She went on to tell me about the disabled services bus that took her to and from work each day. Then she told me about Maria, a Mexican-American woman with whom she had struck up a friendship.
“I’ve got complete use of my upper body,” Laurie said. “I’m lucky, really—at least compared to Maria. Maria was shot, too, just like me—but she can barely use her arms. She uses a special voice-activated program to interact with the computer that dials the phone numbers.”
She told me more about Maria, and how the twenty-something woman had found herself in the wrong place and time when a drive-by shooting took place in her El Paso neighborhood near the Mexican border. “Maria’s got relatives up here,” Laurie explained. “And I think that she wanted to make a fresh start far away from El Paso. I can understand that.”
“Do you ever think about getting away from here?” I asked.
“Me? Oh, no—that’s not what I meant. Here is different. Maria lived in a crime-ridden neighborhood. I’ve got Mom and Dad, and all my old friends from the neighborhood—those who are still around, that is.”
Laurie didn’t need to tell me that by this point in her life, most of her old friends would have moved away from this neighborhood. They had either gotten married or simply moved on, drawn by better opportunities in more prosperous places.
“Well, I admire you,” I said. And I did. “I don’t think that I would be as strong as you in the same situation.”
I didn’t know if this was even the right thing to say, since it would draw her attention back to that wheelchair. But on the other hand, I knew that Laurie didn’t need me to remind her that she didn’t have the use of her legs anymore.
“It is tough,” she said. “You remember, me, right? The way I used to be?”
I nodded. I could remember her: strong, haughty, beautiful. The envy of the other girls in the neighborhood. My older sister—the one whom I had assumed would never be stopped by anything, would never change.
“Are you still hanging around with that Claire?” Laurie asked, abruptly changing the subject.
“Claire is my employee,” I said neutrally.
“Bullshit,” Laurie said. “You’re sleeping with that ‘employee’. She’s a conniving bitch. Watch out for her.”
“Well, just so you’re not afraid to come out and tell me how you feel about things.” I didn’t note that Laurie had guessed correctly about my sleeping with Claire.
“Little brother, I’ll always tell you exactly what I think.”
My visit with my parents and sister done, I stepped out the front door, my mother giving me hugs all the way to the threshold. I reflected for roughly the thousandth time that while I had not had a prosperous childhood, I had been blessed with two parents and a sister who loved me.
Out on the sidewalk now, I allowed myself a last look at the house with its tilting foundation. My childhood home was slowly crumbling, just like the city around it.
On the map of Ohio, Dayton forms a westward-pointing scalene triangle between Cincinnati to the south, and Columbus to the north. A stripped-down city of factories and warehouses, Dayton is a southerly outpost of the Great Lakes rust belt. The city has been bleeding jobs and population since the 1970s, when its manufacturing base began to decline. Today, nearly a quarter of Dayton’s population lives below the poverty line.
Things used to be different. The city known as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers experienced its first boom time during World War II. You’ve almost certainly heard of the Manhattan Project—the military-industrial effort that culminated in the development of the first atom bomb. But you probably haven’t heard of its subsidiary undertaking, known as the Dayton Project. During the war years, Dayton-area companies were involved in the development of neutron-generating devices—one of which formed the trigger mechanisms of the atom bombs known as Fat Man and Little Boy—the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The boom continued into the postwar years. My father—born three months before Pearl Harbor—had no trouble landing a high-paying blue-collar job when he was in his early twenties. All you needed was a high school diploma in those days, along with a little common sense and a willingness to work hard. My father was part of the last generation in which a blue-collar worker could reasonably expect to own his own home and provide for a family on a single paycheck. And even Dad had lived to see the decline of the old postwar status quo.
His company went bankrupt in 2007, the year after he retired. There had been “irregularities” in the management of his pension fund, so that about half of it disappeared with his erstwhile employer. He still had his Social Security check, of course; but he and Mom would have been in dire straits had I not been in a position to help them. And then there were all the bills associated with Laurie’s condition.
I thought again about the firing of Kevin Lang, about Kurt Myers and the other members of the TP Automotive management team. I knew that I would never be able to fully reconcile my role as an agent of such people with my love for my parents and sister.
I was about to delve more deeply into these moral fine points when my cell phone chimed with a text message. Claire Turner was waiting for me.
Chapter 7
It was ten minutes past eight o’clock in the evening. The drapes were drawn across the bedroom of the suite I had rented at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Dayton. I was exhausted from a series of exertions that had been quite pleasant. Pleasant and dangerous, considering my activity partner
“Craig Walker,” she said. “Now I know why I work for you instead of McKinsey or Boston Consulting.”
I rolled over and looked at the woman in bed beside me, rolling her words around in my head before responding. As was always the case with this woman, I would have to tread carefully.
Claire stroked my naked flank. “What I mean is: I’d be willing to bet that a job with McKinsey or Boston wouldn’t come with similar fringe benefits.”
“Hmm,” I replied. Sometimes it was best to simply avoid any concrete response. The remark about McKinsey and Boston was the sort of backhanded compliment that Claire Turner frequently uttered after sex. This particular barb stung me on multiple levels. First of all, it highlighted the fact that I was breaking the rules—going to bed with a person who was in my employment. Craig Walker Consulting might be a two-person firm; but rules were rules—and I was breaking them.
I also knew that Claire would rather have a job with McKinsey & Company or the Boston Consulting Group. And she knew that I knew it. She had only accepted a job with me because last year had been a bad hiring year for freshly minted MBAs. I knew (and once again—she knew that I knew) that her gig with me was nothing more than a way station—a steppingstone to bigger and better things. This time next year—if she had her way—Claire would occupy a plush tenth-story office at one of the real consulting firms. The ones that don’t skulk in the shadows.
Finally, we both knew that the “fringe benefits” were mine and not hers: I had always had an easy time with women—at least compared to other men. But the dynamics of the jungle still applied: Men are in supply and women are in demand. All things being equal, an attractive woman still trumps an attractive man.
And most men would have gladly traded one of their limbs to go to bed with a woman like Claire. It wasn't simply the fact that she was blonde and 5'11". There was the sheer feat of taming her. There was an intensity about Claire that the average man would have found more than a little intimidating.
Part of this was purely physical. In addition to her height, at thirty-two, Claire still had the musculature of the high school athlete that she had been more than a decade earlier. The visible strength in her thighs, calves, and biceps accentuated her overall centerfold's stature rather than detracting from it. Then there were her abs: It is rare enough to see a man with a recognizable six-pack. But I could see the outlines of Claire's abdominal muscles beneath her light copper tan.
Many women had claimed over the years to see similar attri
butes in me. I realized, though, that physical attraction had little, if anything, to do with this particular conquest of mine. By going to bed with me, Claire was asserting her own form of domination over the proprietor of Craig Walker Consulting. She had proven to herself, and to me, that she could get under my skin if she wanted to. She could force me to compromise my standards of professionalism, the ones that I had absorbed and learned to revere during my years as a six-figure business consultant. Her presence in my bed gave her a foothold in my life and personal affairs that a mere employee would never have acquired. It was a vulnerability that she could easily exploit if she ever chose to.
And vulnerabilities were a favorite conversational topic of Claire Turner.
“Did you visit your parents and sister today?” she asked.
“Sure did,” I responded.
“And how were they?”
“Mom and Dad are doing fine, all things considered. Laurie’s got a new job—some sort of a telemarketing gig.”
“Mmm.”
We lay in silence for a while, and I began to contemplate the numerous tasks that awaited me in the coming weeks. Undercover jobs inside companies always required more extensive planning. They also included a significant risk of exposure. Rank-and-file corporate employees—especially those who had reason to believe that their employer was targeting them—could be extremely suspicious of a new and unfamiliar presence placed suddenly in their midst. And in practically all cases, I had to engage the targets immediately, and win their trust within a short period of time.
As my older sister had suggested, it was a bit like being a spy.
"They're your weakness, you know," Claire said.
"Who?"
"Laurie and your mother and father."
After she had said it, she smiled matter-of-factly, and waited to see how I would respond. I knew, of course, that she wasn't simply concerned about my emotional well-being or mental health. Claire had remarked more than once that I should move my base of operations to the East Coast, preferably somewhere in the vicinity of New York. Claire was obsessed with the Big Apple, and she disdained Ohio as an agriculture-and-rust-belt backwater, no matter how much money we were making here. New York was the business and financial epicenter of the world, the place where she would make the contact that would take her to whatever her Next Big Thing would be.
Claire knew that my commitment to my parents and my disabled sister would prevent me from ever leaving Ohio. I had, in fact, told her as much.
Instead of reacting angrily, as she had likely expected, I replied in the same deadpan manner, my voice containing only the slightest hint of sarcasm.
"Gee, Claire, what makes you say that? Unless I remember incorrectly, you've got a family, too. You weren't simply hatched out of a Victoria's Secret catalog, were you?"
She gave my chest a light slap. The gesture was playful, but her eyes remained serious. And it was another reminder of the fact that she had mastered me as much as I had mastered her. How many employees would feel entitled to touch their bosses in such a manner?
"Of course I've got family," she said, her expression suddenly hard. "You know that." And know that I did. Claire had grown up in rural Michigan. Her childhood had not been a happy one. "But we're talking about you."
"Okay. Let's talk about me, then."
"Alright. You feel a sense of guilt over the fact that your father has emphysema, and that your sister was in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was nineteen years old."
I already felt my anger rising. I would have tolerated this remark from few women, and almost no men. Claire had one thing right: my family was my soft spot.
"Did it ever occur to you, Claire, that I take care of my parents and my sister simply because I love them?"
She looked at me incredulously, almost as if I had just suggested that she should cash her next paycheck and distribute the money to random passersby on the street. But I knew that Claire's alcoholic father had been anything but loving. Her mother had been absent for most of her growing up years, though her parents had since reconciled. Claire's two brothers had followed in her father's footsteps. One was a seldom-employed alcoholic. The other one was serving time in the Michigan state prison system for armed robbery.
"And I'm saying that love might be a weakness," she said.
I didn't intend to explain it to her: why I never thought of my oxygen-tethered father or my wheelchair-bound sister as weaknesses. If she couldn't intuitively grasp that sort of thing by this stage in her life, then nothing that I could say would change her mind.
"Let's make a deal, Claire," I said calmly.
"What?" she raised her eyebrows.
"We keep my family out of our discussions—personal as well as professional."
Claire sighed. "Have it your way, Craig. I'm just saying."
"I thought we agreed that you were finished saying."
"Fine. If you don't want to talk about you, then let’s talk about me. My father and mother live in a rundown house where the plumbing doesn't always work, and the downstairs never gets warmer than sixty-five degrees during the worst part of the winter. And you don't see me compromising my professional life to tend to them. I haven't even seen them twice in the past five years."
"You sound almost proud of that."
She paused to consider this. "Yeah. Now that you mention it, I guess I am."
"You cold bitch," I said. I gave her my best smile, the one that could still melt ladies' hearts when and if I wanted it to. The smile that had helped me land those lucrative contracts. I smiled at Claire because this was the only way to utter a comment like that without turning the conversation into an outright argument; and there was already a sense of tension between us today, despite the sex.
She looked back at me and decided to take the face-saving way out. She laughed along with my joke. Then she reached across the bed and touched me in a way that was as painful as it was arousing.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"I'm your boss."
"Oh, really?" she asked. "Tell me, then: what is it that you want of me, boss? Tell me what you want me to do."
Claire's playacting of submissiveness was unconvincing—so out of character as it was for her. But her hands, and her body, and the sweet, pungent smell of her did arouse me as she continued to manipulate me. I was ready for her whether I actually wanted her or not.
Before I could say another word, Claire was atop me, and I was inside her, simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her contradictory aspects: her hyper-feminine sexuality, mixed with a callousness and a lust for power that was more commonly associated with the masculine sex.
I placed my hands around her bare buttocks and dug my fingernails into her skin. I knew from experience that this was what she wanted me to do.
"Fuck me, Craig," she commanded.
And I did. She was moist and soft and compliant. She was ravenous and strong and unyielding in her preoccupation with her own pleasure.
Claire began to buck up and down as she sat astride me. I felt her grip on my shoulders, squeezing me so hard with her fingertips that the pinching discomfort competed with the hot, slippery sensations below. She stared at me through half-lidded eyes, her gaze never wavering. Claire's face was contorted into a grimace that contained desire, but little hint of tenderness or vulnerability. She brought her open mouth to mine, forcing her tongue between my teeth.
It occurred to me that I might be over my head with Claire. Despite her MBA and her impressive professional resume, there was something else inside her that was cold and hard and unpredictable. Something that would be foreign to most women. It might simply be a product of that wrong-side-of-the-tracks town where she had been raised, and those barren Michigan winters. Or it might be something more sinister, a force that had grown inside a child who had found her own twisted strategy for surviving in a dysfunctional household. A child who, lacking love, had learned to thrive on games of victory and domination instead.
Chapter 8
The next day, Sunday, I drove to New Hastings, Ohio and got my first look at United Press and Stamping, aka UP&S.
Central Ohio is flat, and semi-rural outside a handful of cities. My GPS told me that the factory was located on the outskirts of the little town of New Hastings—a satellite community of Columbus, home to the state capitol and the Ohio State University.
Exiting the highway and passing through town, I saw numerous OSU Buckeyes flags and banners dotting the lawns and porches in the town proper. Despite the barns, grain silos, and cornfields (brown and low-cut three months after the harvest) around New Hastings, the town considered itself to be within the metropolitan orbit of Columbus.
I approached the plant from the south, driving along the two-lane highway that led to the main visitor’s entrance. The parking lot was all but empty. Yet as I stepped out of my car, I knew that I would not be alone here, even on a Sunday afternoon. There was a security guard somewhere inside the building, I was sure. I could not see him, but he had no doubt already seen me via one of the plant’s security cameras. I was betting that he would not be unduly alarmed by a lone, well-dressed man driving a Lexus. If questioned, I would tell him that I was a vendor salesperson, and that I merely wanted to confirm the company’s location in advance of my Monday morning appointment.
I was able to manufacture an alibi or a plausible excuse for every eventuality, it seemed. That was one of the skills that I had developed during my years working undercover.
If questioned, I would not be able to tell the security guard the truth: That as an undercover management consultant, it was my custom to perform a visual inspection of my operating environment prior to the beginning of every job. That was my reason for being here on this Sunday afternoon, while the UP&S plant contained no employees.
This practice of advance reconnaissance was about more than simply grasping a site’s location and spatial layout. I needed to absorb the vibes of a place. I had learned over the years that every organizational setting has its own atmosphere. And that atmosphere frequently affects the challenges and outcomes of the job. I wouldn’t be able to get the full vibes until the employees were here, of course; but this observation was the starting point.
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