by Brian Haig
“Why did he go to the guns and bombs people?” Haggar asked, trying to get the discussion back on track. Jack and Jackson were still staring each other down. “The force protection and threat reduction guys, that’s who he should be talking to.”
Jack looked away from Jackson, toward Haggar, and smiled. “Remember, Alan, Perry Arvan is a scientist, not a businessman. Because of the polymer’s qualities he figures the military will categorize it as an explosive. He’s a novice at the military procurement game. Always been a subcontractor, never a direct supplier.”
The CG boys took a moment to absorb all this inside information Jack had just unloaded on them. It sounded so promising. Inside only two years, Arvan had sunk from $400 million in revenue to just over $200 million. What a disaster. They could picture Perry Arvan slapping on Band-Aids, reeling from the shrinkage, trying to stem the bleeding long enough for the big bonanza that would save his hide.
The idea of stealing it all out from under his feet—and at the last minute—was immensely satisfying.
“So what’s your plan?” Bellweather asked, openly admiring Jack for finding such a plump target. Better yet, it was clear that Jack had an incredibly knowledgeable inside source. He was dying to hear the plan; it was bound to be great.
Jack got up and worked his way to the side table laden with food and snacks. He picked up a plate and loaded it with cucumber sandwiches, a few sweet pickles, some chips. “Perry is surviving a day at a time. He borrowed heavily for the expansion and to build his stockpile. He emptied his equity, leveraged himself to the hilt. I understand he owes 150 mil on five-year notes at seven percent. Do the math.”
Walters, only too happy to express the obvious, said, “Any setback at this point will be disastrous.”
“So do you have a plan to squeeze him?” Bellweather quickly asked. He was sure he had a whopper.
Jack selected a pickle and bit down hard. “You’re going to do it.”
“Us?”
“That’s right, and here’s a happy coincidence I think you’ll savor. Perry’s largest account is a munitions company located in Huntsville, Alabama. Globalbang. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”
Big smiles instantly erupted on the other side of the table. Globalbang, they all knew, happened to be one of the many subsidiaries of the Capitol Group. It produced, among other things, Air Force bombs and Navy missiles and an assortment of other things that go boom in the night. No wonder Jack had set his sights on CG. They spent a brief moment admiring how cleverly Jack had walked them into this, then another moment, leaning forward to hear the details.
After nearly inhaling a sandwich, Jack continued. “Last year, Perry sold seventy million in chemical explosives to Globalbang. You can find out more easily than I, but assume his contracts this year are roughly equivalent.” He paused and let the moment build. “Imagine now if those contracts are canceled.”
“He would sue us,” Jackson snarled, still smarting from his earlier humiliation. It was time to even the score, and he knew how to do it. He worked up a condescending scowl and said, “And you know what, Wiley? He’ll have an excellent case. In fact, he’ll cream us.”
“So what?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Let him hire the meanest legal shark he can find. Sue to his heart’s content. It would take at least a year or two for resolution. Perry hasn’t got a prayer of surviving two months, much less two years.”
The light finally came on and Jackson blurted, “And if we take him over—”
“Then why would we sue ourselves?”
Bellweather began gliding around the table, topping off their champagne flutes. They had already toasted the partnership: now it was time to toast a victory that was all but in their laps. They could see it, smell it, taste it. After a moment, he lifted his flute and, smiling broadly, said, “Here’s to Jack and his holy grail.”
“Hear, hear,” they all chanted.
8
Tuesday night meant chicken barbecue at the plant, a weekly event that nearly all of Perry Arvan’s employees and wives made a point to attend. It was a tradition, a ritual. Something Perry had instituted decades before, back when Arvan Chemicals was a desperate start-up with five employees struggling to build a long-shot dream.
In the early years, Marge, Perry’s lovely young wife, kept the books and performed the secretarial chores. Then the kids came and she stepped back and encouraged him to hire a professional bookkeeper. His sons and daughter worked at the plant almost from infancy. Now his grandchildren were dropping by after school, doing odd jobs and learning the trade in the bottom-up route Perry insisted they follow. It was a family place, cradle to grave, always had been, and he fought hard to keep it that way. Nearly three-quarters of his employees were relatives of each other, in one way or another. Sons and daughters hauled vats of chemicals right beside their fathers and mothers. “Uncle This” and “Auntie That” were frequently bellowed about the plant. These days, increasingly, grandchildren of employees he’d known for more than forty years were on the payroll.
As always, Perry stood by the door, warmly greeting everybody who entered. He knew them all by name. He knew their children, where they lived, had attended many of their weddings and stood somberly at the funerals of their kin. They came to him with their problems and tragedies, and he knew those, too.
The world around him had changed, not much for the better, Perry thought. After attending Princeton University for his undergraduate, his master’s, and his doctorate in thermochemistry, he had made the easy decision to plant his dream a few miles down the road, in Trenton.
Trenton was a roaring factory town back then, home to countless small, bustling firms, like his, that fed the fabulous appetites of larger companies, from the great automobile manufacturers in Detroit to the vast array of large chemical firms sprinkled around New Jersey. “Trenton makes, the world takes,” boasted the proud lights on the big bridge that spanned the sluggish, muddy Delaware River to Pennsylvania.
A sad joke these days. A glittering homage to irony. Trenton had long since been eclipsed as a manufacturing center, then entered a period of steep decline. A city that once bragged of almost as many diemakers as Detroit could now only boast of having almost as many murderers, drive-by killers, and muggers. It seemed to Perry that the town had become little more than a swamp of abandoned warehouses, blighted blocks, and unhappy, desolate, drug-addled people.
Perry had watched it all with sad awareness; the decay came fast and cruel. Once-bountiful parks became drugstores where the hopeless bought from the desperate, snorting white stuff up their nostrils or pushing dirty needles in their veins. The only businesses that expanded were bars, racing to keep up with the swift upsurge in drunks. The abrupt eruption of crime and gangs simply overwhelmed the police force. Kids were shot down in school. There was a flood of muggings and rapes and stickups. The local hospitals overflowed with addicts and overdoses and shooting victims who, too often, were children.
He mourned the passing of a once great town. Perry had been sorely tempted to pack up and move a thousand times. But he stayed. Trenton was his home. Arvan Chemicals was one of the last of the breed and proud of it, a place of employment from birth to death, where hard work was rewarded, where families stayed and struggled together.
“Evening, Perry,” Marcus Washington said, pumping hard with his left hand. Perry smiled back and offered his customary “Welcome to the big bake.” One of the many old-timers, Marcus had joined Arvan back in 1968 after an ill-fated tour in Vietnam, where he lost his right eye and the lower part of his right arm. He was desperate for work, horribly scarred, and despite his mangled condition and the manual nature of factory work, Perry took him on. Marcus had never once given him cause to regret that decision.
“Marcus, Angela. Chicken’s still on the grill, but you know where the drinks are.”
“That’s exactly what I need, a drink,” Angela grunted as she stoutly shoved her way past. “Maybe two or
three.”
A drink? Oh no, that’s the last thing you need, Perry was tempted to shout, but pursed his lips and smiled at her anyway. It wouldn’t help, wouldn’t make any difference at all. She and Marcus had met in the plant. He worked on the floor, Angela clerked in shipping. They actually held their wedding in the factory, a big to-do with the whole place bedecked with flowers and shiny gold crepe, the works. Back then Angela was a pretty girl, petite, flirty, a smile-a-minute type. After three dispiriting miscarriages, they finally produced a little boy, a tousle-headed, freckly little redhead named Danny, who was their pride and joy.
Poor Danny lived to the ripe age of eight before he fell ill with a painful blood disease nobody could identify or treat, much less cure. Perry and the workers scraped together what money they could afford to help defray the increasingly expensive treatments. In the end, though, young Danny passed away, screaming in agony. Marcus swallowed the pain and soldiered on. He’d lost pieces of himself in Vietnam; he’d learned to endure loss. But Angela turned moody, sour, and unhappy, ballooned in weight, and adopted booze to assuage her grief. She was so big now she waddled. She took to wearing spandex tights and was quite a sight.
She frequently got drunk at these events and made a damn fool of herself. And that was okay, too. Family. All one big family, they understood, and forgiveness came easy.
Marge sidled up beside him. “Seven o’clock, dear,” she whispered, seizing his arm and tugging him inside. “Time for you to get a drink and eat.”
Perry stole another glance at the parking lot. He saw no latecomers so he nodded and allowed Marge to drag him through the big doors. They held hands and strolled together through the reception area, then entered what the workers fondly called “Perry’s Versailles.”
Arvan had started out in a small red-brick building on a corner lot. Over the years, more buildings had been added to the cluster as the business grew from a drip of a dream into a prosperous midsize enterprise, and the plant expanded from one small building into a vast maze of vats and mixing tanks and labs. Perry had personally overseen every detail of the expansion, always adhering to his red-brick rule; every building had thirty-foot ceilings, red-brick walls inside and out, large swinging windows for safety purposes, with everything situated around a large green courtyard, which now was totally surrounded and enclosed. Given the array of dangerous chemicals, safety and security were always foremost and no expense was spared: the complex now resembled a fortress.
On Sundays, he and Marge and whatever workers cared to contribute tended the gardens inside the courtyard. Trees and bushes and exotic shrubs had been imported from around the world, meticulously chosen by Perry; no matter the season, something was always in bloom. But in springtime the little courtyard exploded with colors and leaves and tendrils of unimaginable assortment. A dozen fountains and ten koi ponds were sprinkled around, along with too many stone benches to count.
It seemed that as the streets around the plant grew rougher, uglier, and more dilapidated, Perry’s gardens flowered into even more of a paradise. The barbecue was always held in the courtyard, and tonight was no different. Two hundred workers and their families were already milling about, drinking and spreading whatever hot rumors they had picked up this week.
Years past, the rumors were harmless and mostly ambled around common themes: office romances, promotions, and corporate politics, such as they were in a small, inbred company. But the past year, a new theme had taken hold. Terror was the only word to describe it: the layoffs struck like a fist. One year, business was booming like never before: the warehouse was crammed with a massive chemical stockpile, new equipment was ordered to chase the sudden demand, and Perry could hardly hire enough folks to handle the load. Then everything dropped off a cliff. The first layoff in Arvan’s history. Pay cuts across the board. The tremors were still being felt, leaving everybody edgy and faintly resentful.
Eddie Lungren, a big, interminably happy Swede who worked in mixing, manned the bar, a job he was quite proud of, though mostly it entailed little more than handing out Budweiser in bottles and cheap boxed wine in flimsy plastic cups. “The usual, boss?” he asked Perry, and after a nod, Eddie’s big hand pushed an icy diet Pepsi across the bar. After a health scare twenty years before, Perry had quit smoking and drank very rarely.
Mat Belton, Arvan’s financial officer, eased his way over. “Nice turnout,” he mentioned, nodding in the direction of the grills where a gaggle of workers were hungrily eyeing the chicken. Tuesday cookouts were strictly informal affairs. Most workers were still wearing their grungy coveralls, and it was strictly jeans and T-shirts for the wives. Before the purge, the turnouts were twice as large.
Perry took a slug of Pepsi. “How were the numbers this week?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Will we make payroll?”
“By a hair. It was touch and go. Had to sell five trucks and six mixing vats on eBay to make it.”
“Won’t be much longer,” Perry assured him, trying to sound confident. The past year Perry and Mat had employed every desperate trick they could think up in a jarring race against bankruptcy. Everything that wasn’t nailed down had been sold or auctioned off—usually for a tenth its worth—in an endless, increasingly reckless effort to raise cash. They had fallen behind on bank payments a few times. For a while Perry’s charm and solid reputation had bought a reluctant form of patience from the banks. Eventually, though, the calls turned threatening and vicious. Mat was forced to play hardball to get the bankers to back off. Go ahead, he had snarled at one particularly obnoxious lender—push harder, we’ll declare Chapter 11, and you and the other buzzards can scratch each other’s eyes out over the scraps, which won’t be worth squat.
Poor Mat had also been the one to make the job cuts. Perry simply didn’t have the heart, so wielding the scythe and delivering the harsh news fell to his financial man. Predictably, Mat’s popularity took a terrible drubbing. The tires on his car got slashed so many times he now took a taxi to work, sneaking up the back stairway and through the rear hallways to his office. He brought bagged lunches to avoid the nasty stares and snide comments in the company cafeteria.
“How long is not much longer?” Mat asked, taking another long sip of wine. A year ago wouldn’t be too soon.
“Hard to say, Mat. Monday, Harry and I went up to Rock Island Arsenal.”
“I heard. How’d that go?”
“Okay, I guess. They were impressed. I think we might be talking with the wrong people, though.”
“All right, who are the right people?”
Perry stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Who the hell knows? That Department of Defense is an octopus, a massive bureaucracy sprawled everywhere. Left hand doesn’t seem to know anything about the right hand. I asked the fellas at Rock Island. No idea.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Perry. Every day counts. We’re tiptoeing on the edge of bankruptcy.”
“Hell, I know that, Mat. We could afford it, I’d hire one of those slick operators from down in Washington. You know, someone to cut through the red tape.”
“That would be wonderful.” Mat drained the wine from his plastic cup. “You’re right, though,” he concluded somberly. “We can’t afford it.”
Timothy Dyson, the besieged CEO of Globalbang, could feel the damp sweat mark spreading on the back of his red leather chair. He was being read the riot act by Mitch Walters and some good-looking young hotshot who had flown down with him in the corporate jet to Huntsville.
“Guess if the war heated up, that would help plenty,” he said softly, sinking lower in his chair.
“See if I got this right,” Walters snarled, rapping a big knuckle on the table. “Two years ago, sales were 1.8 billion. Last year, they slipped to 1.2 billion. This year is sinking below a billion.”
“Essentially, those are the numbers, yes. With a little luck and a strong backwind, we’ll probably hit nine hundred mil.”
Walters rolled his eyes and slapped th
e table. “That’s it?”
“Mitch, this is a demand-driven business. You knew that when you acquired us three years ago. We can’t make the Air Force and Navy shoot more.”
Walters had dropped in for a surprise visit, then forced Dyson to spend half of a miserable hour reviewing the declining state of Globalbang’s business. Thirty minutes of unanswerable questions, pierced by snarls and scowls. Dyson wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
A spy at the local airport had notified Dyson the moment the big CG corporate jet touched down. He dropped everything and placed a frantic call to his wife, telling her to contact a real estate appraiser and arrange a quick sell. Mitch Walters rarely paid visits. Walters never paid friendly visits.
Walters narrowed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, Dyson, that’s just not likely to happen. Your numbers have been nose-diving for two years without stop.”
“But we’re still profitable. I’ve been cutting costs and laying off people like crazy.”
“Not good enough.”
“I’ve also shut down half the facility. No electricity, no water, no nightly cleanup. Half of the plant is a ghost town with big dustballs blowing through the aisles.”
Walters was staring down at one of the paper slides prepared monthly that detailed the intricacies of the company’s finances. “What about this?” he demanded, thumping a finger on the page.
“What’s that?” Dyson leaned forward and tried to get a better view of whatever Walters was peering at. “The supplier slide?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“What about it?”
“What have you done to squeeze them?”
“They haven’t been neglected, believe me. Six months ago, we brought them all down here, turned the screws, said they’d share our pain or else.”
“That’s the right spirit.”
“They agreed to take a ten percent revenue reduction.”
