Killer Instinct (11 page)

“New glasses,” I said. “Or old?”

“New. Johnny picked them out for me.” I happened to know he and Susie had recently vacationed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with Johnny Depp. Kate had clipped out the article from
People
magazine and showed it to me.

“Johnny?” I said, just to make him say it. “Carson? Isn’t he dead?”

“Depp,” Craig said, with a fake-bashful shrug. “Hey, a little too much of the good life, huh?” He patted my stomach, and I almost lost it. “A week at the Ashram, you’ll drop that weight easy. Hiking, Bikram yoga, twelve hundred calories a day—it’s a boot camp for celebs. You’ll love it.”

Kate saw me revving up to say something I might regret, so she quickly interrupted me. “Let me get you a martini.” She hoisted a silver martini shaker and poured into one of the giant glasses.

“I didn’t even know we had martini glasses,” I said. “From Grammy Spencer?”

“From Craig and Susie,” Kate said. “Aren’t they special?”

“Special,” I agreed.

“They’re Austrian,” said Craig. “The same glassworks that make those amazing Bordeaux glasses.”

“Careful,” Kate said, handing me a glass. “Hundred dollars a stem.”

“Oh, there’s plenty more where they came from,” said Craig.

“Did you notice Susie’s brooch?” Kate said.

I had noticed a big ugly gaudy misshapen thing on Susie’s blouse but I thought the polite thing to do was not to embarrass her by pointing it out. “Is it a starfish?” I asked.

“You like it?” Susie said.

Yep, it was a gold starfish covered in sapphires and rubies and must have cost a fortune. I’ve never understood why women like pins and brooches so much anyway. But this was a doozy.

“Oh, Suze, it’s
fabulous,
” Kate said. “Where’d you get it?”

“Craig got it for me,” Susie said. “Was it Harry Winston or Tiffany’s?”

“Tiffany’s,” Craig said. “I saw it and thought it was
so Susie
that I had to get it.”

“Jean Schlumberger,” Susie said. “I would never have spent that kind of money on a piece of jewelry. And it wasn’t even my birthday or our anniversary or any special occasion.”

“Every day I’m married to you is a special occasion,” Craig said, and he put his arm around her, and she gave him a kiss, and I wanted to puke.

I also had to change the subject as quickly as possible, because I couldn’t take any more, so I said, “Why were you guys talking about concrete?”

“They want us to put in new countertops,” said Kate. She gave me a quick, conspiratorial look.

“We just got rid of our granite countertops in our Marin County place after Steven had us over,” said Craig.

This time I didn’t ask whether he meant Steven Spielberg or Steven Segal. “Yeah, I’ve always wanted my kitchen to look like some socialist worker’s communal flat in East Berlin,” I said.

Craig flashed his Lumineer smile. He looked at me with kindly condescension, as if I were some Fresh Air Fund kid. “How’s the corporate world?”

“It’s okay,” I said, nodding. “Gets crazy sometimes, but it’s okay.”

“Hey, your boss, Dick Hardy, invited me to the Entronics Invitational last year at Pebble Beach. Nice guy. Man, I got to golf with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh—that was a blast.”

I got his point. He was a buddy of the CEO of my company, whom I’d never even met, and he got to hang with all the celebs because, well, he was a celeb. I couldn’t imagine Craig golfing. “Neat” was all I said.

“I could put in a word for you with Dick,” Craig said.

“Don’t waste your time. He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“It’s cool. I’ll just tell him to make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Craig. I appreciate the thought, though.”

“You work hard, man. I really admire that. I get paid all this insane money for basically playing, but you really work your ass off. Doesn’t he, Katie?”

“Oh, he does,” said Kate.

“I don’t think I could do what you do,” Craig went on. “The crap you’ve got to put up with, huh?”

“You have no idea,” I said.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told them I wanted to change out of my work clothes. Instead, I looked for Ethan and found him in the tiny guest room upstairs, which was supposed to be the future baby’s room. He was lying on his stomach on the blue wall-to-wall carpet reading a book, and he looked up when I entered.

“Hey, Uncle Jason,” he said. Ethan had a lisp—something else for his classmates to make fun of him about, like he needed anything more—and glasses.

“Heya, buddy,” I said, sitting down next to him. I handed him the gift-wrapped book. “You probably don’t need another book, right?”

“Thanks,” he said, sitting up and tearing right into it. “Oh, this is an excellent one,” he said.

“You have it already.”

He nodded solemnly. “I think it’s the finest in the series.”

“I was debating between this one and one on the Tower of London.”

“This was a good choice. I needed another copy anyway, for the Marin house.”

“Okay, good. But tell me something, Ethan. I’m still not clear on why the Aztecs were so into human sacrifice.”

“That’s kind of complicated.”

“I bet you can explain it to me.”

“Well, it was sort of to keep the whole universe moving. They believed that there was this kind of spirit in the human bloodstream, but mostly in the heart? And you had to keep giving it to the gods or the universe would just stop.”

“I see. That makes sense.”

“So when things were going really bad they just did more human sacrifice.”

“That happens where I work, too.”

He cocked his head. “Oh yeah?”

“Sort of.”

“The Aztecs cooked and skinned and ate humans, too.”

“That we don’t do.”

“You want to see a picture of the Chair of Spikes?”

“Definitely,” I said, “but we should probably go downstairs and have dinner, don’t you think?”

He stuck out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. “We don’t have to, you know. We can just tell them to bring it up to us. That’s what I do a lot.”

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet and lifting him up. “We’ll both go. Keep each other company.”

“I’ll stay up here,” Ethan said.

The adults had switched to red wine, a Bordeaux that Craig had brought. I’m sure it was extremely expensive, though it tasted like dirty sneakers. I could smell steaks in the broiler. Susie was talking about a famous TV star who was in rehab, but Craig interrupted her to say to me, “Couldn’t take any more torture, huh?”

“He’s great,” I said. “He told me that when things got really bad the Aztecs sacrificed more humans.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “He’ll talk your ear off. Hope he hasn’t discouraged you guys from having kids of your own. They don’t all turn out like Ethan.”

“He’s a good kid,” I said.

“And we love him to pieces,” Craig said in a rote voice, like a disclaimer in a drug ad. “So, I want to hear about your work life. I’m serious.”

“Oh, it’s boring,” I said. “No celebs.”

“I want to hear about it,” Craig said. “I’m serious. I need to know what regular people’s work life is like, especially if I’m going to write about it. I consider it research.”

I looked at him and mentally went through about a dozen really nasty and sarcastic replies, but luckily my cell phone went off. I forgot I’d still had it clipped onto my belt.

“There you go,” Craig said. “That’s got to be the office, right?” He looked from his wife to Kate. “His boss or something. Something has to be done
right now.
God, I love the way they crack the whip in the corporate world.”

I got up and went into the living room and answered the cell. “Hey,” a voice said. I immediately recognized Kurt.

“How’s it going?” I said, happy to be yanked away from Craig’s klieg lights.

“I catch you during dinner?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Thanks for talking to the Corporate Security guy. I downloaded the job application and filled out the form and e-mailed it back, and I got a call from the guy. He wants me to come in for an interview tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’re good to go,” I said. “He must be seriously interested in you.”

“Or desperate, I figure. Hey, so maybe I can grab you for a few minutes in the morning, talk on the phone. Get your take on Entronics and what the security problems are, all that. I like to be prepared.”

“How’s right now?” I said.

12

We met at a place in Harvard Square called Charlie’s Kitchen, where they have this excellent double-cheeseburger special. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner: Craig had pretty much killed my appetite, plus Kate had overcooked the steaks. Too many martinis. She didn’t look too happy at first about my abandoning her little dinner party, but I told her a work crisis had arisen, and that seemed to satisfy her. In fact, she seemed a little relieved, because she could see where the dinner was going, and it wasn’t pretty.

I didn’t recognize him at first, because his goatee and mullet were gone. He’d gotten a haircut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, but not military short. It was parted on the side, looked stylish. He was a good-looking guy, I realized, and now he looked like a successful business executive, only he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

Kurt just ordered his regular, a glass of ice water. He said that when he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, fresh, clean cold water was a luxury. You drank the water there, he said, you’d get the shits for days. Now he drank it whenever he could.

He said he’d already eaten supper. When my plate arrived—a big old double cheeseburger and a mountain of fries with a plastic tankard of watery beer—Kurt took one look and scowled. “You shouldn’t eat that shit,” he said.

“You sound like my wife.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might want to think about losing a little weight. You’ll feel better.”

Him, too? “I feel fine.”

“You don’t work out, do you?”

“Who has time?”

“You make time.”

“I make time to sleep late,” I said.

“We got to get you to the gym, do some cardio and some free weights. Don’t you belong to a gym?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I pay like a hundred bucks a month for a membership at CorpFit, so I figure I don’t actually have to go there.”

“CorpFit? That’s one of those pussy smoothie-bar Evian-water places, right?”

“Since I’ve never gone, I really wouldn’t know.”

“Nah. I got to take you to a real gym. Where I go.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping he’d forget we ever talked about working out, but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who forgot anything. I took a look at my mug of beer and called the waiter over and ordered a Diet Coke.

“You still driving that rental?” Kurt said.

“Yeah.”

“When are you getting your car back?”

“I think they said middle of next week.”

“That’s too long. Let me give them a call.”

“That’d be great.”

“You have your Entronics ID with you?”

I took it out and put it on the table. He examined it closely. “Man, do you know how easy it is to counterfeit one of these babies?”

“Never thought about it.”

“I wonder if your security chief ever thought about it.”

“You don’t want to piss him off,” I said, tucking into the burger. “You have a résumé?”

“I can throw one together.”

“In the right format and everything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell you what. E-mail me what you’ve got, and I’ll go over it, make sure it’s in good shape.”

“Hey, that would be awesome.”

“No problem. Now, if I had to predict, I’d say that Scanlon is a tough interview. Though he’ll probably ask you the standards, like, ‘What’s your greatest weakness?’ And, ‘Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to solve a problem.’ Like that. How you work on a team.”

“Sounds like I can handle that,” he said.

“Make sure you get there on time. Early, in fact.”

“I’m a military guy, remember? We’re all about punctuality.”

“You’re not going to dress like that for the interview, are you?”

“Any idea how many uniform inspections I had to endure?” he said. “Don’t worry about me. There’s no corporation in the world more uptight than the U.S. military. But I want to know some details about your access control system.”

“All I know is, you wave this card at one of the boxes and you go in.”

He asked me a bunch more questions, and I told him what little I knew. “Your wife doesn’t mind you staying out late?” he asked.

“I wear the pants in the household,” I told him with a straight face. “Fact is, I think she was glad to get rid of me.”

“You still duking it out with that guy Trevor for the promotion?”

“Yeah.” I told him about my “interview” with Gordy. “He’s not going to give it to me, though. I can tell. He’s just yanking my chain.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He says I don’t have the killer instinct. And Trevor’s a superstar. His numbers are always good, but they’re especially good this year. He’s just a top goddamned salesman. There’s also Brett Gleason. He’s kind of a lunk, but he has that animal aggressiveness that Gordy likes. Gordy says it’s going to be one of us three, but I’d put money on Trevor. He’s got a big demonstration before the big swinging dicks at Fidelity Investments on Monday, and if our monitors win the shoot-out—which they will—then he lands Fidelity. Which is huge. Means he wins. And I’m screwed.”

“Look, I don’t know anything about how things work in business, but believe me, I’ve been in my share of situations that looked hopeless. And the one thing I do know for sure is that war’s unpredictable. It’s volatile. Complex. Generates confusion. That’s why they talk about the ‘fog of war.’ You often can’t believe what you see, and you can never be certain about your enemy’s plans and capabilities.”

“What does that have to do with getting a promotion?”

“I’m saying the only way to guarantee a loss is if you don’t fight. You’ve got to go into every battle knowing you can win.” He took a long swig of ice water. “Make sense?”

13