CHAPTER 6: THE TACOS AL PASTOR THEORY

Boardroom number one was a freezer designed to intimidate. It featured a dark glass oval table that seemed to float in the center of the room, surrounded by twelve black leather chairs occupied by twelve very unfriendly-looking people.

At the head of the table, like a king judging his vassals, sat Maximiliano Montenegro.

I walked in trying to project confidence, but my shoes squeaked against the polished wood floor. Twelve heads snapped toward me in unison. I felt my stomach shrink to the size of a walnut. Max watched me from the other end of the table. His gray eyes scanned my jacket—buttoned up to my chin—and the strand of hair rendered stiff by dried milk. One of his eyebrows arched a fraction of a millimeter, but he didn't say a word.

I slipped into the only empty chair, directly across from Vanessa, who shot me a venom-laced smile.

"Now that we’re all here," Max said, his voice slicing through the air like a whip, "we can continue with the quarterly logistics report. Roberto, the screen."

A bald man with round glasses stood up and clicked a remote. The massive screens in the room sprang to life, vomiting a series of bar graphs, pie charts, and curved lines crossing Cartesian axes. Roberto started speaking at the speed of light.

"As you can see in quadrant B, the EBITDA has suffered a four percent contraction due to bottlenecks in our northern distribution centers. The projected ROI doesn't align with the depreciation of our mobile assets, creating operational friction in the last-mile supply chain."

My brain made a static noise, like an old TV losing its signal.

EBIT-what? Bottleneck? Last-mile?

I stared at the graph in front of me, desperately trying to make sense of a red line going up and down. Nothing. I might as well have been looking at instructions for assembling a nuclear reactor in Russian. Panic started clawing its way up my throat. I was going to be exposed. It would only take one direct question for everyone to realize their supposed Vice President had the financial literacy of a rock.

I tried to sink into my seat, making myself as small as possible. I clicked my pen and started scribbling nonsense on my notepad to pretend I was taking vital notes. I drew a little dog. Then a little dog wearing a hat.

"The proposed solution," Roberto continued, sweating under the CEO’s predatory gaze, "is to inject capital into a new transport fleet to saturate the route and force the retained inventory out."

Maximiliano stopped Roberto by raising a single hand. The silence that followed was absolute and terrifying.

"Saturating the route means increasing fixed costs in a quarter where we are already bleeding liquidity," Max dictated, with a mathematical coldness that made poor Roberto tremble. "That doesn't solve the bottleneck. It just moves it."

Maximiliano turned his head. His storm-cloud eyes locked directly onto me. The air abandoned my lungs.

"Camila," he said my name like it was a trial by fire. "As our new representative of the Dupont interests and an expert in... organic market logistics," I caught the hidden sarcasm referencing the flea market from this morning, "I want to hear your analysis. Roberto suggests buying more trucks. What is your stance on the inventory flow problem in the northern zone?"

The entire table turned toward me. Twelve pairs of eyes evaluating my clothes, my posture, and my silence. Vanessa leaned forward, preemptively tasting my public destruction. They were waiting for me to stutter, to cry, or to excuse myself by saying I was still getting caught up.

My mind went completely blank. I looked at the screen. The red lines suddenly reminded me of lines of people waiting outside a food stall.

Survival instinct took the wheel. My street-smart brain kicked down the door and rode to the rescue.

"Buying more trucks is stupid," I blurted out, without thinking.

Several executives let out murmurs of shock. Roberto turned tomato red. Maximiliano didn't move a single muscle in his face, but he leaned back in his leather chair, waiting.

"Enlighten us," Max demanded.

I sat up straight in my chair, resting my hands on the glass table. If I was going down, I was going down swinging.

"The problem isn't the amount of transport, it’s the slicing rhythm. It’s exactly like a tacos al pastor stand on a Friday night," I said, my voice clear and steady.

The silence in the room was so thick you could hear a mosquito buzz. Vanessa blinked in sheer disbelief.

"Tacos... al pastor?" Roberto repeated, as if I had just spoken Klingon.

"Exactly. Listen. You have the spinning spit of meat roasting in front of the fire. That’s your merchandise, your inventory," I explained, moving my hands to illustrate an imaginary cylinder of pork. "You have fifty people lined up on the sidewalk. That’s your demand. The bottleneck isn't how many plastic plates you have to serve the tacos. The bottleneck is the taco chef."

I lifted myself slightly off the chair, fully possessed by the spirit of my neighborhood.

"If the guy cuts the meat too fast just to move the line, the meat underneath comes out raw and people get sick or return the plate. Total loss," I continued. "If he cuts it too slow, waiting for it to sear perfectly, people get tired of waiting, cross the street, and buy street dogs from the other cart. You lose clients. Roberto says he wants to buy more trucks. That’s like buying twenty more plastic plates when the chef only has two hands. You’re just going to have empty plates cluttering the counter and costing you money."

I looked directly into Maximiliano’s gray eyes.

"What you need isn't more trucks. You need a second prep cook. Someone to chop the onions and heat the tortillas so the master chef can focus solely on slicing the meat. Optimize the distribution center from the inside. Hire more night-shift loading staff, stagger the departure schedules so the trucks you already own don't all leave at seven in the morning and get stuck in traffic. Yes, you spend on warehouse salaries, but it is infinitely cheaper than buying, insuring, and maintaining a fleet of brand-new trucks that are just going to sit parked on the highway."

I dropped back into my chair, feeling my heart hammering against my ribs. I was done. They could call security and kick me to the curb right now.

The silence dragged on for ten agonizing seconds.

Suddenly, an older man in a plaid suit at the far end of the table started nodding, tapping his pen against the glass.

"Fascinating," the man murmured. "She stripped the problem of all the corporate jargon dressing it up. She reduced a ten-million-dollar logistics crisis to... a taco stand."

"It’s disruptive genius," added a woman to my left, looking at me with admiration. "The perspective of micro-commerce applied to macro-logistics. Camila is entirely right. Increasing the OPEX at the operational base is a much lower risk than injecting CAPEX into rapidly depreciating assets."

I looked around, dumbfounded. They were buying it. They were swallowing the raw meat story as if it were the most brilliant economic theory of the twenty-first century. Vanessa’s mouth hung slightly open, utterly incapable of formulating a counterattack against the unanimous support of the key directors.

Slowly, I turned my gaze back to the head of the table.

Maximiliano wasn't nodding. He wasn't smiling. He had both hands steepled over the glass, and his eyes were locked onto me with a disturbing intensity. It was the look of a predator who had just discovered his prey wasn't a rabbit, but something far more complex.

He wasn't sold on my "eccentric genius" disguise. I knew he could see the seams of my performance. But he didn't expose me either.

"The fleet purchase is scrapped," Max dictated, without moving his eyes from mine for a single millimeter. "Roberto, I want a warehouse shift-restructuring plan on my desk first thing tomorrow morning. Based on... Miss Dupont’s model."

I swallowed hard. I had survived round one. But the sustained, calculating stare of my fake fiancé made one thing crystal clear: the real interrogation was just beginning.