The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  “Sit down, Liz. I want to talk with you.”

  She sat down a bit apprehensively, as if she suspected I had called her in to notify her she was being terminated.

  “You haven’t been with us long,” I said to her. “But you’ve become a valued person for us. You’ve got some rough edges, though. I’m going to ask you to avoid calling people ‘dear’ and ‘darling.’ You understand why?”

  She nodded. I sensed that she was holding back tears.

  “Well … I’ve had some new business cards engraved for you. Have a look.”

  I handed her a card from a box of them on my desk. It read:

  ELIZABETH T. MCALLISTER

  VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS

  GAZELLE, INCORPORATED

  I had expected she would be demonstrative. I couldn’t have guessed how much.

  She began to cry. She dropped on her knees before me and seized my legs in her arms.

  “Oh, Len! Len! I love you, Len! I simply love you!”

  Leaving me to wonder exactly what that meant.

  * * *

  While Liz was in Houston I received two large packages from Bai Fuyuan in Shenzhen. One contained finely woven wool sweaters in a variety of styles and colors. The other contained knockoffs of some of the most popular Cheeks styles of panties, bras, garter belts, and teddies, most of them in black.

  I also received a letter from Bai—Federal Express.

  Dear Mr. Cooper,

  I have dispatched to you two cartons containing goods for your examination and, I hope, approval. They are examples of the sort of thing we might be able to work in partnership to manufacture and sell, both in China and in the United States.

  I should very much welcome the opportunity to sit down with you to discuss this merchandise and explore the terms on which mutually profitable and mutually agreeable arrangements might be made.

  I could come to the States, but I am wondering if we might not better meet in Hong Kong, where your Mr. Chan can join in our conversations.

  I would hope, too, that your father might see fit to come.

  Most sincerely,

  Bai Fuyuan

  I ordered the Lear and flew to Florida, taking the packages and the letter with me.

  “It’s good-enough merchandise,” my father said.

  We sat on the lanai—a word my father considered affected and so despised. Just outside its screens was a small swimming pool, where my father and Therèse both swam regularly. Beyond that was a canal, where yachts passed by in an almost regular procession. The pool and yard were surrounded by a strong chain-link fence that was anchored to the ground by steel stakes every foot or eighteen inches of its length. The fence was there because alligators had been known to lunge out of the canal and seize small dogs or cats, or to take up residence in swimming pools.

  “He suggests you meet him in Hong Kong with Charlie Han. What I’d do is write him back and tell him to send Charlie the same samples he’s sent us. Charlie he knows sewn merchandise. This stuff may have defects we don’t see.”

  “Notice the labels,” I said. Each item had a sewn-in label—MADE IN HONG KONG. “None of this stuff ever saw Hong Kong. It was made in China.”

  “And he wants to put in Cheeks labels?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well … if the merchandise is of high quality—and I mean we inspect every shipment, in China or on its way here—I suppose it could be a deal. If we have things manufactured for us in Hong Kong, why not in China? It’s a matter of politics.”

  “It’s a matter of quality,” I said.

  “All right. And quality. And we have to work out a way to be sure Ariana Middleton doesn’t find out what we are doing. I rather imagine we can trust Roger not to tell her.”

  “This is going to mean another trip to Hong Kong,” I said.

  “You could be doing worse. You could be making business trips to Cleveland.”

  “Somebody is going to have to keep an eye on Houston,” I said.

  “You won’t be going to Hong Kong for a while. Let’s try to acquire Sphere before you leave. Or drop it.”

  52

  Zhang Feng had said in Guangzhou that Tom Malloy would resist any effort to acquire Sphere that did not involve an absolute commitment that the company would continue to make and sell the Sphere computer. We had not told him that this was no part of our plans. Liz had reported that he would rear back and fight if he suspected we were going to scrap his wonderful machine.

  As I had told him, we could do what we wanted whether he liked it or not. Sphere, Incorporated, and Malloy personally, owed a lot of money. We could buy up the paper and call the loans. Much of the debt had been secured by pledging Sphere stock as security, and by calling the loans we could acquire the pledged stock that secured them. We would own controlling interest and could elect our own directors, who would in turn elect our officers. We could simply force Malloy out.

  Maybe it was a brutal way of doing business, but it was not uncommon.

  Liz also cautioned us, though, that if Malloy left, his people would very likely leave, too.

  “Something you must understand, Len,” she said to me. “The chief asset of a technology-based company is its people. The chief asset is brains. Otherwise, you’ve got a lot of desks and chairs, plus some bins of components, and probably a small inventory of machines. Absent the people, the brains, the company is nothing. It’s nothing like a smokestack industry, where the mill, the machinery, the trucks, and so on loom large on the balance sheet.”

  “The laser printer…?”

  “Great today. Obsolete tomorrow. I might put it another way—a big asset of a technology company is its future. They have got to have a vision of the future and keep working toward it.” She grinned. “Some speech, huh, sweetie?”

  I nodded. “Okay. What about the value of the name?”

  “I’m not sure there will be any name without Malloy. And what if he travels around bad-mouthing the new management of his company? He could do that.”

  “That would hurt?”

  “You wouldn’t find any benefit in it.”

  I began to wonder if we should not back away from Sphere. The only one we’d be disappointing would be Zhang.

  Plus Liz. I had to think of her. What good was a vice president of technology operations if we backed away from going into technology? And she was being honest. She could have put a more positive spin on the idea of acquiring Sphere, to save the new position she cherished so much.

  There was no point in asking my father what to do. He knew nothing about technology.

  I decided I had to have a second opinion. With the help of Hugh Scheck I identified a reputable professor at MIT and went up to meet with him.

  His name was William Cable, professor of applied mathematics. We met at Boston’s Logan Airport, where I arrived in the company Lear. He was a tall man, I judged about forty, with a pink face and a pink pate, which his sandy hair was rapidly abandoning. He wore round, gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a never-failing little smile.

  I had arranged for a limo to take us wherever we wanted to go. I had supposed his office, but he suggested a seafood restaurant on the harbor. The driver knew where it was. In the car we exchanged pleasantries for a minute or so, and then I moved directly to the point. “Professor, I have come up from New York to pick your brains. I don’t expect you to allow me to do that free of charge. Would a fee of one thousand dollars for this first meeting be satisfactory?”

  He was all restraint. I think he would gladly have accepted a hundred, but he concealed his surprise perfectly. He nodded. “Yes. That will be entirely satisfactory.”

  I pulled from my jacket pocket an inexpensive but real leather black billfold. “For the time being, we can deal in cash,” I said. There were ten one-hundred-dollar bills in the billfold.

  He looked at them but didn’t count them. He put the billfold in his own pocket and folded his hands in his lap. I knew he wouldn’t report the thousand as t
axable income. I’d have been disappointed in him if I learned he had.

  “There is one more thing,” I told him. “I should like for our conversation to be entirely confidential, including the fact that we met at all. You will see from our conversation that I am not involved in anything illegal or unethical. You will also see why I want it to be confidential.”

  He nodded and said nothing.

  “My father, over the past forty years, has built a multibillion dollar corporation. Gazelle, Incorporated owns and operates the Cheeks stores and its catalog sales. Have you heard of us?”

  His smile broadened. “I know about Cheeks shops. I’ve been your customer a few times over the years.”

  “Good. We are in the fortunate position of holding a lot of cash, which we need to invest. We also need to diversify. It has been suggested to us that we acquire Sphere, Incorporated, of Houston. I understand they make a fine laser printer but that their computer has become obsolete. What can you tell me?”

  “Have you ever seen a Sphere computer?” he asked me.

  “No, I never have. People talk about them in glowing terms, but I have never seen one.”

  “I’ll show you one, later. A great many experiments were conducted in the early years of the technology. Many of the ideas weren’t bad. But they failed for a variety of reasons, often for want of adequate financing. I could recite a litany of names: intelligently designed computers that failed.”

  “Sphere?” I asked.

  “Well … looking at them from the outside, a computer is a computer: a beige box with a screen and keyboard. The Sphere was not sphere-shaped exactly, but it was rounded. It was not beige but made mostly of dark green transparent plastic, and you could see the parts inside: the circuit boards, transformer, rectifier, and so on. You could see the disks spinning. You could see the read heads moving across the disks. Of course, that was the only visible movement in the computer. For the rest it was just invisible electrons speeding over the circuits and through the components. I don’t know. Somehow it was exciting to think you could see the thing working.

  “It’s what we can’t see that is really elegant,” he said. “The circuit design. The redundancies.”

  “Redundancies?”

  “If something fails, usually there is something behind it, ready to pick up the work and prevent a crash and loss of data.”

  “Why did the company fail? Why is the Sphere obsolete?”

  The professor looked out across the harbor, at white gulls soaring on the wind, at fishing boats going and coming, trailed by hopeful birds.

  “Two reasons,” he said. “Lack of capital and Tom Malloy’s stubbornness.”

  “If we acquire the company,” I said, “our plan is to use its expertise to assemble microprocessors, chiefly using components we’ll import from China.”

  “Where you can get them cheap, but—you hope—with acceptable quality.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’ll put the Sphere name on the microprocessors,” he added. “Not a bad idea. The wave of the future. The possibilities are endless. You get up in the morning in a bedroom at seventy-two degrees, bathe, dress, and go downstairs. The microprocessor senses that you have left the room and lets the temperature in the bedroom drift down to sixty. You go down to a kitchen where overnight the temperature has been as low as fifty, but when you walk in it is seventy-two. That’s based on time, not that you’ve come into the room. You glance at the refrigerator door and see a printed inventory of what’s inside. You decide to have eggs, and when you take the two out, the inventory goes down from eight to six. Your cooktop knows how you like your eggs and gives the right amount of heat for the right amount of time. When you are about ready to leave, you press a button that starts your car, to let it warm up. A sensor in the garage detects that an engine is running and opens the garage door to let out exhaust fumes. And so on. And that’s just your house.”

  “Tom Malloy wants to build Sphere Four,” I said.

  Professor Cable nodded. “First he’ll have to make his peace with Microsoft—which won’t be all that difficult to do; the antitrust division would never allow Microsoft to refuse to license to him. But he’ll have to give up his old dream of a proprietary operating system, no matter how good it might be. The investment in cash may not be formidable for you. But the commitment to marketing may be. You are experts at that. But selling computers will be a very different thing from selling ladies’ undergarments.”

  “Have you ever heard of Elizabeth McAllister?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, you may. She is going to be our vice president, technology operations, and she may be calling on you. If she does, you have never talked to me. She may ask you to agree to a permanent consulting relationship with us, in which case it will really be me asking. Here is my card with my home phone number. If you need to talk with me for any reason, call that number. Also, here is my number in Hong Kong. We may be doing some more business.”

  “You want me to second-guess your young woman,” he said. He was no simple academic but was a shrewd and perceptive man. I wished I could have hired him but knew I couldn’t.

  “This meeting has been very helpful to me, Professor. What you have told me confirms what my Chinese associate in Guangzhou says and what Liz McAllister says. Unless it’s all just conventional wisdom, I think I’m hearing three knowledgeable people agreeing on basic points.”

  Now I called my father—when I could tell him I had three independent analyses that agreed.

  “They sing from the same sheet, hey? Maybe that’s because they’re all members of the same fraternity.”

  * * *

  I flew to Houston, this time leaving Vicky behind. She’d had enough of Houston and quite enough of Tom and Becky Malloy.

  Liz did go with me, though, on the Lear. I had decided that her declaration that she loved me was as innocent as most of the things she said that were subject to misinterpretation. She said “I love you” almost—not quite—as casually as I might say “Good morning.” We sipped champagne on the flight and talked business. We could see nothing from the windows but the tops of clouds.

  After we had shared a bottle of champagne, her “I love you” took on a slightly different meaning than I had given it. “Anytime, Len,” she whispered. “I don’t expect you to want it … but anytime. No obligation attached.”

  “I’ll remember that, Liz. But I won’t be asking you.”

  I don’t know what Malloy had in mind; maybe to overwhelm us with Texas hospitality. In any case, we found that he had our schedule worked out for us for our first evening in Houston. First we would take a dip in his pool, then eat some barbecue on his patio, and finally we were going to a rodeo.

  “I bet you’ve never seen a rodeo,” he said with enthusiasm so apparently genuine it was hard to believe it was not. “The best one is in Vegas, these days: the National Finals. Used to be Forth Worth. But you’re gonna love this one.”

  But first we went swimming. Not having anticipated this at all, neither Liz nor I had brought swimsuits. No matter. The Malloys kept a supply on hand, all sizes.

  Wearing a bikini was not good judgment for Liz, but that was all they had for women, not even one of our Cheeks oranges. She came out to the pool in as modest a bikini as they had. It didn’t cover enough—which the Malloys pretended, at least, not to notice. She was a sport, though—a game young woman I had to admire. She swam strongly. And she could dive. Even when she had to pull up the bikini top after a graceful dive knocked it down around her belly, she was not conspicuously daunted.

  We hadn’t brought clothes suitable for a rodeo either. But the Malloys entertained people from all over the world and took them to rodeos. As with swimsuits, they had an assortment of clothes for rodeos. For me it was a pair of tight blue jeans, a lemon-yellow shirt with pearl buttons, a cowboy hat, and boots. For poor Liz it was a white satin blouse with a fringed suede vest, a cowboy hat, a pair of Guess jeans, and white lizard Merced
es boots.

  The rodeo was a lot more fun than I had expected. We watched men ride bucking broncos, rope calves, and—what was most interesting to me—ride bulls. Among the women performers one of the most interesting was barrel racing, which required proficiency and courage. The performers were well known to the crowd, just as fans know baseball and football players, and they were judged by their skill and endurance.

  Rodeo events were not for the faint of heart. Liz was sickened when she saw one bull rider thrown and trampled, suffering a broken arm before the rodeo clowns could distract the bull. The stench of manure bothered her sinuses. She confessed to me later that she found the crowd more interesting than the performers.

  When we returned to the Hyatt Regency, she and I sat down for a final drink in the lobby bar.

  “You deserve a bonus for tonight, Liz,” I said to her.

  “I can’t remember ever being so goddamned humiliated,” she said quietly.

  “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” I said. “You’d have got stares if you had done anything differently.”

  When we went upstairs, we hugged and kissed lightly at her door. She smiled, opened with her key, and disappeared inside.

  * * *

  The next morning we sat down with Tom Malloy in his office. I opened the discussion by telling him what exactly Gazelle, Inc. planned for Sphere.

  “We’ve been assured by some very capable people that microprocessors are going to become more and more important and that there will be a growing market for them. Sphere, Incorporated is very well situated to take advantage of that opportunity. You have expertise and a name. Sphere could become a major factor in microprocessing.”

  “We already make microprocessors,” said Malloy. “What do you think makes the Sphere computer work?”

  “I understand. It’s another reason why your company is so well positioned to move in the areas my company is interested in.”

  “Components from China,” said Malloy. “Do you want to name your Chinese partner?”

  “We have no partnership with anyone in China. If we can move on this deal, our supplier will be Zhang Feng.”