didn’t bring you here to talk about my mother’s choice in magazines. Look—” He tapped a palm against his forehead. “Slow down, Marc; manners. How was your flight?”
Edward Everett considered telling him the truth but said, “It was fine.” He suddenly felt even more self-conscious in Johansen’s presence, here in the same pair of jeans and shirt he’d worn on the flight while Johansen felt comfortable enough to slouch on a how-many-thousand-dollar sofa and rest his feet on the coffee table.
“I hate like hell all the flying I have to do,” Johansen went on. “Last year, I logged ninety-six thousand miles. It’s a hassle and a half. All the security crap. I guess there’s a reason for it, post nine-eleven, but I’m thinking anything under four hundred miles, I’m driving.” He let out a breath. “Look, I’ve never been good at chitchat. I work on it because my wife tells me I ought to. ‘They’re not just employees, they’re people,’ she says. And so, fine. Cross that off the list.” He made a motion in the air as if he was drawing a check mark. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I get down to things. I have to get to Dallas for a breakfast meeting tomorrow. Things are … well, you’ll understand in a minute.”
He paused, evidently giving Edward Everett an opening to say something, but he wasn’t sure what the moment demanded, and so Johansen went on. “When I came on board I promised the brass I wouldn’t make any significant changes until I had reasonable confidence that I understood how things were. I think I’m there now.”
He paused again and, because the moment clearly demanded some sort of response from him, Edward Everett said, “I know there have been problems.”
“So, you’ve seen them, too?” Johansen said.
“I know that Webber’s getting hurt hasn’t helped things,” Edward Everett said. “Maybe I could have—”
“Webber?” Johansen said.
“The shortstop,” he said. “The one whose shoulder …”
Johansen furrowed his brow. Could it be that he had no idea, without being in front of his almighty spreadsheets, who Webber was?
“I filed a report,” Edward Everett said. “He’s having surgery this week but he’ll probably never—”
“Oh, wait,” Johansen said. “I remember. Kid we picked up from Baltimore. What about him?”
“You mentioned problems and so I thought that was one I could explain.”
Johansen snorted. “This is about larger issues. We certainly aren’t going to kill one of our franchises over one hurt player.”
Edward Everett felt a flutter in his chest. “So, Perabo City is killed.”
“That’s a good part of the reason I brought you down here,” Johansen said. “We decided to shut it down sometime back. I thought you knew.”
“No,” Edward Everett said. So there it was, he thought. Killed, Johansen had said. He thought he had been prepared for this moment but it was like when his mother died. He’d been expecting it for more than a year but when a nurse called him from the hospital, it had still come as a shock—the finality nothing could prepare you for.
“We needed to rebalance our portfolio, to use some of the lingo from my former life,” Johansen said. “I know that the routine is to say, ‘It was a hard decision,’ but it really wasn’t. The fact of the matter is that the owner, what’s-his-name, the meat guy …”
“Collier,” Edward Everett offered.
“Collier. Right. A piece of work. He ran a shoddy, cut-rate franchise. I mean, who operates an entire baseball operation out of a meat company? Then he tried to play hardball with the wrong people. So when we had to get rid of one of our single-A teams it didn’t take long to decide where the hammer should come down.”
“What did he do?” Edward Everett asked, thinking that it was so much like Collier to make a mistake and leave others to pay the price.
“He’d probably sue me for saying I didn’t like his shirt and so I’ll just say he played his hand as if he were sitting on four aces when all he had was seven-high.”
So it was over, Edward Everett thought; there was no softening it. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had made him get on a plane that had nearly killed him and come here to sit in a house that cost more than what he would make in twenty lifetimes for this. You can’t fire people long-distance, he could hear Johansen’s wife saying. His being here was just another exercise in her making her husband into a better human being.