That Spring in Paris

by Ciji Ware

  “Mom would consider it a betrayal of her darling boy,” replied Jamie, “and it would, actually, be just that. They’d have to choose between getting their investment back versus allowing Brad to maintain control of the company he’s running.”

  “And will ruin, before he’s through,” Juliet said. Then she groaned as the elevator doors opened, “Oh, lord... this is all just horrible. So many things could go sidewise in situations like these. I’ll never get back to Paris at this rate.”

  “Yes you will,” Jamie insisted, his eyes suddenly brighter.

  The pair entered the empty elevator and Jamie pushed the button for the floor where the Thayer family siblings had their collection of rooms.

  “How so?”

  “I just thought of something!” he said. “What if some of us key employees actually did let a few things be known quietly to several select, trustworthy members of the board of directors without Brad ever hearing of it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that, because of mean old Brad and his lousy leadership style, key people like us want to leave our jobs. The ‘vulture’ capitalists waiting in the wings would hear about it from dissident board members and that might conceivably prompt them to move faster to buy the company. Mom and Dad wouldn’t really have a choice except to sell to the new guys, or lose the hotel... and Brad would get a big payday, too, though his ego would be trashed. No harm, no foul.”

  As the elevator came to a stop at their floor, Juliet clapped her hands. “Brilliant! Or at least it’s an idea definitely worth thinking about.”

  Jamie nodded, putting his hand in the door to prevent it from closing on them.

  “Because, if there were a takeover,” he said, “you and I could then make a claim of ‘management change of control’—which the fine print of our contract says is a reason for our stock deal and our options to accelerate in terms of when we could sell, and we would be able to unload them faster.”

  “This is true?” she said, surprised.

  “Yep. I’ve been studying each paragraph of the contract I signed when the company was founded—without reading it carefully five years ago, may I add.”

  “Same here, I’m embarrassed to admit.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said with a short laugh, “you and I are both key players in some regard—since we’ve been around since the beginning—but we’re definitely chopped liver, given our relatively small number of shares compared to Brad’s.”

  She held up her arms, hands crossed at the wrist as if they were roped together. “Well, all I have to say is—please, God, let someone buy GatherGames and liberate us from this bondage. I long for the day when I don’t feel like an arms dealer!”

  Jamie laughed at her feeble joke. They both realized, now, that they had to find a way to set free at least four of the five Thayers of Nob Hill.

  * * *

  Juliet ignored Brad’s edict and spent the first hour in San Francisco unpacking. As expected, she was summoned by text to show up at Brad’s office “a.s.a.p.” She’d been relieved to learn that Jed had been dispatched to China on a mission to secure a better deal for the printing of their new packaging materials—and thus she’d been spared that confrontation.

  As she walked down the corridor in the former warehouse south of Market Street, she thought about the day, six months earlier, when Brad had offered her Avery’s job as graphic design director, along with the title of “Chief Branding Officer.”

  Surprised and undeniably flattered by her taskmaster brother’s seeming confidence in her ability, a small voice in her head had warned that Brad never did anything that wasn’t first and foremost in his own interest.

  “Branding Officer, no less,” Avery had noted dryly, having predicted that Brad would recruit his sister to replace her. “Behold the ‘Golden Coffin’ of permanent servitude.”

  The observation had proven all too accurate after Juliet asked Brad for time to think about the promotion.

  “Yes or no? I don’t have time to screw around on this.”

  “I need a day,” she’d insisted. “I’m driving Avery to the airport.”

  “So Avery’s off to Paris to paint portraits? Really?” he mocked. “She’ll be back with her tail between her legs in less than a year. And by the way,” he added with a nasty edge to his voice, “I’d had it, big time, with that bitch’s pretentious crap about the so-called creative credo. We’re creating stuff right here!”

  “Yeah...” Juliet had retorted, incensed by his derogatory language, “we’re replicating life in a tribal war zone and teaching juveniles to think killing is fun.”

  “Hey, it pays your bills and then some, little sis,” he’d shot back. “And like Dad said, working for me, you can still dabble in art and be practical at the same time. Create those little watercolors of yours on the weekends, why don’t you?”

  “What weekends?” she’d countered, annoyed by the disdain Brad so clearly had for anyone who preferred art above commerce. “I’ve worked every single Saturday since I came here.”

  “Then be a Sunday painter!”

  “Very funny.”

  “So, what’s your answer about the job?” he’d insisted that watershed day. “ I got a meeting in five minutes about the IPO!” She noticed the sweat circles beneath the short sleeves of his ubiquitous black T-shirt that stretched tightly across his chest to emphasize his cyclist’s six-pack abs. Making a public offering by registering a formerly private company on the New York Stock Exchange was tricky business, Juliet knew, and clearly Brad, in a word, was sweating it. Employee stability was a key factor, and Avery’s departure had been a blow.

  “My answer is ‘maybe,’” Juliet had said, wanting to heighten his stress level as he had hers. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  Juliet remembered the scowl that had spread across her brother’s face. “I don’t have to offer you this promotion, you know. I’m only doing it out of family loyalty.”

  “You’re doing it because Avery Evans quit and you know I’m tempted to do the same thing.” She’d gestured vaguely toward the jumble of cubicles beyond the walls of Brad’s office that were filled with twenty-somethings who had a habit of sleeping under their desks when work was intense. “You work people this hard, Brad, you eventually break them,” she’d warned him. “And besides, commercial graphic design and branding have nothing to do with why I went to art school.”

  “Well, I don’t see many folks lining up to buy your landscapes, or Avery’s portraits, either. At least your family was willing to bail you out after graduation.”

  “You didn’t ‘bail’ me out! I put my work on hold because you and Dad begged Avery and me to help when you started this electronic sweatshop. Just like you arm-twisted Jamie out of that video editing job at Pixar Studios.”

  “Another great artiste gone to the Dark Side.”

  Brad could be withering when anyone wouldn’t do his bidding. During this remembered conversation half a year ago, Juliet had honestly felt relieved she had no sharp weapon close at hand during their so-called job interview.

  “Jamie has given you nothing but his professional best,” Juliet had hotly defended their younger sibling, “and Avery and I’ve produced a great look for this company, brother mine. Check your latest sales reports.”

  “’Great,’ you say?” Brad said, arching an eyebrow at an angle he knew was guaranteed to get a rise out of her. “Sales tripled only because I deep-sixed everything but the Sky Slaughter series. Let’s just call what you two did around here ‘okay’... okay?”

  Juliet had summoned every ounce of energy not to blow her stack. In the calmest tones she could muster she’d replied, “You know, don’t you, that insulting your baby sister like you have my entire life is not going to get you what you want this time, Mr. Bully Boy? Do you need me as design director, or not?”

  Brad had seemed to understand, that day, that he was skating on thin ice and raised his hands in pseudo surrender.

  “Okay, okay! I
’m just saying that maybe a little gratitude is in order here. Thanks to Slaughter sales quadrupling what we made the previous year, Jamie bought a sailboat and you were able to pay off your school debt, remember? Going forward, you’ll be making a lot more money than most women in tech, believe me!”

  “Oh, so I’m a gender charity case, am I?”

  Trust Brad to allude to the debt she’d racked up going to Art Center of Pasadena instead of to a ‘real school’ like Stanford, as her mother had argued fiercely. But Juliet had held firm and offered to pay her parents back as an enticement to let her have her way—and she’d kept her word. That day in Brad’s office, right after Avery had bailed, Juliet nearly walked out in her wake. Looking back, if it hadn’t been for her parents’ perilous financial situation, she would have.

  “C’mon, lighten up!” her brother had cajoled as their bickering wound down. “I’m just saying you and Jamie—and Avery Evans, for that matter—have had a very good ride here the last couple of years, considering we started in the hotel’s garage. So, okay... do we have a deal?”

  Juliet had been proud of her salary demands to Brad that day.

  “Add an additional fifty thousand dollars to my salary as design director and Chief Branding Officer, along with seventy-five thousand additional stock options that vest in two years—and I might consider it,” she’d said.

  “Okay. The salary bump, plus sixty-five thousand options that vest in four years.” Brad had countered. “That’s my final offer.”

  “Two years vesting and the salary bump, or no go,” she’d insisted, “and I’ll take the sixty-five thousand stock options.”

  Her brother had hesitated a few seconds before reluctantly agreeing to her terms. “But you have to swear not to tell anyone I gave in to this extortion.”

  She could see that he, too, was fighting hard to keep his cool. Theirs was just another of his typical, bare-knuckles negotiations about money— and they’d played the game to a draw.

  “I’ll keep our deal confidential,” she’d promised.

  “Well, okay then,” he’d confirmed, churlish in his acceptance. “I’ll give you sixty-five thousand additional stock options out of mine.”

  “That vest in two years,” she’d repeated firmly. She put on her no-hard-feelings smile. “I’ll send you an email to confirm the details of this discussion. And thanks.”

  “You’re not welcome.”

  “Hey, bro... with a million-plus shares in your own account, you’ll hardly noticed the difference,” she’d replied and exited his office before he could renege on their deal.

  Given the vagaries of start-ups, fickle investors, and Wall Street’s demands, she knew full well that the company could suddenly go sideways and the extra options to buy more stock at a cheaper price wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on.

  The subsequent angry exchanges over the packaging for the Sky Slaughter video series had convinced her in the months that followed that her brother had promoted her last spring not because he had faith in her abilities, but merely to deter her from deserting him at a crucial moment before the public stock offering went into effect.

  And here they were at another such moment. GatherGames was traded on the stock exchange, now, and Juliet was under even fewer illusions about her job security, especially hearing from Jamie how the “vulture capitalists” were circling for a possible take-over bid. Even the Founder could get the boot if the VCs or the company’s directors ordered it. It was “The Dot-Com Way,” and far from the artistic life she’d ever imagined for herself.

  She inhaled a deep breath and paused a moment outside Brad’s door to gather her wits—and her courage. Everything Jamie had related earlier on the ride in from the airport was spinning around in her brain, along with the knowledge of her eldest brother’s despicable behavior toward Avery in his private suite at the Bay View. Her thoughts drifted to Finn’s honorable self-restraint her last night in Paris when both of them wanted nothing more that to fall into his double bed. Forcing such distracting reminiscences from her mind, she tapped Brad’s door. A voice on the other side growled, “Come in!”

  “Lafayette, I am here,” Juliet announced, hoping to set a jovial tone for their upcoming conversation.

  Brad glanced up and saw who was at the threshold. His thin lips suddenly bloomed into a broad smile that looked as if it belonged to someone else. “Well, hello there!”

  Trim in his uniform black T-shirt and equally dark chinos, he swiftly rose from his glass-topped desk that supported a large-screen Mac computer but was bare of anything else. “Welcome home! I’m so glad to hear that poor Avery’s on the mend.”

  He bolted from behind the desk to give her a peck on the cheek, adding, “I’ve really missed you—and all the good work you’ve done for this place.”

  Perhaps, she thought, as he gestured for her to sit in a chair opposite his desk, she was hallucinating—or—her brother’s looming fear of getting the boot as CEO had waved a magic wand and turned Bradshaw Thayer IV into “Mr. Nice” overnight.

  How long that would last was anybody’s guess.

  CHAPTER 17

  Avery stared at the plaque affixed to the door reading DR. SONJA ABEL, MD – Psychiatry. The office was down a long corridor in a wing of the American Hospital that she’d never seen before, and Finn could tell she dreaded walking over the threshold.

  “I’m sorry I’ve dragged you all the way here,” she said, her voice tight. “But I really don’t think I need to do this, Finn. Why can’t I just paint my way out of this? You know,” she added with a weak smile, “my own special brand of occupational therapy.”

  “Well, one reason is,” Finn said, turning the doorknob, “you can’t even bear to pick up a brush because you’ve told me all you see are pools of blood on your blank canvas.” He pushed open the door. “Believe me, I know something of what you’re going through and I can only say that Dr. A has helped me get past some of this stuff.”

  Once Finn had steeled himself enough to share with Avery, as he had with Juliet, some of his own post-traumatic problems, he’d managed to get her this far. Now, he was determined to deliver her to Dr. Abel as he’d promised Juliet. After that, it was up to Avery herself to commit to treatment—or not.

  “C’mon, kiddo. We two are going to lick this thing,” he said with an assurance he didn’t feel. He addressed the receptionist. “This is Avery Evans. She’s here to see Dr. Abel at two o’clock.”

  * * *

  Brad’s attempts to display ingratiating behavior to his staff and younger siblings endured less than a week. While Juliet had been in Europe, a majority of board members insisted the CEO attend anger management sessions. Despite this edict, the more that the news was filled with the specifics of how the home-grown jihadists in San Bernardino planned and executed the assault on local government employees, the more insistent were Brad’s calls for “action” drawings depicting video characters getting blown up by drones.

  “The guy acts as if home-grown terrorist attacks are a good marketing ploy for his damn war game products!” Juliet complained bitterly to Jamie prior to a scheduled design discussion a few days after returning home. At Brad’s direction, her staff had produced illustrations depicting roadside explosions in front of a small desert village with bodies of ISIS fighters tossed in the air and wounded on the ground, with a few camels killed for good measure.

  During the meeting itself, Brad pointed to drawings posted on one wall in the conference room. “Bor-ing!” he declared. “That stinks! So does that... and that! What’s wrong with you people? We need action! ISIS body parts flying through the air,” he fumed in front of the art department’s entire staff. “SS 2 is due to launch and ship in two months’ time,” he said, referring to Sky Slaughter – Death in the Desert, the next video war game in the proposed series “and just look at the insipid dreck you’re giving me!” He glared at his sister, wagging a finger a foot from her face. “Where are the incoming Hellfires? A U.S. drone overhea
d? The videos show blood and guts,” he shouted, slamming his fist on the conference room table, “and the images on the box have to be the same! That’s what sells this product, you idiots! If you don’t produce more of what I asked for on the packaging, you’re nuked, got it?”

  And then he stomped out of the room, leaving his audience to stare at his retreating back in stunned silence.

  The night before Jamie’s departure to Paris, Brad abruptly organized a family dinner held in a small, private dining room at the Bay View. After the waiters served coffee and dessert and retreated into a catering kitchen nearby, the five Thayers were left sitting uneasily around the linen-clad table. The room’s pale pink silk draperies kissed the rich, off-white carpeting and complimented the ashes-of-roses hue of the brocaded walls. Opulent Christmas decorations of genuine pine garlands and golden pears, entwined with forest green and gold French ribbons, graced the top of large, gilt-framed mirrors that hung at both ends of the intimate space reserved for special family occasions.

  Brad tapped a silver knife on his wine glass, asking for everyone’s attention.

  “I know you’ve all heard scuttlebutt, but I called you here to tell you in person that, yes, I spoke again with the FBI and officially refused to cooperate or reveal anything about our encryption system. I also have private intelligence that certain VCs on our board are looking for a buyer—or buyers—to mount a hostile takeover bid against us. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I’m organizing a full-fledged battle to fight it—and I expect all of you to help in this effort.”

  He glanced around the table, but Juliet, like the rest of her family, was staring at generous servings of chocolate lava cake, its hot, glistening cocoa filling oozing across gold-rimmed porcelain plates.

  In the deafening silence Brad declared, “C’mon! Sales are booming. We’ve all worked too hard to let them take this away from us!”

  “Us?” scoffed Jamie, looking up. “You mean, you. In my view, selling GatherGames when everything is on a high would make Dad and Mom whole, as far as the Bay View’s equity loan is concerned. Juliet and I could cash in our stock much earlier and make individual career plans, which we both want to do.”