate was showing me a Bellini crib. “Sally Wynter bought this one for Anderson,” she said, “and she thinks it’s the best.” She heard my BlackBerry buzz, and she threw me an exasperated look. “Are you here, or are you at work?”

I’d have rather been anywhere else. “Sorry,” I said. I switched the BlackBerry alert mode to silent, so she wouldn’t hear it anymore. “Does that come already assembled?”

“It says some assembly required. I don’t think it’s all that complicated.”

“If you went to MIT,” I said.

We moved into a diaper-rich environment, tall stacks of Huggies and Pampers, floor-to-ceiling, a bewildering assortment. This was more confusing than the sanitary napkin section of CVS, where Kate had sent me once. I’d fled screaming in terror.

“I can’t decide between the Diaper Genie and the Diaper Champ,” she said. “This one uses regular garbage bags.”

“But this one seems to make diaper link sausages,” I said. “That’s kind of cool.” You get your kicks where you can.

We moved on to small electronics. She grabbed a box off the shelf and dropped it into our shopping cart. “This is so genius,” she said. “It’s a backseat baby monitor.”

“For the car?”

“You plug it into the cigarette lighter, and the camera goes on the back of the headrest, and the monitor goes on the dashboard. So you can keep a watch on baby without turning around.”

That’s what I need, I thought. More distractions while I’m driving. “Cool,” I said.

“Here’s a video monitoring system,” she said, grabbing another box from the shelf and showing it to me. “See that little portable video monitor you can carry around with you? So the baby’s never out of sight. Plus, there’s infrared for night viewing.”

Jesus, I thought, this baby’s going to be under more intensive surveillance than Patrick McGoohan in that old TV show The Prisoner.

“Great idea,” I said.

“Oh, here we are,” Kate said. “The best part of all.” I followed her into the baby carriage department, where she immediately glommed on to a big, scary, black carriage with big wheels, antique-looking and forbidding. It seemed like something out of Rosemary’s Baby.

“God, Jason, will you look at this Silver Cross Balmoral pram?” she said. “It’s so unbelievably elegant, isn’t it?”

“What’s that movie where the baby buggy rolls down all those steps?”

“Potemkin,” she said with an annoyed headshake.

I took a look at the price tag. “Does that say twenty-eight hundred, or do I need reading glasses already?”

“Is that how much it is?”

“Maybe it’s in Italian lire.”

“They don’t use lire anymore. It’s euros now.”

“Two thousand eight hundred dollars?”

“Forget it,” Kate said. “That’s crazy. Sorry.”

“Whatever you want, Kate.”

“For way less money, there’s the Stokke Xplory,” she said. “The baby rides higher off the ground. It encourages parent-child bonding. Not much storage space underneath, though. But it’s pretty macho-looking, don’t you think? That telescoping handle?” I saw her cast a longing glance at the Silver Cross Balmoral pram when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“It’s macho, all right,” I said. I sneaked a glance at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail from Gordy. Its subject line was URGENT!

“Of course, there’s always the Bugaboo Frog.”

I clicked onto the message and read, “I tried to call your cell but no answer. Call me IMMEDIATELY.”

“Doesn’t it remind you of a mountain bike?” Kate was saying.

“What? A mountain bike?”

“I’ve been hearing a lot about the Bebe Confort Lite Chassis,” Kate said. “It’s a little more than the Bugaboo, but still a fraction of the price of the Silver Cross.”

“I’ve got to make a call,” I said.

“Can’t it wait?”

“It’s important.”

“This is important too.”

“Gordy’s been trying to reach me, and he says it’s urgent. I’m sorry. This shouldn’t take more than a minute.”

I turned and hurried through the aisles to the parking lot, where I picked up a cell phone signal. I punched out Gordy’s cell number, got a number wrong, and tried again.

“What the hell are you doing?” Gordy barked when he picked up.

“Shopping for baby stuff.”

“This goddamned T &E memo of yours. What the hell’s that all about?”

“Gordy, you approved it before I sent it out.”

He hesitated only for a second. “I didn’t get into the weeds. I left that to you.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Is there a problem? Trevor just came into my office and told me how the entire sales force is on the verge of revolt.”

“Trevor?” I said. Goddamned Trevor was going to Gordy behind my back now, was that it? “Trevor doesn’t speak for the ‘entire sales force,’” I said.

“Well, I got news for you. We just lost Forsythe over this.”

“What do you mean, we ‘lost’ Forsythe?”

“It was the last straw for the guy. Apparently he had a standing offer from our old friend Crawford at Sony, and guess what? Late this afternoon he called and accepted their offer. Why? Because of your damned crackdown. You have the guys eating in Denny’s and staying at fleabag motels, and now we just lost our star performer.”

My crackdown?

“Now who’s next? Gleason? Allard? All because of what the guys are calling the Queeg Memo.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’ve taken care of it,” Gordy said. “I just sent out an e-mail revoking your new policy. Told them there was a miscommunication.”

I gritted my teeth. God damn him. “So what about Forsythe?” I said. “Is he still leaving?”

But Gordy had hung up.

I walked across BabyWorld, the goddamned xylophone and the kids’ voices grating on me like fingernails on a blackboard. Kate was staring at me as I approached.

“Everything okay?” she said. “You look like you just got kicked in the stomach.”

“The balls, more like it. Kate, there’s all kinds of shit going down at work.”

“Well, I’m ready to check out anyway. But you shouldn’t have come tonight. You should have stayed at work.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re totally distracted with your job. You’re not required to go shopping with me, Jase.”

“I wanted to do this,” I said.

“You make it sound like an assignment.”

“That’s not fair. We’re buying baby stuff. I think it’s important for us to do it together.”

“Yeah, but you’re not exactly here, are you? Your head is back at the office.”

“And I always thought you loved me for my body.”

“Jason.”

She pushed the cart toward the checkout line, and I followed her. Both of us were silent, stewing in our own juices. We stood there in line. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you go get the tag for the Rosemary’s Baby carriage.”

“The Silver Cross Balmoral pram?” Kate said. “But that’s crazy expensive.”

“It’s the one you want. It’s the one we’ll get.”

“Jason, we don’t need to spend that kind of money on a baby carriage.”

“Come on, Kate. It would be downright irresponsible to put our baby in a carriage that doesn’t have shock absorbers and side-impact bars.” I broke off. “Look, I want to do this right. Baby Steadman’s going to travel in style. It does come with power steering, right?”

When the cashier rang everything up, I stared at the bill for a few seconds in disbelief. If my father had seen how much we were spending on baby stuff, he’d have had a heart attack in his Barcalounger right in front of the TV set.

I whipped out my gold MasterCard bravely. “I am oppressed by the debt of the capitalist society,” I said.

24

As soon as Doug Forsythe got in the next morning, I strolled by his cubicle and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Got a minute?” I said.

He looked up at me and said, “Sure thing, boss.” He knew what this was about and didn’t bother to hide it.

He followed me to my office.

“Doug, let me ask you something. Did you just accept an offer from Sony?”

He paused, but only for a second. “Verbally, yeah,” he said. “I won’t lie to you. Crawford made me a killer offer.”

Verbally, he was carefully to say. Meaning maybe there was some wiggle room.

“You’ve been here eight years. Are you unhappy?”

“Unhappy? No, not at all. God, no.”

“Then why’ve you been talking to Crawford?”

He shrugged and opened his palms. “He made an offer.”

“He wouldn’t make an offer unless he knew you were considering a move.”

Forsythe paused again. “Look, Jason, I don’t even know if I’m going to be here a year from now.”

“You’re crazy, Doug. You’re bulletproof. With numbers like yours, you don’t have a worry in the world.”

“I’m not talking about me personally. I mean all of us.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, that expenses memo-that really put the fear of God into a lot of us guys. Like, Entronics must really be in rough shape.”

“We’re not in rough shape,” I said. “We just need to be more competitive. Cut costs. A lot of our travel expenses are frankly out of line. Anyway, Gordy overruled me on that.” I was tempted to tell the truth-that Gordy had made me his flak-catcher, told me to do it, then backed down when the shit hit the fan-but I decided to just suck it up.

“I know,” Forsythe said. “But I get a feeling that’s just the tip of the old iceberg.”

“How so?”

He lowered his voice. “I’ve heard talk, is all.”

“What kind of talk?”

“About how Entronics is planning to get rid of its entire Visual Systems sales force. Now that they have Royal Meister’s, they don’t need us.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I’ve heard it,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not true?” He looked right at me now.

I shook my head. Lying like a kid caught with his hand stuck in the cookie jar. “Totally not true,” I said.

“Really?” He sounded genuinely perplexed.

“You don’t want to move to New Jersey,” I said.

“I was born and raised in Rutherford.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” I said quickly. “Now, obviously we’ll match any offer Sony makes you. We don’t want to lose you, you know that.”

“I do.”

“Come on, Doug,” I said. “We need you here. Entronics is your home,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“So forget those rumors,” I said. “You can’t listen to nutty rumors like that.”

He blinked, nodded slowly.

“So I’ll see you at the game tonight,” I said. “Right?”

I was finally on my way out of the office around six when my phone rang. The calls that come after five are often from people trying to avoid talking to a human being. They want to get voice mail. We call this playing dodgeball. Actually, it’s harder and harder to play dodgeball these days, what with cell phones and e-mail, so when someone tries it, it’s pretty obvious.

Franny was still in, and I heard her say, “One moment, Mr. Naseem. You’re in luck. You just caught him on his way out.”

I said, “I’ll take it,” and I went back to my desk. This could be it, I thought. We’d gone back and forth on numbers, and the last time we talked, Freddy Naseem told me he was close to having sign-off from Mr. Belkin himself. This would be the biggest deal I’d closed in six months.

“Hey, Freddy,” I said. “How’re we doing?”

“Jason,” he said, and I could tell from his voice that it wasn’t good news. “There’s been a little complication.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I can work with you.”

He paused. “No, you see…I just got some bad news.”

“Okay.” This was not what I wanted to hear.

“I’ve just been informed that we’re buying the plasmas from Panasonic.”

“What?” I blurted out. Then, calmer: “You weren’t even talking to Panasonic.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t have a choice. Mr. Belkin liked your idea so much he’s decided not to wait, but to start installing the flat-screens in three of our dealerships in two weeks.”

“Two weeks? But three months is what we agreed on-”

“And Panasonic has the inventory to deliver next week. So I really had no choice.”

We couldn’t possibly turn around hundreds of plasma monitors in a month, let alone a week. Panasonic must have had a lot of overstock in their Northeast warehouse.

“But-but it was my idea!” I sputtered. I immediately wished I hadn’t said that. It made me sound like a pouting ten-year-old. “Will you at least give me the chance to see if I can scrape some inventory together?”

“I think things have progressed beyond that point.” He sounded stiff and formal.

“Freddy,” I said, “you have to give me the chance to see what I can do. Given that I suggested the idea to you in the first place.”

“My hands are tied. Sometimes Mr. Belkin makes decisions without consulting me. He’s the boss. And you know what they say. ‘The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss.’” He laughed hollowly.

“Freddy-”

“I’m sorry, Jason. I’m terribly sorry.”

I went to see Gordy to see if he could pull any strings, make some swaps, maybe free up a few hundred flat-screen monitors.

Melanie had gone home, but Gordy was still in his office, on the phone. He was standing, staring at his PictureScreen windows. The ocean waves were crashing against the crystalline white sand. It was strange: In the window by Melanie’s cubicle I could see the fading summer daylight, and just a few feet away was the dazzling artificial midday sunshine of Gordy’s PictureScreen windows. His imaginary world.

I waited for a few minutes. He happened to turn around, saw me. Didn’t acknowledge me. He guffawed, made large wheeling gestures with his hands. Finally, he hung up, and I went in.

He had a triumphant look on his face. “Booya, Steadman. Booya! That was Hardy. Sent me a Hardygram and called. And invited me to go for a sail on his new yacht.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“He flipped when I told him about my Harry Belkin idea, Steadman. Putting plasmas in forty-six auto dealerships-I love it.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you, because he wasn’t complimenting me. He was congratulating himself, since this had somehow become his idea.

He pointed a stubby finger at me. “See, this is what Hardy calls bowling alley positioning, okay? Aim the bowling ball right, and the first pin knocks down all the rest of them.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s a wedge. Once Harry Belkin signs on, then we’ve got every other auto dealership in the country saying, ‘How come I didn’t think of this? Give me some too.’ God, it’s brilliant.”

“Brilliant,” I said. I wanted to get out of his office and go home.

“What’s the latest on that?”

“I’ll-I still have to follow up on that,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, close it, man. Close it. I don’t want to lose it. You lock that one down, and get a couple more big contracts, and we’re safe. How’s the Chicago Presbyterian deal coming?”

“I think I’m close to nailing it.”

“How about Atlanta airport? You get that, it’s huge. Huge!”

“Working on that one too.” The Atlanta airport wanted to replace all the monitors used in their flight information display system, which meant hundreds and hundreds of screens.

“And?”

“I don’t know yet. Too early.”

“I want you to do anything to land Atlanta, understand?”

“I get it,” I said. “I’m all over it. Listen, I want-”

“You talk to Doug Forsythe?” He tugged on his lapels and straightened his tie.

“I think that’s a lost cause, Gordy. He’s already made a verbal commitment-”

“A what? A lost cause? Can you translate that for me, please? I don’t speak that language. That’s not in my vocabulary. Now, if you’re on the G Team, you don’t accept defeat. You make sure Forsythe doesn’t walk. Are we clear?”

“Yes, Gordy.”

“Are you on the G Team or not?”

“Yes, Gordy,” I said. “I’m on the G Team.”

25

I drove home too fast, angry and confused. Freddy Naseem had screwed me over, and so had Gordy, and now the deal he’d stolen credit for had fallen through. Maybe there was an irony here, but I didn’t appreciate it. I was too pissed off.

On the CD player, General Patton was talking about “the predator mind-set.” He growled, “It’s just like the animal kingdom. Ninety percent of us are prey. The other ten percent are predators. Which are you?”

When I got home I noticed an almost-new-looking black Mustang parked in our narrow brick-topped driveway. Kurt’s. He’d bought it from his friend who owned the auto body shop.

I hurried into the house, wondering why he was here.

Kurt was sitting in our living room, the formal room we never used, talking to Kate. The two of them were laughing about something. Kate had set out Grammy Spencer’s tea tray with butter cookies.

“Well, hello,” I said. “Sorry I’m late,” I said to Kate. “Lot happening at the office.”

“Jason,” Kate said, “you never told me Kurt’s a handyman too.”

“Amateur,” Kurt said.

“Hey, Kurt. What a surprise, huh?”

“Hey, bro. I had to meet with a vendor in Cambridge. I finally got approval for the biometric fingerprint verification system, and I had to finalize some details. I figured since I was in your neck of the woods, I’d give you a lift to the softball game.”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“Though I saw your new Mercedes out front. Nice wheels. Bling for the king, huh?”

“Will you take a look at the stairs?” Kate said to me. “Take a look at what Kurt did.”

“Come on,” Kurt said. “It’s no big deal.”

I followed her to the staircase that led to the second floor. The junky oatmeal-colored carpet had been removed, exposing handsome wood. The old carpet lay in a neat pile, cut up into rectangular sections, next to discarded strips of wood with sharp-looking tacks sticking out from them, also neatly stacked. A crowbar and a utility knife lay on the floor nearby.

“Can you believe how beautiful that wood is?” Kate said. “You’d never know it, with that gross carpet covering it up.”

“Wasn’t safe,” Kurt said. “You could break your neck. With Kate pregnant and all, you’ve really got to take care of stuff like that.”

“Very kind of you,” I said.

“I’m thinking you should install a runner,” Kurt said.

“Oh, but I love the wood,” Kate said.

“Still see it, either side,” Kurt said. “Maybe one of those Axminster oriental rug deals. Good thick padding under it. Safer that way.”

“And how about brass carpet rods?” Kate said, excited.

“Easy,” Kurt said.

“Speak for yourself,” I said, a little peevish. “I had no idea you knew how to do this. You can kill people and remove old carpeting.”

Kurt ignored the dig. Or maybe it wasn’t a dig to him. “Taking it out’s the easy part,” he said with a modest chuckle. “Worked for a contractor after high school, did a lot of odd jobs.”

“Could you do that, do you think?” Kate said. “The runner and the carpet rods and everything? We’d pay you, of course. We insist.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kurt said. “Your husband here got me my job. I owe him.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.

“Kurt thinks we have way too many things plugged into that power strip thingy in the living room.”

“Electrical hazard,” Kurt said. “You need another outlet on that wall. Easy to put in.”

“You’re an electrician too?” Kate said.

“You don’t have to be a master electrician to put in an electrical outlet. That’s easy.”

“He just rewired his entire house,” I said, “and it’s not even his house.”

“God,” Kate said to Kurt, “is there anything you can’t do?”

Kurt drove his Mustang fast and skillfully. I was impressed. Most drivers who haven’t grown up around Boston get intimidated by the aggressiveness of the native Boston driver. Kurt, who’d grown up in Michigan, handled the traffic like a native.

We sat in silence for a good ten minutes, and then Kurt said, “Hey, man, did I piss you off?”

“Piss me off? Why do you say that?”

“At your house. Like you were ticked off I was there when you got home.”

“No,” I said in that terse, male way where the tone says it all-you know, what the hell you talkin’ about?

“Just trying to help you there, bud. With the stairs. I figured, I know how to fix stuff, and you’re a busy executive.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I mean, I appreciate it. Kate did too. You were right-she’s pregnant, and we’ve got to be careful about stuff like that.”

“All right. Just so long as we’re cool.”

“Yeah, sure. I just had a bad day at work.” I told him about my big auto-dealership brainstorm and how Gordy had stolen credit for it, and how Harry Belkin had decided to go with Panasonic instead.

“He’s a snake,” Kurt said.

“Who, Gordy?”

“Both of those guys. Gordy we know about. But the Harry Belkin guy-if he’s gonna change the terms of the deal, doesn’t he at least have to give you the chance to bid on it? Since it was your idea?”

“He should have. But I’d already told him we couldn’t deliver the stuff for a couple of months. That’s standard. Panasonic must have had excess inventory. You know, it’s like when you go test-drive a car and you totally fall in love with it, and then the salesman says, sorry, the waiting list is two months long. And you go, two months? I want it today! Well, Panasonic must have said, ‘This is your lucky day. We happen to have some right here in our warehouse. You can have ’em today!’”

“That’s not right. That really sucks.”

“Yes, it does.”

“You’ve gotta do something about that, man.”

“There’s nothing to do. That’s the problem. We’re at least a month out-we have to get inventory from Tokyo.”

“Don’t sit back and take it, bro. Go after it.”

“How? What am I supposed to do, take out one of your replica handguns and put it up to Freddy Naseem’s forehead?”

“My point is, sometimes the quiet, behind-the-scenes approach is the best way. Like the time when we were in Stan and we found this air base near Kandahar, with a big old Russian chopper. One of our local informants told us some of the top Taliban commanders used the helicopter to head up to their secret headquarters in the mountains. I figured, well, we could just nuke the thing, or we could be clever. So we waited till four in the morning, when there was only one TB sentry on duty.”

“TB?”

“Taliban, sorry. I snuck up behind him, garroted him to kill him silently. Then we got inside the base and painted some LME on the tail section near the rear rotor, and the rotor blades. Totally invisible.”

“LME?”

“Liquid metal embrittlement agent. Remember that tube you were looking at in my war trophy collection?”

“I think so.”

“Very cool stuff. Classified technology. A mix of some liquid metal, like mercury, with some other metal. Copper powder or indium or whatever. Paint it on steel, and it forms a chemical reaction. Turns steel as brittle as a cracker.”

“Neat.”

“So the Taliban guys probably did the routine preflight check for bombs and shit, but they didn’t see anything, right? That night, there’s this big crash, and the helicopter just flew apart in the air. Six Taliban generals turned into corned beef hash. Better than just blowing up an empty helicopter, right?”

“What’s that got to do with Entronics?”

“My point is that sometimes it’s the covert stuff that’s the real force multiplier. That’s what wins the battle. Not the guns and bombs and mortar rounds.”

“I’d rather you didn’t garrote Freddy Naseem. Not good for the corporate image.”

“Forget Freddy Naseem. I’m just saying, there comes a time for behind-the-scenes action.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’d need to know more. But I’m here to help, whatever it is.”

I shook my head. “I don’t do underhanded stuff.”

“What about getting inside dope on Brian Borque at Lockwood Hotels? Or Jim Letasky?”

I hesitated. “I feel kind of funny about it, to be honest.”

“And you don’t think Panasonic was being…underhanded, as you put it, for snagging the Harry Belkin deal?”

“Yeah, they were. But I don’t believe in tit for tat. I don’t want to be a snake.”

“Let me ask you this. Kill a guy in an alley somewhere, it’s murder, right? But kill a guy in the middle of a battlefield, it’s heroism. What’s the difference.”

“Simple,” I said. “One’s war, the other’s not.”

“I thought business is war.” Kurt grinned. “It’s in all those books you gave me. I read ’em cover to cover.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“Funny,” he said. “I missed that part.”

That night we played EMC, a giant computer-storage company headquartered in Hopkinton, and once again we won. The guys from EMC must have gotten the word that we were a totally transformed team, so they came to play, as if they’d had a practice before showing up. We were short one player, unfortunately. Doug Forsythe never showed up, which wasn’t a good sign.

My own softball game had improved, for some reason. When I stepped up to the plate, I didn’t flinch at the pitch anymore. I swung harder and with greater confidence. I felt more relaxed at the plate, and I began hitting them deep. My fielding was better too.

But a couple of times, Trevor Allard deliberately threw the ball by me and around me, deliberately cutting me off, as if I couldn’t be trusted with the ball. The one time he threw the ball to me was when I wasn’t prepared-I was half turned away-and he almost took off my ear.

After the game, Kurt and I walked to the parking lot. Trevor was in his Porsche, blasting that Kanye West song, “Gold Digger,” as I passed by-He got that ambition, baby, look in his eyes-and it didn’t seem to be a coincidence.

I told Kurt I wanted to head right home if he didn’t mind giving me a lift.

“So you don’t want to go out with the guys?” Kurt said.

“Nah. Long day. Plus, I told Kate I’d be home. These days she doesn’t like me staying out as late.”

“Pregnant women need to feel protected,” Kurt said. “Primitive instinct. Listen to me-like I know. She’s a nice chick. Pretty, too.”

“And mine.”

“Things okay on the home front?”

“Not bad,” I said.

“It’s a tough gig, marriage.”

I nodded.

“Important to take care of the home front,” he said. “If the home front isn’t in good shape, everything else suffers.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, so what happened to Doug Forsythe tonight?” Kurt said.

“I think we’re about to lose him to Sony.”

“Because of your hard-ass memo?”

“That may have been the last straw. Gordy’s obsessed with me trying to keep him. I twisted Doug’s arm, pleaded with him, but no go. There’s only so much I can do. The guy obviously wants to leave. And I can’t totally blame him. Gordy’s no fun to work for.”

“I’ll bet there’s a Gordy in every company.”

“I’d hate to believe that,” I said. “But what do I know. I’ve only worked for one company.”

“Listen,” Kurt said. “It’s none of my business, but you can’t let Trevor disrespect you.”

“It’s just a game.”

“Nothing’s just a game,” Kurt said. “If he thinks he can get away with that kind of disrespect on the ball field, it’s just going to carry over to the workplace.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Yes, it is,” Kurt said. “It’s a big deal. And it’s unsat.”

26

It was seven-thirty in the morning, and Gordy was on his third giant mug of coffee. Gordy overcaffeinated was not a pretty sight. He was bouncing off the walls.

“Rank ’n’ yank time,” he said, like he was a camp counselor and it was time for the white-water rafting. “Gotta tell ya, your performance reviews of some of these guys were awful generous. Don’t forget, I know these guys pretty well.” He turned to face me slowly.

I said nothing. He was right. I’d been generous in my assessments. I’d also given a boost to some of the outliers, like Festino and Taylor. I didn’t want to give Gordy any ammunition he didn’t need.

“Time for Taylor and Festino to hit the road,” he said.

So what was the point of the “performance review” exercise he’d just put me through? Rank everyone one to five on all sorts of things, when only one number counted?

“Cal Taylor’s two years from retirement,” I said.

“He retired years ago. He just didn’t tell anyone.”

“Festino just needs some more hands-on guidance.”

“Festino’s a big boy. We’ve been floating him for years. Gave the guy extra tutoring after school. Held his hand.”

“What about moving him to Inside Sales?”

“Why, so he can botch that too? Taminek’s been handling Inside Sales just fine. Festino’s been on life support for too long. Shoulda finished law school. Now it’s time to yank the feeding tube. Topgrade him out of here.”

“Gordy,” I said, “the guy’s a family man with a mortgage and a kid in private school.”

“You don’t understand. I wasn’t asking your advice.”

“I can’t do this, Gordy.”

He stared at me. “Why does that not surprise me? Why do I get the feeling you’re not cut out for the G Team?”

I’d never fired anyone before, and I had to start with a sixty-three-year-old man.

Cal Taylor cried in my office.

I didn’t know how to deal with that. I pushed a box of Kleenex across the desk at him and assured him that this was nothing personal. Though in one sense it was entirely personal. It was all about his inability to crawl out of the Jack Daniel’s bottle long enough to get on the phone and deal with the constant rejection that all of us salespeople face every day.

I won’t say it was more painful to me than it was to him. But it was pretty bad. He sat there in front of me wearing his cheap gray summer-weight suit that he wore year-round and had probably bought in a burst of deluded optimism during the Lyndon Johnson administration. His shirt collar was frayed. His white hair was Brylcreemed back, his nicotine-yellowed mustache neatly trimmed. His smoker’s hack was worse than ever.

And he wept.

Entronics had a “termination script” you had to use whenever you fired anyone. No ad-libbing allowed. After me, he’d have to go to HR and then outplacement counseling. They’d tell him about his health benefits and how long he’d continue to get his salary. Then a Corporate Security officer would escort him out of the building. That was the final indignity. Forty years with the company, and they shooed you out like you were a shoplifter.

And when the deed was done, he stood up, and said, “What about you?”

“Me?”

He looked at me with injured eyes. “You happy? Being Gordy’s hatchet man? His chief executioner officer?”

That didn’t require an answer, so I didn’t give him one. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the balls. I could only imagine how he felt. I closed my office door and sank down in my desk chair and watched him walk, slope-shouldered, across the expanse of the cube farm to his cubicle.

Through the gaps in the venetian blinds, I could see him talking to Forsythe and Harnett. My phone rang, and I let Franny get it. She intercommed me and asked if I wanted to take a call from Barry Ulasewicz at Chicago Presbyterian Hospital, and I told her I was in a meeting. She knew I wasn’t on the phone or with anyone, and she said, “You okay?”

“I’ll be fine, thanks,” I said. “I just need a couple of minutes.”

Someone had brought Taylor a stack of white cardboard cartons and was setting them up for him. A few people gathered around his cubicle as he began putting his belongings in boxes. Trevor was shooting baleful glances in my direction.

It was like a pantomime of bereavement: I could see but not hear. The word had spread like ripples on the surface of a pond. People came up to him and said brief, consoling things, then walked rapidly away. Others were passing by and making broad gestures but not slowing their stride. It’s funny the way people act around someone who’s been fired. Getting terminated is sort of like having a serious communicable disease; for every one who stopped to share his sadness there were two who didn’t want to get too close and catch it. Or didn’t want to seem to be in league with poor Cal Taylor, conspiring with him. They wanted to demonstrate their neutrality.

As I picked up my phone to ask Festino to come in, there was a knock at the door.

It was Festino.

27

“Steadman,” Festino said. “Tell me you didn’t just shoot Cal Taylor.”

“Sit down, Ricky,” I said.

“I don’t believe this. Is it the body snatchers? The merger integration team? That who gave the orders?”

I wanted to say, It wasn’t my idea, but that was too weaselly. Though true. I said, “Have a seat, Ricky.”

He did. “How come Gordy didn’t do it, huh? I figured he’d want to do it himself. He enjoys that kind of thing.”

I didn’t reply.

“I gotta tell you, as your friend, that I don’t like what’s happening to you. You’ve gone over to the dark side.”

“Ricky,” I tried to interrupt.

But he was on a roll. “First there’s that ridiculous Queeg Memo. Now you’re Gordy’s executioner. This is not good. I’m telling you this as your buddy.”

“Ricky, stop talking for a second.”

“So Taylor’s the first to swim with the fishes, huh? The first guy voted off the island? Who’s next, me?”

I looked at him for a couple of seconds before looking away.

“You’re kidding, right? Don’t kid a kidder, Jason.”

“The lower thirty percent are being let go, Ricky,” I said softly.

I could see the blood drain from his face. He shook his head. “Who’s going to go over your contracts if I’m gone?” he said in a small voice.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Jason,” he said, a note of wheedling entering his voice, “I’ve got a family to feed.”

“I know. I really hate this.”

“No, you don’t know. Entronics covers my wife’s and kids’ health plans.”

“You won’t just be cut off, Ricky. Your benefits will be continued for up to eighteen months.”

“I’ve got school tuition to pay, Jason. You know what that school costs me? It’s like thirty thousand bucks a year.

“You can-”

“They don’t give financial aid. Not to guys like me, anyway.”

“The public schools are great where you live, Ricky.”

“Not for a kid with Down’s syndrome, Steadman.” His eyes were fierce, and they were moist.

I couldn’t talk for a couple of seconds. “I had no idea, Ricky.”

“Is this your decision, Jason?”

“Gordy’s,” I said at last, feeling like the coward I was.

“And you’re just following orders. Like Nuremberg.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I know how much this sucks.”

“Who can I appeal this to? Gordy? I’ll talk to Gordy if you think it’ll help.”

“It won’t help, Ricky. He’s made up his mind.”

“You can talk to him for me, then. Right? You’re his golden boy now. He’ll listen to you.”

I was silent.

“Jason, please.”

I was silent. I was dying inside.

“You of all people,” he said. He stood up slowly and went to the door.

“Ricky,” I said. He stopped, his back to me, his hand on the knob.

“Let me talk to Gordy,” I said.

Melanie stopped me outside Gordy’s office. “He’s on the phone with Hardy,” she said.

“I’ll come back.”

She glanced through Gordy’s venetian blinds. “His body language tells me he’s almost off.”

Melanie and I talked for a bit about her husband, Bob’s, plan to go in with some guys to buy a franchise for a Chilean sandwich place that was really popular in downtown Boston. I didn’t know how he’d scrape together the money. Bob worked for an insurance company.

Finally, Gordy was off the phone, and I went in.

“I need to talk to you about Festino,” I said.

“Guy freaks out on you, you call Security. He could do that, you know. Go off the deep end. I can see it in him.”

“No, it’s not that.” I told him about Festino’s child and the special school, which we’d all assumed was some hoity-toity prep school where the boys wore little blue blazers and beanies.

Gordy’s eyes grew beady. I stared at his pompadour, because I couldn’t look into his eyes. It seemed puffier than usual. He looked like he’d had his hair colored recently. “I really don’t give a shit,” he said.

“We can’t do it.”

“You think this is a charity? Some frickin’ social services agency?”

“I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t fire Festino. I can’t do it to the guy.”

He tipped his head to one side, looked curious. “You’re refusing?”

I swallowed and hoped it wasn’t audible. I had the feeling I was about to cross some kind of office Rubicon. “Yeah,” I said.

A long, long silence. His stare was unrelenting. Then he said, slowly and deliberately, “Okay. For now. But after TechComm, you and me are going to have a talk.”

TechComm was the huge trade show, where we always threw a swanky dinner for our biggest customers. Last year it was in Las Vegas. This year it was in Miami. Gordy was always the master of ceremonies at the dinner, and he liked to keep the theme a secret until we got there. “I don’t want any disruptions before TechComm.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You know something? I don’t think you have what it takes.”

For once I didn’t answer.

28

I wanted to get out of the office on time today. Kurt had Red Sox tickets. I had to get home and change out of my suit and kiss Kate and get over to Fenway Park by seven.

I was packing up my fancy leather briefcase when I saw Doug Forsythe standing at my office door.

“Hey, Doug,” I said. “Come on in.”

“Got a sec?”

“Of course.”

He sat down slowly, with a tentative look about him. “You know, what you said yesterday? I really took it to heart.”

I nodded. I had no idea what he was getting at.

“I’ve been thinking. And-you’re right. Entronics is my home.”

I was stunned. “Really? Hey, that’s great.”

I noticed an instant message pop up on my computer screen. It was from Gordy. CALL ME NOW, it said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just think it’s the right thing.”

“Doug, I’m so happy to hear that. Everyone’s going to be psyched that you’re staying.”

Another IM. WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? GET OVER HERE!

I swiveled around to the keyboard, typed, IN MEETING, GIVE ME A MINUTE.

“Yeah, well,” he said. He didn’t sound happy, that was the strange thing. “I guess it’s for the best.”

“Doug,” I said, “say it like you mean it.”

“I mean it. It’s the right thing. So…So that’s it.”

“You want us to match Sony’s offer,” I said, taking a stab at it. “And I told you we would. Forward the e-mail to me, or the letter, and I’ll get right to it.”

He inhaled slowly, deeply. “No need,” he said. “I don’t want to hold you guys up for more money.”

No salesguy in the history of Western civilization has ever said that. Or at least said it and meant it. I was immediately on alert. What was going on?

“Doug,” I said, “I gave you a promise. Now, don’t make me beg.”

Forsythe stood up. “Really, it’s fine,” he said. “Here I am, and here I’ll stay. I’m fine with it. I’m cool, I really am.”

He left, and I sat there for a few seconds, baffled. I turned back to the screen and saw another IM from Gordy. NOW! it said. WHAT THE HELL??!!

I IM’d back: ON MY WAY.

As I escorted Forsythe out of my office, I noticed Trevor Allard in his cubicle, darkly watching me. The background on his computer desktop was a photo of his beloved Porsche Carrera. I wondered how much Trevor knew about Forsythe’s job offer, how much he’d been urging Forsythe out of here, pouring poison in his ear. And what he knew about Forsythe’s decision to stay.

Gordy was leaning all the way back in his office chair, arms folded behind his back, beaming like a lunatic.

“What took you so long?” he said.

“Doug Forsythe just came into my office,” I said. “He’s staying.”

“Oh, is that right?” he said archly. “Now, I wonder why that is.”

“What are you talking about, Gordy?”

“All of a sudden Forsythe’s lost interest in defecting to Sony? Like all of a sudden?”

“It’s strange,” I said.

“I wonder why that could be,” he said. “What in the world would make a high-test guy like Doug Forsythe back out of a job offer that’s at least thirty percent better than what he’s doing here, huh?”

“Didn’t want to move to New Jersey?”

“Did he ask you to match Sony’s offer?”

“No, in fact.”

“You didn’t think that was bizarre?”

“Yeah, it was.”

“You ask to see Sony’s offer?”

“What are you saying, Forsythe made the whole thing up or something?”

“Oh no. He’s not a devious guy.”

“Then what?”

He tipped his chair all the way forward, planted his elbows on his desk, and said triumphantly, “The goddamned offer dried up.”

“Dried up?”

“Sony pulled it.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I kid you not. I just got a call from a buddy of mine at Sony. Something happened. Some hiccup. Somewhere way up in the hierarchy, someone got cold feet about Doug Forsythe. Higher than Crawford’s level, I suspect. He was notified early this afternoon that they were revoking the offer.”

“But why?”

He shook his head. “No idea. No one knows. Something must have come up. I have no idea what. But it’s over and done with. Forsythe returns to the mother ship.” He cackled. “Love it when shit like this happens.”

I wasn’t really listening to General Patton on my Business Is War! CD as I drove home. I was remembering Cal Taylor being escorted out of the building by a security guy, not Kurt. Thinking about Festino. About Doug Forsythe, wondering why Sony had revoked the offer, which was unheard of.

The narrator was saying, “A sand tiger shark usually produces only one pup during breeding season. Why? Because in his mother’s womb, the biggest shark devours his brothers and sisters. Or take the spotted hyena. They’re born with fully erupted front teeth, and if two litter-mates are of the same sex, one will kill the other at birth. The golden eagle lays two eggs, but often the stronger chick eats the weaker sibling within the first few weeks after hatching. Why? Survival of the fittest!”

I switched it off.

By the time I got home I was fairly calm. I entered the house very quietly. Kate had taken to coming home early and taking a late-afternoon nap in the front sitting room. Her morning sickness had gone away, but she was getting tired a lot.

The floor of the entry foyer was antique travertine, and it echoed when you walked on it. So I took off my shoes and went past the sitting room in my stocking feet. The air-conditioning was on full blast.

“You’re home early.” Kate was sitting on Grammy Spencer’s hard sofa. Finally, Grammy Spencer’s furniture looked at home.

I came up and kissed her. She was reading a book, a black paperback of Alice Munro stories. “Hey, babe. How’re you feeling?” She had changed out of her work outfit into her sweats. I slipped my hand under her T-shirt and caressed her tummy.

“I don’t know. A little funny.”

“Funny?” I said, alarmed.

“No, just queasy. Heartburn. The usual.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Hey, Jason, can we talk?”

“Uh, sure.” Can we have a talk is up there with We’ve found a lump as the scariest words in the English language.

She patted the sofa next to her. “Want to have a seat?”

I sat down. “What’s up?” I sneaked a glance at my watch. I figured I had ten minutes max to get into my jeans and Red Sox jersey so I could make it to Fenway in time.

“Listen, honey, I want to apologize. I’ve been giving you a hard time about working so hard, and I think I’m not being fair.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Apology accepted.” I didn’t want to sound too abrupt, but I couldn’t get sandbagged into a deep talk.

“I know how hard Gordy has you working, and I just want you to know I appreciate it. I was out of line at BabyWorld.”

“No worries,” I said.

“‘No worries’?” she repeated. “Since when do you say that?”

“Who knows.”

“I mean, look at this place.” She spread her arms wide. “This house is gorgeous, and it’s all because of you. Because of your hard work. It’s all you. And I never forget that.”

“Thanks,” I said. I stood up and kissed her again. “Gotta go.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Fenway,” I said. “I told you.”

“You did?”

“I thought I did. I’m pretty sure I did.”

“With Kurt?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got to go change.”

When I came back downstairs, Kate was in the kitchen making herself a Boca burger and some broccoli. Voluntarily, too.

I kissed her good-bye, and she said, “Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was?”

“I’m sorry. How was your day?”

“It was incredible. Marie had an opening at this gallery in the South End, and I went there as a representative of the foundation. And she showed up with three of her kids-she doesn’t have any child care or any relatives here. So I offered to watch the kids while she talked to the Boston Globe art critic.”

“You took care of three kids?”

She nodded. “For an hour.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I know what you’re thinking. Like, it was a disaster, right?”

“It wasn’t?”

“At first it was. The first ten minutes or so I thought I was going to lose my mind. But then-I don’t know, I did it. It actually was okay. I was pretty good, even. And I realized, you know-I can do this, Jase. I can do this.”

There were tears in her eyes, and there were tears in mine, too. I kissed her, and said, “I’m sorry I’ve got to go.”

“Go,” she said.

29

There was the usual crowd around Fenway Park, the scalpers asking if I needed a ticket or had one to sell, the guys hawking Italian sausages and hot dogs and programs. I found Kurt standing at the turnstiles near Gate A, as we’d arranged. I was surprised to see that he had his arm around a woman’s waist.

She had brassy red hair, a cascade of frizzy curls, and she wore a peach tank top that was tight on her enormous boobs. She had a tiny waist and a great ass, which was well displayed by a pair of short shorts, almost hot pants. She had heavy eye shadow and big eyelashes and bright red lipstick.

Once I got over my raw animal excitement at the sight of this chick, I was immediately disappointed. This was not the sort of woman I expected Kurt to be going out with. He’d never mentioned any girlfriend, and you don’t bring just anybody to a Red Sox game. The tickets are too hard to get.

“Hey, chief,” he said, reaching out for me with his left hand, touching my shoulder.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

“They haven’t thrown out the first pitch yet,” he said. “Jason, I’d like you to meet Leslie.”

“Hi, Leslie,” I said. We shook hands. She had very long red fingernails. She smiled, and I smiled, and we looked at each other for a couple of seconds, not knowing what to say.

“Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Kurt said.

I walked alongside them through the cavernous underbelly of the ballpark, looking for our section. I felt like a third wheel.

When we got to the stairs at our section, Leslie announced she had to use the little girls’ room. That’s what she called it. We were going to miss the first pitch for sure.

“She’s cute,” I said, when Leslie had gone off to the little girls’ room.

“Yep.”

“What’s Leslie’s last name?”

He shrugged. “Ask her.”

“How long have you been going out with her?”

He glanced at his watch. “About eighteen hours. Met her in a bar last night.”

“I think I’m going to get a steak-and-cheese sub. You want one?”

“You don’t want to eat that shit,” Kurt said. “Look at all the progress you’re making. You don’t want that crap in your body.”

“How about a Fenway Frank?” Those are the hot dogs they sell at the ballpark. One of the secrets you learn if you go to Fenway a lot is that if you prefer your hot dog cooked, you don’t buy it in the stands, where they often give it to you lukewarm or even cold. Yuck.

“Not for me, thanks.”

I’d lost my appetite. “How’s work going?”

“Good,” he said. “Been doing some background investigations and some badge-replacement. Had to drive out to Westwood today. Routine stuff. Though I did have to open an investigation on someone.”

“Oh yeah? Who?”

“Can’t say. No one you know. Guy’s fencing LCD monitors. Selling them on eBay. I had to put in an additional camera and pull the guy’s hard drive.”

“You gonna catch him?”

“Count on it. And the biometric fingerprint readers are in, so everyone’s going to have to stop down at Corporate Security over the next couple of days and give us a fingerprint.” He looked at me. “You’re not sleeping. What’s up?”

“I’m sleeping.”

“Not enough. Problems on the home front?”

“Not really,” I said. “It’s Gordy.”

“Guy’s such a broke dick,” he said. “He’s like a one-man Q Course.”

“Yeah, but the difference is, Gordy isn’t trying to make me into a better soldier.”

“True. He’s trying to wash you out for real. Guy has it in for you. Gotta do something about that.”

“What do you mean, he has it in for me? You know something?”

He paused just long enough for me to tell that he really did know something after all. “One of my responsibilities is to monitor e-mail.”

“You guys do that?”

“Have to. Scan for key words and stuff.”

“But you’re looking at his e-mail for other reasons,” I said.

He blinked.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“Part of my job,” he said.

“What does he say about me?”

“You’re obviously a threat. We gotta do something about the guy.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“Clearly. See, what Gordy doesn’t understand is that his job isn’t quite so secure as he thinks.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Japanese don’t like his style. His profanity. His crudeness.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “As long as he gets results, they’re happy with him. And he gets results. So he’s safe.”

He shook his head. “He’s a racist. Hates the Japanese. And the Japanese don’t like that. I’ve been doing some reading. The Japanese admire the strong-willed American manager style. But they won’t tolerate anti-Japanese racism. Believe me, the second he shows his racism in public, he’s gone. So fast your head will spin.”

“He’s too smart for that.”

“Maybe,” Kurt said.

Then Leslie walked up in a toxic cloud of cheap perfume. She put her arm around Kurt, grabbing his butt.

“Let’s find our seats,” he said.

I’ve been to Fenway scores of times, maybe a hundred times, but I never fail to feel a thrill when I walk up the steps and the field appears before me suddenly, brilliant green glittering in the sun or the lights, the red dirt, the throngs.

We had amazing seats, right behind the Red Sox dugout, two rows from the field. We could watch the ESPN cameramen changing lenses and stuff, the blond on-air talent applying her lipstick.

Leslie didn’t know too much about baseball and wanted Kurt to explain the game to her. He said he’d do it later.

“One bit of good news today,” I said to Kurt in a low voice as we watched the game. “Doug Forsythe decided to stay.”

“Oh yeah?”

This is the thing about baseball: there’s a lot of downtime when you can talk. “Yeah. Something happened to his Sony offer. Someone got cold feet-the offer was withdrawn. Never heard of that happening before.”

“Kurt,” said Leslie, “I don’t think I even know what your sign is.”

“My sign?” Kurt said, turning to her. “My sign is ‘Do Not Disturb.’”

We’d been talking so much we missed a great play, so we both looked up at the enormous electronic scoreboard, where they run the video instant replays.

“I can’t even see what happened,” Kurt said.

“It’s a lousy screen,” I said.

“We must have something better than that.” He meant Entronics, and it was interesting that he was saying “we” already.

“Oh, God, yeah. That’s an old RGB LED large-format video display. Got to be six or seven years old, but the technology moves fast. We’ve got a large-format HD video screen that’s crystal clear.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I know the assistant equipment manager. You can talk to him. He’ll know who to talk to.”

“About replacing the scoreboard? Interesting.”

“Right.”

“Great idea, man.”

“I’ve got a million of ’em”

Suddenly the Sox hit a grand slam, and everyone jumped to their feet.

“What just happened?” Leslie asked. “Was that good or bad?”

30

I got to the office right at seven, feeling invigorated and a little mellow after a particularly tough workout at Kurt’s gym. I plowed through paperwork and reports, played a little dodgeball myself by leaving phone messages for people I didn’t want to talk to. Of the thirty or so sales cycles I was involved in, the two biggest by far-now that Freddy Naseem had screwed me over on the Harry Belkin deal-were the Chicago Presbyterian Hospital project and, giant among giants, the Atlanta airport. I sent off some e-mails on those. Did some research into the other big auto dealerships around the country. Man, there were some big ones out there. AutoNation, out of Fort Lauderdale, and United Auto Group, out of Secaucus, New Jersey, both made Harry Belkin look like your neighborhood chop shop. Belkin was like number fourteen on the list of megadealers. The damn thing was, I’d put in so much work on the deal and gotten so close.

And the Red Sox scoreboard thing had really got under my skin. The more I looked into it, the more intrigued I got. The scoreboard at Fenway was basically a twenty-four-foot-by-thirty-one-foot video screen that used light-emitting diode technology-that’s LEDs to you. Lots and lots of little pixels spaced about an inch apart, each pixel made up of a bunch of little LEDs that contain a chemical compound that turns different colors when you pass electricity through it. The whole thing’s run by a digitized video driver. From a distance it looks great, like a giant TV screen. From a distance.

They’ve got these electronic digital signs all over the world by now. My online research told me that the biggest one was in central Berlin, on the Kurfürstendamm. There’s the big Coca-Cola sign in Times Square, in New York, and the NASDAQ sign, and there’s another big one on top of the Reuters building in London and in Piccadilly Circus, and of course they’ve got them all over Las Vegas.

What’s cool about these signs is that, with a few keystrokes of a computer, you can change the display entirely. Not like the old billboard days when guys had to go up there and tear down the old poster and paste up the new one. Now it could be done in seconds.

They’re cool, but they’re also kind of grainy, kind of coarse. You can see the little colored dots. The technology was developed a decade ago. Entronics didn’t do these huge outdoor displays. The technology was too specialized, and besides, our LCD and plasma displays had never been bright enough to use outdoors.

But not anymore. Now we had something even brighter, even better. We had the new flexible OLED PictureScreen in prototype, like the ones in the windows of Gordy’s office. It was high-definition, low-glare, weather-safe, and it was way better than anything else out there.

Fenway Park was only the beginning. Fenway was the first bowling pin. Once I got an Entronics PictureScreen above center field in Boston, I could start getting them in other baseball parks, then football stadiums. Then Times Square and Piccadilly Circus and the Kurfürstendamm and Las Vegas. Movie trailers on outdoor billboards. Rock concerts. The Tour de France. Formula One. The Cannes Film Festival.

The Vatican. They had those huge projection TVs around St. Peter’s Square so people could watch the Pope celebrate mass, or the Pope’s funeral, or whatever. Shouldn’t the Vatican, with all their gold, have the best technology out there?

How come, I wondered, no one at the top of Entronics in Tokyo had thought of this? It was a true brainstorm. It was huge.

And why stop at outdoor signs? Why not indoor billboards too-airports, shopping malls, big retail stores, company lobbies…

Sometimes I amaze even myself.

So in a state of total delirium, I wrote up a business plan, an outline of how Entronics PictureScreens could take over the world. I did quick-and-dirty research into the drawbacks to the existing technologies. I found out who the biggest companies were that provided electronic digital signs around the world, since we’d have to deal with them-we didn’t have the infrastructure to put the stuff together ourselves. This was truly a killer application.

And by nine o’clock, I finished a draft of a memo that, I was convinced, would transform Entronics, save our division, and catapult me to the top of the company. Well, not the top. Not Tokyo-since I’m not Japanese. But close.

Now what? Now what should I do with it? Give it to Gordy so he could swipe it and claim credit? But I couldn’t just shoot it off via e-mail to the MegaTower in Tokyo. The company didn’t work that way.

I looked up as someone passed my office, a scrawny Japanese man with aviator glasses.

Yoshi Tanaka.

The spy, the ambassador, the conduit to the higher-ups in Tokyo.

Yoshi was my ticket. He was the guy I’d have to talk to. I waved at him, beckoned him into my office.

“Jason-san,” he said. “Hello.”

“Say, Yoshi, I’ve got this killer idea I want to run by you, see what you think.

He furrowed his brow. I told him about the memo I’d written. How much revenue I thought this concept could generate for the company. We’d already developed the technology-the sunk costs were already budgeted. There’d be no additional R &D. “See, we don’t need to bolt small panels together anymore to make a huge one,” I said. “Our PictureScreen’s going to make the existing LED display technology look like JumboTron out of 1985. The revenue potential is immense.” The more I talked, the better it sounded.

Then I saw Yoshi’s blank stare of utter incomprehension. The man hadn’t understood a word I was saying. I’d just wasted five minutes gassing on and on.

I might as well have been speaking…well, English.

After lunch I stopped down at Corporate Security and spent about thirty seconds putting my index finger in a biometric reader so the machine could learn my fingerprint. When I came back up, I went to Gordy’s office and told him I needed a few minutes of his time to tell him about an idea I had.

I’d realized I was going to have to get Gordy’s sign-off on my big electronic billboard idea, like it or not. Without his endorsement, the concept wasn’t going anywhere.

He leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his back in his smuggest “impress me” mode.

I told him. I handed him a hard copy of my business plan.

“Oh, so now you’re going into product marketing,” he said. “We’re in sales, remember? Looking to move to Santa Clara? Or Tokyo?”

“We’re allowed to originate ideas.”

“Don’t waste your time.”

I felt deflated. “Why is it a waste of time?”

“Believe me, that idea’s so old it’s got whiskers and liver spots. That came up at the last product-planning meeting in Tokyo, and the Jap engineers said it wouldn’t fly.”

“Why not?”

“Not enough candelas or something to use outside.”

“I’ve been over the PictureScreen technical specs, and it’s as bright as an LED.”

“It’s a glare issue.”

“There’s no glare. That was the whole breakthrough.”

“Look, Jason. Forget it, okay? I’m not an engineer. But it’s not going to work.”

“You don’t think it’s worth e-mailing Tokyo?”

“Jason,” he said patiently. He drummed his fingers on top of the business plan. “I’m a change agent. I’m a Six Sigma black belt. I was schooled in the change acceleration process, okay? But I know when to give up the fight, and that’s something you’ve got to learn.”

I hesitated. I was crestfallen. “Okay,” I said. I got up and reached for my business plan, but Gordy picked it off his desk, scrunched it up in his fist, and deposited it in his trash can.

“Now here’s what I want your mind on. TechComm. From the second we all arrive in Miami, a couple of days from now, I want you schmoozing our resellers and channel partners. And remember, first night of TechComm is the big Entronics dinner for all the sales guys and our biggest customers, and I’m the emcee. So I want you in full battle mode. Okay? Stick to your knitting. We got a division to save.”

31

Kurt’s black Mustang was parked in my driveway.

I entered quietly. I felt suspicious, but also guilty about feeling that way. Kate and Kurt were sitting in the living room talking. They didn’t hear me come in.

“It’s too much,” she was saying. “It’s eating him up. It’s all he wants to talk about, Gordy and the Band of Brothers.”

Kurt mumbled something, and Kate said, “But Gordy’s just going to stand in his way, don’t you think? If he’s going to climb any higher in that company, it’s not going to be with Gordy’s help.”

“My ears are burning,” I said.

That jolted the two of them. “Jason!” Kate said.

“Sorry to interrupt your conversation.”

Kurt turned around in his chair. Grammy Spencer’s chintz-covered easy chair. Much more comfortable than her Victorian sofa.

“Notice anything?” Kate said.

“Besides the fact that my wife and my friend seem to be conducting an affair?”

“The walls, silly.”

I looked at the living room walls, and all I saw were the framed paintings Kate had collected over the years from artists the Meyer Foundation funded.

“You got a new painting?” They all looked pretty much the same to me.

“You don’t notice they’re all hanging straight, finally?”

“Oh, right. Yes, very straight.”

“Kurt,” she announced.

Kurt shook his head modestly. “I always like to use two hangers on each frame-that brass kind with the three brads.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“And I used a level. Hard to get ’em straight without a level.”

“I’ve always thought so,” I said.

“And Kurt fixed that dripping faucet in the bathroom that’s always driving us crazy,” Kate said.

“It never bothered me,” I said. Kurt did this and Kurt did that. I wanted to barf.

“Just needed a new washer and O-ring,” Kurt said. “A little plumber’s grease and an adjustable wrench.”

“Very kind of you, Kurt,” I said. “You just happen to carry plumber’s grease and adjustable wrenches and O-rings around with you in your briefcase?”

“Jason,” Kate said.

“I keep a bunch of tools in a storage unit back of my buddy’s auto body shop,” Kurt said. “Just stopped over there on the way over. No big deal.”

“You had to see a vendor in Cambridge again?”

He nodded. “Figured I’d just stop by and say hi, and Kate put me to work.”

I shot Kate a dirty look. “Are we still going to the movies tonight, Kate?” I said.

Kurt got the message and said good-bye. Then Kate began the incredibly long and involved process of getting ready to go out-there’s always a “quick shower,” and about forty-five minutes of blow-drying her hair, and then the makeup, which she applies as if she’s about to walk down the red carpet to the Kodak Theatre to get an Oscar. Then the inevitable, frantic race to get to the movie on time. Of course, the more I hounded her to hurry up, the slower she went.

So I sat in the bedroom, impatiently watching her do her makeup. “Hey, Kate,” I said.

“Mm?” She was lining her lips with that pencil-looking thing.

“I don’t want you to exploit Kurt anymore.”

“Exploit him? What are you talking about?” She stopped in mid-stroke, turned around.

“You’re treating him like your servant. Every time he comes over here, you put him to work fixing something.”

“Oh, come on, Jason, he volunteers. Anyway, does he look like he resents it? I think it makes him feel useful. Needed.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it strikes me as a little-I don’t know, entitled.”

“Entitled?”

“Like you’re the lady of the manor, and he’s some peasant.”

“Or maybe I’m Lady Chatterley and he’s the gamekeeper, is that it?” she said sarcastically.

I shrugged. I didn’t get the reference.

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You are jealous, aren’t you?”

“Jesus, Kate. Of what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re jealous of the fact that he’s so handy, such a regular guy.”

“A regular guy,” I repeated. “And I’m-what? Thurston Howell the Third? My dad worked in a sheet-metal plant, for God’s sake.”

She shook her head, snorted softly. “When you told me he was Special Forces, I was expecting something, I don’t know, different. Crude, maybe. Rough around the edges. But he’s awfully considerate.” She let out a low giggle. “Plus, he’s not unattractive.”

“‘Not unattractive’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. Not-not what I expected, that’s all. Don’t be jealous, sweetie. You’re my husband.”

“Yeah, and he’s, what? Now he’s like your-your Yohimbe warrior with the blowgun and the machete?”

“Yanomami.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, sometimes a machete is just the tool you need,” she said.

I sulked for a while in the car, but by the time we got there I’d cooled off.

My wife likes films that have subtitles. I like movies that have cars that crash through plate-glass windows. Her all-time favorite movie is Closely Watched Trains. She likes them slow and contemplative, preferably in Czech or Polish, captioned in Serbo-Croatian.

Whereas my all-time favorite movie is Terminator 2.

I like movies, not films. My requirements are simple: big explosions and car chases and gratuitous violence and unnecessary flashes of female nudity.

So naturally we’d gone to a foreign-film theater that evening in Kendall Square in Cambridge to see a film set in Argentina about a young priest in a coma who’s in love with a quadriplegic dancer. Or maybe I should say, she watched it while I snuck glances at my BlackBerry, which I hid from her behind the popcorn bucket. The guy I was dealing with at Chicago Presbyterian, the Assistant Vice President for Communications, had once again changed his specs for the plasma screens he wanted in their one hundred operating rooms and wanted me to reprice the whole proposal. The facilities manager at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport said that he’d just been told by Pioneer that their plasma displays had a higher resolution and a better greyscale performance than Entronics and wanted to know if that was true. I was damned if I was going to lose this deal to Pioneer.

And an e-mail from Freddy Naseem. He wanted me to give him a call.

What the hell could that be about?

“Did you like it?” Kate said, as we walked to the car. You had to take your parking ticket to get it validated in one place, then pay for it somewhere else. It was a system apparently designed in the Soviet Union.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was moving.”

I figured that would make her happy, but she said, “Which part?”

“Most of it, really,” I said.

“What was it about?”

“What was what about?”

“The movie. What was the plot?”

“Is this a quiz?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What was the story?”

“Come on, Katie.” I beeped the Mercedes open and went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door for her.

“No, I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t think you watched any of it. You spent the whole time on your BlackBerry. Which really pissed off everyone around us, by the way.”

“I glanced at it a couple times, Kate.” She stood there, refusing to get in. “There’s some stuff I really needed to check on.”

“This is a night off,” she said. “You’ve got to stop.”

“I thought you said you understood this came with the job. Didn’t we talk about this? Come on, get in.”

She stood there, arms folded. She was starting to show already. You could see the swell in her belly underneath her cotton dress. “You need an intervention or something. You’re out of control.”

“You’re never going to live like you did when you were a kid, you know. Not as long as you’re married to me.”

“Jason, that’s enough.” She looked around as if to see who might be listening. “My God, I feel like I’ve created a monster.”

32

In the morning I called Freddy Naseem at eight-thirty on the dot, when I knew he always got in.

“Jason,” he said, sounding overjoyed to hear from me. “Did you ever find out how quickly you’d be able to get us the plasma monitors?”

“But I thought you were all set with Panasonic. You said they could get the screens to you within a week. Did something change?”

He paused. “They got us all the monitors yesterday. But there was just one little problem. None of them worked.”

“None of them?”

“Every single one-dead as a doornail. Panasonic is blaming some glitch at their Westwood warehouse. They say there was a gas leak of some sort-chlorine gas, I think. Apparently chlorine gas destroys the microchips or some such thing. And hundreds of flat-screen TVs and monitors in that warehouse were ruined. The problem is, they won’t be able to replace the product for a few months at least, and Harry Belkin is desperate to have them in.”

I answered slowly. My mind was reeling. “Well,” I said, “you’ve come to the right place.”

I found Kurt in the company Command Center on the ground floor adjacent to the main entrance. I’d had to page him, and when I told him I needed to see him right away, he told me to meet him there.

The Command Center was lined with banks of Entronics closed-circuit TV monitors and a big curved console around the room where guys wearing microfleece pullovers-the air was cold here because of all the computers-sat tapping at keyboards or shooting the breeze with one another. You could see on the monitors every entrance to the building, every computer room and common area; you could see people coming in and out and walking around. It was amazing, and a little creepy, how much of the company you could see from here.

Kurt was standing with folded arms talking to one of the guys in fleece. He was wearing a blue shirt and rep tie and looked very much in charge. The guys in fleece were, I knew, contract security officers, so Kurt really was their boss.

“Bro,” he said when he saw me. He looked concerned. “What’s up?”

“We gotta talk,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.

His eyes grew hard. “Let’s talk.”

“In private,” I said. I led the way out of the Command Center to the hall and found an unoccupied break room. It was littered with old copies of the Herald and a Dunkin’ Donuts carton and discarded cardboard coffee cups, and it smelled like someone had been sneaking a smoke.

“I just got a call from Freddy Naseem.”

“The guy from Harry Belkin.”

“Right. He told me that all the Panasonic monitors arrived dead, so he wants to do business with us.”

“Hey, that’s great news. Big win for you.”

I stared at him. “There was a chlorine-gas leak at Panasonic’s Westwood facility. Fried the printed circuits in the monitors.”

“You asking me to do something for you?”

“I think you already did,” I said quietly.

He blinked. His face was unreadable. He turned away, studying the empty Dunkin’ Donuts box. Then he said, “You got the deal back, didn’t you?”

My stomach sank. He’d done it.

If he’d done that, then was there really any question that he’d done the things Trevor accused me of? Trevor’s car trouble. The plasma screen that conked out at Trevor’s presentation to Fidelity. Gleason’s Blue Screen of Death.

Doug Forsythe’s job offer drying up.

What else had he done?

“This isn’t the way I wanted it, Kurt.”

“Panasonic snaked you. That’s unsat.”

“Do you realize what kind of deep shit we’d both be in if anyone connected us to what happened?”

Now he looked annoyed. “I know how to cover my tracks, bro.”

“You can’t do this,” I said. “Maybe sabotage is acceptable in the Special Forces, but not in the business world.”

He stared right back at me. “And I expected a little gratitude.”

“No, Kurt. Don’t ever do this again. Are we clear? I don’t want any more of your help.”

He shrugged, but his eyes were cold. “You don’t understand, do you? I take care of my friends. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. Like the Marines say, no better friend, no worse enemy.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “I’m glad I’m not your enemy.”

33

I had a midmorning flight to Miami, out of Logan, so I didn’t go in to work. I decided to sleep late. Late being relative, of course. Kate snuggled right up against me in bed, which was nice, until I suddenly noticed the time. It was almost eight. I bolted out of bed to finish the packing I’d started the night before.

“Hey, Kate,” I said, “aren’t you going to work?”

She mumbled something into the pillow.

“What?”

“I said, I don’t feel well.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Cramps.”

Alarmed, I went to her side of the bed. “Down-there?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that normal?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been pregnant before.”

“Call Dr. DiMarco.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Call him anyway.”

She paged him while I nervously bustled about packing, brushed my teeth, took a shower, shaved. When I came out of the bathroom, she was asleep.

“Did he call back?”

She turned over. “He said not to worry. Said call him if there’s spotting or bleeding.”

“Will you call me on my cell?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. I’ll call if there’s anything. How long are you going to be gone for?”

“TechComm lasts three days. Think of all the foreign movies you can watch on Bravo while I’m gone.”

Just about all of the Band of Brothers was aboard the Delta flight to Miami. Everyone but Gordy sat in economy. Gordy was in business class. Not sitting in first class was his money-saving gesture.

I had an aisle seat, several rows away from any of the other guys, and I was enjoying the fact that there were empty seats on either side. Until a woman sidled past me, holding a screaming baby. She started speaking Spanish to the infant, who wouldn’t stop crying. Then she poked a finger into the baby’s diaper, unwrapped it, and began changing the wriggling creature on her lap, right there. The smell of baby poop was overpowering.

I thought: Good God almighty, is this what’s in store for me? Changing diapers on airplanes?

When the mother finished changing the diaper, she scrunched up the old one, reclosed the Velcro tabs to tighten the poop package, then jammed the soiled diaper into the seat pocket in front of her.

Behind me, some of the Entronics guys were getting a little rowdy, like frat boys. I turned around for a quick look. They were laughing loudly as some guy, whose face I couldn’t see, was showing them something in a magazine. Trevor waved the guy over, said something, and both of them exploded in guffaws. The guy punched Trevor lightly on the shoulder and turned around and I could see it was Kurt.

At that moment he saw me and walked down the aisle. “This seat taken?” he asked.

“Hey, Kurt,” I said warily. “What are you doing here?”

“My job. Booth security. Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure, but it might be someone’s seat.”

“It is. It’s mine,” he said, squeezing past me. He turned to the Spanish woman with the baby. “Buenos días, señora,” he said in what sounded to me like an awfully good Spanish accent. She said something back. Then he turned back to me. “Cuban,” he whispered. He sniffed the air, caught the diaper aroma. “That you?” He was trying to defuse the tension by cracking a joke.

I smiled to say I got it but it wasn’t funny.

“So, you still don’t want my help?”

I nodded.

“That include information I happened to come across that concerns you.”

I hesitated. Inhaled slowly, then let out my breath even more slowly. I couldn’t let him keep doing this. It was wrong, and I knew it.

But the lure was overpowering. “All right,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

He unzipped a nylon portfolio and took out a brown file folder and handed it to me.

“What’s this?” I said.

He spoke quietly. “You know that big idea you came up with at Fenway?”

“The billboard thing?”

“Take a look.”

I hesitated, then opened the folder. It held printouts of e-mails between Gordy and Dick Hardy, the CEO of Entronics USA.

“I guess our CEO was in Tokyo for the Global Executive Summary. But he’s coming to TechComm.”

“He never misses it.” I read through the e-mails. Gordy was all excited about a “major idea” he’d come up with, a “disruptive” application of existing technology that could transform Entronics’ position in the global market. Digital signage! He used some of the exact phrases I’d used: “The sunk costs are already budgeted.” And “It will put Entronics on the map in the digital signage industry.” And: “PictureScreen will make existing LED display technology look like JumboTron in 1985.”

“This pisses me off,” I said.

“I thought it might. That broke dick’s not going to get away with screwing you over again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not talking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing. When you’re in combat, you don’t have time to think. You just act.”

“No,” I said. “No favors.”

He was silent.

“I mean it,” I said.

He remained silent.

“Come on, Kurt. No more. Please.”

34

The hotel was a big fancy Westin attached to the convention center. Our rooms all had balconies overlooking Miami and Biscayne Bay. I’d forgotten how much I liked Miami, even though the heat was oppressive in the summer, and I wondered why I didn’t live here.

I worked out in the hotel fitness center and had a late room-service lunch while I did e-mail and returned calls. I checked in with Kate at home and asked how she was feeling, and she said the cramps had gone away so she was a lot better.

TechComm, I should explain, is the big trade show for the audiovisual industry, which is just about as geeky as it sounds. Twenty-five thousand people from eighty countries attend, all of them connected in some way to a multibillion-dollar industry that’s populated by the guys from the Dungeons & Dragons Club in high school. Understand that the highlight of the whole show is not the awards banquet but the “Projection Shoot-out” a big demo of LCD projectors, okay?

At five, I dressed in Miami casual, which meant a nice golf shirt and a pair of pressed chinos, and went down to the big opening reception in Ballrooms B and C. It was the kickoff to the convention. When I got there, I saw that the whole Band of Brothers, plus Gordy, were dressed pretty much the same way as me. There was bad music and decent hors d’oeuvres and drinks. People were getting their badges and program guides and figuring out which seminars and panel discussions they wanted to go to when they weren’t on booth duty. “Principles of AV Design”? “Fundamentals of Video Conferencing”? The hot one seemed to be “The Future of Digital Cinema.”

Snatches of conversation wafted by me: “…Native resolution of nineteen-twenty-by-ten-eighty…that four million pixels makes HD video look soft…unstable signal environments…totally seamless playback…” Festino told me that NEC was giving away a Corvette and wondered whether we could enter the drawing. Then he said, “Hey, look. It’s Mister Big.”

Dick Hardy entered the party like Jay Gatsby. He was a big, trim man with a big head, a ruddy face, a strong jaw. He looked like a CEO out of Central Casting, which is probably why our Japanese overlords named him to the job. He was wearing a blue blazer over some kind of white linen T-shirt.

Gordy spotted him and rushed over, gave him a bear hug. Since Hardy was a lot taller than Gordy, the hug was comic-Gordy’s arms grabbed Hardy around the belly.

Nerdy or not, TechComm is pretty damned cool. Everywhere the next morning you could see huge screens and displays, multimedia shows of light and sound. Video walls twelve feet high playing movie trailers and commercials. One booth was a virtual-reality simulation of a Renaissance palace you could walk into, all done by hologram. It was magic. The future was on display. People in the rental and staging business were checking out the latest audio-mixing consoles. One company was showing off its wireless digital video broadcast system for the home. Another one was inviting people to try its wireless phone conference system. Yet another had outdoor digital touchscreens.

We had the PictureScreen on display, mounted into a big picture window, along with our biggest and best plasma and LCD displays and our six newest, lightest, and brightest LCD projectors for schools and businesses. I manned the booth a little, greeting walk-bys, but most of the time I was in meetings with big customers. I did two lunches. Kurt and a couple of guys from our facilities department had gotten here early to set up the booth and get it wired and move boxes, and Kurt had spent much of the day hovering nearby, keeping watch on the equipment and especially the unguarded area behind the booth. He’d gotten pretty popular among the Band of Brothers, I noticed.

I didn’t see Gordy much. He and Dick Hardy had a long meeting with some folks from Bank of America. I was perfectly civil to him, of course. He was a scumbag. What else was new? During a break between meetings, Gordy stopped by our booth, glad-handed a little, and took me aside.

“Booya on that Belkin dealership deal,” he said, an arm around my shoulder. “You see the press release Dick Hardy just sent out?”

“Already?”

“Hardy doesn’t waste time. Entronics stock is already trading higher on the New York Stock Exchange.”

“Because of that one deal? That’s got to be a pimple on Entronics’ ass.”

“It’s all about momentum. Who’s up, who’s down. Good timing, too, Entronics announcing the deal at TechComm. Love it. Love it!”

“Good timing,” I agreed.

“You know something, Steadman? I’m starting to think I might have underestimated you after all. When we get back, we should get together one of these nights, you and me and the ladies, huh?”

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” I said with a straight face.

Later on, I did the booth crawl, checking out the competitors. People were grabbing freebies all over the place, swag like messenger bags and beach towels and Frisbees. I stopped at the booth of one company that did rotating video displays and weatherproof, 360-degree outdoor LED displays. I’d removed my badge so they’d think I was just another end user. At the booth of a company that sold huge indoor/outdoor LED video screens, assembled from smaller modular panels, I really dug deep, asking a bunch of questions about pixel pitch and color correction. Questions that probably made me seem smart, like the number of nits, which is a unit of brightness, and the pixel uniformity technology. But I wasn’t trying to impress them. I really wanted to know what the competition was up to. They told me their video screens had been used in Sting and Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.

I checked out the booth of a company called AirView Systems, which sold flight information display systems to airports. They were one of our biggest competitors for the Atlanta airport contract, so I wanted to see what they did. AirView wasn’t a big company, so all the top officers were there schmoozing. I shook hands with the CFO, Steve Bingham, a handsome guy in his fifties with silver anchorman hair, a lean face, deep-set eyes.

Then I stopped at the Royal Meister booth, which was larger than ours, and even more decked out with plasmas and LCDs and projectors. The young guy who was manning the booth was all over me, since he thought I was a potential customer. He handed me his business card, wanted to show us the latest and greatest. He could have been me five years ago. He asked for my business card, and I patted my pockets and told him I must have left them back at my hotel room and turned to get the hell out of there, hoping he wouldn’t see me at the Entronics booth when he did his booth crawl.

“Let me introduce you to our new Senior Vice President of Sales,” he said.

“Thanks, but I’ve got to get to a seminar.”

“Are you sure?” a woman said. “I always like to say hello to prospects.”

I didn’t recognize her at first. Her mousy brown hair was the color of honey. She’d put highlights in her hair too. She was wearing makeup for the first time.

“Joan,” I said, startled. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Jason,” Joan Tureck said, extending her hand to shake. “I don’t see an exhibitor badge-you’re no longer with Entronics?”

“No, I-I think I misplaced the badge,” I said.

“Along with his business card,” said the young sales guy, now visibly ticked off.

“But I thought you were with FoodMark.”

“This position opened up suddenly, and I couldn’t resist. Meister wanted someone with an intimate understanding of the visual systems space, and I happened to be available. Being a carnivore wasn’t a requirement.”

It made perfect sense that Royal Meister had hired Joan Tureck. In the big battle between divisions, with two megacorporations duking it out over which sales force lived and which died, she was a huge asset. She knew where all the bodies were buried at Entronics. She knew where all our fault lines were, all our weaknesses and soft spots.

“You-you look great,” I said.

“It’s Dallas,” she shrugged.

“So you’ve got the equivalent of Gordy’s job,” I said.

“I wish that were all there was to it. Most of my job these days is taken up with planning for the integration.”

“Meaning what’s going to happen to your sales force?”

She smiled again. “More like what’s going to happen to your sales force.”

“You look like the cat that got the cream, Joan.” Old Cal Taylor’s line.

“Strictly two percent. You know me.”

“I thought you hated Dallas.”

“Sheila grew up in Austin, you know. So it’s not so bad. They’ve invented something called air-conditioning.”

“They have great steak houses in Dallas.”

“I’m still a vegan.” Her smile faded. “I heard about Phil Rifkin. That was a shock.”

I nodded.

“He was such a nice guy. Brilliant. A little strange, sure, but he never struck me as suicidal.”

“I never thought so either.”

“Very peculiar. And very sad.”

I nodded.

“I saw the press release Dick Hardy put out. I guess Gordy landed a major deal at the Harry Belkin auto dealerships.”

I nodded again. “That was news to me, too,” I said. “I thought I’d done it, but hey, what do I know?”

She drew closer and walked with me out of the booth. “Jason, can I give you some unsolicited advice?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve always liked you. You know that.”

I nodded.

“Get out now, while you can. Before you and all the rest of you are out on the street. It’s much easier to look for a job when you already have one.”

“It’s not a sure thing, Joan,” I said weakly.

“I’m telling you as a friend, Jason. Call me a rat, but I know a sinking ship when I see one.”

I didn’t reply, just looked at her for a few seconds.

“We’ll stay in touch,” she said.

35

When the show was closing for the day, I stopped back in to check in on my guys and see who they’d connected with. Festino had the Purell out and was furiously trying to kill the microbes he’d picked up from the disease-ridden hands of hundreds of customers. Kurt was at work securing the equipment for the night.

“Coming to the big dinner?” I asked Kurt, as he secured the equipment.

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it,” he said.

As I walked back to my room to shower and change into a suit, I saw Trevor Allard standing by the elevator banks. “How’s it going, Trevor?” I said.

He turned to me. “Interesting,” he said. “It’s always nice to run into old friends.”

“Who’d you see?”

The elevator binged, and we got on, the only ones.

“A buddy of mine from Panasonic,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mm-hmm.” The elevator doors closed.

“He told me you got the Harry Belkin contract because a whole shipment of Panasonic plasmas were DOA.”

I nodded. I was feeling the usual anxiety, being inside the steel coffin, but now I felt a dread of a different sort. “It’s weird,” I said.

“Very weird. Bad for Panasonic. But good for you.”

“And Entronics.”

“Sure enough. Your deal, of course. A huge win for you. Good bit of luck, huh?”

I shrugged. “Hey,” I said, “you make your own luck.” Or someone makes it for you.

“Really got me thinking,” Trevor said carefully. We were both watching the elevator buttons. No elevator TV here, unfortunately. What would the word of the day be? Imputation? Insinuation? “Took me down memory lane. Reminded me of Fidelity. I had a bum monitor, too, remember?”

“We’ve been through that, Trevor.”

“Yep. I lost Fidelity over it. Then there was that car trouble I had a few months ago-I lost Pavilion, remember? Then there was Brett Gleason’s Blue Screen of Death.”

“You’re still harping on this nonsense?”

“Bad things happen to your adversaries, don’t they? There seems to be a real pattern here.”

The elevator binged again, and we’d arrived at our floor.

“Right,” I said. “And even paranoids have enemies.”

“I’m not dropping this, Jason,” he said as he turned right and I turned left to go to our rooms. “Brett and I are going to dig deep. I know you’re behind all this stuff, and I’m going to find out the truth. I promise you.”

36

I called Kate, took a shower, and changed into a suit and tie for dinner. Entronics had taken over one of the Westin ballrooms. Gordy had, as usual, kept the theme of the dinner a secret.

His TechComm dinners were always blowout extravaganzas. The year before, the theme had been The Apprentice, and he got to be Donald Trump, of course. The year before that was Survivor. Everyone got bandanas and was forced to eat a bowl of “dirt,” made of crumbled Oreos and gummy worms. He always gave an over-the-top, borderline-insane talk, a cross between that self-help guru Tony Robbins and Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs.

We were all wondering what it would be this year.

When I walked in I saw that the whole place had been decorated, at what had to be enormous expense, to look like a boxing arena. Projected on the walls-using Entronics projectors, no doubt-were all sorts of vintage fight posters, the kind that usually came in mustard yellow with big red-and-white crudely printed letters and monochrome photos of the fighters. There were posters for JERSEY JOE WALCOTT VS. ROCKY MARCIANO and CASSIUS CLAY VS. DONNIE FLEEMAN and SUGAR RAY FORSYTHE VS. HENRY ARMSTRONG.

In the middle of the room was a boxing ring. I’m serious. Gordy had actually had a boxing ring brought in-he must have rented it somewhere in Miami-steel frame and corner posts, covered ropes, canvas floor, wooden stepladder to climb in, even the stools in opposite corners. There was a black steel ring gong mounted on a freestanding wooden post nearby. It sat there in the middle of the banquet hall, surrounded by dining tables.

It looked incredibly stupid.

Kurt saw me enter and came right up to me. “This must have cost a couple of bucks, huh?”

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll see. Gordy asked my advice. I should be flattered.”

“Advice on what.”

“You’ll see.”

“Where’s Gordy?”

“Probably backstage having a last hit of courage. He asked me to go get his Scotch bottle.”

I found my assigned seat, at a table close to the boxing ring. Each of the Band of Brothers was seated, one or two to a table, with important customers.

I just had time to introduce myself to a guy from SignNetwork before the lights went down and a pair of spotlights swung around and stopped at the blue velvet stage curtains at the front of the room. A loud trumpet fanfare blared from loudspeakers: the theme from the movie Rocky.

The curtains parted and two burly guys burst through carrying a throne. On it sat Gordy, wearing a shiny red boxing robe with gold trim and hood, and shiny red boxing gloves. He was wearing black high-top Converse sneakers. The throne was labeled “CHAMP.” In front of them scurried a young woman, flinging rose petals from a basket. Gordy was beaming and punching the air.

The burly guys carried Gordy down a path cleared between the dining tables, while the woman threw rose petals just ahead of them, and “Gonna Fly Now” blared from the speakers.

There was tittering, and some outright laughter, from the tables. People didn’t know what to make of it all.

The guys set the throne down next to the boxing ring, and Gordy rose to his feet, gloves way up in the air, as the music faded.

“Yo, Adrian!” he shouted. The rose-petal woman now busied herself clipping a wireless lapel mike to his robe.

There was laughter. People were starting to roll with it. I still couldn’t believe Gordy was doing this, but he was known to do strange routines at our annual kickoffs.

He turned around to show off the back of his robe. It said ITALIAN STALLION in gold block letters. It even had a white patch sewn on the top that said SHAMROCK MEATS INC., just like in the first Rocky movie.

He turned back around and lifted his robe coquettishly to give us a peek of his stars-and-stripes boxing trunks.

“Wrong movie,” Trevor shouted from his table over to one side. “That’s Rocky III!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gordy said, beaming.

“I thought you’re Irish!” shouted Forsythe, getting into it.

“Honorary Italian,” he said. “My wife’s Italian. Where’s my drink?” He found his bottle of Talisker 18 on a little table next to the ring, glugged some into a glass, and took a swig before stepping into the ring. He made a hand gesture, and the rose-petal woman hit the ring gong with a striking hammer. He bowed, and there was applause.

“Booya!” he shouted.

“Booya,” some of the guys replied.

“Booya!” he yelled, louder.

“Booya!” everyone shouted back.

He pulled down the hood but left the robe on-probably a wise decision, given his physique. “We at Entronics are going to go the distance for you,” he shouted. There was a high-pitched squeal of feedback.

“Yeah!” Trevor shouted back, and he was joined by a bunch of the other guys. I clapped and tried not to roll my eyes.

“We’re going all fifteen rounds!” Gordy shouted.

The rose-petal woman was standing at a long table next to the ring, cracking eggs into glasses. There was a pile of egg cartons on the table. I knew what was coming up. There were probably twenty-eight glasses lined up, and she was cracking three eggs into each glass.

Gordy took another gulp of his Scotch. “When your back is to the wall and it’s do or die, you look within yourself to find the spirit of a hero,” he said. “Like Rocky Balboa, we think of ourselves as the under-dog. Rocky had Apollo Creed. Well, we have NEC and Mitsubishi. Rocky had Mr. T-we have Hitachi. Rocky had Tommy Gunn-we have Panasonic. Rocky had Ivan Drago-we have Sony!”

Raucous cheers from the Band of Brothers, and from some of the channel partners and distributors now too.

“We say, ‘Be a thinker, not a stinker!’” Gordy said. “We’re here to make your dreams a reality! Now, I’m not going to get down and do one-arm pushups for you.”

“Aww, come on!” Taminek shouted. “Do it!”

“Come on, Gordy!” Trevor shouted.

“I’ll spare you,” he said. “Because this is not about Gordy. It’s about the team.” His words seemed to be a little slurred. “The G Team! We’re all team players. And we’re gonna show you now what we mean. Jason, where are you?”

“Right here,” I said, my stomach sinking.

“Get up here, sparring partner!”

I stood up. Was he going to ask me to box him in the ring? Good God. Get me the hell out of here. “Hey, Gordy,” I said.

“Come on,” he said, waving me toward him with his left glove.

I approached the ring, and the rose-petal girl came up to me with a glass of raw eggs.

“Drink it down, Jason,” Gordy said.

I could hear cheering and laughter.

I held the glass of eggs, looked at it, smiled like a good sport. I held it up for everyone to see, and I shook my head. “I’ve got high cholesterol,” I said.

“Aww,” said Trevor, and he was joined by Forsythe and Taminek and then the others.

“Come on, Tigger,” said Festino.

“You’re all fired,” I said.

“Drink up,” Gordy commanded.

I lifted the glass to my mouth and poured it down my throat and began swallowing. The eggs slid down in a gooey, viscous string. I felt sick, but I kept going. When I handed the empty glass to the rose-petal girl, a cheer arose.

“All right!” Gordy said. He tapped my head with a glove. “Who’s next? Where’s Forsythe? Where’s Festino?”

“I don’t want to get salmonella,” Festino said.

I returned to my table, looking around for the nearest restroom in case I had to hurl.

“Pussy,” Gordy slurred. “Trevor, show ’em a real man.”

“I want to see Jason chug another glass.” Trevor laughed.

Gordy began weaving around the canvas like a real punch-drunk fighter, and I could tell he wasn’t faking it. He was drunk. “See, thing is, wanna know why we invited you all?” he said. “All you customers? Think we invited you because we like spending time with you? Hell, no.”

There was laughter. Trevor sat down, relieved that the moment had passed.

“We want every frickin’ last one of you to standardize on Entronics,” Gordy said. “Know why?” He held up his gloves, punched the air. “Because I want the whole G Team to be as rich as me.”

Some of the Band of Brothers guffawed loudly. So did a few of the customers, only not quite as loudly. Some, however, were not smiling.

“You know what kind of car Gordy drives?” he said. “A Hummer. Not a Geo Metro. Not a goddamned Toyota. Not a Japmobile. A Hummer. Know what kind of watch Gordy wears? A Rolex. Not a stinking Seiko. It ain’t made in Japan. Where’s Yoshi Tanaka?”

“Not here,” someone said.

“Yoshi-san,” Gordy said with a sarcastic twist. “Not here. Good. Fact, I b’lieve none of our Japanese expatriates are here. Prob’ly too busy filing their secret informant reports on us. Sending microdots back to Tokyo. Goddamned spies.”

There was laughter, but now it was the nervous kind.

“Japs don’t trust us,” Gordy went on, “but we show them, don’ we? Don’ we, guys?”

There was rustling, the clinking of forks as the guests quietly ate their salads.

“They’re slow-kill, those Japs,” he said. “Passive-aggressive. Let the dust pile up in the corner. Never tell you what the hell they’re thinking, those Japs. Inscrutable assholes.”

“Gordy,” Trevor called out. “Take a seat.”

Gordy was leaning on the ropes now. “Think it’s easy working for a bunch of slant eyes who want you to fail just because you’re a white guy?” he said. His words were more and more slurred, getting indistinct. “The G Team,” he said.

Trevor got up, and I did too. “Come on, Gordy,” he called out. “Jesus,” Trevor muttered, “he’s plastered.” We walked over to the ring, and so did Kurt and Forsythe. Gordy was leaning against the ropes, canting all the way over. He looked up and saw us approaching. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot. “The hell away from me,” he said.

We grabbed him, and he struggled for a few seconds, but not very hard. I heard him mumble, “Wha’ happens in Miami stays in…Miami…” before he passed out.

As we carried Gordy out of the banquet room, I saw Dick Hardy standing against a wall, his arms folded, his face a dark mask of fury.