The Interior (18 page)

“Go ahead, Jimmy,” Sandy said.

“Don’t you think you should wait for the police?” David asked.

Jimmy turned his squinty eyes on David. “We’re way the hell out here in the middle of nowhere. You want to wait for the police and have a thousand women go hysterical when they come outside on their lunch break and see their friend or whatever squashed like a melon?” he asked sarcastically. “Or how about this? You want to sit around and wait five hours for the locals to arrive and have that thing over there start stinking up the place?”

“All I’m saying is, we don’t know what happened,” David said.

This was Aaron’s cue, and he resumed his narration. “I carried her upstairs to my office,” he said. “You know how we have those cots in there?” David didn’t, but he nodded anyway. “I laid her down. She was upset, screaming about not wanting to die. Why did I leave her alone? Why did I go to another office to make my calls? Why didn’t I just carry her straight to the clinic?” His whole body shook as if trying to shake away his guilt. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t, I guess. I called Sandy. I knew Mr. Knight would be here today, and I wanted to tell him about the accident in person. After I called Sandy, I tried Madame Leung. When she wasn’t in her office, I called the nurse straightaway.”

David thought, Straightaway? It must have been five minutes at least.

“Then I went to find Madame Leung. I wanted her to stay with…with…the injured girl. I thought she would want a woman with her. Madame Leung was in the control area, speaking over the loudspeaker to the workers down on the floor. It was important to keep them calm, don’t you think?” The young man looked earnestly at David. “But when we got back to the office, the girl was gone.” Aaron’s face went a few shades whiter. David put a hand on the back of Aaron’s neck and pushed his head back down between his knees.

Doug Knight said, “She must have jumped out of your window.”

“No,” Aaron mumbled. “My office isn’t on this side. My office faces the back and looks out over the wall.”

David looked up at the building. There were no windows on this side.

“Well,” Doug said conversationally, “she must have climbed up to the roof, then.”

“Christ almighty, you’re a cold-hearted bastard!” Henry stared at his son, his fists in tight balls at his side. “A woman has died here. Our family has been in business for more than seventy years. We’ve never lost an employee.”

“All I’m saying, Dad, is that she killed herself,” Doug went on calmly. “It’s not your fault.”

The older man, reacting to his son’s soothing tones, gradually regained his composure. Then he turned away, walked back to the body, and knelt beside it.

“He’s old,” Doug said to no one in particular. “I hope he’ll be strong enough to deal with this.” Then Doug went over to his father, put an arm on his shoulder, and spoke softly to him.

Hurriedly the body was removed and the blood washed away. Several times Doug pleaded with his father to go back to the conference room, but the old man couldn’t seem to tear himself away. Since he wouldn’t leave, the rest of them couldn’t either. At one, the bell rang and hundreds of women began filing out of the Assembly Building. Soon the courtyard was a sea of women in pink smocks with pink bandanas. Many of them walked arm in arm, chatting and laughing together. A couple of the younger women—perhaps on dares from their compatriots—waved and smiled at the foreigners, then began calling out greetings. David couldn’t understand the words, but he could tell they were friendly from the women’s smiles and infectious giggles. As the women eddied by, David searched for Hulan, but how could he find one face amidst this basically faceless crowd? Once they were past, David glanced over at Aaron Rodgers and was relieved to see that color had come back to his cheeks.

At last Henry turned and headed in the direction of the Administration Building, the others following close behind. Once back in the conference room, Henry still appeared unsteady, but his son moved to sit next to him, which seemed to bring the older man a measure of comfort. David suggested that they break for the day, but Henry dismissed the idea, saying, “There’s nothing more we can do about that poor woman now. Let’s keep this moving.” Then he turned to Sandy and added, “But I want you to find out who she was. Make sure her family has the means for a proper burial. The Chinese set great store in that, you know. Make a payment to the family. Cash is always good. And if she had children—”

“I’ll take care of it,” Sandy said.

“Okay, then.” Henry turned his gray eyes on David. “I guess I spoke too soon about liabilities.”

“A suicide could hardly be Knight International’s fault,” David said.

“What about the injury that happened on the factory floor?”

“We’ll have to look into it,” David replied. “Have there been other accidents?”

“None,” Henry said.

David looked questioningly over at Sandy.

“This is a first,” Sandy said. “Sure, we have some problems, but nothing that a little peroxide and a Band-Aid won’t cure.”

Again, a week ago David could have demanded answers, but he was back in private practice. The finalization of the deal was the most important thing for his client as well as the Knights, so he didn’t have the luxury of grilling these people. Besides, Keith must have covered this material a hundred times over. So David moved on, re-addressing the due diligence issues that he’d brought up earlier in the day. Did Knight have any outstanding lawsuits? Henry answered no.

“Looking ahead, do you foresee any lawsuits?”

“Maybe from that woman’s family,” Henry replied glumly.

David shook his head. “I think you can take care of that. As you’ve said, you’ll provide for the woman’s family even though it’s a suicide. Your generosity will go a long way in a peasant family. But I’m not talking about what happened today. Right now Tartan is concerned with any possible liabilities it will be facing when it acquires your company. So I want you to think broadly about such things as copyright infringement, manufacturing defects, patents, licensing agreements.”

They spent the next couple of hours going over each issue. Henry let Doug and Sandy do most of the talking, but this made sense. Not long after Henry had decided to move operations to China, he’d had the first of his heart attacks, so the responsibility for building this compound had fallen on Doug and to a lesser extent Sandy. All of which had ultimately worked to the company’s advantage. If Henry hadn’t been home recovering, he never would have stayed put long enough to come up with not only the idea for Sam & His Friends but also the technology. During the months he’d been homebound, he’d brought in all manner of toy and software designers to help him turn his concepts into reality. All of it—even the things that had been invented by others—was owned entirely by Knight International.

Even in a worst-case scenario Knight looked good. They had patents pending on some of the new technologies and materials used in the Sam & His Friends line. The Knights insisted that there were no manufacturing defects, and they reiterated what David already knew: Knight International had a fair record with labor. Still, part of the reason Knight had come to China was to avoid dealing with the American unions.

“Our workers here do have a union of sorts,” Sandy explained. “The elected union leader also serves as on-site party secretary. We’ve found Madame Leung very easy to deal with. Actually, we couldn’t get along without her. She’s like a den mother, troubleshooter, and conflict resolver rolled into one. Our workers go to her when they have problems at work, but also when they have problems at home. Since most of our workers live right here in dormitories, you can imagine how conflicts might come up. But,” he added, “a lot of the women get lonely for their husbands or children. We’ve had a few cases of women having affairs with the men here.”

“I haven’t seen many men,” David noted. “In fact, I haven’t seen many people at all except during the lunch break.”

“We try to keep the men and women separated from each other as much as possible,” Sandy said. “All of the men are locals. They crate the packaged products for shipping, load the trucks, deal with refuse. We’ve trained them how to use forklifts and…” Sandy smiled sheepishly. “Well, you get the idea. The point is, they’re almost always in the warehouse or the shipping building. Their lunch break is at a different time than the women’s. The only time they see each other is at the end of the day when the men go home and the women go to their dorms.”

“All that to discourage fraternizing?”

“Madame Leung thinks it’s best,” Sandy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about how inhibited the Chinese are about sex. They’re especially puritanical about extracurricular sex. I’m talking about serious penalties for screwing around. Did you know there was a time you could get sent to a labor camp for having an affair with a married woman? Things have always been a bit looser in the countryside, where the government isn’t watching as closely and the attitudes are, shall we say, cruder. Nevertheless, we employ married women and single girls. Most of them are far from home and lonely. While there are still plenty of ways for the men and women to get together—this is a big place and all it takes is a few minutes—we’re trying to do what we can to prevent broken hearts and unwanted pregnancies.”

David moved on to licensing agreements. Like Sam & His Friends, several of the older products had also originated from television or movie characters, but those licenses had been locked into place years ago. In fact, Knight’s relationship with the various studios had only improved with the wild success of Sam & His Friends. David finally had to ask Henry the question that had been gnawing at him since he’d read about the sale on the day of Keith’s funeral. “With so much opportunity out there, plus the way you love your company, why are you selling?”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m a dying man,” Henry said.

David regarded the older man. He still looked shaken from seeing the dead woman, but death seemed very far from him personally. Henry looked strong and fit for a man his age. “Ill or not, how can you give up something you so obviously love?”

“It’s a new world. I’ve lived my life in the toy business. Sure, I’ve made my forays into Hollywood, and they’ve been very profitable. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my years in New York and L.A., going to lunches in fancy restaurants or commissaries, chatting up studio marketing and licensing people.”

“You could let someone else do those things,” David said.

“But it’s my company. I like to be in control. Oh, not everything. I’ve never cared much for everyday operations.”

“He means,” Sandy clarified, “that he likes to sit on the floor and invent toys. He likes to work with the test groups—kids and moms. He likes to go to the toy fairs and put our products into the hands of the people who’ll sell them. There isn’t another company where the inventor is so closely linked with the end user. It’s what’s made Knight so successful.”

“Then why sell?” David pressed.

“Because we’ve come to a crossroads,” Henry said. “I just don’t like the outside demands on my time.” He got an almost dreamy look on his face. “I’ll travel, maybe find an island or someplace around here, set up a little workshop out back…”

As he spoke, David understood why this was such a great deal for Tartan. Knight International had done extremely well over the years and Henry was a genius, but his iron-fisted control over the company and its practically nonexistent board of directors had undoubtedly kept Knight from expanding. With a host of managers, lawyers, accountants, and designers set to come in, and with Henry’s commitment to bringing his products “home,” the Knight brands under the Tartan umbrella could skyrocket.

And the conglomerate wasn’t just buying a company with great potential, but would also continue to avail itself of the services and connections of Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout, in particular Miles Stout. Henry Knight had made his connections in Hollywood, but for years he’d been isolated in New Jersey and more recently isolated because of ill health. Tartan was in L.A., as was Phillips, MacKenzie. Miles, David recalled, had spent a lot of the firm’s money on entertaining Hollywood bigwigs over the years. By getting his children into the right private schools, he’d developed personal relationships with studio heads. He’d coached Michael Ovitz’s kid for a soccer season. His wife had set up play dates with the Roth kids. He’d helped Lew Wasserman get his grandchild into Brentwood Elementary. In turn, these media giants had invited Miles to be a fourth for tennis, to play a round of golf at the Riviera Country Club, to give money to their favorite charities, to go to screenings and premieres, and to join their Oscar-night parties. David could remember those evenings in years past when Miles and Mary Elizabeth had been whooshed away in a limousine to go party-hopping from the MCA Universal tent to the Paramount soirée to the Sony bash. Those studio relationships, while not part of the building blocks of the contracts, did act as the mortar. Add to this a final bonus: an independent contractor—in this case an eccentric toy inventor—coming up with new products on his island hideaway.

So, if the information Sandy Newheart and the Knights were giving him was correct—and David would have to check that it was—then he felt confident that this aspect of the deal would be all right. That still left what Tartan and Knight, as public companies, needed to disclose to the government: the financial details on past performance as well as what the consolidated company would look like, what the shareholders would get and if it was fair, documents dealing with antitrust issues since the original companies were both in the toy business, and affidavits stating that their officers and directors were in compliance with their respective companies’ codes of conduct—meaning no instances of bribery, undisclosed transactions with vendors, or violations of the laws of the countries in which they operated.

“I see that Keith and your people have already provided the SEC with what it needs to know,” David said, flipping through the papers.

“As you say, we’re square on all of that,” Henry said. “You’ve got the evidence right in front of you.”