Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“What?” What the hell was he talking about? The Atlas McKenzie deal was all but inked. This made no sense!

“Don’t worry, it’s not going to come up this morning. But still, a major bummer, huh?” In a louder voice, he called out, “Mrs. Devries!”

Todd turned away and strode up to Dorothy Devries, who had just entered the boardroom. Todd clasped her small hand in both of his large ones and waited until she turned her cheek toward him before he kissed it.

Dorothy was wearing a Nancy Reagan burgundy pants suit with white piping around the lapels. Her white hair was a perfect cumulus cloud with just a hint of blue rinse in it, which brought out the steely blue of her eyes. Fairfield Partners had left Dorothy Stratton Devries a small piece of the company and a seat on the board, which was a condition of hers that Willard Osgood had no quibble with. It looked good to have the founder’s family still connected to Stratton. It told the world that Fairfield still respected the old ways. Of course, Dorothy had no power. She was there for window dressing, mostly. Fairfield owned ninety percent of Stratton, controlled the board, ran the show. Dorothy, a sharp cookie, understood that, but she also understood that, outside the boardroom at least, she still possessed some moral authority.

Her dad, Harold Stratton, had been a machinist for the Wabash Railroad, a tinsmith’s apprentice, a steeplejack. He worked as a machinist at Steelcase, in Grand Rapids, before he started his own company with money provided by his rich father-in-law. His big innovation had been to develop a better roller suspension for metal file cabinets — progressive roller bearings in a suspension-file drawer. His only son had died in childhood, leaving Dorothy, but women didn’t run companies in those days, so eventually he turned it over to Dorothy’s husband, Milton Devries. She’d spent her later years in her big, dark mansion in East Fenwick as the town matriarch, a social arbiter as fearsome as only a small-town society queen can be. She was on every board in town, chairwoman of most of them. Even though she liked Nick, and made him the CEO, she still looked down on him as being from a lower social class. Nick’s dad, after all, had worked on the shop floor. Never mind that Dorothy was but one generation away from having machinist’s grease on her own fingers.

Nick, reeling from Todd’s casual revelation, saw Scott sitting down at his customary place at the oval mahogany board table. As Nick approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, he heard Todd saying, “Dorothy, I’d like you to meet Dan Finegold.”

“Hey,” Nick whispered, standing immediately behind Scott, “what’s this about Atlas McKenzie?”

Scott craned his neck around, eyes wide. “Yeah, I just got the call on my cell at dinner last night — Todd happened to be there, you know...” His voice trailed off. Nick remained silent. Scott went on: “They went with Steelcase — you know, that joint venture Steelcase has with Gale and Wentworth—”

“They called you ?”

“I guess I was on Hardwick’s speed-dial, all those negotiations at the end—”

“You get bad news, you tell me first, understand?”

Nick could see Scott’s pale face flush instantly. “I... of course, Nick, it was just that Todd was right there, you know, and—”

“We’ll talk later,” Nick said, giving Scott a shoulder squeeze too hard to be merely companionable.

He heard Dorothy Devries’s brittle laugh from across the room, and he took his place at the head of the table.

The Stratton boardroom was the most conservative place in the headquarters — the immense mahogany table with places for fifteen, even though there hadn’t been fifteen board members since the takeover; the top-of-the-line black leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the slim monitors at each place that could be raised and lowered with the touch of a button. It looked like a boardroom in any big corporation in the world.

Nick cleared his throat, looked around at the board, and knew he was not among friends anymore. “Well, why don’t we get started with the CFO’s report?” he said.

Something about the way Scott went through his depressing presentation — his dry, monotone, doom-and-gloom voice-over to the PowerPoint slides projected on the little plasma screens in front of everyone — was almost defiant, Nick thought. As if he knew full well he was hurling carrion to the hyenas.

Of course, they didn’t need his little dog-and-pony show, since they’d all gotten the charts in their black loose-leaf board books, FedExed to everyone yesterday, or couriered over to their hotel. But it was a board ritual, it had to go into the minutes, and besides, you couldn’t assume that any of them had actually read through the materials.

Nick knew, however, that Todd Muldaur had read the financials closely, the instant he got them in Boston, the way some guys grab the sports section and devour the baseball box scores. Todd probably didn’t wait even for the printouts; he’d surely gone through the Adobe PDF files and Excel spreadsheets as soon as Scott had e-mailed them.

Because his questions sounded awfully rehearsed. They weren’t even questions, really. They were frontal assaults.

“I don’t believe what I’m seeing here,” he said. He looked around at the other board members — Dorothy, Davis Eilers, Dan Finegold — and the two “invited guests” who always attended the first half of the board meeting: Scott, and the Stratton general counsel who was here in her capacity as board secretary. Stephanie Alstrom was a small, serious woman with prematurely gray hair and a small, pruned mouth that seldom smiled. There was something juiceless, almost desiccated about Stephanie. Scott had once described her as a “raisin of anxiety,” and the description had stuck in Nick’s mind.

“This is a train wreck,” Todd went on.

“Todd, there’s no question these numbers look bad,” Nick tried to put in.

“ Look bad?” Todd shot back. “They are bad.”

“My point is, this has been a challenging quarter — hell, a challenging year — for the entire sector,” Nick said. “Office furniture is economically sensitive, we all know that. Companies stop buying stuff practically overnight when the economy slows.”

Todd was staring at him, rattling Nick momentarily. “I mean, look, new office installations have plummeted, business startups and expansions have slowed to almost nothing,” Nick went on. “Last couple of years, there’s been serious overcapacity in the office furniture sector, and that, combined with weaker demand across the board, has put serious downward pressure on prices and profit margins.”

“Nick,” Todd said. “When I hear the word ‘sector,’ I reach for my barf bag.”

Nick smiled involuntarily. “It’s the reality,” he said. He folded his arms, felt something crinkle in one of the breast pockets of his suit.

“If I may quote Willard Osgood,” Todd went on, “‘Explanations aren’t excuses.’ There’s an explanation for everything.”

“Uh, in all fairness to Nick,” Scott put in, “he’s just seeing these numbers for the first time.”

“What?” said Todd. “Today? You mean, I saw these numbers before the CEO?” He turned to Nick. “You got something more important on your mind? Like, your daughter’s ballet recital or something?”

Nick gave Scott a furious look. Yeah, it’s the first time seeing the real numbers, he thought. Not the fudged ones you wanted to fob off on them. Nick was sorely tempted to let loose, but who knew where that might lead? Nervously, he fished inside the breast pocket of his suit and found a scrap of paper, pulled it out. It was a yellow Post-it note. Laura’s handwriting: “Love you, babe. You’re the best.” A little heart and three X’s. Tears immediately sprang to his eyes. He so rarely wore this suit that he must not have had it dry-cleaned last time he wore it, before Laura’s death. He slipped the note carefully back where he’d found it.