“‘They’ being Todd and the other Fairfield boys?”
“Todd and his wife and Eden and another couple. Anyway.”
“I had an interesting talk with MacFarland at Atlas McKenzie.”
“Oh, yeah?” Scott’s expression seemed wary.
“Yeah. Learn something new every day. You know why they decided not to go with us?”
“Gotta be price, what else? Not quality, that’s for sure. But you get what you pay for.”
“MacFarland seems to think we’re on the block. Now, why would he think that?”
Scott spread out his palms.
“Atlas McKenzie uses the same Hong Kong law firm as Fairfield, which is how they heard.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Funny thing is, I heard something sort of similar from the guy at GSA just now.”
“GSA?” Scott said, swallowing.
“The Homeland Security deal? That just fell apart too.”
“Shit.”
“And you know why? They need Made-in-America, and they heard a rumor we’re going to be offshoring our manufacturing to China. Isn’t that the craziest thing?”
Scott, picking up on Nick’s bitter sarcasm, sat up straight in his chair and said solemnly, “If Todd and those guys were planning a move like that, don’t you think they’d at least mention it to me?”
“Yeah, I do, actually. Have they?”
“Obviously not-I would have told you right away.”
“Would you?”
“Of course-Jesus, Nick, I can’t believe people listen to stupid rumors like that. I mean, it’s no different from those idiotic rumors about the deep-fried chicken head in the box of Chicken McNuggets, or the bonsai kittens, or how the moon walk was a fraud-”
“Scott.”
“Look, I’ll make some calls, look into it for you, okay? But I’m sure there’s nothing to it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Nick said. “I really hope you’re right.”
48
Eddie didn’t stand up when Nick came to his office that afternoon. Just gave him a mock salute, as he leaned back in his Symbiosis chair with his feet on his desk. On the silver-mesh fabric wall behind him was a poster with the words “MEDIOCRITY. It Takes a Lot Less Time and Most People Won’t Notice the Difference Until It’s Too Late.” Above the slogan was a photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was one of those wiseass spoofs of corporate workplace propaganda, but Nick sometimes wondered how much irony Eddie really meant.
“I get a promotion?” Eddie asked. “I mean, with you coming down here instead of making me come up.”
Nick pulled up a small, wheeled stool. “They call it Management by Walking Around. MBWA.”
“Lot to be said for MBSOYA. Management by Sitting on Your Ass.”
Nick forced a smile, and told him about what MacFarland and Grover Herrick had said, skipping the incidentals.
“Fuck me,” Eddie said. “Gotta be bullshit, right? You talk to Scott McNally about this?”
“He says there’s nothing to it. But he knows more than he’s telling me. I’m sure of it.”
Eddie nodded slowly. “If you’re out, I’m out, right?”
“Who said anything about my being out? I just want you to see what Scott’s up to, that’s all.”
Eddie grinned slowly. “You want an assist, I’ll fire you the puck and cross-check the assholes. I’ll even break the fucking stick over their heads.”
“A little e-mail surveillance should do it, Eddie.”
“I’ll get one of the techs to pull his e-mail records off the server, right? Just get me a few keywords.”
“That sounds like a start.”
“Oh, sure. Phone records, all that stuff. Easy peasy. But boy, you sure do have a knack for stepping in the shit.” Eddie’s skin formed webbing around his eyes as he smiled. “Good thing you got a friend who doesn’t mind cleaning your shoes.”
“You’ll let me know if you find anything.”
“That’s what friends are for.”
Nick didn’t meet his eyes. “And not a word to anyone.”
“Back at ya, buddy.”
Nick hesitated for a moment, then wheeled the stool close to Eddie’s desk. “Eddie, did you tell the cops you went over to my house after we found my dog?”
Eddie peered at him for a while. “They didn’t ask me. I don’t volunteer information. That’s cop interview lesson number one.”
Nick nodded. “They didn’t ask me either. Not yet. But in case it comes up, I want to make sure we have a consistent story, okay? I asked you to come over, and you did. Only natural that I’d give you a call. You’re my security director.”
“Only natural,” Eddie repeated. “Makes sense. But you got to calm down, buddy. You worry too much.”
49
When he returned to the executive floor, Marjorie stopped him and handed him a slip of paper, a concerned look in her face. “I think you need to return this call right away,” she said.
Principal J. Sundquist, she had written in her clear, elegant script, and then the telephone number.
Jerome Sundquist. Twenty-five years ago, he’d been Nick’s high school math teacher. Nick remembered him as a rangy guy-a former tennis pro-who bounced around the classroom and was pretty good at keeping up the Math Is Fun act. To his students, he was Mr. Sundquist, not “Jerome” or “Jerry,” and though he was reasonably laid back, he didn’t pretend to be pals with the kids in their chair desks. Nick half-smiled as he remembered those chair desks, with the little steel basket for books under the seat, and a “tablet arm” supported by a continuous piece of steel tube that ran from the back supports to the crossover legs. They were manufactured, back then as they were now, right in town, at Stratton’s chair plant, a few miles down the road. Nick hadn’t seen the numbers recently, but they listed for about a hundred and fifty, on a unit cost of maybe forty. Basically, it was the same design today.
Jerome Sundquist hadn’t changed that much, either. Now he was the school principal, not a young teacher, and allowed himself a little more sententiousness than he used to, but if you were a high school principal, that was pretty much part of the job description.
“Nick, glad you called,” Jerome Sundquist said, in a tone that was both cordial and distant. “It’s about your son.”
Fenwick Regional High was a big brick-and-glass complex with a long traffic oval and the kind of juniper-and-mulch landscaping you found at shopping centers and office parks-nothing fancy, but somebody had to keep it up. Nick remembered when he came home after his first semester at Michigan State, remembered how small everything seemed. That’s how it should have felt when he visited his old high school, but it didn’t. The place was bigger-lots of add-ons, new structures, new brick facings on the old ones-and somehow plusher than it was in the old days. Plenty of it had to do with how Stratton had grown over the past couple of decades, with a valuation that broke two billion dollars three years ago. Then again, the higher you got, the longer the fall to the bottom. If Stratton collapsed, it would bring a lot of things down with it.
He stepped through the glass double doors and inhaled. As much as the place had changed, it somehow smelled the same. That grapefruit-scented disinfectant they still used: maybe they’d ordered a vat in 1970 and were still working through it. Some sort of faint burnt-pea-soup odor wafting from the cafeteria, as ineradicable as cat piss. It was the kind of thing you only noticed when you were away from it. Like the first day of homeroom after summer vacation, when you realized that the air was heavy with hair-styling products and eggy breakfasts and cinnamon Dentyne and underarm deodorant and farts-the smell of Fenwick’s future.
But the place had changed dramatically. In the old days everyone came to school on the bus; now the kids were either dropped off in vans or SUVs or drove to school themselves. The old Fenwick Regional had no blacks, or maybe one or two a year; now the social leaders of the school seemed to be black kids who looked like rappers and the white kids who tried to. They’d added a sleek new wing that looked like something out of a private school. In the old days there used to be a smoking area, where longhaired kids in Black Sabbath T-shirts hung out and puffed and jeered at the jocks like Nick. Now smoking was outlawed and the Black Sabbath kids had become Goths with nose rings.