A Calculated Risk Page 5

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “Are you planning to knock over the Federal Reserve Bank?”

  I had no idea how to reply. Though he’d picked the wrong bank, what I’d planned to do now seemed—in the cold, harsh light of reality—no more than the petulant whim of a child. What in God’s name was I thinking of? There was silence on the phone; I couldn’t hear even the sound of breathing.

  “I wasn’t planning on stealing any of their money,” I muttered at last.

  “No?”

  “No.” I paused. “I was only going to borrow some of it for a while.”

  “The Federal Reserve Bank does not lend money—except to other banks,” he said. “Are you a bank?”

  “I wasn’t planning to take out a loan,” I admitted. My lips were against the mouthpiece of the phone, my head pressed against the windowpane. I closed my eyes and took another big swig of brandy.

  “I see,” said Tor at last. “Well, perhaps we should discuss this further in the morning—when we’re all a little fresher.”

  “Are you upset? Are you morally indignant?” I asked.

  “No. I am not upset—nor morally indignant,” he assured me.

  “Well, what are you, then?”

  After a pause, he said in a strange, detached voice, “I am curious.”

  “Curious? About what? I’ve told you what I’m doing,” I said.

  “Yes, you certainly have,” he agreed. “But I want to see your plan.”

  “My plan? What on earth for?” I was truly alarmed.

  “I’m an old hand, my dear. Who knows? Perhaps I might improve upon it. With that—good night.”

  And we hung up.

  I lit a cigarette, and stared out at the city for a very long time. Then I crushed it out and made my way through the maze of orchids toward the bedroom. The emotions I was wrestling with were completely unfamiliar to me—I couldn’t have even named them.

  But I would go to New York that weekend. Of that, I was certain.

  THE MOTIVE

  It is a matter of indifference to the man of large affairs whether the disturbances which his transactions set up in the industrial system help or hinder the system at large, except in so far as he has ulterior ends to serve. But most of the captains of modern industry have such ulterior ends.

  —Thorstein Veblen,

  THE MACHINE AGE

  I never desired wealth for its own account, but for the accomplishment of some ulterior purpose.

  —Thomas Mellon

  I never wondered what the outcome might have been had Tor not phoned that night. From the moment he’d entered my life, I’d felt myself losing control. He wanted it to seem that I was the one who’d brought about those changes—that he was a mere observer—but I knew computers weren’t enough for him; he wanted to change reality. My reality. That’s what bothered me.

  The first change had taken place by the very next morning, when I stood in the steamy bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I always squeezed fresh juice and ground some coffee beans so I could have a strong citrus-java infusion before facing myself in the mirror. The older you get, the wiser it is to take such precautions. But this morning, the face that looked back at me from the clear space I’d wiped in the mirror told me what a liar I’d been. It was the face of a born adventuress.

  How cleverly I’d concealed this from myself. After ten years of frustration and bitterness—of battling with the System until I was blue in the face, just to do a decent day’s job—I suddenly looked forward to going to work! I felt cheerful, and ten years younger, and I knew why: if Tor would really help me, as last night he’d said he would, I could pull off this setup of my hypocritical fellow bankers in style. I whistled a few bars of the “Ride of the Valkyries,” threw on my clothes, and headed for the office.

  I must confess that although my boss, Kiwi, had a reputation for cheerful treachery and obdurate ladder climbing, my own reputation in some circles was worse. The rumor that I ran my department like a galley ship was a great exaggeration; it was only that I knew what motivated computer people. And what happened that morning proved my point.

  Individuals who work with computers are not ordinary human beings. Psychologists haven’t scratched the surface of the breed—nor could they—because they start from the premise that everyone has basic primal needs like sleep, food, and human warmth. The sort of individual I’m describing does not have such needs. He’s known within the industry as a teckie.

  The teckie relates to computers more closely than to people. He does his best work at night, when all but nocturnal beasts of prey have gone to sleep. He eats little, subsisting essentially on junk food. He never sees daylight or breathes air, flourishing instead in artificial lighting and climate control. Should he marry and breed—which is rare—he classifies his children by whether they are analog or digital. He can be arrogant, unruly, ungovernable, and antisocial. I knew all about teckies, because I was one myself. And I considered teckie traits—from the evolutionary standpoint—to be assets, rather than liabilities.

  Every teckie at the bank knew of my reputation; they came to me from far and wide, because they knew I’d pay them fairly and work them to death. They hankered after tight schedules, long hours, and problems so tough they’d make Einstein grow pale and God scratch his head. Since I always tried to deliver this sort of environment to them, it was rumored that I had balls—a colloquial teckie expression signifying moxie.

  That morning, my reputation paid off: I arrived to find a large packet on my desk from the personnel director. The packet was full of résumés from technicians throughout the bank, with a cheerful little note from the director himself:

  Dear Verity—I hadn’t realized you were recruiting. The personnel director is always the last to know.

  The personnel director might be the last to know, but the grapevine was always the first. I hadn’t posted any open positions—my proposal had only been printed and mailed last night—and there were résumés in this packet from some of the most heavy-duty teckies at the bank, all applying for my new project: the quality circle to implement Theory Z. This meant, of course, that the grapevine knew something I didn’t—until just now: that the Managing Committee had read my proposal, and they’d liked it. They were going to bite.

  Someone else was on the verge of biting: Kiwi had been frothing at the mouth outside my office as Pavel held him at bay. I’d been locked up all day, interviewing applicants for the quality circle as soon as I got my official approval, and I’d already hired Tavish—one of the top technicians at the bank—over his boss’s heated objections. But before I confronted Kiwi on the subject of going over his head, there was something else I needed to deal with: my forthcoming trip to New York.

  First thing that morning, I’d sent Kiwi the papers he had to sign, hoping that without noticing, he’d approve my travel plans. I had my own budget for such trips, and it was usually just a formality for him to initial one. Ordinarily, Kiwi loved nothing better than to pack me off so he could run around supervising my staff. He had few “direct reports” of his own—just a handful of managers who knew their jobs and considered him an unnecessary obstacle to doing them. When I was gone, my own staff hid out in the latrines to avoid him.

  “What did Mr. Willingly want?” I asked Pavel as I peeked out of my office. “Were those my plane tickets he was waving around out here? Has he signed them yet?”

  “Who ever knows what he wants?” Pavel moaned. “He doesn’t even know, himself. He doesn’t have enough to keep him busy; you should learn to delegate upward, and keep him off our backs. ‘Kiss-it Willingly the Turd’—that’s what we call him in the secretarial lounge. Everyone empathizes with you, having to work—”

  “Pavel, I asked you a question,” I said, my voice unusually brittle. Pavel glanced up at me in surprise. He rearranged the pencils on his desk.

  “His Majesty wants to see you in his office at once,” he told me. “Now. Yesterday. The day before yesterday. Something
about Tavish—that guy you just interviewed—and his boss, that fish person.”

  The boss over whose objections I had just hired Tavish was a pompous Prussian named Peter-Paul Karp. I decided I’d better deal with this, and left Pavel sulking at his desk.

  Kiwi’s office, across the floor from mine, was reached by threading the maze. His secretary waved me in without looking up from her typing. I was braced for the worst—but I was in for a surprise.

  “Ah, Banks!” he greeted me, breathing deeply, as if he’d just come from a brisk walk in a large meadow. My defenses went up at once. “Good news! Good news! But first—let me give you your paperwork—I’ve signed everything. So you’re off to New York at the weekend, are you? And about to launch a new project as well—so I hear.” He handed me the travel file.

  “As a matter of fact, I was just on my way to discuss it with you—”

  “And a high-visibility project, too, so they tell me. I want you to know I’m here to help, Banks, my door is always open. As Ben Franklin said—‘We must all hang together or we’ll all hang separately.’ And Ben Franklin was right.” He shot me a glance.

  Yep, that Ben Franklin sure was some fellow.

  What this meant was that I’d been right to jump the gun. The Managing Committee had approved and funded an even larger proposal than the one Kiwi had shot down. His traitorous kibosh of my Fed job had gotten him nowhere. He couldn’t cancel this project and rap my knuckles. Nor could he take credit for it, since I’d made sure he didn’t even have a copy of it to read. So he was going to try to stick his nose into it—but I could field those attempts, as I had with others in the past.

  Before I could pat myself on the back for a game well played, he added, “So you can imagine my surprise, when you didn’t share with me the recruitment problems you’ve been having, before your project is even off first base.” Recruitment problems? “Our friend Karp, down in foreign exchange systems, just rang me up. Seems he doesn’t want this”—he consulted his desk pad—“this ‘Tavish’ to come across the fence. That right?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, silently cursing Karp for getting Kiwi into the problem, “it only happened a moment ago. Karp’s been unreasonably obstinate about it all.”

  “So you told him he could call Lawrence if he didn’t like it—that right?”

  I nodded glumly. Lawrence was Kiwi’s boss—one of the highest-level executives at the Bank of the World, and head of the Managing Committee. I’d tried that ploy only because I knew Karp would never do it. Nobody ever called Lawrence—he called you. And if he did, you usually wished he’d never found a reason to look up your number.

  “We seem to be getting off on the wrong foot with this project,” Kiwi was saying. “We don’t want to upset Lawrence with our petty little staffing squabbles, do we? I told Karp we’d talk turkey, you and I, and find some solution. If this chap Tavish is so indispensable to Karp’s work down there, do we need to pry him away? Besides, Karp claims Tavish owes him a favor.”

  This put me in a real bind. The biggest problem with Theory Z was that, by definition, a quality circle functioned without a manager. I could select members for the team, but once established, they would operate behind closed doors—without my involvement. Therefore, I needed an ally within the group—one who was strong enough technically to garner respect from the others, but still do things my way. Tavish was the only one I could think of who’d do all that and keep Kiwi’s hands out of the cookie jar. I could hardly use that as a justification to Kiwi, however.

  But something was bothering me about Kiwi’s attitude. He was being too reasonable—not to mention cheerful. It seemed to me that this Karp business was a red herring. I decided to find out what lay beneath the surface.

  “What was the good news you were talking about, when I first came in?” I asked.

  “Well—I’m not supposed to tell anyone.…” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

  Bingo. I went over to close the door, then took a seat opposite him. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, leaning forward, “but you know I can keep a secret.”

  “This is strictly between us,” he said, glancing about as if the walls were bugged. “Guess where I’m dining tonight?”

  I rattled off the name of every posh restaurant I could think of in town. Each time he shook his head in the negative, his grin grew broader. The light was beginning to dawn, though I hoped I was mistaken.

  “It’s more exclusive than those; a private club,” he said.

  I sat there, numb, as the anger inside began to build to rage. Kiwi was so excited, he’d forgotten what he had done to me only two nights before, by knocking the pins out of my career advancement. I tried to prepare an expression that would fall somewhere between amazement and enthusiasm, but I felt my true feelings setting like plaster across my face.

  “The Vagabond Club!” he whispered, his voice trembling with hysterical joy. “Lawrence is taking me!”

  The Vagabond Club was Kiwi’s most cherished fantasy, as everyone knew. He would have slashed his wrists if he thought that, in the hereafter, such a sacrifice would gain him entry to the hallowed halls of the Vagabond Club.

  In San Francisco, a city that boasted more private, male-only clubs than any other in America, the Vagabond Club was a luminary. It was neither the oldest men’s club in the city nor the most exclusive. But more high-powered deals were cut within the ivy-covered walls of the Vagabond Club than in all the boardrooms of all the banks in America put together. It infuriated me that when women had finally gotten the vote, a paycheck, and a seat at the round table, they’d moved the whole game behind closed doors. In fact, the bank paid for executive membership in such clubs, whose policy was to treat other executives (myself, for instance) like scullery maids to the stars. And they were using shareholders’ money to do it! At the Vagabond Club, there were guards posted outside the door, to ensure that no woman was permitted to enter and sully the conversation—or grab a piece of the pie. Mother Nature still called the shots. Brains were not the right equipment to join this coven.

  I complimented Kiwi on his luck, which was due to an inarguable asset: he was a man.

  “Since Lawrence is recommending me for membership,” Kiwi was gushing on, breathless as a schoolgirl, “I can’t very well upset him. Couldn’t you throw Karp some sort of bone till this blows over? If you must have this Tavish, then find Karp another body that will do as well. I leave it to you, Banks; you’re a good man—woman, that is. I’ll phone and tell him we’ve found a mystery candidate. Someone wonderful. I leave it to you to ferret out who it will be.”

  I left Kiwi’s office clutching my papers for New York. I felt fortunate to have come out as well as I had. After all, I’d be able to hang on to Tavish for at least another day—till I came up with a plan to keep him—and by Friday I’d be in the Big Apple. Once I had Tor on my side, there wasn’t much that could stop me. And tossing around a few million dollars, even if only for a short time, would assuage the complaints of any disgruntled employee.

  At least, so I thought at the time.

  I’d invited Tavish to dine with me that night at my own club—Le Club, my favorite restaurant in San Francisco. If I were leaving for New York by the weekend, I wanted the quality circle in full operation before then. And I knew exactly what they had to do.

  Tavish—an honorable, forthright teckie—might be squeamish about a few things I had in mind. On the other hand, if I didn’t give him some guidelines, they’d still be looking under the wrong rocks when I returned. I was only trying to be helpful. After all, they’d be breaking into the very systems I had managed for the last ten years.

  When I pulled up before the restaurant, I saw Tavish loitering under the dark green canopy. He was wearing a suit, necktie, and sneakers. His shoulder-length blond hair had been freshly trimmed, making him look nearly as old as his twenty-two years.

  “Gee, I hope you didn’t buy that suit just for dinner tonight,” I told him when I’d parked
and come down the block. “Where’s your T-shirt? I thought it was your only uniform.”

  “I’m wearing it beneath my dress shirt, like Superman,” he told me. “I feel it gives me a sort of closet panache.”

  Though Tavish might have seemed boyish and ingenuous, he’d cut his teckie teeth on some impressive number crunchers.

  The oddity of the data-processing business is that many teckies, regardless of their age, earn more than most powerful executives do. According to the figures in Tavish’s file, he had exceeded my current income when he was barely eighteen. So impressive were his credentials that I wondered why he was here at the bank working for a bozo like Karp; he could write his own ticket thirty miles away, down in Silicon Valley. I wanted to know more about what did motivate Tavish; that’s why I’d asked him to dinner. And I didn’t wait all five courses to get to the point.

  “I like this place,” Tavish said half an hour later, surveying the warm, cozy room where we were seated in a deep green velvet banquette. The waiters were delivering a beautifully prepared meal and replenishing our champagne in unobtrusive silence. “And I’m happy to have the chance to thank you, for getting me out of the clutches of Karp.”

  “I’m afraid you’re not quite out yet,” I told him, following my blanquette de veau with some terrific pouilly-fuissé. “Your pal Peter-Paul phoned Kiwi today—just after I thought I’d hired you—and said the deal’s off. In a sense, I thought this might be your farewell dinner; he seems to think you’ll see things his way. Says you owe him some sort of favor.”

  “I owe him, all right,” Tavish said grimly, “but not what he thinks. It’s no secret, at least not with you. I’ve worked with Karp before, you see, down in the peninsula. He hired me to develop copyrighted software that his firm would market. I’d get fifty percent of the royalties—or so he claimed—and something else that I wanted even more.”