“It’s not bad workmanship,” he told Calvin. “It’s the shape the bridge has to be to fit into Jon’s mouth. Jon was warned it was going to be a lot of trouble.”
“I was warned not to eat pistachio nuts, too, but I haven’t stopped.” Jon came in from the back room, fitting the new bridge in place. “These things are put together just like airplane models, I swear. It’s just that they use porcelain instead of plastic. Maybe there are airplane models that use porcelain instead of plastic.”
“Don’t look at me,” Calvin said. “You’re the one who always liked airplane models.”
“I didn’t always like them,” Jon said. “I just put together a few when we didn’t have the money to do much of anything else. Did you two come up with any answers while I was off breaking apart my mouth?”
Charlie looked down at the pile of papers in his lap and sighed. For most of the afternoon, he and Calvin and Jon had been poring over Calvin’s figures on Europabanc, trying to see where something had gone wrong—and coming up with nothing, of course, because (Charlie was convinced) there was nothing to come up with but a computer error. Calvin’s bad luck with computers was notorious. He couldn’t even send his letters to word processing without causing a breakdown in the main system. If he hadn’t been so intent on making himself look important, they wouldn’t have been here all these hours fussing at something that didn’t matter any more anyway. If the discrepancy had shown up back in August, when they were making the final moves in their offer for Europabanc, then there would have been a problem. They’d had to have a certain amount of cash on hand to make the deal fly, and that cash had had to be verified. But the discrepancy hadn’t shown up then. To satisfy Calvin, they’d just gone through the old reports and found everything to be just as it should be. Whatever this was was recent and therefore minor, something the accountants could have straightened out when it came time for the year-end report. At least, that’s what this should have been. It wasn’t, because Calvin was Calvin.
Jon dropped into a chair, stretched out his legs, and said, “We’re not going to straighten this out. Nobody’s going to straighten this out. It’s going to turn out to have been a glitch in the computer, and when we run the program again it will be gone.”
“We ran the program four times last night,” Calvin said coldly. “We were at the office until four o’clock in the morning.”
“Too tired to see straight, probably, and making mistakes because of it.” Jon yawned. “I really don’t want to spend this whole trip talking business, Calvin. I was looking forward to a chance to relax.”
“You don’t have any right to relax,” Calvin said. “You’re about to be the head of the largest financial services combine in history.”
“It sounds more impressive if you just say I’m going to be head of a bank. What about you, Charlie? Are you as sick of all these numbers as I am?”
“I was sick of them before we ever got started,” Charlie said truthfully. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at dealing with the Europabanc thing. I can’t even think about it without feeling a little dizzy.”
“I can’t think about it without feeling tired.” Jon pulled his legs back in, stretched his arms this time, and shook his head. Charlie had seen him get like this in the past, innumerable times, because Jon Baird was the sort of man who couldn’t sit still for long. These days, if he’d been a child, some teacher would probably have wanted to put him on Ritalin. Now he got up and paced around the cabin. It was a much larger cabin than any of the others had—and not really authentic, either, since the captain’s cabin on the original Mayflower hadn’t had two rooms—but it was still tiny and the ceiling was still low. Jon had to stoop slightly while he paced, in spite of the fact that he was a very short man.
“The thing is,” he said finally, “I’ve got more trouble than I want on this trip anyway, and I don’t need business around to complicate things. Did I tell you I got the private detective’s report in on Sheila?”
“Was that Mr. Demarkian who did the private detective’s report?” Charlie asked. “I didn’t think that was his field, somehow.”
“It isn’t. I hired a perfectly ordinary private detective to check up on Sheila, the same one I used to check up on Fritzie. I got the same answer, too. What is it about me, my wives aren’t unfaithful with other men, they’re unfaithful with credit cards and diet programs.”