above them.
Stillman nodded. “Right.”
Walker had said, “He may have had someone call my supervisor. I’ll take you there.”
Stillman had followed Walker to the corner office. Joyce Hazelton had been standing at her window, staring out at the array of tall buildings across Van Ness Avenue, when Walker knocked. She had spun around, a distracted expression in her eyes.
Walker had not seen that she was on the telephone, because the receiver had been hidden by her dark hair, and the cord had been in front of her. “Sorry,” he’d said from the doorway, but he’d heard her say, “I think he’s here now . . . Mr. Stillman?”
Stillman had nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She had said, “Mr. McClaren wondered if you had a minute to talk to him.” She had handed Stillman the phone, then put her arm around Walker’s shoulder to propel him out of the office with her, and closed the door behind them. She’d stood outside her own office for a few seconds, and the novelty of it had made Walker consider asking her who Max Stillman was, but the impulse had lasted only a moment, because her manicured hand had made a little sweeping motion to shoo him toward his desk.
He had turned and gone back. The day’s figures for payouts in the casualty end of the business made a difference, but the unannounced arrival of some old rich buddy of the current McClaren was like a cloud passing a mile above him. There had been a shadow for a few seconds while it was overhead, but it had moved on.
When Walker had returned from lunch, Stillman had been planted at the unoccupied desk in the open bay that was usually reserved for temporary workers, and Joyce Hazelton had been scurrying around gathering piles of reports and policy files. Walker had taken a couple of steps closer to offer help, but she had acknowledged him with a perfunctory smile and given her head a little shake.
Late that afternoon, Bill Kennedy had slipped into Walker’s cubicle to deliver the morning’s figures from the field. “He’s still out there, I see.”
Walker had brought himself back from the structured, silent, logical world of statistics. “Who?”
Kennedy’s voice had gone lower. “ ‘What bear?’ huh? Good strategy, John. That’s why possums rule the earth.”
Walker had glanced over his computer monitor into the vast, open office. Stillman was glaring down at another file. “He’s just some friend of Mr. McClaren’s.”
“He’s a spy.”
“On what?”
“On whom. On us. It’s got to be. Accounting just cut a check for him. It’s a hundred thousand, listed on the system as ‘Security Expense.’ ”
Walker had shrugged. “Maybe he’s going to overhaul the computer system so your twelve-year-old nephew can’t break in and peruse the physical exams of actresses anymore.”
Kennedy had shaken his head in pity. “Take a look. Is that a computer geek? No. That’s what repressive governments send out if the general’s daughter doesn’t come home from the prom.”
Walker had looked at Kennedy wearily. “And why do you suppose this stranger showed up in our peaceful village? Could it be that they hired him to find out who the village idiot is, and watch him rushing from hut to hut raving and talking wild?”
“Good point.” Kennedy had smiled as he stepped off, then called back, “Sorry, got to get these figures delivered.”
During the next few days, Walker had found that he was receiving more frequent visits from acquaintances in other departments. The men tended to step into his cubicle and move uncomfortably close to Walker’s shoulder, where they could pretend to look down at something he was showing them on his desk or computer screen, then raise their eyes slightly to stare at Stillman without being caught. The women were more subtle. They would sit in the only visitor’s chair, in the corner where Stillman couldn’t see them, and simply watch Walker’s eyes to see if Stillman did anything unusual while they fished for information.
Walker didn’t have any. “If he’s a security consultant, I assume he’s here to make us more secure, right? So feel secure.”
Marcy Wang stood and stared into his eyes as she drifted toward the door of his cubicle. “He’s here to make whoever paid him feel secure. I didn’t pay him, and neither did you.”
This time, as Walker’s eyes returned to his work, they passed across Stillman. He was alarmed to see that this time Stillman was not in profile, bent over the desk he had commandeered. He was half-turned in his swivel chair, staring frankly at Walker. Their eyes met for a heartbeat before Walker was able to nod nonchalantly and force his gaze down to the safety of his papers.
Each morning for the next three days, when Walker sat in the tiny kitchen of his apartment waiting for the coffee to drip through the machine, he remembered Stillman and felt uneasy. He thought about him as he dressed and drove to work, hoping he would be gone. Then he took the elevator to the seventh floor, discovered that Stillman was there again, hung his coat on the single hanger on the wall of his cubicle, and tried to obliterate him by concentrating on his work until nightfall.
Walker had worked for McClaren’s for only two years, beginning the summer after he had graduated from college. When he was a junior, he had entertained a vague notion of working a year and then going to law school, but as his senior year went on, the idea of more school had receded in his mind, and the prospect of going to work had taken all his attention. When a man from McClaren’s had come to the University of Pennsylvania campus near the end of Walker’s senior year, he had signed up for an interview. The corporate mystique had intrigued him.
McClaren’s was the company that had insured clipper ships making tea runs to China, and had covered gold shipments coming down from the mountains to San Francisco banks. The original headquarters had been replaced by this modern steel-and-glass building, but the furniture in it was Victorian, made of heavy, close-grained wood that appeared to be relics of agents who had written policies on shiploads of elephant tusks brought here to make billiard balls and piano keys. There was a lingering hint of huge risks and huge opportunities. Even now McClaren’s kept a reputation for promotion from within that was rivaled only by the Jesuits.
When graduation had approached, he had still not received any offers that piqued his interest as much as the offer to work for McClaren’s. He had always imagined he would work in Ohio within a few hours of home, but on the day before commencement, he had talked to his father and discovered that his parents had never given the idea much consideration. He had quietly set the plan aside and signed a contract with McClaren’s. He had completed the training period of six months and been assigned to this cubicle on the seventh floor of the home office.
He had been placed under the distant but sane supervision of Joyce Hazelton. She had explained to him what an analyst did: “They give us raw data. We cook and serve.” Information about all company operations was brought in, and he would screen the numbers for meaning and write reports that revealed trends and anomalies. She had said, “If we suddenly have seven percent of our clients dying on a full moon, I want that in block letters. If it’s fifteen percent, I want it underlined too.” Since then she had left him alone except to smile cordially at him once a day and meet with him every six months to show him that his performance ratings were all excellent.
He had found an unexpected pleasure in his work. The analysts all made jokes about the job, but it was intoxicating. Examining the figures was like being a cabalist searching for messages about the future encoded in the Talmud. Some of the messages were reassuring. At certain ages people had children and bought term life. By consulting actuarial tables, he knew how many of the policies sold this year would come back for payoff at what future dates, and how many premiums the company would receive in the meantime. He could consult the company’s tables on historical profit on invested premiums to produce an estimate of total return. Because of the large number of policies and the long stretch of time, the individual deviations from the norm disappeared to produce reliable predictions.
The work of the analysts was solitary because it demanded uninterrupted concentration, so they tended to savor encounters with their colleagues, and they greeted each other with manic friendliness. That made his time in the office pleasant enough, but he had not detected much improvement in the part of his life that took place between seven P.M. and seven A.M., and that had worried and depressed him. He thought about it most often on the trips to and from work, when he passed groups of people about his age who were walking together, because they seemed to have found some solution that he had missed.
Each time he caught himself silently phrasing it that way, he quickly corrected himself: it was all right to pretend confusion and befuddlement to amuse people, but it was a pose, not an excuse he was allowed to use to
