He looked like a prince of darkness, standing at the gate in a purple T-shirt, a fur coat, the fingernails of his gun hand-painted in green and blue. I smiled watching him, thinking that capitalism had surely entered its most picturesque phase.
4.
The hate in the staff canteen was as palpable as the humidity outside. It buzzed and stung, finding weak spots in my carefully prepared defences. We had played the videotape with the chairman’s speech to the employees but it did nothing to dilute the feelings of the office staff who behaved like a subject race.
The girls giggled rudely. The men glowered, pretending to misunderstand the nature of the orders we gave them. I felt that their threat might, at any instant, become physical and an attack be made. Barto, more agitated than usual, produced the 45. He was laughed at. He stood there aghast, no longer feeling as cool as he would have liked.
It was a particularly bad start. I requested the sales, marketing and production managers to escort me to my new office where we could discuss their futures.
When I left the canteen I was burning with a quiet rage. My hands were wet. My stomach hurt. I was more than a little frightened. I began to understand why men raze villages and annihilate whole populations. The 22 under my arm nagged at me, producing feelings that were intense, unnameable, and not totally unpleasurable.
5.
I fed on my fear and used it to effect. It was my strength. It hardened me and kept my mind sharp and clear. It gave me the confidence of cornered men. It made sleep almost impossible.
We worked from the old general manager’s office, the brown smudge of his suicide an unpleasant reminder of the possibility of failure. We found the floor more convenient than the desk and spread papers across it as we attempted to piece the mess together.
It became obvious very early that the marketing manager was a fool. His understanding of conditions in the market place was minimal. His foolishly optimistic report had been a major contributing factor in the present state of affairs.
He had taken too many store buyers to too many lunches. It must have been a little awkward for the buyers to tell him they weren’t taking any more of his products.
It was also difficult for me to tell him that he could not continue as marketing manager. He was large and weak and watery. He had the softness of those who lie long hours in hot baths before dressing carefully in tailormade suits. He could not adjust to me. He could not think of me as a threat, merely as someone who needed a wash. When I dismissed him he did not understand. He returned to his office the next day and continued as usual.
When you kill flathead you put a knife in their foreheads. Their eyes roll and sometimes pop out. The marketing manager reacted in a similar manner when it occurred to him that he was being fired. His mouth opened wide with shock and I was reminded of a flathead when I looked at his eyes.
As with the fish, I found it necessary not to think too much about what I was doing. I consoled myself with the knowledge that there would have been no job for him if we had not arrived. He had been thorough enough to have destroyed any hope of his own survival. He had covered it from every angle.
With the marketing manager’s departure I discovered a whole filing cabinet full of documents that he had withheld from me. As I examined them I felt like a surgeon who comes to remove a small growth and finds a body riddled with secondary cancers. I had promised the board of directors things which, given all the available information, had seemed reasonable at the time. But here the gap between the diseased body and my promises of glowing health seemed an inseparable gulf.
I began to feel that I might be less remarkable than the glorious picture the board had of me. When I had presented my credentials and broad methods to them I had felt myself to be quite glamorous, a superior being who could succeed where they and their underlings had failed. It was a good picture. I preened myself before it as if it were a mirror.
I claimed to despise the board but I didn’t want that mirror taken away from me. It was very important that they hold me in high esteem.
Incensed by the appalling news we found in marketing, we recalled the sales force and threatened them with violence and torture if they did not succeed. I am thin and not particularly strong but I had a gun and I had the genuine craziness of a man who will do anything to get what he wants. Anger filled me like electricity. My fingertips were full of it. They felt so tight and tense I couldn’t keep them still. Bart stood smoking a joint and waving the Colt around the office with the most carefree abandon, sighting down the barrel at first one head and then another. We spoke to them quietly and politely about the sales targets we expected them to meet in the coming year.
Whether through accident or design Bart.let off a shot into the ceiling and the sales manager involuntarily wet his pants. His staff laughed out loud at his misfortune. I thought how ugly they looked with their big cufflinks and silly grins.
It was not the ideal way to do business, but the times were hard, other job opportunities non-existent, and the competition in the trade intense. Our products had been de-listed by five major chains and were in danger of being kicked out of another three. Only our cheapest lines survived, and these-frozen dinners of exceptionally low quality and price-would have to spearhead our return to the market. They were cheap and filling and there were a lot of people who needed cheap filling meals.
I gave Bart control of the marketing function and watched him nervously like a driver who takes his hands from the wheel but is ready to take it back at any serious deviation. Apart from twelve months as a trainee product manager with Procter and Gamble, Bart’s previous experience had been totally in advertising agencies. There was really nothing but my intuitive judgement to say that he’d be a success in this new role.
I needn’t have worried. He had a business brain the like of which is rarely seen, as cool and clean as stainless steel and totally without compassion. It was Bart who dumped two warehouses full of frozen food straight into the river, thus clearing a serious bottleneck in the system and creating space for products that could actually be sold. He budgeted for the $200 fine and spent another $200 on the finest cocaine to celebrate with. I approved these expenses without question. The goods had been sitting in the warehouse for two years and had been written down in value by a thoughtful accountant who seemed the only person to have anticipated the company’s present plight.
Bart doubled the advertising budget, a move which terrified me but which I approved. He planned to drop advertising altogether in the second half and plough an equivalent amount into promotions. It was pressure-cooked marketing. It was unorthodox and expensive but it was the sort of brutal tactic that could be necessary for our success.
Bart pursued the practice of business with the logic of an abstract artist. Things were, for him, problems of form, colour and design. He pursued cool acts with relentless enthusiasm.
From my office I watched him walk across the wide bitumen apron to fire the production manager. His hair was now dyed a henna red, and his cowboy boots made his out-turned toes look curiously elegant. He walked as casually as a man who has run out of cigarette papers taking a stroll to a corner shop.
6.
The typists had stopped staring at us and were actually managing to get some work done. However I still continued to have trouble with my secretary. She was nearly forty-five, matronly in style, and as the secretary to the most senior executive, she was the leader of the others. She was pursuing some guerrilla war of her own, expressing her distaste for me in a hundred little ways which were almost impossible to confront directly.