“She’s cute,” I said, when Leslie had gone off to the little girls’ room.
“Yep.”
“What’s Leslie’s last name?”
He shrugged. “Ask her.”
“How long have you been going out with her?”
He glanced at his watch. “About eighteen hours. Met her in a bar last night.”
“I think I’m going to get a steak-and-cheese sub. You want one?”
“You don’t want to eat that shit,” Kurt said. “Look at all the progress you’re making. You don’t want that crap in your body.”
“How about a Fenway Frank?” Those are the hot dogs they sell at the ballpark. One of the secrets you learn if you go to Fenway a lot is that if you prefer your hot dog cooked, you don’t buy it in the stands, where they often give it to you lukewarm or even cold. Yuck.
“Not for me, thanks.”
I’d lost my appetite. “How’s work going?”
“Good,” he said. “Been doing some background investigations and some badge-replacement. Had to drive out to Westwood today. Routine stuff. Though I did have to open an investigation on someone.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Can’t say. No one you know. Guy’s fencing LCD monitors. Selling them on eBay. I had to put in an additional camera and pull the guy’s hard drive.”
“You gonna catch him?”
“Count on it. And the biometric fingerprint readers are in, so everyone’s going to have to stop down at Corporate Security over the next couple of days and give us a fingerprint.” He looked at me. “You’re not sleeping. What’s up?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Not enough. Problems on the home front?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s Gordy.”
“Guy’s such a broke dick,” he said. “He’s like a one-man Q Course.”
“Yeah, but the difference is, Gordy isn’t trying to make me into a better soldier.”
“True. He’s trying to wash you out for real. Guy has it in for you. Gotta do something about that.”
“What do you mean, he has it in for me? You know something?”
He paused just long enough for me to tell that he really did know something after all. “One of my responsibilities is to monitor e-mail.”
“You guys do that?”
“Have to. Scan for key words and stuff.”
“But you’re looking at his e-mail for other reasons,” I said.
He blinked.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“Part of my job,” he said.
“What does he say about me?”
“You’re obviously a threat. We gotta do something about the guy.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“Clearly. See, what Gordy doesn’t understand is that his job isn’t quite so secure as he thinks.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Japanese don’t like his style. His profanity. His crudeness.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “As long as he gets results, they’re happy with him. And he gets results. So he’s safe.”
He shook his head. “He’s a racist. Hates the Japanese. And the Japanese don’t like that. I’ve been doing some reading. The Japanese admire the strong-willed American manager style. But they won’t tolerate anti-Japanese racism. Believe me, the second he shows his racism in public, he’s gone. So fast your head will spin.”
“He’s too smart for that.”
“Maybe,” Kurt said.
Then Leslie walked up in a toxic cloud of cheap perfume. She put her arm around Kurt, grabbing his butt.
“Let’s find our seats,” he said.
I’ve been to Fenway scores of times, maybe a hundred times, but I never fail to feel a thrill when I walk up the steps and the field appears before me suddenly, brilliant green glittering in the sun or the lights, the red dirt, the throngs.
We had amazing seats, right behind the Red Sox dugout, two rows from the field. We could watch the ESPN cameramen changing lenses and stuff, the blond on-air talent applying her lipstick.
Leslie didn’t know too much about baseball and wanted Kurt to explain the game to her. He said he’d do it later.
“One bit of good news today,” I said to Kurt in a low voice as we watched the game. “Doug Forsythe decided to stay.”
“Oh yeah?”
This is the thing about basebalclass="underline" there’s a lot of downtime when you can talk. “Yeah. Something happened to his Sony offer. Someone got cold feet-the offer was withdrawn. Never heard of that happening before.”
“Kurt,” said Leslie, “I don’t think I even know what your sign is.”
“My sign?” Kurt said, turning to her. “My sign is ‘Do Not Disturb.’”
We’d been talking so much we missed a great play, so we both looked up at the enormous electronic scoreboard, where they run the video instant replays.
“I can’t even see what happened,” Kurt said.
“It’s a lousy screen,” I said.
“We must have something better than that.” He meant Entronics, and it was interesting that he was saying “we” already.
“Oh, God, yeah. That’s an old RGB LED large-format video display. Got to be six or seven years old, but the technology moves fast. We’ve got a large-format HD video screen that’s crystal clear.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“I know the assistant equipment manager. You can talk to him. He’ll know who to talk to.”
“About replacing the scoreboard? Interesting.”
“Right.”
“Great idea, man.”
“I’ve got a million of ’em”
Suddenly the Sox hit a grand slam, and everyone jumped to their feet.
“What just happened?” Leslie asked. “Was that good or bad?”
30
I got to the office right at seven, feeling invigorated and a little mellow after a particularly tough workout at Kurt’s gym. I plowed through paperwork and reports, played a little dodgeball myself by leaving phone messages for people I didn’t want to talk to. Of the thirty or so sales cycles I was involved in, the two biggest by far-now that Freddy Naseem had screwed me over on the Harry Belkin deal-were the Chicago Presbyterian Hospital project and, giant among giants, the Atlanta airport. I sent off some e-mails on those. Did some research into the other big auto dealerships around the country. Man, there were some big ones out there. AutoNation, out of Fort Lauderdale, and United Auto Group, out of Secaucus, New Jersey, both made Harry Belkin look like your neighborhood chop shop. Belkin was like number fourteen on the list of megadealers. The damn thing was, I’d put in so much work on the deal and gotten so close.
And the Red Sox scoreboard thing had really got under my skin. The more I looked into it, the more intrigued I got. The scoreboard at Fenway was basically a twenty-four-foot-by-thirty-one-foot video screen that used light-emitting diode technology-that’s LEDs to you. Lots and lots of little pixels spaced about an inch apart, each pixel made up of a bunch of little LEDs that contain a chemical compound that turns different colors when you pass electricity through it. The whole thing’s run by a digitized video driver. From a distance it looks great, like a giant TV screen. From a distance.
They’ve got these electronic digital signs all over the world by now. My online research told me that the biggest one was in central Berlin, on the Kurfürstendamm. There’s the big Coca-Cola sign in Times Square, in New York, and the NASDAQ sign, and there’s another big one on top of the Reuters building in London and in Piccadilly Circus, and of course they’ve got them all over Las Vegas.
What’s cool about these signs is that, with a few keystrokes of a computer, you can change the display entirely. Not like the old billboard days when guys had to go up there and tear down the old poster and paste up the new one. Now it could be done in seconds.
They’re cool, but they’re also kind of grainy, kind of coarse. You can see the little colored dots. The technology was developed a decade ago. Entronics didn’t do these huge outdoor displays. The technology was too specialized, and besides, our LCD and plasma displays had never been bright enough to use outdoors.