quiet his own mind. He sometimes presented himself as though he were new to this planet, a rational observer who simply couldn’t understand the mysteries of human behavior. The truth was much more painful: he understood. He had been given his chance at love soon after he had arrived in San Francisco—maybe the only time in his life that it would come—and had wasted it. For a year and a half he had been trying to get over his loss of her, and his disappointment in himself for having somehow failed to keep her. It helped to immerse himself in the morass of details that the insurance business generated. And now and then there were distractions—like Stillman.
On the seventh day of Stillman, as Walker put his analysis of the quarter’s performance bond figures into the drawer, out of sight, and took a step toward the coat hanging on the single hanger in his cubicle, Max Stillman’s body suddenly filled the opening. “Time for lunch?” asked Stillman.
“I was thinking about it,” said Walker. “But if you need help or something, I can go later. My schedule’s pretty flexible.”
“No,” said Stillman. “Come on. I’ll buy.” He had turned and started off down the side aisle of the bay, toward the elevators, before Walker had managed to snag his coat.
Stillman’s body seemed to project around it a zone of silence. It took Walker a few seconds in the seventh- floor hallway to see that it was because whenever he was in a crowd, the people who worked at McClaren’s were acutely conscious of him, and the strain of thinking of small talk that was small enough to be said in his hearing made talk vanish altogether. During the ride down in the elevator, Walker became aware of sounds he had never noticed before: the distant groan of the electric winch that unwound the cable to let the elevator down, the sixty- cycle hum of the overhead lights. Everyone in the elevator assumed the same strange pose, facing the doors with the head tilted slightly upward to gaze at some distant, invisible point. People he had observed a dozen times chattering in the elevator as they left for lunch together appeared never to have seen one another before. He began to be aware that the people around him had taken note that he was with Stillman, and while he was wondering what they were thinking, he began to sweat.
It was almost a relief to follow Stillman across the lobby to the garage. He was going to find out what this man wanted. Stillman’s car was a big Chevrolet that looked like the same model the police used, but when Walker got in, he saw the keys Stillman turned to start it had a tag from a rental company.
The day was bright and clear, and Walker tried to feel pleased about the novelty of sitting in a passenger seat while someone else maneuvered through the crowded and frustrating San Francisco streets. He watched the route Stillman took, from Telegraph Hill to Lombard, down Stockton across to Sacramento, but then he somehow made it to Sutter and Grant above the mess at Market Street and below the place where Grant became one-way in the opposite direction. The car stopped in front of a hotel where loud reggae music blared from the lobby, and Stillman got out of the car to make room for a parking attendant to get in and take it away in a flash of metal and squealing tires.
Walker looked toward the hotel, but Stillman was walking up the incline between the two stone lions that guarded the entrance to Chinatown. When Walker caught up, Stillman explained, “I have deals with a lot of parking attendants. This way, the kid gets a few extra bucks, and you get back to work on time.”
“What about you?” asked Walker. He regretted the clumsiness of it, but he pressed forward. “You have to be back too, don’t you?”
Stillman shook his head. “I’m working now.”
Walker silently turned that statement around and around to study it, but Stillman said, “That’s the good part of being in business for yourself. You get to start and stop when you feel like it.”
“What’s the bad part?”
“Your boss is an asshole, and he knows that you feel nothing for him but contempt. Of course, I wouldn’t enjoy those compartments they put you in. It’s not that I can’t sit still or something.”
“I noticed.”
Stillman glanced at him. “Yeah, I guess you would have. But those little cubbyhole things . . . ” He shook his head sympathetically. “The problem with them is that they’re insulting. You’re locked up, but there’s no door to close, so people can look in on you.” He paused. “Ever been in prison?”
Walker’s head turned toward Stillman, but Stillman’s expression had not changed. This was just part of the breezy conversation. “No. Have you?”
“It’s like that, sort of. It’s about who has the options. Prisons are set up so there’s no question in the prisoner’s mind that he’s not going anyplace, but so he knows he can be watched—not that he is, but that he can be.”
Walker had not missed the fact that Stillman had not answered his question. He said, “The cubicles aren’t quite that bad. The wall cuts the noise and helps you keep your mind on what you’re doing. On a good day I look down, then look up again and it’s time for lunch. I come back, same thing. When it’s time to go home, I print a hard copy of what I’ve done, and the amount I’ve done surprises me.”
Stillman didn’t seem convinced. “How long have you been at it?”
“Almost two years; a year and a half in my cubicle.” It was almost reassuring that the questions were so transparent and simple. If Stillman were investigating Walker, he would already know all of this.
“Oh, yeah,” said Stillman. “That’s right. You were in the training class with Kennedy and Cardarelli and Snyder and Wang and those people.”
Walker nodded, then stared ahead as they walked farther into Chinatown, past shops that were as big inside as department stores had been when he was a child in Ohio, but filled with a jumble of cast-resin imitations of carved smiling Buddhas, T-shirts that said GREETINGS FROM ALCATRAZ, genuine antiques, and cases of jewelry that looked as though it might be spectacularly expensive. Stillman took him past restaurants on both sides of the street with oversized double bronze doors, but showed no interest in them. Walker decided that it was time to face the difficult part. He said, as casually as he could, “What are you doing at McClaren’s?”
Stillman showed no surprise. “Once in a while they call me in when something’s bothering them. I’m doing some investigating.”
Walker felt his heart begin to pump harder. The job at McClaren’s that he had liked shrunk and withered in his imagination. Enough, he thought. “Are you here to investigate me?”
“Hell no,” said Stillman. “I’m here to eat lunch.” He walked on more quickly, then turned a corner.
Walker followed him a few steps, then stopped abruptly.
Stillman turned in surprise, cocked his head, and waited.
Walker said, “I want to know whether I’m some kind of suspect.”
Stillman took two steps toward him, and Walker remembered that he didn’t know this man at all. From the beginning, Walker had noticed an air of barely suppressed violence about him, a permanent tension. Walker felt instinctively that if Stillman wanted to attack him physically, his best chance would not be to remain immobile and hope to fend him off. Stillman’s face was only two feet from his own now, and he looked enormous. Walker got ready, his eyes on Stillman’s and his arms tightening to strike first if he saw a sudden movement.
“Mr. Walker. John,” Stillman amended. “I hereby swear, what I’m investigating is not you. If you’ve done something, it might be me that catches you at it, but I give you my solemn oath that I don’t know about it now, didn’t come to your office for that purpose, and don’t give a shit about it. Now let’s eat lunch.” He remained motionless, like a wall across the sidewalk, his eyes holding Walker in place.
Walker stared back into his sharp, brown eyes. “If you were investigating me, would you tell me the truth?”
Stillman’s face tightened into a happy grin. “Fuck no,” he said, then turned and hurried into a doorway.
Walker followed Stillman into a dim alcove, then up a long flight of stairs lit only by a chartreuse and magenta neon sign in Chinese characters. When Walker reached the top and carefully pushed the door inward, he found Stillman in a bright yellow room where waiters bustled back and forth under sunlit skylights carrying large zinc- colored trays loaded with covered dishes. There were about thirty fashionably dressed customers sitting at black metal tables, eating and talking. A restaurant, thought Walker, and it was only then that he realized he had been convinced it would be something else.
They sat at a table near a window, and Stillman unabashedly amused himself by staring down at the pedestrians on the sidewalk below. When the waiter appeared with menus, Stillman said distractedly, “Just bring us whatever Mr. Fo had today.”
The waiter said, “Very good, Mr. Stillman,” and scurried off.
Walker said, “How do you know the owner didn’t have seagull brains sauteed in rancid yak butter?”
