One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  He stood, and she saw that his companion was heading back to the table. The band was taking a break.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s blue skies at Day and Domes,” Donna said. “From what Brian tells me, you’re a big part of that.”

  “I just keep the checkbook balanced.”

  The woman was upon them now. Donna stood. Closer up, it was plausible that she was the same age as Rosten, also that they were simply friends. She had a ring, which didn’t prove much, but she moved too easily to be a lover facing the boss’s wife among cutlasses.

  “We met earlier,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry it was so perfunctory,” said Donna.

  “Grace Bondurant,” Rosten said.

  “Thank you,” said Donna. “I can memorize a sonata, but a name goes through my head without stopping, I’m afraid.”

  “Tom told me you play viola in the symphony,” Grace said.

  “And you?” said Donna.

  “Investment banking,” Grace said.

  “That must have been quite a school you two went to,” said Donna.

  “Who says English majors have no future?” said Grace.

  Just then Brian finished his circuit of the room.

  “Looks like a cabal,” he said.

  “Two recovering humanists and one who never took the cure,” said Donna. “Have you met Grace Bondurant?”

  “Yes,” said Brian, not looking at any of them. “I hate to break this up.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” said Donna, offering her cheek to Rosten and his companion.

  “Likewise,” said Grace. “Next time I hope we can hear you play.”

  “Make him bring you backstage,” Donna said. Brian was already edging away from them. Donna followed and at a certain distance turned and waved.

  “Are you all right?” she said to Brian.

  “Robert will meet us at the curb on the south side of the building,” he said. “The pickup circle is always so clogged.” He looked at his watch.

  “Something is off,” she said. “Can you talk about it?”

  The band was overdoing “Fly Me to the Moon” when they reached the exit.

  “Do you have a coat?” Brian shouted.

  “I took a chance,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, and they escaped the room and rode the escalator single file to the ground level.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to an empty corner with two chairs and a table with a lamp. She followed, and he looked about them as they sat down. He put his elbows on his black, creased knees and spoke softly.

  “Why did you apply for a new credit card for us?” he said.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “I’m not accusing you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to sound like that.”

  “What would we need another card for?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his nail clipper. He did not open it. He just turned it in his hand.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “You didn’t send in an application?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, we were turned down.”

  She laughed.

  “Must have been quite a card,” she said. “What comes after platinum?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said.

  “Some wires crossed.”

  He opened and closed the nail clipper until she said, “You’re worried.”

  “It’s very puzzling.”

  “Tom Rosten should be good at mysteries, shouldn’t he?” she said.

  4

  When the CEO calls at noon and invites you to lunch, you put your Au Bon Pain sandwich away, let the Diet Coke go flat in its cup on your desk, and hustle to get down to the lobby before him. Eating was a continuation of work by other means. Of course, anybody else at Day and Domes would envy such access to the boss, but Rosten had been looking forward to the ham and Swiss that was now giving up its flavor to the blend of left-behinds in the office fridge.

  “Let’s go to the Berghoff,” said Joyce as he came off the elevator. “How’s that sound?”

  With its squat waiters with coins in their aprons and menu that hadn’t changed in decades, it wasn’t the sort of place people would expect to find a CEO, which was probably what commended it to Joyce. He was the kind of rich man who did not mind being seen driving around Kenilworth in a rusty old Jeep.

  “The Berghoff was my father’s favorite,” said Rosten.

  “It never grows old,” said Joyce, though it had.

  When they got settled, he leaned directly into a story about his father taking him fishing on a river in Idaho. Apparently he hadn’t brought Rosten to lunch for business. Rosten wanted to believe they were talking as friends, but there was something insistent about the way Joyce spoke, as if it was not simply getting away for a few moments but flight.

  “The fish weren’t especially big,” he said. “But the current, that was something else. It was so strong I had to lock arms with my dad to wade into position. I was scared of falling in and being swept away, but I stood there and cast into the rapids. The danger was a rush. Where you’ve been, you’ve got to know what I mean. The fear and the thrill together. In the end I got a reward for the risk. I wrestled it from the deep. Do you see what I mean? But you don’t strike me as somebody who spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid.”

  Rosten’s father had not had much taste for it, having been a Marine in Korea, where he had been decorated for courage in the face of the Chinese onslaught. His mother used to say that at Chosin Reservoir he had decided on an indoor life. But one summer, when Rosten was twelve, he announced that every American youngster needed to see the country’s natural splendors.

  “So we packed up the Chevy and lighted out for the territories,” Rosten said over his Wiener schnitzel.

  Toward the end of their trip, they stopped at Rocky Mountain National Park. By this time Rosten had had his fill of motels smelling of stale cigars and hand soap, let alone the bugs and long trails to nowhere. Then one morning his father woke him before dawn, gave him a package of sticky buns and a waxed carton of milk he had submerged overnight in ice water in the sink, and promised him a sight he would never forget.

  They drove to a hillside, which looked like every other hillside they had seen in the states whose fresh decals decorated the Chevy’s rear bumper. Along the dirt road Rosten noticed other unfortunate children in cars, all of which faced toward a hillside a ways away.

  “There’s going to be a burn,” his father said.

  “A fire?” Rosten said.

  “To clear the understory so the forest can replenish itself,” his father said.

  “They control it, Tommy,” his mother said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  This made Rosten lose interest and start reading for the umpteenth time the Classic Comics he had bought for the trip. Soon, though, he put them down. Bright yellow fire trucks began swarming the hillside. Men his father called smoke jumpers hurried around, cutting fire breaks and spreading out hoses that they then attached to big tanker trucks. Even before Rosten saw the first flame, the activity appeared as intense as life and death.

  Once ignited, the fire spread quickly, sending up a wall of smoke and flashing sparks. At first, miraculously, the trees themselves did not burn, but then at the crest of the hill they exploded, a line of torches against the sky. Then the wind shifted, and the smell of smoke grew thicker. The firefighters fell back and began cutting down trees and frantically digging a wider trench. Soon a yellow truck came careening down the dirt road where the observers were.

  “You must evacuate the area!” a man shouted through a bullhorn, its metallic buzz a thing so outside of nature that it might have come from The War of the Worlds. “You must evacuate! Now!”

  His father pulled into the line of retreating cars as calmly as if he were going to the grocery store. When they checked out of the motel that afternoon to head to the next park on their TripTik, Rosten could sme
ll the smoke in the lobby.

  “There’s a lesson for you, son,” his father said. “Sometimes it’s best just to leave well enough alone.”

  “Is that what you’re thinking?” Joyce said across the varnished oak table in the Berghoff.

  “Don’t you ever ask yourself whether we could be betting the company too soon?” said Rosten.

  “Time is running ahead of us,” said Joyce. “Time is the fire.”

  In the weeks after the Berghoff lunch, Joyce held Rosten at a distance. Maybe he had not liked the note of caution. Rosten was all right with that. His father used to say that you weren’t earning your pay if you weren’t willing to give your boss honest counsel and take your punishment.

  It had been one of his more useful lessons, though at the time Rosten would not have guessed any of them would be. He used to dread the days when classes were suspended for teacher training, because his father always used the occasion to drag him downtown to the First National Bank to teach him “the way the world works” and praise the rhythm and ring of typewriters, the flutter of bills through fingers, the tap and scrape of adding machines.

  “Someday you will appreciate the music of commerce,” he said. “You can do a lot worse than getting yourself established at a bedrock company like this one. You may turn up your nose, but it’s as safe as working for the federal government, and it pays better.”

  That was before First National merged into the National Bank of Detroit, which merged with Banc One Corporation, which disappeared into J. P. Morgan Chase, which made the acquisitive CEO the big man in New York that he had always yearned to be and left Chicago without its largest financial institution. As for the safety of government work, Rosten’s father certainly had not been thinking about the Marines or the CIA.

  There were never many cars on the executive level of the garage when Rosten arrived in the morning. Back in his father’s day, everyone who wanted to have a future made sure they beat their boss in to work and stayed until he left. Many a night Rosten’s mother muttered darkly, waiting for the late train to arrive as the dinner got dry on the stove. Now things were upside down. The only one who regularly beat Rosten to the office was Joyce, though today the car was missing, probably taken by his driver to be washed.

  The parking structure had an elevator that connected to the lobby of the Dome. Rosten walked through Joyce’s empty space and pushed the button. When the elevator opened, it released a disreputable odor. The little diode showed L as soon as the door closed, but the car barely seemed to be moving until it finally bumped to a stop. The back door opened. Maurice looked up from the security desk and tipped his finger to his brow. Rosten nodded past him. The brass-clad elevator that rose through the Dome smelled of polish from the overnight cleaning. He got off on his floor, dropped his coat and briefcase in his office, and took the stairs the rest of the way.

  He needed to pass his ID in front of the scanner to open the doors of the stairwell. They joked that when the doors stopped opening, it was time to pay a visit to Snow’s office and pick up your package. Rosten’s ID got a green light and a click. The industrial carpet and heavy fire doors made the stairway so silent that it seemed to erase his presence.

  Until now, Joyce had kept Investor and Public Relations out of the acquisition loop. “The less Sandra Harms knows,” he said, “the more she can deny.” The last thing they needed was for somebody to figure out that Day and Domes was planning to acquire a Silicon Valley darling. “You’re the spook,” Joyce said. If Fisherman had been there, he would have quoted Benjamin Franklin to the effect that three may keep a secret, if two of them were dead. But, of course, Fisherman himself was one of the casualties.

  Eventually, Rosten persuaded Joyce that they were better off with Harms being in the loop: She couldn’t very well spin people away from the truth if she didn’t know exactly where it was. So Rosten was going to brief her this morning, and he thought that it would be a nice touch if Joyce joined them. Maybe it would even close some of the distance between his boss and him. But there was no light under Joyce’s door.

  The elevator played Mozart on the way down. They had Donna Joyce to thank for this. Rosten held the door open when he reached his floor, just to let a phrase play out, then he stepped out into a silent corridor. No light came through the masked windows of the conference room. His key was a little stiff in the big, new dead-bolt lock. Inside, he flipped on the overhead fluorescents, which hesitated a moment before illuminating the conference table scattered with legal pads and the walls hung with large pages torn from the two large easels in the corners. Written on them were lists, calculations, skeletal spreadsheets in black and red marker pen: corporate wallpaper.

  They had been careful to keep some things obscure—A Co., B Co., C Co., and of course New Co. Fisherman would have found this pathetic, but Rosten was a long way from that world, where everything could become its opposite in the blink of an eye like one of those optical tricks in which a cube turned itself inside out or a rabbit became a duck. Here two plus two always equaled four. If it quacked like a duck, you did not have to worry that it was a hunter.

  An interloper might not have guessed, if he had stumbled into the jumble of code names, numbers, and bullet points on the walls of the war room, but behind it all was a perfect clarity of purpose: maximizing the total value that Day and Domes provided its shareholders. The definition of this value was the increase in share price plus dividends. The constant dollar was the meter stick, like the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458th of a second, absolute.

  Until now, Day and Domes’s promise to the market had always been steadiness and predictability, with no big spikes, no big drops, a straight line with a gently positive slope. But when Joyce came aboard, he realized that if the company stuck with credit reporting alone, it would decline. Basic credit information was old economy. Already, despite Day and Domes’s dominance, some analysts were saying that with the Internet revolution, the company’s core business could become a commodity, like wheat.

  Nobody wanted to be a farmer. Joyce reasoned that as companies captured more and more information about their customers through loyalty cards, Internet sales, online ratings and surveys, and the like, Day and Domes should not only house the data but should also apply advanced analytics that would allow clients to sell to each customer as if he or she were an intimate. Firms could entrust the precious asset of their customer data to Day and Domes because its name was a synonym for rectitude. This was essential because eventually D&D would know more about their customers than its clients did. But you needed more than trust. You needed to innovate, and you needed scale.

  Joyce’s first acquisition target was a Silicon Valley firm called Gnomon Co. A big commitment of capital carried a risk, but there were models that could quantify it, which was why Rosten’s team was working overtime.

  Rosten had recognized the models’ power in business school, and at the investment bank he had used them to predict the price a complex derivative security would sell for on the first day of trading. He nailed it within a penny and got a promotion. In certain moods, though, he brooded that behind the models’ success was the fact that everyone used them. He had gotten the price right because all over the world brilliant young men and women had gone through the same analysis he had. They spotted the same hidden options, calculated their Black-Scholes values. They used the same equations, made the same simplifying assumptions, and when they rolled it all up into a single number, it reflected the way it was derived. The model might not mirror reality. Perhaps what the model modeled, in a profound sense, was itself.

  Rosten had asked Sandra Harms to arrive early. She had a lot of catching up to do before the work teams arrived. He respected her wattage and drive, though it gave her the reputation of being unapproachable. This, of course, beckoned attention, but it was not the only thing about her that did. She defined any space she stepped into, unless Joyce was in it, too. Then they defined it together. She had the figure of Degas’s woman aft
er the bath and met you with bright blue, unaverted eyes. Her long, black hair was pinned up in a swirl that made men want her to let it down. But there was gossip about an incident in which a Day and Domes manager came on to her and ended up gone, with a package that could only have been described as limp. So when men in the company talked about her among themselves, they often intoned a warning: “First do no Harms.”

  Rosten did not generally warm to people like her, but he had no trouble working with them. Help them execute on their long-term career plan and they would do what you asked them to. The door opened.

  “Why didn’t you just lock your team in a safe?” she said. “Did you actually intend to get everyone in the Dome talking?”

  “What are they saying?” he said. “Welcome, by the way.”

  “They expect a layoff.”

  “That works.”

  “What a nice thought,” she said with a rumor of a smile. “So who are we buying?”

  He pointed her to a chair at the table.

  “Not absolutely sure yet,” he said. “I’ll go through the state of the bidding.”

  “You mean A Co. and B Co.,” she said, pointing to the easel. “Sounds like an infantry battalion.” That was not a simile he would have expected from her. “My father was in the Army,” she said. “You did service yourself.”

  “Not in the military.”

  “You’re not at liberty to disclose, I suppose.”

  “Have you heard any talk on the Street?” he said.

  “About your time in a le Carré novel?” she said.

  He fumbled with a folder on the table and eventually came up with the one-pager he had prepared. As he handed it to her, she said, “Are you afraid of me too?” Her face added nothing, not aggression or challenge, not sport. She remained so silent and blank that he felt an intense desire to answer. He used to know how to deal with this.

  “We have to get to work,” he said.

  “Yes, let’s do,” she said. “Let’s get down to the data.”

  “It is our business, after all,” he said.