Beauty: A Novel (2 page)

Salvage

S
he was in the car on the Mass Pike, still trying to figure what had put Baxter into his asshole mood. She thought maybe there was something up with the fish plant. That would explain why they’d brought Remy in. Carol had just happened to walk across the line of fire. She could take it, and she had years of practice shrugging off the Beast stuff, though Baxter had never thrown it at her before. His hair was seriously on fire, about the fish outfit and a lot more. Her phone went off, and she tried to come up with what he needed to be told.

“Carol.” It was Remy in his keep-calm, bus-wreck voice.

She said, “Let me call you back.” So she didn’t have to deal with Baxter right now.

If it was Remy, there was a problem at the fish plant, but how bad could it be? Remy’s bus-wreck voice meant there could be news of an executive at the plant who carried automatic weapons and was off his medication. Or a workforce of amputees. Worst case, Baxter had suddenly decided Carol had zero time in which to clean house and run the garage sale. Whatever it was, she had seen it before and could handle it.

All that actually counted was what always counted: the fish plant, in this case, didn’t fit with anything Baxter Blume had in hand or in the pipeline and was not viable on its own. Carol’s background this time around was thinner than usual, but the basics were familiar. Baxter Blume had had to take the fish plant along with a package of more appealing components acquired from a Japanese firm. The Japanese had gotten the plant from Germans, the initial outside owners of what had for generations been a private company under local ownership. The Germans had made a mistake and talked the Japanese, supposedly a more natural fish owner, into making another mistake. For Baxter Blume, the fish plant was simply a cheap lubricant to get the Japanese deal out the door. As best Carol could tell, there had once been enough profits to justify a loan for a new plant even as the margins were shrinking. Now, with the North Atlantic fish stock apparently approaching terminal depletion, the fish-processing industry had itself reached a stasis of consolidation that left Carol’s near corpse of the moment not only far too small to compete but also deeply in debt.

The comforting thing was that the officers of the plant, all but one with the company for decades, had stayed through the corporate changes. These had been the local owners, and presumably they would have had a chance to pull out with both the Germans and the Japanese. Which told Carol that the owner-executives, and all the line workers, too (neighbors after all), might have a sentimental interest in keeping the company on an even keel as she dismantled and disposed. There were valuable physical assets, and she believed she could keep processing frozen fish, of which there seemed to be a fair amount, as she negotiated the sales of the lines and whatever else. It wouldn’t hurt to be able to tell buyers that the lines were operating. It wouldn’t hurt the locals to pocket a few more paychecks before the final severance.

Carol could hardly believe this was her last burial. As she said that to herself again, something clicked into place. Baxter’s noise in the conference room had been his way of showing everybody that, after all her years as an undertaker, Carol was tough enough to take the heat as a CEO.

Pine and fir began to green the roadside woods, and the sun was out, so she got off the freeway to drive the two-lane roads. She drove east and a bit north, as best she could determine. She drove without the clutch for the fun of it.

When she crossed the short bridge over the channel that made Elizabeth Island, she saw signs to the industrial park, which was not big but which was real enough to look familiar. It had an engineering group and a circle with medical offices; it had professionals and contractors and somebody’s little tech component division. It had the new plant for Elizabeth’s Fish and its latest corporate mask, Elizabeth Seafood Products.

Carol drove past the corporate offices and the executive parking. She drove around behind the plant itself, which was a good-size box.

Here was a two-hundred-year-old company, originally a family company, with brand-new parking for at least a hundred cars, all the lines still bright and white on uncracked asphalt after a first winter, the earth still raw where the edges met the woods and where the snow was gone except for the plow leavings. It was very nice and very ample parking for a very shiny new plant that Carol knew had state-of-the-art equipment, from its processing lines to its wrap-and-stack to its cold facilities, which included some tricky automated truck-to-freezer cold receiving and pallet-to-truck cold load. It was a new turnkey plant with great employee parking.

And twenty cars in the lot. More parking lot than employees. More building than employees.

Carol would have expected the plant to have lost a shift or two, but she had also assumed there would be a sizable workforce to keep the place generating the profits, however meager, it was declaring. Whatever their respective faults, the Germans and Japanese were not likely to have been knowing stewards of a completely fraudulent factory. They would both, however, have relied on the operational reports from the local management.

Carol came to any burial with questions. This time she had more than usual because Baxter Blume had bought the company so cheaply and so quickly that due diligence had gone out the window. But Carol’s strength, “her meal ticket,” as Baxter liked to say so frequently, was her “knee-jerk” sense of things. That was Baxter’s way of saying that it didn’t matter if Carol couldn’t read a sophisticated balance sheet because at the undertaker level of things, common sense was more useful.

What was her knee-jerk here?

On the map, Elizabeth Island was a small fist of land that pushed out of far northeast Massachusetts into the Atlantic. It had a harbor that used to support a substantial fishing industry, but that industry had been declining for more than twenty years and had been all but gone for at least five.

Yet here was a brand-new, state-of-the-art fish plant, in the woods no less, all but idle.

Carol would have to bury the company no matter what, but she’d want to get senior management away from the cash register in the next ten or fifteen minutes.

She circled back to the front, where the executive parking lot was sparsely but expensively stocked and where six landscape guys with a flatbed and a pickup and a mini-backhoe were getting the Elizabeth Seafood Products (ESP) public grounds ready for spring sod.

And here came—who? The president of ESP? She thought so. Another call came in from Remy, but she didn’t answer. She was into it now, whatever the problem might be. She took her time getting out of the car and putting on her jacket, and she locked the car before facing the president. She let him come to her.

She smiled and walked a few steps to meet the president, to show him some respect, to honor the fact that he’d come out in shirtsleeves on a cold afternoon.

“Carol,” he said in a good imitation of a down-market Baxter, and they met beside a midsize Mercedes. Maybe it was his Mercedes, and maybe, Carol thought, that made him feel okay. He smiled and held out his hand.

She shook it and said, “Mr. Mathews?”

“Pete, please. We didn’t think we’d see you until tomorrow, but I’ve had my assistant keeping an eye out the window for prowlers. Nice little vehicle you have. How do you like the looks of our new home? Come on inside. It’s the end of the day, but you can take a peek and meet some of us. We’re eager as can be about the new association with Baxter Blume.”

She let him take her elbow and guide her at the grand entrance to ESP, but after a few steps, she pointed over at the landscapers.

He stopped. “Getting ready to decorate with some sod. A frill, maybe, but at not much expense, and I’ve found it makes a difference in morale and in relationships. May I call you Carol?”

She said, “Why don’t we send them home?” He flinched, and covered it.

“They’re almost on their way right now. They usually break at four thirty. Come on inside so the team doesn’t have to squint through the blinds to check you out.” Mathews chuckled.

“Let’s send them home for good, Mathews.”

“Yep. Fair enough. You’ve found a soft spot in your first five minutes, Carol, but I think it’s the only one you’re going to find. We’ve always run a tight ship here, no pun intended, and we’ve been able to tighten up considerably since the Japanese ownership began pulling back. We can talk to you about that for the rest of the afternoon and all day tomorrow. I’ll get my assistant to send out the facilities guy and we’ll go to gravel and be the better for it. I think we’re all going to be on the same page in this thing, Carol, and we’re going to benefit from your good eye. Costs. Yep, there will be things we’ve overlooked in the forest because we’re too close to the trees. But not many, I think you’ll find.”

Carol stood her ground and watched him talk. He knew. She said, “Let’s you and I go right now and get it over with.” She pried his hand off her elbow and took hold of his elbow. “Come on,” she said and pulled him toward the landscapers’ trucks. “Hold on a minute, men,” she called.

The foreman waited for them by the door of the flatbed.

“Marco,” Mathews said. “We’re going to go with the gravel. I know we talked about sod and you’ve been getting ready for the sod, but we’re cutting back all over and we’ve decided to pull back out here as well. I’ll have somebody call your office and work it out first thing in the morning. The gravel is going to look fine with everything else you’ve already done. Okay? Thank you, Marco, and excuse us. We’ve got a lot on our plate.”

Mathews started away, but Carol held him where he was. She said to Marco, who was not yet able to read things clearly, “No gravel. Nothing. You’re done here. Any charges will need to be thoroughly detailed. I have to tell you we’ll be looking closely and arguing wherever we can.”

“Mr. Mathews?” Marco said. He was figuring it out now, at one level or another.

Mathews had turned most of the way back around toward the building, but she still had his elbow. She gave him a squeeze, and he looked back at Marco and nodded and said, “Let’s leave it at that, Marco. That makes the best sense. Let’s just shut it down for now.”

Marco might have been sorry to lose his contract, but he looked glad to see Mathews take it in the shorts. Once in a while when the Beast was on duty, people could be glad. Carol said, “Let’s go meet the team, shall we?”

They went into
the executive offices, and Mathews gave Carol a quick look down into the plant from the second floor. Carol didn’t know fish from flamingos, but she saw what had to be six lines and everything necessary to support a three-shift operation. She wondered if she was going to be able to find a buyer to take all of it. Wouldn’t that be nice? Mathews wanted to talk, and she paid no attention and he shut up. He’d done all his kidding outside. Five of his lines were quiet, and obviously there wouldn’t be other shifts. Even with the limited information she had, she could connect plenty of dots.

As she and Mathews walked to his suite at the end of the hall, the other guys appeared out of their office doors and fell in behind. There were times when it was sad with the officers, when you knew they were doing their best and doing, all things considered, not a bad job. There were also other times. There were always surprises.

Some of the surprises could be chalked up to the turnovers in ownership. The Germans were a packaging outfit, and they packaged foods among other things. They were coming unraveled, and this was where it became guesswork for Carol. There wasn’t enough due diligence. So although she wasn’t clear on the time line or how ESP came to their attention, the Germans seemed to have noticed and appreciated the little bit of cash reserves that the fish company had at the time. Carol guessed that, as the German unraveling picked up speed, somebody at Elizabeth’s Fish, Mathews presumably, persuaded somebody in Bremen that those slight cash reserves could be leveraged into a new plant that would yield significant positive cash flow. How would he have made that persuasion? Leaving aside the shrinkage of groundfish stocks in the ocean, Elizabeth’s Fish must have long been suffering from margin shrinkage in a competition with much larger fish processors. Soon its cash reserves were going to be needed just to keep the business afloat. Carol imagined Mathews coming up against the wall and realizing the Germans themselves were fractured enough to grab at straws. Let’s build a new plant. Who cares if it won’t be large enough to go against industry leaders? Those reserves, and the dollars they leveraged, could be channeled through grateful pockets as opposed to a sinkhole operation. It must have been a surprise when the Japanese took over the company, however briefly. The Japanese knew fish, but they may have also, as Baxter Blume did, simply taken Elizabeth’s Fish off the Germans’ hands in order to close on an acquisition of other divisions.

Surprise: Mathews had a very nice office.

He offered Carol the low sofa, but she went and stood behind his desk and watched the rest of the fat boys file in. Mathews introduced the financial officer, the production manager, and the sales and marketing guy. If there was an HR guy, he was missing. Carol didn’t speak. She looked at each one in turn, and they sat. All of them knew she was there to pull the plug on the company. Mathews’s pretense aside, they were ready. They’d set themselves up comfortably. They were a foursome for the golf course.