2. Maxim
MAXIM
There’s a difference between reading that a house is on fire and standing in the yard watching the windows glow while staring at the man who lit the match.
Osaka to Anchorage, Anchorage to Teterboro. Twenty-one hours of my life were spent above the Pacific, and I landed in Manhattan to learn that the disaster’s much worse in person.
I’m attending my own gala as a stranger. No announcement preceded me, no car met me with a sign, and my name doesn’t appear on the guest list. I took these precautions because if Niklaus doesn’t know I’m coming, he cannot prepare for my arrival.
I’m beginning to wonder whether I should’ve announced my return. One wonders what sort of show my son would’ve put on for me.
The Osaka arrangement was the last piece. Marseille came first, then Rotterdam’s shadow side, then the Baltic routes, each secured the slow way, in person, over years. A network isn’t built by phone. It’s built by showing up, eating what your host eats, and outlasting every silence he offers you.
I outlasted them all, and our organization now moves freight across the globe without asking anyone’s permission. That was the work. That was where I was, all the birthdays and board meetings I wasn’t here. I stayed away to open our growth potential, and it’s worked.
So, I stand near the terrace doors with a drink I won’t touch, and the room shows me everything.
Every department of my international shipping company is represented tonight.
Mandler from the Accounts Receivable department permits accounts to age beyond ninety days across five divisions.
Legal retainers have tripled in cost, which is indicative rather than causative.
A group of six company lawyers is drinking expensive whiskey and having a conversation at the bar.
Their conduct is no worse than that of the Logistics department.
These departments constitute the backbone of this organization, which I initially established with two trucks and a dock lease. Now they report profit margins that’d cause a competent manager to resign.
Beneath the lawful ledgers, in the accounts that see no auditor, is even worse news. Port management, grumbling at their table when they see me.
Nice to know they remember who I am.
I expect them to be the first to come to heel when I begin my local work.
They know I know that three of our port contracts were renegotiated downward over the years.
Downward. As if they were happy to take less.
Our percentage shaved a point here, a point there over months.
The shavings drift, and when I follow the drift on paper, every current bends toward Alexei Sokolov.
When I left, the Vernigora name on a contract meant the matter was closed. These days, that’s up for debate.
Alexei Sokolov doesn’t seize territory. Seizure is loud, and loud is expensive and comes with government eyes. Instead, he circles a weakened operation the way carrion birds work, with patience, in a wide arc, descending only when the thing below him has stopped kicking.
His people have been seen at our piers. They toured a terminal in Elizabeth as if they owned it. They asked one of our crane operators, in the friendliest way, how he liked his benefits and whether he’d be interested in something better.
You don’t price a rival’s assets unless you expect a sale, and Sokolov expects a sale. Looking around this ballroom, I understand why he’s grown so confident.
Last month, his lieutenant sent flowers to our Newark office. The card read “Condolences,” although no one had died. That is Sokolov’s humor, and the message underneath it was plain enough.
Something here is dying, and he wants us to know he knows.
The gala itself runs well. The service is crisp, the seating is intelligent, the difficult guests have been managed by someone with a sense of the room. Whoever operates this event knows the work. The same cannot be said of anyone above them.
Willem Aertsen flew in from Rotterdam for this party. His firm controls berth partnerships at Europe’s largest port, and we have courted him for years. I’ve personally sat through two of his lectures on inland waterway logistics, an experience I wouldn’t repeat for money.
A dark-haired woman I don’t know finally rescued him as he stood alone by the dessert table, with the expression of a guest whose host has forgotten his name.
His host has not forgotten his name. His host has simply located something more interesting to hold. And my son has not once looked up from the pet on his lap.
In fairness, he has no reason to look for me.
My last message said Zurich through the end of the month, and I let the message stand, because I wanted the subterfuge.
Niklaus believed his father was several time zones away.
He’s spent the evening accordingly, showing me the man he’s become in my absence.
Men entertain at parties. That’s not the problem. The problem is that my son currently has his tongue in a girl’s ear, at a corporate function, in front of his board, his clients, his staff, and the continent of Europe in the person of Willem Aertsen.
Aertsen is watching him do it. Tomorrow, Aertsen flies home, and my son’s giving him all the ammunition he needs to keep ignoring Vernigora Industries.
I catalog the rest of the room to keep my hands relaxed. Two board members near the quartet, older now, laughing at something with the ease of men who have stopped reading what they sign. A Port Authority official by the raw bar, worth more goodwill than this hotel, unattended.
There was a time I could walk any floor of my tower and greet every soul on it by name. Those days are long past. I don’t recognize more than half of these people.
I told myself the network needed building, and it did, and I built it.
The Rotterdam courtship, the Hamburg warehousing, three years of tea in Osaka to secure a partnership with a Yakuza boss that will matter for decades to come.
And now I find myself questioning whether it was worth the loss of face in Manhattan.
The work here asks other questions. It asks who let the boy hold the wheel this long, knowing what he was. There’s one honest answer, and it’s wearing my shoes.
Klaus was willful as a child. I’ve never held that against him. Willful can be forged into something if a father stands close enough to forge it.
But I stood an ocean away and sent money and instructions instead. There were other concerns at the time, and now, I pay for it with humiliation and resentment.
There’s a distance between a boy who was given too little guidance and a man of twenty-nine who was given everything after, every title, every allowance, every second chance the staff could invent for him.
There’s a distance between willful and… this.
Bleeding accounts. A reputation hemorrhaging so publicly that a rival now prices our piers over lunch.
A CEO, interim, self-styled permanent, who cannot cross a ballroom to shake the one hand in it that matters, because both of his are occupied.
Willful, I could work with. But this is inexcusable.
The woman in his arms laughs at the ceiling. Klaus doesn’t watch her laugh. He watches the crowd watching them, checking who has noticed her, and there it is, the whole man in one glance. My son doesn’t look at what he holds. He looks at the audience.
His insecurity is on full display for everyone to see.
I came down from the suite tonight, telling myself the trip was reconnaissance.
Assess the operation, count the room, and measure the damage in person before the work of correcting it begins.
Standing here with an untouched drink while my son performs dominance for the crowd, I cannot focus. The disappointment gnaws at me.
I wanted to see him. A man wants to lay eyes on his own son, even a son who believes his father is a cold bastard on a permanent business trip.
Perhaps especially that son. I wanted to see whether time had made anything of him that distance could not.
Fathers are optimists in the last unlit corner of themselves, whatever else the world has burned out of the rest.
The quartet finishes a waltz and begins another. The second one is a better choice than the first, which tells me the playlist was built by someone who expected the room to fill and settle in stages, and it did. Well done to him.
Or rather, her.
Somewhere behind the service doors, the operation that actually functions in this family hums along, plates moving, glasses filled.
The Aertsen rescue was conducted so smoothly that the old man is now seated, refreshed, and lecturing a captive vice president about barge tonnage in front of his wife, laughing and enjoying himself. Finally.
Whoever the dark-haired woman is, she’s done more for this company tonight than its interim chief executive.