Jack was dead. Murder suicide, and I believed it. Jack, his wife Elaine, his daughters Laura and Claire. He’d burned the house down to disguise it, but forensics had seen through the cover. Fire can’t disguise a bullet wound.
I was a cocky kid back when I first met him, no doubt, but I had the results to back it up. I had quickly discovered that the key to success wasn’t necessarily getting it right all the time, or even most of the time, but being able to bullshit well enough that you could cover your mistakes before anyone else spotted them. This industry moved too fast for ‘Due Diligence’ to slow you down. Mistakes were to be corrected, not avoided. That’s not to say I was lazy, I was fucking good at that job. Take a look at my scoresheet, or my quarterlies, or my bonus sheets if you want proof. It’s just that I knew that working hard only got you so far, and beyond that you had to work smart. If that meant covering your fuckups, then fine.
Like, there was the pawn shop account. Now, hands up, I fucked that one up. I should have had them labelled as special watch clients and registered the account with the Rev and all the rest of it. But the point isn’t that I fucked up. The point is I spotted the mistake before anyone else. Delayed a manager here, bought a drink for another there and boom, one slightly delayed audit later and the whole thing was watertight. That’s how it worked, for all of us. You’re a fool if you think any less.
My results. That’s why I was there. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’d been with the company for about five years at that point and my journey upwards had been swift. That was when I met Jack. Jack was a legend at the company already. Jack was the guy who got noticed when he came in for his first week as a business account manager and struck a deal with the biggest minicab company in the city to get them card terminals in the cabs. Soon, that company had every drunk bitch with a stomach full of Jagerbombs and Daddy’s credit card stumbling into their backseats, and Jack had every rival company falling over themselves to follow suit. They rolled out his model citywide, the revenue was staggering. That one deal had made Jack a legend, and his subsequent work had only cemented his reputation.
No one figured out how he did it, but he just had this way with clients. Companies who’d banked with our rivals for years, decades even, were biting our hands off to switch. There was a company where the CFO himself had been a school friend of their banking manager at one of our rivals. They’d been best men at each others weddings. Frankly, I considered that level of personal involvement unprofessional, but their friendship was one donated kidney away from being a daytime movie.
It took Jack three days to claim that contract from our rival. Two days of which was working out the details. A handshake had been gained after one three hour presentation.
The day Jack asked after me personally was a Friday. I saw him striding across the room towards me. I can’t tell you how long I’ve tried to think of a way to describe that walk. I tried to find an animal that I could liken it to. A lion, or a shark, maybe. But then I realised why that didn’t fit. Animals are all part of a system. They have a role, and a place, and a niche that they fill. Even animals at the top of the food chain need to stalk their prey. They need to respect their prey in order to dominate them.
Jack was not part of our system. Jack was above it. Where people would normally walk across a room, taking care to sway and sashay around desks, photocopiers and co-workers, Jack simply strode and it seemed like the room itself would create him a path. You couldn’t pick an animal as a metaphor for Jack. Jack made us all animals by comparison.
That was why, when Jack asked for me, personally, to work with him as his assistant, I could have ripped the guy’s arm off and my yes wouldn’t have been enthusiastic enough.
