doors remotely, with the smart key, and lead Julie into the elevator and up.
“You’re sure we should be here?” she says. “You’re not in trouble?”
“Why?”
“Your shoulders. Roll them back. Now exhale. Slowly.”
“Massage school,” I say.
“It stays with you. It trains your eye. Back there in the airport, the compression of people’s spines? It’s like they’re all six inches shorter than they should be.”
“You’d think they’d walk taller there.”
“They’re munchkins. Crabs.”
The point of this errand is still waiting to reveal itself. We walk out onto my floor and nothing’s changed except the art. Artemis Bond, the apostle on our board, donated to us a trove of wildlife oils said to be worth millions, though I’d be shocked if that were true. The bugling bull elk and treed pumas and flushing quail rotate through the building, floor by floor; I know it’s September now by all the waterfowl. The art is our only connection to natural cycles here. An energy-saving coating on the windows cuts out the heart of the spectrum from the light and turns people’s skin the color of old dull nickels. It makes paper explosive, too bright to look at, and assistants have actually left us over eyestrain. One even filed suit, and may have won. Such victories don’t pay. The CTC cases I’ve known who’ve wrangled judgments for wrongful termination are spacemen now, in orbit, in exile, unwelcome back on earth.
Julie trails me past a gang of cubicles glowing with junior executive ambition to a partitioned warren of larger offices that means we’re approaching the operational heart of things. The air swirls and eddies with all the old polarities—fear of the lion’s den just down the hall, the hope for an unmolested interlude at the copier or fax machine, the seductions of fresh-brewed decaf in the snack nook. My assistant looks up from his desktop—I’ve tripped some wire—and reformats his self-presentation appropriately, jerking taut the slack around his eyes.
“It’s you,” he says.
I point Julie to my office, which has a love seat. A foreshortened sofa, actually. It’s never been used for courtship, that I know of.
My assistant rolls back his chair two caster-turns. I’m a sight, it seems.
“Any messages?”
“Just one or two. Your hotel in Las Vegas is covered. The Mount Olympus. They’re crowded, so I had to take a suite. They said it has a jukebox and a pool table.”
“Nice.”
“You think so? It kind of gave me chills. Mr. Bingham alone in some hotel room, practicing his bank shots, playing records.”
“Who else. Did a woman named Alex call?”
“Don’t think so. Just that airline lady who sounds like Catwoman. She calls every couple of hours. She wants your mobile. I’ve been guarding your privacy.”
“Linda. What does she want?”
“Wouldn’t tell me. Is that voice an act?”
“I’ve never noticed it. Give her my number next time. Nothing about that meeting in Omaha?”
“No, but your briefcase came from Great West baggage. I stood it up next to your chair. Your tie is twisted.”
I own just one briefcase, and I’m carrying it. I walk into the office, hip-bang the door closed, and look down at a burgundy case with gold-tone hardware that might have been my style a few years back, but not since I started reading
“Is this you in this picture?” Julie is on the love seat, a magazine on her lap. The
“That’s me. The one they’re hoisting on their shoulders.”
“Why are your shirts off? What are all those ropes?”
“We were rock climbing in Bryce Canyon. It’s a program. Wilderness Accountability. We ate wild grasses. We chiseled arrowheads.”
“One of those things where you let yourself fall backwards and everyone catches you?”
“Only they don’t catch you. On this one they let you fall. And then they step on you.”
I heft the case. It’s light, but it feels full. I shake it. Paper. The combination lock reads 4–6–7. I used to carry an expensive pocketknife—a gift from a Waco oil services firm in gratitude for the lawsuit-free excision of eleven second-tier managers, three of them less than a year from being vested in a pension plan that’s since gone under —but it was taken from me by airport guards who measured the blade length and said it broke the law. I could use something like it to jimmy the case. I open my top middle desk drawer and stir the junk around, a lot of giveaway convention bric-a-brac, looking for something slim and strong and pointed, but the best I can do is a silver-plated bookmark snagged from KPMG at the last GoalQuest. The thing is hardly metal, a flimsy wafer, and when I wedge it against a hinge, it cracks.
“Back from the vale of sorrows. Ryan B. His mournful dignity marred by coffee stains insufficiently blotted from wrinkled collar.”
This man is not worth elevating my vision for, a conclusion I came to long ago, but he might have a knife in his trousers, so I do. It’s the same old assault on the senses. Flared canine nostrils snuffling for blood trails near the watercooler. Marx Brothers eyebrows, permanently arched and flaked with dead skin that flies off him when he laughs, which he only does with both hands inside his pockets, as though there’s a switch near his scrotum he has
