“I never do think about diets,” Sheila Baird said.
“You will,” Fritzie Baird told her. “Trust me, my dear, you will.”
“You forgot me,” Charlie Shay handed his plate across the table. “You got everybody else but—”
“Got you now.” Jon Baird stood up again—he had only just sat down—-and piled salad on Charlie Shay’s plate. Then he handed the plate over, sat down again, and surveyed the table. For the first time since Gregor had met him, he actually looked pleased. “Well,” he said. “Here we are. You don’t know how I’ve been looking forward to this trip.”
“He must have been looking forward to this trip,” Mark Anderwahl murmured at Gregor’s side. “If he hadn’t been, he’d never have gotten the rest of us to go along with it.”
There was a clear cruet of salad dressing traveling around the table, family style in the best middle-class tradition, and Gregor caught it as it came by and doused his lettuce vigorously. Then he turned his attention fully to the young man at his side. He had, of course, been in contact with Mark Anderwahl before, although they hadn’t exactly been introduced. Mark had been present in the bow when they had gathered to watch the boat set sail that morning. Unlike the rest of the Bairds, however, Mark had not done any talking. He had simply stood back and watched his wife with fierce and restless eyes. Now he was paying no attention to her at all. Gregor picked up his fork, tried the salad, decided the salad dressing was abnormally bitter, and put his fork down again.
“You’re Mark Anderwahl,” Gregor said. “I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.”
“No, we haven’t.” Mark picked up his fork, took a taste of his salad, put down his fork, and winced. “Oh, God,” he said, “here we go again. One of Jon’s salad dressings. They get worse every year.”
“If you knew it was gong to be bad, why did you use it?”
Mark Anderwahl blinked. “I work for Baird Financial. I had to use it. Jon gets very huffy if you don’t eat his salad dressing.”
“Is it just salad dressing, or are there other things he cooks and makes you eat?”
“He tried a pie once, but it didn’t work out. And he grills steaks, of course. All the men of that generation grill steaks. The steaks are all right.”
“Oh.”
“Look at old Charlie,” Mark Anderwahl said. “Practically gagging and stuffing it down all the same. That’s how he got to be a partner. Uncle Calvin, now, he got to be a partner because Uncle Jon knew it was either make him one or be nagged to death. You don’t know what kind of trouble it causes, having so many partners who don’t know the first thing about business.”
Gregor was surprised. “Calvin Baird and Charlie Shay don’t know the first thing about business?” In his experience, really successful enterprises—and Baird Financial certainly was that—didn’t carry a lot of deadwood.
Mark Anderwahl chewed slowly on a lettuce leaf, considering. “Well,” he said, “it’s like this. Charlie doesn’t know anything about business—and I mean anything at all. If you’re not going to go for the salad dressing, the only way to explain him is that he’s one of Uncle Jon’s really old friends. With Uncle Calvin it’s different. He’s a businessman, all right, he’s just the wrong kind of businessman.”
“What do you mean, the wrong kind?”
Mark waved his fork in the air. “Small-minded,” he declared. “He’d be really good with a McDonald’s franchise somewhere or running a five-and-dime store, but at Baird Financial he just doesn’t do any good.”
“Do you mean because of these numbers he’s worried about?” Gregor asked, thinking about the meeting in the hall before dinner. “He was talking to me about some sort of discrepancy in some sort of record.”
“In the cash-on-hand reports in the back-up research for the Europabanc deal.” Mark shook his head. “That’s silly, but at least it’s understandable. You don’t want discrepancies even if they don’t matter. No, I mean when we first decided to buy Europabanc, a couple of years ago. Uncle Calvin didn’t want us to.”
“I thought the Europabanc deal was a good one.”
“It is a good one. It’s a spectacularly good one. It’s not just the chance of a lifetime, it’s the chance of a millennium. There hasn’t been an opportunity like it before and there probably won’t be one again. I mean, for God’s sake. We’re going to do in one fell swoop what it took the Rothschilds generations to put together.”