Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  “You have cancer, maybe?”

  I half smiled, said quietly, “I’m in good health, Gordy, but thanks for asking.”

  “Then what the hell’s your problem?”

  I was silent while I pondered the best way to answer that wouldn’t get me fired.

  “Four years in a row you’re Club 101. Then you’re what? You’re Festino.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t close.”

  “That’s not the case, Gordy. I was Salesman of the Year.”

  “In a great market for plasma and LCDs. Rising tide floats all boats.”

  “My boat floated higher.”

  “Your boat still seaworthy? That’s the question. Look at the last year. See, I’m starting to wonder whether you’re hitting the wall. Happens, sometimes, to sales guys at this point in their careers. Lose that spark. You still have the fire in the belly?”

  It’s called acid reflux, and I was feeling it right now.

  “It’s still there,” I said. “You know, like they say the only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. The more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.”

  “I don’t want to hear any of that Mark Simkins candy-ass crapola here,” he said. Busted. “He’s full of it. The more times you fail, the more accounts you lose.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he means, Gordy,” I began.

  “‘Expect good things to happen,’” he said, doing an unexpectedly good imitation of Mark Simkins, halfway between Mister Rogers and the Reverend Billy Graham, if you can imagine that. “Well, in the real world that we’re living in here, I expect a shitstorm every day, and I come prepared with my rubber poncho and galoshes, you get me? That’s how it works in the real world, not in Candy-Ass Land. Now, you and Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason want to do a side-by-side? See who drives a bigger piece of the number? See who’s up-and-coming and who’s history?”

  History. “Trevor got lucky last year. Hyatt started buying big.”

  “Steadman, listen to me, and listen good: You make your own luck.”

  “Gordy,” I said, “you assigned him the better accounts this past year, okay? You gave Trevor all the good chocolates, and you gave me all the ones with the pink coconut centers.”

  He looked up at me abruptly, those ferret eyes glittering. “And there’s a hole in the ozone layer, and you were switched at birth, and you got any other excuses while you’re at it?” His voice got steadily louder until he was shouting. “Let me tell you something. There is shit about to rain down on us from Tokyo, and we don’t even know what kind of shit it is! And if I promote the wrong guy here, it’s my ass on the line!”

  I wanted to say, Hey, I don’t want this stupid promotion anyway. I just want to go home and have a steak and make love to my wife. But I’d suddenly realized that, damn it, I wanted the job. Maybe I didn’t want the job so much as I wanted to get it. I said, “You won’t be making a mistake.”

  He smiled again, and I was really starting to despise his evil little smiles. “It’s survival of the fittest around here, you know that.”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “But sometimes evolution needs a little help. That’s my job. I promote the fittest. Kill off the weak. And if you get this job, you’ve got to be able to fire people. Lop off the deadwood. Throw the deadweight overboard before it sinks us. Could you fire Festino?”

  “I’d put him on a plan first.” A performance plan was the way the company told you to shape up or beat it. It was usually a fancy way to create a paper trail to fire you, but sometimes you could turn things around.

  “He’s on a plan already, Steadman. He’s deadwood, and you know it. If you get the job, could you fire his ass?”

  “If I had to,” I said.

  “Any member of your team doesn’t perform, you don’t hit your numbers. One weak link, we all suffer. Including me. Remember: There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’”

  I thought: Yeah, well, there’s an “I” in “idiot.” And a “U” in “stupid.”

  But I just nodded thoughtfully.

  “See, Steadman, you can’t be sentimental. You’ve got to be willing to push your grandmother under a bus to make your nums. Allard would. Allard’s got that. So does Gleason. How about you?”

  Sure, I’d push Allard’s grandmother under a bus. I’d push Allard under a bus. Gleason too.

  I said, “My grandmother’s dead.”

  “You know what I’m saying. Motivating people to climb the hill for you isn’t the same as carrying a bag.” Carrying a bag—that was insider-speak for selling.

  “I know.”

  “Do you? You got the fire in the belly? The killer instinct? Can you level-set? Can you incent your team?”

  “I know how to do what it takes,” I said.

  “Let me ask you a question: What kind of car did you drive to work today, Steadman?”

  “Well, it’s a rented—”

  “Just answer the question. What kind of car?”

  “A Geo Metro, but that’s because—”

  “A Geo Metro,” he said. “A Geo. Metro.”

  “Gordy—”

  “I want you to say that aloud, Steadman. Say, ‘I drove a Geo Metro to work today.’”

  “Right.”

  “Say it, Steadman.”

  I exhaled noisily. “I drove a Geo Metro to work today because—”

  “Good. Now say, ‘And Gordy drove a Hummer.’ Got it?”

  “Gordy—”

  “Say it, Steadman.”

  “Gordy drove a Hummer.”

  “Correct. Is anything sinking in? Show me your watch, Steadman.”

  I glanced down at it involuntarily. It was a decent-looking Fossil, about a hundred bucks at the kiosk in the Prudential Mall. I held out my left hand reluctantly.

  “Take a look at mine, Steadman.” He flicked his left wrist, shot his cuff, revealed a huge, gaudy Rolex, gold and diamond-encrusted with three subdials on its face. Tacky-looking, I thought.

  “Nice watch,” I said.

  “Now look at my shoes, Steadman.”

  “I think I get your point, Gordy.”

  I noticed he was looking up at his door. He flashed a thumbs-up at whoever was outside. I turned around to see Trevor walking by. Trevor gave me a smile, and I smiled right back.

  “I’m not sure you do get my point,” he said. “The top sixty percent of the sales force hit their OTEs.” OTE was on-target earnings. “Then there’s the overachievers, okay? The Club. And then there’s the high-octane, the best-in-breed. The meat-eaters. Like Trevor Allard. Like Brett Gleason. Are you a meat-eater, Steadman?”

  “Medium rare,” I said.

  “Do you have the killer instinct?”

  “You have to ask?”

  He stared at me. “Show me,” he said. “Next time I see you, I want to hear about how you closed one of your big accounts.”

  I nodded.

  His voice got quiet, confiding. “See, I’m all about BHAGs, Steadman.” He pronounced it bee-hags. It stood for “big hairy audacious goals.” He’d read an article somewhere that quoted from some book. “You have the ability to come up with a BHAG?”

  “Very big and very hairy,” I said, just to let him know I knew what it meant. “Absolutely.”

  “You playing to play, or playing to win?”

  “To win.”

  “What’s our company motto, Steadman?”

  “‘Invent the Future.’” Who the hell knew what that meant? Like we sales reps were supposed to invent the future? They invented stuff in Tokyo, under the cone of silence, and shipped it over to us to sell.

  He stood up to signal that our little meeting was over, and I stood up too, and he came around the desk and put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re a good guy, Jason. A really good guy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But are you good enough to be on the G Team?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that G stood for Gordy. “You
know I am,” I said.

  “Show me that killer instinct,” he said. “Kill, baby, kill.”

  Melanie gave me a sympathetic smile as I stumbled out of Gordy’s office into the natural sunshine. Well, actually, it was gray and cloudy and starting to rain outside. Much nicer in the Caribbean, but I liked the real world.

  I switched my cell phone back on as I walked back to my office. My cell started making that fast, urgent-sounding alarm sound that indicated I had a message. I checked the calls received and didn’t recognize the number. I called voice mail and heard a message from someone whose voice I didn’t at first recognize. “Yo, Jason,” a gravelly voice said. “I got some information for you on that guy at Lockwood Hotels.”

  Kurt Semko.

  When I got to my office, I called him back.

  10

  “Guy’s name is Brian Borque, right?” Kurt said.

  “Yeah?” I was still feeling kind of numb from being beaten about the head and neck with Gordy’s psychic rubber truncheon.

  “My buddy’s still in corporate security at Lockwood, and he did some poking around for me,” Kurt said. “So dig this: Your man Brian Borque and his fiancée just came back from Aruba, right?”

  “Yeah?” I vaguely remembered him saying he’d be out of the office for a week or ten days. “He said he took his wife to Vienna, Virginia, I remember.”

  “First-class tickets there and back, five-star hotel, all expenses paid, and by guess who?”

  “Who?”

  “Hitachi.”

  I was silent for a few seconds as it dawned on me. “Shit,” I said.

  Kurt’s reply was a slow, husky chuckle. “Maybe that explains the runaround you’ve been getting.”

  “I’ll say. And he’s been jerking me around for a year on this contract. Boy, that pisses me off.”

  “Greedhead, huh?”

  “I should have known. He was stringing me along for Super Bowl tickets and everything else he could get out of me, and all the while I’m just his chick on the side, because he’s in bed with Hitachi. He was never going to buy from us anyway. All right. Thanks, man. At least now I know.”

  “No worries. So…what are you going to do about it?”

  “Close it or kill it, that’s the rule around here. I kill it and move on.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t see why you have to kill it and just walk away. See, there’s something else you may not know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Seems Lockwood Hotels has a policy on not accepting gifts greater than a hundred bucks from a customer or vendor.”

  “They have a policy like that?”

  “That’s why my buddy in corporate security knows about it.”

  “Borque’s in trouble, that what you mean?”

  “Not yet. A file’s been opened. That little trip to Aruba was worth a good five or six thousand bucks. I’d say that’s a violation of company policy, wouldn’t you?”

  “What am I supposed to do with that? Blackmail the guy?”

  “Naw, man. You help him out of his ethical dilemma. Lead him away from temptation. You…torque Borque.” He chuckled again. “Then you’re good to go.”

  “How?” I said.

  I called Brian Borque but got his voice mail and asked him to call me back as soon as he could.

  In the meantime I checked my e-mail and plowed through the usual meaningless company crap, but one subject header caught my eye. I normally ignore all the job listings—after all, I already have a job, and anything in my department I hear about long before they post it. But this one was a notice for a Corporate Security officer that had just been posted today.

  I skimmed it quickly. “Perform various duties such as ensuring the physical security of the facility as well as acting as first response to all emergencies including security, medical, bomb, and fire,” it said. “Qualified candidates must have: High School Diploma or GED, good communication skills, and physical security background.” It went on to say, Prefer: Recent Military experience such as Military Police…Demonstrated leadership and experience with handguns a plus.”

  I remembered what Taminek said at the Outback: “We got to get this guy a job at Entronics.”

  Interesting idea.

  I saved the job listing as new in my e-mail in-box.

  I was getting a little nervous waiting for Brian Borque to call me back, so I got up to stretch my legs. I took a quick walk down the hall to see the Technical Marketing Engineer, Phil Rifkin, to arrange for a demo I had to do in a couple of days.

  Phil Rifkin was your quintessential audiovisual nerd, the Alpha Geek in our division. He was an engineer by training, was deeply familiar with all Entronics LCD projectors and LCD screens and plasma displays. He supported the sales force, answered stupid questions, taught us about the latest products, and arranged for the demos to go out of our repair facility. Sometimes he accompanied a sales rep on a demo if the rep was unsure how to operate one of our products or the customer was really high-profile. He was also our in-house technical guru when customers had questions we couldn’t answer.

  Rifkin worked in what we called the Plasma Lab, even though it wasn’t just for plasmas. It was a long, narrow, windowless room. Its walls were covered with plasma and LCD screens. Its floor was a tangle of power cords and cables and huge spools, which everyone was always tripping over. I knocked on the lab door, and he opened it quickly as if he’d been waiting for me.

  “Oh—hello, Jason.”

  “Hi, Phil. I’m demo’ing the 42MP5 on Friday morning in Revere,” I said.

  “So?” He blinked owlishly.

  Rifkin was a small, thin guy with a huge mop of frizzy brown hair like a Chia pet. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and was partial to white short-sleeve dress shirts with two pockets and big collars. He kept strange hours, tended to work through the night, lived out of the vending machines.

  Phil lacked all social skills. Fortunately he didn’t need them in his job. In his own little world he was vastly powerful, a veritable Czar of all the Plasmas. If he didn’t like you, there might not be a plasma display available to demo for your new customer. Or he might not have it prepped in time. You had to be nice to this guy, and I always was. I’m not an idiot.

  “Can you make sure all the cables make it too?”

  “Component cable or RGB or both?”

  “Just component.”

  “Make sure you warm the unit up for a couple of minutes first.”

  “Of course. Do you think you could preadjust it? To full Rifkin standards?”

  He shrugged, privately pleased but trying not to let on. He turned and I followed him in. He stood before a forty-two-inch mounted on the wall. “I don’t know what the big deal is,” he said. “Leave the sharpness at 50%. I like to jack up the reds and blues and tone down the greens. Contrast at 80%. Brightness at 25%. Tint at 35%.”

  “Got it.”

  “Make sure to show off the zoom feature—the scaling’s far superior to any other plasma out there. Much sharper. What’s this for, anyway?”

  “The dog track in Revere. Wonderland.”

  “Why are you wasting my time on this?”

  “I leave nothing to chance.”

  “But a dog track, Jason? Greyhounds chasing a mechanical bunny rabbit?”

  “Even animal-rights abusers like good monitors, I guess. Thanks. Can you have this prepped and on the truck by eight Friday morning?”

  “Jason, is it true that we’re all gonna have to pack up and move to the City of Hate?”

  “Huh?”

  “Dallas. Isn’t that what’s really going on with the Royal Meister acquisition?”

  I shook my head. “No one’s told me that.”

  “They wouldn’t, would they? No one ever tells people on our level anything. We always find out when it’s too late.”

  Back in my office, my phone was ringing. Lockwood Hotels came up on the caller ID.

  “Hey, Brian,” I said.

  “There he is,�
� Brian said, sounding typically buoyant. “You got the Sox tickets, right?”

  “That’s not why I called,” I said. “I wanted to circle back to you on the proposal.”

  “You know I’m doing what I can,” he said, his voice suddenly flat and clipped. “There’s all kinds of factors in play here that are beyond my control.”

  “I totally understand,” I said. My heart started beating fast. “I know you’re doing everything you can to work the system for me.”

  “You know it,” Brian said.

  “And you know Entronics will price-compete on any reasonable proposal.”

  “No doubt.”

  My heart was thudding loud and my mouth was dry. I grabbed a mostly empty Poland Spring water bottle and drained it. The water was warm. “Of course, some things we can’t match and won’t try,” I went on. “Like the trip you and Martha just took to Aruba.”

  He was silent. So I continued, “Hard to compete with free, you know?”

  He was still silent. I thought for a moment that the phone had gone dead.

  Then Brian said, “FedEx me a fresh set of docs, will you? I’ll have ’em inked and on your desk by close of business Friday.”

  I was stunned. “Hey, thanks, Bri—that’s great. You rock.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said quietly.

  “I appreciate everything you’ve done—”

  “Really,” he said, a note of hostility entering his voice. “I mean it. Don’t mention it.”

  The phone rang again. It was a private caller, which meant it might have been Kate. I picked it up.

  “These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise,” said a voice I immediately recognized.

  “Graham,” I said, “how’s it going?”

  “J-man. Where you been?”

  Graham Runkel was a world-class stoner who lived in Central Square, Cambridge, in a first-floor apartment that smelled like bong water. We went to high school together in Worcester, and when I was younger and irresponsible, I’d from time to time buy a nickel bag of marijuana from him. Less and less often in recent years, though, but once in a while I’d stop by his apartment—the Den of Iniquity, he called it—and smoke a joint with him. Kate disapproved, of course, thought it was juvenile behavior, which it was. Ganja could do things to your brain. A couple of years ago, Graham had canceled his subscription to High Times because he’d become convinced that the magazine was in fact owned and operated by the Drug Enforcement Administration to lure and entrap unsuspecting pot heads. He once confided to me after a few bong hits that the DEA put a tiny digital tracking device in the binding of each issue, which they located by means of an extensive satellite system.