Beauty: A Novel (5 page)

Parks told his assistant to call down. Everybody’d been prepped.

Carol led Parks and Annette along the hall with its glimmering fish wallpaper, and like a warden bringing no reprieve, she came out onto a mezzanine above the plant floor. It was a new factory, and it was big for Elizabeth Island, and you knew from the meticulous hum that it was state-of-the-art. But it was still not nearly a big enough plant to compete with the really big outfits that controlled the market now. The last twenty people who worked the floor were gathered beneath the mezzanine.

Once upon a time, Carol would have wanted to make the fat boys witness the announcement, but they wouldn’t have cared.

Carol always made a point of looking at, and seeing, the people she was letting go. She looked now, and looked again. All twenty of the people on the floor were women.

She was surprised. She’d shut down women before, but not a lot, and she’d come ready for men. That shouldn’t have made a difference, except that today it did. Carol was a woman, too, and she was being shut down herself.

Carol walked down the stairs and stood in the middle of the floor with her feet apart and her hands on her hips. She spoke louder than she needed.

She said, “I think you all know what the deal is. I’ve come here to shut this place down and shut it down for good. This equipment is going to go somewhere else. Maybe the building will be used for some purpose or other—it will be, if I do my job well—but Elizabeth’s Fish is all done, and I’m sorry to tell you that. We’ll work it out for you as best we can. What we owe you, we’ll pay you. What we can get for you, we’ll get for you. You’ve seen it coming. Today’s the day, and I am sorry. Dave Parks is here, and his door is open. So is mine.”

She stood silent. She looked around at the faces facing her. She met every eye that wanted her.

She realized she was waiting for Baxter to make his bodyguard call.

Then she realized he was not going to call her this last time, and that felt like its own surprise, on top of everything else. Carol, just like these women, was out of a job.

Instead of walking to the stairs and up off the floor, Carol said, “There is this.” She did not say it as loudly or officially as she had been speaking. She said it like a conversation wandering.

Some of the women who had begun to turn away turned back. As well as smocks, all of them wore surgical green bags over their hair, and Carol should have put one on before she came out.

She said, “I’ve just been down to the old plant.”

She had never said anything like this before. She didn’t know where she was going with it, but she was going.

And it came to her, this instant, Baxter’s knee-jerk, how she and these women might be able to stand up. She wasn’t anywhere near positive it would work, but she was not ready to let these women, or herself, go.

She said, “I understand that all the old lines are still in there, and that they still work.”

She said, quietly enough that several of the women had to lean in to hear, “I’m going to see if that building and that equipment might support some reduced sort of operation. If it will, I’m going to get it running, and I’m going to need you people. It may not be a likely thing, and you may not want any part of it, but I’m going to figure it out fast and let you know fast. Think about it. Meanwhile, instead of pulling the plug right now, I’m going to ask you to keep doing your jobs here so that, no matter what happens, we can use up the inventory here and make a few extra bucks to divvy out.”

The Second Half

D
ave wondered why the hell Carol MacLean had just teased those women on the floor with the possibility of more work.

When he and Carol and Annette got back to his office, he shut the door, and Carol again gestured for him to sit at his desk. She even said “Please.” It was a nice gesture, and since he had seen her commandeer Mathews’s desk, Dave noted the gesture. Carol sat in one of the two snazzier-than-necessary chairs on the other side of the desk. Annette waited for Dave to signal that it was all right for her to sit in the other snazzy chair.

He nodded at her. Annette was not shy, but she was in her fifties now and had never spent much time off the island or, as they said, “over the bridge.” She had black hair going gray in a bun; she wore baggy cardigans; she had a hopeful face. She was not imposing and wouldn’t have wanted to be, and right now she was amazed almost to paralysis by Carol MacLean, the businesswoman from New York. When Carol asked Annette to remind her of her last name, it was all Annette could do to produce the “Novato.”

To her further credit, Carol smiled at Annette in a friendly, unbig-shot way.

Then she turned to Dave. In his dreams, Dave had a great poker face, which he didn’t, as his poker buddies would testify. Carol leaned her elbows on her knees, which were next to the HR magazines with their high-gloss covers advertising the thrill of workers’ comp issues and making the most of the older worker.

“Dave, you think I was lying to the women on the floor about the hope of more work so I could keep them on task as long as possible and with as little loss as possible out the back door.”

So much for the poker face. But Dave could still read people. He watched Carol.

She said, “There’s background you don’t know that prompted me to say what I did. If I find out we can make the old plant go, I’ll tell you the background. But I wasn’t kidding.”

Fair enough. Carol looked like a capable businesswoman on her game, not somebody who’d tease those women on the floor to cut corners. But Dave wasn’t ready to roll over just yet.

Annette had opened a notebook on her lap and was ready to hear her assignment so she could go back to her desk and do her best.

Carol turned to her and said, “Annette, you’re in the room because Dave likes you. Because Dave likes you, I like you. Whether for a couple weeks or a lot longer, we three are going to be running the company. So please put your notebook down for a minute.”

Annette closed her notebook and put her hands over it but couldn’t let it off of her lap.

Dave decided to get it moving. He said, “The old plant works. We’ve only been out of it a couple of months. What do you need to know?” He put some demand in his voice, and Carol didn’t seem to mind.

She said, “I thought you’d been in here longer than that.”

Which wasn’t what he was asking, but okay, for the moment. “That was the pretense,” he said. “We took the new address and touted the facility to the Germans and worked the old plant all the way out the fourth quarter because we got, or we booked, results that didn’t yet reflect the cost-return equation of running the new plant at quarter capacity.”

Dave didn’t like hearing himself say those thoughts out loud, but she didn’t look too surprised.

She said, “If the Japanese had waited much longer to buy, the Germans would have had to see what was going on.” Which was the truth, and Dave knew it.

He said, “Maybe the Germans didn’t want to know, or the Japanese. So, yeah, Mathews was lucky, but he also worked at it. By the time you guys bought in, I imagine he had about worked every angle.”

In fact, Dave suspected that Mathews might have had a whole separate filing system of records and projections that could be worked in the dark as the company wound down.

It seemed Carol had suspicions of her own. “Annette,” she said, “I sense there’s another angle working. Do you have any idea what else Mathews and the others are selling? How they’re going to get their last nickel?”

Dave interrupted before Annette could answer. “Good question, Carol,” he said. “But let’s get straight who’s asking and why. We thought we were just going to help put this company out of its misery. If something else, like a new company, is happening, let’s be clear about it. The old plant is funky, but we’ve got people who can turn the lights on. They can turn the key for the whole operation. That plant works. So, if you’re really not jerking us around, I think you ought to tell us about this secret background of yours.”

Carol looked glad for the chance to unload, and Dave sat back, lie detector switched on.

She said, “After this burial, I was supposed to get a promotion from Baxter Blume. Last night, I found out the promotion is going to someone else, and once I’m done here, I’m out at Baxter Blume. I was going to continue burying Elizabeth’s Fish as if nothing had happened, do a good job, and get Baxter Blume to say good things about me. Then I went on the floor and saw the women. I’ve seen plenty of women in plants, but I didn’t expect them here, and I realized I wasn’t any different from them. I was another woman on the way out. When I realized that, I didn’t want to just lie down and get shoved out any more than I wanted to shove those other women. I said what I said off the top of my head, but I’ve got good business instincts, and there are ingredients in the circumstances here. I’m not smart enough to play everything Mathews and the other fat boys were playing, but I trust my instincts. I was supposed to be promoted. Instead of burying companies, I was supposed to get a company of my own. I still want that. I want to spend my time keeping a company alive. We might, you and I and Annette, have a shot with that old plant.”

Well. No shit. She was talking past the edges of sound business, but she was also talking about serious personal risk for herself. Even if she got fired, when she got back to New York, she’d still be around the business at that level in the big leagues. If she stayed here, it wouldn’t take long for her to be out of the loop for good. She knew that, and she was signing on regardless, which counted big-time as far as Dave was concerned. She was also asking Dave and Annette to take a risk, but they didn’t have nearly as much to lose as she did.

No question she’d need him if she was going to buy the plant. She probably didn’t know yet that she’d also need Annette, but that would become apparent.

Dave stood up behind his desk. He turned on his radio, and a familiar dree-ee-ee-eam came out low. He snapped his fingers once and did a very quick guitar move—not to frighten the new leader of the pack.

Some people, handling a situation, sweated through their clothes. Not Dave. He joined the band in this kind of deal. He didn’t have a clue about Carol MacLean. Or Annette. He spun around to take in his windowsill. Pictures of grown daughters. Picture of the last steel mill, into which you could fit fifty of this new fish plant. Bent putter and a bad-luck golf glove. Golf hat from Augusta that his wife got him when he couldn’t go. Child-size football helmet on a plaque beside the pictures of the kid teams he coached. Then on that wall beside the window, a big watercolor painting of the old and then-still-active Elizabeth’s Fish plant from across the harbor. Good picture. A plant he liked more than he’d admitted to Carol when they were down there.

Dave got back to the radio and shucked his blazer off. He wore a green necktie and a white dress shirt with Ralph Lauren’s little polo player. If somebody like Carol’s boss Baxter saw the polo player, he’d know that Dave was deep in the minor leagues.

He rolled up his sleeves and sat back down as if his desk were a jacked Fairlane, and he asked Annette, serious question, “Yes?”

Carol, looking confused, said, “Maybe this stays among us for a while. What I said on the floor will go around town, but let’s not chat about it with Baxter Blume. I’m not going to cheat Baxter Blume, but I’m thinking we could do right by everybody, and if Baxter Blume finds out too soon, they might decide to get me off the property as fast as I got the fat boys off.”

Dave turned down the radio to get this. He had just pretty much decided to trust Carol. So he hated to hear her say they weren’t going to cheat her old boss, especially after she’d just gotten done saying she hadn’t lied to the women on the floor. Nixon came to mind: Your president is not a liar and a cheater.

Carol said, “Nothing changes with this new plant.” She looked at Dave as if she could read his mind. “It’s a high-volume, low-margin plant with way too much debt to overcome. Even if we could afford to buy it from Baxter Blume and take it through bankruptcy, we’d have a long haul rebuilding and expanding the brand. And we’d probably never get to capacity competing with similar but much larger operations working at less than capacity for established brands fifty miles south and a hundred miles north. You know all that. So on behalf of Baxter Blume, we sell everything we can for the best we can get, and Elizabeth’s Fish goes into the ground, and whatever debt we don’t put into the ground at the same time, that goes to work for Baxter Blume. I came here to make this happen, and I want it done right. Only, while we’re selling everything else, we also sell the old plant, debt free but at established fair value, to ourselves, to a new company that we’re going to run. When we get to that part of the process, we talk to Baxter Blume. If we get the name cheap, maybe we take the name. Maybe not. But if we aren’t squeaky clean going to Baxter Blume, they’ll know and they’ll hit us over the head.”

They couldn’t yet know how the numbers would play out, but what Carol said, and how she said it, made sense to Dave. He had been in business long enough to see bodies, so he knew when to leave the room. At least he hoped he did. For now, he was staying in.

Carol said, only to Annette, “We’ll figure out, mostly you’ll figure out, whether the old plant, free of debt, will buy itself and provide enough money for us to get traction. Will it still have some market? Do we need employee stockholders to pay the bills until we have traction?”

Dave nodded at Annette to go for it.

She said to Carol, “You’re asking whether it’s even possible that we ever actually would get traction.”

Carol said, “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” and Dave watched it happen as Annette stepped up as a player for the first time.

Carol, on the other hand, looked nervous for the first time. Dave wondered if she was having second thoughts about throwing what was left of her career out the window. Please, God, he thought, don’t let her be worrying about whether she’d be stupid enough to put her own money at risk. That kind of thing could be contagious, and Dave didn’t want to be around it. What would her guy Baxter have to say about that kind of risk?

Baxter Blume had taken this company on so cheaply that there hadn’t been real need to run, or time to run, even a feint at due diligence. Which was why Dave believed Carol didn’t know shit about this company. Carol was risking enough by going forward on a hunch and with people she’d just met. There was no way she would invest her own money, Dave thought.

Carol was focused on Annette. She had asked Annette whether there could be traction, and Annette was thinking.

Annette said, “Yes.”

She said it to Carol, and then turned and said it to Dave. “Yes.”

Annette put her notebook down on the floor and leaned forward and said it again. “Yes.”

Carol looked at Dave to see if he was letting Annette call it.

Annette said, “It will have traction.”

Dave nodded back to Carol and said, “Absolutely.”

Outside, rain had begun to hit the window hard, but inside was stillness, and Dave watched Carol considering. At some point she’d have to consider whether the women she’d talked to on the plant floor would and could deliver.

She looked at Dave and said, “The women are solid, right?”

The women were different generations of Elizabeth Island Yankees and Italians and Portuguese, some with faces like Annette’s, some paler, some darker, some harder. There were also Asian and South American workers now. Dave knew them to be, all of them, good workers, and he believed they would jump at the chance of starting up again in the old plant.

He said, “No question.”

Carol grinned at him and back at Annette.

Dave said, “So, what about the three of us?”

And Carol said, “I am in. I am going after this new company, period. I’d sure like to hear the two of you say that you’re in.”

“Commitment’s good, especially when getting close to a corpse. Well, I like the corpse. I’m in, Carol, and I’m glad to be in with you, and glad to be with Annette, if she’s in.”

Annette said, “In,” very loud, and then laughed at how loud, and both of them laughed with her, and then Carol said, “Okay. Let’s get started.” And the laughter stopped.

Carol was a natural leader, which was something you felt, and Dave felt it, and it looked as if Annette did, too.

Carol said, “Annette, I’d like you to start working up valuations for everything we’re going to unload, in individual pieces and in various likely packages. While you’re doing that, please keep an eye out for however the fat boys are still ripping off the company. I know I mentioned it before, but I’d be amazed if they didn’t have something going.”

“Fat boys? The other senior executives, you mean?”

“Yes, forgive me.”

“No. They are fat.”

Dave didn’t have to be reminded why he liked Annette, but he liked being reminded.

Annette said, “There is that electricity that began disappearing at the old plant almost a month ago.”

Carol looked to Dave, who spread his hands. He’d mentioned it to her in passing because Annette had mentioned it to him.

Annette said, “I talked to the utilities. They’ve checked their readings, and that’s all they can tell me. I figure we can’t afford to send electricians in to follow all the wiring. I did have somebody check the smoke alarms, though, and I told the Fire Department to be ready to come fast, in case. But I don’t think it is the wiring.”

Now, Dave suspected, Carol might be getting it about Annette. Decent person, hard worker, capable, self-starting, loyal, fresh perspective, not allergic to details. There were only so many Annettes in the world, and they had one.