Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Right.”

Eddie got up. “Nothing to worry about, man. Get some sleep. You look like shit.”

“Thanks.” Nick got up, to walk Eddie out, then thought of something. “Eddie,” he said. “That night. You said it was your gun, tied everything to you, right? That’s why I didn’t have a choice.”

Eddie’s eyes were dead. “Yeah?”

“Now you tell me the gun was clean. No connection to you at all. I don’t get it.”

A long silence.

“Can’t take chances, Nicky,” Eddie finally said. “Never take chances.”

Nick walked Eddie out of his study, heard footfalls on the carpeting. Saw a jeans-clad leg, a sneaker, disappear up the stairs.

Lucas.

Just getting home? Was it possible that he’d overheard their conversation? Nah, he’d have had to have stood outside the study door, listening. Lucas didn’t do that, the main reason being that he had no interest in what his dad was up to.

Still.

Nick wondered, a tiny wriggle of worry.

Driving to work the next morning, Nick was in a foul mood. The news that a homicide detective was poking around the corporation had sent him spiraling into a tense, sleepless night. He thrashed around in the big bed, got up repeatedly, obsessed about that night.

What Happened That Night — that was how he thought of it now. The memory had receded to attenuated, kaleidoscopic images: Stadler’s leering face, the gunfire, the body sprawled on the ground, Eddie’s face, carrying the body wrapped in black trash bags.

He was out of pills, which was just as well; any more of them, he figured, and he was headed for the Betty Ford clinic. He tried to think about work stuff, anything but that night. But that just meant the board meeting in the morning. Board meetings always made him tense, but this time he knew that the shit was about to rain down.

On the way into work he stopped at a light next to a gleaming silver S Class Mercedes. He turned to admire it and saw that the driver was Stratton’s VP of sales, Ken Coleman. Nick rolled down his passenger’s side window, tapped on his horn until he got Coleman’s attention. When Coleman — forty-one, a good seventy pounds overweight, a bad hairpiece — rolled down his window, his face lit up.

“Hey, Nick! Looking pretty slick.”

“Board meeting. New car, Kenny?”

Coleman’s grin got even wider. “Got it yesterday. You like?”

“Must list for a hundred grand, right?”

Coleman, always hyper, nodded fast, up and down and up and down like some bobble-head doll. “Over. Fully loaded. Like, AMG sports package and, I mean, heated steering wheel, you know?” The top sales guys at Stratton made more than Nick did. He didn’t resent it; someone had to do the soul-destroying shit they did.

The light turned green, but Nick didn’t move. “Buy or lease?” he asked.

“Well, lease. I always lease, you know?”

“Good. Because it’s going back to the dealer.”

Coleman cocked his bobble head, a movement like a terrier, almost comic. “What?”

Behind him, someone honked a horn. Nick ignored it. “We laid off five thousand workers, Ken. Half the company. To cut costs, save Stratton. Pretty much wiped out the town. So I don’t want a member of my executive management team driving around town in a fucking hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, understand?”

Coleman stared in disbelief.

Nick went on, “You take that back to the dealership by close of business today and tell ’em you want a fucking Subaru or something. But I don’t want to see you behind that heated steering wheel again, you understand?”

Nick gunned the engine and took off.

The five members of the board of directors of the Stratton Corporation, and their guests, were gathered in the anteroom to the boardroom. Coffee was being served from vacuum carafes, and not the institutional food-service blend that was served in the Stratton employee cafeteria, either. It was brewed from Sulawesi Peaberry beans fresh-roasted by Town Grounds, Fenwick’s best coffee place. Todd Muldaur had complained about the coffee at the first board meeting after the buyout, poked fun at the Bunn-O-Matic. Nick thought Todd was being ridiculous, but he ordered the change. That, and little cold bottles of Evian water, melon slices, raspberries and strawberries, fancy pastries trucked in from a famous bakery in Ann Arbor.

Todd Muldaur, in another of his expensive suits, was at the tail end of a joke when Nick arrived, holding forth to Scott, the other guy from Fairfield Partners, Davis Eilers, and someone Nick had never seen before. “I told him the best way to see Fenwick is in your rearview mirror,” Todd was saying. Eilers and the other guy laughed raucously. Scott, who’d noticed Nick’s approach, just smiled politely.

Davis Eilers was the other deal partner, a guy who had a lot of operational experience. He’d done his time at McKinsey like Todd and Scott, only he’d played football at Dartmouth, not Yale. He later ran a number of companies, sort of a CEO-for-hire.

Todd turned, saw Nick. “There he is.” He tipped his cup at Nick. “Great coffee!” he said expansively and gave a wink. “Sorry to miss you last night. Busy being a dad, huh?”

Nick shook Todd’s hand, then Scott’s, then Eilers’s. “Yeah, couldn’t get out of it. My daughter’s school play, you know, and given—”

“Hey, you got your priorities straight,” Todd said with an excess of sincerity. “I respect that.”

Nick wanted to toss the cup of hot Sulawesi Peaberry in the guy’s face, but he just looked straight in Todd’s too-blue eyes and smiled appreciatively.

“Nick, I want you to meet our new board member, Dan Finegold.” A tall, handsome guy, athletic-looking. A thatch of dark brown hair starting to silver over. What was it with Fairfield Equity Partners? It was a fucking frat.

Dan Finegold’s handshake was a crusher.

“Don’t tell me Yale football too,” Nick said cordially. Thinking: Our new board member? Like, were they going to tell me? Just spring it on me?

“Yale baseball, actually,” said Todd, clapping both men on their shoulders, bringing them together. “Dan was a legendary pitcher.”

“Legendary, my ass,” said Finegold.

“Hey, man, you were, ” Todd said. He looked at Nick. “Dan’s got twenty years’ experience in the office-supply space, with all the scar tissue. I’m sure you know Office-Source — that was his baby. When Willard bought it, he grabbed Dan for Fairfield.”

“You like Boston?” Nick asked. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He couldn’t say what he was really thinking, which was: Why are you here, and who invited you onto the board, and what’s really going on here? Fairfield had the right to put whomever they wanted on the board, but it wasn’t exactly cool for them to just show up with a new board member in tow. They hadn’t done it before. It wasn’t a good precedent, or maybe that was the point.

“It’s great. Especially for a foodie like me. Lot of happening restaurants in Boston these days.”

“Dan’s part owner of an artisanal brewery in upstate New York,” said Todd. “They make the best Belgian beer outside of Belgium. Abbey ale, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Welcome to the board,” Nick said. “I’m sure your expertise in Belgian beer’s going to come in handy.” Something about Belgian beer and Abbey ale sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

Todd took Nick by the elbow as they walked to the boardroom. He spoke in a low voice. “Bummer about Atlas McKenzie.”

“Huh?”

“Scott told me last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

Todd gave him a quick, curious glance. “The deal,” he said under his breath. “How it fell through.”