self-defense training was of little use unless someone came at her. Tess merely stood there, staring at her, along with everyone else in the coffee bar, except for two chess players who were using a timer for their game. Cecilia knew how to defend, but not how to attack. Tess knew how to attack, but she had no intention of doing so. After a few moments of this standoff, Cecilia improvised, throwing her body against Tess's knees in a blatantly illegal tackle and bringing her crashing to the floor.
As Tess fell she reached out blindly with both hands, dropping the crumpled sheets. Cecilia grabbed them and bolted, leaving Tess in a puddle of steamed milk and crockery.
'Just another coffeehouse brawl,' Tess told the manager when he rushed over to examine the damage, not to her but to the heavy cups and saucers. 'Caffeine makes some people very aggressive.'
It hurt, being dumped on one's butt on a concrete floor. Of course, Tess thought, a coffeehouse couldn't have anything warm or soft underfoot. As she pulled to her feet, she saw a coffee-splattered piece of paper under the table. Greasy and gray, it appeared to be a page from some company's articles of incorporation. Tess remembered seeing such documents when she was a reporter. This was the last page of the charter, bearing two signatures: Prudence Henderson, president and treasurer of VOMA, and the lawyer who had filed the charter for her: Michael Abramowitz.
Chapter 15
The president of the United States came between Tess and her bagels the next morning, and it wasn't in one of her strange dreams.
Nor was it the first time. Like most Baltimoreans, Tess had more experience than she wanted with visiting presidents, First Ladies, cabinet secretaries, and their ilk. Just forty-five miles up the parkway from Washington, Baltimore had become the destination of choice during the last decade, an easy photo op for those who wanted to surround themselves with local misery or color. Real folks. Even the queen of England had felt obliged to put in an appearance at an Orioles game. But whether it was a monarch or a president, a Democrat or a Republican, it all meant the same thing for the local populace-traffic jams and security checks, breathless reports on television for a week before and after, a disruption of life in general.
Cranky at being deprived of her breakfast routine, Tess splurged on a chocolate-filled croissant and a cup of hazelnut coffee from one of the stalls inside the old Broadway market. She had planned to savor the high-calorie treat and gourmet coffee, but she ended up bolting both when she saw the bus crossing Broadway. One reason her Toyota had survived this long was because she used public transportation when possible, as long as she didn't have to transfer. Baltimore 's bus system didn't make it easy. Today she ended up six long blocks from her destination, the complex of state office buildings at Preston and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
The bland gray towers here housed hundreds of state employees from several divisions. Tess took the elevator to room 808, home to all corporate charters filed in the state of Maryland, for businesses and nonprofits alike. Cecilia's smeared copies must have come from here, from the old microfilm files, a technology now almost as quaint as telegraphs and Morse codes.
It was a dusty, overheated room, always crowded and tense. When Tess was a reporter, jazzed up on caffeine and deadlines, just being here had pushed her to the edge of teeth grinding irritation. The too-small room seemed to affect everyone's reflexes, until employees and visitors alike moved as if suspended in honey. There was always a crowd at the banks of filing cabinets, always a line at the front desk, never enough clerks to help out. Strange little gnomes, male and female, hogged the microfilm machines and tables. Tess had never known, or cared, who these people were or what they were doing.
Now she was one of them. A free spirit, liberated from the forty-hour-a-week grind. Tess waited to surrender to the same lethargy the others had, to shuffle to the front desk, where she would get the folio number for the file she wanted, then to the cabinets where the files were kept, and to the machine where she could scan to the page number she needed. But the only feeling she had was her usual urgent desire to get out as quickly as possible. It took a mere five minutes to get the reel of microfilm, but the microfilm readers were already taken by people with piles and piles of film stacked at their sides. A bad sign, Tess decided, a very bad sign. She would have to rely on her more devious instincts, becoming sharper by the day, to jump ahead in line.
'Anybody parked on Howard Street?' she asked brightly. 'Because they're ticketing.'
Immediately three people rushed for the doors. One left a microfilm reader vacant and Tess usurped it, ignoring the glares of those who had not moved quite so quickly. She scanned on fast, which made her head ache as the pages rushed by in a blur. The machine gave off a noxious smell, a combination of ink and dust, laced with a burning odor from the old motor. VOMA's charter began on page 1,334, fairly deep into the file. She slowed the scan to a crawl, but she had already passed it by and had to reverse direction for several hundred pages before she could zero in.
She was looking for more names to add to her growing list. Tess knew from writing about charities that a nonprofit typically had officers and a board. A lawyer filed the incorporation papers, but the lawyer usually didn't have any further dealings with the group. Still, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that Abramowitz filed the papers for a group that had at least one member who hated his guts. The original filing for VOMA, the Victims of Male Aggression, listed only Prudence Henderson as president-treasurer, and the 'agent,' lawyer Michael Abramowitz- the same names she had found on Cecilia's fragment in the coffehouse. No board, and nothing unusual in the bylaws, basically a statement of purpose ('a nonprofit that seeks to educate about sexual assault') and a promise not to support or oppose individual political candidates. That was boilerplate, a federal law any tax-exempt group had to follow.
Tess scanned idly through the other charters in the file, curious to see if Michael Abramowitz often helped out with filings. His name did not come up again. But there were hundreds of thousands of corporations on file here. Abramowitz could have filed for any number, or helped out on just this one. Searching for his name this way was useless. She scanned back to the VOMA charter and pushed the 'print' button. The greasy, smudged copies were free, and Tess believed one should always take advantage of government freebies.
Before she left, she asked at the front desk to see the group's latest filing, an annual update known as the pink sheet, because of its color. If a board had been installed since the original filing, or if new officers had been named, VOMA would provide the list with its annual statement, another source of names and leads. When Tess was a reporter, a clerk would bring out the entire file, standing guard to ensure one looked only at the top pink sheet, which was public. The rest of the file was confidential. It had been a simple and painless process. Too simple and painless apparently: The legislature had changed it. The clerk told Tess she now needed twenty-six dollars, check or cash, to get the pink sheet today, nothing if she could wait for them to mail it, which could take up to two weeks. Tess wondered if she could bill it to Tyner without explaining to Tyner what she was doing. Nope. Better to go the cheaper route. Why gamble twenty-six dollars on a long shot?
She left the building, heading south to the greatest library in the free world.
Well, not anymore. Probably not ever. But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library still was a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the grand main hall. If she could be married here, she would.
She found a seat in the business and technology section, between two homeless men researching the Voting Rights Act, and pulled out a small, spiral-backed notebook and her sheaf of lists, all the names she had been able to link to Abramowitz. She started with the current phone book and worked backward, using the old directories on microfilm to find numbers and addresses for those not in the most recent book. It was boring detail work, the kind of thing she had always done well. Too well. Tess had a talent for the small stuff. It was the big picture that often eluded her. In another time, another place, she would have been bent over a large quilt, sewing away at her one tiny block of fabric, the pattern so close to her eyes it had blurred.
But there were few rewards today. Most of the names on her list were not there, or too common to track.
