The Consultant

by Little,Bentley

  The consultant smiled and waved as the elevator door opened behind him. “Thank you all for coming.”

  The milling group began to break apart, some going into the elevator with Patoff, others taking the second elevator, still others taking the stairs. Craig found Phil. “There go my divorce plans,” his friend said, smiling.

  “Pretty nice,” Craig said, nodding toward the cafeteria.

  “We’re paying for it.” He looked around. “How much do you think that ‘fee’ is going to be? My guess is a lot more than a few cents per paycheck.”

  They waited by the elevators. “I noticed Matthews wasn’t here,” Craig said, keeping his voice low.

  “I actually saw him this morning,” Phil said. “I got here early, thought I’d get a little something done before the meeting, and we rode up a few floors on the same elevator. Looked a little worse for wear, maybe, but not the Howard Hughes figure I was expecting.”

  “At least he’s not…”

  “Dead?” Phil finished for him. “I thought exactly the same thing.”

  One of the elevators opened, and they got inside. “Still no word of Lupe?” Phil said.

  Craig shook his head, glancing up at the small surveillance camera in the corner.

  Phil nodded his understanding, and they rode the rest of the way to their respective floors in silence.

  ****

  Craig had set up a meeting of his own after lunch. The final OfficeManager updates were near completion, and he wanted Huell and his team of programmers to give him a live demo so he could make sure everything was copacetic before giving Scott Cho access. Unfortunately, five minutes before the scheduled demo, he got a call from Regus Patoff requesting that he attend a meeting on the fourth floor. It was in a room with which he wasn’t familiar, and when he arrived, he saw ten people he didn’t know seated on folding chairs, watching Patoff set up an outdated TV and VCR combo on a tall metal cart. Craig sat down on a chair in the back row. Moments later, two other people sat next to him.

  “Thank Ralph you could make it,” the consultant said to them, smiling. He adjusted his bow tie. “I have to step out for a moment, but I want you to watch a little video for me. Afterward, we will discuss it.” He turned on the television, turned on the VCR, walked past the seated employees, turned off the room lights and closed the door as he left. There was a minute of silence and a blue screen until the video came on.

  An old Bill Nye video about dinosaurs.

  What was the point of this? Craig looked around. It was hard to see in the dark, but by the light of the screen he was able to tell that the men and women around him were focused intently on the goofy lab-coated science teacher talking about the Age of Reptiles. None of them seemed fazed by the video, none of them were making fun of it or questioning it. They were just watching.

  He had never seen any of the people here before, and he wondered if they were BFG employees instead of CompWare workers, if he was being set up somehow.

  It was a twofer. After the half-hour dinosaur program, they had to sit through still another Bill Nye show, this one about the solar system. Patoff returned at the end of the video, flipping the lights back on and passing out to everyone a pencil and thick sheaf of papers affixed to a clipboard. “Please fill this out,” he said. “And make your answers as detailed as possible.”

  Craig didn’t know what to expect. He felt as though he was back in junior high, and when he saw that the top page was a worksheet about dinosaurs, he assumed that BFG was testing their memorization skills or comprehension. But the second page had nothing to do with Bill Nye or the videos. It was a detailed questionnaire about dreams, asking for descriptions of recent nightmares, even referencing specific people, places and objects to see if they appeared in any of the dreams. He flipped through the other pages: one contained questions about sexual fantasies, one about preferred modes of death, one about torture.

  A soft hand touched his shoulder, and his head jerked up to see the smiling face of Regus Patoff. As always, the consultant’s eyes were hard and dead. “Answer every question to the best of your ability.”

  “And if we don’t?” Craig challenged him.

  “Then you will be terminated.”

  Terminated.

  As always, there seemed to be a deeper meaning to the word, a menacing hint that it denoted more than being fired. Craig wanted to get up and walk away, wanted to storm out dramatically and make a scene, but he lacked the nerve. He settled for writing short fake answers to those questions that required them and randomly checking the boxes of those that were true or false. He was the first to hand in his clipboard, and he left without saying a word.

  It still felt strange coming back to an empty desk where Lupe was supposed to be. He had contacted her family—her parents and sister—and confirmed that she was missing, and he’d contributed what he could to the police report, telling the investigating officer that she had had suspicions about one of the consultants at work. Not wanting to be sued,

  or worse

  he hadn’t mentioned Patoff specifically, but his hope was that a police investigation would turn up evidence against the consultant. He knew the likelihood was that Lupe was…gone. But there was still a chance that it could be something less severe than he feared, and he chose to believe that that would be the ultimate outcome.

  He was just about to call Huell and set up another OfficeManager demo when Scott Cho came in, furious. “And where were you for the past hour?” Scott demanded.

  “I was at a meeting.”

  “I called a meeting!” the department head bellowed. “For everyone! All divisions!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? I couldn’t even reach you!”

  Craig looked at him calmly. “Maybe I should tell Mr. Patoff that you think your meeting is more important than his.”

  Scott blanched. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, some of the belligerence gone from his voice.

  “Then leave me alone and let me do my job,” Craig told him.

  “I am still your boss. And I will not tolerate any insubordination!”

  Craig sighed. “I’m not being insubordinate. I’m trying to meet with the programmers about the OfficeManager updates, which I will then show to you. But if you want to waste time with this…”

  Scott strode off, scowling. “Just do your damn job,” he said.

  At home that night, Craig was helping Dylan with his math homework (had he studied fractions this young? He didn’t think so) when his son suddenly stopped writing and looked up at him. “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you should get a new job.”

  Frowning, Craig looked over his head at Angie, but she raised her eyebrows and shook her head, indicating that she knew nothing about this.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “Mr. Patoff.”

  “Mr. Patoff?”

  “What if he makes you play hide-and-go-seek? Dylan paused. “With that…dwarf.” Craig heard the tremor in his son’s voice.

  He put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “Mommy quit. Why don’t you quit, too? We can move to New York.”

  Craig smiled. “New York? Where did that come from?”

  “I don’t know. But we can move there.”

  “But all your friends are here. And our home is here.” He turned Dylan so the two of them were facing one another. “Mr. Patoff is a scary man,” he admitted. “No one likes him. And you and Mommy need to stay away from him. I’m going to stay away from him, too. But he won’t be here forever. Once he finishes his job at my work, he’s going to move on to someplace else, and then he’ll be gone forever. We just need to wait a little while longer.”

  The look of doubt on Dylan’s face was so comical that it was all Craig could do not to laugh.

  “I’ll be fine,” he promised.

  Dylan looked seriously into Craig’s eyes. “I worry about you, Daddy. I don’t want
anything to happen to you.”

  It was the purest expression of love Craig had ever experienced, and he gave his son a warm hug. “Don’t worry, little buddy. Nothing’ll happen to me.” Over the boy’s shoulder, he caught Angie’s eye. She didn’t look convinced, and he smiled at her, trying to appear reassuring. He was worried himself, but he couldn’t let them know that, and he prayed that what he’d told Dylan was true: that the consultant would soon be gone.

  THIRTY FOUR

  Anthony Generra finished washing his hands and looked at himself in the men’s room mirror, frowning. His tie was slightly askew, tilting left, though it had been perfectly in position when he’d left home. He adjusted it, made sure the tie clip held it in place and backed away from the mirror to check from afar.

  He looked good.

  Look good, feel good, do good, be good, he thought. It was a motto learned from his father as a child, and one he’d always tried to live by.

  He was an overachiever because of his father, although that result was probably unintentional. A Republican congressman, his dad had so consistently stressed his pro-life bona fides that Anthony’s brother Basino, knowingly born with Down syndrome, had been treated as a saint—at Anthony’s expense. It was Basino who was a blessing to the family, who had taught all of them so much about compassion, who was so loving and life-affirming that he made every day a joy. Anthony, by contrast, was just ordinary, not an inspiration, and despite all of his academic accomplishments over the years, he’d always kind of gotten lost in the shuffle. Even here at CompWare, he’d ended up being just another face in the crowd, one of the many talented, top-of-their-class professionals hired by the company.

  Until The Consultant chose him to be one of His helpers.

  This was what he’d been made for. He was perfect for this job, and The Consultant had known he was perfect, but Anthony still didn’t understand how the man had known. Frustrated by his lack of career progress despite his significant personal achievements, Anthony had, for the last few years, begun…acting out. But he’d kept all of that secret, had never mentioned any of his extracurricular activities to anyone.

  It had started simply enough with responses to wrong numbers or telemarketers who called him at home at inconvenient times. He would tell a caller that Anthony Generra was dead, that he had killed him. Or he would pretend to be an Anthony Generra who was deaf or mentally disabled.

  Then there’d been the boy at McDonald’s.

  That was when he’d upped his game. He’d been reading the newspaper and having a cup of coffee one morning before going to work. A family of tourists, probably from Texas, judging by the dad’s Longhorns t-shirt, walked into the fast food restaurant. Or, in the case of the kids, ran into the restaurant like whirling dervishes. They were big, loud and obnoxious, all of them, and despite the numerous empty tables in the dining room, the mom and her brats plopped themselves down in a booth right next to his while the dad stood in line to order at the counter.

  “Wash up,” the mom ordered, and all three kids ran to the bathrooms. The mom carried her little baby with her into the woman’s room, where her little girl had already dashed in, and the two boys ran into the men’s room. One of them came out almost immediately, hands still dripping wet, and yelled triumphantly as he sped back to the table.

  “Little boy,” Anthony said, motioning him over. He’d remembered an old Emo Phillips joke about hitting a crying baby in a movie theater, and that had given him an idea.

  The kid shot a look at his dad, still in line, and apparently deciding it was safe, ran up.

  “What’s your name?” Anthony asked.

  “Devon.”

  “Devon what?”

  “Devon Sanderson.”

  Anthony spoke softly. “Now listen to me, Devon Sanderson. And hear me good. If you don’t quiet down and stop making so much noise, I’m going to kill you.”

  The boy’s eyes widened, and he made as if to run.

  “Don’t you move a muscle, Devon. You just stand there and listen. Because if you don’t stop yelling in this restaurant, I will not only kill you, but your brother and your sister and your parents and even that little baby. I just escaped from prison, and I don’t want any attention drawn to me. So if you keep up this racket and the cops come, I will slit your throat from ear to ear. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded fearfully.

  “Now,” and Anthony delivered the coup de grâce, “get the fuck back to your table and don’t you dare look in my direction again.”

  He didn’t. The boy was silent throughout his breakfast, his eyes steadfastly avoiding Anthony’s direction. Twice, his mother asked him if something was wrong, and both times Devon shook his head. Anthony waited until the family was about to leave, then he got up himself, walked over to the exit and held the door open for them, nodding knowingly at Devon as he passed.

  He watched the family drive off in their minivan, smiling to himself.

  It had given him a feeling of power to deceive the boy so thoroughly, a warm sensation that was utterly satisfying.

  A week later, at another fast food restaurant where a fishbowl sat on the counter so that customers could drop in their business cards for a chance to win a free lunch, he had reached in and pulled out several cards at random. One was for a man who ran a tow truck service, and he called that number from a pay phone at an AM/PM mini-mart during his lunch hour, putting on his most threatening voice. “Do you know who this is?” he asked when the man answered the phone and identified himself.

  The tow truck operator possessed the defensive belligerence of the easily annoyed. “Should I?”

  “Last week, you towed a vehicle with over two million dollars of my product hidden in its frame. That vehicle has now been impounded by the police.”

  He said nothing else, let the silence drag out.

  The tow truck operator made a tentative noise indicating that he was about to speak, then cleared his throat and tried to speak again. His reply, when it came, was timid and deferential. “I…I wasn’t aware of any of this.”

  “I am extremely displeased,” Anthony told him, leaving an unspoken threat hang between them.

  “I…What…I…” The man was fumbling around, unsure what was being asked of him. Did Anthony want him to pay back the two million? Was he supposed to get the car back?

  “I want my product,” Anthony said. “Tomorrow. Bring it to dock thirty-two at nine p.m.”

  He had no idea if there even was a dock thirty-two or, if there was, at which port it would be located.

  The tow truck man was equally confused. “Is that in San Pedro or—”

  “Nine p.m.”

  “Wait! Wait! I need to know the type of vehicle and—”

  Anthony hung up the phone. He waited a few moments to see if the man would try to *69 the call, but the phone did not ring. He imagined the tow truck driver frantically searching through his records of last week’s work, trying to find a vehicle that had been impounded by the police. Grinning to himself, he walked into the AM/PM and got himself a 32-ounce Coke before heading back to work.

  That had been just the beginning.

  There had been many more incidents, and the amazing thing was that somehow The Consultant had known about all of them.

  It was the reason, in fact, that Anthony had been recruited.

  When The Consultant requested an interview, Anthony saw that the man was in possession of a complete file on him. But instead of consulting its contents and asking pertinent questions, He had smiled at Anthony and pushed the manila folder across the table for him to read. Everything was in there. The boy at McDonalds. All of the phone calls. Transcripts of conversations. Where this information had been obtained, He wouldn’t say, but it was obvious that Anthony had been under surveillance for quite some time. And it was just as obvious that The Consultant admired what Anthony had done. Smiling, He said, “That priest shakedown was particularly funny. I laughed my ass off when you did that.”

 
; Anthony wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The Consultant took back the folder, leaned forward. “Let’s get down to business, shall we? One of my associates recently disappeared, and I’m looking for someone to take his place. John was an observer, but the observer phase of our study ends today, and now I need someone with a slightly different skill set, someone to take a more, shall we say, active role on my behalf.

  “I feel that your talents have been wasted here at CompWare. Up to this point, you’ve been merely one of many cogs in this giant machine. What I’m offering you is the opportunity to be an engine at BFG.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The Consultant had smiled broadly. “It means,” He said, “that I will be hiring you to do what you do.” He tapped the folder meaningfully.

  He’d been given carte blanche.

  There was no official job description, no assigned duties. The Consultant provided him with information: names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, spouses’ names, children’s names, parents’ names, friends’ names, pets’ names. But he was never told what he could or could not do with that information. He was left entirely to his own devices, encouraged to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted in any way that he wanted.

  After the first week, The Consultant had called a meeting with him and had told Anthony, “Now you are living up to your full potential.”

  And he was.

  Anthony finished straightening his tie, smiled at his appearance in the mirror. Look good, feel good, do good, be good.

  Well, maybe not do good.