Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  I listened to the rest of the messages, and the only one that actually got through to me was the last one. It was Kurt, chatting alone in the digital storeroom.

  ‘Hey, Michael, it’s me, you’re not there … or you are and you don’t want anybody on the line … and that means me, too, whatever, and that’s fine, I mean, that you’re not talking to me, I can just imagine … so just for a minute, not long, of course, because … I really want you to talk to me again, because … Jesus, how can I say this … it’s me, I mean, you know that, right?’

  There was silence. The only noise was the faint hum of the connection, running for a couple of seconds. I sat behind the desk, staring out the window in a trance, the cell phone pressed to my ear. The message—ended, disconnected and stored quite some time ago—would be saved for another twenty-four hours. No longer.

  I had arrived in a foreign land, in hostile territory. I didn’t want to be there. And to tell the truth, I wasn’t really there yet. All my suits were still hanging in the closet, shirts at a hundred-and-fifty euros apiece, silk ties. My consultant’s pitch was still in my computer, which I always had with me.

  If I had to report to Dries van Waayen at ten-fifteen, I wanted to know what to ask, not only about myself but mainly about Ms. Radekker. I’d find out soon enough when I was going to be fired. I knew exactly how that would go. HC&P let it be known in no uncertain terms that loyalty was the highest good. You were never to abandon each other, to let each other down, but if you did you’d be out the door before the end of the day. I had absolutely no faith in the loyalty of the firm. Apparently it was my time to go, and this was how I’d make my contribution to maintaining the profits. Fine.

  But with Radekker things were not fine. She was dead and her body had disappeared. Something had happened within the walls of this office building that no one knew anything about except me. If I didn’t do something fast, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. Once I was outside the firm it would be impossible to make contact with anyone, so someone from management had to be informed. Dries van Waayen was the first. After all, he was responsible for personnel. If I was going to tell Van Waayen, I’d have to know who Radekker was, what department she worked in and whether she had been reported missing. Those kinds of things. Simple things.

  All the names, telephone numbers and workstations of the firm’s employees were available through the HC&P network. Within two minutes I knew that only one Radekker worked for the firm: Ina Radekker, debt analyst in the Finance & Control department with an assigned workstation, room 3-026. She had her own phone extension, but I had little use for that now. I clicked through the phone book, looking up Radekker in Amsterdam. Two hits. H.K. Radekker on Van Breestraat. Didn’t seem like the right one to me. Wrong initials and much too upmarket. My lips were so dry they hurt. From the air conditioning or from something else, maybe the radiation from all the cell phones. I pulled on the loose bits of skin with my teeth until one tore off. Without chapstick I had no life. I looked at the second name: I. Radekker, Admiraal de Ruyterweg. That sounded more like a debt analyst in her early thirties. I wrote down the address and phone number and called. Instinctively I held my breath. What if someone answered, what was I supposed to say? I could hardly just blurt out what I thought: that someone had been killed here last night and I thought it was Ms. Radekker, and was she missing perhaps, or … After twenty rings I hung up. No one was home. Logical. Or not logical, that was possible, too. Everything was possible.

  One by one the others came in. New smells jostling with each other. Coffee, eau de toilette, leather and wax from polished shoes and chic briefcases. Snatches of conversations could be heard left and right, sometimes faltering, then pierced with an unexpectedly loud laugh. Beginning of the day, an ordinary day, Thursday, not even the end of the week. Outside a watery morning in June, inside enough collective ambition in one room to supply the Netherlands with its own aeronautics industry.

  ‘Here, you look like you could use this.’

  From the corner of my left eye I saw a steaming cup of coffee appear on the desk.

  Gijs dragged a chair from another desk and sat down across from me. He was holding an old plastic bag, from the Albert Heijn supermarket. Gijs was not one for luxury briefcases. A waste of money. Especially if you could pick up a perfectly good bag every week for ten cents when you did your grocery shopping. Gijs was my age, a little more than ten centimetres taller—one metre ninety-three—economist by training, mathematician by nature. Set him down in front of a complex calculation and he’d simply see the answer, as if the numbers and symbols were exactly the same as the colours and lines in a painting. It was like me looking at a photo and saying, ‘Oh, right, a car,’ except he’d look at a complicated math problem and say, ‘Oh, right, twenty-one.’

  Where it came from he himself didn’t know. ‘Can’t you see that?’ he’d ask. ‘It’s right there. You can see that it’s there, can’t you? How can you not see it?’ He saw sums as compositions, tables as visual constructions. For him, annual reports and balance sheets were the simplest of cartoons. During his college years he once failed an exam because although he knew the answer he couldn’t explain how he had arrived at it. In fact he didn’t arrive at answers; they were there already.

  But not for me. I saw the world in terms of relationships, of positions and interests. If someone said something to me, I saw his words like a river flowing across a landscape. From his tone and pronunciation I could hear the relative importance of what he was saying and see where the dikes were strong and where they were in danger of giving way. I could sense exactly what a person ought to say, when and to whom, in order to preserve the unity of his words while remaining within the banks. Gijs couldn’t see that. When Gijs listened to someone, all he heard was what had been said.

  ‘If someone says twelve, then what he means is twelve, right? Or am I being stupid?’

  Sort of like that. And we were both colour blind, he a bit more than I, but we both thought there were an awful lot of metallic green cars riding around.

  ‘Report done?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not done?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Worked all night and still not done? Bad planning, Bellicher.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Can I do something? Help? I have an hour.’

  The hot coffee spread slowly through my body and produced a relaxation I hadn’t felt in hours. Gijs’s phlegmatic attitude did the rest. Suddenly I realized that I was taking myself for a ride, and doing it big time. I was hiding behind the events of the previous night and acting as if my future in the firm didn’t matter anymore. My own problems were nothing in comparison with a murder. At least that’s what I thought. But if I was brutally honest with myself, things were exactly the opposite.

  HC&P was an unusual collection of people, full and partial geniuses with audacious talents and bizarre gifts. People like Gijs van Olde Nieland, who saw the world as a pallet of numbers, values and codes, who looked at everything other people regarded as abstract and saw it as concrete—and found that perfectly normal. There were many more like him in the company, attracted by the work, by the sometimes absurdly convoluted problems that were dumped on the consultant’s desk with increasing frequency, because this was the perfect place for people who could see straight through the most complex questions. It was a self-sustaining process. That explained the incontestable position of the big international consultancies, and with just over a hundred thousand consultants in more than seven hundred branches in a hundred and twenty-four countries, HC&P was among the biggest. Consultants from the firm exercised influence over the policies of governments and the business community throughout the world. As modern consigliari they had the ear of the rich and powerful. Behind the scenes they guided the decisions of governments and companies, decisions that affected the lives of hundreds of millions, billions of people wherever they happened to live: in Amsterdam, London, New York or Paris, but a
lso in villages like Rijpwetering, Lurcy la Ville, Pleasant Hill or Wexford. With their far-flung network, consultants were not only aware of developments wherever they were taking place, but in some cases they set that policy themselves.

  In the Netherlands I was part of that network. I belonged there, with people like Gijs and Thomas and Jan, and with Jessica, who saw everything as an expression of strategy and tottered on the brink of perversion. You could see that by the way she moved her body, sometimes with barely controlled little jolts, almost undetectable, because she managed to gain control over herself at the very last second. At inconvenient moments she would come and stand so close to me that I could hardly speak. Every movement could be a form of assault. She would do those kinds of things and then look as if she were in a meeting, talking about the strategic difference between a brand and a product.

  Jessica and I did not live together, but that didn’t really mean anything. She had an apartment on Gerrit van der Veenstraat. I lived on Deurloostraat, a hundred square metres on the top floor. The two addresses suggested more of a difference than there really was, because without her I wasn’t the man I wanted to be. Gijs was the first person I had met at HC&P, but it was through Jessica that I came to love the firm. I belonged with these people.

  And I belonged with Sandra and with Marja, who could see the religious background and upbringing of everyone she had ever met as if it were wrapped around them like an aura. She could reduce the most complicated conflicts to manageable proportions within three minutes. ‘One Protestant among four Catholics,’ was her observation after having been merely introduced to the five members of a completely gridlocked board of managing directors. ‘The Protestant always loses, of course, except you know Protestants, they never give in.’

  I belonged there, with all the other goofballs who couldn’t tell a grey car from a green one but who could study a collapsing public service, learn about the strategy, the economics, the sociology and the communications and tell them all apart, list the priorities and explain it all to boot.

  First look, then think. That was rule number one. Otherwise you wouldn’t know what you were talking about. All around me I could see the people I belonged with. If I couldn’t belong with them anymore, I couldn’t belong anywhere.

  Dries van Waayen wasn’t finished with me yet.

  11 Black or white

  ‘You know anybody at Finance & Control?’ I asked.

  Gijs nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘they’re the only people in the building who know what a number looks like, although most of them are hopeless. Who are you looking for?’

  ‘Radekker.’

  ‘Mr. or Ms.?’

  ‘Ms. Debit analyst.’

  ‘Never heard of her. Something going on? You want me to call somebody for you?’

  I thought fast and saw how my words would make their way through the company—via Gijs to the department and from the department to the manager of that department, and on and on.

  ‘No, not necessary,’ I said. ‘I just can’t find her.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t know who to ask, Mr. Communications Specialist. Leave it to me.’

  Before I knew it he was sitting there with his phone in his hand, glancing at me with an expression that was something between surprise and complacency. Nothing ever bothered Gijs. It wasn’t just because of his mathematical way of thinking but it also had to do with the kind of family he was from. Gijs van Olde Nieland was raised with the manners of the old nobility, which was still manifestly apparent. If you had to fart or burp, you went ahead and did it; if you wanted something, you asked for it; and if you thought somebody else ought to be doing something, you said so. Gijs possessed an enthusiastic ease and a natural aloofness. The simplicity of privilege was still in his blood, and that was just the quality that I could use right now. If I had any hope of averting my approaching dismissal when I met with Dries van Waayen later on, I needed good arguments. Convincing arguments.

  ‘I need a client,’ I said.

  ‘A client? Any old client?’ Gijs slid the cell phone back into his pocket.

  ‘No. A client who makes an impression.’

  Gijs thought a bit. In his eyes I could see him making an assessment. That assessment was me. Gijs had an imposing circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances. He was part of a network of people in good positions, through his father’s family as well as his mother’s. There was no multinational or ministry that didn’t include some member of his family. Decades of democratization and equal opportunity had made fewer changes in this picture than you would expect. Only if you worked directly with someone like Gijs would you notice his easy powers of persuasion and his matter-of-fact way of getting otherwise inaccessible people on the phone. But he never flaunted it. Never.

  That’s why my question was so unusual. I was asking him to mobilize his contacts in order to help me. Here. Now. I was asking him to dig up some uncle or second cousin who would come asking for me—specifically for me, whether they were actually interested in my services or not. For Gijs the question was whether I was worth it. A simple question, but one he would never ask me himself.

  ‘And you’d like this to happen fairly quickly, right?’

  I looked at my watch. It was eight-fifteen.

  ‘Um, what’s quick?’ I said. ‘If I can’t bring in a new account within the next hour and a half, I’m out of here.’

  Gijs said nothing. He stood up, rubbed his lips with his hand, waved a finger at me and walked away. After three steps he turned and came back to my desk.

  ‘An hour and a half?’ he asked.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘So that’s …’ now Gijs looked at his watch, ‘… about a quarter to ten?’

  ‘If possible.’

  ‘And what happens at a quarter to ten, if I may ask?’

  ‘I’ll be sitting with Dries van Waayen.’

  ‘Right.’

  Neither of us spoke. Gijs stood up and picked up his cup.

  ‘You want more coffee?’

  Without waiting for an answer he picked up my cup as well and paused for a moment at my desk, a cup in each hand, his mind God knows where. A subservient genius. He bowed toward me and whispered a question. Always quite correct.

  ‘This doesn’t happen to have anything to do with that … uh … Ms. Rakker from Finance & Control?’

  I shook my head. ‘Radekker is something entirely different.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Gijs laughed and leaned in a bit closer.

  ‘Is it something I should know?’ he asked.

  I laughed too but said nothing.

  Gijs slammed the cups down on the desk. ‘The basics, Bellicher! Come on! You’re still capable of that, I hope? Without the basics I can’t get anywhere with you.’

  It was one of the company rules. The ability to stick to the basics was one of the preconditions for working at the higher advisory level. Anyone who got caught up in the details would find himself in some dead-end job as assistant or researcher without any hope of escape. Details were important, of course, but the devil is in the details. Everyone knew that. Everything has to tally up, no one is ever to allowed to slip, but there comes a point when the consultant trusts that all the aspects, even the smallest, the ones that are still invisible, will ultimately be dealt with. The senior trusts that the junior will close up all the leaks. The partner trusts that the senior has his juniors working in all the right places. That’s how it goes. Everything focused on advancing the basics. Gijs was right. In a world where the normal pace was three steps ahead, I was hopelessly behind. If I didn’t take care of myself first, I could forget the questions about Ina Radekker. No one would listen to me.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I left my clients stranded for three days.’

  Gijs burped. ‘Excuse me?’ he said, and not out of politeness but to show his surprise, although it did smell like his last meal. ‘You left your clients stranded, without c
alling them? Without e-mailing? Just like that?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Personal,’ I said.

  ‘Circumstances beyond your control?’

  ‘Way beyond.’

  Gijs smiled. ‘Say no more. I’ll call someone.’

  Van Waayen was in consultation. Essentially there was nothing unusual about that, since Van Waayen was always in consultation. That was his work and he was exceptionally good at it. Of the nine partners in the firm, Dries van Waayen was far and away the best talker. He could think and talk at the same time. It was a quality that made many clients trust in him implicitly, because he sometimes would come up with the solution to a problem while they were literally sitting there. Once people worked with Dries they never left him. He had a cast-iron reputation which he protected in every conceivable way. And rightly so, since a good name is the basis on which every new client walks in the door. Without a good name the river ultimately dries up.

  I waited, sitting in a chair in the waiting room with his secretary, Rachel, who looked over at me every now and then and smiled in a way that made me suspect the worst.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s going to be awhile,’ she said, and she pointed to the door to his office. It was going on ten. ‘He’s in there with Mr. Breger, and …’

  The phone rang, cutting off the little contact we had. Behind the door were the sounds of bumping and laughter made by people who had come to the end of a conversation. The door handle went down, and soon the door was resolutely opened. A big man came out of the office. Tall and broad, with rough features and a voice that was much too loud. Dries van Waayen followed on his heels, still laughing at something that had been said earlier. The two men walked through the secretary’s room and out to the corridor. They didn’t even look at me and acted as if there was no one else in the room. The secretary gestured to Van Waayen and pointed to the phone.