Company Man (5 page)

It wasn't long after Nick had finally gotten Julia back to sleep—picking her up, hugging her, snuggling with her in her bed—that there was a quick rap on the front door.

Eddie Rinaldi, Stratton's corporate security director, was wearing a tan fleece jacket and a pair of jeans, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. Nick wondered whether Eddie had just come over from his usual hangout, Victor's, on Division.

“Shit, man,” Eddie said. “That sucks, about the dog.”

Eddie was a tall, lanky guy, edgy and intense. His frizzy brown hair was run through with gray. He had pitted cheeks and forehead, the legacy of a nasty case of acne in high school. He had gray eyes, flared nostrils, a weak mouth.

They'd been high school teammates—Eddie was the right wing on the same hockey team on which Nick, the captain, played center—though they'd never been especially close. Nick was the star, of the team and of the high school, the big man on campus, the good-looking guy all the girls wanted to go out with. Eddie, not a bad hockey player, was a natural cut-up, half-crazy, and with a face full of zits, he wasn't exactly dating the prom queen. The joke about Eddie among some on the team was that he'd been left on the Tilt-A-Whirl a bit too long as a baby. That wasn't quite fair; he was a goofball who just scraped by in school, but he had a native cunning. He also looked up to Nick, almost hero-
worshiped him, though his idolatry always seemed tinged with a little jealousy. After high school, when Nick went to Michigan State, in East Lansing, Eddie went to the police academy in Fraser and lucked out, got a job with the Grand Rapids PD, where after almost two decades he hit a bad patch. As he'd explained to Nick, he'd been accused of brutalizing a suspect—a bullshit charge, but there it was—banished to a desk job, busted down the ranks until the publicity blew over, or so he was assured by the police chief. But he knew his career was as good as done for.

Nick, by then CEO of Stratton, stepped in and saved his ass, offering Eddie a job he was maybe underqualified for, assistant director of corporate security, in charge of background checks, pilferage investigations, that sort of thing. Just as Nick had assured the longtime security director, a white-haired sergeant who'd retired from the Fenwick force, Eddie had poured himself into the job, deeply grateful to Nick and eager to redeem himself.

Two years later, when the security director took early retirement, Eddie moved into the top job. Sometimes Nick thought it was like the old hockey days: Nick, the star, the power forward as they called him, with his hundred-mile-an-hour slap shot, taking the face-offs, making a pass through nine sticks as if he were threading a needle; and Eddie, grinning wildly as he did wild stunts like kicking an opponent's skates out from under him, spearing guys in the gut, carving some other guy's face with his stick, skating up and down the wing with a jittery juking craziness.

“Thanks for coming over,” Nick said.

“First I want to see the kitchen.”

Nick shrugged, led him down the hall. He switched on the light and peeled back one of the heavy plastic sheets, taped to the doorjamb, which served as a dust barrier between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Nick stepped through, followed by Eddie, who gave a low whistle, taking in the glass-fronted cabinets, the Wolf commercial range. He set down the little nylon gym bag he'd been carrying. “Jeez Louise, this gotta cost a fortune.”

“It's ridiculous.”

He switched one of the burners on. It
tick-ticked
and then ignited, a powerful roar of blue flame coming out. “Man, serious gas pressure. And you don't even cook.”

“Had to bring in a new line for that. Tore up the lawn, had to reseed and everything.”

“Shit, how many sinks you got?”

“I think they call that one a prep sink, and that one's for dishes.”

“The dishwasher's gonna go in there?”

“Yeah.” Fisher & Paykel, was that it? Another result of Laura's star-searches for the best appliances ever.
It's two drawers,
she'd told him,
so you can run smaller loads
. Okay, whatever.

Eddie tugged at a handle, releasing a slab of rock maple. “This a knife drawer?”

“Built-in cutting board.”

“Sweet. Don't tell me you picked all this shit out.”

“Laura designed the whole thing, picked out every appliance, the color scheme, the cabinets, everything.”

“Tough to cook without a kitchen counter, you know.”

“That's coming.”

“Where do you keep the booze?”

Nick touched the front of a cabinet. It popped open, revealing an array of liquor bottles.

“Neat trick.”

“Magnetic touch-latch. Also Laura's idea. Scotch?”

“Sure.”

“Rocks, right?” Nick held a tumbler against the automatic icemaker on the door of the Sub-Zero and watched as the cubes
chink-chink-chinked
against the glass. Then he poured a healthy slug of Johnnie Walker, handed it to Eddie, and led the way out of the kitchen.

Eddie took a long sip, then gave a contented sigh. “Hey, Johnnie, Daddy's home. What are you drinking, buddy?”

“Better not. I've been taking a pill to sleep, not supposed to mix it with alcohol.”

They left the kitchen, entered the dark back corridor, illu
minated only by the orange glow from the switch plates. Nick switched on the lamp on the hall table, another of the millions of little details about this house that reminded him of Laura every single day. She'd spent months looking for the perfect alabaster lamp until she found it one day in an antiques store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when she'd accompanied him on a business trip. The shop dealt only with the trade, decorators and interior designers, but she'd sweet-talked her way in, then spotted the lamp. The base was carved of alabaster quarried in Volterra, Italy, she'd explained, when Nick asked why it had cost so freaking much. To Nick it just looked like white rock.

“Aw, don't take pills, man. You know what you need to help you sleep?”

“Let me guess.” The lights in his study came on automatically as they entered, pinpoints in the ceiling and little floods that washed the hand-plastered walls, the huge Sony flat-panel TV mounted on the facing wall, the French doors that opened onto the freshly seeded lawn.

“That's right, Nicky. Pussy. Look at this place. Incredible.”

“Laura.”

Eddie sank into one of the butter-soft leather Symbiosis chairs, took a swig of his Scotch, and placed it noisily down on the slate-topped side table. Nick sat in the one next to him.

“So I picked up this chick Saturday night at Victor's, right? I mean, I must've had my beer goggles on, because when I woke the next morning she—well, she had a great personality, know what I'm saying? I mean, the bitch must have fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.” He gave a dry, wheezing cackle.

“But you got a good night's sleep.”

“Actually no, I was shit-faced, man. Point is, Nick, you gotta get out there and start dating. Get back on the trail of tail. But man, watch out, there's a lot of skanks out there.”

“I don't feel like it yet.”

Eddie tried to soften his voice, though it came out more as an insinuating rasp. “She died a year ago, Nicky. That's a long time.”

“Not if you're married seventeen years.”

“Hey, I'm not talking about getting
married
again. I'm the
last
one to tell you to get married. Look at me—I don't buy, I lease. Trade 'em in regularly for the latest model.”

“Can we talk about my security system? It's late, and I've had a long day.”

“All right, all right. My systems guy's a total fucking wizard. He put in my home system.”

Nick's brows shot up.

“I mean, I paid for it out of my own pocket, come on. If he can get the equipment, I'll have him put one in tomorrow.”

“Cameras and everything?”

“Shit. We're talking IP-based cameras at the perimeter and at all points of entry and egress, cameras inside, overt and covert.”

“What's IP?”

“Internet-something. Means you can get the signal over the Internet. You can monitor your house from your computer at work—it's amazing shit.”

“Back up to tape?”

“No tape. All the cameras record to a hard drive. Maybe put in motion sensors to save on disk space. We can do remote pan-and-tilt, real-time full-color streaming video at seven and a half frames per second or something. The technology's totally different these days.”

“This going to keep my stalker out?”

“Put it this way, once he sees these robot cameras swiveling at him as he approaches the house, he'll turn and run, unless he's a total whack job. And at the very least, we get a bunch of high-quality images of him next time he tries to break in. Speaking of which, I saw some serious cameras around the guard booth down the road. Looks like you got cameras all around the perimeter fence, not just at the entrance. We mighta got lucky, got a picture of him. I'll talk to the security guys down there first thing in the morning.”

“You don't think the cops already did that?”

Eddie made a
pfft
sound. “Those guys aren't going to do shit for you. They'll do the bare minimum, or less.”

Nick nodded. “I think you're right.”

“I know I'm right. They all hate your fucking guts. You're Nick the Slasher. You laid off their dads and their brothers and sisters and wives. I bet they love seeing you get some serious payback.”

Nick exhaled noisily. “What do you mean, ‘unless he's a total whack job'?”

“That's the thing about stalkers, man. They don't necessarily obey the rules of sanity. Only one thing can give you total peace of mind if he comes around again.” He unzipped the black nylon gym bag and took out a small oilcloth bundle. He unwrapped it, revealing a blunt matte-black semiautomatic pistol, squarish and compact, ugly. Its plastic frame was scratched, the slide nicked. “Smith and Wesson Sigma .380,” he announced.

“I don't want that,” Nick said.

“I wouldn't rule anything out, I were you. Anyone who'd do that to your dog might well go after your kids, and you gonna tell me you're not going to protect your family? That's not the Nick
I
know.”

Nick slipped into the dark theater—the FutureLab, they called it—and took a seat at the back. The Film was still playing on the giant curved movie screen, a high-gain, rear-projection video screen that took up an entire curved front wall. The darkness of the theater was soothing to his bleary morning eyes.

Jangly techno music emanated in surround sound from dozens of speakers built into the walls, ceiling, and floor. Watching this beauty reel, you were careening through the Kalahari Desert, down a narrow street in Prague, flying over the Grand Canyon, close enough to the walls to be scraped by the jagged rocks. You were whizzing through molecules of DNA and emerging in a City of the Future, the images kaleidoscopic, futuristic. “In an interlinked world,” a mellifluous baritone confided, “knowledge reigns supreme.” The Film was about the future of work and life and technology; it was totally abstract and cerebral and very trippy. Not a stick of furniture was anywhere to be seen.

Only some customers were shown The Film. Some visitors, particularly Silicon Valley types, were blown away by it and, when the lights came up, wanted to chatter on and on about the “seamless integration” between office furniture and technology, about the Workplace of the Future, ready to sign on the dotted line right then and there.

Others found it pretentious and annoying, didn't get it at all. Like this morning's audience, a delegation of nine high-level executives from the Atlas McKenzie Group. It was one of the world's largest financial services companies, had its spindly tendrils in everything from banking to credit cards to insurance, in more than a hundred countries and territories. Nick watched them squirm in their seats, whispering to each other. They included the Senior VP of Real Estate and the VP for Facilities Management and assorted minions. They'd been flown up from Chicago the day before on the Stratton corporate jet, been given the full-out tour by Stratton's Guest Experience Team. Nick had had lunch with them, shown them around the executive offices himself, given them his standard pitch about the flattening of the corporate pyramidal hierarchy and how the work environment was moving from individual to the collaborative community, all that stuff.

Atlas McKenzie was building an immense office tower in Toronto. A million square feet, a third of which would be their new corporate headquarters, which they wanted outfitted from scratch. That meant at least ten thousand workstations, at least fifty million bucks up front, and then there was the ten-year maintenance contract. If Stratton got the deal, it would be a huge win. Beyond huge. Unbelievable. Then there were all the Atlas McKenzie offices around the world, which could well be standardized on Stratton—Nick couldn't even calculate how much that could mean.

All right, so The Film was flopping. They might as well have been watching some subtitled art house film set in a small Bulgarian village.

At least yesterday afternoon they'd been totally jazzed by the Workplace of the Future exhibit. Visitors always were, without exception. You couldn't help but be. It was a fully functional mock-up of a workstation, eight by ten, that looked a lot more like a network news anchor set than some cubicle out of Dilbertland. The visitors were given ID tags to wear that contained an embedded chip, which communicated with an electronic sensor so that when you entered the
space, the overhead lights changed from blue to green. That way, co-workers could tell from way across the floor that you were at your desk. As soon as you sat down, an electronic message was flashed to your team members—in this case, the laptops provided to the visitors—telling them you were in. Amazing what Stratton's engineers came up with, he'd often marveled. In front of the worker's desk in the Workplace of the Future was a six-foot-long wraparound computer monitor, superhigh resolution, on which appeared a page of text, a videoconference window, and a PowerPoint slide. Clients saw this and coveted it, the way some guys drool over Lamborghinis.

They were running about ten minutes behind, so Nick had to sit through The Talk. The screen faded to black, and slowly, slowly, the lights in the Lab came up. Standing at the brushed-aluminum podium was Stratton's Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, a very tall, slender woman in her late thirties with long, straight blond hair cut into severe bangs and giant horn-rim glasses. She was Victoria Zander—never Vicky or Tori, only Victoria. She was dressed dramatically, in all black. She could have been a beatnik from the fifties, a pal of Jack Kerouac's on the road.

Victoria spoke in a mellifluous soprano. She said, “Your corporate headquarters is one of the most powerful branding tools you have. It's your opportunity to tell your employees and your visitors a story about
you
—who you are, what you stand for. It's your
brandscape
. We call this the
narrative office
.” As she talked, she jotted down key phrases—“smart workplace” and “heartbeat space” and “Knowledge Age”—on a digital whiteboard set into the wall in front of her, and her notes, zapped instantly into computer text, appeared on the laptops in front of the folks from Atlas McKenzie. She said, “Our model is
wagons around the campfire
. We live our private lives in our own wagon but come together at suppertime.”

Even after hearing it a dozen times, Nick didn't understand all of her patter, but that was okay; he figured that no one else did either. Certainly not these guys from Chicago,
who were probably rolling their eyes inwardly but didn't want to admit their lack of sophistication. Victoria's loopy little graduate seminar was intimidating and probably soared over their heads too.

What these guys understood was modular wiring infrastructure and pre-assembled components and data cables built into access floors. That was where they lived. They didn't want to hear about brandscapes.

He waited patiently for her to finish, increasingly aware of the visitors' restlessness. All he had to do was a quick meet-and-greet, make sure everyone was happy, chat them up a bit.

Nick didn't actually get involved in selling since he became CEO, not in any real hands-on way. That was handled on the national accounts level. He just helped close the deal, nudged things along, assured the really big customers that the guy at the top cared. It was remarkable how far a little face time with the CEO went with customers.

He was normally good at this, the firm handshake and the clap on the back, the no-bullshit straight answer that everyone always found so refreshing. This morning, though, he felt a steady pulse of anxiety, a dull stomachache. Maybe it was a rebound reaction to the Ambien he'd taken last night, that tiny sliver of a pill that lulled him to sleep. Maybe it was the three cups of coffee instead of his usual two. Or maybe it was the fact that Stratton really,
really
needed this deal.

 

After Victoria finished her presentation, the lights came up, and the two lead guys from Atlas McKenzie went right up to him. One, the Senior VP of Real Estate, was a slight, whey-faced man of around fifty with full, almost female lips, long lashes, a permanently bland expression. He didn't speak much. His colleague, the VP for Facilities Management, was a stubby man, all torso, with a heavy five-o'clock shadow, a beetle brow, obviously dyed jet-black hair. He reminded Nick of Richard Nixon.

“And I thought you guys just did chairs and filing cabinets,” said Nixon, flashing bright white teeth with a prominent center gap.

“Far from it,” Nick chuckled. They knew better; Stratton had been courting them for months, making their business case, running a long series of offsite meetings that Nick had thankfully been spared. “Listen, if you need to check your e-mail or your voice mail or whatever, we've got a wireless campsite down the hall.”

The whey-faced man, whose name was Hardwick, sidled up to Nick and said silkily, “I hope you don't mind a rather direct question.”

“Of course not.” The delicate-featured, blank-faced Hardwick was a killer, a genuine corporate assassin; he could have been an apparatchik out of the old Soviet Politburo.

Hardwick unzipped a Gucci leather portfolio and pulled out a clipping. Nick recognized it; it was an article from
Business Week
headlined, “Has Midas Lost His Touch?” There was a picture of the legendary Willard Osgood, the crusty old founder of Fairfield Equity Partners—the man who'd bought Stratton—with his Coke-bottle glasses and leathery face. The article focused mostly on “the millions in pretax losses incurred by Stratton, once the fastest growing office-furniture company in the U.S.” It talked about Osgood's “vaunted Midas touch for picking quality companies and growing them steadily over the long term” and asked, “What happened? Will Osgood stand idly by while one of his investments falls off a cliff? Not likely, say insiders.”

Hardwick held the clipping up for a few seconds. “Is Stratton in trouble?” he asked, fixing Nick with a watery stare.

“Absolutely not,” Nick replied. “Have we had a couple of lousy quarters? Hell, yeah—but so have Steelcase and Herman Miller and all the other players. We've been through two years of layoffs, as you know, and the severance costs are a bear. But we're doing what we've got to do to stay healthy in the long term.”

Hardwick's voice was almost inaudible. “I understand that. But you're not a family-run company like you used to be. You're not running the whole show. I'm sure Willard Osgood's breathing down your neck.”

“Osgood and his people pretty much leave us alone,” Nick said. “They figure we know what we're doing—that's why they acquired us.” His mouth was dry. “You know, they always like to give their companies enough rope.”

Hardwick blinked, lizardlike. “We're not just buying a hell of a lot of workstations from you folks, Nick. We're buying a ten-year service contract. Are you going to be around a year or two from now?”

Nick placed a hand on Hardwick's bony shoulder. “Stratton's been around for almost seventy-five years,” he said, “and I can assure you, it's going to be here long after you and I are gone.”

Hardwick gave a wan smile. “I wasn't asking about Stratton. I'm asking if
you're
going to be around.”

“Count on it,” Nick said. He gave Hardwick's shoulder a squeeze as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eddie Rinaldi leaning against the wall by the entrance to the Lab, arms folded.

“Excuse me for a second,” Nick said. Eddie rarely dropped by, and when he did it was always something important. Plus, Nick didn't mind taking a break in this awkward exchange.

He went up to Eddie. “What's up?”

“I got something for you. Something you better take a look at.”

“Can it wait?”

“It's about your stalker. You tell me if you want to wait.”