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After that, conversation flowed as easily between them as it had last night at dinner.
It started, oddly, with him taking an interest in her work. “Can you overhaul any sort of company or operation?”
“I like to think I could, if they were willing.”
“Do you apply your methods to your own life?”
“Not really. You might be surprised to learn that I’m a bit of a procrastinator in my personal life. I’ve tried to apply GTD at home, but I guess it’s a case of the shoemaker’s children going shoeless.”
“GTD?”
“It stands for Getting Things Done. It’s a productivity management system.”
“A productivity management system called... Getting Things Done?”
She did hear how that sounded, and she waited for him to mock her, but he just smirked. She changed the subject. “Where did you grow up?”
“Not far from Riems, in fact.”
“Do you have a big family?”
“I’m the second of four siblings. I’ve one older sister who’s a teacher, and a younger brother and sister—twins—who still live at home.”
“And your parents?”
“Are not together,” he said quickly, a hint of his old brittleness returning. “My father is not around. It’s just my mother and siblings and me.”
She could respect the desire to shut down this line of conversation. If not for her dad, Cara would herself have had a very different life. And besides, they were making nice. No need for either of them to trot out family baggage. So she made an observation about the view, which, as they ascended into the mountains, was as spectacular as she’d imagined. The narrow road hugged blue-gray rock ridges and was lined with deep-green coniferous trees.
“You should see the approach to Gimmelmatt,” Mr. Benz said, back to trying to tamp down a smile. “It’s just like this, but at the bottom, in a valley, you have the world’scutestvillage.”
The factory visit went well. Cara was good at this part, having developed a song-and-dance routine that disarmed people. Though she shouldn’t call it a song-and-dance routine. It was genuine. She believed all the stuff she said about transparency. It wasn’t that she was going to tell everyone everything at every step along the way, but being secretive didn’t serve anyone. That hadbeen another Tonya adage, and later, when Cara started heading up projects on her own, she learned it the hard way—she’d been on more than one project where the client’s obsession with secrecy or spin-doctoring ended up sabotaging the whole thing. But happily, neither Morneau nor the Eldovian royal family had an overzealous communications department that needed to be managed. As she’d told Tonya on day one, her barriers here were going to be individuals. Leon Bachmann, for sure. He’d been quite snippy with her today, though she could appreciate that he was doing his job—and probably doing it more vehemently because he was in front of his hometown crowd. More worrisome was the CEO, Noar Graf, who for reasons she hadn’t yet uncovered, was hostile. She’d had her rescheduled one-on-one with him, and he’d been either unwilling or unable to answer most of her questions. It was possible he was incompetent. That happened sometimes. People failed upward until they were left in charge of people or operations they weren’t equipped to manage.
She glanced at her watch. Five minutes before four, which was her final meeting of the day. She’d been meeting with reps from different employee groups all day, and her last was some folks from the shipping department.
She sighed and rolled her shoulders. It had been a long day. Final push, though.
“Ms. Delaney, I thought you might be hungry.”
Mr. Benz appeared at her side just as she was about to head back into the break room where her meetings were taking place. As he set a packet of almonds in her palm, his hand paused. She noticed again how weirdly attractive his hands were. He had prominent veins and long fingers. As they were making the transfer, one of those fingers sort of . . . caressed her thumbnail. She would have said it was an accident, but it was an oddly specific gesture. The pad of his index finger found her thumbnail and circled it, twice. Each time he made contact with the flesh of her cuticle, she shivered.
She forced words out. “Thank you.”
He quickly retracted his hand. She thought he’d been about to say something when Leon, who was sitting in on all the meetings with unionized employees, appeared. Mr. Benz retreated, and Leon laid his index finger across his lips and leaned toward the door and beckoned her to do the same. It took her a moment to readjust to work—or to espionage, which it seemed they were doing. There were agitated voices coming from inside the break room. Leon frowned as he listened.
She didn’t actually expect him to tell her what they were saying, but he surprised her by doing exactly that. “They are talking about how you’re not to be trusted. Well, one of them says she liked what you said earlier, but another counters that you’re staying in the palace and therefore not a neutral party.”
She’d never thought of it that way. Perhaps she should have. But she hadn’t known there was going to be this regional inferiority complex, whereby the Riems crowd felt like second-class citizens. “Where I’m staying has no bearing on my work, or its outcome,” she whispered.
“They already think you’re here to close the Riems plant—they think it’s a foregone conclusion. Their observations about your lodging may merely be, what do you say in English? Confirmation bias? But...”
But perceptions mattered.
The interesting thing was that the meeting was extremely productive. One of the senior mail clerks pointed out that instead of shipping finished watches from Riems direct to their retail destinations, they sent them first to Witten, and all the outbound shipping happened from there. “What kind of sense does that make? We make all the Abendlieds here, so in cases where that’s all we’re shipping, we’re wasting time and postage,” he said, and Cara had to agree. There probably weren’t enough savings to be had there to make much of a difference, but this was part of what these meetings were designed to uncover—aspects of the company’s processes and culture that were so ingrained they weren’t questioned.
Mr. Benz was waiting for her outside the meeting room when they were done. She wondered if their truce would hold. She wondered why her cuticle was tingling at his reappearance.
Her cuticle. Was tingling. She ordered herself to get a grip.
