'Mr. Bartlett,' came a female voice with a Brooklyn accent, 'it's Bernd Allen calling.'
'Put him on.'
Bernd was a Brit who was in charge of day-to-day accounting for Bartlett Medical Devices. He was forty- seven and not a risk taker and he was always worried about something. That was his job. These days he had plenty to be worried about
He had been running a weekly projection of the cash flow at BMD, and the drawdown was now getting perilous.
The flagship product of Bartlett Medical Devices had been the 'balloons' used in heart angioplasty that inflate and expand clogged arteries. They were marketed together with stents, miniature metal mesh supports that keep coronary arteries open after angioplasty. The problem was that in 27 percent of the cases, the stents manufactured by BMD caused scar tissue to form, a process called restenosis, and re-block an artery, requiring a repeat of angioplasty or even a bypass operation. Other manufacturers' numbers were not any better. But a few months back, out of the blue, Hemotronics, a competing company near Boston, had introduced stents coated with drugs that prevented scarring. BMD's piece of the $2.6 billion angioplasty market had plummeted from 13 percent to 4 percent and was still dropping like a stone.
Add to that, two titanium joint replacements for arthritis patients that they'd pinned their future on-along with millions in cash-still had at least two years of human trials left before they could hope for FDA approval. Long story short, BMD was in a mature product cycle with its most lucrative hospital hardware, with nothing major in the pipeline for at least two years. They had bet the ranch on the stem cell research at Gerex.
'W.B., I just got last week's numbers back from the green-eyeshade chaps downstairs. As you asked, I had them refine all the assumptions. Remember the union contract. There's going to be a three percent wage increase for all hourly personnel at the end of the month. And we didn't hedge our Euro exposure and now it's going against us. That's my own bloody fault. And since we don't have any pricing flexibility in that territory at the moment it's like a four percent haircut right off the bottom line. Remember we ran that in a worst-case scenario a while back. Well, chances are we're about to see it for real.'
Bartlett had been watching the rate of cash burn and trying not to let the problem be evident. The logical thing to do, start laying off workers in the fabrication divisions, was out of the question. If you had a make-or-break deal cooking, you couldn't afford to look like you were on the ropes.
'Give me some parameters,' Bartlett said.
'You know we've already hit our credit lines at Chase about as hard as we dare without them calling for a review. So unless we try to refinance some real property, say the flagship building downtown-and in this interest- rate environment any rational lender would put a gun to our head-we've got to ink this deal with Cambridge Pharmaceuticals in two months max. Right now we're living on borrowed money and it's about to be borrowed time too.'
'Bernd, take a deep breath. We're on schedule and we've got to make sure we stay that way. Get hold of Grant and tell him I want him to double-check the regulatory situation for the Cambridge deal. I know he already has, but I want a memo from our attorneys by noon tomorrow. If there are going to be any roadblocks cropping up, we need to know about them now. We can't afford to be blindsided.'
He clicked off the phone and tried to think. In the confines of a limousine, it was hard.
Unknown to the world-but, unfortunately, known to his wife, Eileen-Winston Bartlett had a natural son. And that son, now in his own career, despised Bartlett. It was one of many sorrows he had long since learned to bear.
All the same, he increasingly regretted that he had made such a botch of their relationship. The man who was his natural son had done very well for himself professionally, had plenty of drive. And in fact Bartlett believed he himself deserved some of the credit for that. What he had done was let the boy fend for himself, which was exactly how Bartlett was raised.
And it had worked. The pity was, he now hated Winston Bartlett's guts.
But Bartlett had begun thinking more and more about a legacy. What if he could make peace with that son and bring him into the business? Right now the closest thing he had to a son was Grant Hampton, and Hampton was a little too slick and expedient. Bartlett knew a gold-standard hustler when he saw one.
The more he thought about it, the more he was convincing himself to make his natural son his sole heir.
Assuming there was anything left to pass on.
'Mr. Bartlett asked me to give you this,' Kenji Noda said handing her a large manila envelope as they stepped off the elevator. 'It's a copy of the original plans. And also, there's a blueprint for the current layout, along with measurements.'
She took it, looking him over again as she did. There was something very fluid about his motions. He could have been a dancer. There was a softness about him, and yet you got an unmistakable sense of inner strength. She suspected he had something to do with Bartlett's incredible collection of Japanese
She walked into the below-stairs service space and looked around. The back part, which was the kitchen, had stone walls that had been whitewashed. There also were two massive fireplaces, which, she assumed, had once housed coal-burning stoves. Large grease-and-soot-covered gas ranges were there now.
But the space was fabulous. Massive load-bearing columns went down the center, and a partition separated the front half of the space from the back. The front traditionally would have been the nursery and sewing room, in short, the maids' working quarters.
She turned to the man Bartlett had called Ken.
'Does Mr. Bartlett have a cook?' she asked. 'This kitchen doesn't look used.'
'No,' he said. 'Actually, he almost never dines here, and Mrs. Bartlett has her meals delivered from various restaurants. Though she does go out sometimes as well.'
This was the first time she had heard any mention of Eileen Bartlett.
'She resides on the top two floors,' he went on. 'She has her own dining room up there, where she takes her meals, along with an efficiency kitchen.'
So the Bartletts did live completely separate lives. That explained a lot.
'Okay,' she said, 'I want to look around and get a feeling for the space and start putting together some ideas.' She was starting to focus on the job. The ceiling was lower than upstairs, but still the space had enormous possibilities. 'Off the top, I'd probably suggest we open this out. Remove that dividing wall and make a great room. With the right kind of kitchen, this could be a marvelous contemporary space for semiformal dining and entertaining.' Assuming, she thought, Winston Bartlett actually wanted a renovated space to entertain. She still had the nagging suspicion that he just wanted
Mix different materials for the different parts of the kitchen and the room, she thought. The cabinets could be mahogany, to echo the extensive use of that wood upstairs, and the walls around the stove area and the fireplaces could be an earth- colored slate. And that look could be accented with polished granite countertops in a slightly darker hue. There would need to be a high-Btu stove, probably a big Viking, with a slate backsplash all around. A couple of stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerators and a large Bosch dishwasher could be spaced along in the slate and granite. And if Bartlett wanted it, there could be a place for a temperature-controlled wine cellar. High-end
