Better Than This (18 page)

We were going to have to talk about where we went from here sooner or later, and we were both aware of it. Alice had said Marcus wanted out of our partnership. I wondered if he still felt that way. It seemed like right then was not the time to get into it, even though since that night it had felt like an ever present obstruction between us.

“Tell her I like the picture by the way. I hung it in my office at home.”

“Right. I’ll tell her.”

I was picking up odd signals. His discomfort seemed to relate more to talking about Alice herself rather than any awkward memory her name prompted. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine,” he said quickly, and I knew even if it wasn’t he wouldn’t tell me. He glanced at his watch. “I better get on.” At the door he paused. “Good luck today.”

“Thanks.”

Spectrum Software was based in a business park on the southern limits of San Jose, where technology companies seemed to sprout like mushrooms overnight. A couple of billboards by the highway promoted one of their products which was a program called Home Finance. I’d heard a rumour it was about to be dumped, replaced with something new, but secrecy surrounded the project and that was as much as I knew. Whatever was planned, it was overdue. The billboard showed a guy in his shirtsleeves seated at a desk in what was meant to be his home, with his wife standing behind with her hands resting on his shoulders. They were both looking at a document he was holding with perplexed frowns. The tag line was: “Take the worry out of monthly bills with Home Finance.” The entire concept was dated and had all the punch of a tapioca pudding. Underneath the ad in smaller print was the legend: A Morgan Industries Company.

I turned into the lot and found an empty slot. I was surrounded by an octagonal hub of buildings housing the companies located on the park. The offices were individually detailed, but the buildings shared a common cubist design and acres of mirrored glass so they conformed to an overall concept. All of the manufacturing and warehousing facilities were housed in rectangular barn-like structures out of sight behind the offices where there was a perimeter parking lot for the people who worked in dispatch and assembly. The centre lot was where the designers and software engineers parked their cars. I had never seen so many BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes in one place before, not to mention the fair sprinkling of Ferraris and other exotics among them.

When I reached the Spectrum building a smiling young woman behind a long curving desk directed me up the stairs. A Morgan Industries logo shared wall space over her head. The major shareholder of the group was Nelson Morgan, who was now in his mid-forties and had a personal worth numbered in hundreds of millions. The little I knew about him was gleaned from scant business magazine articles, but he was renowned for keeping a low profile so information was sketchy. He’d started out in his early twenties with a partner who he met at college, but the company they’d formed had gone bust, so Morgan had started again a year later on his own. From selling custom-made computers he’d branched out, making his mark by his apparent knack of being able to spot coming trends in the market place and then buying smallish often undervalued companies that were in a position to take advantage of them. He pumped in investment funds, the companies expanded rapidly and their value vastly increased, making Morgan incredibly wealthy along the way. The only other thing I knew was that he had a reputation for being ruthless in his business dealings.

At the reception desk upstairs another pretty young Californian blonde took my name and asked me to take a seat. I was a few minutes early, but I didn’t have to wait long before Phil Bennet, one of the marketing people I’d been dealing with, appeared.

He shook my hand. “Nick. How’re you doing?”

“Fine, Phil.”

“Great.” He smiled broadly, but his eyes darted nervously back and forth. “We’re in the conference room today,” he said. “Only place there’s enough space to fit us all in.” He started leading the way. “I think we’ve got everything you’ll need.” He began checking things off on his fingers. “Projector to hook up to your laptop. Screen of course. There’s a desk for you to lay out anything else you’re going to need. Water. Coffee. Anything else you can think of?”

“Sounds like you have it covered.”

“Whiteboard? Flip chart?”

“No need, it’s all on my laptop.”

“Terrific.”

He beamed and nodded, and beamed some more but I could have sworn there was something desperate in his eye, like he would have given his right arm to be somewhere else right then. I was conscious of the sound of our footsteps on the wooden floor. Phil began talking as if the lull in our conversation made him uncomfortable.

“Have you been in the conference room before? It’s laid out in a U shape for this kind of thing. I don’t know why we do that. I guess it works though.” He glanced at his watch. “Right on time. That’s terrific.”

I thought he seemed edgy. He was talking too much and he avoided looking me in the eye. We reached the door and he paused.

“Well, good luck.”

Something about his tone seemed all wrong to me. I said, “Phil, is there anything I should know about today?”

He looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“I get the feeling you’re nervous about something.”

“Nervous? Hell no, why should I be nervous?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s me.”

He laughed but it sounded hollow and devoid of humour. He slapped me on the back. “You’ll be fine.”

I started to say something else but he cut me off. “We better go in.” Then he opened the door and there was no more time. The entire marketing team was assembled inside. Sam Mendez sat in the centre facing the screen, and on one side sat Bev Jones, on the other somebody I didn’t recognize. Phil took his place on one of the side tables with the other product managers and immediately found something on a notepad deeply fascinating. Sam rose to meet me. He shook my hand and gestured around the room.

“Nick. You know most people here I think.”

“Sure.” I shook hands with Bev, and nodded to the others.

“And this is Dan Morris from Morgan Industries.”

I shook hands with him too. He was heavy set and unsmiling and he didn’t say anything.

“Okay, let’s get started,” Sam said, getting straight to the point. He seemed less genial than normal, but I told myself it was probably the occasion and maybe the Morris guy. I guessed as a Morgan man he favoured keeping KCM, so perhaps Sam was simply hoping I’d live up to the build up he’d given me.

I went to the front of the room and began setting up. When I was ready I glanced around. Sam was speaking quietly to Bev. The Morris guy was writing something on a pad, and Phil was determinedly looking at a spot on the opposite wall. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something wasn’t right. People tend to mimic one another in unconscious ways when they’re in a group. Wherever I looked everybody was busy talking quietly to their neighbour or else they were examining their pens and notebooks, looking anyplace but at me. There was an unnatural tension in the room and I suddenly felt like the accused man who looks at the jury for a clue to his fate and finds nobody will meet his eye.

“Good morning, everyone.”

Gradually they turned towards me, their expressions politely blank. I had no choice but to put my misgivings aside and get down to the reason I was there. An hour is a long time to hold the attention of a group of people. My job was to put together all the information I’d gathered over months of research into Spectrum’s business, and use it to show what Carpe Diem could bring to their marketing mix. There was masses of information: Strategy, demographics, targets, reach and frequency rates for proposed media a lot of charts and numbers. The kind of stuff that can easily be about as interesting as watching grass grow. I turned on my laptop and an image was projected onto the screen.

“This is Billy,” I said.

My delivery was deadpan droll. A cartoon figure looked back at the audience. Billy wore baggy trousers that collected round his ankles and a baseball cap on backwards along with an oversize “I-shirt. He was white, round shouldered and had perfected an expression of sullen boredom. In short he was instantly recognizable as a stereotypical teenager. Nobody had expected this, and after a moment’s surprise they all smiled.

“Billy’s going to come along for the ride while I talk to you, because he’s kind of interested in getting into the software business himself one day.” I turned to address the screen. “Right, Billy?”

“Hey, I saw the cars in the lot out there, man,” Billy replied in the laid back drawl of a Californian high school kid. “Do I get to make enough money for a Porsche?”

“Sure, Billy. Of course you have to work hard. It might take a little while.”

“Jeez, I know that. Like, I didn’t expect it to happen right away,” he answered with pained exaggeration as if he was addressing a simpleton. “I mean it could probably take six months or something, right?”

There was a ripple of chuckles. They were enjoying the show. The whole thing was intricately scripted of course, and I’d had to practise hard to get my timing perfectly synchronized with what Billy said and did. But I’d put a lot of time into this and I was word perfect and I never missed a cue.

“Let’s take a look at some of the areas Spectrum operates in,” I said.

A chart flashed up headed accounting software, one of their key markets. It was divided into coloured segments.

“We can see here your share has declined recently.” I went on to quickly outline who the other players were, and how they were performing. It was pretty routine stuff and there wasn’t a lot I could do to jazz it up, but I wanted to make the point that there was an opportunity here that they were missing. Suddenly Billy appeared again. He slouched across the screen and kicked one of the chart segments into touch.

“Sooo boring, dude,” he said.

More laughter. Suddenly something that was normally incredibly dull was starting to be fun. The segment spun and opened into a cool graphic and showed a competitor’s logo on a building outside of which was parked the most fantastic looking customized sports car.

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Billy.

“You like that, huh?” I said.

The shot became a close-up picture and Billy started reciting the car’s features while he practically salivated with lust.

“Four litre, twelve cylinder turbo charged motor. Zero to sixty in five point eight seconds, top speed a hundred and eighty miles an hour.” He hopped in behind the wheel. “Man, the babes are really gonna go for this.”

“The guy who owns it works for this company, Billy. Want to know how he got it?”

Billy looked back at me round eyed. “How?”

And suddenly I was talking about opportunities, and Billy was interested and so was everyone else in the room.

And so it went on. Whenever things were in danger of getting a little tedious, there was Billy, and soon people were waiting for him to appear, just to see what he would do next. It was humorous and attention grabbing and it allowed me to deliver my message, which of course was the point. It was a brilliant gimmick, and it showed off the kind of conceptual thinking we were capable of. Though the idea had originally come from Marcus, he’d decided we couldn’t do it because creating an animated character like Billy was hugely time consuming and expensive. But I had bulldozed him into it because I knew right away Billy would give us the final edge we needed. He was proof we could deliver and I knew that if we had done everything else well this was going to blow KCM and Larry Dexter out of the water.

But something still wasn’t right. Everybody was interested in Billy, no issue there. The problem was, they were a little too interested. They laughed in the right places and they were attentive but it was as if Billy gave them an excuse to pretend I’d ceased to exist. I felt like a ventriloquist whose dummy has stolen the show and as I neared the end of my pitch a deep foreboding was clutching at my insides. I glanced at Sam Mendez and he was staring almost grimly at the screen, while Morris didn’t even appear to be watching at all.

It was midday when I wrapped it up. I ended on a little speech telling them all how much I’d enjoyed the last few months, how excited I and everyone else at Carpe Diem was at the prospect of working with them. People shifted position uncomfortably, gazed at me blankly. A guy somewhere cleared his throat.

When I was done Sam rose from his seat. “Thank you, Nick. A very interesting presentation.”

Very interesting? That was it?

Still, I expected him to ask if anybody had any questions, the usual routine with these things, but instead he looked at his watch.

“I think we’re going to break for lunch now and we’ll come back later to discuss amongst ourselves what we’ve just heard.”

Suddenly the room was transformed. People pushed back their chairs and gathered up their things. They couldn’t wait to get out of there. Morris got up and made a comment to Sam, then offered me a brief nod of acknowledgment before leaving the room. Phil appeared and hovered at my shoulder.

“Greatjob, Nick. Fantastic. That Billy, he was a hoot. So listen, can I help you with anything?” Obviously it was his job to get rid of me.

Numbly I started packing away, wondering what had gone wrong. Out the corner of my eye I saw Sam and Bev heading for the door and I knew this was my last chance.

I called out, and hearing his name Sam paused. “Can I have a word?”

He and Bev exchanged quick glances, then reluctantly, it seemed to me, he said, “Sure.”

I didn’t know quite what to say, so I decided to take the direct approach. “I get the feeling something’s going on here that I don’t know about.”

A second passed, and I knew he was deciding whether to be straight with me or give me some false bullshit assurance, slap me on the back and send me on my way.

“I’m going to be frank with you,” he began at last. “I don’t think I need to tell you how impressed everyone here has been with both you personally and your company over the past months. That goes for me as much as anyone.”