A Billion Ways to Die (18 page)

“None. If HR gets even slightly suspicious, they’ll just toss my résumé in a drawer and move on. The last thing they want is to talk to the cops.”

“Why’s that?”

“Most HR departments are overworked, underappreciated and marginalized, despite the importance of what they do. There’s no percentage in bringing problems to upper management. Only solutions.”

“You’re already sounding corporate.”

“Simply maximizing my potential as a proactive collaborator in achieving our mission of enhanced shareholder value.”

After close study of my identity theft short list, I chose Martin Goldman, who, like me, had a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. I remembered Marty. He was quiet, calm, competent and even more disheveled than I was. He’d spent most of his career at a public policy think tank called Metreconica in Princeton, New Jersey. They were absorbed into another company ten years before, prompting Martin to move around a few times as a research analyst in the NGO social welfare arena before shipping out last year for Singapore.

There was no photo on his LinkedIn profile, but a Google image search threw up a few shots of him at his nephew’s bar mitzvah five years earlier, when he was working in New York City. We would never be mistaken for identical twins, but it wouldn’t take much for Natsumi and me to achieve a good family resemblance.

I called all his former employers and received confirmation on his dates of employment, with no further comment. The same with Penn and his undergraduate school, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

I put the finishing touches on Marty’s résumé and before I could second-guess myself into indecision, sent it to the recruitment officer at The Société Commerciale Fontaine’s offices in White Plains. Then, like millions of edgy, hopeful and slightly self-deluded job aspirants across America, I anxiously awaited a response.

C
HAPTER
15

W
hen the phone call came, it felt like a hallucination. Even though I was well prepared for the possibility the scam might work, the words coming though the earpiece seemed strangely detached from reality.

“Mr. Goldman?” the female voice asked.

“Yes. Yes it is,” I said, in a near stammer.

“You’re sure?” she said, amused.

“Yes. I’m absolutely positive.”

“This is Jenny Richardson. I’m an internal recruiter for The Société Commerciale Fontaine. I was hoping we could talk about the position you applied for.”

“That’d be really great,” I said. “And thanks for using the whole company name. Now I know how to pronounce it.”

“When did you get back from Singapore?”

“Actually, about a month ago. And I’m not yet officially gone, but I’d love to make a change if I can find the right position.”

“Why’s that?” she asked, with a forthrightness I both appreciated and felt a little unbalanced by.

“I’m in the process of breaking up with my girlfriend,” I said. “She wants to stay over there. I definitely do not. But more importantly, I’m much more interested in the position you have open than continuing with my present responsibilities.”

“Nice pivot. Could you come in for an interview? Just me for now, so nothing to worry about.”

“I only worry about making a good impression. When would be good for you?”

She gave me a few dates and times and I picked the earliest, feeling that looking eager was better than chafing under further delay. She seemed pleased with the choice.

“Splendid. Business casual is fine.”

N
ATSUMI
WAS
nearly as taken aback as I was.

“I have to admit,” she said, “I didn’t think this would work.”

“Hasn’t worked yet, but it’s a good start.”

“We’re certain Chuck won’t recognize you.”

“No. We’re not certain about anything but ongoing ugly uncertainty.”

“Okay.”

T
HE
RECEPTIONIST
guarding Fontaine’s human resources department had a professional’s honed resistance to gratuitous charm. So after one frail attempt at conversation, I sat in my khaki slacks, open button-down collar shirt, V-neck sweater, blue blazer and tassel loafers, and proceeded to fill out the standard application form.

When I handed her the clipboard, she gave it a glance and whisked her hand in the general direction of the chair I’d just left. I sat back down, charmless but compliant.

When Jenny Richardson appeared, the mood in the waiting room took a dramatic turn for the better. She had the tidy, neatly proportioned shape of a former gymnast, complete with short, straight hair and an open, earnest cast to her face. She shook my hand and asked, “What’s the weather like out there?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “Sunny?”

“Good thing I’m not recruiting a meteorologist,” she said, brightly. Then again, she said everything brightly.

“So you want your data analysts focused on the data instead of the weather?”

“I like that. Follow me.”

We went through an unmarked door into a trackless room filled with cubicles as far as the eye could see. She led me along a circuitous route that I would never be able to retrace on my own. She held miniconversations with everyone we encountered, without actually slowing our pace. No one tried to make eye contact with me, not wanting to establish a relationship with a person they’d likely never see again. I smiled at them anyway.

We entered one of the rare semiprivate offices along an outside wall. The partition was glass, though you could close it off with a glass door. The space was large and equipped with both a desk set and a living room-like seating area. The solid walls were decorated with banal, corporate-issue artwork, and no sign that Jenny resided there as a regular thing. I sat on a rock-hard love seat. Jenny took a chair and spread a copy of my résumé out on her lap.

“How did you like Singapore?” she asked.

“They run a tight ship.”

“I’ve never been there. Or anywhere but London, where my high school class took a two-week tour of famous landmarks. Do you think that makes me a lesser person?”

“No. Just less-well-traveled,” I said. “You have time to make up for that.”

“I do. I’m only twenty-nine years old, though I’ve worked in this office twice as many years as I spent in college, which makes me feel old. So why do you think you’d be great in this job?”

“I love data the way other people love puppies. Spreadsheets, compilations, bar charts, integers, vectors and algorithms make me feel safe and warm.”

“Though you also love puppies,” she said, helping me along.

“And kittens. Though it’s not the data per se that’s so compelling, it’s what you do with it. That’s where most people in the information industry fall down. They’re far more comfortable telling you what
is
than what it all
means
.”

She took her hands away from the résumé and adjusted her skirt, pulling down the hem with a deft and barely noticeable maneuver.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that. I can barely do arithmetic, but I think I’m more sensible than my boyfriend, who works on Wall Street and thinks all truth lies within Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.”

“Accepted by whom, I always want to ask.”

“What can I tell you about our Economic and Cultural Development Department?”

“What do they most want the person in this position to achieve?”

“Excellent question. They’re buried in data that sloshes in continuously from all these public and private resources, from all over the world, in every imaginable format and level of sophistication, and they just don’t know what the heck to do with it all. Those are my words, not what they tell me. But it looks like they most need what you most like to do—make sense out of a big old jumble of information.”

“To what end?” I asked.

“To prove to management that the company’s investment in this stuff actually helps our financial picture in addition to being a nice-to-have PR gimmick.”

“What if I prove the investment is a colossal waste of money?”

“Then we’ll have to fire you and get someone who knows how to prove what we want you to prove,” she said, then quickly added, “Just kidding.”

Though I wasn’t too sure about that.

“Okay. Fair enough. Who do I need to convince I’m the right guy for the job?”

“Me. And Dr. Rajendra Gyawali, head of Corporate Research and Strategy. Chuck will go along with his recommendation.”

“Charles Andalusky?” I asked.

“You are correct, sir. You’ve done your homework.”

“Can you tell me anything about Dr. Gyawali?”

“He’s Nepali, like from Nepal, not Naples. They tell me he’s a genius, and I’ve got no reason to argue with them. I’ve placed a half-dozen people into his office over the years, but I haven’t the foggiest idea how he picks. I just know it helps if I like you.”

I almost asked her if she did, then thought the test was avoiding putting her in an awkward position, even though she was the one who put herself there in the first place. So I kept silent, which I sensed from her manner was the right thing to do.

“So,” she said, looking down at my résumé, “all your contact information is here?”

“The cell phone is the best. It never leaves my side.”

“Splendid,” she said, in an encouraging, yet inconclusive way.

R
AJENDRA
G
YAWALI
worked in a completely different office, in another building across town that housed the corporation’s technical support services. It made me wonder if the corporate structure was organized around social aptitude, which meant housing all the geeks and data wonks in the same building.

Where Jenny’s habitat was fresh but sterile, Gyawali and his team of researchers lived under high ceilings, amongst military-style metal office furniture, lab benches, computer rooms and white boards spanning all four walls of messy conference rooms.

Gyawali himself, in contrast, was dressed for a gallery opening—all business, but hardly casual. A handsome man with a tall forehead that likely helped his reputation for genius, tightly packed hair, pale skin and Ricardo Montalbán features. He moved as gracefully as he dressed, and we spent the entire interview, more like a guided tour, strolling down the halls and through the building’s cluttered, shopworn work areas.

He asked three highly technical questions related to probability theory, recursive functions and statistical analysis. He nodded when I answered, then spent the rest of the meeting sharing his frustration with an upper management that knew nothing about his department’s inner workings, yet felt free to provide ongoing advice on how those workings might better perform.

“Thus my professional responsibilities are about 10 percent implementation and 90 percent justification.”

“I can help you with that,” I said.

“That’s my fondest hope.”