“Custodians?” Holmes said.
McGee’s enormous eyes were wide, and a smile was forming in the corners of her mouth. And Holmes knew, without having to ask, that this, whatever this was, had nothing at all to do with what they’d been talking about a moment before.
“No,” Holmes said.
McGee frowned. “You don’t even know what it is.”
Holmes leaned back against the sofa, arms folded across his chest. “I don’t need to.”
“What is it?” April said.
McGee handed her the page. “It’s perfect.”
Holmes realized then that the occasion for the party had been hiding in her pocket all along.
There was a long silence as the inevitable question, the question Holmes had decided he himself wouldn’t ask, went unspoken among the others. And Holmes found himself hoping the silence might go on forever, or at least as long as it took for them all to gather their coats and belongings and head for the door.
But then April, sweet April, handed the page back. “Perfect for what?”
McGee lifted the ad weightlessly between her fingertips. “This is how we’ll bring them down.”
“Oh, God,” Holmes said.
Over in the love seat Fitch broke out in more drunken laughter.
“Just listen.”
And McGee explained her plan. She was going to get a job there. She was going undercover.
“As a cleaning lady?” Holmes said, no longer able to remain quiet.
“Let her finish,” April said.
Once inside, McGee would get into their files. “I’ll grab everything I can find,” she said.
“About what?” Fitch shouted from his reclining position. “What do you think they’re hiding?”
“Everything,” McGee said, “going all the way back to the beginning. Every toxic spill they’ve hushed, every environmental report they’ve squelched, every pension they’ve cheated, every corner they’ve cut, every compromise, every casualty they’ve written off.”
For months and years, she’d buried them in information about the company’s crimes: exposés uncovered by shoestring nonprofits; hunches chased by alt weekly reporters; arcane pie charts issued by obscure agencies; blog posts by unaffiliated Ph.D.s.
“But why them?” Fitch’s drunkenness seemed to have miraculously vanished. “There’s a million other companies doing this stuff. If not worse. Why are you so obsessed with them?”
“Because they’re here,” Myles said. “And they’re all that’s left. The others are gone.”
McGee rewarded him with a partial smile. “And everyone’s afraid they’ll leave, too. So they don’t say anything, don’t hold them accountable. Why do you think the city keeps giving them tax breaks? They move another plant down south to get away from unions, and the city gives them more handouts. The company threatens bankruptcy so they can slash wages, and then they give their executives a two-hundred-percent raise. No one says a word. The city council wouldn’t give them a jaywalking ticket, they’re so afraid they’ll pack up HQ.”
“City councils don’t give out tickets,” Holmes said.
“It’s a parasite,” McGee said, ignoring him, “destroying this place.”
“You actually think this is stuff they’ve just got lying around?” Holmes said. “All these revealing documents?”
“Filed under D,” Fitch said with a deep, throaty air of mystery, “for diabolical plans.”
“That,” McGee said, turning to Holmes, “is where you come in.”
“No,” Holmes said, “no, it isn’t.”
It was all a simple matter of locks, she said. And locks had simple answers: picks. “You,” she said, coming up to Holmes’s side, “just have to teach me how.”
“Have you forgotten where I woke up this morning? Me and Myles?” Holmes looked over to find Myles had returned to his staring game.
“Since when are you afraid of getting in a little trouble?”
“There’s trouble for a purpose,” Holmes said, “and there’s trouble that’s just stupid. His interview—” Holmes pointed to Fitch, who promptly rose from the sofa, eager to sneak away. “What did it accomplish?”
“If it’d worked,” McGee said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“What makes you think they have this stuff at all? These reports? These memos? Why on earth would they keep them?” And why, Holmes wondered, looking around the room, had everyone else fallen so silent? Fitch diving back into his cup. Myles off in a daydream. April at the sink, bent over her sweatshirt. Why was no one taking his side?
“Because they’re arrogant,” McGee said. “Because they think they’ll never get caught. Especially your new friend.” McGee nodded toward Fitch, and he swallowed deeply. “If Ruth Freeman really doesn’t fear the truth, like she says, then she’s got no need for a shredder.”
“What if you get caught?” April said.
“I’ll make sure I don’t.”
“What’s there to say?” Myles finally lowered his eyes from the painting. “It’s not like we can talk you out of it.”
And of course, Myles was right. McGee wasn’t asking their permission. She was informing them of what she’d already decided.
“This isn’t us,” Holmes said. “This isn’t what we do.”
“Like you said,”—McGee turned back to Holmes—“what we do isn’t working.”
April had drifted over from the sink. “I should get going.” The ball of pink cotton cupped in her hands looked like a dead rabbit.
“It’s early.” McGee’s smile reappeared. As if she were trying to remind them this was just a party, an innocent party.
Was it early? To Holmes, the hour suddenly felt ancient, as if they’d been frozen in these positions not just for the evening but for eternity, like a dark parlor scene painted by an old master in a world before industrial ruins—before trash could be glued to a canvas and passed off as art. It was time for some new kind of scene. A landscape, a seascape. A nude. It didn’t matter. He’d gladly settle for even less than that, for a vase of cut flowers, a still life with fruit.
Twelve
She called herself Zolska Zhronakhovska. For her hair, she found a dye to turn the brown hay-colored blond. She had April cut her bangs straight across and iron out the waves. From the front, it looked as though she were wearing half an iceberg lettuce on her head.
She practiced speaking so it sounded as if her mouth were full of ice cubes. Only ever the simplest of words. Yes. No. Okey-dokey.
According to the placard, the woman in the basement was the “Head of Facilities Maintenance,” a fancy title for someone whose office was a cage. The woman’s name was Dorothy, and Dorothy shared the cage with mops and buckets and jugs of pastel cleaning fluid. Dorothy was slim as a cigarette. Her red plaid shirt fit her like a cape.
Beneath the low-hanging fluorescent strips, Dorothy asked McGee questions about her experience and about her immigration status, and McGee smiled and scratched her head and blinked. At the thrift store, April had dug up a pair of toothpaste-white orthopedic shoes. McGee’s pleated, acid-washed jeans closed at the ankle with zippers and bows.
“Okey-dokey,” she said, knowing perfectly well the legal formalities were a bluff.
Dorothy pointed to a square in the calendar. McGee would start the next night.
Never had she ridden in anything capable of moving so fast without seeming to move at all. When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, McGee thought at first that she’d forgotten to press the button and was still in the basement.
But the view had changed. Dorothy’s cage was gone. There was a tiny black woman squatting with a rag before a set of double glass doors. Beyond the doors was a suite of inner offices.
McGee was right where she’d intended to be.
But already there’d been complications. This was a forty-story office tower, and not until after Dorothy had hired her had it occurred to McGee to wonder what the odds would be that she�
��d be assigned the precise floor she wanted. One in forty, April had pointed out in her innocently helpful way. And sure enough, McGee had shown up tonight for her first night of work, and Dorothy had handed her a scrap of paper bearing the number twenty-four. From there she was supposed to work her way up, not down. McGee had no contingency plan, and the sight of the number twenty-four had shut off something in her brain. If she’d been capable of thinking anything, she might have thought to turn around and walk home—give up right then and there. But she’d managed to suppress her instinct to flee, and then she’d managed to suppress the unwanted information too, crumpling the number in her pocket and getting on the elevator and pressing the button for three instead.
Now here she was, her brain still numb, with a woman glaring at her, annoyed by the interruption. The woman’s ID badge said her name was Calice.
“What is it?” Calice said, already turning back to her work.
Trembling slightly, McGee picked a bottle at random from her cart. “Okey-dokey.”
“What are you doing?” Calice said as McGee approached the glass.
McGee smiled, and she was raising the spray bottle to the glass when Calice grabbed her arm. She was small but strong.
“No, no, no,” Calice said. “What are you doing?”
It was difficult to guess the woman’s age. There were no wrinkles anywhere on her face, but her hair was threaded with gray.
“This is my floor.” Calice’s teeth were big and square and clenched. She took McGee by the arm and led her over to the elevator. Calice pointed at the forty numbered lights above the elevator doors. The third bulb was lit. Calice motioned toward that one, then pointed at herself.
“You see?” she said.
Every last bit of moisture in McGee’s mouth had evaporated, but she swallowed deeply anyway. “Okey-dokey,” she said, turning around again and squirting a faint yellow mist onto the glass.
Calice’s mouth fell open. “All right,” she said, shouting with the first syllable, already calming with the second. She stopped her tongue between her big square teeth. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said. She came right up to McGee’s chin, so close she could smell the citrus in the woman’s shampoo. “I don’t know what country you’re from that you don’t understand no. Babies understand no. Dogs understand no. Are you dumber than a dog?”
McGee didn’t know whether it was the chemicals in the air or the misery of the charade, but she suddenly felt like crying. Yellow drops were streaking down the glass.
The woman opened the glass door, and the yellow drops swerved toward the bottom.
The scene McGee overheard Calice narrating into the receptionist’s phone was not flattering, but there was nothing she could think to do to about it.
Then the numbered lights above the elevator fell—3, 2, 1, B. And then back up they came, 1, 2, 3, and McGee felt her pulse rise with each digit. The elevator doors parted, and Dorothy burst between them, unbuttoned plaid shirt flapping behind her.
Throughout the cursing and pointing that followed, McGee stood silent and dumb, offering nothing in response.
Was it minutes? It felt like hours. She didn’t know. Eventually Dorothy and Calice gave up and went away. They must have decided it was easier to retreat.
McGee waited alone in the reception area a short while longer, wobbling in her orthopedic shoes, but the women never came back.
She needed to get moving. Too much time had already slipped away. Skipping the cubicles, McGee headed straight for the corridors of private offices. As she went, she read the etched bronze nameplates on the thick oak doors. None of them belonged to Ruth Freeman. So back she went again to the beginning, but she was finding it hard to focus. The names passed under her eyes, and she forgot to read them.
Back to the beginning again, once more. Slowly, slowly this time. Concentrate. Nameplate after nameplate, but it still wasn’t there. No Ruth Freeman.
Fitch had been useless. She’d interrogated him repeatedly in the days leading up to this. But he’d been such a wreck when he’d been here before, he couldn’t remember anything about the layout. They might as well have blindfolded him.
McGee wilted backward into the spongy wall of the nearest cubicle. Was it possible Fitch had given her the wrong floor number?
On her way back to reception, to the cleaning cart she’d left behind, McGee passed a poorly lit corridor in a corner far removed from the other offices. In a glance, it looked unused, if not forgotten, space set aside for some unknown future. Most of the doors along the darkened corridor were unlabeled. Only a few of the rooms had windows overlooking the hall. Peering inside as she went, McGee saw conference rooms, long tables circled with chairs.
She was moving quickly, not watching where she was going, and as she turned a corner, she slammed her shin at full stride into the metal leg of a desk. The pain was so exquisite, she couldn’t even cry out, her breath stuffed in her mouth like cotton. She crumpled to the floor, holding her leg, biting her lip until she tasted blood.
She stayed there several minutes, squeezing her knee to her chest. When the pain finally subsided enough that she was able to lift her pant leg, she found a scarlet welt along the ridge of her shin. What kind of place was this for a desk, anyway—this dim, narrow hallway? Had it been left there to be thrown away? And would she be the one responsible for getting rid of it? But no, the computer on top was hooked up and plugged in, as was the phone. There was a pile of papers in a metal tray. A rubber stamp lay on its side in the center of the desk. McGee picked up the stamp and held it before her eyes. The letters were a backward-slanting cursive. Ink had rendered them almost indistinguishable from the background. McGee pressed the stamp into the pad and untucked her shirt. On her belly, she tattooed herself with Ruth Freeman’s signature.
Of course. Of all the offices, this one, tucked away in the shadows, was by far the most villainous.
She left the desk limping, but she’d already forgotten the pain in her shin.
McGee’s training had consisted of an hour spent sitting in front of a TV/VCR combo in the basement. On a tape drained almost entirely of color, a pair of actors in extravagant perms had demonstrated the art of dusting and vacuuming and mopping (coil the head before pressing!), and when it was over, Dorothy had turned the lights back on and handed McGee a flip chart full of colorful pictures and a schedule of which things she was supposed to clean on which night: light switches, light fixtures, keyboards, computer screens, telephones, windows, floors and carpets, door handles, door frames, windowsills, blinds.
McGee made her way back toward Ruth Freeman’s office, in what she hoped would appear to the guards watching on the security cameras as a natural progression, touching her cloth to everything in sight but never stopping.
In the private offices, with no cameras, she skipped steps that seemed unimportant. But in these places there were far more steps to begin with. The executives had bookcases and shelves and tables and chairs and file cabinets, collections of glass elephants and tennis trophies, awkwardly posed family photos with the same frosty blue backdrop—as if the rich all lived somewhere up among the clouds.
And then at last, McGee stood in the doorway of Ruth Freeman’s office. The office was less spacious than the others but had the same furniture: the polished tables and chairs, the hardwood desk so large it looked like an aircraft carrier. The room, at least, was just as Fitch had described.
Ruth Freeman didn’t decorate. Little in the office suggested anything about the woman who worked there. But that in itself said a lot. The anonymity could have been a sign of bland taste. But more likely it was the hallmark of a woman who liked to keep secrets. The only object at all revealing was a small photograph in a simple cherry frame propped up in one corner of the desk. In it a man and woman posed on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Behind them the sun was setting, the sky streaked with crimson. McGee had long imagined Ruth Freeman as middle-aged and underfed, desperately trying to cling to her youth, a wearer
of pantsuits with shoulder pads and too much makeup, hair chemically stiffened to the texture of funnel cake. But as Fitch had said, the woman in the photo was older than middle age, her hair gray. She’d made no attempt to color it. Her skin collected in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her smile was friendly. But of course, the Ruth Freeman in the picture was on vacation. The Ruth Freeman who sat in this chair, at this desk, was someone else entirely.
The man standing beside her in the picture was younger, lean and handsome, dressed in khakis and a white linen shirt, the top three buttons undone. On his face McGee recognized the smile of someone at ease with himself, someone well acquainted with comfort.
As she’d expected, Ruth Freeman’s file cabinet was locked. In vain McGee searched the one unlocked desk drawer for a key. But as it was, she didn’t yet have a plan for handling the files once she found them. And not until dawn was blandly announcing itself though the tinted windows of the corridor and it was time for her to move on to the next floor, did McGee come across the room housing the photocopier. By then all she wanted to do was go home to bed.
Myles didn’t even roll over when she came in. There were no grunts when she fumbled to join him under the covers, still dressed in her horrible jeans. She was too tired to deal with zippers and bows.
Sometime later—hours later, maybe—McGee became aware of Myles’s lips on her forehead, but she had no strength to do anything in return. And then he was gone.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, her phone rang, and she let it go to voice mail. A few seconds later the ringing started all over again.
“What happened?” April asked, even before McGee had a chance to say hello. She was calling from the bookstore.
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