Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  She patted the sofa next to her. “Want to have a seat?”

  I sat down. “What’s up?” I sneaked a glance at my watch. I figured I had ten minutes max to get into my jeans and Red Sox jersey so I could make it to Fenway in time.

  “Listen, honey, I want to apologize. I’ve been giving you a hard time about working so hard, and I think I’m not being fair.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Apology accepted.” I didn’t want to sound too abrupt, but I couldn’t get sandbagged into a deep talk.

  “I know how hard Gordy has you working, and I just want you to know I appreciate it. I was out of line at BabyWorld.”

  “No worries,” I said.

  “‘No worries’?” she repeated. “Since when do you say that?”

  “Who knows.”

  “I mean, look at this place.” She spread her arms wide. “This house is gorgeous, and it’s all because of you. Because of your hard work. It’s all you. And I never forget that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I stood up and kissed her again. “Gotta go.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Fenway,” I said. “I told you.”

  “You did?”

  “I thought I did. I’m pretty sure I did.”

  “With Kurt?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got to go change.”

  When I came back downstairs, Kate was in the kitchen making herself a Boca burger and some broccoli. Voluntarily, too.

  I kissed her good-bye, and she said, “Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was?”

  “I’m sorry. How was your day?”

  “It was incredible. Marie had an opening at this gallery in the South End, and I went there as a representative of the foundation. And she showed up with three of her kids—she doesn’t have any child care or any relatives here. So I offered to watch the kids while she talked to the Boston Globe art critic.”

  “You took care of three kids?”

  She nodded. “For an hour.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Like, it was a disaster, right?”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “At first it was. The first ten minutes or so I thought I was going to lose my mind. But then—I don’t know, I did it. It actually was okay. I was pretty good, even. And I realized, you know—I can do this, Jase. I can do this.”

  There were tears in her eyes, and there were tears in mine, too. I kissed her, and said, “I’m sorry I’ve got to go.”

  “Go,” she said.

  29

  There was the usual crowd around Fenway Park, the scalpers asking if I needed a ticket or had one to sell, the guys hawking Italian sausages and hot dogs and programs. I found Kurt standing at the turnstiles near Gate A, as we’d arranged. I was surprised to see that he had his arm around a woman’s waist.

  She had brassy red hair, a cascade of frizzy curls, and she wore a peach tank top that was tight on her enormous boobs. She had a tiny waist and a great ass, which was well displayed by a pair of short shorts, almost hot pants. She had heavy eye shadow and big eyelashes and bright red lipstick.

  Once I got over my raw animal excitement at the sight of this chick, I was immediately disappointed. This was not the sort of woman I expected Kurt to be going out with. He’d never mentioned any girlfriend, and you don’t bring just anybody to a Red Sox game. The tickets are too hard to get.

  “Hey, chief,” he said, reaching out for me with his left hand, touching my shoulder.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “They haven’t thrown out the first pitch yet,” he said. “Jason, I’d like you to meet Leslie.”

  “Hi, Leslie,” I said. We shook hands. She had very long red fingernails. She smiled, and I smiled, and we looked at each other for a couple of seconds, not knowing what to say.

  “Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Kurt said.

  I walked alongside them through the cavernous underbelly of the ballpark, looking for our section. I felt like a third wheel.

  When we got to the stairs at our section, Leslie announced she had to use the little girls’ room. That’s what she called it. We were going to miss the first pitch for sure.

  “She’s cute,” I said, when Leslie had gone off to the little girls’ room.

  “Yep.”

  “What’s Leslie’s last name?”

  He shrugged. “Ask her.”

  “How long have you been going out with her?”

  He glanced at his watch. “About eighteen hours. Met her in a bar last night.”

  “I think I’m going to get a steak-and-cheese sub. You want one?”

  “You don’t want to eat that shit,” Kurt said. “Look at all the progress you’re making. You don’t want that crap in your body.”

  “How about a Fenway Frank?” Those are the hot dogs they sell at the ballpark. One of the secrets you learn if you go to Fenway a lot is that if you prefer your hot dog cooked, you don’t buy it in the stands, where they often give it to you lukewarm or even cold. Yuck.

  “Not for me, thanks.”

  I’d lost my appetite. “How’s work going?”

  “Good,” he said. “Been doing some background investigations and some badge-replacement. Had to drive out to Westwood today. Routine stuff. Though I did have to open an investigation on someone.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “Can’t say. No one you know. Guy’s fencing LCD monitors. Selling them on eBay. I had to put in an additional camera and pull the guy’s hard drive.”

  “You gonna catch him?”

  “Count on it. And the biometric fingerprint readers are in, so everyone’s going to have to stop down at Corporate Security over the next couple of days and give us a fingerprint.” He looked at me. “You’re not sleeping. What’s up?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Not enough. Problems on the home front?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s Gordy.”

  “Guy’s such a broke dick,” he said. “He’s like a one-man Q Course.”

  “Yeah, but the difference is, Gordy isn’t trying to make me into a better soldier.”

  “True. He’s trying to wash you out for real. Guy has it in for you. Gotta do something about that.”

  “What do you mean, he has it in for me? You know something?”

  He paused just long enough for me to tell that he really did know something after all. “One of my responsibilities is to monitor e-mail.”

  “You guys do that?”

  “Have to. Scan for key words and stuff.”

  “But you’re looking at his e-mail for other reasons,” I said.

  He blinked.

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Part of my job,” he said.

  “What does he say about me?”

  “You’re obviously a threat. We gotta do something about the guy.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “Clearly. See, what Gordy doesn’t understand is that his job isn’t quite so secure as he thinks.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Japanese don’t like his style. His profanity. His crudeness.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “As long as he gets results, they’re happy with him. And he gets results. So he’s safe.”

  He shook his head. “He’s a racist. Hates the Japanese. And the Japanese don’t like that. I’ve been doing some reading. The Japanese admire the strong-willed American manager style. But they won’t tolerate anti-Japanese racism. Believe me, the second he shows his racism in public, he’s gone. So fast your head will spin.”

  “He’s too smart for that.”

  “Maybe,” Kurt said.

  Then Leslie walked up in a toxic cloud of cheap perfume. She put her arm around Kurt, grabbing his butt.

  “Let’s find our seats,” he said.

  I’ve been to Fenway scores of times, maybe a hundred times, but I never fail to feel a thrill when I walk up the
steps and the field appears before me suddenly, brilliant green glittering in the sun or the lights, the red dirt, the throngs.

  We had amazing seats, right behind the Red Sox dugout, two rows from the field. We could watch the ESPN cameramen changing lenses and stuff, the blond on-air talent applying her lipstick.

  Leslie didn’t know too much about baseball and wanted Kurt to explain the game to her. He said he’d do it later.

  “One bit of good news today,” I said to Kurt in a low voice as we watched the game. “Doug Forsythe decided to stay.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  This is the thing about baseball: there’s a lot of downtime when you can talk. “Yeah. Something happened to his Sony offer. Someone got cold feet—the offer was withdrawn. Never heard of that happening before.”

  “Kurt,” said Leslie, “I don’t think I even know what your sign is.”

  “My sign?” Kurt said, turning to her. “My sign is ‘Do Not Disturb.’”

  We’d been talking so much we missed a great play, so we both looked up at the enormous electronic scoreboard, where they run the video instant replays.

  “I can’t even see what happened,” Kurt said.

  “It’s a lousy screen,” I said.

  “We must have something better than that.” He meant Entronics, and it was interesting that he was saying “we” already.

  “Oh, God, yeah. That’s an old RGB LED large-format video display. Got to be six or seven years old, but the technology moves fast. We’ve got a large-format HD video screen that’s crystal clear.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “I know the assistant equipment manager. You can talk to him. He’ll know who to talk to.”

  “About replacing the scoreboard? Interesting.”

  “Right.”

  “Great idea, man.”

  “I’ve got a million of ’em”

  Suddenly the Sox hit a grand slam, and everyone jumped to their feet.

  “What just happened?” Leslie asked. “Was that good or bad?”

  30

  I got to the office right at seven, feeling invigorated and a little mellow after a particularly tough workout at Kurt’s gym. I plowed through paperwork and reports, played a little dodgeball myself by leaving phone messages for people I didn’t want to talk to. Of the thirty or so sales cycles I was involved in, the two biggest by far—now that Freddy Naseem had screwed me over on the Harry Belkin deal—were the Chicago Presbyterian Hospital project and, giant among giants, the Atlanta airport. I sent off some e-mails on those. Did some research into the other big auto dealerships around the country. Man, there were some big ones out there. AutoNation, out of Fort Lauderdale, and United Auto Group, out of Secaucus, New Jersey, both made Harry Belkin look like your neighborhood chop shop. Belkin was like number fourteen on the list of megadealers. The damn thing was, I’d put in so much work on the deal and gotten so close.

  And the Red Sox scoreboard thing had really got under my skin. The more I looked into it, the more intrigued I got. The scoreboard at Fenway was basically a twenty-four-foot-by-thirty-one-foot video screen that used light-emitting diode technology—that’s LEDs to you. Lots and lots of little pixels spaced about an inch apart, each pixel made up of a bunch of little LEDs that contain a chemical compound that turns different colors when you pass electricity through it. The whole thing’s run by a digitized video driver. From a distance it looks great, like a giant TV screen. From a distance.

  They’ve got these electronic digital signs all over the world by now. My online research told me that the biggest one was in central Berlin, on the Kurfürstendamm. There’s the big Coca-Cola sign in Times Square, in New York, and the NASDAQ sign, and there’s another big one on top of the Reuters building in London and in Piccadilly Circus, and of course they’ve got them all over Las Vegas.

  What’s cool about these signs is that, with a few keystrokes of a computer, you can change the display entirely. Not like the old billboard days when guys had to go up there and tear down the old poster and paste up the new one. Now it could be done in seconds.

  They’re cool, but they’re also kind of grainy, kind of coarse. You can see the little colored dots. The technology was developed a decade ago. Entronics didn’t do these huge outdoor displays. The technology was too specialized, and besides, our LCD and plasma displays had never been bright enough to use outdoors.

  But not anymore. Now we had something even brighter, even better. We had the new flexible OLED PictureScreen in prototype, like the ones in the windows of Gordy’s office. It was high-definition, low-glare, weather-safe, and it was way better than anything else out there.

  Fenway Park was only the beginning. Fenway was the first bowling pin. Once I got an Entronics PictureScreen above center field in Boston, I could start getting them in other baseball parks, then football stadiums. Then Times Square and Piccadilly Circus and the Kurfürstendamm and Las Vegas. Movie trailers on outdoor billboards. Rock concerts. The Tour de France. Formula One. The Cannes Film Festival.

  The Vatican. They had those huge projection TVs around St. Peter’s Square so people could watch the Pope celebrate mass, or the Pope’s funeral, or whatever. Shouldn’t the Vatican, with all their gold, have the best technology out there?

  How come, I wondered, no one at the top of Entronics in Tokyo had thought of this? It was a true brainstorm. It was huge.

  And why stop at outdoor signs? Why not indoor billboards too—airports, shopping malls, big retail stores, company lobbies…

  Sometimes I amaze even myself.

  So in a state of total delirium, I wrote up a business plan, an outline of how Entronics PictureScreens could take over the world. I did quick-and-dirty research into the drawbacks to the existing technologies. I found out who the biggest companies were that provided electronic digital signs around the world, since we’d have to deal with them—we didn’t have the infrastructure to put the stuff together ourselves. This was truly a killer application.

  And by nine o’clock, I finished a draft of a memo that, I was convinced, would transform Entronics, save our division, and catapult me to the top of the company. Well, not the top. Not Tokyo—since I’m not Japanese. But close.

  Now what? Now what should I do with it? Give it to Gordy so he could swipe it and claim credit? But I couldn’t just shoot it off via e-mail to the MegaTower in Tokyo. The company didn’t work that way.

  I looked up as someone passed my office, a scrawny Japanese man with aviator glasses.

  Yoshi Tanaka.

  The spy, the ambassador, the conduit to the higher-ups in Tokyo.

  Yoshi was my ticket. He was the guy I’d have to talk to. I waved at him, beckoned him into my office.

  “Jason-san,” he said. “Hello.”

  “Say, Yoshi, I’ve got this killer idea I want to run by you, see what you think.

  He furrowed his brow. I told him about the memo I’d written. How much revenue I thought this concept could generate for the company. We’d already developed the technology—the sunk costs were already budgeted. There’d be no additional R&D. “See, we don’t need to bolt small panels together anymore to make a huge one,” I said. “Our PictureScreen’s going to make the existing LED display technology look like JumboTron out of 1985. The revenue potential is immense.” The more I talked, the better it sounded.

  Then I saw Yoshi’s blank stare of utter incomprehension. The man hadn’t understood a word I was saying. I’d just wasted five minutes gassing on and on.

  I might as well have been speaking…well, English.

  After lunch I stopped down at Corporate Security and spent about thirty seconds putting my index finger in a biometric reader so the machine could learn my fingerprint. When I came back up, I went to Gordy’s office and told him I needed a few minutes of his time to tell him about an idea I had.

  I’d realized I was going to have to get Gordy’s sign-off on my big electronic billboard idea, like it or not. Without his endorsemen
t, the concept wasn’t going anywhere.

  He leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his back in his smuggest “impress me” mode.

  I told him. I handed him a hard copy of my business plan.

  “Oh, so now you’re going into product marketing,” he said. “We’re in sales, remember? Looking to move to Santa Clara? Or Tokyo?”

  “We’re allowed to originate ideas.”

  “Don’t waste your time.”

  I felt deflated. “Why is it a waste of time?”

  “Believe me, that idea’s so old it’s got whiskers and liver spots. That came up at the last product-planning meeting in Tokyo, and the Jap engineers said it wouldn’t fly.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not enough candelas or something to use outside.”

  “I’ve been over the PictureScreen technical specs, and it’s as bright as an LED.”

  “It’s a glare issue.”

  “There’s no glare. That was the whole breakthrough.”

  “Look, Jason. Forget it, okay? I’m not an engineer. But it’s not going to work.”

  “You don’t think it’s worth e-mailing Tokyo?”

  “Jason,” he said patiently. He drummed his fingers on top of the business plan. “I’m a change agent. I’m a Six Sigma black belt. I was schooled in the change acceleration process, okay? But I know when to give up the fight, and that’s something you’ve got to learn.”

  I hesitated. I was crestfallen. “Okay,” I said. I got up and reached for my business plan, but Gordy picked it off his desk, scrunched it up in his fist, and deposited it in his trash can.

  “Now here’s what I want your mind on. TechComm. From the second we all arrive in Miami, a couple of days from now, I want you schmoozing our resellers and channel partners. And remember, first night of TechComm is the big Entronics dinner for all the sales guys and our biggest customers, and I’m the emcee. So I want you in full battle mode. Okay? Stick to your knitting. We got a division to save.”

  31

  Kurt’s black Mustang was parked in my driveway.

  I entered quietly. I felt suspicious, but also guilty about feeling that way. Kate and Kurt were sitting in the living room talking. They didn’t hear me come in.