Company Man

by Joseph Finder

  Nick flashed on news stories he’d read about crazed employees—“disgruntled workers,” they were always called—who’d been let go, and then showed up at work and started picking people off.

  “I just remembered a phone conference I’m late for,” Scott McNally muttered as he squeezed past the intruder. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  Nick got up slowly, raised himself to his full six-two. The crazy bearded guy was considerably bigger.

  “What can I do for you?” Nick asked politely, calmly, the way you might try to lull a rabid Doberman pinscher.

  “What can you do for me? That’s fucking hilarious. There’s nothing more you can do for me, or to me, asshole.”

  Marge, hovering directly behind him, her hands flailing, said: “Nick, I’ll call Security.”

  Nick put up his hand to tell her to hold off. “I’m sure there’s no need,” he said.

  Marge squinted at him to indicate her strong disagreement, but she nodded, backed away warily.

  The bearded man took a step forward, puffing up his massive chest, but Nick didn’t budge. There was something primal going on here: the interloper was a baboon baring his canines, screaming and strutting to scare off a predator. He smelled of rancid sweat and cigar smoke.

  Nick fought the strong temptation to deck the guy but reminded himself that, as CEO of Stratton, he couldn’t exactly do stuff like that. Plus, if this was one of the five thousand Stratton workers who’d been laid off within the last two years, he had a right to be angry. The thing to do was to talk the guy down, let him vent, let the air out of the balloon slowly.

  Nick pointed to an empty chair, but the bearded man refused to sit. “What’s your name?” Nick said, softening his voice a bit.

  “Old Man Devries woulda never had to ask,” the man retorted. “He knew everyone’s name.”

  Nick shrugged. That was the myth, anyway. Folksy, paternal Milton Devries—Nick’s predecessor—had been CEO of Stratton for almost four decades. The old man had been beloved, but there was no way he knew ten thousand names.

  “I’m not as good with names as the old man was,” Nick said. “So help me out here.”

  “Louis Goss.”

  Nick extended his hand to shake, but Goss didn’t take it. Instead, Goss pointed a stubby forefinger at him. “When you sat down at your fancy computer at your fancy desk and made the decision to fire half the guys in the chair factory, did you even fucking think about who these people are?”

  “More than you know,” Nick said. “Listen, I’m sorry you lost your job—”

  “I’m not here because I lost my job—see, I got seniority. I’m here to tell you that you deserve to lose yours. You think just because you waltz through this plant once a month that you know anything about these guys? These are human beings, buddy. Four hundred and fifty men and women who get up at four in the morning to do the early shift so they can feed their families and pay their rent or their mortgages and take care of their sick kids or their dying parents, okay? Do you realize that because of you some of these guys are going to lose their houses?”

  Nick closed his eyes briefly. “Louis, are you just going to talk at me, or do you want to hear me out?”

  “I’m here to give you a little free advice, Nick.”

  “I find you get what you pay for.”

  The man ignored him. “You better think seriously about whether you really want to go through with these layoffs. Because if you don’t call them off by tomorrow morning, this place is going to grind to a halt.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I got half, maybe three-quarters of the factory floor with me on this. More, once we start. We’re all sicking out tomorrow, Nick. And we’re staying sick until my buddies get their jobs back.” Goss was smiling with tobacco-darkened teeth, enjoying his moment. “You do the right thing, we do the right thing. Everyone’s happy.”

  Nick stared at Goss. How much of this was bluster, how much on the level? A wildcat strike could paralyze the company, especially if it spread to the other plants.

  “Why don’t you think this over when you’re driving home tonight in your Mercedes to your gated community?” Goss went on. “Ask yourself if you feel like taking your company down with you.”

  It’s a Chevy Suburban, not a Mercedes, Nick wanted to say, but then he was struck by that phrase, “gated community.” How did Goss know where he lived? There’d been nothing in the newspaper about that, though of course people talked…Was this a veiled threat?

  Goss smiled, a mirthless, leering grin, saw the reaction on Nick’s face. “Yeah, that’s right. I know where you live.”

  Nick felt his rage flare up like a lit match tossed into a pool of gasoline. He sprang out of his seat, lunged forward, his face a few inches from Louis Goss’s face. “What the hell are you trying to say?” It took all his self-restraint to keep from grabbing the collar of the guy’s flannel shirt and twisting it tight around his fat neck. Up close he realized that Goss’s bulk was all flab, not muscle.

  Goss flinched, seemed to shrink back a bit, intimidated.

  “You think everyone doesn’t know you live in a fucking huge mansion in a gated community?” Goss said. “You think anyone else in this company can afford to live like that?”

  Nick’s anger subsided as quickly as it had surged. He felt a damp sort of relief; he’d misunderstood. The threat that Louis had actually made seemed suddenly tame by comparison. He leaned even closer, poked a finger against Goss’s chest, jabbing the little white hyphen between “Harley” and “Davidson.”

  “Let me ask you something, Louis. Do you remember the ‘town meeting’ at the chair plant two years ago? When I told you guys the company was in a shitload of trouble and layoffs seemed likely but I wanted to avoid them if possible? You weren’t sick that day, were you?”

  “I was there,” Goss muttered.

  “Remember I asked if you’d all be willing to cut your hours back so everyone could stay on the job? Remember what everyone said?”

  Goss was silent, looking off to one side, avoiding Nick’s direct stare.

  “You all said no, you couldn’t do that. A pay cut was out of the question.”

  “Easy for you to—”

  “And I asked whether you’d all be willing to cut back on your health plan, with your daycare and your health-club memberships. Now, how many people raised their hands to say yeah, okay, we’ll cut back? Any recollection?”

  Goss shook his head slowly, resentfully.

  “Zero. Not a single goddamned hand went up. Nobody wanted to lose a goddamned hour of work; nobody wanted to lose a single perk.” He could hear the blood rushing through his ears, felt a flush of indignation. “You think I slashed five thousand jobs, buddy? Well, the reality is, I saved five thousand jobs. Because the boys in Boston who own this company now don’t fuck around. They’re looking at our biggest competitor and seeing that the other guys aren’t bending metal, they’re not making their furniture in Michigan anymore. Everything’s made in China now, Louis. That’s why they can undercut us on price. You think the boys in Boston don’t remind me of that every single goddamned chance they get?”

  “I got no idea,” Louis Goss muttered, shuffling his feet. It was all he could muster.

  “So go right ahead, Louis. Have your strike. And they’ll bring in a new CEO who’ll make me look like Mister Rogers. Someone who’ll shut down all of our plants the second he walks in this building. Then you wanna keep your job, Louis? I suggest you learn fucking Mandarin.”

  Louis was silent for a few seconds, and when he spoke, it was in a small, sullen voice. “You’re going to fire me, aren’t you?”

  “You?” Nick snorted. “You’re not worth the severance package. Now, get the fuck back on the line and get the hell out of my…work space.”

  A few seconds after Louis Goss had lumbered away, Marge appeared again. “You need to go home, Nick,” she said. “Now.”

  “Home?”

  “It’s the
police. There’s a problem.”

  2

  Nick backed his Chevy Suburban out of his space too fast, not bothering to check whether anyone was behind him, and careened through the parking lot that encircled the headquarters building. Even at the height of the workday, it stood half-empty as it had for the last two years, since the layoffs began. Gallows humor abounded among the employees these days, Nick knew. The upside of losing half the workforce was, you could always find a parking space.

  His nerves felt stretched taught. Acres of empty black asphalt, surrounded by a great black field of charred buffalo grass, the remains of a prescribed fire. Buffalo grass never needed mowing, but every few years it had to be burned to the ground. The air smelled like a Weber grill.

  Black against black against the black of the road, a desolate landscape. He wondered whether driving by the vast swath of scorched earth every day, staring at the charred field through the office windows, left a dark carbon smudge on your psyche.

  You need to go home. Now.

  When you have kids, they’re the first thing you think of. Even a guy like Nick, hardly a worrywart, you get a call from the cops and your imagination takes flight in a bad direction.

  But both kids were all right, the cops had assured Marjorie. Julia was on her way back from school, and Lucas—well, Lucas had been in classes today and was doing whatever the hell he did after school these days, which was another issue entirely.

  That wasn’t it.

  Yes, it was another break-in, they’d said, but this time he really needed to come by. What the hell could that mean?

  Over the past year or so, Nick had gotten used to the periodic calls from the alarm company or the police. The burglar alarm would go off in the middle of the day. There’d been a break-in. The alarm company would verify that the alarm was genuine by calling home or Nick’s office and requesting a code. If no authorized user said it was a false alarm, the company would immediately dispatch the Fenwick police. A couple of cops would then drive by the house, check it out.

  Inevitably it happened when no one was there—the crew working on the kitchen were taking one of their frequent days off; the kids were at school; the housekeeper, Marta, was out shopping or maybe picking up Julia.

  Nothing was ever stolen. The intruder would force a window or one of the French doors, get inside, and leave a little message.

  Literally, a message: words spray-painted in Day-Glo orange, all capital letters formed with the precision of an architect or mechanical engineer: NO HIDING PLACE.

  Three words, one on top of another.

  Was there any doubt it was a deranged laid-off employee? The graffiti defaced the walls of the living room, the dining room they never used, the freshly plastered walls of the kitchen. In the beginning it had scared the shit out of him.

  The real message, of course, was that they weren’t safe. They could be gotten to.

  The first graffiti had appeared on the heavy, ornate ashwood front door, which Laura had deliberated over for weeks with the architect, a door that had cost a ridiculous three thousand dollars, a fucking door, for God’s sake. Nick had made his feelings known but hadn’t objected, because it was obviously important to her, for some reason. He’d been perfectly content with the flimsy paneled front door that came with the house they’d just bought. He didn’t want to change anything about the house except maybe to shrink it to half its size. There was a saying that was popular at Stratton, which Old Man Devries was fond of repeating: the whale that spouts gets the harpoon. Sometimes he thought about having one of those bronze-looking estate wall plaques made for him by Frontgate, the kind you see on stone entrance pillars in front of McMansions, saying in raised copper letters, SPOUTING WHALE HOUSE.

  But to Laura, the front door was symbolic: it was where you welcomed friends and family, and it was where you kept out those who weren’t welcome. So it had to be both beautiful and substantial. “It’s the front door, Nick,” she’d insisted. “The first thing people see. That’s the one place you don’t cheap out.”

  Maybe, on some level, she thought a three-inch-thick front door would make them safer. Buying this insanely big house in the Fenwicke Estates: that was her idea too. She wanted the safety of the gated community. It took only a couple of anonymous threatening phone calls, as soon as the layoffs were announced.

  “If you’re a target, we’re all targets,” she said. There was a lot of anger out there, directed at him. He wasn’t going to argue with her. He had a family to protect.

  Now, with her gone, it felt as if he’d absorbed her neurosis, as if it had penetrated his bones. He felt, sometimes, that his family, what remained of it, was as fragile as an egg.

  He also knew that the security of their gated community was little more than an illusion. It was a show, an elaborate charade, the fancy gatehouse and the guards, the private security, the high black iron fence with the spearhead finials.

  The Suburban screeched to a stop before the ornately scrolled cast-iron gate beside the brick gatehouse built to resemble a miniature castle. A brass plaque on one of the piers said FENWICKE ESTATES.

  That little “e” at the end of Fenwick—he’d always found it pretentious to the point of being irritating. Plus, he was so over the irony here, this posh enclosed neighborhood equipped with the priciest security you could get—the tall wrought-iron perimeter fence with the fiber-optic sensing cable concealed inside the top rail, the pan-tilt-zoom CCTV surveillance cameras, the motion-sensor intruder alarms—where you couldn’t stop the loonies from scrambling in through the dense surrounding woods and climbing over the fence.

  “Another break-in, Mr. Conover,” said Jorge, the day guard. Nice guy, couldn’t be nicer. The security guards were all professional in demeanor, all wore sharp uniforms.

  Nick nodded grimly, waited for the motor-driven gate to open, ridiculously slow. The high-pitched electronic warning beep was annoying. Everything beeped these days: trucks backing up, dishwashers and clothes dryers, microwaves. It really could drive you crazy.

  “Police are there now, you know,” said Jorge. “Three cruisers, sir.”

  “Any idea what it is?”

  “No, sir, I don’t, I’m sorry.”

  The damned gate took forever to open. It was ridiculous. In the evening sometimes there was a line of cars waiting to get in. Something had to be done about it. For Christ’s sake, what if his house caught fire—would the fire department trucks have to sit here while his house turned to toast?

  He raced the engine in annoyance. Jorge shrugged a sheepish apology.

  The second the gate was open far enough for the car to get through, he gunned it—the Suburban’s pickup never ceased to amaze him—and barreled over the tiger-teeth tire-shredders that enforced one-way traffic, across the wide circular court paved in antique brick in a geometric pattern by old-world Italian stonemasons shipped over from Sicily, past the SPEED LIMIT 20 sign at twice that at least.

  The brick pavement turned into glass-smooth macadam road, no street sign. He raced past the old-growth elms and firs, the mailboxes the size of doghouses, none of the houses visible. You had to be invited over to see what your neighbor’s house looked like. And there sure as hell weren’t any block parties here in Fenwicke Estates.

  When he saw police squad cars parked on the street and at the entrance to his driveway, he felt something small and cold and hard forming at the base of his stomach, a little icicle of fear.

  A uniformed policeman halted him a few hundred feet from the house, halfway up the drive. Nick jumped out and slammed the car door in one smooth, swift motion.

  The cop was short and squat, powerful-looking, seemed to be perspiring heavily despite the cool weather. His badge said MANZI. A walkie-talkie hitched to his belt squawked unceasingly.

  “You Mr. Conover?” He stood directly in front of Nick’s path, blocking his way. Nick felt a flash of annoyance. My house, my driveway, my burglar alarm: get the fuck out of my way.

  “Yeah, that�
��s me, what’s going on?” Nick tried to keep the irritation, and the anxiety, out of his voice.

  “Ask you some questions?” Dappled sunlight filtered through the tall birches that lined the asphalt lane, played on the cop’s inscrutable face.

  Nick shrugged. “Sure—what is it, the graffiti again?”

  “What time did you leave the house this morning, sir?”

  “Around seven-thirty, but the kids are normally out of there by eight, eight-fifteen at the latest.”

  “What about your wife?”

  Nick gazed at the cop steadily. Most of the cops had to know who he was at least. He wondered if this guy was just trying to yank his chain. “I’m a single parent.”

  A pause. “Nice house.”

  “Thank you.” Nick could sense the resentment, the envy rising off the man like swamp gas. “What happened?”

  “House is okay, sir. It’s brand-new, looks like. Not even finished yet, huh?”

  “We’re just having some work done,” Nick said impatiently.

  “I see. The workers, they’re here every day?”

  “I wish. Not yesterday or today.”

  “Your alarm company lists a work number for you at the Stratton Corporation,” Officer Manzi said. He was looking down at an aluminum clipboard, his black eyes small and deeply inset like raisins in a butterscotch pudding. “You work there.”

  “Right.”

  “What do you do at Stratton?” There was a beat before the policeman looked up and let his eyes meet Nick’s: the guy knew damned well what he did there.

  “I’m the CEO.”

  Manzi nodded as if everything now made sense. “I see. You’ve had a number of break-ins over the last several months, is that correct, Mr. Conover?”

  “Five or six times now.”

  “What kind of security system you have here, sir?”

  “Burglar alarm on the doors and some of the windows and French doors. Basic system. Nothing too elaborate.”

  “Home like this, that’s not much of a system. No cameras, right?”