Killer Instinct (30 page)

Letasky appeared in my doorway, dressed in a suit and tie.

“You have your browser open?”

“Yeah?”

“Go to the City of Atlanta website.”

I typed in the web address.

“Now go to Departments, and then Procurement. Got it?”

“What is it, Jim? You gonna torture me?”

“No, I want you to see it. You see ‘Aviation RFPs/Bids’?”

It came up on the screen: The deal I once thought was ours. In red letters it said A
PPARENT
L
OW
B
IDDER
A
IR
V
IEW
S
YSTEMS
C
ORPORATION
and C
ONTRACT
A
WARD
P
ENDING
. The contact name was Lorna Evers.

My stomach sank. “Crap. You mean those bastards let us take them to dinner, and all the while this was up on their website?”

“Just appeared this morning.”

I sank down in my chair. “Shit. We needed this. I thought we had it.”

“You didn’t have a chance,” Letasky said. “We didn’t have a chance. The fix was in.”

The fix was in.
Every salesman’s favorite complaint. That along with
They never return my calls.
“You have no idea how badly we needed this. So is this it? The deal’s done?”

“Officially and formally it’s tentative. ‘Under consideration,’ meaning it just requires sign-off at the highest levels. But yeah, it looks like it’s done.”

“We tried,” I said. “Tried our best.”

“Not always good enough,” Letasky said.

An e-mail popped up in my in-box from Dick Hardy. The subject line was: A
TLANTA
. The message contained one word: “Well?”

I e-mailed back, “Still working it. Not optimistic.”

On his way out of the office, Letasky stopped for a few seconds and turned back. “Oh, listen. Trevor invited me to play basketball with him on Thursday nights, and if Gail lets me, I’ll probably do it.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure what he was getting at.

“I just wanted you to know. It’s not like I’m choosing up sides or anything.”

“Sides? Trevor’s my second-line manager. We’re not on opposite sides.”

“Okay.” Letasky nodded, humoring me. “It’s just that—well, you know, maybe it’s none of my business, and maybe I should keep my mouth shut, being new and all. But, well, did anyone ever tell you that Trevor sometimes…says stuff about you?”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not always very nice. Kinda bad-mouths you, sometimes. He says you can be ruthless—that you do stuff to your rivals.”

I shook my head, smiled sadly.

“I just thought you should know,” he said.

“Well, that’s too bad. But I appreciate your telling me.”

After Letasky had left, I stared for a long time at the City of Atlanta website. Then I picked up the phone and called Kurt.

“I need your help,” I said.
Dear God,
I thought,
now you’re really mucking things up
. “Just one more time.”

43

At the hospital that night we got the word that Kate was okay to go home in the morning. Which worked for me, because I was in serious need of a chiropractor after spending the nights on the soft couch in her room. I told Kate I wanted to hire a private nurse to help her out at home, since she was supposed to get out of bed as little as possible, but she told me I was being ridiculous, she didn’t need a nurse.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Susie wants to visit. You know, make sure I’m okay.”

I nodded. “Good. I don’t want you home alone.”

“She’s flying over from Nantucket.” Craig and Susie had taken a house in Nantucket for August and September, as usual.

“It’ll be nice to see Susie and Ethan again,” I said. I’d enjoy seeing Ethan, in fact. “Craig, not so much.” Christ, I thought, wasn’t there some legal limit on the number of times I had to see Craig?

“Craig isn’t coming. He’s back in L.A. She’s bringing Ethan. It really would be good for Ethan to spend more time with you.”

“It would be good for Ethan to be taken away from them and placed in foster care.”

“Jason.”

“Anyway, I don’t have much time to hang out with him, you know that.”

“I know.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s coming.” Without Craig.

Kurt called me on my cell phone as I was drifting off to sleep.

“How long does this trade show go on?” he asked.

“The one at Bayside?”

“Right. The one your friends from Atlanta are attending.”

“Two more days. Why?”

“I came across something interesting. Called in some favors with an SF guy in Marietta, Georgia, who knows people in Atlanta.”

“Interesting how?”

“Let’s talk in the morning when I have something more concrete.”

In the morning, they did an amnio on Kate to make sure everything was okay. The nurse asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby, and Kate quickly said no, so the nurse said they’d send the results without mentioning sex.

Then I signed Kate out of the hospital, and one of the nurses brought her down to the main entrance in a wheelchair and I drove her home. I skipped my morning workout and instead spent a few hours being a good husband, getting her set up in bed with a commode right next to her so she wouldn’t have to get up to relieve herself. I made sure the phone and the TV remote were within reach on the bedside table. I set up one of those Airport gizmos, which wasn’t as hard as I feared, so she could easily use her laptop in bed, lying on her side. I put a tall stack of books on the table too. For Christmas last year I’d bought her a hardcover set of Russian novels in a “hot new translation,” as Kate put it.
Anna Karenina
and
The Brothers Karamazov
and
Crime and Punishment
and
The Double
and
The Gambler,
and a bunch more. One of them had been an Oprah Book Club selection. Her idea, obviously; to me, that’s worse than getting socks for Christmas. She often talked about how she wished she had time to read all of Dostoyevsky. Now was her chance. She’d grabbed
The Brothers Karamazov
greedily and dived right in.

I arrived at the office late, and among my many voice-mail messages was one from Kurt inviting me to lunch. I called him back and said, “Thanks, man, but I’m just going to grab a sandwich and work at my desk. You know, the old crumbs-in-the-keyboard—”

“I’ve made reservations at a really nice Japanese restaurant in Boston,” Kurt interrupted. “One o’clock.”

I didn’t even know Kurt liked Japanese food, and I didn’t quite get his insistence. “Another time would be great.”

“This is not optional,” Kurt said. “We’ve had a lucky break. Meet me at Kansai at one.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“That’s okay. I’m in the city already. Took the morning off work.”

I’d worked for a Japanese-owned company for years, but I’d never really gotten into Japanese food. Too healthy, maybe. Too minimalist.

“So what’s this about?” I said.

“You’ll see. Are you hungry?”

“Not so much.”

“Me either. No worries.”

We were shown to a low black-lacquered table where we had to remove our shoes and sit on tatami mats on the floor. There was a hot plate on the table with a big bowl on it boiling away, a big hunk of kelp floating in some murky water.

“Need to use the bathroom?” he said.

“No, thanks, Dad.”

“Why don’t you anyway?”

“This going to be a long lunch?”

“Men’s room is down the hall on the left. But you might want to keep going down the row to the last booth on your right.”

“And?”

“Go ahead.”

I shrugged and went down the hall to the last booth on the right. A rice-paper screen provided privacy, but by shifting over a few inches I was able to see in at an angle.

What I saw in there almost took the top of my head off.

Lorna Evers, the Deputy Procurement Officer for the City of Atlanta, was enjoying a romantic luncheon with a man with silver anchorman hair and deep-set eyes. Steve Bingham, the CFO of AirView Systems.

The company that had just won the Atlanta airport contract that we should have gotten.

They were sitting next to each other on one side of the table, sucking face, and Lorna’s hand was expertly kneading the man’s crotch. On the table in front of them, untouched, was a platter of paper-thin, blood-red slices of raw beef.

It took a lot of willpower to keep from knocking over the shoji screen and telling Lorna Evers what I thought of her procurement process. I went back to our table.

Kurt watched me approach, eyebrows raised.

“How’d you know?” I asked, stony.

“Told you, I know a guy in Marietta. Who knows a P.I. in Atlanta. Who deals a lot with the City of Atlanta. So I did a little prep work in Lorna’s hotel room.”

“God
dammit
. She’s the goddamned deputy procurement officer. The city’s got to have all kinds of laws against this.”

“Code of ethics, sections 2-812 and 2-813,” Kurt said. “Thought you’d want to know some specifics. Miss Lorna can not only lose her job but also get locked up for six months. I also don’t think her husband would be too happy about it.”

“She’s married.”

“So is Steve Bingham. Steve has five kids too.”

I stood up. “Excuse me. I want to say hi to Lorna.”

I made my way back to her booth and barged right in to the gap between the rice-paper screens. The two were going at it hot and heavy, and they looked up, embarrassed.

“Oh, hey, Lorna,” I said. “Great place, huh?”

“J-Jason?”

“I hear the hand roll’s excellent.”

“You—what are you—?”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” I said. “Steve, right? Steve Bingham, from AirView? I think we met at TechComm.”

Steve Bingham’s deep crimson blush contrasted interestingly with his silver hair. He crossed his legs to conceal the obvious bulge in his trousers. “We’ve met?” he said, and cleared his throat.

“TechComm can be a zoo,” I said. “You meet so many people. But you two are obviously well acquainted.”

“Jason—” Lorna said in a pleading tone.

“Awful sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I’ll call you on your cell later on.” And I gave her a little wink.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to call Lorna. She called me an hour or so later. She’d found some “discrepancies” in AirView’s bid, she said, and had decided to award the contract to me.

I should have been elated, but instead I felt sullied. This was not how I’d hoped to win the biggest deal in my career.

The Hardygram came a few minutes after I e-mailed him the good news, sent from his BlackBerry. In all caps, he wrote:

YOU DID IT!

He called shortly thereafter, almost giddy with excitement, to tell me that he was almost certain I’d saved our division from the chopping block.

“Great,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“Boy, are you low-key about this,” Hardy said, his voice booming. “You’re a modest fellow, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Well, the press release is going out over the Internet any minute now. Hedge fund managers are starting to look at Entronics stock differently now. They know what a big deal this is. Even if you don’t.”

I stopped home to change and check on Kate. She was lying on her side in bed, tapping away on her laptop. She was researching placenta previa, too, but apparently she’d only found the scary websites. I told her about the less scary ones, and how the nurse had said that if she took it easy everything would probably be okay.

She nodded, considering. “I’m not worried,” she said. “You’re right. If you go by the odds, I’ll be fine.” She placed a hand on her belly. “And baby’ll be fine too.”

“Right,” I said. I tried to sound upbeat and authoritative.

“So I’m not going to worry about it.”

“Exactly.”

“Worrying won’t do me any good.”

“Right.”

“Right.” She took a breath. “This morning I e-mailed some JPEGs of Marie Bastien’s work to the director of the Franz Koerner Gallery in New York.”

It took me a minute to remember who Marie Bastien was. “The quilts,” I said.

“The director’s a friend of Claudia’s.”

“Convenient.”

“Yeah, well, if you’ve got the connections, use them, I figure. I’m not going to say a word to Marie, of course. But if they’re interested, this could be just the breakthrough she needs. You look bored.”

“I’m not bored.”

“I didn’t ask you about your day. I’m sorry. How was your day?”

I told her that I’d just probably saved the division by winning the Atlanta airport contract, but I didn’t tell her how. She responded with a pretty convincing imitation of enthusiasm. Then she said, “The cable’s not working.”

“That’s a bummer. Did you call the cable company?”

“Obviously,” she said, peevishly. “They said we have a signal. Which is not true. They said if we want the box replaced, they can get someone out here in a couple of days. I really don’t want to wait. I’m under house arrest here.”

“Well, at least you’ve got the Internet.” We had high-speed DSL through the phone company.

“I know. But I want to watch TV. Is that so much to ask? Can you
please
take a look at the cable?”

“Kate, I have no idea how to fix a cable box.”

“It might just be the wiring.”

“I’m not a cable guy. It all looks like a bowl of spaghetti back there to me.” I paused a second and couldn’t resist adding, “Why don’t you call Kurt? He can fix anything.”

“Good idea,” she said, not getting my little dig. Or maybe she did and she didn’t want to “dignify it,” as she liked to say. Not that my digs ever needed dignifying. She turned back to her laptop. “You know that actress who was in the movie we saw last night?” She now had two accounts with an Internet movie-rental company so she could rent twelve DVDs at a time. She’d been renting a lot of indie films. I believe they all starred Parker Posey. “Did you know she was in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
?”