Rebuilding Harry Ch. 03

***

He spent the rest of the day staring at files, the two sides of the dilemma weighing even heavier when it came time to go home. He didn't see Veronica at all for the rest of the day, and it bothered him, because he wanted to talk about the case to somebody, except that even after what happened in the sauna earlier there was still no guarantee that she was onside with him. Still, she had left the other firm because the offer of power came with an added work responsibility. Of course, if she'd wanted to get away from extra work she'd certainly have quit this job, what with everything she'd done for him as well as what Reg was hoping to get from her.

And there was something in what she'd said that had seemed strange. "I'll trust you first." Trust him to do what? To do the best he could? To follow her lead into a trap? She'd confirmed that Reg was setting one, but if hewasdoomed, then wouldn't even more effort on his part make the fall that much harder? The questions bounced back and forth in his mind all the way home until he just had to laugh. This extra paranoia was just causing extra stress, and eating up time and energy that was needed for the presentation. As it was he didn't get enough at the office done, so he had to bring it home. All through dinner, he and Trish sat quietly, her reading the newspaper, him reading file after file. At one point Trish looked up from the newspaper, appraised him for a second, and asked, "Big project, Harold?"

"What?" he asked, looking up. "Oh, this? Yeah. I have a presentation."

"What on?" she asked.

"I have to recommend a strategy on going after some overdue accounts," he said.

"Oh?" she said, sounding politely interested. "And what are you going to recommend?"

"Well," he said, "I'm supposed to give reasons that we be patient with them. It'd be a risk, but it might be the right thing to do... I think. I don't know."

"Why don't you know?" she asked, setting her newspaper aside, placing her elbows on the table and resting her face in her hands. She stared at him so fixedly, it struck him as odd, but that charming beauty mixed with an analytical stare made him answer, despite himself.

"I don't know," he said. "I got handed this presentation by my manager, but apparently the vice president is going to champion a different approach... It's like I've been set up for a fall."

"Wow," she said, pursing her lips. "What are you going to do?"

He shrugged. "My best," he said. "Anything interesting in the paper?"

"Here?" she asked. "No, nothing really."

"Alright," he said. "I, uh, I really should be getting back to this."

"Oh," she said, "Sure, Harold." She looked almost surprised. He couldn't blame her -- he'd never turned down the opportunity to chat with her before, and it occured so rarely, that he himself was a little suprised by it. Still, the weight of the presentation was quite heavy on his mind, and he'd had enough to worry about without trying to explain something he didn't even understand all that well himself. And, try as he could, he couldn't forget about that afternoon in the sauna, about how powerful it was, and yet how brief. It had been potent, sure, but it was too abrupt to have the feeling of love in it. For all he knew, it was a quick fuck that Veronica needed, and that was it.

He looked back down at the files. Each one of them had been given to him by her, so part of him was wondering what to do with the information. If he trusted her, it would be good information to know, right? But if he didn't trust her, then it would also be good information to know, because it would be what would lead him to failure. There was an interesting mix to the files - half of them weren't even in any sort of financial trouble at the moment, but a quick look at the history suggested that they had been overdue once or twice in their history. They seemed to make a case for a lenient approach, based on the long-term outcome. Of the other files, most of them were companies that had good credit for a long time but were now unable to pay for the company's services. A couple of them had cancelled their accounts and were in the process of repaying their debt in a longer-term plan. None of them, however, had gone into bankruptcy.

There were three other files, however, that included clients who had basically gone delinquent. Interestingly enough, though, they were larger firms with a shorter history with the company. They did, however, represent a significant loss. In the long term, it had been absorbed, but that wasn't the most interesting part of the accounts. All three had gone by the wayside almost a decade ago. Why had Veronica included them?

"Just do your job," she'd said. It was all so confusing. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, before almost laughing at his psychic's impression.

"What is it?" Trish asked.

Harry looked up again. He'd practically forgotten they were still sitting at the table together.

"Nothing Trish," he said. "Don't worry about it. I'm going to the den."

"Alright," she said, and he felt her eyes on him as he picked up the files and walked past her. He could imagine that he seemed very odd to her, which in its own way was somewhat gratifying, since at least odd wasn't boring.

The next day at the office, and for the rest of the week, there was no trace of Veronica there to help him except for the daily checklist. There weren't any more clues for him from her, though, and by the day before, even though he'd already summarized the points for his presentation, he still felt like something was missing. Through it all he'd tried to keep questions about Veronica at bay. Could he trust her? Was she playing Reg and him against each other? Was she being played by Reg instead? Early on, the more he thought of it, the more new questions he could think up, and so he decided it was best to try to just concentrate on the things he could control, and with that sudden clarity he realized that regardless of whether or not he could trust Veronica, there was a surefire way to figure out if there was an Achilles heel to his proposal, and that was to figure out everything he possibly could.

The office had transfered Mrs. Kowalski to him from Human Resources. She was a middle-aged mother of three who did her work pleasantly, but awaited orders rather than set out to find her own work, which made sense since she wasn't slated to be working for him long-term anyway. So, when he finally came to her the morning of the day before the presentation with his request, she looked up at him, a little startled.

"You want me to dowhat?" she asked.

"I want you to bring me every file the company has on every client in our division, currently to as far back as when we started fifteen years ago, and to bring someone from IT up here who knows how to work with a database."

"Okay," she said, looking bewildered. "How many files do you expect that to be?"

"Well," he said, "it's probably going to be a couple of hundred."

"Sure," she said, "Whatever you say, Mr. Stevens." She picked up the phone as Harry went back into the office, ready to lay out his plan.

Twenty minutes later, a pudgy, unshaven intern knocked at the door, asking "Mr. Stevens?"

"Yeah?" Harry said, looking up. "Are you from IT?"

"I am," the boy said. "I'm Roger. What did you need help with?"

Harry laughed. "Are you good with databases?"

"I'm alright," he said. "I've worked with Oracle and DB2 involving many different languages, as well as the usual SQL and stored pro-"

"Okay, okay," Harry laughed. "I don't want you to get ahead of me, because you'll be talking about things I know nothing about."

"So," Roger said. "What do you need?"

Harry waved him in and pointed to a chair. "I need to know if you can take a look at all the data we have on our clients, and to pull up every company in the last fifteen years that's temporarily gone into overdue status. I need them to know which ones are still with us, and which ones amounted to bad debt. Can you do that?"

"Psh," Roger said. "Are you kidding?"

"No, why?" Harry asked. "What's the matter?"

"It'll take about two minutes to do, assuming you have a connection to it from here and you're interfaced and-"

Harry waved his hands. "You can use my computer, but as for having a connection and being interfaced and whatnot, I'm in your care."

Roger shrugged, and when Harry stood up from his desk and offered him the chair, Roger went to it and sat down. At that moment, there was another knock on the door as Mrs. Kowalski peaked in. "Mr. Stevens? I have the files."

"Okay," he said. "Did you have to make many trips? Sorry about that."

"Oh, that wasn't a problem," she said. "I only had to make one."

"Really?" Harry asked. "That's great! Where are they?"

"Out here," she said, and when he opened the door he saw a massive loading trolley, about four feet high in boxes.

Harry snorted. "I hope that's all of them," he said.

"Well, I did a quick check and noticed that some from a few years back were missing," she said.

"Oh, that's fine," he said. "I've got those three."

"I countedsixmissing, Mr. Stevens," she said, looking concerned. "If you have three of them, that still leaves three more unaccounted for."

"Hm..." he said, thoughtfully. "Well, we can catch up with those later. Can you get on the records people and figure out who has those files?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Stevens," she said.

Harry went out to the trolley and pushed it into his office. "How's it going, Roger?" he asked as set it against the wall.

"Well," Roger said, "It was a little trickier than I thought, since there were quite a few joins I had to work out, as well as combining views from several archived-"

"Roger..." Harry said. "You might as well be speaking Chinese."

"It went fine, Mr. Stevens," Roger said. "How do you want the data?"

"Uh..." he said, looking at the boxes of files on the trolley. "I've got to get the records from here."

Roger stood up and took a look at a couple of the topmost boxes. "These seem to be indexed according to an ID, rather than a company or individual name."

"Oh," Harry said. "And?"

"Just give me a second to rework the query..." Roger said. "Ah, yes, it's alright. Each ID corresponds exactly to-"

"Chinese, Roger," Harry said.

"I'll have the printout list them both, sir," he said. "Will that be all?"

"Uh... wait until I can see the report first," Harry said.

Roger sighed, but ran the report from the printer, stapled the four pages together, and handed it over. Harry studied it for a second.

"I had it sorted according to the date of their last transaction with us, chronologically backwards," he said. "That way you can tell at what point which companies stopped doing business with us."

"Uh huh," Harry said. "So the ones at the bottom of the list are the ones that aren't with us?"

"That's right," Roger said. Harry turned to the last page, and noticed that only the last two dozen entries had their last transactions dated further back than last month. He also noticed that there were some big names in those two dozen entries, the sort that made the front page ofthe Chronicle'sbusiness section when they went under. However, there were over three pages of companies that were still current with the company. Ideas popped into his head, and his first instinct was to make a checklist. That made him laugh -- Veronica, siren temptress or not, had made him an organized thinker, and he had to thank her for that.

"What's so funny?" asked Roger. "I laid it all out correctly."

"No, no," Harry laughed, patting Roger on the shoulder. "I just think we might need to run a few more reports, break up the data more. Also, I have a feeling we're going to have to recreate some files from scratch. Can you help me out here a little longer?"

"I guess," Roger said.

"Good," Harry said. "Okay, here's what we need first..."