Bitter Business

you’ll just have to fake it,” Cheryl advised. “You know how crazy Tillman gets if you’re late. Have you had anything to eat yet today?”
    “Does bourbon count?”
    “You’ve got to be kidding. I have half a corned beef sandwich in my desk. You can eat it in the elevator on the way up to the forty-second floor.”
    “What would I ever do without you?”
    “Miss your appointments, get lost, and starve to death,” was my secretary’s forthright reply.
     
    I managed to leave the Meteor Software meeting in time for my meeting with Dagny Cavanaugh and with my reputation intact. Unfortunately, I also took away with me four pages of things that Skip Tillman had, with a nod of his patrician head, managed to dump in my lap.
    I took State Street south from my office and followed Cheryl’s directions through the low-rent end of the loop into the working-class neighborhood that’s produced five of the city’s last six mayors. Bridgeport is an uneven enclave where tidy bungalows and comer taverns fill in the spaces between factories and vacant lots. I passed a meatpacking plant, a cardboard box company, and a lot filled with rusting scrap, including a couple of trucks and a city bus in various stages of disintegration.
    I missed the plant the first time around. I was expecting to see a sign but there wasn’t one, so I ended up driving past it—a squat, windowless brick building set back from the street behind a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Bits of newspaper had caught in the barbs and the shreds of newsprint undulated in the wind like seaweed rocked by an ocean current.
    Inside, it wasn’t much better. A slack-jawed receptionist presided over a scarred Formica desk and a couple of chairs that looked like they’d been salvaged from the waiting room at the bus terminal. It was a wonder that Jack Cavanaugh didn’t get the bends every day going from the opulence of his house on Astor to the industrial shabbiness of his plant. I also thought it was a pretty safe bet that Peaches didn’t drop in on her husband at the office very often.
    “Kate Millholland to see Dagny Cavanaugh,” I said.
    The receptionist dragged her eyes from her copy of Cosmopolitan. “I’ll let them know you’re here,” she replied in a weary voice.
    I wandered the perimeter of the waiting area, an expanse of brown linoleum surrounded by cinderblock walls that had been painted a depressing shade of yellow and hung with grainy photos of industrial goods. Family-owned companies, I knew, were less likely to squander money on nonessentials, and in a company like Superior Plating, where customers didn’t come around to call, the only place they’d give a damn about appearances would be the bottom line.
    “You must be the lawyer who’s taking over for Daniel Babbage,” boomed a curt male voice as I examined a photograph of what I took to be a lamppost.
    I turned to see a broad, battering ram of a man in his late thirties with a shock of black hair, a military bearing, and the imprint of Jack Cavanaugh on his face. He wore navy-blue work clothes, immaculately pressed. The hand he extended was clean, but so callused that when I shook, it did not feel warm, only dry and hard.
    “I’m Kate Millholland,” I said.
    “Eugene Cavanaugh,” he replied. “Around here they call me Gene. Dagny’s still with the auditors. She asked me to show you around.” He cast a disapproving eye over my clothes. “Are those the only shoes you’ve got?”
    “I don’t mind if they get dirty.”
    “Good. They’re going to.” He handed me a pair of safety goggles and reached around the back of the reception desk and pulled out a scuffed white hard hat. “Put these on,” he instructed sternly. “Visitors have to wear them in the plant.”
    I did as I was told and immediately felt ridiculous. My expensive suit of plum-colored wool and my Ferragamo pumps—things that conveyed authority in my world— seemed frivolous and ridiculously out of place here. I followed Eugene down a narrow corridor and through a set of double doors.
    “I don’t know if you know anything about our business,” he said, his tone implying a certainty that I did not, “but we’re a metal plating operation—mostly chrome and bronze. Occasionally we do some gold, but generally there’s not much call for it.”
    “What about specialty chemicals?” I asked. “How much of your business is done by that division?”
    “Like I said, we’re a plating