One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “Sam?” she said.

  “Tom Rosten,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Can you hear me?” he said.

  “If I decide to listen,” she said.

  “We’re in the air,” he said.

  “Lucky you,” she said. “Down here we’re all in the mud.”

  “Don’t do anything until we get back to the Dome,” he said. “I’ll come to your office.”

  “To shut me up,” she said.

  “Obviously we need to talk,” he said.

  10

  Andrea from Goldman had it all arranged: a quick dinner then the show. Grace went along because Luisa had a sleepover. Since getting half in touch with Tom again, being alone in the apartment without Luisa didn’t work for her.

  The taxi stopped at a dingy block of buildings with razor wire on the window ledges. Only a poster next to a dinged-up metal door indicated that the place was a theater. The performance got started very late, but half the seats were still empty when the house lights finally dimmed.

  Two women entered from opposite sides of the stage and wandered about, talking, sometimes to one another, sometimes to themselves. Did they know one another? Were they lovers? A third character arrived, a man in sweats. Whenever one moved, the others shifted position. It wasn’t drama; it was planetary motion.

  Grace tried to get into it the way she used to with the obscurities of the Yale Rep back when she was majoring in impossible texts. The glow from the screens of BlackBerries around the audience suggested that she wasn’t the only one bored. She glanced at Andrea, who actually seemed fascinated, then angled herself toward the aisle and fired up her own device, scrambling to disable the ringtone just in case Luisa decided for once to check-in.

  When she got to her e-mail queue, she saw Tom’s name. God, the message must have been sitting there for hours as she raced home to change and then sat through dinner listening to Andrea’s complaints about compensation. It had been days and days since she had fumbled and hit Send, thinking it was Delete. He must have thought she was losing it, leaving the sentence hanging without even an ellipsis.

  She looked at the subject line: “RE: Old Flame.” Her finger touched the key that would open it but then pulled back. Touched and pulled back again. Why would he use those words? He wouldn’t be tormenting her again with that one in Washington, would he? And why the RE:? She pushed the key.

  The first thing she saw was a message from Harms to Tom:

  —Good luck.

  She scrolled down further and found her own broken thought:

  —I just

  Just was confused. Just sorry. Just sitting here losing it. She read the chain from top to bottom. There was nothing at all from Tom. He had forwarded Harms’s without comment. Harms had forwarded Grace’s message to him, which was the first he had seen it, because somebody in Tom’s office had apparently sent it to someone in Harms’s office the very day Grace had sent it to Tom. Good luck.

  She turned the BlackBerry facedown on her lap, smothering the light, and made an attempt to catch a thread from the stage that she could use as a lifeline. Woman Number Two approached very close to the Man, back onstage now in a tight T-shirt and jeans. It must have taken some minimal sense of the dance for the two of them to move around one another as they did, mirror reflecting mirror, never touching, as if to do so would be to vanish. She turned the BlackBerry back over and looked again.

  —I just

  Her thumb on the little wheel rolled up and down. Up and down.

  The intermission came and dragged on. When everyone was seated, there was another delay. She took out her BlackBerry and went to RE: Old Flame. She hit Reply. Then Send.

  She had turned her back on his shame when he had confessed it. She had confirmed this with her silence since. Now he had sent silence to her. And she had reciprocated. Silence to silence, conversing.

  But she could not leave it at that. She hit Reply again. Though she worried her words, the message she sent him was brief.

  Eventually the room went black. Applause pattered here and there. The house lights came up.

  “What do you think?” said Andrea.

  “I don’t,” said Grace.

  “Perfect,” said Andrea.

  Even with the convenience of the company plane, it was past business hours when Rosten met with Berry and Szilard. The conversation did not go well.

  “You do understand that someone is going to pay,” Berry said. “If it isn’t Greener right now, it will be all the rest of you later.”

  “We need to keep him on ice,” said Rosten.

  The known traitor in place had value.

  “The price of inaction goes up quickly with time,” said Berry. “I don’t think you appreciate just how critical a moment this is.”

  Contain. Contain the memory. Contain the fear.

  “The deal needs to get done,” said Rosten.

  “Everything will eventually be known,” said Berry. “If it becomes known too late, there will be six kinds of trouble with the law.”

  “What Greener did wasn’t material,” said Rosten. “We have received guidance about that.”

  “Did the miraculous Hardy Twine give it to you in writing?”

  “It was not required.”

  “Ask him for a formal opinion letter and see what you get,” said Berry.

  “I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree,” said Rosten.

  “I don’t agree to anything,” said Berry. “You will get my opinion letter tomorrow. It will be very explicit.”

  By the time Rosten got home, he had been up for more than thirty-six hours with no more than a short, troubled nap on the plane to California. Still, he was unable to sleep. He sat on the couch in his living room, something by Philip Glass on the speakers, repeating and repeating, with variations so tiny they might as well have been subliminal. He looked at his BlackBerry again. He had no right to expect her to respond. Respond to what? He had said nothing, which was exactly what he could offer her.

  The music bored into him, turning and returning. You think you have learned your lesson. But what if it doesn’t matter? What if the man ends up on the parapet anyway, with you standing there watching him die?

  He closed his eyes and tried to breathe out everything, pattern, variation, everything. His BlackBerry vibrated, pulling him back. He looked. It was from her. It was blank.

  He dropped the device on the table and closed his eyes again.

  —I just

  Perfectly just. The music turned and turned, elliptically, held by an unseen mass. The BlackBerry on the glass tabletop vibrated again. He picked it up. She had changed the subject line to “More.”

  —I understand. I don’t understand.

  Of course.

  Work with me and you will be safe. Berry could not count the number of times he had threatened someone with safety, but this Rosten was a hard case. What kind of safety was he looking for?

  In order to get around him, Berry accepted, belatedly, an invitation to buy a table at the Symphony Gala, which had been delayed because of the illness of the maestro. Berry had no trouble filling the table. He simply posted a notice, open to everyone in the firm, first come first served. They were all grabbed by admins and paralegals within an hour.

  He rose by escalator through the Palmer House’s ornate lobby. When he used to think about running for office, he dreamed of holding a victory celebration here. Two more escalators and he reached the Grand Ballroom, where he checked the seating and placed himself a reasonable distance from Joyce’s table so he could wait and observe and at the right time appear as if by chance. Within a few minutes he saw the target working the crowd.

  “Brian Joyce,” he said, walking up to him, hand presented and, after a pause, taken. “You are a hard man to work for.”

  “Donna Joyce,” said the woman, presenting her hand.

  “Morrie Berry,” he said, taking it.

  “Morrie has been handling some matte
rs for us,” Joyce said.

  “Do you have a minute?” Berry said.

  “It’s Donna’s evening,” Joyce said.

  “I should say hello to some people,” she said, smiling and moving off.

  When she was gone, Berry said, “She’s well trained.”

  “This encounter is unwelcome,” said Joyce.

  “Understood,” said Berry. “But if I’m making a mistake, it will only mean losing one relatively minor client. You, on the other hand, have everything at risk if you make the mistake of not hearing me out.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Your man Rosten is fucking up.”

  “He’s my right hand.”

  “It is paralyzed,” said Berry. “He’s of no use.”

  “But you are, I suppose.”

  “Work with me,” said Berry, “and you will be safe.”

  Gunderman smelled it as soon as he entered the house.

  “Megan!” he called.

  The scent was pungent. He would have thought that an animal had gotten inside if he hadn’t smelled this same odor once before, while walking along the lake with Megan on a summer afternoon.

  “It’s not a skunk, Daddy,” she had said, laughing. “It’s skunk. Just skunk.”

  “Translate to Dadspeak.”

  “Bud,” she said. “Marijuana. If it smells sweeter, it’s hashish.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “They’re in the air,” she said.

  He could not deny that, but he had always been certain that she would never take any of them into her lungs.

  He pounded up the stairs, the smell growing stronger. When he opened the door, a blast of cold wind from the wide-open windows met his face.

  “Megan,” he said.

  “It’s a kind of incense,” she said. “They sell it.”

  “Megan,” he said.

  The red in her eyes may have been from the smoke, but the tears were for her name.

  “What in the world have we done to you?” he said.

  When Donna returned to the table, the lawyer was gone. She had recognized him from the news. There were a lot like that at the Symphony Ball.

  “Business done?” she said.

  “As done as it gets,” he said. “Sorry about the interruption. Tell me who you saw.”

  She did, and he paid attention.

  “Let’s dance tonight,” Brian said.

  “He must be quite an attorney.”

  “We shall see,” he said.

  All the signals pointed to final negotiations over the weekend, which would let them take advantage of the dead time between the market close on Friday afternoon and Monday morning’s open. For several weeks now, intense discussions had been taking place at all levels, though Nyström had barely been heard from. The business media’s choice as the Next Big Thing had become the Man Who Never Was. Meanwhile, the chairman and Joyce were talking nearly every day. The lawyers had completed nondisclosure agreements in record time. Due diligence was a sprint, but Rosten was confident they were going to be ready.

  “The world is data,” Joyce said.

  “The empire of the empirical,” said Rosten.

  “Something like that,” said Joyce.

  “Do you think she had never tried it before?”

  “She has always been so responsible.”

  “And now she isn’t?”

  “I was ready for the alcohol.”

  “You were never young yourself, of course.”

  “I was older, much older the first time I smoked. It was with Maggie. They say the drug is so much stronger now that it might as well be heroin.”

  “It is not heroin, of course.”

  “I can’t believe you want me to look the other way.”

  “What does Maggie want to do?”

  “She accused me of leaving Megan unsupervised. I said that until Bill Cadwalader starts sending me child-support payments, I have to earn a living.”

  “It didn’t take long before the conversation moved away from your daughter.”

  “I’m not proud of that.”

  “I could have told you how it was going to go.”

  “You’re saying that divorce is a predictable linear function, but to me it feels like we’re operating way beyond the accumulation point.”

  “Do you see how you just hid in language?”

  “I’m using the language I know. My language isn’t the problem. What Maggie said is the problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She said that maybe we had made a mistake to separate.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I said nothing, and she went right back to blame.”

  “Which was safer for both of you. What went through your mind?”

  “It made me angry. What she had done to Megan, and now never mind?”

  “Done to Megan?”

  “I mean, Megan has always refused to put anything into her body unless it’s organic.”

  “And marijuana isn’t?”

  “Not funny.”

  “What do you suppose was the meaning of what she did?”

  “She’s in pain.”

  “There are a lot of places to smoke other than in her room, knowing that you are on the way home from work.”

  “She wanted to hurt me?”

  “Or to tell you that she is human, too, that she is capable of letting you down. A time will come when you are going to have to decide what is really best.”

  “How to discipline her.”

  “Whether divorce will be a mistake or a favor to all concerned.”

  Through the window, Rosten watched the red taillights pulsing, outbound on Lake Shore Drive. He had already let the admins leave. The last e-mails were arriving with their attachments, comfortably ahead of the deadline he had set. This was his finance group at its best, driving forward, getting it done. The Gnomon team, led by the chairman, was going to arrive in Chicago Friday. The fuse was short. But the attachments needed no revision, so it was just a matter of putting the pieces together and sending them west.

  He thought he heard something, but he did not look up. Then he felt a presence, and there was Harms, framed by the doorway. The gold pendant at her throat was askew. Her perfect hair was mussed. He thought he could even see a spot on her starched blouse. Rosten rose up out of the numbers. He had never seen her disordered this way.

  “Come on in,” he said, waving her to the chair on the other side of the desk.

  “Has Szilard talked to you?” she said.

  “Berry did,” said Rosten. “I think they’ve given up on me.”

  Her fingers twisted her hair.

  “He was talking crime,” she said.

  She pulled the pendant tight in front of her and then let it drop into the darkness.

  “I thought you didn’t see any risk to yourself,” he said.

  She stood.

  “Nobody was talking about prison then,” she said.

  “Look,” he said, “the boss is the boss. He has solid, independent sources of advice.”

  “Hardy Twine doesn’t have skin in the game.”

  “Szilard dared you to try to get an opinion letter from him, right?”

  “You’ll go down with Joyce, you know, the way you’ve decided to play it,” she said.

  “You’re worried about me?”

  “We can all be ruined,” she said. “But yes, I am concerned about you.”

  “I can live with the consequences.”

  “You have a duty beyond Joyce, you know,” she said. “You have a responsibility to tell the board.”

  “Szilard has gotten you to do a lot of thinking.”

  “We could do our best thinking together,” she said then leaned forward. The pendant flashed in the depths, like something dropped into the water.

  Lawton had not even wanted to see Greener’s face, except perhaps to spit in it. Joyce had agreed with Rosten to string the man along and see what they could learn
, but Lawton didn’t like it.

  Snow had persuaded Strand to go off on an all-expenses-paid vacation. Greener didn’t know that, and the Admin News Network didn’t either. As far as everyone but the crisis team was concerned, she had been packaged out and had disappeared. As per the plan, Snow let word slip that Strand may not have been working alone.

  The first thing Greener did when he arrived at the team meeting was to report that Chase’s nose was out of joint as a result of not being included.

  “What does such a nose actually look like?” Lawton said. “I mean, is it cocked to one side? Twisted up like a screw?”

  “Gentlemen,” said Snow. She turned to Greener. “Strictly speaking, you should not have been talking to him about our work.”

  “So he’s a suspect,” said Greener.

  “Nobody thinks that,” said Gunderman. “We just have to be extremely careful. There is every reason to believe that a very smart individual is behind what Strand did.”

  “Who brought you back?” Greener said.

  “If at any point you have reason to suspect me or any one of us,” said Gunderman, “you need to take it straight to Rosten.”

  “That would be the proper procedure,” said Snow.

  Greener took out his BlackBerry and began playing it with his thumbs.

  “Rules of the road,” he said. “Let’s get them down in writing. For everyone’s protection.”

  Lawton wanted to tell him the only protection anyone needed was to wear a hazmat suit around him.

  “Good idea, Rob,” Gunderman said. “I should have thought of it myself.”

  Greener finished his message and it popped into everyone’s queue. Lawton saw Rosten’s name in the address line and shot him a message of his own.

  —Disregard Greener’s last. All part of the game.

  As Snow reviewed the bidding, Greener took to his thumbs again.

  “I would rather you didn’t do that,” she said.

  “I’m sure you would,” Greener said.

  They went through the motions of laying out a plan of attack. Greener deflected it at a few points, and Gunderman agreed with him. The meeting ended. Greener left quickly. Snow held Lawton and Gunderman back.