was doing here, he wouldn’t know the answer. She gracefully turned on her high heels, opened a big oak door at the end of the room, and disappeared.
Walker looked toward Stillman, but he wasn’t where Walker had expected him to be. He had moved off across the floor, and he was settling into a big wing chair under a painting of a clipper ship. Walker was distracted by the room. It was different from the rest of the building. It was like a men’s club in an old movie about London. The chairs and tables were antique, and even the walls up here had somehow been contrived to have the solidity of things made by hand a long time ago.
The door opened silently, and seemed to open only a crack, but the woman miraculously slipped out and quietly closed it again. “He’s just wrapping something up,” she said. “He asked if you could give him a minute.” Stillman nodded.
She turned and glided past Walker, and he had a chance to look at her without getting caught. He was comparing her to a fashion model in a magazine, then changed his mind. Her movements were designed to convey efficiency and polish rather than allure, as though her job was to warn people that everything up here was different, more professional, better.
A phone rang quietly as she was passing a desk in an alcove that looked like the set for the television news. She paused without diverting her course and snagged it from the front of the desk. “Mr. McClaren’s office.” Even her voice was beautiful, but it was perfection rather than warmth, like a voice broadcast from a great height. “I’m very sorry, sir, but he’s just going into a very important meeting. We’ll get back to you in about fifteen minutes.” She replaced the receiver, and her eyes passed across Walker without a hint of a smile.
Suddenly the big oak door opened, and Walker realized that the flash of gray beyond it was his first glimpse of the man who ran the company where he had worked for two years. Rex McClaren was as tall as Walker, dressed in a gray suit. Walker could see wrinkles around the pale blue-gray eyes as he looked at Stillman and smiled. His hair looked as though it had turned gray early, because his face was not old enough to go with it. His voice was a deep, quiet one with a slight accent that Walker associated with prep schools in New England. “Max,” he said. “Sorry to hold you up. I hope I didn’t break your stride.”
“It’s okay,” said Stillman. He looked at Walker and began to raise his hand toward him, as though to begin an introduction.
McClaren was too quick. “Ah,” he interrupted. “John Walker.” He stepped forward and gave Walker’s hand a firm, hard shake. Walker saw that the smile made the wrinkles around the eyes return.
“Pleased to meet you,” Walker mumbled.
McClaren looked puzzled, and in his confusion he reminded Walker of one of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania, mildly embarrassed at his mistake but comfortable in his admission: his position proved that any mistake of his was caused by the press of great matters, not by mere stupidity. “Oh, I guess that’s right. We haven’t met. I’ve seen you around, but I don’t ever seem to get down to analysis lately.” The word “lately” clearly meant during Walker’s short career. “Joyce likes to run the place without any intrusion from on high. Good to meet you.”
Walker nodded, but said nothing because his mind was stumbling over new impressions. He had never seen McClaren before, and he wondered how McClaren had seen him. He obviously had a long-standing relationship with Joyce Hazelton, but Walker couldn’t remember anything she’d said to him that would have revealed that she had met McClaren. But even more mystifying was the oddly familiar tone between McClaren and Stillman.
McClaren looked at Stillman, his eyebrows rising as though they had something to do with listening. Stillman was up. “We just stopped by to get your blessing, Rex. We won’t hold you up.”
McClaren half-grinned, but there was a question behind it. “You’ve got it,” he said. “But don’t worry about holding me up. I thought you guys had a plane to catch.”
Stillman glanced at his watch. “Oh, thanks. Yeah, we’d better do it.” He raised his eyes to Walker. “You have any questions while we’re here?”
Walker shook his head. “Thanks for taking the time to see us,” he said to McClaren. He retreated, with as much dignity as he could manufacture, toward the elevators.
The car was out of the garage, a mile away, and accelerating onto the 101 before Walker said, “What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid our hope of lunch is fading. We’ll concentrate on making the plane.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“My investigation just turned something up,” said Stillman. “Somebody from McClaren Life and Casualty has to go with me to check it out. That’s you.”
“Why me?”
Stillman slipped into the left lane and flashed past a line of cars, then veered to the right and shot through an opening into a clear space ahead. “I need someone who really works for the company, who knows a little about what goes on in all parts of it, and who can disappear from his cubicle for a while without having the company fall apart. I also need somebody who knows Snyder.”
“Ellen Snyder?” said Walker. “This is about her?” He was shocked, pained.
“There. You do know her.”
“She was in my training class,” said Walker. “There were sixty of us, and I don’t know her any better than the others do.” He heard himself say it, and was surprised that his first, almost automatic response was a lie.
“I interviewed a few candidates, and I had to settle for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not a psychological mess.”
“Who is?”
Stillman looked at him in irritation. “The rest of them. They’re hiding behind layers and layers of bullshit. I ask them where they were born, and they say, ‘I’ll check and get back to you.’ I ask them if they filled out some stupid form in a file, and they tell me who they told to do it for them. They’re so ambitious for the next promotion that they can hardly think about what they’re doing for the next ten minutes.”
Walker began to compose a defense for them, but he realized that all he would be able to come up with was “Being ambitious doesn’t make somebody a psychological mess.” This was not exactly true, or not always true, so he was silent.
Stillman said, “I’m afraid for people like that. And if they’re on my side, I’ve got to be afraid for me, too. I’m going to have to teach my partner a few things as we go, and I don’t have time to go back to the beginning.”
“Partner?” Walker protested.
“Did I say ‘partner’? It’s a figure of speech,” Stillman said.
Walker assembled his arguments and began to touch them off, one by one. “I am a data analyst. I was hired to work in the insurance business, not in security, or whatever you call it.”
“Then maybe you ought to know more about insurance,” said Stillman. “The problem with insuring against theft is that you can’t always cover yourself against loss by raising premiums. Once in a great while, you have to leave your cubicle and go convince some actual thieves that you won’t put up with it.”
“You’re joking.” Having detected no change in Stillman’s expression, Walker began to worry that he wasn’t. He found himself remembering woolly tidbits of propaganda from his training class: the agent on the Malaysian ship who had held a sawed-off shotgun to the captain’s head to keep him from surrendering to the pirates. What Stillman was saying made a certain surreal sense. “What, exactly, would you want me to do?”
“Most likely, not a thing,” said Stillman. “I think it’s a case of fraud. We verify that I’m right, collect some leads, and turn everything over to the police. It’s a terrific deal for you.”
“Why is that?”
“McClaren’s is an old-fashioned company,” said Stillman. “You’ve been around for a couple of years, so you must have noticed that much.”
Walker said, “It’s the only insurance company I’ve ever worked for.”
“The company is what Wall Street calls ‘closely held.’ That means that the forty percent of the stock that isn’t owned outright by people named McClaren is in blocks held by spindly-looking horse-faced daughters with different married names, their heirs, and their descendants.”
“That much I know,” said Walker.
“Well, every twenty years or so, they all get together for a picnic in the back yard of the old house on Nob Hill and decide who in the next generation ought to be president. They thank the last one and send him off to spend the
