And so I went back out to the parking lot, still feeling as if I must be in a dream. Surely it wasn’t normal for a brand-new employee to be offered a company car, no strings attached? Wasn’t that the sort of thing you had to earn? I didn’t know—I’d never been in anything remotely resembling this situation before. All I could was go along and hope I wouldn’t do or say anything too stupid.
Moving the car and getting it settled in its new location took about five minutes. I felt a little pang as I locked the door and walked away from the Corolla; after all, despite its lack of beauty, it had been a trusty vehicle, and the first thing I’d ever paid for all by myself. But it certainly didn’t compare to a brand-new C-class.
“I must go out now,” Van Rijn told me, as I settled myself behind the desk and booted up the Mac. “I would like those letters finished by the end of the day. There is also a packet in the top drawer with forms for your health insurance and so forth. The man from Federal Express usually comes around eleven o’clock. You may take lunch at one.”
I could only nod. Apparently satisfied, Van Rijn headed for the front door and walked out without a backward glance. It seemed he trusted me to keep things running in his absence.
After the door shut behind him, I let out a breath and shook my head. It had to be shock over the car that made my fingers tremble a little as I typed in the password he had left for me.
The silence in the empty building seemed thunderous. Luckily, I had used iTunes on my PC, and it wasn’t much different on the Mac. The elegance of the building intimidated me; the classic rock I usually preferred would have felt grossly out of place, but I found an Internet station that streamed classical music and let it play quietly in the background. That way I didn’t feel quite so alone.
Enough of that, I told myself. Do you know how many people would give their left nut to be where you are? Plenty, that was how many—half of whom didn’t even have a left nut to give. I wondered where that phrase had come from and thought Leslie would probably know.
No time for dithering, anyway. Van Rijn had left me a stack of work to do, and I was going to make sure it was finished in the time he had specified, even if it meant working through lunch. Which, I realized, I hadn’t brought with me, so I’d have to go out. And that meant taking the Mercedes out for its maiden voyage.
On an impulse I got up from the desk and went to the door, then opened it and stood there for a moment, just staring at the gleaming C-class as it sat in lonely splendor in the empty parking lot. What did it mean? Was Van Rijn really that obsessed with appearances, or was giving me the car to drive just another way to make me beholden to him?
As if paying me triple what a job like this should earn isn’t enough? I thought, then shook my head and shut the door. If I let myself, I’d just keep imagining progressively nightmarish scenarios. It was pretty obvious the guy had money to burn, so if he wanted to waste some of it on giving me a company car, why should I worry about it? After all, a company car was a pretty damn good tax write-off.
Satisfied that I’d sent the heebie-jeebies to bed for the moment, I returned to my desk and set up the first letter Van Rijn wanted me to transcribe. It wasn’t even written on ruled paper, but all the words marched their way across the page in lines so neat it might as well have been. The content was prosaic enough; he was following up on a large purchase from an estate somewhere in Somerset, England. And the tone was formal but charming in its way, utterly unlike anything I had encountered in the business world so far. His writing reminded me of things I’d read while pursuing my degree—I imagined Elizabeth Bennet herself would be impressed by this letter—but there was a big difference between encountering that sort of writing from someone who’d been dead for a few hundred years and seeing it from the man you worked for.
Still, the content of the work made it much more interesting than I’d had any right to expect it to be. I made short work of the first three letters, saving them in separate files according to date and the name of their respective recipients so they’d be easier to access. But when I got to the fourth letter, I stopped dead and stared down in consternation at the paper Van Rijn had given me. Was this supposed to be a joke?
No, I decided. Not a joke. Dutch.
Yes, it turned out the next batch of letters was written in Dutch. Thank God Van Rijn had such clean handwriting, or I would never have been able to make sense of it. Even then it was painstaking work, slowly transcribing one word after another with no idea of what I was typing. Once or twice in the first letter I couldn’t make out a word, but a quick search online located a Dutch-English dictionary. Overbrengen meant some sort of transport. Afbetaling apparently referred to payment of some kind.
So engrossed was I in this work that I nearly jumped out of my seat as the door buzzer sounded. Who the hell? But then I remembered Van Rijn’s remark about the FedEx man showing up around eleven o’clock. Sure enough, the little time readout in the upper right-hand corner of my Mac told me it was five minutes after eleven. More than an hour had gone by with me hardly noticing.
I got up from my chair and opened the door. The FedEx driver looked a little surprised as he stared down into my face.
“That was fast,” he remarked, then handed me a letter-sized packet. “Sign here.”
“What was fast?” I asked, awkwardly shoving the package under my arm so I could sign the little electronic gizmo he gave me next.
“You,” he said. “Gina’s only been gone three days.”
“Who was Gina?”
“Girl who was here before you. Before that was…Jackie? Janni?” He shrugged. “Whichever it was, she didn’t last very long.”
At his words the familiar sick sensation began somewhere in the pit of my stomach. “Oh, really?” I managed.
“Yeah, Van Rijn really runs through his secretaries. Too bad.” The FedEx man gave me an appraising look. He was probably a few years older than I, dark, but it was hard for me to tell whether his background was Hispanic or Middle Eastern. His voice had no trace of an accent, except the standard Southern California drawl.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what sorts of cars those erstwhile secretaries drove, but I thought better of it. A delivery man’s gossip probably wasn’t the most reliable source of information. There could be a hundred different reasons why Van Rijn’s former assistants had resigned.
“Guess I’ll have to stay on my toes, then,” I said, taking care to keep my tone light.
He grinned, teeth flashing white against his olive skin. “Maybe you’ll have better luck. You don’t quite fit the type.”
Even though I knew I probably shouldn’t say anything, I asked, “Type?”
With another grin he reached out and took the signature gizmo from me. I belatedly realized I’d been holding on to it far longer than necessary. With the stylus he tapped the side of his head. “You’re the first brunette I’ve seen around here. The rest were blonde.”
“Well, maybe Mr. Van Rijn finally decided he needed his business letters spelled correctly,” I said tartly, then wished I could have taken the words back. That was just downright rude. After all, I’d known lots of blondes back in Billings who were plenty smart. The ones I’d run into here in Southern California, though….
But luckily my audience was far from blonde, and he laughed. “Yeah, maybe.” Another one of those appraising looks. “Well, I’m here every day, so—”
“So I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. That was probably more encouragement than I should have given, but I didn’t want to be outright disrespectful. Pissing off the man who delivered Van Rijn’s important papers was probably not a good idea.
The FedEx guy didn’t seem offended, though. With a final grin he said, “Great,” and sauntered off to his waiting truck.
I shut the door and resumed my seat behind the desk, but it was almost impossible for me to regain my focus. So just how many secretaries had Van Rijn gone through over the years? And why had they left? Maybe he paid so much because
he was impossibly exacting, and no one he’d hired had ever been able to measure up. Maybe the letters written in Dutch were a test of some sort.
But if he cared so much about having high-quality work, why had he requested a photo? Not that I was prejudiced enough to think you couldn’t be attractive and smart at the same time. Seriously, though, the sorts of women who were willing to answer an ad that required a photo usually weren’t the types with advanced degrees from MIT. I wasn’t in that class, either, but at least I had my bachelor’s in English from SMU Billings and had always been a good student. Well, except for that one disastrous geometry class, of course.
I forced myself to return to the document I’d been working on, which was half done. After that I only had one more of the Dutch letters to get through. I’d be finished well before the end of the day, possibly even before my mandated one o’clock lunch hour. That would give me plenty of time to check my work before Van Rijn returned from whatever mysterious errands were taking up the bulk of his day. God forbid he should find any errors. Usually a manager allowed some time for you to get up to speed, but the FedEx guy’s casual comments about my predecessors had made me more than a little uneasy. If Van Rijn couldn’t find fault with my work, then he’d have no reason to let me go. And his previous assistants must have left at his behest; I couldn’t imagine anyone leaving a job like this voluntarily.
But what if they did? I thought then. Again I felt a tremor of unease. What if Van Rijn had expected a lot more than just his letters typed and his packages signed for? What then?
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that one. It wasn’t as if I was some shrinking virgin—there’d been enough guys between Cary, the boy I’d lost my virginity to the summer between high school and college, and Rob, my boyfriend during my senior year at MSUB, that I definitely knew what was what under the sheets. And in the back seats of cars, the last row of the dollar theater, and the barn at my uncle’s ranch, if I was going to be perfectly honest. Well, that was what happened when you lived at home. You had to get creative about your coitus, or the sexual frustration was sure to play havoc with your GPA.
And, my evasion with Leslie the night before notwithstanding, I had to admit to myself that I found Van Rijn attractive. He wasn’t the type I normally went for—Ellen, my older sister, had once teased me that I wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t look like he should be acting on a daytime soap—but people’s tastes changed as they got older, didn’t they? However, it was a big jump from thinking someone was attractive to getting in the sack with them. Not to mention the fact that Van Rijn hadn’t said one word or made one gesture which would cause me to think our relationship was anything but professional.
“You’re an idiot,” I said aloud to the empty office. “That’s some good work, making the jump from a bunch of secretaries who got fired for something or other to thinking your boss is going to force you into bed to keep your salary.” Put that way, in my firm, no-nonsense Midwestern tones, it did seem more than a little ridiculous. If nothing else, Mr. Van Rijn was an attractive, wealthy, charming man—he could have had his pick of just about anyone in this town. He certainly didn’t need to put out random Internet ads to lure women into his web. No, he was the kind of guy who probably had to beat off single women with a stick.
Feeling somewhat reassured, I picked up the final letter from the stack and made myself to get back to work. Probably I’d think about all this later and realize what an idiot I was being.
Even so, I didn’t really want to contemplate what I would do if Van Rijn ever did make an advance.
Three
The buzzer at the front door sounded, then again and again, as if being pressed by some particularly persistent kid playing ding-dong ditch.
I launched myself out of my desk chair. Anything to break up the monotony—I’d finished Van Rijn’s letters hours ago, and there were only so many times you could recheck your work.
Maybe it really was someone playing ditch. When I opened the door, I didn’t see anyone. The parking lot was likewise deserted, except for my Mercedes. Mr. Van Rijn hadn’t yet returned from his errands.
Whatever. I returned to my computer, even though I hadn’t been doing anything more important than playing Solitaire. I’d barely started back on my game when the buzzer sounded once more.
I muttered a curse under my breath and got up again, although I moved more slowly this time. All right, so I hadn’t done anything constructive for the past two hours. That didn’t mean I felt like playing jack-in-the-box with some unknown prankster.
This time, someone was at the door. A very large someone, wearing a gray work shirt with a logo for “Global Transport” embroidered on the breast pocket. “Didn’t you hear the bell?” he demanded.
“Well, yes,” I said. “But when I went to the door, no one was there.”
“We’re in the back,” he said. “Can’t really deliver a crate to the front door, can I?”
He had a point, but what was I supposed to do? Mr. Van Rijn hadn’t told me that the buzzer could be for either the front door or the back warehouse. I began to tell the driver as much, but he just lifted a hand.
“Open the warehouse doors,” he said. “I’m on a schedule here.”
I decided it wasn’t worth arguing over. “I’ll get it right now.”
Luckily, Van Rijn had shown me how to operate the electric doors to the warehouse, so I hurried back there as fast as my three-inch heels would allow. I didn’t want to give the driver anything else to complain about. It wouldn’t look good if word of my ineptitude somehow got back to my boss.
At least I made it to the warehouse door before the driver did; by the time he’d climbed back into the cab of his truck, I already had the door open and ready for him. He backed the truck in, then got out as another man came around the other side of the vehicle. They didn’t bother to ask me what to do with their cargo. They’d obviously done this many times before, as they knew exactly where to set the crates.
After they were done the driver—still scowling—handed me a manifest, asked me to sign, and then gave me the copy for our records before he stalked back over to his truck and pulled out into the alley at a speed I didn’t think was quite safe. Was his schedule so tight that even five minutes made that big a difference?
Nothing I could do about it now. It wasn’t a mistake I’d repeat, that was for sure. I sneaked a peek at the manifest I held, but it didn’t give much detail as to the contents of the crates, only that the shipment had apparently come from Hamburg, Germany.
After that little interlude I played around with downloading some interesting background scenes to decorate my desktop, but even that didn’t take much time—the Internet connection here was very fast. Maybe Van Rijn had a T1 line running into the building instead of plain old cable or DSL. It seemed like the sort of thing he would do. I’d kept Word open on my desktop, even though I really had nothing left to do. Still, I’d learned early on that managers usually would accept an imitation of industry, even if you really didn’t have anything that required you to be productive.
At last five o’clock rolled around. With an overwhelming sense of relief, I bent down to retrieve my purse from the bottom desk drawer. I straightened up and saw Van Rijn standing in front of the desk, holding the letters I had given him.
My first response was to stiffen, thinking he must have found some error I had overlooked, but then he smiled at me and said, “This is very good work. You have not dealt with Dutch before?”
I shook my head and gave him a smile of my own. “No. I had three years of French in high school, but of course that’s not even close.”
In response he said something that I knew couldn’t be Dutch and must be French, but the words were so rapid-fire I couldn’t begin to distinguish anything beyond a few syllables.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Van Rijn—I didn’t retain much of it.” I shrugged. “Not a lot of use for French in Billings. I think I can still say ‘the pencil is red,’ but don’t ask fo
r more than that.”
“Oh,” he said, then added, “Pity. At any rate, you have a good eye. I will have more for you tomorrow.”
Thank God, I thought. Here’s hoping for heaps and heaps more so I won’t feel quite so useless.
“One other thing,” he continued.
Despite myself, my back stiffened. Here it comes….
“There is a function tomorrow evening, to which I have been invited. I would like you to accompany me.”
“Oh?” I asked, hoping I looked appropriately intrigued. Well, I was intrigued, all right. The part of my brain that wouldn’t shut up was wondering if this function was the sort of thing portrayed in that Tom Cruise movie, the one with the weird sex club in Manhattan or London or wherever the hell it was. I would never have watched it in the first place, except Becky, my best friend my junior and senior years of high school, was obsessed with Tom Cruise. No accounting for taste, I suppose. Managing a smile, I responded, “‘Additional duties’?”
“Precisely. It is a semi-formal affair, or what passes for these things in Los Angeles. It would be best if you brought a change of clothing with you tomorrow.”
“Of course, Mr. Van Rijn.” Well, it sounded as if a return trip to the mall was on the books for tonight. I knew I sure as hell didn’t have anything remotely appropriate for a “semi-formal” event in the kinds of circles my boss probably ran in. Good thing my bank account was relatively well-padded at the moment.
He nodded. “Good evening, then.”
I took the dismissal for what it was and fled. Good thing I’d gotten some practice with the new Mercedes’ controls at lunch, or I probably would have accidentally flipped on the windshield wipers or my fog lights while trying to make a hasty exit. Not that it mattered; Van Rijn hadn’t followed me to the door and wouldn’t have seen my gaffes anyway.
Well, at least I had the shopping to preoccupy me—maybe if I took long enough at it I wouldn’t have to wonder what exactly this affair was, and why he felt compelled to bring his secretary along instead of a proper date. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. The parties I’d been to since I’d arrived in L.A. six months ago had been casual affairs, to put it mildly. They’d all been hosted by Leslie’s brothers; the gruesome twosome owned a house out in North Hollywood and liked to host the post-college analogue of frat-house keggers. At least, that was what the parties felt like to me, since I’d been to my share of those sorts of get-togethers during my years at MSUB. No canapés or sushi there, that was for sure. You were lucky to get chips and maybe some seven-layer dip if someone was feeling particularly ambitious.
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