“It would be good for Ethan to be taken away from them and placed in foster care.”
“Jason.”
“Anyway, I don’t have much time to hang out with him, you know that.”
“I know.”
“Well, I’m glad she’s coming.” Without Craig.
Kurt called me on my cell phone as I was drifting off to sleep.
“How long does this trade show go on?” he asked.
“The one at Bayside?”
“Right. The one your friends from Atlanta are attending.”
“Two more days. Why?”
“I came across something interesting. Called in some favors with an SF guy in Marietta, Georgia, who knows people in Atlanta.”
“Interesting how?”
“Let’s talk in the morning when I have something more concrete.”
In the morning, they did an amnio on Kate to make sure everything was okay. The nurse asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby, and Kate quickly said no, so the nurse said they’d send the results without mentioning sex.
Then I signed Kate out of the hospital, and one of the nurses brought her down to the main entrance in a wheelchair and I drove her home. I skipped my morning workout and instead spent a few hours being a good husband, getting her set up in bed with a commode right next to her so she wouldn’t have to get up to relieve herself. I made sure the phone and the TV remote were within reach on the bedside table. I set up one of those Airport gizmos, which wasn’t as hard as I feared, so she could easily use her laptop in bed, lying on her side. I put a tall stack of books on the table too. For Christmas last year I’d bought her a hardcover set of Russian novels in a “hot new translation,” as Kate put it. Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and The Double and The Gambler, and a bunch more. One of them had been an Oprah Book Club selection. Her idea, obviously; to me, that’s worse than getting socks for Christmas. She often talked about how she wished she had time to read all of Dostoyevsky. Now was her chance. She’d grabbed The Brothers Karamazov greedily and dived right in.
I arrived at the office late, and among my many voice-mail messages was one from Kurt inviting me to lunch. I called him back and said, “Thanks, man, but I’m just going to grab a sandwich and work at my desk. You know, the old crumbs-in-the-keyboard-”
“I’ve made reservations at a really nice Japanese restaurant in Boston,” Kurt interrupted. “One o’clock.”
I didn’t even know Kurt liked Japanese food, and I didn’t quite get his insistence. “Another time would be great.”
“This is not optional,” Kurt said. “We’ve had a lucky break. Meet me at Kansai at one.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“That’s okay. I’m in the city already. Took the morning off work.”
I’d worked for a Japanese-owned company for years, but I’d never really gotten into Japanese food. Too healthy, maybe. Too minimalist.
“So what’s this about?” I said.
“You’ll see. Are you hungry?”
“Not so much.”
“Me either. No worries.”
We were shown to a low black-lacquered table where we had to remove our shoes and sit on tatami mats on the floor. There was a hot plate on the table with a big bowl on it boiling away, a big hunk of kelp floating in some murky water.
“Need to use the bathroom?” he said.
“No, thanks, Dad.”
“Why don’t you anyway?”
“This going to be a long lunch?”
“Men’s room is down the hall on the left. But you might want to keep going down the row to the last booth on your right.”
“And?”
“Go ahead.”
I shrugged and went down the hall to the last booth on the right. A rice-paper screen provided privacy, but by shifting over a few inches I was able to see in at an angle.
What I saw in there almost took the top of my head off.
Lorna Evers, the Deputy Procurement Officer for the City of Atlanta, was enjoying a romantic luncheon with a man with silver anchorman hair and deep-set eyes. Steve Bingham, the CFO of AirView Systems.
The company that had just won the Atlanta airport contract that we should have gotten.
They were sitting next to each other on one side of the table, sucking face, and Lorna’s hand was expertly kneading the man’s crotch. On the table in front of them, untouched, was a platter of paper-thin, blood-red slices of raw beef.
It took a lot of willpower to keep from knocking over the shoji screen and telling Lorna Evers what I thought of her procurement process. I went back to our table.
Kurt watched me approach, eyebrows raised.
“How’d you know?” I asked, stony.
“Told you, I know a guy in Marietta. Who knows a P.I. in Atlanta. Who deals a lot with the City of Atlanta. So I did a little prep work in Lorna’s hotel room.”
“Goddammit. She’s the goddamned deputy procurement officer. The city’s got to have all kinds of laws against this.”
“Code of ethics, sections 2-812 and 2-813,” Kurt said. “Thought you’d want to know some specifics. Miss Lorna can not only lose her job but also get locked up for six months. I also don’t think her husband would be too happy about it.”
“She’s married.”
“So is Steve Bingham. Steve has five kids too.”
I stood up. “Excuse me. I want to say hi to Lorna.”
I made my way back to her booth and barged right in to the gap between the rice-paper screens. The two were going at it hot and heavy, and they looked up, embarrassed.
“Oh, hey, Lorna,” I said. “Great place, huh?”
“J-Jason?”
“I hear the hand roll’s excellent.”
“You-what are you-?”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” I said. “Steve, right? Steve Bingham, from AirView? I think we met at TechComm.”
Steve Bingham’s deep crimson blush contrasted interestingly with his silver hair. He crossed his legs to conceal the obvious bulge in his trousers. “We’ve met?” he said, and cleared his throat.
“TechComm can be a zoo,” I said. “You meet so many people. But you two are obviously well acquainted.”
“Jason-” Lorna said in a pleading tone.
“Awful sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I’ll call you on your cell later on.” And I gave her a little wink.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to call Lorna. She called me an hour or so later. She’d found some “discrepancies” in AirView’s bid, she said, and had decided to award the contract to me.
I should have been elated, but instead I felt sullied. This was not how I’d hoped to win the biggest deal in my career.
The Hardygram came a few minutes after I e-mailed him the good news, sent from his BlackBerry. In all caps, he wrote:
YOU DID IT!
He called shortly thereafter, almost giddy with excitement, to tell me that he was almost certain I’d saved our division from the chopping block.
“Great,” I said. “I’m glad.”
“Boy, are you low-key about this,” Hardy said, his voice booming. “You’re a modest fellow, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Well, the press release is going out over the Internet any minute now. Hedge fund managers are starting to look at Entronics stock differently now. They know what a big deal this is. Even if you don’t.”
I stopped home to change and check on Kate. She was lying on her side in bed, tapping away on her laptop. She was researching placenta previa, too, but apparently she’d only found the scary websites. I told her about the less scary ones, and how the nurse had said that if she took it easy everything would probably be okay.
She nodded, considering. “I’m not worried,” she said. “You’re right. If you go by the odds, I’ll be fine.” She placed a hand on her belly. “And baby’ll be fine too.”