The Consultant (30 page)

Patoff was not reasonable, however. Nothing about this situation was reasonable, and Matthews could not shake the feeling that it would be dangerous for him to talk about the consultant behind his back.  

Rachel had already fallen back asleep, and he took a long hot shower, got dressed, made himself some strong coffee for breakfast, and headed to the office.  

Only three of the Board members showed up for the meeting, and each of them looked the way he felt. Pale, shaky, with bags under their eyes, they filed into the conference room as though they were attending their mothers’ funerals. Their newest member, Daniel Lu, was nowhere to be seen, and when Matthews asked if anyone knew whether he was coming or what had happened to him, the others were conspicuously silent. Hogarth Paquenlo’s hand was trembling as he picked up his glass of water and took a drink. It seemed obvious that they had encountered the consultant, but how that had happened, or what Patoff had said to them, remained a mystery. He wanted to ask, but was afraid to do so and decided for the moment to go through the motions of conducting a regular board meeting.  

“Should we give thanks to Ralph?” Matthews said before they started, but the joke fell flat, and he was immediately sorry he’d said it. Just referencing the consultant brought the man further into the room than he already was, and made it that much more difficult for Matthews to try and coax a little courage out of the cowed men to either side of him.  

There was an agenda, and he followed it for the first ten minutes, but he was distracted and the other three men were even less engaged than he was. Finally, he put down the paper in his hand. “If no one else is going to address the elephant in the room, then I am.” He took a deep breath. “We made a huge mistake hiring BFG, and I’m truly sorry that I recommended them.”  

“I make a motion that this meeting be adjourned,” Mitchell Lockhart said quickly. His usual gruff and overbearing manner was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his voice was quavering, his trembling hands nervous.  

“Seconded,” Don Chase hurriedly responded.  

“We need to talk about this,” Matthews insisted.  

Lockhart turned on him. “It
is
your fault,” he said. “If you hadn’t pushed us to…” He trailed off, eyes darting to the security camera mounted in the corner of the room.  

“I think we should vote to terminate the contract,” Matthews said. “We can pay them off if we have to, but I think it would be better than going on the way we are now.”  

“There’s been a second,” Lockhart announced. “All those in favor of adjourning, say ‘Aye.’”  

“Aye!” all three said in unison.  

“What happened to you?” Matthews asked, looking at them.  

Lockhart fixed him with haunted eyes, an expression mirrored in those of his colleagues. “It’s your fault,” he said, and, grabbing his papers, hurried from the room.  

Matthews stood as the rest of the Board departed rapidly. Alone in the room, he could not help wondering what exactly the consultant had said or done to the men to make them so skittish.  

No, not skittish.  

Terrified.  

He had never seen anyone so bone-deep frightened, and their fear made him afraid. It was not as if he wasn’t scared already, but seeing the normally rough and loutish Lockhart pale and shaking, cowering at the mention of Patoff’s name, left Matthews feeling both fearful and helpless. This was his company, but he was no longer in charge of it. Formerly a lion proudly at the head of a pack, he was now a mouse scurrying alongside, trying not to draw attention to himself. He had hoped to enlist the support of the Board in ousting BFG. But whereas they’d previously been slow to see any sign of problems and had sided with Patoff against him, now they were petrified by Patoff, too intimidated to even
think
about defiance.  

He could see no way out of this.  

Distracted, taking no notice of the employees he passed, Matthews left the conference room and took an elevator to the top floor. Walking to his office at the end of the hall, he told Diane to hold all his calls and let no one in. He closed the door behind him, sat down at his glass-topped desk and swiveled around in his chair to gaze at the campus far below, something that always cleared his mind and helped him think. Frowning, he suddenly pivoted back around. He’d seen something on his desk, something in his peripheral vision that had not immediately registered.  

A snow globe.  

Sure enough, the object sat unobtrusively atop a closed ledger on the left side of the desk as though it was nothing more than a paperweight that had always been in that spot. He leaned forward to look at it more closely. The base was brass, an ornately carved stand with clawed feet at each corner of a rococo square, on top of which sat a glass sphere depicting a scene of violent depravity. Matthews picked up the globe, the movement causing a ripple of red glitter at the bottom that could have symbolized either a river of lava or a tide of blood. Peering within the watery world, he saw a naked man strangling a Lady Godiva-esque woman on a miniature horse as he entered the horse from behind. In back of him, another woman, sitting on a stool made of severed body parts, had her face buried in his buttocks.  

Grimacing, he shook the globe. The red glitter dispersed through the water, making droplets of blood that fell upon the participants.  

He put the object down. How had it gotten here? He knew
who
had brought it here, but he did not know when or how. In his mind, he saw Regus Patoff sneaking into the building in the middle of the night and making his way up here in complete blackness, without the aid of flashlight, his eyes glowing in the dark like a cat’s.  

Matthews scanned the room. His office was one of the few places left that was not under constant observation by security cameras, and for once he wished that the room
was
monitored. He would like to be able to see what had happened, and would like to have video proof of Patoff’s incursion into his private domain, something that he might be able to use against him.  

The door suddenly swung open of its own accord, bringing with it a tangible and instantaneous drop in temperature. Patoff strode into the office, throwing a paper-clipped stack of papers down on his desk. “Sign these,” he ordered.  

Feigning a calm he did not feel, Matthews picked up the papers, glancing at the top sheet as he did so. “What are they?”  

“None of your concern,” the consultant said dismissively. “Sign them.”  

“I’m not—”  

“
Sign
them.”  

Matthews signed. He felt weak and pathetic as he flipped each page and found the blank line on which he was to affix his signature. Knowing that it made no difference, he didn’t even bother to read what he was signing, because he was fully aware that despite any objections he might have, he would only end up being bullied into doing exactly what he was doing now. It left him more dignity if he signed without reading, pretending this was one of those meaningless formalities in which an underling places inconsequential documents before him that require rote signatures.  

He finished, handing the papers back. “Anything else?”  

Patoff smiled. “As a matter of fact, there is. Based on our preliminary findings, we’ve compiled a list of the six most inessential employees, those who will definitely not be needed after the restructuring. Ordinarily, they would be part of the first round of layoffs, but thanks to early identification, we have the opportunity of pressuring them to quit. This will save us money—”  

“I’m not pressuring anyone to quit,” Matthews said, gaining back some of his self-assurance. “These are loyal workers. They deserve to at least be able to collect unemployment—”  

“They don’t deserve
shit.
” Patoff glared at him. “Weak-minded, weak-willed losers who’ve been dragging this company down. They deserve to be dropped in the ocean without a lifejacket.”  

“I’m not going to do that to any of my workers. In fact, I’m going to authorize generous severance packages for anyone who has to be let go.”  

Without even bothering to respond, as if Matthews had said nothing and was not even there, the consultant turned and walked out of the office. The door closed behind him,
slammed
shut, though Patoff had neither touched it nor looked at it. Matthews exhaled deeply, a feeling of relief flooding through him now that Patoff was gone. He practically collapsed in his chair, leaning back in it and swiveling around to face the window. Below, a man and woman walked along the sidewalk through the campus, deep in discussion. He could not see who they were from this height, but he felt protective of them just the same. It was his responsibility to remain strong and get his company through this nightmare. BFG would leave eventually, and in the interim, he needed to shield his workers from Patoff and his minions to the best of his ability. He’d done a crappy job so far, and it was high time that he stepped up to the plate.  

He turned back around—and all of his confidence disappeared. There were
two
snow globes on his desk now, though there was no way that could possibly be. Gingerly, he picked up the new one. Inside the glass was a small perfect replica of his own head, with the bottom of his neck red and ragged, as though it had been chopped off with a blunt hatchet.  

Was this supposed to be a warning? A threat?  

He didn’t know, but the resurgence of resolve that he’d felt had disappeared completely, and he spent the rest of the day locked in his office, praying that the doors would not fly open and Patoff would not return.  

**** 

He and Rachel were supposed to meet their friends the Sternhagens at Mr. Chow for dinner, but Matthews wasn’t in the mood, and he begged off, claiming that he had extra work he needed to complete. To reinforce the lie, he parked himself in front of his computer all evening. He told Rachel that she could go—was
hoping
she would go—but she called the Sternhagens and rescheduled, leaving him to keep up his charade until it was time for bed.  

Still, it was better than going out. He didn’t feel like seeing people tonight, was not sure he would be able to make small talk and pretend that everything was okay, and it was far safer to just stay home and hide.  

He called it quits around ten o’clock, having spent the past three hours doing nothing, staring at his email queue and periodically refreshing the page, trying not to look at the steadily increasing number of messages in his inbox.  

Rachel was in bed, watching the Food Network or the Cooking Channel or one of those other useless cable stations she liked so much. Bobby Flay was visiting a little restaurant called Rudell’s Smokehouse in the picturesque seaside town of Cayucos on California’s central coast, raving about the smoked albacore tacos. Green rolling hills rose up behind the town, and in front of it the ocean was as blue as the sky. That was where Matthews wished he was right now, rather than here in grimy dog-eat-dog Los Angeles, and it made him wonder if maybe it was time to retire, to pack it in and spend whatever years he had left travelling, relaxing and enjoying life. Did he really have the same fire in his belly now that he did twenty years ago? Probably not, and while he loved his company and was proud of how it had grown, the desire to spend all day every day on CompWare business had definitely lessened.  

Who was he kidding? He wasn’t tired. He was scared, afraid to work at his own company, afraid of the consultants he had hired, afraid, afraid, afraid…  

“You’re quiet tonight,” Rachel observed.  

“Long day,” he said.  

“You should take some time off.”  

“I was just thinking the same thing,” he told her.  

In the old days, hearing that he’d had a long day, she would have relieved his pressure with some generously proffered oral sex, but now she simply gave him a quick peck on the cheek and rolled over to sleep. He lay where he was, listening to the television, staring up at the flickering blue light on the ceiling and wondering when exactly his life had gone off track.  

He was almost asleep, in that hazy twilight existence where words being spoken by characters on TV in the fading real world were being incorporated into his encroaching dreamlife, when he was awakened by knocking at the front door. He sat up groggily, swung his legs off the bed, and suddenly realized that he shouldn’t be
able
to hear any knocking up here. Such a thing wasn’t possible. Sound didn’t carry that way, from the front door to a bedroom on the opposite side of the house.  

The noise came again, and it sounded like someone with a sledgehammer was trying to break down a wall.  

Goose bumps popped up on the back of his neck, raced down his arms.  

“What’s that?” Rachel muttered, only half-awake.  

“I’ll check,” he said, but his gut already knew what it was.  

The consultant
.  

This time, he was more frightened than angry. He wanted to be able to act as he had the last time Patoff had shown up unannounced, wanted to project power and strength, to once again order the consultant off his property and warn him not to come back, but he remembered how the contents of his desk had floated up into the air, the way his office door had opened and closed by itself, and was afraid of what might happen if he angered the man. He imagined windows being shattered, furniture smashing against walls, Rachel’s snow globes exploding into shards of glass and droplets of water.  

Grabbing his robe from on top of the hope chest at the foot of the bed, Matthews pulled it on, slid into his slippers and made his way out into the hall, closing the bedroom door behind him. The knocking had stopped for a moment, but it returned with a vengeance, not knocking but
pounding
, so loud that he could practically feel it in his gut. He hurried downstairs, thinking that he should fire his home security company and wishing for the first time in his life that he was the kind of person who owned guns. He had no idea what he was going to do when he confronted the consultant.