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Kramer, ITC’s head attorney, stood to one side and listened to him. Gordon saw Doniger jabbing his finger in the air at her angrily. Clearly, he was giving her hell.
    :
    Robert Doniger was thirty-eight years old, a brilliant physicist, and a billionaire. Despite a potbelly and gray hair, his manner remained youthful — or juvenile, depending on whom you talked to. Certainly age had not mellowed him. ITC was his third startup company; he had grown rich from the others, but his management style was as caustic and nasty as ever. Nearly everybody in the company feared him.
    In deference to the board meeting, Doniger had put on a blue suit, forgoing his usual khakis and sweats. But he looked uncomfortable in the suit, like a boy whose parents had made him dress up.
    “Well, thank you very much, Officer Wauneka,” Gordon said into the cell phone. “We’ll make all the arrangements. Yes. We’ll do that immediately. Thank you again.” Gordon flipped the phone shut, and turned to Doniger. “Traub’s dead, and they’ve identified his body.”
    “Where?”
    “Gallup. That was a cop calling from the ER.”
    “What do they think he died of?”
    “They don’t know. They think massive cardiac arrest. But there was a problem with his fingers. A circulatory problem. They’re going to do an autopsy. It’s required by law.”
    Doniger waved his hand, a gesture of irritable dismissal. “Big fucking deal. The autopsy won’t show anything. Traub had transcription errors. They’ll never figure it out. Why are you wasting my time with this shit?”
    “One of your employees just died, Bob,” Gordon said.
    “That’s true,” Doniger said coldly. “And you know what? There’s fuck all I can do about it. I feel sorry. Oh me oh my. Send some flowers. Just handle it, okay?”
    :
    At moments like this, Gordon would take a deep breath, and remind himself that Doniger was no different from most other aggressive young entrepreneurs. He would remind himself that behind the sarcasm, Doniger was nearly always right. And he would remind himself that in any case, Doniger had behaved this way all his life.
    Robert Doniger had shown early signs of genius, taking up engineering textbooks while still in grade school. By the time he was nine, he could fix any electronic appliance — a radio, or a TV — fiddling with the vacuum tubes and wires until he got it working. When his mother expressed concern that he would electrocute himself, he told her, “Don’t be an idiot.” And when his favorite grandmother died, a dry-eyed Doniger informed his mother that the old lady still owed him twenty-seven dollars, and he expected her to make good on it.
    After graduating summa cum laude in physics from Stanford at the age of eighteen, Doniger had gone to Fermilab, near Chicago. He quit after six months, telling the director of the lab that “particle physics is for jerkoffs.” He returned to Stanford, where he worked in what he regarded as a more promising area: superconducting magnetism.
    This was a time when scientists of all sorts were leaving the university to start companies to exploit their discoveries. Doniger left after a year to found TechGate, a company that made the components for precision chip etching that Doniger had invented in passing. When Stanford protested that he’d made these discoveries while working at the lab, Doniger said, “If you’ve got a problem, sue me. Otherwise shut up.”
    It was at TechGate that Doniger’s harsh management style became famous. During meetings with his scientists, he’d sit in the corner, tipped precariously back in his chair, firing off questions. “What about this?” “Why aren’t you doing that?” “What’s the reason for this?” If the answer satisfied him, he’d say, “Maybe. . . .” That was the highest praise anyone ever got from Doniger. But if he didn’t like the answer — and he usually didn’t — he’d snarl, “Are you brain-dead?” “Do you aspire to be an