Company Man (37 page)

Audrey's e-mail icon was bouncing, and she saw it was Kevin Lenehan, the electronics tech.

She walked right over there, almost ran.

“What's the best restaurant in town, would you say?” Kevin said.

“I don't know. Terra, maybe? I've never been there.”

“How about Taco Gordito?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you owe me dinner. I told you the recording on this baby started at three-eighteen in the morning on Wednesday the sixteenth, right? After the sequence you're so interested in?”

“What'd you find?”

“The hard drive's partitioned into two sections, right? One for the digital images, the other for the software that drives the thing.” He turned to his computer monitor, moved the mouse around and clicked on something. “Very cool system, by the way. Internet-based.”

“Meaning?”

“Your guy had the ability to monitor his cameras from his office.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Nothing. I'm just saying. Anyway, look at this.”

“That doesn't mean anything to me. It's a long list of numbers.”

“Not a techie, huh? Your husband has to program the VCR for you?”

“He can't either.”

“Same with me. No one can. So, look. This is the log of all recorded content.”

“Is that the fifteenth?”

“You got it. This log says that the recording actually started on Tuesday the fifteenth at four minutes after noon, right? Not like fifteen hours later.”

“So you found more video?”

“I wish. No, you're not following me. Someone must have gone in and reformatted the section of the hard drive where the recordings are made, then started the whole machine over, recycled it, so it just
looked
like it started from scratch at three-whatever in the morning on Wednesday. But the log here tells us that the system was initiated fifteen hours earlier. I mean, it's saying there's recorded content going back to like noon that day. Only, when you click on the files, it says ‘File not found.'”

“Deleted?”

“You got it.”

Audrey stared at the screen. “You're sure of this.”

“Am I sure the box started recording at noon the day before? Yeah, sure as shit.”

“No. Sure you can't retrieve the recording.”

“It's, like, so gone.”

“That's too bad.”

“Hey, you look, like, disappointed. I thought you'd be thrilled. You want proof part of the video was erased, you got it right here.”

“You ever read the book
Fortunately
when you were a kid?”

“My mom plopped me down in front of
One Life to Live
and
General Hospital
. Everything I learned about life I learned from soap operas. That's why I'm single.”

“I must have read it a thousand times. There's a boy
named Ned, and he's invited to a surprise party, but unfortunately the party's a thousand miles away. Fortunately a friend lends him an airplane, but unfortunately the motor explodes.”

“Ouch. I hate when that happens.”

“Fortunately there's a parachute in the airplane.”

“But unfortunately he's horribly burned over ninety percent of his body and he's unable to open the chute? See how my mind works.”

“This case is like that. Fortunately, unfortunately.”

“That pretty much describes my sex life,” Kevin said. “Fortunately the girl goes home with Kevin. Unfortunately she turns out to be a radical feminist lesbian who only wants him to teach her how to use Photoshop.”

“Thanks, Kevin,” Audrey got up from the stool. “Lunch at Taco Gordito's on me.”

“Dinner,” Kevin said firmly. “That's the deal.”

Nick's cell phone rang just as he was pulling into the parking lot, almost half an hour later than usual this morning.

It was Victoria Zander, the Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, calling from Milan. “Nick,” she said, “I'm at the
Salone Internazionale del Mobile
in Milan, and I'm so upset I can barely speak.”

“Okay, Victoria, take a deep breath and tell me what's up.”

“Will you please explain to me what's going on with Dashboard?”

Dashboard was one of the big new projects Victoria was developing, a portfolio of flexible, modular glass walls and partitions—very cool, beautifully designed, and something Victoria was really high on. Nick was high on it for business reasons: there was nothing else like it out there, and it was sure to hit a sweet spot.

“What do you mean, ‘What's going on'?”

“After all the time and money we've put in on this, and—it just makes no
sense
! ‘All major capital expenditures on hold'—what do you
mean
by that? And not even giving me the courtesy of advance notice?”

“Victoria—”

“I don't see how I can continue working for Stratton. I re
ally don't. You know, Herman Miller has been after me for two years, and frankly I think that's a far better home for—”

“Victoria, hold on. Cool your jets, will you? Now, who told you we're shelving Dashboard?”

“You guys did! I just got the e-mail from Scott.”

What e-mail?
Nick almost asked, but instead he said, “Victoria, there's some kind of glitch. I'll call you right back.”

He clicked off, slammed the car door, and went to look for Scott.

“He's not here, Nick,” Gloria said. “He had an appointment.”

“An appointment where?” Nick demanded.

She hesitated. “He didn't say.”

“Get him on his cell, please. Right now.”

Gloria hesitated again. “I'm sorry, Nick, but his cell phone doesn't work inside the plant. That's where he is.”

“The
plant
? Which one?”

“The chair factory. He's—well, he's giving someone a tour.”

As far as Nick knew, Scott had been inside the factories maybe twice before. “Who?”

“Nick, I—please.”

“He asked you not to say anything.”

Gloria closed her eyes, nodded. “I'm really sorry. It's a difficult position.”

Difficult position? I'm the goddamned CEO,
he thought.

“Don't worry about it,” he said kindly.

 

Nick hadn't visited the chair plant in almost three months. There was a time when he'd visit monthly, sometimes more, just to check out how things were running, ask questions, listen to complaints, see how much inventory backlog was on hand. He'd check the quality boards at each station too, mostly to set an example, figuring that if he paid attention to the quality charts, the plant manager would too, and so would everyone below him.

He made visits to the plant just like Old Man Devries used to do, only when the old man did it, they weren't called Gemba walks, as they were now. That term had been introduced by Scott, along with Kaizen and a bunch of other Japanese words that Nick didn't remember, and that sounded to him like types of sushi.

It was the layoffs that made walking the plants an unpleasant chore. He could sense the hostility when he came through. It wasn't lost on him, or anybody else, that Old Man Devries's job had been to build plants, and Nick's was to tear them down.

But he knew it was something he should probably start doing again, both here and in the other manufacturing complex about ten miles down the road. He'd go back to the monthly walks, he vowed.

If he had the chance.

If the factories were still here.

He noticed the big white sign on the front of the red brick building that said
DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT,
and next to it a black LED panel with the red digital numerals 322. Someone had crossed out
ACCIDENT
and scrawled over it, with a heavy black marker,
LAYOFFS
.

He went in the visitors' entrance and caught the old familiar smell of welding and soldering, of hot metal. It took him back to visits to his father at work, of dog-day summers in high school and college spent working on the line.

The plump girl who sat at the battered old desk and handed out safety glasses, greeted visitors, and answered the phone, did a double take. “Good
morning,
Mr. Conover.”

“Morning, Beth.” Beth-something-Italian. He signed the log, noticed Scott had signed in about twenty minutes earlier along with someone else whose signature was illegible.

“Boy, both you
and
Mr. McNally in the space of an hour. Something going on I should know about?”

“No, in fact, I'm looking for Mr. McNally—any idea where he is?”

“No, sir. He had a visitor with him, though.”

“Catch the other guy's name?”

“No, sir.” She looked ashamed, as if she hadn't been doing her job. But Nick couldn't blame her for not checking the ID of the CFO's guest too carefully.

“Did Scott say where they were going?”

“No, sir. Sounded like Mr. McNally was giving a tour.”

“Brad take them around?” Brad Kennedy was the plant manager, who gave tours only to the VIPs.

“No, sir. Want me to call Brad for you?”

“That's okay, Beth.” He put on a pair of dorky-looking safety glasses.

He'd forgotten how deafening the place was. A million square feet of clattering, pounding, thudding metal. As he entered the main floor, keeping to the “green mile,” as it was called—the green-painted border where you'd be safe from the Hi-Lo electric lift trucks that barreled down the aisles at heedless speeds—he could feel the floor shake. That meant the thousand-ton press, which stamped out the bases of the Symbiosis chair control panel, was operating. The amazing thing was that the thousand-ton press was all the way across the factory floor, clear on the other end, and you could still feel it go.

The place filled him with pride. This was the real heart of Stratton—not the glitzy headquarters building with its silver-fabric cubicles and flat-panel monitors and all the backstabbing. The company's heartbeat was the regular thud of the thousand-ton behemoth, which sent vibrations up your spine as you passed through. It was here, where you still found some of those antique, dangerous, hydraulic-powered machines that could bend steel three-quarters of an inch thick, the exact same one on which his father had worked, bending steel, a seething monster that could take your hand off if you weren't careful. His dad had in fact lost the tip of his ring finger to the old green workhorse once, which caused him more embarrassment than anger, because he knew it was his fault. He must have felt that the brake machine, after all those years of a close working relationship, had been disappointed in him.

As he walked, he looked for Scott, and the more he
looked, the angrier he got. The idea that Scott, who worked for him, a guy he'd hired, would dare shelve projects, block funding, change vendors without consulting him—that was insubordination of the most egregious sort.

Four hundred hourly workers in this plant, and another hundred or so salaried employees, all turning out chairs for the Armani-clad butts of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, the Prada-clad rumps of art directors.

He was always impressed by how clean the factory floor was kept, free of oil spills, each area clearly marked with hanging signs. Each section had its own safety board, marked green for a safe day, yellow for a day with a minor injury, red for an injury requiring hospitalization. Good thing, he thought grimly, he didn't have one of those hanging in his house. What was the color for death?

He was looking for two men in business suits. They shouldn't be hard to find here, among the guys (and a few women) in jeans and T-shirts and hard hats.

Periodic messages flashed on the TV monitors, a steady stream of propaganda and morale-building.
THE STRATTON FAMILY CARES ABOUT YOUR FAMILY—TALK TO YOUR BENEFITS ADVISER
. And:
THE NEXT INSPECTOR IS OUR CUSTOMER
. And then:
STRATTON SALUTES JIM VEENSTRA—FENWICK PLANT—25 YEARS OF SERVICE
.

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 in
sisted 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.