The 2084 Precept (72 page)

And then I replied to the shipping agency
and told them Monday and would they please courier a signed
notarized contract to us because our ship would not load until we
had received it. I would return the contract signed as soon as
possible. Alternatively, I wrote, we can start on a later date.

My new company mobile rang. It was Geoff
from United Fasteners.

“Hi there, Peter,” he said, “Geoff here. So
your new Spanish number works!”

“Hello Geoff, how are things?”

“Things are fine; really fine, especially
the progress at Clark’s. But excluding the weather of course. It’s
not Spain here!”

“Yes, I can’t say I am suffering in that
regard.”

“Quite! But Roger has asked me to enquire if
you could possibly make it over here for a meeting before the end
of the month. Get you away from the beach. We need your advice. We
ourselves have now become the object of a takeover bid. We don’t
know what to do about it. Or at best, we are only 99% sure; and so
we thought of you.”

“Ha, ha, Geoff, only 99%? Sure I’ll come
over. Shouldn’t be a problem. And who, might I ask, dares to be
interested in United Fasteners?”

“One of our shareholders; a group which has
recently been increasing its shareholding on the open market. This
particular group is becoming increasingly known for its successful
acquisitions. You may have heard of it. Goes by the name of
Obrix.”

My neurons were not surprised. Over the past
few weeks they had been required to raise their surprise resistance
levels more than once. They accordingly remained as calm as if they
had just been told that England had lost a World Cup game. I told
Geoff that I would call him within the next few days to agree on a
time and date.

I then swapped phones and called Jeremy. I
went straight to the point. “The connection between Obrix, United
Fasteners, and me please, Jeremy,” I said.

“Ah, you have heard already?” he asked.
“Well, I will explain everything to you in detail the next time we
meet, Peter. This is not a matter for a telephone conversation,
trust me. Briefly however, we were thinking of acquiring the United
Fasteners Group. But it had a big loss-making subsidiary. And
having heard about your performance from one of your prior clients,
I arranged for Roger and Geoff to hear about you. And seeing what
you had then began to achieve at Clark’s, I decided to find out if
you would like to assist me in my university work. Anonymously, of
course, in case it didn’t work out.”

Here we go again. Always these feasible
explanations which fit in nicely with his alien student
hallucinations. Well, I was annoyed. I was offended. What a load of
crap. But there was really no point in my launching into a
telephone tirade. And I would also like to continue with my money
for nothing contract in Slough. So I said thank you and I said
goodbye. But just you wait, Jeremy. Just wait until we next meet.
You are a pleasant enough person and I quite like you but your
explanations are going to need some supreme and magnificent
delusionary activity on your part to have a chance of overwhelming
my neurons’ mixture of perplexed confusion and outright
disbelief.

* * * * *

I left the office on the dot again. I
shouldn't do that, particularly on a Friday, it sets the wrong
tone, but there have to be exceptions to everything. First of all
my neurons wanted nothing more to do with deranged alien students.
Secondly, today had been a long day but also a successful one and
certain things require celebrating; starting off with an hour or so
swimming in the sea and a nice cool beer on the terrace
afterwards.

And I prolonged the celebration by taking
the taxi back to Palma to a café which hosted a weekly blitz-chess
tournament on Friday evenings. I didn't win it. I lost on time to
the winner in the last round and finished second. Deservedly so,
there is never any luck in chess. But the small cash prize was good
enough to finance a fish dinner. And the few Courvoisiers which
followed I financed myself.

Today was Saturday and I woke up late and it
was getting hot already. I had a swim in the pool and I breakfasted
on the terrace, yes, poached eggs again, and then I settled down to
my second cup of Illy coffee and a cigarette and contentedly
reviewed the agreeable state of affairs in which I found myself as
of today's date.

On the personal side, I had gained one
million Euros in just over six weeks for doing very little. Neither
Delsey nor more powerful people were bothering me and it seemed to
me that I had no further responsibilities toward Jeremy and his
imaginary world, nor toward whatever screaming and arguing was
going on among the planet's current holders of might and power.

At the same time, on the business side, the
Naviera was about to show a miraculous turnaround. And I was about
to become Mr. Superman for Sr. Pujol himself. He would think I was
perfect, which I am not of course, which is a good thing, because
perfect people tend not to have any friends. I was merely someone
fortunate enough to have landed in a situation containing its own
built-in solutions and who had also been lucky enough to stumble
across them without wasting too much time.

With the Africa business we would be near
enough doubling our revenues and the majority of that would be pure
profit, given that most of the costs would remain the same,
including the
Gerona Sol
crew's wages. In fact, as far as I
could see at the moment, the only increase in costs would be for
fuel. But against that, we had another immense saving: the
dockworker's costs. We would be saving the full weekly Palma costs
and most of the Barcelona ones, as the ship would only be appearing
there once per week.

And we would only be incurring dockworkers'
costs once per week in Morocco, and we would only need about six
dockworkers there, say, and they would be at vastly cheaper rates
than the ones in Spain. Next week, Pedro, Conchita and I could work
out the exact numbers but unless my thinking was wrong, the labor
costs savings would be for an estimated 3,500 man-days per year.
And we could enjoy the uproar this would cause among the
dockworkers in both Barcelona and Palma, but there was nothing at
all they could do about it.

What is more, it would seem to them as if I
had previously been trying to give them a chance by asking about
the possibility of a headcount reduction, a proposal which they had
undeniably rejected out of hand, in fact they had refused to even
discuss it. So my shirt was as white as snow for the purpose of any
future excursions into the pig-headed wonderland of communist-style
labor.

We would also soon be earning more money by
recuperating some of the 40-ton container cargo once the crane was
repaired and by losing fewer journeys during the year following the
Mahon Star
deck upgrade. And on top of that, we were
reducing miscellaneous costs on items such as fuel burned by tuna
fishing, bookkeeping expenses, pallet rental costs, and plenty of
other minor items such as Alfonso's so-called travel and
entertainment expenses.

* * * * *

Saturday being just another day in the
working week as far as Sr. Pujol was concerned, I gave him a call.
He answered with "
Buenos días, Sr. O'Donoghue, que tal van las
cosas?
", and I was pleased to hear that he had got the language
message, he was no longer subjecting me to any of his Catalan shit,
forgive my use of the word.

"I have some good news for you, Sr. Pujol,"
I said.

"You have? Always nice to receive good news.
Chipping away at the losses, are you?"

I didn't reply for a moment. Let him think
about his question and then blast him with something that will make
his day, and probably many more of his days after that. Not that I
was going to give him the full story, always good to have them
spend a few months thinking that their consultant was achieving one
success after another before finally achieving the desired goal of
arriving in Shangri-La and finding the pot of gold fortuitously
nestling among that valley's green meadows, beneath a rainbow of
course. And fixing the monthly financials to show only gradual
progress is naturally child's play when you know what you are
doing.

"One might say that, Sr. Pujol, yes.
However, that is not the good news. The fact is, I have identified
with absolute certainty a number of operational and cost issues
which need to be dealt with, and for which solutions are available,
and I have also established that the implementation of those
solutions is feasible, and, furthermore, feasible within the
short-term. This will result in the Naviera's losses disappearing
entirely. The negative cash flow will also disappear of course,
which means that your group will no longer need to continue
financing this company."

Now it was his turn to pause for a while.
Probably running a quick check on his ears, assuming, of course,
that snakes happen to have ears.

"That is incredible news," he said. "And you
have only been there two weeks. How definite are you about this,
and how short is short-term?"

"I am 100% definite, Sr. Pujol, or I would
not be communicating it. And short-term is a few months. I can't
say exactly how many, but certainly prior to year-end."

"But that is unbelievable. Such an immense
problem over such a long period of time and then you arrive and fix
things inside a couple of weeks. Can it be that by pure chance I
have hired a genius, Sr. O'Donoghue?" And the reptilian chuckle
accompanied the question.

"Oh no, you have not hired a genius, Sr.
Pujol. If there had been no major issues for me to find, I wouldn't
have been able to find them. It has simply been a badly managed
company. And, my apologies for correcting you, Sr. Pujol, but
things are not fixed yet. Nothing is fixed. A lot of hard work
still lies ahead."

All of my employers love the humility and
the modesty, even the reptilian ones. I even love it myself. It's a
sort of game, and an easy one to play when you are sitting on
solutions which are going to start rolling the day after tomorrow
already. And as for mentioning bad management, Alfonso of course
had been the cause of that.

"Yes, yes," said Sr. Pujol, "even so…it is
remarkable." He sounded to me as if he was wetting his pants.
Dreaming, no doubt, of all the flattery and veneration his board
members would soon be showering on him for this masterly coup of
his.

"But that is also not the good news, Sr.
Pujol," I said.

"What? Not? It isn't?"

"No. The good news is that within the first
half of next year we will be making a substantial profit. An
ongoing and sustainable profit, by the way. And substantial in the
sense that I estimate a pre-tax net of around 14% of revenues. I
haven't worked out what that means in terms of return on capitaI. I
would need a few minutes with the balance sheet sometime next week
to find that out. But in any case there is no need for detailed
statistics until we get there."

"How can you do all of this? And so fast?"
he asked and I gave myself the pleasure of imagining the formation
of an increasingly larger pool beneath his desk. He was already
composing his speech to his board members. And there was one thing
which he didn't know about of course, nor was he going to know
about it until I felt good and ready to add it to his pile of
goodies. And that was that I had the two idle ships up my sleeve. I
would either find a way for both ships to start generating even
more profits for us, or I would create more money by selling them
for the best price I could get.

There was, needless to say, a fly in all of
this ointment. There often is. A lot of the
Barcelona-Mallorca-Barcelona freight had moved over to the roll-on,
roll-off ships. The trucks drive onto the ship, deliver at the
other end and drive back with any empty containers and/or
containers loaded with shipments destined for the mainland. It
avoids complicated and expensive logistics at both ends and, also
at both ends, heavy dockworker costs. So the remaining Naviera
business on this route would eventually disappear, or the volume
would decline to loss-making levels. I didn't think Pujol and his
group could afford the huge investment required for a Ro-Ro ship,
and even if they could, it would not be easy to drag an acceptable
amount of business away from the competitors.

But he didn't need to know any of this yet.
And in any case, if I stayed on long enough, I would have
restructured the overall nature of our business and the routes
involved, and the profits would remain. They would just be earned
in a different way, that's all.

"I think I will come and visit you again in
Palma," he continued, "and you can show me exactly what kind of
magic it is you are working on. It will probably be in about three
weeks’ time after we have dealt with a takeover situation we are
dealing with. Would that be alright with you?"

“Yes.” I said, “That would be alright with
me. And who are you thinking of taking over, if you don’t mind my
asking?”

“Oh no,” he said. “It’s the other way round.
It’s an English-based group. It’s called Obrix. They own some of
our shares and they now want to buy us outright.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Yes, I think I have
heard of them.”

And we said goodbye and my neurons began to
work overtime again on this Obrix thing. Until I stopped them in
favor of laying back down on my ocean waves and letting them carry
me to a group of five paradise islands inhabited only by females,
all under the age of thirty, and all waiting for me to wash up on
their beaches in order to provide me with cool drinks while they
cooked fantastic fish meals for me and did many other things for me
as well.

And the many other things they started doing
for me were intense ones indeed, Morpheus and his guys were doing a
great job. But then I woke up. I must have snoozed for about an
hour, the terrace lounge chairs in this hotel were good ones, no
doubt about it. I went back to my room and changed and climbed down
the steps into the sea and swam around the rocks for an hour or
so.