A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

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.