Page 7 of Breathe
“Okay, whatever. But for now, go home. You kinda look like shit, you know.”
“Gee, thanks. I’ll just talk to Leo real quick.”
“How about you talk to Leo tomorrow,” she insisted.
“How about I’ve got three hundred workers with nowhere to work today? How about a union that’s going to bill me overtime for the extra shifts wherever I put them?” he retorted, more harshly than he’d meant to.
“I get it, Kane, but you can—”
“I don’t know if you do,” he said. “Second fire in a week, Anna. Did you see the papers this morning?” He waved vaguely toward the lobby and the outside world. “‘History Comes Back to Haunt Fielding Paper,’ they said.”
“Who cares what they say? No one was hurt. You’re insured. You can rebuild.”
He sighed. He shouldn’t have said anything. “Yes. Yes, we will. But I still need Leo.” He got his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.
“You can’t smoke in—” Anna began.
“I know.” He stuck one between his teeth anyway and walked over to Leo’s office.
• • •
“Did anyone cooperate on this piece in the Globe?”
Leo was a tall man, almost as tall as Kane, with unexpectedly black hair for his age, and a face just lined enough to look rugged. He was the same age as Kane’s father would have been. Apart from Kane himself, Leo was the company’s best spokesman. “Not that I’ve been able to find out so far,” he said, “but I don’t think they needed any cooperation. Most of the information in it is general, from our annual reports and the police, sources like that. Like the newspapers.” Leo smiled. “In PR terms, you come out looking good. You being there made a big difference to them. Shows you care.”
“I do care, for Christ’s sake.” Kane felt around his pockets for his cigarettes and then remembered he already had one in his mouth that he wasn’t allowed to light. It made his scowl even deeper.
Fielding Paper meant everything to him; it always had. Even before his father had died, Kane had known he would take over one day, that his family looked to him to continue the company that had been doing business in Massachusetts since Colonial times. Robert had delighted in bringing Kane to work with him, showing him all the different parts of the business, especially Robert’s favorite part, the science: the ratio of cotton to linen fiber, the levels of iron and copper in the water, the most efficient ways to reclaim that water.
The sick tragedy of it was that Robert’s experimentation with the science of paper-making had killed him, in the end, when a boiler he was working on had exploded.
Kane had been twenty-two, about to graduate from college, with no worries beyond where to find the next keg and how to get rid of his roommate so he could have a girl over, when he’d gotten the call.
And then he’d been shown the finances. Robert, it turned out, was a loyal Fielding but a poor businessman. There had been too much tinkering and not enough modernizing. They weren’t producing enough paper to make a profit. The board had told him this and then looked at him in a gray wave of silence, waiting for him to agree to sell what they could; to let someone else worry about the inefficient mills and all the employees who relied on him.
Sitting at the end of that conference table, Kane could have been in a different universe from these old men and women, who’d been friends with his father but apparently didn’t feel the loyalty to the business that Robert had. He’d begged for a few days to think about a sale and stumbled out of the room.
Leo had been with the company since Robert’s time. Kane was grateful to him for his faith when Kane went back and told the board he wasn’t going to sell. Half of them resigned, but not Leo.
Leo’s loyalty had been rewarded: Kane had had to let more people go than he expected, and had gone hat-in-hand to every wealthy friend of his father’s to raise the money he needed, but within a few years of converting half their plants to recycled paper, and the most intense PR work Leo had ever done, Kane was able to hire almost everyone back, and the profit-share plan the company had for its employees had taken off. Fielding Paper was a stable force in an ever-changing industry.
Until now.
“I know you care, Kane,” Leo said, “but it doesn’t hurt to remind the public. The article talks about the inspections you do each year...”
“Didn’t do a very good job on this one, did I?” Kane muttered.
“It’s not your responsibility,” Leo said, but Kane just glared at him.
It was all his responsibility. He had four sisters and three nephews to manage trust funds for. He’d had his mother to console and encourage, until she, too, had died a couple of years after his father. He had thousands of employees and an industry that was always telling him to streamline, which would mean closing mills that had stood in some towns for two hundred years. Of course it was his responsibility. Who else was going to do it?
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Kane,” Leo finally snapped. “Let’s go back to your office if you’re just going to fidget a hole in my chair.”
He hadn’t realized he’d been fidgeting. But he was happy to go back to his window.
“At least it happened at night,” said Leo from a seat on the other side of Kane’s desk. “I mean, maybe whoever’s doing this isn’t a homicidal maniac. Maybe he’s just a pyromaniac with delusions of grandeur. No one was in the building to get hurt.”
“Yeah.” Kane scrubbed his hand through his hair, risking dropping ashes into it. Next time, next time, next time, hammered through him.
