Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

A radio was blasting out Fleetwood Mac’s “Shadows” from the progressive-build station where the Symbiosis chairs were assembled. Nick had borrowed the process from Ford and pretty much forced it on the workers, who resisted any further dumbing-down of their jobs. They liked building the whole chair themselves, and who could blame them? They liked the old piecework incentives. Now, one chair was assembled every fifty-four seconds as a light cycled from green to amber to red, signaling the workers to finish up. This plant turned out ten thousand Symbiosis chairs a week.

He jogged past the in-line washer that cleaned the oil off the chair-control covers and then sent them clattering down into an orange supply tub. He couldn’t help slowing a bit to admire the robotic machine, a recent acquisition, that took sized and straightened wire stock, made five perfect bends, and then cut it, all in twelve seconds. In front of a press that made tubes out of eight-foot steel coils for the stacking chairs, a guy wearing green earplugs was asleep, obviously on break.

The floor supervisor, Tommy Pratt, saw him, threw him a wave, came hurrying up. Nick couldn’t politely avoid the guy.

“Hey! Mr. Conover!” Tommy Pratt was a small man who looked like he’d been compacted from a larger man: everything about him seemed dense . Even his hair was dense, a helmet of tight brown curls. “Haven’t seen you down here in a while.”

“Couldn’t stay away,” Nick said, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “You seen Scott McNally?”

Pratt nodded, pointed toward the far end of the floor.

“Thanks,” Nick shouted back. He gestured with his chin at an orange tub stacked high with black chair casters. An unusual sight — Scott’s new inventory-control system made sure there was never a backlog. Keeping too much inventory on hand was a cardinal sin against the religion of Lean Manufacturing. “What’s this?” he said.

“Yeah, Mr. Conover — we’ve been having a problem with, like, every other lot of those casters. You know, they’re vended parts—”

“Seriously? That’s a first. I’ll have someone call Lenny at Peerless — no, in fact, I’ll call Lenny myself.” Peerless, in St. Joseph, Michigan, had been manufacturing chair casters for Stratton since forever. Nick vaguely remembered getting a couple of phone messages from Lenny Bloch, the CEO of Peerless. “Uh, no, sir,” Pratt said. “We switched to another vendor last month. Chinese company, I think.”

“Huh?”

“The bitch of it is, sir, with Peerless, if we ever got a bad batch, which hardly ever happened by the way, he’d just truck us a new lot overnight. Now we gotta deal with container ships, you know, takes forever.”

“Who switched vendors?”

“Well, I think Brad said it was Ted Hollander who insisted on it. Brad put up a fight, but you know, the word came down, we’re cutting costs and all that.”

Ted Hollander was vice president for control and procurement, and one of Scott McNally’s direct reports. Nick clenched his jaw.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said in a voice of corporate cordiality. “When I tell the guys to look at cost containment, some of them go a little overboard.” Nick turned to go, but Pratt touched his elbow. “Uh, Mr. Conover, one more thing. I hope I’m not driving you away here — I don’t want you to think all we’re ever gonna do is bitch at you, you know?”

“What is it?”

“The damned Slear Line. We had to shut it down twice since the shift started this morning. It’s really bottlenecking things.”

“It’s older than I am.”

“That’s just it. The service guy keeps telling us we gotta replace it. I know that’s a load of dough, but I don’t think we have a choice.”

“I trust your judgment,” Nick said blandly.

Pratt gave him a quizzical look; he’d been expecting an argument. “I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we can’t put it off that much longer.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

“Because we couldn’t get the requisition approved,” Pratt said. “Your people said it wasn’t a good time right now. Something about putting major capital expenditures on hold.”

“What do you mean, ‘my people’?”

“We put the request through last month. Word came down from Hollander a couple of weeks ago.”

“There’s no freeze on major expenditures, okay? We’re in this for the long haul.” Nick shook his head. “Some people do tend to get a little overzealous. Excuse me.”

Two men in suits and safety glasses were walking through the “supermarket,” the area where parts were stored in aisles. They were walking quickly, and one of them — Scott — was waving a hand at something as they left the floor. Nick wondered what he was saying to the other man, whom he recognized from last night.

The attorney from Chicago who was supposedly advising Scott on structuring deals. The man whom Scott, who hadn’t been on the shop floor in more than a year, was showing around in such a low-profile, almost secretive way.

There was, of course, no reason in the world for a financial engineer to tour one of Stratton’s factories. Nick thought about trying to catch up with them, but he decided not to bother.

No need to be lied to again.

There wasn’t any e-mail from Cassie. Not that he expected any, but he was sort of hoping there’d be something. He realized he owed her an apology, so he typed:

Where’d my little porcupine go?

— N

Then he adjusted the angle on the flat-panel monitor, opened his browser and went to Google. He typed in Randall Enright’s name, and the name of his law firm, from the card Cassie had gotten from him last night.

Abbotsford Gruendig had offices in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, among other places. “With over two thousand lawyers in 25 offices around the world, Abbotsford Gruendig provides worldwide service to national and multinational corporations, institutions and governments,” the firm’s home page boasted.

He typed in Randall Enright’s name. It appeared, as part of a list of names, on a page headed with the rubric MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS and then more boilerplate:

Our corporate lawyers are leaders in M&A, focusing on multi-jurisdictional transactions. They can advise on licence requirements and regulatory compliance and provide local legal services in over twenty jurisdictions. Our clients include many larger corporations in the telecommunications, defence and manufacturing sectors.

Blah blah blah. More legal gobbledygook.

But it told him that Scott sure as hell wasn’t getting up to speed on new accounting regulations.

He was up to something completely different.

Stephanie Alstrom, Stratton’s corporate counsel, wore a navy blue suit with a white blouse and a big heavy gold chain necklace that was probably intended to make her look more authoritative. Instead, the necklace and matching earrings diminished her, made her look tiny. Her gray hair was close-cropped, her mouth heavily lined, the bags under her eyes pronounced. She was in her fifties but looked twenty years older. Maybe that was what decades of practicing corporate law could do to you.

“Sit down,” Nick said. “Thanks for dropping by.”

“Sure.” She looked worried, but then again, she always looked worried. “You wanted to know about Abbotsford Gruendig?”

Nick nodded.

“I’m not sure what you wanted to know, exactly, but it’s a big international law firm, offices all over the world. A merger of an old-line British firm and a German one.”

“And that guy Randall Enright?”

“M and A lawyer, speaks fluent Mandarin. A real hotshot. China law specialist, spent years in their Hong Kong office until his wife forced them to move back to the States. Mind if I ask why the sudden interest?”