Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  Telling people wasn’t the main thing to me anyway. What was important was that I was in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, and we were having a baby, and I was starting to feel really positive about my work. It was all good.

  At the twelve-week point, I started telling the guys at work. Gordy could not have been less interested. He had four kids and avoided them as much possible. He liked to brag about how little he saw his family. It was a macho thing to him.

  Festino shook my hand and even momentarily forgot about the Purell. “Congratulations on the death of your sex life, Tigger,” he said.

  “Not totally dead yet,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, just wait. Babies themselves are the best form of birth control. You’ll see.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Oh, yeah. My wife and I do it doggie-style. I sit up and beg, and she rolls over and plays dead.”

  I pantomimed a Borscht Belt rimshot in the air. “Thank you, you’re a wonderful audience, I’m here all week,” I said. “Try the veal chop, it’s great.”

  “Wait till you’ve got the Barney song stuck in your head,” Festino said. “Earworm from hell. Or till the only TV show you’re allowed to watch anymore is The Wiggles. And when you go out to dinner, it’s Chuck E. Cheese’s at five o’clock. So when are you going to do an amnio?”

  “Amnio?”

  “You know, that test for birth defects.”

  “Boy, you do look on the dark side, don’t you?” I said. “Kate’s not close to thirty-five.”

  “It’s like what doctors always say. Prepare for the worst and all that.”

  It seemed like a kind of personal question, but mostly I was surprised that Festino cared. “It’s ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst,’” I said. “You left out the first part.”

  “I was just cutting to the chase,” Festino said.

  The pregnancy was the biggest thing to happen to us in the first couple of months after my promotion, but it wasn’t the only big thing. We moved out of the little house in Belmont and into a town house in Cambridge. We still couldn’t swing one of those houses on Brattle Street she’d been fantasizing about, but we bought a beautiful Victorian on Hilliard Street, just off Brattle, that had been renovated a few years ago by a Harvard professor who’d just been lured away to Princeton. There were things we wanted to change—the carpet on the steep stairs to the second floor was badly frayed, for instance—but we figured we’d get around to it sometime.

  We probably underpriced the Belmont house, since Kate couldn’t wait to move to Cambridge. It sold within two days of our putting it on the market. So we were in our new house within two months. I hadn’t seen her happier in years, and that made me happy.

  In the driveway—no garages in this fancy part of Cambridge, believe it or not—sat our two brand-new cars. I’d traded in my totally rebuilt Acura for a new Mercedes SLK 55 AMG Roadster, and Kate reluctantly traded in her tired old Nissan Maxima for a Lexus SUV hybrid, only because it was, she said, far more fuel-efficient and less polluting. My Mercedes just looked sweet.

  It was all happening fast—maybe too fast.

  Just about every morning I worked out with Kurt now, at his gym or at Harvard Stadium or running along the Charles River. Kurt had become my personal trainer. He told me I had to lose the paunch, had to become lean and mean, and once I started feeling better about myself physically, everything would follow.

  He was right, of course. I dropped ten pounds in a couple of weeks, and after a couple of months I was down thirty pounds. I had to buy new clothes, which Kate was delighted about. She saw it as an opportunity to upgrade my wardrobe, get me out of those Men’s Warehouse suits and into some suits from Louis of Boston in confusing European sizes with unpronounceable names of Italian designers inside.

  Kurt had strong feelings about how I ate—i.e., I was poisoning myself—and he had me eating high-protein and low-fat and only “good” carbs. Lots of fish and vegetables and stuff. I cut way back on the eggplant parmesan subs and the olive loaf sandwiches at lunch. I stopped visiting my stoner friend Graham, cut out the weed entirely, because Kurt had convinced me that it was a vile habit, that I needed to keep all my faculties sharp. Sound mind, sound body, all that.

  He insisted I take the stairs at work at least once a week instead of the elevator. Twenty floors? I squawked. You’re out of your mind! One morning I tried it, and I had to change my shirt as soon as I got to my office. But after a while climbing (or descending) twenty flights wasn’t all that brutal. When you have an elevator phobia, you’ll put up with a lot of pain to avoid being trapped in the vertical coffin.

  Kate was thrilled about my Extreme Makeover. She was determined to eat healthy throughout her pregnancy, and now I was along for the ride. She’d never met this guy Kurt, but she liked what he was doing for me.

  She didn’t know the half, of course.

  In my new, bigger office, I put up all these framed, military-themed, corporate motivational posters. One was a photo of a sniper in camouflage fatigues and camo face paint lying on the ground aiming his weapon at us. It said, in big letters, BRAVERY, and then: “It takes an extraordinary person to face danger and maintain composure.” Another one showed some guys on a tank and the words, “AUTHORITY: It is the strongest who prevail.” I had FORTITUDE and PATIENCE too. Hokey? Sure. But just looking at them got me pumped.

  At work, especially, things just started clicking into place for me. It was as if every pitch I swung at was a home run, every putt dropped, every three-pointer swished, nothing but net. I had a hot hand. One good thing led to another.

  Even buying the new Mercedes led to a major sales coup.

  One morning I was sitting in the plush waiting room of the Harry Belkin Mercedes dealership in Allston, waiting for my new car to be prepped. I sat there for a good hour on a leather sofa, drinking a cappuccino from an automatic machine, watching Live with Regis and Kelly on their surround-sound TV.

  And then I thought: how come they don’t have Entronics plasma screens in here, running features and ads on the latest Mercedes models? You know, beauty shots. Mercedes would pay for it. Then I started thinking, the Harry Belkin Company was the largest auto dealership in New England. They had BMW dealerships, and Porsche dealerships, and Maybach dealerships. Lots of others, too. Why not suggest the idea? Hell, supermarkets were doing it—why not high-end auto dealerships?

  I did some research online and identified the right guy to talk to. He was the Senior Vice President for Marketing, and his name was Fred Naseem. I called him, pitched my idea, and he was immediately intrigued. Of course, the price was a concern, but isn’t it always? I pulled out my entire arsenal of tried-and-true sales tricks. I told him about how much added revenue the supermarket chains were generating using plasma screens to advertise at checkout lines. Waiting rooms are just like checkout lines, I told him. Everyone hates to wait. It’s a waste of time. But people like to be informed, to get new information. And be entertained. So entertain them and educate them—and sell them on the most exciting features of your new-model cars. Then I broke down the costs for him, only of course I never called it a “cost” or a “price” but an “investment.” Broke it right down to dollars per day invested versus what they’d generate. It was a no-brainer. Then I did the classic “yes-set” close—giving him a series of tie-down questions to which I knew he had to answer “yes.” Your customers are discerning, aren’t they? I’ll bet they appreciate the amenities you provide for them in the waiting room, like the coffee and the bagels, don’t they? They’d think the Entronics monitors looked cool up on the wall, don’t you think? Boom boom boom. Yes yes yes. Then: Is it accurate to say that your boss, Harry Belkin, would like to increase the average revenue generated in each of your auto dealerships? Well, what’s he gonna say? No? Then I moved in for the kill. Asked the Big Question: Are you ready to start making the additional profits that the Entronics monitors will surely generate for you?

  The Big Yes.r />
  When he wavered at the very end, as customers often do, I hit him with a couple of legendary closing tricks I’d picked up from my Mark Simkins CDs. I think it was the set called The Mark Simkins College of Advanced Closing. The sharp-angle close, where you maneuver them into making a demand you know you can meet. I told him that for this much inventory, delivery would probably be six months off. Well, now that he was all hot and bothered about getting those flat-screens into his dealerships, he wanted it all and he wanted it now. He wanted delivery in half that time. Three months.

  That I could do. I could have done two months if he’d insisted. But I wanted him to demand something I could do. As soon as I agreed, I knew he as good as owned it.

  Then I threw in the old “wrong conclusion” close. You say something you know is wrong so they have to correct you.

  “So, that’s six hundred thirty-six-inch monitors and another twelve hundred fifty-nine-inchers, right?”

  “No, no, no,” Freddy Naseem said. “The other way around. Six hundred fifty-nine-inchers and twelve hundred of the thirty-six.”

  “Ah,” I said. “My mistake. Got it.”

  He was mine. I loved the irony of selling to a guy who worked in auto sales. No one was safe.

  He was stoked. In fact, this became his idea—that’s how I knew I had traction. He talked to Harry Belkin himself, called me back and said that Mr. Belkin was sold on the idea, and now it was only a matter of negotiating the price.

  Sometimes I amaze myself.

  A day later he called me back. “Jason,” he said, all excited. “I have some numbers for you, and I hope you have some numbers for me.” He told me how many plasma displays they wanted—huge ones for the walls of their forty-six dealerships, smaller ceiling-mounted ones. I didn’t get it. The number was a lot higher. And then he explained: it wasn’t just the BMW and Mercedes dealerships. It was the Hyundai and Kia dealerships too. Cadillac. Dodge. Everything.

  I was almost at a loss for words. For me, this is unusual.

  When I recovered, I said, “Let me put some numbers together for you and circle back to you tomorrow. I’m not going to waste your time. I’m going to get you the best price I can get.”

  Everything seemed to be falling my way.

  Except Gordy. He was still Gordy. The biggest drawback to my new job was that it was all Gordy all the time. He had me coming in at 7:00 A.M. and would regularly storm into my office with one complaint or another. He’d IM me, sounding urgent, summon me to his office, and it would turn out to be nothing. Notes for a presentation he wanted me to look at. A spreadsheet. Whatever trivial thing he happened to think was important at that second.

  I did my share of complaining about him to Kate. She listened patiently. One night I came home after work and she handed me a white plastic bag from a bookstore. It held CDs for me to play to and from work: How to Work for Bullies and Tyrants at the Office and Since Strangling Isn’t an Option.

  “Gordy’s not leaving,” she said. “You’re just going to have to learn to deal with him.”

  “Strangling,” I said. “Now, there’s an idea.”

  “Sweetie,” she said, “how come you never ask me about my day?”

  She was right; I rarely did, and now I felt intensely guilty. “Because I’m a guy?”

  “Jason.”

  “Sorry. How was your day?”

  When the Harry Belkin deal seemed to be far enough along, I stopped in to see Gordy and tell him the good news. He nodded, asked a few questions, didn’t seem all that interested. He handed me the monthly expense reports and told me to go over them. “Two months,” he said. “Two months till the end of Q2.” Entronics operated on the Japanese fiscal year, which sometimes got confusing.

  I glimpsed at the expense report, and said, “Jesus, the Band of Brothers spends a lot on T&E, huh?” That’s Travel & Entertainment—hotels, travel, meals.

  “See?” he said. “It’s crazy. I’ve been meaning to crack down on abuses of corporate credit cards for some time. But now that I’ve got one throat to choke, I want you to come up with a new T&E policy.”

  He wanted me to be the bad guy. Why not you? I thought. Everyone hates you already.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “One more thing. Time to rank ’n’ yank.”

  I knew what he meant—stack-rank everybody and fire the underperformers—but was he saying he wanted me to do it?

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No one said it was gonna be easy. You and I get to rate our guys on a five-point scale, and then you’re gonna get rid of the underperformers. Up ’n’ out.”

  “The underperformers?” I said, wanting to hear him say it aloud.

  “The C players get fired.”

  “Bottom ten percent?”

  “No,” he said with a fierce stare. “Bottom third.”

  “Third?”

  “We can’t afford ’em anymore. This is a Darwinian struggle. Only the toughest survive. I want Tokyo to see an immediate change in our numbers.”

  “How immediate are we talking about?”

  He stared at me for a few seconds, then got up and shut his office door. He sat back down, folded his arms.

  “So here’s how it’s going down, Steadman, and don’t you breathe a word of this to any of your Band of Brothers. By the end of the second quarter—that’s barely two months from now—Dick Hardy and the boys in the MegaTower are going to be making a decision. It’s either gonna be us or the Royal Meister sales force. Framingham or Dallas. Not both.”

  “They’re going to winnow out all but the top performers,” I said, nodding. “Consolidation. Survival of the fittest.”

  He gave his shark’s smile. “You still don’t get it, do you? They’re not cherry-picking. One lives, the other dies. It’s a bake-off. The one with the best numbers gets to survive. The other office gets shut down. A ‘soft quarter’ is not going to be shrugged off anymore. It’s a goddamned death sentence. We have another quarter like this one and everyone in this building gets their walking papers. Now, ready for the bad news?”

  “That was the good news?”

  “It’s all riding on you, buddy. You’ve got to pull a goddamned rabbit out of your hat in the next couple of months or everyone in the Entronics Framingham office, including you and your so-called Band of Brothers, gets shot. It’s all up to you. You cannot afford a single misstep.”

  “Don’t you think we should let everyone know the stakes?” I said.

  “No way, Steadman. Scared salesmen can’t sell. Clients can see the flop sweat. They smell the panic. Bad enough with all the rumors flying around the halls, the turmoil we’ve been seeing. So this is our little secret. You and me. You’re working directly for me now. And if you screw up, I’m gonna have to get my résumé printed up too. The difference is, I’m eminently employable. You, on the other hand, will be blackballed from here to Tokyo. I will personally see to it.”

  I wanted to say something about how the flop sweat wasn’t good for managers either, but I stayed silent.

  “You know,” Gordy said, “I didn’t want to give you this job at first. But now I’m glad I did. You know why?”

  I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. “Why’s that, Gordy?”

  “Because I like Trevor a lot more than I like you, and I wouldn’t wish this on him.”

  On the way out of Gordy’s office, I passed Cal Taylor in the hallway. He’d just come from the restroom, and he was looking a little loopy. Ten in the morning, poor guy.

  “Hey, there, boss,” he said. “Something wrong?”

  “Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong.”

  “You look like you just ate a bad clam,” Cal said.

  You have no idea, I thought.

  23

  For the rest of the morning, I went over the T&E expenses and began to devise the tough new policy that Gordy wanted. I thought of this as my “no more Mister Nice Guy” memo. It was pretty hard-line, I have to admit. No more flying business class: eco
nomy all the way, unless you used your own frequent-flyer miles to upgrade. No more fancy hotels: now the limit was a hundred and seventy-five bucks a night. All business trips had to be scheduled at least seven days in advance, because it was cheaper; any last-minute trips had to be authorized in advance, by me. I lowered the per diem to fifty bucks a day, which was pretty harsh, but dealable, I thought. You couldn’t write off any meals beyond that unless you were taking a customer. And no more taking customers out for drinks unless there was food too. We spent way too much on off-site meetings, so I cut down on those too. A lot of money had been dumped on catering lunch meetings at the office, but no more. Now you had to bring your own lunch.

  I did some number-crunching and figured out how much this new policy would save the company, and I e-mailed the memo to Gordy.

  Right after lunch, he called and said, “I love it.”

  I took a break, returned a bunch of calls, then I read over my memo again. Tried to soften the language a bit so that it didn’t sound quite so hard-ass. Then I e-mailed it to Franny to read over and double-check for typos and such.

  Franny—Frances Barber—was the secretary I’d been assigned. She’d been with the company for over twenty years, and her only flaw was that she went out for a cigarette break every half hour. She sat in the cubicle outside my new office. Franny had a real no-nonsense look, a tight mouth with vertical lines above her upper lip. She was forty-five but looked ten years older, wore a strong, unpleasant perfume that smelled like bug spray, and was pretty fearsome if you didn’t know her. But we hit it off right away. She even began to reveal a bone-dry sense of humor, though it took a while.

  She buzzed me on the intercom and said, “A Mister Sulu for you?” She sounded uncertain. Her voice was so cigarette-destroyed it was deeper than mine. “Though he doesn’t exactly sound Japanese. He sounds more like a surfer.”

  Obviously she didn’t know Classic Trek. “Graham,” I said as I picked up. “Long time.”