“Yeah, yeah.” He didn’t laugh. “So you want kids. You want a bigger house, a fancier car. More toys.”
“Don’t forget about world peace. And the Sox tickets.”
“You want to run Entronics?”
“Last I looked, I wasn’t Japanese.”
“You want to run some company, though.”
“Thought’s crossed my mind. Usually when I’m halfway through a six-pack.”
He nodded. “You’re an ambitious guy.”
“My wife thinks I’m about as ambitious as a box turtle.”
“She underestimates you.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I don’t, man. Said it before and I’ll say it again. I never forget a favor. You’ll see.”
17
Saturday morning I called Jim Letasky at home.
He was surprised to hear from me. We talked a bit. I congratulated him on snagging the Albertson’s deal away from us, then I got to the point.
“Gordy put you up to this?” Letasky said.
“We’ve had our eye on you for a while,” I said.
“My wife loves Chicago.”
“She’ll love Boston more.”
“I’m flattered,” he said. “Really. But I already turned down a job offer from Gordy twice already. Three times, come to think of it. No offense, but I love it here. I love my job.”
“You ever get up to Boston on business?” I said.
“All the time,” he said. “Once a week. It’s part of my territory.”
We agreed to meet in a couple of days when he was in Boston. He didn’t want to meet at the Entronics headquarters, where he’d see people he knew, and the word would get back to NEC. We arranged to meet for breakfast at his hotel.
Early Monday morning Kurt took me to his gym in Somerville. No beautiful women in Lycra bodysuits working out on brand-new elliptical trainers here. No smoothie bar with bottles of Fiji water.
This was a serious weight lifter’s gym that stank of sweat and leather and adrenaline. The floor was ancient splintery planks. There were racks for speed bags, there were medicine balls and heavy bags and double-end bags, and there was a boxing ring in the center of the room. Guys were jumping rope. They all seemed to know Kurt and like him. The toilet had an old-fashioned wooden cistern up above, and you pulled a chain to flush it. There was a NO SPITTING sign. The locker room was gross.
But I loved it. It was real, far more real than CorpFit or any of the other “fitness clubs” I’d belonged to and almost never gone to. There were a couple of old treadmills and stair climbers, and racks of free weights.
We were both on the bikes warming up, Kurt and I, at five-thirty in the morning. Ten or fifteen minutes of hard pedaling to get our blood pumping, Kurt insisted, before we went through the floor workout. Kurt was wearing a black Everlast muscle T. The guy had huge biceps, and delts that bulged out of his sleeveless shirt like grapefruit.
We talked a bit while we worked out. He told me he was going to initiate an upgrade of the building’s closed-circuit camera system to digital. “All the recordings will be digital,” he said. “Internet-based, too. Then I gotta do something about our access control system.”
“But we all have those proximity badges,” I said.
“So do the cleaning people. They can get into any office. And how much do you think it costs to bribe one of those illegal aliens to get their card? A hundred bucks, maybe? We gotta go biometric. Thumb-print or fingerprint readers.”
“You really think Scanlon’s going to sign on to that?”
“Not yet. He’s in favor, but it costs a bundle.”
“Scanlon talk to Gordy about it?”
“Gordy? Nah, Scanlon says it has to get approved at Dick Hardy’s level. He wants to wait a few months. See, no one wants to spend on security unless there’s a problem. Money flows only when blood flows.”
“You’re new,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t twist Scanlon’s arm too hard.”
“I’m not gonna twist his arm at all. You gotta know when to fight and when to retreat.” He smiled. “One of the first things you learn in the box. It’s in those books you gave me, too.”
“The box?”
“Sorry. In country.”
“Ah. Makes sense.” I was short of breath and trying to economize my words.
“Hey, I love those corporate warfare books. I get it, man. I really get it.”
“Yeah,” I panted. “Probably in a way…most corporate executives don’t.”
“Roger that. All these bogus corporate warriors with all their bullshit about killing the competition. It’s funny.” He jumped off the bike. “Ready for abs?”
After we’d showered and changed, Kurt handed me a folder. I stood outside on the street in the early morning sunlight, the cars roaring by, and read through it.
I had no idea how he’d done it, but he’d managed to get the exact dollar figure of Jim Letasky’s take-home for the last four years-salary, commission, and bonuses. He had the amount of Letasky’s mortgage, the monthly payment, the rate, and the balance remaining, plus what he’d paid for his house, in Evanston, and what it was worth now.
His car payments. The names of his wife and three kids. The fact that Letasky was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas. Kurt had noted that Letasky’s wife didn’t work-outside the home, as they say-and that his three kids were in private school, and what that cost. His checking account balance, how much of a balance he kept on his credit cards, what the major expenditures were. It was scary how much Kurt had found out.
“How’d you get all this?” I said as we walked to his motorcycle.
Kurt smiled. “That’s NTK, man.”
“Huh?”
“Need-to-know basis. And all you need to know is, you always wanna have better intel than the enemy.”
Since it was Kurt’s first day on the job, I offered to take him out to lunch to celebrate. But he was tied up with all sorts of paperwork and orientation sessions and the like. When Trevor Allard returned to the office from Fidelity, around noon-earlier than I’d expected-I strolled over to his cubicle, and said, as casually as I could, “How’d it go?”
We didn’t like each other very much, but we were good at reading each other, the way a couple of wolves size each other up in a few seconds. There was nothing outwardly competitive about the way I asked, but he got what I was really asking: Did you land the deal? You going to be my boss now?
He looked at me blankly.
“The demo,” I reminded him. “This morning. At Fidelity.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You were demo’ing the sixty-one-inch, right?”
He nodded, watching me the whole while, his nostrils flaring. “The demo flopped.”
“Flopped?”
“Mm-hmm. The monitor wouldn’t even turn on. Total dud.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, Jason, I’m not kidding.” His voice was cold and hard. “I’m not kidding at all.”
“Of course. Jeez, I’m sorry. So what happened-you lose Fidelity?”
He nodded again, watching my face closely. “Naturally. No one wants to spend ten thousand bucks per unit on a bunch of plasmas that are questionable. So, yep, I lost ’em.”
“Crap. And you forecast Fidelity as a ‘commit,’ right.” That meant as close to a sure thing as you could get in this world.
He compressed his lips. “So here’s the thing, Jason. Me and Brett, we’ve had a run of real bad luck recently. My car gets a flat tire, then some kind of electrical problem. Brett’s computer gets wiped out. Now I somehow get a bad monitor, after having it tested. Both of us lose major deals as a result.”
“Yeah?”
“What do Brett and I have in common? We’re both in the running for Crawford’s job. Against you. And nothing happens to you. So I can’t help but wonder how and why this is all happening.”
“You’re looking for a reason? An explanation? I mean, it sucks, and I’m sorry about it, but you guys have both been unlucky lately. That’s all.”