He made visits to the plant just like Old Man Devries used to do, only when the old man did it, they weren’t called Gemba walks, as they were now. That term had been introduced by Scott, along with Kaizen and a bunch of other Japanese words that Nick didn’t remember, and that sounded to him like types of sushi.
It was the layoffs that made walking the plants an unpleasant chore. He could sense the hostility when he came through. It wasn’t lost on him, or anybody else, that Old Man Devries’s job had been to build plants, and Nick’s was to tear them down.
But he knew it was something he should probably start doing again, both here and in the other manufacturing complex about ten miles down the road. He’d go back to the monthly walks, he vowed.
If he had the chance.
If the factories were still here.
He noticed the big white sign on the front of the red brick building that said DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT, and next to it a black LED panel with the red digital numerals 322. Someone had crossed out ACCIDENT and scrawled over it, with a heavy black marker, LAYOFFS.
He went in the visitors’ entrance and caught the old familiar smell of welding and soldering, of hot metal. It took him back to visits to his father at work, of dog-day summers in high school and college spent working on the line.
The plump girl who sat at the battered old desk and handed out safety glasses, greeted visitors, and answered the phone, did a double take. “Good morning, Mr. Conover.”
“Morning, Beth.” Beth-something-Italian. He signed the log, noticed Scott had signed in about twenty minutes earlier along with someone else whose signature was illegible.
“Boy, both you and Mr. McNally in the space of an hour. Something going on I should know about?”
“No, in fact, I’m looking for Mr. McNally—any idea where he is?”
“No, sir. He had a visitor with him, though.”
“Catch the other guy’s name?”
“No, sir.” She looked ashamed, as if she hadn’t been doing her job. But Nick couldn’t blame her for not checking the ID of the CFO’s guest too carefully.
“Did Scott say where they were going?”
“No, sir. Sounded like Mr. McNally was giving a tour.”
“Brad take them around?” Brad Kennedy was the plant manager, who gave tours only to the VIPs.
“No, sir. Want me to call Brad for you?”
“That’s okay, Beth.” He put on a pair of dorky-looking safety glasses.
He’d forgotten how deafening the place was. A million square feet of clattering, pounding, thudding metal. As he entered the main floor, keeping to the “green mile,” as it was called—the green-painted border where you’d be safe from the Hi-Lo electric lift trucks that barreled down the aisles at heedless speeds—he could feel the floor shake. That meant the thousand-ton press, which stamped out the bases of the Symbiosis chair control panel, was operating. The amazing thing was that the thousand-ton press was all the way across the factory floor, clear on the other end, and you could still feel it go.
The place filled him with pride. This was the real heart of Stratton—not the glitzy headquarters building with its silver-fabric cubicles and flat-panel monitors and all the backstabbing. The company’s heartbeat was the regular thud of the thousand-ton behemoth, which sent vibrations up your spine as you passed through. It was here, where you still found some of those antique, dangerous, hydraulic-powered machines that could bend steel three-quarters of an inch thick, the exact same one on which his father had worked, bending steel, a seething monster that could take your hand off if you weren’t careful. His dad had in fact lost the tip of his ring finger to the old green workhorse once, which caused him more embarrassment than anger, because he knew it was his fault. He must have felt that the brake machine, after all those years of a close working relationship, had been disappointed in him.
As he walked, he looked for Scott, and the more he looked, the angrier he got. The idea that Scott, who worked for him, a guy he’d hired, would dare shelve projects, block funding, change vendors without consulting him—that was insubordination of the most egregious sort.
Four hundred hourly workers in this plant, and another hundred or so salaried employees, all turning out chairs for the Armani-clad butts of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, the Prada-clad rumps of art directors.
He was always impressed by how clean the factory floor was kept, free of oil spills, each area clearly marked with hanging signs. Each section had its own safety board, marked green for a safe day, yellow for a day with a minor injury, red for an injury requiring hospitalization. Good thing, he thought grimly, he didn’t have one of those hanging in his house. What was the color for death?
He was looking for two men in business suits. They shouldn’t be hard to find here, among the guys (and a few women) in jeans and T-shirts and hard hats.
Periodic messages flashed on the TV monitors, a steady stream of propaganda and morale-building. THE STRATTON FAMILY CARES ABOUT YOUR FAMILY—TALK TO YOUR BENEFITS ADVISER. And: THE NEXT INSPECTOR IS OUR CUSTOMER. And then: STRATTON SALUTES JIM VEENSTRA—FENWICK PLANT—25 YEARS OF SERVICE.
A radio was blasting out Fleetwood Mac’s “Shadows” from the progressive-build station where the Symbiosis chairs were assembled. Nick had borrowed the process from Ford and pretty much forced it on the workers, who resisted any further dumbing-down of their jobs. They liked building the whole chair themselves, and who could blame them? They liked the old piecework incentives. Now, one chair was assembled every fifty-four seconds as a light cycled from green to amber to red, signaling the workers to finish up. This plant turned out ten thousand Symbiosis chairs a week.
He jogged past the in-line washer that cleaned the oil off the chair-control covers and then sent them clattering down into an orange supply tub. He couldn’t help slowing a bit to admire the robotic machine, a recent acquisition, that took sized and straightened wire stock, made five perfect bends, and then cut it, all in twelve seconds. In front of a press that made tubes out of eight-foot steel coils for the stacking chairs, a guy wearing green earplugs was asleep, obviously on break.
The floor supervisor, Tommy Pratt, saw him, threw him a wave, came hurrying up. Nick couldn’t politely avoid the guy.
“Hey! Mr. Conover!” Tommy Pratt was a small man who looked like he’d been compacted from a larger man: everything about him seemed dense. Even his hair was dense, a helmet of tight brown curls. “Haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
“Couldn’t stay away,” Nick said, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “You seen Scott McNally?”
Pratt nodded, pointed toward the far end of the floor.
“Thanks,” Nick shouted back. He gestured with his chin at an orange tub stacked high with black chair casters. An unusual sight—Scott’s new inventory-control system made sure there was never a backlog. Keeping too much inventory on hand was a cardinal sin against the religion of Lean Manufacturing. “What’s this?” he said.
“Yeah, Mr. Conover—we’ve been having a problem with, like, every other lot of those casters. You know, they’re vended parts—”
“Seriously? That’s a first. I’ll have someone call Lenny at Peerless—no, in fact, I’ll call Lenny myself.” Peerless, in St. Joseph, Michigan, had been manufacturing chair casters for Stratton since forever. Nick vaguely remembered getting a couple of phone messages from Lenny Bloch, the CEO of Peerless. “Uh, no, sir,” Pratt said. “We switched to another vendor last month. Chinese company, I think.”
“Huh?”
“The bitch of it is, sir, with Peerless, if we ever got a bad batch, which hardly ever happened by the way, he’d just truck us a new lot overnight. Now we gotta deal with container ships, you know, takes forever.”
“Who switched vendors?”
“Well, I think Brad said it was Ted Hollander who insisted on it. Brad put up a fight, but you know, the word came down, we’re cutting costs and all that.”
Ted Hollander was vice
president for control and procurement, and one of Scott McNally’s direct reports. Nick clenched his jaw.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said in a voice of corporate cordiality. “When I tell the guys to look at cost containment, some of them go a little overboard.” Nick turned to go, but Pratt touched his elbow. “Uh, Mr. Conover, one more thing. I hope I’m not driving you away here—I don’t want you to think all we’re ever gonna do is bitch at you, you know?”
“What is it?”
“The damned Slear Line. We had to shut it down twice since the shift started this morning. It’s really bottlenecking things.”
“It’s older than I am.”
“That’s just it. The service guy keeps telling us we gotta replace it. I know that’s a load of dough, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
“I trust your judgment,” Nick said blandly.
Pratt gave him a quizzical look; he’d been expecting an argument. “I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we can’t put it off that much longer.”
“I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
“Because we couldn’t get the requisition approved,” Pratt said. “Your people said it wasn’t a good time right now. Something about putting major capital expenditures on hold.”
“What do you mean, ‘my people’?”
“We put the request through last month. Word came down from Hollander a couple of weeks ago.”
“There’s no freeze on major expenditures, okay? We’re in this for the long haul.” Nick shook his head. “Some people do tend to get a little overzealous. Excuse me.”
Two men in suits and safety glasses were walking through the “supermarket,” the area where parts were stored in aisles. They were walking quickly, and one of them—Scott—was waving a hand at something as they left the floor. Nick wondered what he was saying to the other man, whom he recognized from last night.
The attorney from Chicago who was supposedly advising Scott on structuring deals. The man whom Scott, who hadn’t been on the shop floor in more than a year, was showing around in such a low-profile, almost secretive way.
There was, of course, no reason in the world for a financial engineer to tour one of Stratton’s factories. Nick thought about trying to catch up with them, but he decided not to bother.
No need to be lied to again.
79
There wasn’t any e-mail from Cassie. Not that he expected any, but he was sort of hoping there’d be something. He realized he owed her an apology, so he typed:
Where’d my little porcupine go?
—N
Then he adjusted the angle on the flat-panel monitor, opened his browser and went to Google. He typed in Randall Enright’s name, and the name of his law firm, from the card Cassie had gotten from him last night.
Abbotsford Gruendig had offices in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, among other places. “With over two thousand lawyers in 25 offices around the world, Abbotsford Gruendig provides worldwide service to national and multinational corporations, institutions and governments,” the firm’s home page boasted.
He typed in Randall Enright’s name. It appeared, as part of a list of names, on a page headed with the rubric MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS and then more boilerplate:
Our corporate lawyers are leaders in M&A, focusing on multi-jurisdictional transactions. They can advise on licence requirements and regulatory compliance and provide local legal services in over twenty jurisdictions. Our clients include many larger corporations in the telecommunications, defence and manufacturing sectors.
Blah blah blah. More legal gobbledygook.
But it told him that Scott sure as hell wasn’t getting up to speed on new accounting regulations.
He was up to something completely different.
Stephanie Alstrom, Stratton’s corporate counsel, wore a navy blue suit with a white blouse and a big heavy gold chain necklace that was probably intended to make her look more authoritative. Instead, the necklace and matching earrings diminished her, made her look tiny. Her gray hair was close-cropped, her mouth heavily lined, the bags under her eyes pronounced. She was in her fifties but looked twenty years older. Maybe that was what decades of practicing corporate law could do to you.
“Sit down,” Nick said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
“Sure.” She looked worried, but then again, she always looked worried. “You wanted to know about Abbotsford Gruendig?”
Nick nodded.
“I’m not sure what you wanted to know, exactly, but it’s a big international law firm, offices all over the world. A merger of an old-line British firm and a German one.”
“And that guy Randall Enright?”
“M and A lawyer, speaks fluent Mandarin. A real hotshot. China law specialist, spent years in their Hong Kong office until his wife forced them to move back to the States. Mind if I ask why the sudden interest?”
“The name came up, that’s all. Now, what do you know about Stratton Asia Ventures?”
She wrinkled her brow. “Not much. A subsidiary corporation Scott set up. He never ran it by my office.”
“Is that unusual?”
“We review all sorts of contracts, but we don’t go after people and insist on it. I assumed he was using local counsel in Hong Kong.”
“Check this out, would you?” Nick handed her the e-mail from Scott to Martin Lai in Hong Kong, which Scott had tried to delete.
“Ten million dollars wired to an account in Macau,” Nick said as she looked it over. “What does that tell you?”
She looked at Nick, looked down quickly. “I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“Can you think of a circumstance in which ten million dollars would be wired to a numbered account in Macau?”
She flushed. “I don’t want to be casting aspersions. I really don’t want to guess.”
“I’m asking you to, Steph.”
“Between you and me?”
“Please. Not to be repeated to anyone.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “One of two things. Macau is one of those money-laundering havens. The banks there are used for hidden accounts by the Chinese leaders, same way deposed third-world dictators use the Caymans.”
“Interesting. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
She was clearly uncomfortable. “Embezzlement—or a bribe. But this is only speculation on my part, Nick.”
“I understand.”
“And not to be repeated.”
“You’re afraid of Scott, aren’t you?”
Stephanie looked down at the table, her eyes darting back and forth, and she said nothing.
“He works for me,” Nick said.
“On paper, I guess,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Her remark felt to Nick like a blow to his solar plexus. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
“The org chart says he’s under you, Nick,” she said hastily. “That’s all I mean.”
80
“Got something for you,” Eddie said over the phone.
“I’ll meet you in the small conference room on my floor in ten minutes,” Nick said.
Eddie hesitated. “Actually, why don’t you come down to my office?”
“How come?”
“Maybe I’m tired of taking the elevator up there.”
The only thing worse than this kind of idiotic, petty game, Nick thought, was responding to it. “Fine,” he said curtly, and hung up.
“You know how much e-mail Scotty blasts out?” Eddie said, leaning back in his chair. It was a new chair, Nick noticed, one of a premium, super-limited run of Symbiosis chairs upholstered in butter-soft Gucci leather. “He’s like a one-man spam generator or something.”
“Sorry to put you out,” Nick said. He also noticed that Eddie had a new computer with the largest flat-panel monitor he’d ever seen.
“Guy’s a Levitra addict, first off. Gets it over the Internet. I guess he doesn’t want his doc to know�
��small town and all that.”
“I really don’t care.”
“He also buys sex tapes. Like How to Be a Better Lover. Enhance Your Performance. Sex for Life.”
“Goddammit,” Nick said, “that’s his business, and I don’t want to hear about it. I’m only interested in our business.”
“Our business,” Eddie said. He sat upright, reached over for a thick manila folder, and set it down in front of Nick with a thud. “Here’s something that’s very much our business. Do you even know the first fucking thing about Cassie Stadler?”
“We’re back to that?” Nick snapped. “You stay out of my goddamned e-mails, or—”
Eddie looked up suddenly, his eyes locked with Nick’s. “Or what?”
Nick shook his head, didn’t reply.
“That’s right. We’re joined at the hip now, big guy. I got job security, you understand?”
Nick’s heart thrummed, and he bit his lower lip.
“Now,” Eddie said, a lilt to his voice. “I’m not reading your fucking e-mails. I don’t need to. You forget I can watch your house on my computer.”
“Watch my house?” Nick shook his head. “Huh?”
Eddie shrugged. “Your security cameras transmit over the Internet to the company server, you know that. I can see who’s coming and going. And I can see this babe coming and going a lot.”
“You do not have permission to spy on me, you hear me?”
“Couple of weeks ago you were begging for my help. Someday soon you’ll thank me. You know this chick spent eight months in a psycho ward?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Only it was six months, and it wasn’t a ‘psycho ward.’ She was hospitalized for depression after a bunch of college friends of hers were killed in an accident. So what?”
“You know that for the last six years, there’s no record of any FICA payments on this broad? Meaning that she didn’t have a job? Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“I’m not hiring her to be vice president of human resources. In fact, I’m not hiring her at all. She’s been a yoga teacher. How many yoga teachers make regular Social Security payments, anyway?”
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