“Oh-hello, Jason.”
“Hi, Phil. I’m demo’ing the 42MP5 on Friday morning in Revere,” I said.
“So?” He blinked owlishly.
Rifkin was a small, thin guy with a huge mop of frizzy brown hair like a Chia pet. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and was partial to white short-sleeve dress shirts with two pockets and big collars. He kept strange hours, tended to work through the night, lived out of the vending machines.
Phil lacked all social skills. Fortunately he didn’t need them in his job. In his own little world he was vastly powerful, a veritable Czar of all the Plasmas. If he didn’t like you, there might not be a plasma display available to demo for your new customer. Or he might not have it prepped in time. You had to be nice to this guy, and I always was. I’m not an idiot.
“Can you make sure all the cables make it too?”
“Component cable or RGB or both?”
“Just component.”
“Make sure you warm the unit up for a couple of minutes first.”
“Of course. Do you think you could preadjust it? To full Rifkin standards?”
He shrugged, privately pleased but trying not to let on. He turned and I followed him in. He stood before a forty-two-inch mounted on the wall. “I don’t know what the big deal is,” he said. “Leave the sharpness at 50%. I like to jack up the reds and blues and tone down the greens. Contrast at 80%. Brightness at 25%. Tint at 35%.”
“Got it.”
“Make sure to show off the zoom feature-the scaling’s far superior to any other plasma out there. Much sharper. What’s this for, anyway?”
“The dog track in Revere. Wonderland.”
“Why are you wasting my time on this?”
“I leave nothing to chance.”
“But a dog track, Jason? Greyhounds chasing a mechanical bunny rabbit?”
“Even animal-rights abusers like good monitors, I guess. Thanks. Can you have this prepped and on the truck by eight Friday morning?”
“Jason, is it true that we’re all gonna have to pack up and move to the City of Hate?”
“Huh?”
“Dallas. Isn’t that what’s really going on with the Royal Meister acquisition?”
I shook my head. “No one’s told me that.”
“They wouldn’t, would they? No one ever tells people on our level anything. We always find out when it’s too late.”
Back in my office, my phone was ringing. Lockwood Hotels came up on the caller ID.
“Hey, Brian,” I said.
“There he is,” Brian said, sounding typically buoyant. “You got the Sox tickets, right?”
“That’s not why I called,” I said. “I wanted to circle back to you on the proposal.”
“You know I’m doing what I can,” he said, his voice suddenly flat and clipped. “There’s all kinds of factors in play here that are beyond my control.”
“I totally understand,” I said. My heart started beating fast. “I know you’re doing everything you can to work the system for me.”
“You know it,” Brian said.
“And you know Entronics will price-compete on any reasonable proposal.”
“No doubt.”
My heart was thudding loud and my mouth was dry. I grabbed a mostly empty Poland Spring water bottle and drained it. The water was warm. “Of course, some things we can’t match and won’t try,” I went on. “Like the trip you and Martha just took to Aruba.”
He was silent. So I continued, “Hard to compete with free, you know?”
He was still silent. I thought for a moment that the phone had gone dead.
Then Brian said, “FedEx me a fresh set of docs, will you? I’ll have ’em inked and on your desk by close of business Friday.”
I was stunned. “Hey, thanks, Bri-that’s great. You rock.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said quietly.
“I appreciate everything you’ve done-”
“Really,” he said, a note of hostility entering his voice. “I mean it. Don’t mention it.”
The phone rang again. It was a private caller, which meant it might have been Kate. I picked it up.
“These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise,” said a voice I immediately recognized.
“Graham,” I said, “how’s it going?”
“J-man. Where you been?”
Graham Runkel was a world-class stoner who lived in Central Square, Cambridge, in a first-floor apartment that smelled like bong water. We went to high school together in Worcester, and when I was younger and irresponsible, I’d from time to time buy a nickel bag of marijuana from him. Less and less often in recent years, though, but once in a while I’d stop by his apartment-the Den of Iniquity, he called it-and smoke a joint with him. Kate disapproved, of course, thought it was juvenile behavior, which it was. Ganja could do things to your brain. A couple of years ago, Graham had canceled his subscription to High Times because he’d become convinced that the magazine was in fact owned and operated by the Drug Enforcement Administration to lure and entrap unsuspecting pot heads. He once confided to me after a few bong hits that the DEA put a tiny digital tracking device in the binding of each issue, which they located by means of an extensive satellite system.
Graham was a man of many talents. He was always rebuilding engines, working on his 1971 VW Beetle in the backyard of his apartment building. He worked in a record store that sold only vinyl. He was also a “Trekker,” a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, which to him was the height of culture. Only the original series-Classic Trek, as they called it; everything else was an abomination, he thought. He knew all the plot lines by heart and all the character names, even the minor, nonrecurring characters. He once told me that his first big crush had been on Lieutenant Uhura. He went to a lot of Star Trek conventions, and he’d turned a scale model of the Starship Enterprise into a bong.
Graham had also done jail time, not unlike some of my other buddies from the old neighborhood. In his early twenties he went through a rough patch and broke into a couple of houses and apartments, trying to pay back a marijuana deal, and he got caught.
Basically, Graham had ended up where I might have ended up if my parents hadn’t been so insistent I go to college. His parents considered college a waste of money and refused to pay for it. He got pissed off and dropped out of high school at the beginning of senior year.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “It’s been real crazy at work.”
“Haven’t heard from you in weeks, man. Weeks. Come on over to the Den of Iniquity-we’ll do a spliff, get baked, and I’ll show you what I’ve done to the Love Bug. El Huevito.”
“I’m awful sorry, Graham,” I said. “Another time, okay?”
Around noon, Festino appeared in my office door. “You hear about Teflon Trevor?” There was a look of unmistakable glee on his face.
“What?”
He snickered. “He had an appointment with the CEO of the Pavilion Group in Natick to do a meet-and-greet, a handshake kind of thing, and ink the deal. CEO’s the kind of guy you don’t keep waiting five seconds, you know? Real control freak. So what happens? One of the tires on Trevor’s Porsche blows out on the Pike. He missed the meeting, and the CEO was totally pissed.”
“So? We’ve all had car trouble. So he calls Pavilion on his cell and tells them, and they reschedule. Big deal. It happens.”
“That’s the beauty part, Tigger. His cell phone died too. Couldn’t make a call. So basically the CEO and everyone else is sitting around waiting for Trevor and he never shows up.” He squeezed out a dab of hand cleaner and looked up at me with a smile.
“Hate when that happens,” I said. I told him about how I’d just turned the Lockwood deal around, about playing the Aruba card. You could see Festino looking at me in a whole new way.