He reaches to shake her hand, an unusual gesture. “Oh! You’re married. All this time, I should’ve been saying, ‘Mrs. Strickland.’ How rude of me.”
“Not at all.” The truth is that she likes it, the same as how she likes that everyone here calls her Elaine. “And you have to be Mr. Gunderson.”
“Giles, please. My royal processional must have tipped you off. The heraldic displays and tableaux vivants.”
Desk work has taught Lainie to hold her smile regardless of confusion or embarrassment. Mr. Gunderson—Giles, what a suitable name—senses it straightaway and offers an apologetic chuckle.
“Forgive my obtuseness. I toddle around most days without a single person following a word of my nonsense. It makes me ever so popular.”
He smiles, and it is so sincere, so patient, so absent of ulterior design, that she has to fold her hands or else risk reaching out to take his again. It makes her feel silly, and she looks at the appointment book to hide her blush.
“Let’s see, I have you down for a 9:45 with Mr. Clay.”
“Yes and I’m fifteen minutes early. Always be ready to go, that’s my motto.”
“Can I get you some coffee while you wait?”
“I wouldn’t say no to some tea, if you have it.”
“Oh! I don’t think we have tea. It’s coffee all the time here.”
“That’s too bad. They used to keep tea. Perhaps just for me. Coffee—a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water.”
“I never thought about it like that.” An arch remark comes to mind; typically she would bottle it, but next to this man, she feels safe. She leans in. “Maybe I’ll serve only tea from now on. Turn all these grabby apes into gentlemen.”
Giles claps his hands together. “Capital idea! Why, the next time I come, I expect your ad men to be wearing cravats and discussing the finer points of cricket. And we will serve only tea, Mrs. Strickland. You must get used to using the royal we.”
The telephone rings, then rings again, two lines at once, and Giles bows and sits, keeping his portfolio case at his feet like a dog. By the time Lainie is finished telling Bernie’s secretary that Giles has arrived and routing the calls, a trio of execs from a detergent company has arrived at the desk, all of them clearing throats, and after them, a bald-headed duo she knows has been giving Klein & Saunders headaches about a kitty-litter campaign. A half hour of appeasement passes before Lainie has a moment to breathe, at which point she notices Giles Gunderson still sitting there.
The lobby, by strategy, has no clock, but Lainie keeps one on her desk. She makes a surreptitious study of Giles and decides that his unmovable smile is his way of bracing against inevitable affront. Lainie considers darting through the office to see if any of the secretaries have tea, the manna that might set Giles at ease. Instead she waits, and waits, until the insult of Bernie’s lateness hangs in the room like oily exhaust from a backfiring bus. The brume thickens as thirty minutes becomes forty, and forty creeps, at the pace of a fraying rope, toward one hour.
Each passed second further instills Giles’s profile with nobility. There is something familiar about his bearing. When Lainie recognizes it, she catches her breath. It is the same poise she saw reflected in the ladies’ room mirror during her first week at Klein & Saunders as she’d adjusted hair and makeup and practiced her defenses against butt pinches. It had been part of the Elaine Strickland she’d developed apart from her husband—the Elaine Strickland she’s still developing. She’d raised her chin so high she’d almost looked down her nose, and that’s what Giles is doing, constructing, as grandly as necessary, a fantasy of his importance.
They have nothing in common—she the young wife and he the doddery gent—and yet for that instant seem to Lainie to be more alike than any two people on earth. It is too much for her to take. She places on her desk the placard she uses for bathroom breaks (SEAT YOURSELF, BE RIGHT BACK!) and, without allowing herself a chance to think better of it, plunges through the frosted-glass door and into the office.
19
“ALL HOPES FADE…”
“When spring … while the spring…”
“As the spring recedes. As the spring recedes. Is this Chekhov? Is this Dostoyevsky? Nyet. It is a sentence simple enough for a glupyy rebenok. This whole enterprise, it is bear claws, digging into my flesh!”
Hoffstetler is never calm when called to see Mihalkov. Now, though, he is frenetic, unable to restrain body or tongue. Today’s cab driver had complained of him kicking the back of the seat, and while waiting in the industrial park, he’d pounded his shoe heels into his concrete block enough to carve out twin caves. His mood isn’t lightened by the Bison, an oaf intelligent enough to pilot a Chrysler all around Baltimore but unable to memorize a remedial code phrase. Hours were being wasted at a time when there weren’t seconds to spare.
The violinists, called to duty on the Black Sea’s day off, are crusty eyed in disheveled suits. They raise untuned instruments when they see Hoffstetler, but he elbows past before they can hit the first note of Russian cliché. The effulgent blue of the lobster tank makes a brown murk of the booths below; the murkiest shape is Mihalkov himself in his usual seat. Hoffstetler bolts that way, striking a two-top with his hip. It smarts, and he sees in his mind the creature’s ripped sutures.
“This foolishness must end! Hours I spend waiting in the park or being driven around by your pet beast!”
“Dobroye utro,” Mihalkov says. “Such energy so early.”
“Early? Do you not understand?” Hoffstetler hurries through a triumphal arch and stands over Mihalkov, his hands in fists. “Every minute I am not at Occam is a minute those savages might kill it!”
“The loudness, pozhaluysta.” Mihalkov rubs his eyes. “I am with headache. Last night, Bob, I overindulged.”
“Dmitri!” Hoffstetler’s spittle disturbs Mihalkov’s black tea. “Call me Dmitri, mudak!”
It speaks well of Hoffstetler’s proficiency as an informant, he will think later, that he had never, before that moment, had to experience the full abilities of a man trained by the KGB. Mihalkov, eyes cast down with the misdirection of a headache, snatches Hoffstetler by the wrist and yanks downward, as if closing blinds. Hoffstetler is driven to his knees. His chin lands on the tabletop and he bites down on his tongue. Mihalkov twists Hoffstetler’s arm behind his back and pulls upward. Hoffstetler’s chin grinds into the table. The musicians, directly in Hoffstetler’s eyeline, snap shut their jaws, nod out a rhythm, and start playing.
“Look at the lobsters.” Mihalkov tidies his mouth with a napkin. “Go on, Dmitri.”
Pivoting on his chin hurts. Blood from either his chin or tongue dampens the table. He looks up with his eyes. The tank looms, a tsunami caught behind glass. Even under duress, Hoffstetler can see what Mihalkov means. Usually the crustaceans are torpid, shrugging along the tank’s bottom like barnacles. Today they are agitated, antenna swaying and claws pinching as they flex legs and carapace to scrabble up the walls, claws clacking against glass.
“They are like you, are they not?” Mihalkov asks. “They should relax. Accept their fate. And yet, left alone, they get big ideas. Climbing, escape. But it is wasted energy. They do not know the size of the world beyond their tank.”
Mihalkov picks up a fork. Hoffstetler’s eyes go to it. It’s clean, silver, lustrous in the low light. Mihalkov presses the points against Hoffstetler’s shoulder.
“A little twist and the arms come right off. Like butter.” He drags the fork to the nape of Hoffstetler’s neck. “The tail also. Very simple. Twist and pull, and off it comes.” The fork moves again, the tines ticking across his shirt until they rest against his biceps. “The legs are easy. Wine bottle, pepper mill—roll the arms flat and the meat, it just squirts out.” He licks his lips as if tasting the melted butter. “I can teach you how to do it,
Dmitri. It is a good thing to know, how to take an animal apart.”
He releases his hold and Hoffstetler slumps to the floor, cradling his wrenched arm. Though his eyesight is blurred by tears, he sees Mihalkov gesture and feels the Bison’s huge hands lifting him into the air and depositing him in the booth. The comfort of the seat is somehow grotesque; writhing on the floor made more sense. He fumbles for a napkin, holds it against his chin. There is blood, but not a lot. Leo Mihalkov knows what he’s doing.
“My superiors have told me that extraction is impossible.” Mihalkov drowns two spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. “I made your case. A convincing one, I thought. The Soviet Union, I told them, does not lead the United States in many categories. But in space, we lead! The Occam asset, it would solidify this.” He sips, shrugs. “But what does a brute like me know about such things? I am what you said: a pet beast. All of us, Dmitri, are the pet beast to someone.”
Hoffstetler crumples the bloody napkin in his fist and gasps through panting.
“So it dies, then? We just let it die?”
Mihalkov smiles. “Russia does not leave its countrymen without recourse.”
He wipes his hands clean and lifts from the seat cushion a box. It is small, black, made of industrial plastic. He undoes the box’s fasteners and opens it to reveal three objects nestled into slotted protective foam. Mihalkov extracts the first item. Hoffstetler is familiar with many a gadget, but this is something new. It is the size of a baseball and constructed from a curled knuckle of metal pipe like a homemade grenade, except that the soldering is professional and the wiring held in place with tidy epoxy putty. A small green light, yet unlit, is taped next to a red button.
“We call this a popper,” Mihalkov says. “It is one of the Israelis’ new toys. Secure it within ten feet of Occam’s central fuses, depress the button, and five minutes later it will release a surge strong enough to disable all electricity. Lights, cameras, everything. It is highly effective. But I warn you, Dmitri, the damage is temporary. The fuses are replaced, and the power will return. I do not expect you to have more than ten minutes to complete your task.”
“My task,” Hoffstetler repeats.
Mihalkov nestles the popper back into the foam and, with the gentleness of a farmer scooping up a baby chick, withdraws the second item. This Hoffstetler recognizes, for he has wielded so many in so many regretful ways. It is a fully assembled syringe. Mihalkov removes the final item, a small glass vial filled with a silver liquid. He holds these items with more care than he held the popper and gives Hoffstetler a sympathetic smile.
“If the Americans are exterminating the asset, as you say, then there is but one course of action. You must get to it first. Inject it with this solution. It will kill the asset. More important, it will eat away the asset’s insides. When it is through, there will be nothing left to study but bones. Perhaps a little handful of scales.”
Hoffstetler laughs, a snort that spatters the table in spit, blood, and tears.
“If we can’t have it, neither can they. Is that the idea?”
“Mutually assured destruction,” Mihalkov says. “You know the concept.”
Hoffstetler braces one hand against the table and covers his face with the other.
“It didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he sobs. “It went centuries without hurting anyone. We did this to it. We dragged it up here. We tortured it. What’s next, Leo? What species do we wipe out next? Is it us? I hope it is. We deserve it.”
He feels Mihalkov’s hand settle atop his, pat it gently.
“You told me it understands pain like we do.” Mihalkov’s voice is soft. “Then be better than the Americans. Be better than all of us. Go ahead, listen to your author Mr. Huxley. Think of the creature’s feelings. Deliver it from its suffering. When you are finished, we wait, four or five days, just for appearances. Then I will take you, myself, to the embassy and put you on a ship to Minsk. Picture it, Dmitri. The blue skies like nothing they have here. The sun like the Christmas star through the snowy trees. So much has changed since you’ve seen it. You will see it again. You will see it with your family. Concentrate on that. All of it, it is nearly at the end.”
20
EVERYONE KNOWS THE front-desk girl, and everyone is busy. But today they halt their activities to watch her pass, her unerring smile gone grim and her studied saunter supplanted by a step so swift it flutters the hem of her dress. Lainie comes at Bernie’s secretary at such a march that the secretary, well-trained, responds defensively, “He’s not in.” Lainie presents roadblocks to clients all day; she knows how to dodge them, too. She swerves around the secretary, snatching the knob of Bernie’s door and pulling it open.
Bernie Clay is kicked back in his leather chair, ankles crossed atop his desk, a highball in one hand, face stretched in a laugh. Relaxed on the sofa are the copy chief and lead media buyer, chuckling over look-alike drinks. Too late, but bound by protocol, the secretary buzzes Bernie to say that Elaine Strickland is entering. Bernie’s smile fades to a look of perplexity. He gestures with his drink at the other men.
“This is called a meeting, Elaine.”
She’ll faint, she’ll be fired, she’s so stupid, what was she thinking?
“Mr. Gunderson … is waiting for you.”
Bernie squints, as if hearing Chinese.
“Right. But I’m in an important meeting.”
The copy chief snorts. Lainie looks at the sofa. Both men are smirking. A cold marble of sweat plummets down her backbone, even as she feels an angry roil at how these men just sit there, half-drunk and entitled. She holds tight to the resentment. If she must faint, let her do it from a respectable height. She plants her feet.
“He’s been waiting for an hour.”
Bernie rocks his chair to an upright position. Liquor slurps over the rim of his glass, hits the carpet. Not his concern, Lainie thinks: a janitor, one more of the overlooked, will take to her knees to do the scrubbing. Bernie sighs at the men and cricks his head at Lainie, as if to say, Let me deal with this. They stand up, buttoning jackets, not bothering to hide the collegial grins of watching a buddy butt heads with a strident female. The copy chief winks at Lainie as he passes. The media buyer brushes so close that Lainie is certain he can hear, if not feel, the crash of her heart.
“I know I offered you full-time employment,” Bernie says, “but let’s not let that go to our heads. Do your job, Elaine. And I’ll do my job. I’ll come and get Mr. Gunderson when I’m ready. I hope that’s before closing time, but we’ll see.”
“He’s a nice man.” Lainie despises the tremor in her voice. “He waited two weeks to get an appointment—”
“This is what I’m saying. You don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you? Everyone who walks through that door has a history. Don’t you? Let me tell you something about nice old Mr. Gunderson. He used to work here. Until he got arrested for moral depravity. Surprise. So when you charge in here, with other people in my office, and say Mr. Gunderson, that’s what they think of. It doesn’t make my life easier. I’m the only one in town who’ll work with Mr. Gunderson. I do it out of the goodness of my heart. Let me tell you something else. His work? It’s useless. Sure, it’s good. But it’s antique. It doesn’t sell. Two weeks ago, he brought me this big red monstrosity and I had him redo it green. I did it because I don’t have the heart to tell him the truth. He’s finished in this biz. At least my way he gets a kill fee. So, really, Elaine, who’s the nice one now?”
Lainie no longer knows. Bernie exhales indulgently, gets up, puts his arm around her, and guides her to the door, where he instructs her, tolerantly, she has to admit, to tell Mr. Gunderson that Mr. Clay had an emergency, and that he’s to leave his painting behind. That way the hard hearts in accounting can deliver the bad news later. Lainie feels like a child. She nods, a good girl, her forced smile crimping her face in a way she associates with home, the dinner table, pretending everything is all right.
When she returns to the lobby, Gi
les stands up, straightens his jacket, and strides forward, portfolio case swinging. Lainie scurries behind the desk as a soldier might into a foxhole, and selects from her inventory a tone of apology and the script that goes with it. Mr. Clay is busy handling an unforeseen event. I didn’t know. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry. Won’t you leave your work with me? I’ll make sure Mr. Clay sees it. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be Richard, to feel your heart harden to stone with every word. Giles shatters that stone by beginning to unbuckle the portfolio case without protest, accepting her blatant lie, not because he believes it, but because he doesn’t wish to cause her further upset. Forget what Bernie said about moral depravity. Giles Gunderson is the kindest man Lainie has ever known.
“Stop.”
It sounds like her voice. It feels like her voice, too; her lips feel the plosive pop. But how can such an insubordinate sound come from a woman blinded by Spray ’N Steam vapor, weighed down by a beehive hairdo, deafened by the repetitive thwack of a headboard against a wall? Still the voice continues, over the belligerent telephone and the harrumphs of the waiting room’s latest arrivals, so that she, just this once, might prioritize a man who is no one else’s priority.
“They don’t want it,” she says.
“They…” Giles adjusts his glasses. “I’m sorry?”
“They won’t tell you. But they don’t want it. They’ll never want it.”
“But it’s … they asked for green and—”
“If you leave it with me, you’ll get a kill fee. But that’s all.”
“—and it’s as green as can be, it can’t get any greener!”
“But I don’t think you should.”
“Miss Strickland?” Giles is blinking hard. “Mrs. Strickland, I mean—”
The Shape of Water Page 18