“Look, I don’t know anything about how things work in business, but believe me, I’ve been in my share of situations that looked hopeless. And the one thing I do know for sure is that war’s unpredictable. It’s volatile. Complex. Generates confusion. That’s why they talk about the ‘fog of war.’ You often can’t believe what you see, and you can never be certain about your enemy’s plans and capabilities.”
“What does that have to do with getting a promotion?”
“I’m saying the only way to guarantee a loss is if you don’t fight. You’ve got to go into every battle knowing you can win.” He took a long swig of ice water. “Make sense?”
13
In the morning I slipped out of bed quietly at six, before the alarm went off. After years of getting up at six, my body was programmed. I could hear Kate’s labored breathing, from too much booze last night. I went downstairs to make coffee, bracing myself to encounter Craig, me precaffeine and thus vulnerable, in case he was an early riser. Then I remembered that six in the morning was three in the morning California time, and he was likely to still be asleep, especially after a late night.
The kitchen and dining room were littered with the detritus of the dinner, dishes and serving platters and silverware heaped everywhere. Kate and Susie had grown up with housekeepers picking up after them, and Susie still had someone who cooked meals and cleaned up afterward. Kate…well, Kate sometimes lived as if she did. Not as if I had the right to complain about it, since I don’t have that excuse. I just hate doing dishes and am a slob by nature. A different excuse.
Wineglasses and martini glasses and Grammy Spencer’s cordial glasses cluttered the kitchen counters, and I couldn’t find the coffeemaker. Finally, I located it and put some coffee up to brew, accidentally spilling some of the ground coffee onto the green Corian countertop. Concrete, over my dead body.
I heard a clinking sound, and I turned around. There at the kitchen table, concealed behind a tall stack of pots and pans, was little Ethan. He looked small and frail and like the eight-year-old he was, not the scarily precocious kid he normally seemed to be. He was eating Froot Loops from a giant soup tureen he must have found in the china cabinet. The spoon he was using was a sterling silver soup ladle.
“Morning, Ethan,” I said, quietly so as not to wake the slumbering party animals upstairs.
Ethan didn’t reply.
“Hey there, buddy,” I said, a bit louder.
“Sorry, Uncle Jason,” Ethan replied. “I’m not really a morning person.”
“Yeah, well, me neither.” I went up to him, about to muss his hair, but stopped myself when I remembered how much he disliked people mussing his hair. Come to think of it, I never liked that much either. Still don’t. I gave him a pat on the back and cleared myself a place, pushing aside a stack of Grammy Spencer’s blue Spode china plates, slick with congealed grease from the overcooked steaks. “You mind if I share some of those Froot Loops?”
Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s yours anyway.”
Kate must have bought them for Ethan when she went shopping yesterday. Her husband gets burlap flakes and twigs. I made a note to register a complaint later. I got a regular cereal bowl from the kitchen cabinet and poured out a generous heap of the carnival-colored little Os and doused it with some of the contraband whole milk from Ethan’s carton. I hoped there’d be some left after our guests were gone.
I went out to the porch to get the morning papers. We got two-the Boston Globe for Kate, and the Boston Herald for me, the one my dad always read. When I returned to the kitchen, Ethan said: “Mommy said you went out last night to avoid Daddy.”
I laughed hollowly. “I had to go out on business.”
He nodded as if he saw right through me. He jammed an immense spoonful of cereal into his little mouth. The ladle barely fit. “Daddy can be annoying,” he said. “If I could drive, I wouldn’t be home very much either.”
Ricky Festino intercepted me as I was about to enter my office. “They’re here,” he said.
“Who?”
“The body disposal team. The cleaners. Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction.”
“Ricky, it’s too early, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I switched on my office lights.
Festino grabbed my shoulder. “The merger integration team, asshole. The chain-saw consultants. They’ve been here since before I got in. Six guys, four of them from McKinsey, and two guys from Tokyo. They’ve got clipboards and calculators and handhelds and goddamned digital cameras. They just came from Royal Meister headquarters in Texas, and let me tell you, they left a trail of bodies in Dallas. I heard about it from a buddy there, called me last night, warned me.”
“Slow down,” I said. “They’re probably just here to figure out how to make the two organizations mesh.”
“Boy, are you living in fantasyland.” I noticed he was sweating already. His blue button-down shirt was soaked through under his arms. “They’re looking for redundancies, dude. Identifying non-value-adding activities. That means me. Even my wife says I don’t add value.”
“Ricky.”
“They say who stays and who goes. This is like corporate Survivor, only the losers don’t get to go on Jay Leno.” He took the little bottle of hand cleaner out of his pocket and began juggling it nervously.
“How long are they here for?” I asked.
“I don’t know, maybe a week. My buddy in Dallas told me that they spent a lot of time pulling up everyone’s performance reviews. The top twenty percent got invited to keep their jobs. Everyone else is deadwood to be lopped off.”
I closed my office door. “I’ll do what I can to protect you,” I said.
“If you’re here,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I be here?” I said.
“Because Gordy hates you?”
“Gordy hates everyone.”
“Except his butt boy, Trevor. If I still have a job and that douche bag becomes my boss, I swear I’m going to go Columbine. Come in here with an Uzi and do my own ‘performance review.’”
“I think you’ve had too much caffeine,” I said.
The day was long and exhausting. Rumors of impending disaster had begun to run through the halls.
At the end of the day, as I rode the elevator down to the lobby, the other passengers and I watched the flat-screen monitor mounted on the elevator wall. It showed sports news (the Red Sox were a half game ahead of the Yankees in the American League East standings), news headlines (another suicide bombing in Iraq), and selected stock quotes (Entronics was down a buck). The word of the day was “sapient.” Today’s “celebrity” birthdays were Cher and Honoré de Balzac. A lot of the guys find the elevator TV thing really annoying, but I don’t mind it. It takes my mind off the fact that I’m in a sealed steel coffin dangling from cables that might snap at any moment.
When the elevator doors opened at the lobby, I was surprised to see Kurt standing there, talking to the Corporate Security Director, Dennis Scanlon. Kurt was wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt, and striped silver rep tie, and he looked like a vice president. Clipped to his left lapel was a blue temporary Entronics badge. The Corporate Security area was off the lobby of the building-I guess because that’s where the Command Center and all the other security facilities were.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Why are you still here? I thought your interview was this morning.”