“Right.”
“Say it, Steadman.”
I exhaled noisily. “I drove a Geo Metro to work today because-”
“Good. Now say, ‘And Gordy drove a Hummer.’ Got it?”
“Gordy-”
“Say it, Steadman.”
“Gordy drove a Hummer.”
“Correct. Is anything sinking in? Show me your watch, Steadman.”
I glanced down at it involuntarily. It was a decent-looking Fossil, about a hundred bucks at the kiosk in the Prudential Mall. I held out my left hand reluctantly.
“Take a look at mine, Steadman.” He flicked his left wrist, shot his cuff, revealed a huge, gaudy Rolex, gold and diamond-encrusted with three subdials on its face. Tacky-looking, I thought.
“Nice watch,” I said.
“Now look at my shoes, Steadman.”
“I think I get your point, Gordy.”
I noticed he was looking up at his door. He flashed a thumbs-up at whoever was outside. I turned around to see Trevor walking by. Trevor gave me a smile, and I smiled right back.
“I’m not sure you do get my point,” he said. “The top sixty percent of the sales force hit their OTEs.” OTE was on-target earnings. “Then there’s the overachievers, okay? The Club. And then there’s the high-octane, the best-in-breed. The meat-eaters. Like Trevor Allard. Like Brett Gleason. Are you a meat-eater, Steadman?”
“Medium rare,” I said.
“Do you have the killer instinct?”
“You have to ask?”
He stared at me. “Show me,” he said. “Next time I see you, I want to hear about how you closed one of your big accounts.”
I nodded.
His voice got quiet, confiding. “See, I’m all about BHAGs, Steadman.” He pronounced it bee-hags. It stood for “big hairy audacious goals.” He’d read an article somewhere that quoted from some book. “You have the ability to come up with a BHAG?”
“Very big and very hairy,” I said, just to let him know I knew what it meant. “Absolutely.”
“You playing to play, or playing to win?”
“To win.”
“What’s our company motto, Steadman?”
“‘Invent the Future.’” Who the hell knew what that meant? Like we sales reps were supposed to invent the future? They invented stuff in Tokyo, under the cone of silence, and shipped it over to us to sell.
He stood up to signal that our little meeting was over, and I stood up too, and he came around the desk and put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re a good guy, Jason. A really good guy.”
“Thank you.”
“But are you good enough to be on the G Team?”
It took me a few seconds to realize that G stood for Gordy. “You know I am,” I said.
“Show me that killer instinct,” he said. “Kill, baby, kill.”
Melanie gave me a sympathetic smile as I stumbled out of Gordy’s office into the natural sunshine. Well, actually, it was gray and cloudy and starting to rain outside. Much nicer in the Caribbean, but I liked the real world.
I switched my cell phone back on as I walked back to my office. My cell started making that fast, urgent-sounding alarm sound that indicated I had a message. I checked the calls received and didn’t recognize the number. I called voice mail and heard a message from someone whose voice I didn’t at first recognize. “Yo, Jason,” a gravelly voice said. “I got some information for you on that guy at Lockwood Hotels.”
Kurt Semko.
When I got to my office, I called him back.
10
“Guy’s name is Brian Borque, right?” Kurt said.
“Yeah?” I was still feeling kind of numb from being beaten about the head and neck with Gordy’s psychic rubber truncheon.
“My buddy’s still in corporate security at Lockwood, and he did some poking around for me,” Kurt said. “So dig this: Your man Brian Borque and his fiancée just came back from Aruba, right?”
“Yeah?” I vaguely remembered him saying he’d be out of the office for a week or ten days. “He said he took his wife to Vienna, Virginia, I remember.”
“First-class tickets there and back, five-star hotel, all expenses paid, and by guess who?”
“Who?”
“Hitachi.”
I was silent for a few seconds as it dawned on me. “Shit,” I said.
Kurt’s reply was a slow, husky chuckle. “Maybe that explains the runaround you’ve been getting.”
“I’ll say. And he’s been jerking me around for a year on this contract. Boy, that pisses me off.”
“Greedhead, huh?”
“I should have known. He was stringing me along for Super Bowl tickets and everything else he could get out of me, and all the while I’m just his chick on the side, because he’s in bed with Hitachi. He was never going to buy from us anyway. All right. Thanks, man. At least now I know.”
“No worries. So…what are you going to do about it?”
“Close it or kill it, that’s the rule around here. I kill it and move on.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t see why you have to kill it and just walk away. See, there’s something else you may not know.”
“Like what?”
“Seems Lockwood Hotels has a policy on not accepting gifts greater than a hundred bucks from a customer or vendor.”
“They have a policy like that?”
“That’s why my buddy in corporate security knows about it.”
“Borque’s in trouble, that what you mean?”
“Not yet. A file’s been opened. That little trip to Aruba was worth a good five or six thousand bucks. I’d say that’s a violation of company policy, wouldn’t you?”
“What am I supposed to do with that? Blackmail the guy?”
“Naw, man. You help him out of his ethical dilemma. Lead him away from temptation. You…torque Borque.” He chuckled again. “Then you’re good to go.”
“How?” I said.
I called Brian Borque but got his voice mail and asked him to call me back as soon as he could.
In the meantime I checked my e-mail and plowed through the usual meaningless company crap, but one subject header caught my eye. I normally ignore all the job listings-after all, I already have a job, and anything in my department I hear about long before they post it. But this one was a notice for a Corporate Security officer that had just been posted today.
I skimmed it quickly. “Perform various duties such as ensuring the physical security of the facility as well as acting as first response to all emergencies including security, medical, bomb, and fire,” it said. “Qualified candidates must have: High School Diploma or GED, good communication skills, and physical security background.” It went on to say, Prefer: Recent Military experience such as Military Police…Demonstrated leadership and experience with handguns a plus.”
I remembered what Taminek said at the Outback: “We got to get this guy a job at Entronics.”
Interesting idea.
I saved the job listing as new in my e-mail in-box.
I was getting a little nervous waiting for Brian Borque to call me back, so I got up to stretch my legs. I took a quick walk down the hall to see the Technical Marketing Engineer, Phil Rifkin, to arrange for a demo I had to do in a couple of days.
Phil Rifkin was your quintessential audiovisual nerd, the Alpha Geek in our division. He was an engineer by training, was deeply familiar with all Entronics LCD projectors and LCD screens and plasma displays. He supported the sales force, answered stupid questions, taught us about the latest products, and arranged for the demos to go out of our repair facility. Sometimes he accompanied a sales rep on a demo if the rep was unsure how to operate one of our products or the customer was really high-profile. He was also our in-house technical guru when customers had questions we couldn’t answer.
Rifkin worked in what we called the Plasma Lab, even though it wasn’t just for plasmas. It was a long, narrow, windowless room. Its walls were covered with plasma and LCD screens. Its floor was a tangle of power cords and cables and huge spools, which everyone was always tripping over. I knocked on the lab door, and he opened it quickly as if he’d been waiting for me.