“That happens where I work, too.”
He cocked his head. “Oh yeah?”
“Sort of.”
“The Aztecs cooked and skinned and ate humans, too.”
“That we don’t do.”
“You want to see a picture of the Chair of Spikes?”
“Definitely,” I said, “but we should probably go downstairs and have dinner, don’t you think?”
He stuck out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. “We don’t have to, you know. We can just tell them to bring it up to us. That’s what I do a lot.”
“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet and lifting him up. “We’ll both go. Keep each other company.”
“I’ll stay up here,” Ethan said.
The adults had switched to red wine, a Bordeaux that Craig had brought. I’m sure it was extremely expensive, though it tasted like dirty sneakers. I could smell steaks in the broiler. Susie was talking about a famous TV star who was in rehab, but Craig interrupted her to say to me, “Couldn’t take any more torture, huh?”
“He’s great,” I said. “He told me that when things got really bad the Aztecs sacrificed more humans.”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “He’ll talk your ear off. Hope he hasn’t discouraged you guys from having kids of your own. They don’t all turn out like Ethan.”
“He’s a good kid,” I said.
“And we love him to pieces,” Craig said in a rote voice, like a disclaimer in a drug ad. “So, I want to hear about your work life. I’m serious.”
“Oh, it’s boring,” I said. “No celebs.”
“I want to hear about it,” Craig said. “I’m serious. I need to know what regular people’s work life is like, especially if I’m going to write about it. I consider it research.”
I looked at him and mentally went through about a dozen really nasty and sarcastic replies, but luckily my cell phone went off. I forgot I’d still had it clipped onto my belt.
“There you go,” Craig said. “That’s got to be the office, right?” He looked from his wife to Kate. “His boss or something. Something has to be done right now. God, I love the way they crack the whip in the corporate world.”
I got up and went into the living room and answered the cell. “Hey,” a voice said. I immediately recognized Kurt.
“How’s it going?” I said, happy to be yanked away from Craig’s klieg lights.
“I catch you during dinner?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Thanks for talking to the Corporate Security guy. I downloaded the job application and filled out the form and e-mailed it back, and I got a call from the guy. He wants me to come in for an interview tomorrow afternoon.”
“You’re good to go,” I said. “He must be seriously interested in you.”
“Or desperate, I figure. Hey, so maybe I can grab you for a few minutes in the morning, talk on the phone. Get your take on Entronics and what the security problems are, all that. I like to be prepared.”
“How’s right now?” I said.
12
We met at a place in Harvard Square called Charlie’s Kitchen, where they have this excellent double-cheeseburger special. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner: Craig had pretty much killed my appetite, plus Kate had overcooked the steaks. Too many martinis. She didn’t look too happy at first about my abandoning her little dinner party, but I told her a work crisis had arisen, and that seemed to satisfy her. In fact, she seemed a little relieved, because she could see where the dinner was going, and it wasn’t pretty.
I didn’t recognize him at first, because his goatee and mullet were gone. He’d gotten a haircut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, but not military short. It was parted on the side, looked stylish. He was a good-looking guy, I realized, and now he looked like a successful business executive, only he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.
Kurt just ordered his regular, a glass of ice water. He said that when he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, fresh, clean cold water was a luxury. You drank the water there, he said, you’d get the shits for days. Now he drank it whenever he could.
He said he’d already eaten supper. When my plate arrived-a big old double cheeseburger and a mountain of fries with a plastic tankard of watery beer-Kurt took one look and scowled. “You shouldn’t eat that shit,” he said.
“You sound like my wife.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might want to think about losing a little weight. You’ll feel better.”
Him, too? “I feel fine.”
“You don’t work out, do you?”
“Who has time?”
“You make time.”
“I make time to sleep late,” I said.
“We got to get you to the gym, do some cardio and some free weights. Don’t you belong to a gym?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I pay like a hundred bucks a month for a membership at CorpFit, so I figure I don’t actually have to go there.”
“CorpFit? That’s one of those pussy smoothie-bar Evian-water places, right?”
“Since I’ve never gone, I really wouldn’t know.”
“Nah. I got to take you to a real gym. Where I go.”
“Sure,” I said, hoping he’d forget we ever talked about working out, but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who forgot anything. I took a look at my mug of beer and called the waiter over and ordered a Diet Coke.
“You still driving that rental?” Kurt said.
“Yeah.”
“When are you getting your car back?”
“I think they said middle of next week.”
“That’s too long. Let me give them a call.”
“That’d be great.”
“You have your Entronics ID with you?”
I took it out and put it on the table. He examined it closely. “Man, do you know how easy it is to counterfeit one of these babies?”
“Never thought about it.”
“I wonder if your security chief ever thought about it.”
“You don’t want to piss him off,” I said, tucking into the burger. “You have a résumé?”
“I can throw one together.”
“In the right format and everything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell you what. E-mail me what you’ve got, and I’ll go over it, make sure it’s in good shape.”
“Hey, that would be awesome.”
“No problem. Now, if I had to predict, I’d say that Scanlon is a tough interview. Though he’ll probably ask you the standards, like, ‘What’s your greatest weakness?’ And, ‘Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to solve a problem.’ Like that. How you work on a team.”
“Sounds like I can handle that,” he said.
“Make sure you get there on time. Early, in fact.”
“I’m a military guy, remember? We’re all about punctuality.”
“You’re not going to dress like that for the interview, are you?”
“Any idea how many uniform inspections I had to endure?” he said. “Don’t worry about me. There’s no corporation in the world more uptight than the U.S. military. But I want to know some details about your access control system.”
“All I know is, you wave this card at one of the boxes and you go in.”
He asked me a bunch more questions, and I told him what little I knew. “Your wife doesn’t mind you staying out late?” he asked.
“I wear the pants in the household,” I told him with a straight face. “Fact is, I think she was glad to get rid of me.”
“You still duking it out with that guy Trevor for the promotion?”
“Yeah.” I told him about my “interview” with Gordy. “He’s not going to give it to me, though. I can tell. He’s just yanking my chain.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He says I don’t have the killer instinct. And Trevor’s a superstar. His numbers are always good, but they’re especially good this year. He’s just a top goddamned salesman. There’s also Brett Gleason. He’s kind of a lunk, but he has that animal aggressiveness that Gordy likes. Gordy says it’s going to be one of us three, but I’d put money on Trevor. He’s got a big demonstration before the big swinging dicks at Fidelity Investments on Monday, and if our monitors win the shoot-out-which they will-then he lands Fidelity. Which is huge. Means he wins. And I’m screwed.”