“Hey, Kurt. What a surprise, huh?”
“Hey, bro. I had to meet with a vendor in Cambridge. I finally got approval for the biometric fingerprint verification system, and I had to finalize some details. I figured since I was in your neck of the woods, I’d give you a lift to the softball game.”
“Okay, sure,” I said.
“Though I saw your new Mercedes out front. Nice wheels. Bling for the king, huh?”
“Will you take a look at the stairs?” Kate said to me. “Take a look at what Kurt did.”
“Come on,” Kurt said. “It’s no big deal.”
I followed her to the staircase that led to the second floor. The junky oatmeal-colored carpet had been removed, exposing handsome wood. The old carpet lay in a neat pile, cut up into rectangular sections, next to discarded strips of wood with sharp-looking tacks sticking out from them, also neatly stacked. A crowbar and a utility knife lay on the floor nearby.
“Can you believe how beautiful that wood is?” Kate said. “You’d never know it, with that gross carpet covering it up.”
“Wasn’t safe,” Kurt said. “You could break your neck. With Kate pregnant and all, you’ve really got to take care of stuff like that.”
“Very kind of you,” I said.
“I’m thinking you should install a runner,” Kurt said.
“Oh, but I love the wood,” Kate said.
“Still see it, either side,” Kurt said. “Maybe one of those Axminster oriental rug deals. Good thick padding under it. Safer that way.”
“And how about brass carpet rods?” Kate said, excited.
“Easy,” Kurt said.
“Speak for yourself,” I said, a little peevish. “I had no idea you knew how to do this. You can kill people and remove old carpeting.”
Kurt ignored the dig. Or maybe it wasn’t a dig to him. “Taking it out’s the easy part,” he said with a modest chuckle. “Worked for a contractor after high school, did a lot of odd jobs.”
“Could you do that, do you think?” Kate said. “The runner and the carpet rods and everything? We’d pay you, of course. We insist.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kurt said. “Your husband here got me my job. I owe him.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“Kurt thinks we have way too many things plugged into that power strip thingy in the living room.”
“Electrical hazard,” Kurt said. “You need another outlet on that wall. Easy to put in.”
“You’re an electrician too?” Kate said.
“You don’t have to be a master electrician to put in an electrical outlet. That’s easy.”
“He just rewired his entire house,” I said, “and it’s not even his house.”
“God,” Kate said to Kurt, “is there anything you can’t do?”
Kurt drove his Mustang fast and skillfully. I was impressed. Most drivers who haven’t grown up around Boston get intimidated by the aggressiveness of the native Boston driver. Kurt, who’d grown up in Michigan, handled the traffic like a native.
We sat in silence for a good ten minutes, and then Kurt said, “Hey, man, did I piss you off?”
“Piss me off? Why do you say that?”
“At your house. Like you were ticked off I was there when you got home.”
“No,” I said in that terse, male way where the tone says it all-you know, what the hell you talkin’ about?
“Just trying to help you there, bud. With the stairs. I figured, I know how to fix stuff, and you’re a busy executive.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I mean, I appreciate it. Kate did too. You were right-she’s pregnant, and we’ve got to be careful about stuff like that.”
“All right. Just so long as we’re cool.”
“Yeah, sure. I just had a bad day at work.” I told him about my big auto-dealership brainstorm and how Gordy had stolen credit for it, and how Harry Belkin had decided to go with Panasonic instead.
“He’s a snake,” Kurt said.
“Who, Gordy?”
“Both of those guys. Gordy we know about. But the Harry Belkin guy-if he’s gonna change the terms of the deal, doesn’t he at least have to give you the chance to bid on it? Since it was your idea?”
“He should have. But I’d already told him we couldn’t deliver the stuff for a couple of months. That’s standard. Panasonic must have had excess inventory. You know, it’s like when you go test-drive a car and you totally fall in love with it, and then the salesman says, sorry, the waiting list is two months long. And you go, two months? I want it today! Well, Panasonic must have said, ‘This is your lucky day. We happen to have some right here in our warehouse. You can have ’em today!’”
“That’s not right. That really sucks.”
“Yes, it does.”
“You’ve gotta do something about that, man.”
“There’s nothing to do. That’s the problem. We’re at least a month out-we have to get inventory from Tokyo.”
“Don’t sit back and take it, bro. Go after it.”
“How? What am I supposed to do, take out one of your replica handguns and put it up to Freddy Naseem’s forehead?”
“My point is, sometimes the quiet, behind-the-scenes approach is the best way. Like the time when we were in Stan and we found this air base near Kandahar, with a big old Russian chopper. One of our local informants told us some of the top Taliban commanders used the helicopter to head up to their secret headquarters in the mountains. I figured, well, we could just nuke the thing, or we could be clever. So we waited till four in the morning, when there was only one TB sentry on duty.”
“TB?”
“Taliban, sorry. I snuck up behind him, garroted him to kill him silently. Then we got inside the base and painted some LME on the tail section near the rear rotor, and the rotor blades. Totally invisible.”
“LME?”
“Liquid metal embrittlement agent. Remember that tube you were looking at in my war trophy collection?”
“I think so.”
“Very cool stuff. Classified technology. A mix of some liquid metal, like mercury, with some other metal. Copper powder or indium or whatever. Paint it on steel, and it forms a chemical reaction. Turns steel as brittle as a cracker.”
“Neat.”
“So the Taliban guys probably did the routine preflight check for bombs and shit, but they didn’t see anything, right? That night, there’s this big crash, and the helicopter just flew apart in the air. Six Taliban generals turned into corned beef hash. Better than just blowing up an empty helicopter, right?”
“What’s that got to do with Entronics?”
“My point is that sometimes it’s the covert stuff that’s the real force multiplier. That’s what wins the battle. Not the guns and bombs and mortar rounds.”
“I’d rather you didn’t garrote Freddy Naseem. Not good for the corporate image.”
“Forget Freddy Naseem. I’m just saying, there comes a time for behind-the-scenes action.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’d need to know more. But I’m here to help, whatever it is.”
I shook my head. “I don’t do underhanded stuff.”
“What about getting inside dope on Brian Borque at Lockwood Hotels? Or Jim Letasky?”
I hesitated. “I feel kind of funny about it, to be honest.”
“And you don’t think Panasonic was being…underhanded, as you put it, for snagging the Harry Belkin deal?”
“Yeah, they were. But I don’t believe in tit for tat. I don’t want to be a snake.”
“Let me ask you this. Kill a guy in an alley somewhere, it’s murder, right? But kill a guy in the middle of a battlefield, it’s heroism. What’s the difference.”
“Simple,” I said. “One’s war, the other’s not.”
“I thought business is war.” Kurt grinned. “It’s in all those books you gave me. I read ’em cover to cover.”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Funny,” he said. “I missed that part.”