First Class Stamp

by Aj Harmon

  While the group protesting outside had lessened in size, they’d moved closer to her building. Over the past couple of weeks, the closer they came, the more tenants had left. Maria was in fact nervous, but she wasn’t going to show it. They seemed to be disorganized now and didn’t appear to have a united voice. They’d originally been protesting the amount of money the government was spending on the Olympics; money that was allegedly being diverted from other funds like schools and hospitals. And with that she could agree. But now they were shouting about everything from the Olympics to saving the whales and increasing money to AIDS research to banning all yellow cars! They gave the impression of being utterly unorganized and while that could be viewed as a good thing, the protests winding down, Maria understood that it also meant the remaining individuals could be unpredictable and that had her feeling anxious.

  Moving through her to-do list, Maria kept herself busy and productive most of the morning. The mail arrived and she sat behind her desk methodically dividing the envelopes into piles as she did every day; a junk mail pile, standard mail that came every month like bills, and the curious pile. She began with the junk mail and tossed the majority of it into the recycling bin in the corner under her desk. Tearing open envelopes and dealing with bills and newsletters came next, saving the third pile for last. A lot of that pile ended up in with the junk mail. Advertisers were getting smart in how they sent out mail…making their envelopes look official and interesting but it only took two seconds to realize that the inside was the same old garbage and ended up in the same place as all the other crap.

  Opening a beige linen envelope, Maria retrieved a letter typed on matching stationary from a company, Latin World Corporation, she’d never heard of. Scanning the contents of the letter, an audible sigh of frustration and despair escaped her lips. “How much more?” she asked herself. Laying the envelope and letter down in front of her, Maria rubbed her forehead and stood to go and get a drink from the break room. The phone rang only three steps from the door and she contemplated ignoring it, but couldn’t.

  “Maria Calvo,” she said in her most professional voice.

  “What the hell are you doing at work? I told you to stay home!”

  “Why are you calling me at work then?”

  “Because I figured you’d still come in. You are loyal to a fault, Maria!”

  “It’s my job!” she exclaimed. “We still have tenants in the building you know.”

  “I know,” Ben replied. “How is it there? Bad?”

  “It’s not great, but we’re managing.”

  “So what happened to your car windows?”

  “What? How did you know…”

  “Luca,” he interrupted, “doesn’t understand how the ticket box in the parking garage could possibly break the windows on the other side of the car. If you are going to try and hide things from him you should at least come up with better lies...believable ones.”

  Maria sank into her chair. The gig was up. “The protests are close now,” she sighed. “I assumed the first brick that came through the window was a random incident, but with the second one I knew they were aiming at me!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have…”

  “Could have what? You’re all thousands of miles away and you pay me to do my job. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “How’s Luca?”

  “He’s fine. We live far enough away from this that he doesn’t know anything and I need to keep it that way. A ten year old boy doesn’t need to have the added burden of worrying about his mother.”

  “Added burden?” Ben asked.

  Sighing again, Maria confided in Ben, a man she hadn’t seen in almost six years, but a man who appeared to care for her son. “I think he’s not liking school very much,” she began, “but I’m not sure I can put my finger on what it is.”

  “He’s being bullied,” stated Ben.

  “He is? Did he tell you that?”

  “Not in words,” Ben frowned. “I just…sense something in his letters. He likes learning but he doesn’t like school. In my limited experience, it sounds like there’s some kids who he isn’t getting along with.”

  “Oh God,” she pleaded. “Please don’t let anyone hurt my boy.”

  “Look, you’re coming here next week, so maybe I can talk to him and…”

  There was a massive crash that Ben heard through the phone. If it was that loud for him he couldn’t imagine how close it was for Maria.

  “What was that?” he demanded. “Are you alright? Maria?”

  “I’m here,” she stuttered. “They just drove a car through the glass windows!”

  The added security leapt into action and within minutes the building was secured and the police had arrived. The mob, however, had scattered. Maria had dropped the phone and run to the lobby only to be heartbroken at the site. An old battered Nissan pick-up truck had driven up the concrete steps outside and right through the glass wall into the building. Its bumper and tailgate were the only part of it still outside. Shattered glass carpeted the tiled floor and steel bars were twisted and bent. Chaos ruled.

  By the time Maria returned to the phone, Ben was all but having heart palpitations not knowing what was going on and if Maria was in any kind of danger.

  “The police are here and they’ve arrested the driver. I’ll need to get somebody here immediately to secure the building until necessary arrangements have been made to have the repairs done. I wondered what that note had meant.”

  “What note?” Ben asked.

  “The letter warning us about Americans in Brazil.”

  “What letter?” he asked again.

  “I faxed it to New York weeks ago. Patrick told me he’d look into it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just shaken up. Everyone is in the process of evacuating the building…voluntary not mandated.”

  “Once everyone is out I want you out, too,” Ben ordered.

  “As soon as I’ve gotten someone to secure the hole in the building. But I’m completely safe now,” she laughed, more out of nervousness than amusement. “I’m surrounded by the police. But this might be a good time to consider the offer you got this morning in the mail.”

  “What offer?” Ben was starting to think he had absolutely no idea what was going on in Rio.

  “The offer to buy the building.”

  “From who?”

  “Some company I’ve never heard of.”

  “Fax it to me please. To me…not Patrick!”

  *****

  “If anything had happened to her I would be strangling you with my bare hands this very second!” Ben screamed as he entered the building management offices of MEL Holdings. Everyone froze and gasped at Ben striding through the desks pointing at Patrick who was on the phone with his girlfriend. “I hope you have some friends in here who are willing to stand between you and me or I swear to God I’ll break your neck right this second. That is, unless you have a fucking good reason why you sat on the letter that was faxed to you from Crystal Towers in Rio.”

  Not one of the ten or so employees in the room had ever seen Ben anything but personable and professional. They were stunned into silence. No one moved. No one said a word. No one even breathed.

  “Well?” Ben demanded.

  Patrick hung up the phone, never breaking eye contact with his boss. “I…I got the fax and…and we get…get letters like that every so often and…and they don’t usually…”

  “Don’t usually what?” Ben glared at him, his legs touching the desk only a couple of feet from Patrick.

  Patrick shrugged. “They mean nothing.”

  “Maria, you remember Maria don’t you? She’s the one who faxed you the letter. Well, she’s had two bricks hurled at her car…WHILE SHE WAS IN IT!”

  Patrick retreated, shoving himself backwards, away from his desk.

  “And today,” Ben lowered his voice, “a truck just drove through the front door of Crystal Towers, the cro
wd cheering behind it, WHILE SHE WAS IN THE BUILDING! Along with all the tenants!” He slammed his palms down on the desk and leaned over, teeth bared, looking like he was going to tear Patrick apart, limb by limb.

  Patrick didn’t have a reply.

  “Where’s the letter?” Ben asked in a more controlled voice.

  Patrick stood, hurried to the file cabinet a few feet from his desk, opened the second drawer, skimmed through some papers and pulled out the fax and handed it to Ben.

  “What did you do after you got this?”

  “I called Maria,” Patrick defended himself.

  “And you told her you’d ‘look into it’?” He didn’t get a response. “So what did you do? How did you look into it?”

  Patrick shrugged and remained silent.

  “I’ll tell you what you did,” Ben snarled. “You put it in that fucking file cabinet, that’s what you did!”

  Again, Patrick didn’t say a word.

  “You’re fired.” Ben turned to one of the other employees behind him, who was watching the drama unfold. “Call security…NOW!”

  Forty-five seconds later, two men who appeared to be WWF wrestlers in a former life appeared in the doorway. “Get him out of the building before I rip him to pieces,” Ben spat.

  “Yes, sir.”

  With the fax still in his hand, he ran up the flight of stairs and back to his office. He had to call Matt…a call he desperately didn’t want to make.

  *****

  Maria arrived home just before Luca was expected to come home. It had taken her longer than expected to deal with the police and find a contractor to come and secure the building with plywood. Once that was completed, she gathered up her things, including some work files, and headed home. She took the long route which added almost thirty minutes to the drive because of traffic congestion, but it was worth it – no angry mob and no bricks.

  Attempting to calm her nerves, she made herself a Caipirinha, Brazilian rum and lime, and sat on the small front patio of her home waiting for signs of Luca. He had soccer practice after school for an hour so she expected him within a few minutes. He would be surprised to see her home and she needed to somehow tell him the truth without raising any suspicion or worry.

  Sipping on her drink, she closed her eyes and took long, deep breaths, eventually calming her nerves. As suspected, Luca was slowly walking towards the house, kicking at the dirt on the side of the road with each step. His eyes were looking down and his shoulders slumped. He turned onto the narrow brick path that led to their neighbor’s front door, the same route he took every day after school.

  “Luca!” Maria yelled, waving at her boy.

  His head whipped up and his face showed instant surprise at seeing his mother. It also revealed blood. Maria slammed her glass down on the small table in front of her and raced towards her son.

  “It’s okay mama,” he said.

  “What happened?” she cried.

  “I fell.”

  “You fell or you were pushed?”

  Luca shrugged his shoulders.

  Maria’s heart broke. Ben was right. He was thousands of miles away and he knew more about Luca than she did. Doing her best to remain calm, she placed her arm gently around his shoulders and said, “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up and you can tell me what happened.”

  *****

  “Our building is not for sale,” Ben repeated forcefully into the telephone receiver. He’d read the faxed letter from Maria and had called the man who’d sent it – Vicente Rivera of Latin World Corporation.

  “I make you a generous offer,” Vicente replied. “Under the circumstances, I doubt you will get an offer half as good as this one.”

  “It makes no difference to me what the offers are,” Ben remained firm. “The building is not for sale.”

  “You may live to regret this Mr. Lathem. Soon, you may not have a building to sell.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Not at all. I just mean to say that the protestors are unpredictable and you cannot know what they do next,” he said in his thick Portuguese accent.

  “I’ll demolish the building first,” Ben muttered under his breath. “I think we’ll go with risking it,” Ben said to him.

  “Very well, but I ask you to reconsider. At least take it to your brothers. I know you do not have the final say.”

  Ben said a curt goodbye and hung up the phone.

  “Matt is here,” came his secretary’s voice through the intercom. “He’s in his office.”

  Of course he’s in his office, Ben thought. Because he’s still the boss even though I do all the work. I have to go to him. Once I’d like him to condescend to my office! But he stood and picked up the two faxes from his desk and strode down the hall to the opened door. Matt was pouring himself a drink and looked up as Ben entered the room.

  “Want one?” he asked.

  Ben nodded. He could use a stiff drink right about now. He walked over and took the leaded crystal tumbler from Matt and the two men sat on opposite sides of the coffee table, each on their own couch.

  “Mark isn’t back from Puerto Rico,” Matt said. He sat back into the rich leather sofa. He lifted his right leg and placed his ankle on his left knee and took a long sip of the gin. He was in khaki shorts and flip flops with a white polo shirt. There appeared to be jam…or ketchup on the sleeve.

  “Sorry I had to interrupt your day,” Ben offered. “But I didn’t think this could wait.”

  “No,” Matt shook his head. “It can’t. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  So Ben went back to the previous Friday and the letter from Luca and the email he’d sent to Maria and then hit all the highlights of today, including his loss of control with Patrick.

  “Understandable,” Matt nodded. “But absolutely avoidable. This whole damn thing. Avoidable.”

  “And what would you’ve done differently?” sneered Ben. “This is not the only building we own and occupy…or did you forget that?”

  Matt took a mouthful of his drink and placed the glass on the table in front of him. Leaning back he calmly looked Ben straight in the eye and said, “I’m going to make the accurate assumption that this has been a difficult day for you and therefore you are not always thinking before you speak.”

  Ben instantly realized he was going to have to remove all emotion during this conversation. Matt had not gotten to where he was in business by being emotional. Calculating and shrewd? Yes. Ethical and honest? Yes. But never emotional.

  “First and foremost we need to ensure the safety of ALL our employees, our contractors, and our tenants. The building is expendable. Human life is not. We need to have our people down there to assess the situation and feed me accurate information about what is going on.”

  “But Maria…” Ben blurted.

  “Maria is a valuable employee,” Matt stopped him mid-sentence, “and will be treated as such. But it appears that she has been unwilling to either, one, realize the seriousness of the situation, or two, inform us because she assumed we would assume she was unqualified or not suited for the job, either of which, or both of which, has brought us to this place, right here.”

  Ben couldn’t argue with that. He had been confident in Maria’s abilities but in this, the thing she’d done wrong was assume Patrick would do his job, and Ben voiced his opinion firmly.

  “Yes,” Matt agreed. “You were right in firing his ass. And I wouldn’t have faulted you for breaking his arm on the way out.”

  The two men continued to discuss the threatening note and then the offer to purchase the building. Matt had no intention of selling…well, not at that price, anyway.

  It was agreed that security would be tripled and Matt would be sending a couple of employees to go and assess not only the damage to the building, but the climate of the protestors and find out what in fact they were really upset about. Matt never broke the law, but quite often, when there were protests at one of their locations, a check for an undisclosed amount of
money usually sent the protestors away quite happily. He had no reason to believe that this would end up any differently.

  A plan was made. They each had their own tasks to complete so Ben stood and headed for the door.

  “Ben,” Matt said as he reached the doorway. “I understand that you want the reigns, but don’t make the same mistake Maria did and fear telling me what’s really going on.”

  Ben didn’t reply…he just continued out the door and back to his office.

  8.

  “So who is he?” Willis Grossman demanded.

  “Nobody! He’s a nice guy who has taken an interest in your son. Something you haven’t done!” Sophia snapped back.

  “I just spent the whole damn weekend with the kid! What more do you want?”

  “You mean he spent the weekend at your apartment but you didn’t pay any attention to him the whole time he was there. You got him a new computer game and left him to his own devises for forty-eight hours. That isn’t parenting! Especially when you haven’t seen him in weeks!” Sophia yelled.

  “Take this outside!” demanded Aldo. “Alex will hear you!”

  “I’m finished,” Sophia said, folding her arms across her chest.

  “I’m not!” Willis spat and grabbed her by the arm to yank her outside.

  “Take your hand off my daughter!” Aldo screamed.

  Willis instantly let go and shoved the door open, storming outside. Sophia followed him onto the sidewalk. It was almost eight o’clock and pedestrian traffic was slow.

  “He could be a pedophile,” Willis yelled at her through gritted teeth. “You let my son go off with some man who could be doing God knows what to him!”

  “He is not a pedophile, you asshole! Are you that jealous of a man because Alex loves to spend time with him and is bored to tears when he’s with you? If so, that’s one hundred percent your fault. Don’t you dare go bringing Ben into this.”

  “Oh yes Ben,” he seethed. “That’s all I heard about all weekend. “Ben did this and Ben said that and Ben took me to a ballgame and Ben has a suite and Ben bought me a jersey! Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben Ben! I’m sick of Ben!”