Killer Instinct (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded as I sat.

“Nothing yet?”

“Nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She blinked, not helping me at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at me with surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More aggressive?”

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

“How about a Boca Burger?”

“No, I’m fine. Really. Don’t bother.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Gordy doesn’t have to do anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That looks like a phallus to you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said.

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

“How bad?” Kate said.

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

6

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

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

Actually, we sucked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, Kurt,” I said.

“Hey.”

“You here to play?”

“Looks like you guys could use another player.”