John D. MacDonald
Travel Light and Travel Far
The moment I walked into my office after three rugged days in Detroit, my secretary, Miss Nancy, told me Prentice Flannigan wanted to see me right away. I knew from her tone he wasn’t anxious to give me a bonus. I asked her if she had any clue.
“Lew Wales goofed up the Chem-Land contract,” she said.
I stared at her. “Completely?”
“Nobody seems to know yet.”
“But how the hell could he have even got close enough to it to have...”
“I honestly can’t tell you any more about it, Bill.”
After Flannigan’s girl told him I was waiting in the outer office, he took two minutes to wind up his conference with a couple of the engineers. When I went in and closed the door, he asked me, in a soft, funereal voice, to sit down. He tilted his chair back and closed his eyes, laced his big white fingers across his flat belly, and sighed a few times.
Prentice Flannigan, except for his prematurely white hair, looks a little like old photographs of Henry Wallace. He has cultivated vague, professorial mannerisms, and he dresses like a medical missionary. But, if any fat and ancient corporation in America should suddenly feel the need of a totally ruthless hatchet man to bring it back into a competitive position in the shortest possible time, and should make a list of the ten possible candidates for the job, Flannigan’s name wouldn’t be far down the list.
Without opening his eyes, he said, “Brewster phoned me from Detroit.”
“It took some infighting to bring him around.”
“You did well out there, William.”
“Thank you.”
He opened one ice-blue eye. “Don’t thank me. I sent you out there so the whole thing would be handled the way I wanted it handled.” He sat up abruptly and began to carefully straighten a paper clip, scowling at it as he did so. “I am responsible to the Board of Directors. Mr. Ellison. They are not interested in why things go right or go wrong. If they don’t go right, most of the time. I am a pretentious, overrated bum. They throw me out. In any corporate structure as complex as this one, I must assign authority and responsibility to people who will, out of self-interest plus ability, keep me from looking like a bum.”
“Mr. Flannigan. I—”
“You have exactly the same problem I have, Ellison, but on a humbler level. I am your board of directors. I think of you only in terms of your usefulness, without sentimentality. When this corporation needed surgery, they brought me in. I brought some of my own people. I found others here, like you, I felt I could make good use of. I have suspected you have a blind spot, a serious flaw. I was able to prove that suspicion correct.”
“I guess you must mean—”
“Now I have a problem, Ellison. Logically, I should request your immediate resignation. If I had a man to slip into your job, that is exactly what I would do. But I happen to need your services. Understand, I operate only on the basis of your usefulness to me. I must eradicate this flaw which limits your usefulness.”
I could feel a chilly trickle of sweat along my ribs. Flannigan has the ability to terrify me, but if I ever let him know it, I would be lost.
“Tell me about my flaw,” I said.
“I can name three incidents in the past fourteen months, William. The Therman-Gould Tool Company problem. The Reiseman lease. And now the Chem-Land fiasco. You took full blame for the first two incidents and repaired the damage. Perhaps you would have tried to handle Chem-Land the same way.”
“I’ve heard that one of my people, Lew Wales, goofed, but I don’t know how.”
He looked so disappointed. I knew he had been planning to jump me with it. He shrugged. “How do the innocents always mess things up? Shaking with zeal, they take onto themselves authority they do not have to handle matters about which they are ignorant. Your Mr. Wales dug into your project file, William, and came up with the draft of the least advantageous agreement with Chem-Land we were willing to make. It was to have been our final offer, if such an offer proved necessary, which it didn’t. We had negotiated a very favorable contract which was to have been signed tomorrow. Mr. Wales thought it was something you had forgotten. So, helpfully, he rushed it off to the Chem-Land attorneys.”
I lowered my face onto my open hands. “Does this blow it?” I whispered.
“Not at all! Not at all! It just skims the cream off the contract. We’ll still do a little better than break even, if nothing goes wrong. It will put an ugly little dent in the operating statement.”
“Did you talk to Lew?”
“Until he became totally incoherent. It took him about four minutes to reach that condition. But before he reached it, he began apologizing to me for the mistake he made in the Therman-Gould estimate, and the matter he overlooked regarding the Reiseman lease. This morning I looked at your file and his, as maintained by Personnel.”
I kept my hand motionless as I held a match to my cigarette. “Looking for the flaw?” I asked him. “A flaw named Lew Wales? So why didn’t you five him?”
Flannigan smiled at me. His smile is notoriously more dangerous than his frown. He uses it to quick-freeze the blood of his victims.
“You’re so unruffled. Bill Ellison. I’m not making a mark on you, am I?”
I felt my way into that one very carefully. “At my age, Mr. Flannigan, and taking into account your reputation, if you bounce my pants off the front sidewalk, the industry will know it and remember it. I’ll find other jobs, but you will have sawed off the top third of the ladder, and I’ll never live long enough to cash in on a stock option. I’ll spend the rest of my life like a deep-sea diver who isn’t getting quite enough oxygen. I’m aware that, right at this moment. I’m fighting for a kind of survival that is the most important thing in my life. That is the kind of a mark you’re making. But if I should start to beg and plead and crawl, Mr. Flannigan, you can be damned well certain you’d be better off hurling me the hell out of here.”
He studied me for a few moments and then said, “Perhaps I can consider myself fortunate that I am safely twenty years older than you are. I would not like to be thirty-two right now, standing nose to nose with you, boy. You can make a lousy pair of sixes smell like a full house.”
“Which is why you’ve been hustling me along so fast, isn’t it?”
“Suppose you just tell me why I didn’t fire Wales, William.”
“In the first place, you’ve left it up to me and your other lieutenants to hire and fire our own staff people. I’ve fronted for Lew twice. I should have fired him. I didn’t. So, in the second place, if I have personal reasons for not firing him, you don’t want to do me the favor of taking me off the hook. Thirdly, you don’t know if this is a special circumstance unlikely to occur again, or if it is characteristic of me to take such a soft attitude toward my people that I endanger my own career.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“A special circumstance.”
“How special?”
I had to look away from him. “We both went out of Penn State and into the Korea thing together. I used the hell out of him in school. He was the offensive guard. He opened fine fat holes. He made me look very, very good. I used him in Korea. I got a field commission. He became my platoon sergeant. And he brought me in on his back one night, off a recon patrol. We applied here, and we both got on, and he made me look good, at first. We had a double wedding, a pair of Pittsburg girls, good friends. If you looked at the files, you noticed the addresses. We live next door to each other. Alice and I have no kids. Lew and Janey have two, and they live in our house as much as in theirs. Alice and Janey are more like sisters than friends. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had six promotions. Lew has had five. I’ve been responsible for the last four he’s been given. I thought I could keep him backstopping me, a step behind me. In this past year. I’ve come to realize it was a bad mistake.”