“Well. That’s very interesting.” Joe smiled back at her. “Is that your file on this story?”
“Yeah,” said Paulette.
“Would you mind leaving it with me?” he asked. He cleared his throat. “I’m kind of embarrassed,” he said, shrugging a small-boy shrug. The defensive set of his shoulders backed his words. “Look, I’m going to have to read this myself. Obviously, the scope for mistakes is-” he shrugged.
Suddenly Miriam had a sinking feeling: It’s going to be bad. She racked her brains for clues. Is he going to try to bury us?
Joe shook his head. “Look, I’d like to start by saying that this isn’t about anything you’ve done,” he added hurriedly. “It’s just that we’ve got an investment to protect and I need to work out how to do so.”
“Before we break the story.” Miriam forced another, broader, smile. “It was all in the public record,” she added. “If we don’t break it, one of our competitors will.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Joe said smoothly. “Listen, I’ll get back to you in an hour or so. If you leave this with me for now, I just need to go and talk to someone in Legal so we can sort out how to respond. Then I’ll let you know how we’re going to handle it.”
“Oh, okay then,” said Paulette acceptingly.
Miriam let her expression freeze in a fixed grin. Oh shit, she thought as she stood up. “Thanks for giving us your time,” she said.
“Let yourselves out,” Joe said tersely, already turning the first page.
Out in the corridor, Paulette turned to Miriam. “Didn’t that go well” she insisted.
Miriam took a deep breath. “Paulie.”
“Yeah?”
Her knees felt weak. “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” Paulette looked concerned.
“Elevator.” She hit the “call” button and waited in silence, trying to still the butterflies in her stomach. It arrived, and she waited for the doors to close behind them before she continued. “I may just have made a bad mistake.”
“ ‘Mistake?’” Paulette looked puzzled. “You don’t think-”
“He didn’t say anything about publishing,” Miriam said slowly. “Not one word. What were the other names on that list of small investors? The ones you didn’t check?”
“The list? He’s got-” Paulette frowned.
“Was Somerville Investments one of them?”
“ Somerville? Could be. Why? Who are they?”
“Because that’s-” Miriam pointed a finger at the roof and circled. She watched Paulette’s eyes grow round.
“I’m thinking about magazine returns from the newsstand side of the business, Paulie. Don’t you know we’ve got low returns by industry standards? And people buy magazines for cash.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, Paulie.”
When they got back to Miriam’s cubicle, a uniformed security guard and a suit from Human Resources were already waiting for them.
“Paulette Milan? Miriam Beckstein?” said the man from HR. He checked a notepad carefully.
“Yes?” Miriam asked cautiously. “What’s up?”
“Would you please follow me? Both of you?”
He turned and headed for the stairwell down to the main entrance. Miriam glanced around and saw the security guard pull a brief expression of discomfort. “Go on, ma’am.”
“Go on,” echoed Paulette from her left shoulder, her face white.
This can’t be happening, Miriam thought woodenly. She felt her feet carrying her toward the staircase and down, toward the glass doors at the front.
“Cards, please,” said the man from Human Resources. He held out his hand impatiently. Miriam passed him her card reluctantly: Paulette followed suit.
He cleared his throat and looked them over superciliously. “I’ve been told to tell you that The Industry Weatherman won’t be pressing charges,” he said. “We’ll clear your cubicles and forward your personal items and your final paycheck to your addresses of record. But you’re no longer allowed on the premises.” The security guard took up a position behind him, blocking the staircase. “Please leave.”
“What’s going on?” Paulette demanded, her voice rising toward a squeak.
“You’re both being terminated,” the HR man said impassively. “Misappropriation of company resources; specifically, sending personal e-mail on company time and looking at pornographic Web sites.”
“ ‘Pornographic-’” Miriam felt herself going faint with fury. She took half a step toward the HR man and barely noticed Paulette grabbing her sleeve.
“It’s not worth it, Miriam,” Paulie warned her. “We both know it isn’t true.” She glared at the HR man. “You work for Somerville Investments, don’t you?”
He nodded incuriously. “Please leave. Now.”
Miriam forced herself to smile. “Better brush up your résume,” she said shakily and turned toward the exit.
Two-thirds of her life ago, when she was eleven, Miriam had been stung by a hornet. It had been a bad one: Her arm had swollen up like a balloon, red and sore and painful to touch, and the sting itself had hurt like crazy. But the worst thing of all was the sense of moral indignation and outrage. Miriam-aged-eleven had been minding her own business, playing in the park with her skateboard-she’d been a tomboy back then, and some would say she still was-and she hadn’t done anything to provoke the angry yellow-and-black insect. It just flew at her, wings whining angrily, landed, and before she could shake it off it stung her.
She’d howled.
This time she was older and much more self-sufficient-college, pre-med, and her failed marriage to Ben had given her a grounding in self-sufficiency-so she managed to say good-bye to an equally shocked Paulie and make it into her car before she broke down. And the tears came silently-this time. It was raining in the car park, but she couldn’t tell whether there was more water inside or outside. They weren’t tears of pain: They were tears of anger. That bastard-
For a moment, Miriam fantasized about storming back in through the fire door at the side of the building, going up to Joe Dixon’s office, and pushing him out of the big picture window. It made her feel better to think about that, but after a few minutes she reluctantly concluded that it wouldn’t solve anything. Joe had the file. He had her computer-and Paulie’s-and a moment’s thought told her that those machines would be being wiped right now. Doubtless, server logs showing her peeking at porn on the job would be being fabricated. She’d spoken to some geeks at a dot-com startup once who explained just how easy it was if you wanted to get someone dismissed. “Shit,” she mumbled to herself and sniffed. “I’ll have to get another job. Shouldn’t be too hard, even without a reference.”
Still, she was badly shaken. Journalists didn’t get fired for exposing money-laundering scams; that was in the rules somewhere. Wasn’t it? In fact, it was completely crazy. She blinked away the remaining angry tears. I need to go see Iris, she decided. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start looking for a new job. Or to figure out a way to break the story herself, if she was going to try and do it freelance. Today she needed a shoulder to cry on-and a sanity check. And if there was one person who could provide both, it was her adoptive mother.
Iris Beckstein lived alone in her old house near Lowell Park. Miriam felt obscurely guilty about visiting her during daytime working hours. Iris never tried to mother her, being content to wander around and see to her own quiet hobbies most of the time since Morris had died. But Miriam also felt guilty about not visiting Iris more often. Iris was convalescent, and the possibility of losing her mother so soon after her father had died filled her with dread. Another anchor was threatening to break free, leaving her adrift in the world.
She parked the car in the road, then made a dash for the front door-the rain was descending in a cold spray, threatening to turn to penetrating sheets-and rang the doorbell, then unlocked the door and went in as the two-tone chime echoed inside.
“Ma?”
“Thr
ough here,” Iris called. Miriam entered, closing the front door. The hallway smelled faintly floral, she noticed as she shed her raincoat and hung it up: The visiting home help must be responsible. “I’m in the back room.”
Doors and memories lay ajar before Miriam as she hurried toward the living room. She’d grown up in this house, the one Morris and Iris had bought back when she was a baby. The way the third step on the staircase creaked when you put your weight on it, the eccentricities of the downstairs toilet, the way the living room felt cramped from all the bookshelves-the way it felt too big, without Dad. “Ma?” She pushed open the living room door hesitantly.
Iris smiled at her from her wheelchair. “So nice of you to visit! Come in! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The room was furnished with big armchairs and a threadbare sofa deep enough to drown in. There was no television-neither Iris nor Morris had time for it-but there were bookcases on each wall and a tottering tower of paper next to Iris’s chair. Miriam crossed the room, leaned over, and kissed Iris on top of her head, then stood back. “You’re looking well,” she said anxiously, hoping it was true. She wanted to hug her mother, but she looked increasingly frail-only in her fifties, but her hair was increasingly gray, and the skin on the backs of her hands seemed to be more wrinkled every time Miriam visited.
“I won’t break-at least, I don’t think so. Not if you only hug me.” Iris grimaced. “It’s been bad for the past week, but I think I’m on the mend again.” The chair she sat in was newer than the rest of the furniture, surrounded by the impedimenta of invalidity: a little side trolley with her crochet and an insulated flask full of herbal tea, her medicines, and a floor-standing lamp with a switch high up its stem. “Marge just left. She’ll be back later, before supper.”
“That’s good. I hope she’s been taking care of you well.”
“She does her best.” Iris nodded, slightly dismissively. “I’ve got physiotherapy tomorrow. Then another session with my new neurologist, Dr. Burke-he’s working with a clinical trial on a new drug that’s looking promising and we’re going to discuss that. It’s supposed to stop the progressive demyelination process, but I don’t understand half the jargon in the report. Could you translate it for me?”
“Mother! You know I don’t do that stuff any more-I’m not current; I might miss something. Anyway, if you go telling your osteopath about me, he’ll panic. I’m not a bone doctor.”
“Well, if you say so.” Iris looked irritated. “All that time in medical school wasn’t wasted, was it?”
“No, Mom, I use it every day. I couldn’t do my job without it. I just don’t know enough about modern multiple sclerosis drug treatments to risk second-guessing your specialist, all right? I might get it wrong, and then who’d you sue?”
“If you say so.” Iris snorted. “You didn’t come here just to talk about that, did you?”
Damn, thought Miriam. It had always been very difficult to pull one over on her mother. “I lost my job,” she confessed.
“I wondered.” Iris nodded thoughtfully. “All those dotcoms of yours, it was bound to be infectious. Is that what happened?”
“No.” Miriam shook her head. “I stumbled across something and mishandled it badly. They fired me. And Paulie… Remember I told you about her?”
Iris closed her eyes. “Bastards. The bosses are bastards.”
“Mother!” Miriam wasn’t shocked at the language-Iris’s odd background jumped out to bite her at the strangest moments-but it was the risk of misunderstanding. “It’s not that simple; I screwed up.”
“So you screwed up. Are you going to tell me you deserved to be fired?” asked Iris.
“No. But I should have dug deeper before I tried to run the story,” Miriam said carefully. “I was too eager, got sloppy. There were connections. It’s deep and it’s big and it’s messy; the people who own The Weatherman didn’t want to be involved in exposing it.”
“So that excuses them, does it?” asked Iris, her eyes narrowing.
“No, it-” Miriam stopped.
“Stop making excuses for them and I’ll stop chasing you.” Iris sounded almost amused. “They took your job to protect their own involvement in some dirty double-dealing. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Well.” Iris’s eyes flashed. “When are you going to hang them? And how high? I want a ringside seat!”
“Ma.” Miriam looked at her mother with mingled affection and exasperation. “It’s not that easy. I think The Weatherman’s owners are deeply involved in something illegal. Money laundering. Dirty money. Insider trading too, probably. I’d like to nail them, but they’re going to play dirty if I try. It took them about five minutes to come up with cause for dismissal, and they said they wouldn’t press charges if I kept my mouth shut.”
“What kind of charges?” Iris demanded.
“They say they’ve got logfiles to prove I was net-surfing pornography at work. They… they-” Miriam found she was unable to go on speaking.
“So were you?” Iris asked quietly.
“No!” Miriam startled herself with her vehemence. She caught Iris’s sly glance and felt sheepish. “Sorry. No, I wasn’t. It’s a setup. But it’s so easy to claim-and virtually impossible to disprove.”
“Are you going to be able to get another job?” Iris prodded.
“Yes.” Miriam fell silent.
“Then it’s all right. I really couldn’t do with my daughter expecting me to wash her underwear after all these years.”
“Mother!” Then Miriam spotted the sardonic grin.
“Tell me about it. I mean, everything. Warm a mother’s heart, spill the beans on the assholes who took her daughter’s job away.”
Miriam flopped down on the big overstuffed sofa. “It’s either a very long story or a very short one,” she confessed. “I got interested in a couple of biotech companies that looked just a little bit odd. Did some digging, got Paulette involved-she digs like a drilling platform-and we came up with some dirt. A couple of big companies are being used as targets for money laundering.
“Turns out that The Weatherman’s parent company is into them, deep. They decided it would be easier to fire us and threaten us than to run the story and take their losses. I’m probably going to get home and find a SLAPP lawsuit sitting in my mailbox.”
“So. What are you going to do about it?”
Miriam met her mother’s penetrating stare. “Ma, I spent three years there. And they fired me cold, without even trying to get me to shut up, at the first inconvenience. Do you really think I’m going to let them get away with that if I can help it?”
“What about loyalty?” Iris asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I gave them mine.” Miriam shrugged. “That’s part of why this hurts. You earn loyalty by giving it.”
“You’d have made a good feudal noble. They were big on loyalty, too. And blind obedience, in return.”
“Wrong century, wrong side of the Atlantic, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Now Iris grinned. “Oh, I noticed that much,” she conceded. “No foreign titles of nobility. That’s one of the reasons why I stayed here-that, and your father.” Her smile slipped. “Never could understand what the people here see in kings and queens, either the old hereditary kind or the modern presidential type. All those paparazzi, drooling after monarchs. I like your line of work. It’s more honest.”
“Harder to keep your job when you’re writing about the real world,” Miriam brooded gloomily. She struggled to sit a little straighter. “Anyway, I didn’t come around here to mope at you. I figure I can leave job-hunting until tomorrow morning.”
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Iris asked pointedly. “You mentioned lawsuits-or worse.”
“In the short term-” Miriam shrugged, then took a deep breath. “Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I’ll be okay as long as I leave them alone.”
“Hmm.” Iris looked at Miriam sidelong. “How
much money are we talking about here? If they’re pulling fake lawsuits to shut you up, that’s not business as usual.”
“There’s-” Miriam did some mental arithmetic-“about fifty to a hundred million a year flowing through this channel.”
Iris swore.
“Ma!”
“Don’t you ‘Ma’ me!” Iris snorted.
“But-”
“Listen to your old ma. You came here for advice, I’m going to give it, all right? You’re telling me you just happened to stumble across a money-laundering operation that’s handling more money in a week than most people earn in their life. And you think they’re going to settle for firing you and hoping you stay quiet?”
Miriam snorted. “It can’t possibly be that bad, Ma, this isn’t goodfellas territory, and anyway, they’ve got that faked evidence.”
Iris shook her head stubbornly. “When you’ve got criminal activities and millions of dollars in cash together, there are no limits to what people can do.” For the first time, Miriam realized with a sinking feeling, Iris looked worried. “But maybe I’m being too pessimistic-you’ve just lost your job and whatever else, that’s going to be a problem. How are your savings?”
Miriam glanced at the rain-streaked window. What’s turned Ma so paranoid? she wondered, unsettled. “They’re not doing badly. I’ve been saving for the past ten years.”
“There’s my girl,” Iris said approvingly.
“I put my money into tech-sector shares.”
“No, you didn’t!” Iris looked shocked.
Miriam nodded. “But no dot-coms.”
“Really?”
“Most people think that all tech stocks are down. But biotech stocks actually crashed out in ninety-seven and have been recovering ever since. The bubble last year didn’t even touch them. People need new medicines more than they need flashy Web sites that sell toys, don’t they? I was planning on paying off my mortgage year after next. Now I guess it’ll have to wait a bit longer-but I’m not in trouble unless I stay unemployed over a year.”
“Well, at least you found a use for all that time in med school.” Iris looked relieved. “So you’re not hard up.”
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