The Switch

12

The phone trilled, jolting Tanner, waking him abruptly out of a troubled dream.

“Michael, it’s Karen.”

She didn’t have to say; he recognized her taut, constricted voice.

“Something — wrong?”

“We lost it.”

“Lost what? What time is it?”

“Five something. I got an e-mail late last night from my guy Kent, at the Four Seasons.”

He massaged his eyes with his hand. “An e-mail.”

“I’d asked him, again, where the paperwork was, and he said, quote, I don’t think it’s happening.”

“I don’t think what’s happening?”

“The Four Seasons deal.”

“We had an agreement. You’re saying we lost the Four Seasons deal?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I told you I was feeling funny about it.”

He sat up, his eyes blurred, crusty. “We didn’t lose Four Seasons. That’s not even possible.”

“No, it happened. It did. He said another bidder got the account.”

“Did he say—”

“City Roast.”

“Blake Gifford?”

“Right.”

He uttered an expletive. “I’m going to call Liam.” He exhaled. “I need coffee.” And then he remembered that, like the cobbler’s shoeless children, he was fresh out.

It wasn’t until he got to the office and fired up the Bonavita, using beans pilfered from a prepacked bag of French roast, that he was thinking clearly enough to call Liam, his contact at the Four Seasons in Toronto.

“Michael,” Liam said when he picked up. Tanner could hear it in his voice, the bad news, the dread. “I’m so sorry.”

“So what happened?”

“I got bigfooted.”

“I don’t get it.”

He sighed heavily. “I should have called you, but I was just so pissed off. I’d already submitted the paperwork, and this Blake Gifford asshole reached out to my boss and snagged the deal.”

“But... the cold brew concentrate thing...?”

“I know. He — Gifford learned about your pitch and said he could do the same thing, only for slightly less.”

“But it — it was my idea!”

“I know. I know. Plus he said he’d plug the hotels during his show.”

“Which no one watches.”

“Still, it’s TV, and it’s National Geographic, and, you know, there’s the glitz factor. The name-recognition thing, it being Blake Gifford and all.”

“Nobody else was doing the concentrate. I don’t even think City Roast makes it.”

“I guess they do now. I’m sorry about this, Mike. I mean, your product is great and you’re a really good guy. But this is above my pay grade. I’m really sorry.”

He grabbed lunch from a Japanese noodle place down the block where the owner, Kenji, always greeted him with a cheery “Tanner-san!” He needed to be out of the office for a while, mulling over what he was going to do now that the Four Seasons deal was dead.

He ate at the counter while going over new package designs by a freelance artist they’d hired. He spent the rest of the afternoon in his office on the phone, with a grower in Costa Rica (bad cell phone connection; the call must have dropped ten times) and then with a coffee-shop owner in Harvard Square who wanted him to train his new-hire baristas but didn’t, it turned out, want to pay for it. He called his CFO, Robert Runkel, into his office to tell him the bad news about the Four Seasons. Runkel insisted on going over some numbers and projections that almost made Tanner lose his lunch.

His phone made a text alert sound, and he picked it up. A text from Sarah. Free to meet today?

He wrote back: Sure, after work. Now what? She’d just told him she was going to rent an apartment, which was as sure a sign as there could be that she wasn’t coming back. Now she wanted to meet, what, to discuss something yet more difficult?

Then came the question of what “after work” meant. He had no meetings or calls scheduled for after four thirty. Normally he stayed until six or seven, most days worked out afterward, and then got home for a late dinner. He wrote: 5 OK? The reply came: 5:00 at The T Room on Newbury St.

OK, he wrote. It didn’t escape his notice that she’d picked a tea place to meet with her coffee-guy husband.

As Runkel was standing up to leave, Lucy Turton loomed in the doorway. “Excuse me, Michael. But you weren’t picking up. You’ve got a personal call. He says it’s important.”

“Which line?” he asked Lucy.

“Three.”

“How do you know it’s a personal call?”

“That’s what the guy said.”

He furrowed his brow. “Okay.”

He picked up the landline phone. “This is Michael Tanner.”

“Oh, Mr. Tanner, I’m so glad I reached you. My name is Sam Robbins, and I think you may have my computer. I’m pretty sure I have yours.”