The Blue Rose by Anthony Eglin

forestall the company’s collapse. Ironically, he’d played it straight this time, operating the company in an aggressive, yet businesslike fashion, never straying from the path of legitimacy. Despite everything he had done to bolster sales and reduce overhead, profits kept slipping inexorably downward and costs continued to spiral. Red ink was seeping insidiously through the pages of each successive monthly profit-and-loss statement. More loans were out of the question. He couldn’t pay those he had. The banks were now getting testy. If the company were to go under, it could be more than just a financial disaster for him. If the State Attorney General or the FBI started to get nosy, or if a cub reporter decided to resurrect the demise of Baker-Reynolds, it would only be a matter of time before Wolff ’s past would start popping up all over the media.
    In a lifetime of constructing creative contingency plans, this time he had none.
    He wondered which part of his past they would dig up first. Probably the five years’ incarceration for fraud, he assumed, along with a fine of three million dollars to be used to repay his victims. This was part of the sentence he had received eighteen years ago for an elaborate Ponzi scheme that had bilked over one hundred investors in five eastern states of more than two hundred million dollars. Employing, as one legal mind stated, ‘a brilliantly conceived but legally corrupt and morally diabolical scheme’, Bernard Wolfenden – his real name – was found guilty of establishing phony corporations, creating fake deeds of trust, fictitious balance sheets and other documents to give investors the impression of legitimacy. Even a loan officer at a prestigious bank was on his payroll at the time.
    Wolff finally took his eyes off the ceiling, glanced at his watch, and got up from the chair. It was two minutes to ten. It was inevitable, he concluded, that once the name Wolfenden was in the nation’s computer search engines, other unsavoury episodes of his past would ooze to the surface – the Dallas affair, for one. The media would have a field day with that. So, above all else, he had to keep Baker-Reynolds going. He preferred not to think more about Dallas right now.
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    The meeting started precisely at ten. Wolff insisted on punctuality. Eighteen people were in attendance. The mega-sized boardroom table, more befitting a White House banquet, left little room for anything else in the room. The story was that old man Baker bought it at auction, had it cut in four pieces, and reassembled it in the room. Sundry awards and diplomas – many faded, all with rose motifs – added listless blotches of colour to the beige walls.
    At the head of the table, Ira Wolff studied some papers with Jed Harmon, the company’s Chief Financial Officer. There was a stern look on Wolff ’s tanned face. He was fastidiously dressed in a navy pinstripe suit with a lot of white cuff showing. His only noticeable mannerism was the constant need to brush aside the strands of grey-streaked hair that flopped continually across his glaucous eyes.
    Wolff handed the file he’d been scrutinizing back to Jed Harmon and walked over to the vacant chair at one end of the table. He placed his hands on the back of the chair and surveyed the room.
    â€˜Okay, let’s get comfortable. Settle down. Lillian, would you close the door, please.’
    There was a jockeying of chairs – the casters gliding silently on the thick, wool carpet – a rustling of papers and the room fell silent. Wolff cleared his throat.
    â€˜Good morning, everybody. Nice to see you back in the saddle, Bill,’ he said, glancing across the table at his General Sales Manager, Bill Samuelson, who had recently been on leave of absence. Wolff paused briefly, to make eye contact around the room. ‘These last two weeks I’ve spent mostly with Jed and our auditors. As a result of those