Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Atop a pile of papers on his desk sat the laptop, the wrong laptop, the laptop belonging to S. Robbins. It was nagging at him. He wanted to root around in the files, find the full name, an address, maybe a phone number. Give the man, or woman, a call and arrange a swap.

Tanner opened the MacBook Air. He heard a throat being cleared. He looked up and saw his sales director, Karen Wynant, a petite, worried-looking dark-haired woman in her late thirties. She had her contacts out, since she wasn’t on a sales call, and wore her oversized unfashionable red-plastic-framed glasses.

“Michael, you have a minute?”

“Uh, what’s up?” He closed the laptop.

Karen was a worrier of the first rank and tended to borrow trouble, to worry about things there was no point in worrying about. She could be exasperating, but Tanner found it reassuring, almost moving, how seriously she took the business, how committed she was. This wasn’t just a job to her.

“How’d it go in LA?”

“Like I said, he wants to talk to his partners.”

“I thought we agreed on the price.”

“Yeah, well.”

“He wants to negotiate some more?”

“He knows we want the sale. Battaglia Restaurant Group looks good on our website. He didn’t have to say it.”

His intercom buzzed, but he ignored it.

“Which one did he go for?”

“The Kenyan.”

“Really? I’m surprised.”

“Why? It’s the best one we’ve got. Guy’s obviously got a sophisticated palate.”

“A little acidic, no?”

“Maybe it’s not for breakfast, but it’s fine for after dinner, and it’s different. It’s bright.”

“He said he likes dark roasts — that’s why I sent him the French roast Colombian.”

“Maybe he’d never had a light roast before.”

“Alessandro Battaglia?”

“Who knows.”

“Should I follow up, or should you?” His intercom buzzed again.

“Me first; then he’ll hand me off to his beverages guy and you take over. I told you all this in my e-mail. Everything okay?”

She cleared her throat again. She seemed to be working up to something. “I haven’t seen a contract from the Four Seasons, have you?”

“It’ll come. Don’t sweat it.” He tried not to sound annoyed. She asked daily. If anyone should be nervous about the Four Seasons deal, it was Tanner himself. He and Karen had flown to the Toronto headquarters of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts three times, pitching a deal to provide all the coffee to a half dozen of the Four Seasons hotels in North America. They made it through round after round, until it was just Tanner Roast left.

What had done the trick was Tanner Cold Brew. The Four Seasons people agreed it was the best-tasting concentrate around. They complimented him on having the ingenuity to add cold brew to the tastings. None of their rivals had offered that.

So Tanner Roast won the bake-off. It was a handshake deal, the contracts being drawn up over the next few weeks, but it was a deal nonetheless. What no one apart from Tanner and his CFO knew was that this would save Tanner Roast from going under. The finances were that tight.

He stood up to encourage Karen to leave, and when he turned he saw Lucy Turton, the office manager, standing in the office doorway. Lucy was tall and outdoorsy, with short blond hair and a permanent healthy flush in her cheeks.

“A minute?” she said. Karen excused herself and left.

“Sure.”

Lucy came in, closed the door, and perched on the edge of the visitor chair. “It’s about Connie again.”

Tanner rolled his eyes. She was talking about an office employee, the bookkeeper, Connie Hunt. Connie was out of the office a lot. She always conjured up one reason or another why she had to miss work. Last year, she was suddenly gone for a week, and when she returned, Lucy had asked her if everything was okay. Connie had replied that her dog had had puppies — so that, really, it was like maternity leave. For several years, Lucy had been begging Tanner to fire Connie. But he always insisted on giving the woman another chance. “Now what?”

“All right, so last month she was gone for almost a week because of carpal tunnel in her right arm. But when she came back she said it was in her left wrist. She was out last week because of a death in her family. Her aunt, she said. But today she just said it was her uncle who died. And I’m like, ‘Which one died? Make up your mind.’ Michael, you’ve got to fire her ass.”

Tanner shook his head, heaved a sigh. “I get the sense that life’s not easy for her. She left a good job to come here.”

Lucy snorted. “Or so she tells us.”

“We need to give her another chance.”

“We’ve given her, like, five last chances, and it doesn’t make a difference. Plus, she’s always late with the monthly. She spends most of her time on Facebook or selling stuff on eBay. Don’t we have a way of monitoring what she’s doing on a company computer?”

“If we do, that’s like Big Brother stuff. Not for me. Sorry.”

When Lucy left, Tanner opened the laptop and entered the password again, from the little pink Post-it note he’d found stuck underneath. S. Robbins. He found the Documents icon and double-clicked it, and a column of folders came up. They had names like:

Book Project

Chicago House

D.C. Condo

Correspondence

Donor Thank-yous

Briefing Memos

Press Releases

Op-Eds

Speeches

SSCI

Staff

Tanner glanced at his watch, saw that he had about three minutes before the cupping started. He opened the “Book Project” folder and then opened the first document he came to, labeled “Proposal 3.4.” It began:

By Senator Susan J. Robbins

After twenty-four years in the United States Senate, I’ve learned a few hard lessons. The food in the cafeteria in the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building is—

He looked up. Senator Susan J. Robbins.

“S. Robbins” was Senator Susan Robbins. He’d heard of her. A longtime US senator from Illinois.

He had a computer belonging to a US senator.

Huh.

A knock on the jamb of his open office door.

“Boss,” Sal said. “We’re ready.”

Twelve small glass tumblers were arrayed in two rows. Six different Guatemalan coffees they were considering buying, two tumblers for each. There was a whole elaborate ritual to “cupping,” as it was called. And scientific accuracy. Tanner dipped a spoon into the dense crust formed by the water-infused coffee grounds, put his nose right down in there, an inch away from the surface, and sniffed. He got the fleeting floral aroma, from the most volatile molecules escaping. He did that for each of the six coffees. Meanwhile Sal sniffed the other six. Any noncoffee person watching the proceedings would think this laughable. But you didn’t skip step one in the cupping ritual.

Tanner nodded at Sal, who then began removing the grounds from the tumblers, using two spoons. Then his mobile phone rang. He pulled it out. Sarah. “Will you excuse me?” he said to Sal.

“We should let it cool a couple degrees anyway,” Sal said, busy with his two spoons.

Walking away from the long table, toward the office, he answered it.

“Sarah.” He was standing in a far corner of the warehouse, amid boxes of grinders and brewing machines, equipment they’d lend new customers, an incentive.

“Listen, Tanner, I’m sorry to bother you at work.”

“That’s okay. Good to hear from you. Where are you?”

“I’m at an open house.” She sold real estate, houses and condos. She became a real estate agent in the impoverished days when they were just starting Tanner Roast, all expenditures and no income, and hadn’t stopped. She liked it. “I can’t really talk long.”