Killer Instinct (26 page)

“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 J
ERSEY
J
OE
W
ALCOTT VS.
R
OCKY
M
ARCIANO
and C
ASSIUS
C
LAY VS.
D
ONNIE
F
LEEMAN
and S
UGAR
R
AY
F
ORSYTHE VS.
H
ENRY
A
RMSTRONG
.

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 “C
HAMP
.” 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 I
TALIAN
S
TALLION
in gold block letters. It even had a white patch sewn on the top that said S
HAMROCK
M
EATS
I
NC
., 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.

— PART THREE —

37

The first thing I did was to get rid of the Caribbean. I had them remove all the PictureScreens from my new office. I wanted to be able to see out of the windows, even if all I could see was the parking lot.

Everything Gordy used to do I wanted to do the opposite. After all, I was the anti-Gordy. That’s why Dick Hardy had named me the new VP of Sales.

That and the fact that Entronics was desperate to fill the slot as fast as possible. They wanted to put the Gordy debacle behind them.

Gordy’s drunken rampage was all over the Internet the next day. The message boards on Yahoo were filled with stories of the
Rocky
show, the glasses of raw eggs, the Rolex and the Hummer, and especially the anti-Japanese slurs. Gordy, who was well-known in the small world of high-tech sales, had become a celebrity.

And in Tokyo, the top officers of Entronics were beyond embarrassed. They were livid. They’d been willing to accept Gordy’s private bigotry, but the moment he began spouting publicly, he had to be shot.

The Entronics Public Relations Manager in Santa Clara put out a press release saying that “Kent Gordon has left Entronics for personal and family reasons.”

I got a slew of congratulatory phone calls and e-mails—from friends I hadn’t heard from in years, from people who were probably positioning themselves for a job with Entronics, not knowing there might not be any jobs at all soon. Joan Tureck sent me a very nice e-mail congratulating me and adding, ominously, “Good luck. That most of all. You’ll need it.”

The second thing I did was to call in Yoshi Tanaka and let him know that things were going to be different from now on. Unlike my predecessor, I wanted to work with him. I wanted his input. I wanted to know what he thought. I wanted to know what he thought the guys in Tokyo thought. I spoke slowly, used simple words.

I won’t say Yoshi smiled at me—his facial muscles apparently didn’t have that ability—but he nodded solemnly and thanked me. I think he understood what I was saying, though I couldn’t be sure.