No Way Back (16 page)

Before I can stop her, her fingers are dancing along my scalp, moving aside my hair, gently touching my wound. ‘Does that hurt?’ she asks.

‘No. Ouch. Yes.’

‘Look at it,’ she says, in something like fascination. ‘Was it really a rusty nail?’

‘Not sure how rusty. It was kind of dark.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Long story.’

‘Now, Jim, this is a very important question, and you must answer me seriously.’ She looks at me sternly.

I’m expecting her to ask if I broke into someone’s house and hit my head in their attic. But she asks instead: ‘When was your last tetanus shot?’

Tetanus shot? I can’t recall my last doctor’s appointment. When your medicines tend to be delivered in eight-ball format rather than pill jars, things like health care and doctors
take a back seat to other priorities, such as: When can I next get high. But I do not want to explain this, nor do I want to spend the afternoon at Tampa General, waiting for a tetanus vaccination.
So I lie. ‘Yeah, I had one. Right before I came to Florida.’

‘You are very lucky, then,’ she says. Amanda’s voice is soft, very close to me – her mouth just above my ear. I feel her warm breath against my skin. Her fingers are in
my hair. It’s strangely intimate. Even though we’re in the public reception area, and I know people are watching us, her back shields this private moment from everyone’s view.

I glance at her shirt. It’s a natural movement of my eyes – I merely try to look straight ahead – but straight ahead in this case means that I look down her loose-fitting
camisole. I see her breasts. She wears no bra. Her nipples are pink, round, the size of cherry blossoms. And I see something else, too – something jarring and out of place on this
girl’s skin that is so smooth and pale. A tattoo, on her left breast, just above her nipple.

The tattoo is not a girly, feminine drawing. It’s Cyrillic, blue-black ink, block letters.

I glance up, at her face, but it’s too late. She has caught me. Done the triangulation. She knows. Exactly where I was looking.

But she stays still, with her shirt hanging down. Her fingers remain on my head; and her touch becomes even softer, more gentle. She leans closer.

‘You are very lucky,’ she says, again, softly, more breath than voice, and I smell her perfume: floral, like honeysuckle. She pauses. ‘Very lucky.’

‘Am I?’ My voice is hoarse. I look down, to avoid her eyes. I’m firing on all cylinders today: breaking into houses, avoiding Russian mobsters, ogling my employee’s
breasts. Maybe this afternoon I’ll use a cap gun to stick up the local Winn-Dixie. Just for the hell of it.

I stand, and we break contact. She backs off, and we switch places behind the desk.

The moment is gone, and she sits down and puts on her headset. Then, as if nothing has happened, she says: ‘Your three o’clock is here. He’s in the small conference
room.’

‘My three o’clock?’

‘Pete Bland. He’s been waiting for you. You’re twenty minutes late.’

I inherited Pete Bland, Tao’s attorney, from my predecessor, the same way I inherited Charles Adams’s title, and his desk chair, and his tattooed receptionist.

Pete Bland is a partner at Perkins Stillwell, Tampa’s pre-eminent white-shoe corporate law firm. This is yet another example of a pattern I’ve noticed everywhere at Tao since my
arrival: for a company that hasn’t turned a penny of profit, ever, and relies on the largesse of distant investors, thrift is nowhere to be seen. The sweeping art deco reception area, the
designer furniture, the Aeron chairs, the class-A office space, and, now, the fancy attorney – all of these add up to one haemorrhagic burn rate.

But that cash haemorrhage is precisely the reason I called this meeting with Pete Bland – I need to staunch that bleeding. And fast. There’s only one way to do that.

I take a Manila folder from a locked drawer in my desk and hurry to the small conference room. I’m expecting to find a corpulent middle-aged man, in an expensive suit and gold cufflinks.
Instead, I see a skinny thirty-five-year-old kid with Doc Marten shoes and stylishly long sideburns – I think they still call them ‘mutton chops’, don’t they? – and a
colourful neon tie that looks as if it needs its own power generator. I guess when you’re born with the name ‘Pete Bland’, there are two ways you can cope: give in, or resist.
Tao’s corporate attorney chose the second path. With his shoes, and sideburns, and tie, he looks more pimp than lawyer.

‘Jim Thane,’ he says, ‘great to meet you. I’m Pete Bland.’ Despite his unusual dress, he has a standard lawyer’s handshake: dry, firm, quick. Lawyers are like
taxi drivers; they always want you to know that the meter is running. ‘I’ve heard a lot of good things about you.’

Clearly a lie, which I ignore.

‘But I have to ask,’ he continues, ‘what happened to your head?’

I almost forgot. I touch the wound. It’s the size of two eggs now. ‘I didn’t look where I was going.’

‘Story of my life,’ Pete Bland agrees. ‘That’s how we wind up with a mortgage and two kids.’ He sits down, pops the lid of his attaché. He removes a yellow
legal pad and a pen. ‘So,’ he says, clicking his pen. ‘You want to fire a few people.’

I look behind him, make sure the door is firmly closed. ‘More than a few, actually.’

Two things happen after you fire a lot of people. First, you spend less money on salary. Second, you get sued. The two things go hand in hand, and one follows the other like caboose after
locomotive. That is the reason for my meeting with our company attorney: I want the first, but not the second.

Pete Bland asks: ‘You have that list we talked about?’

I open the Manila folder I brought, and hand him a single typewritten page. On it is a double-spaced list of names. No bold typographical heading, by the way, saying: ‘To Be Fired Next
Wednesday’. That’s one of those little CEO tricks you learn after many years of accidentally leaving papers on the photocopier.

‘Before we start,’ Pete says, ‘maybe we should call your HR person in here and have her join us?’

I tap my index finger next to one of the names on the list – Kathleen Rossi, Director of HR.

‘Ah,’ he says.

I nod grimly.

He looks over the list. ‘OK, let’s cut to the chase. Forty names. How many of them are black, how many women?’

‘Zero black, four women.’

‘How many women will be left after you fire everyone on this list?’

‘Two,’ I answer.

‘No good,’ he says, quickly. ‘Take all four women off the list.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘I shit thee not,’ Pete says. He doesn’t look up. He’s busy drawing a line through each of the obviously female names. ‘You’ll save whatever you think
you’ll save on salary, but you’ll pay it back ten times, first to me, then to the EEOC.’ He looks up. ‘Now, tell me about the old folks. How many on the list?’

‘How do you classify “old folks”?’

‘People over forty.’

‘Ouch.’

Pete leans back in his chair and studies me through slitted eyes. He has the look of a doctor trying to decide whether a patient is ready for grim news. He tosses his pen onto the table.
‘Clark Rogers, he’s the partner at Stillwell who handles employment law? – you probably know him?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘He has a saying. You wanna
hear it?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘“
When an employee
looks
ugly, things
get
ugly.
” That’s his saying.’

‘Classy.’

‘You said you wanted to hear it.’

‘Actually, I didn’t.’

He shrugs.

‘There are six people on that page over forty,’ I say. ‘“Old folks”, to use your fancy legal jargon.’

‘So let’s do the math. Six people means fifteen per cent of all the people being fired,’ Pete says. ‘How many old folks are employed at Tao currently?’

‘Seven.’

‘See the problem?’ Pete Bland asks. ‘They make up eight per cent of the workforce, but fifteen per cent of the lay-offs. Might as well cut a cheque right now. Write it out to
“Aggrieved Old Persons Class Action Trust”. How much money you got in the bank?’

‘Not much.’

‘Enough to pay my bill?’

‘I wouldn’t sit on our invoice, if I were you.’

He looks at me warily, to see if I’m joking. I am not. He slides the list to my side of the table, gingerly, a train robber passing a stick of dynamite. ‘Here’s what you do.
Take three of the old folks off the list.’

‘Which three?’

‘I don’t care. Flip a coin.’

‘I’m firing them for a reason. They’re terrible.’

‘Of course they’re terrible,’ Pete says. ‘They’re old. When people get old, they get lazy. That’s why we want to fire them. But you can’t do it. Not in
this country.’

He stares at me, lets his point sink in.

Then he goes on: ‘Once you make the changes that I’m recommending – the girls and the old folks – you’ll be OK. The WARN Act doesn’t apply here. You can just
terminate at will. When’s the big day?’

‘Wednesday, next week.’

He nods glumly. ‘I
am
sorry,’ he says. ‘I know this is the hard part of your job.’

Actually, I want to tell him, the hard part of my job is figuring out who
not
to fire. This company is like a high-tech grease trap – all drippings, no meat. But I put on a dour
expression and say, ‘Yes, it’s going to be very difficult.’

Pete Bland attempts to commiserate with me, for exactly five seconds, by not speaking, and nodding. Then, his mourning complete, he clicks his pen smartly, as if snapping the head off a
particularly annoying insect. He rises from his chair, puts his pad back into his attaché. ‘You married?’

‘Yes.’

‘We should go out. Me, you, the wives. There’s this little place on the water, only the natives know about it. It’s called the Gator Hut. Ever been?’

‘No.’

‘It’s great,’ Pete says. ‘I’ll have my assistant set something up.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ I say. An image comes to me: of Libby, seated at the table with Pete and his wife. My wife wears a morose expression, and her arms are crossed, and she stares
sullenly, refusing to speak or to eat, like a political prisoner on a hunger strike. ‘A lot of fun,’ I repeat.

‘Good,’ he says. We shake hands.

I escort him to the door. ‘There is one other thing,’ I say, as if it’s an afterthought. ‘Someone at Tao is embezzling money from the company. Would you mind doing a
little fact-finding?’

‘Fact-finding?’ He raises an eyebrow.

‘The money is being sent to a house on Sanibel. I want to know who owns the house.’

I hand him a piece of paper with the 56 Windmere address.

‘Easy enough,’ he says. ‘I’ll have someone run a search.’

I leave the office at six thirty and arrive home ten minutes later. When I climb from my car, I notice my neighbour across the street – the velociraptor with the overbite
and the protruding forehead.

He’s pacing on his front porch, speaking into a cellphone, gesturing with his free hand, which holds the stub of a cigar.

He’s far enough away that I can’t make out his words distinctly, but I hear the murmur of his voice, the rhythm and flow of his words. I am about to turn and walk into my own house.
A breeze catches my neighbour’s voice, and carries it to me. Something clicks, and now I know why I couldn’t understand him. He is speaking Russian.

He turns to look at me, and our eyes lock. I feel guilty, as if I’ve been caught spying. He says something into his phone – but now the breeze is gone and I can’t hear him
– and he snaps his cellphone shut, and drops it into his pocket. He throws his cigar to the ground, crushes it with his heel, and walks inside.

I search for Libby in the kitchen first, and then in the bedroom. I do not find her in either place. I wander back outside, into the front yard, to look for her in the
vegetable garden. But the garden too is empty. The soil is flat and virginal, without a single footprint.

I go to the side of the house. A chorus of cicadas ululate around me. Twenty yards away, behind the pool, there’s a garden shed, on a raised wooden platform. The door of the shed is open.
Inside is dark. When I approach, I see my wife, kneeling in the shadows of the shed, her back to me.

‘Libby?’ I call.

My wife turns to me. ‘Jimmy,’ she says, sounding startled. She pushes a bag of topsoil quickly onto a metal shelf.

She rises to her feet, slaps her palms. Then, without looking back, she leaves the shed, and closes the door behind her. ‘You’re home early,’ she says. It sounds remarkably
like an accusation.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just gardening.’

I think about the garden I just passed, its flat soil and lack of footprints.

‘What happened to your head?’ she asks.

‘Accident.’

‘What kind of accident?’

Admitting that I broke into someone’s house, or that I found four million dollars of cash in a stranger’s attic, or that I hid behind a shower curtain from a man with a gun, will
probably not build my wife’s confidence in my good judgement.

So I say, ‘Supply closet at work. Would you believe all I wanted was a lousy pen, and this is what I got?’