The Gift (10 page)

“Says you, who’s sleeping on the floor of a bloody basement stockroom,” Lou hissed. “How’s about you take a pill and go about fixing your own life? Or is that what got you in this mess in the first place? You know, I’m getting tired of your judging me, Gabe, when I’m up here and you’re the one down there.”

Gabe’s expression looked curious in response, which made Lou feel guilty. “Sorry,” Lou sighed.

Gabe simply nodded.

Lou examined the pills as his head pounded, heavier now. “Why should I trust you?”

“Think of it as a gift.” Gabe repeated the words Lou had spoken only days before, bringing chills down Lou Suffern’s spine.

A
LONE IN HIS OFFICE
, L
OU
took the pills from his pocket and placed them on his desk. He laid his head down and finally closed his eyes.

“Christ, you’re a mess,” he heard a voice say close to his ear, and he jumped up.

“Alfred,” he said, spotting his nemesis. He rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Seven twenty-five. Don’t worry, you haven’t missed your meeting. Thanks to me.” Alfred smirked, running his nicotine-stained fingers along Lou’s desk, his one touch enough to tarnish everything and annoy Lou. The term
grubby little mitts
applied here.

“Hey, what are these?” Alfred picked up the pills and popped open the lid.

“Give them to me.” Lou reached out for them, but Alfred pulled away. He emptied a few into his open, clammy palm.

“Alfred, give them to me,” Lou said sternly, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice as Alfred moved
about the room waving the container in the air, teasing him with the same air as a school bully.

“Naughty, naughty, Lou, what are you up to?” Alfred asked in an accusing singsong that chilled Lou to the core.

Knowing that Alfred was already devising to use these against him, Lou thought fast.

“Looks like you’re concocting a story.” Alfred smiled. “I know when you’re bluffing; I’ve seen you in every meeting, remember? Don’t you trust me with the truth?”

Lou fought to keep his tone easy, almost joking, but he was deadly serious. “Honestly? Lately, no. I wouldn’t be surprised if you hatched a plan to use that little container against me.”

Alfred laughed. “Now, really. Is that any way to treat an old friend?”

Lou’s light tone faded. “I don’t know, Alfred, you tell me.”

They had a moment’s staring match. Then Alfred broke it.

“Something on your mind, Lou?”

“What do you think?”

“Look,” Alfred’s shoulders dropped, the bravado replaced by Alfred’s new humble act. “If this is about the meeting tonight, rest assured that I did not meddle with your appointments in any way. Talk to Melissa. With Tracey leaving and Alison taking over, a lot of stuff got lost in the mix.” He shrugged. “Though between you and me, Alison seems a little flaky.”

“Don’t blame it on Alison.” Lou folded his arms.

“Indeed,” Alfred smiled and nodded slowly to himself. “I forgot that you two have a thing.”

“We have no
thing
. For Christ’s sake, Alfred.”

“Right, sorry.” Alfred zipped his lips closed. “Ruth will never know, I promise.”

The very fact that he’d mentioned Ruth unnerved Lou. “What’s gotten into you?” Lou asked him, serious now. “Really, what’s up with you? Is it stress? Is it the crap you’re putting up your nose? What the hell is it? Are you worried about the changes—”

“The changes.” Alfred snorted. “You make me sound like a menopausal woman.”

Lou stared at him.

“I’m fine, Lou,” he said slowly. “I’m the same as I’ve always been. It’s you who’s acting a little funny around here. Everyone’s talking about it, even Mr. Patterson. Maybe it’s these.” He shook the pills in Lou’s face, just as Gabe had done. “You’re acting irrationally, sweating in meetings, forgetting appointments. Not exactly a great replacement for Cliff, are you?”

“They’re headache pills.”

“I don’t see a label.”

“The kids scratched it off; now can you please stop mauling them and give them back?” Lou held an open hand out toward Alfred.

“Oh, headache pills. I see.” Alfred studied the container again. “Is that what they are? Because I thought I heard the homeless guy saying that they were herbal?”

Lou swallowed. “Were you spying on me, Alfred? Is that what you’re up to?”

“No.” Alfred laughed easily once again. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ll have some of these checked out for you, to make sure they’re nothing stronger than headache pills.” He took a pill, pocketed it, and handed back the container. “It’ll be nice to be able to find out a few things for myself since my friends are lying to me.”

“I know the feeling,” Lou agreed, glad to have the container back in his possession. “Like my finding out about the meeting you and Mr. Patterson had a few mornings ago and the lunch you had last Friday.”

Unusual for Alfred, he looked genuinely shocked.

“Oh,” Lou said softly, “you thought I didn’t know, didn’t you? Sorry about that. Well, you’d better get to dinner, or you’ll miss your appetizer. All work and no caviar makes Alfred a dull boy.” Then he led a suddenly silent Alfred to his door, opened it, and winked at him before closing it quietly in his face.

S
EVEN THIRTY P.M. CAME AND
went without Arthur Lynch appearing on the fifty-inch plasma TV in front of Lou at the boardroom table. Aware that at any moment he could be seen by whoever would be present at the meeting, Lou attempted to relax in his chair and tried not to sleep. At seven forty, Mr. Lynch’s secretary informed him that Mr. Lynch would be a few more minutes.

While waiting, the increasingly sleepy Lou pictured
Alfred in the restaurant, brash as could be, the center of attention, loud and doing his best to entertain—stealing the glory, making or breaking a deal that Lou wouldn’t be associated with unless Alfred failed. In missing that—the most important meeting of the year—Lou was losing the biggest chance to prove himself to Mr. Patterson. Cliff’s job dangled before him day in and day out, like a carrot on a string. So did Cliff’s old office down the hall next to Mr. Patterson’s, its blinds open and vacant. It was a larger office with better light. It called to him. It had been six months since the memorable morning Cliff had had his breakdown—after weeks and weeks of unusual behavior. Lou had finally found Cliff crouched under his desk, his body trembling, his computer keyboard held tightly and close to his chest. Occasionally his fingers tapped away at the keys in a sort of panicked Morse code. They were coming to get him, he kept repeating, wide-eyed and terrified.

Who exactly
they
were, Lou had been unable to ascertain. He’d tried gently to coax Cliff out from under the desk, to make him put his shoes and socks back on, but Cliff had lashed out as Lou neared and hit him across the face with the computer mouse, swinging the wire around like a lasso. The force of the small plastic mouse hadn’t hurt Lou nearly as much as the sight of this young successful man falling apart. But the office had since lain empty for all these months, and as rumors of Cliff’s further demise drifted, Lou’s sympathy for him lessened while the competition for his job increased.

Lou’s frustration grew as he stared at the black plasma screen still yet to come alive. His head pounded, and he could barely think as his migraine spread from the base of his head to his eyes. Feeling desperate, he retrieved pills from his pocket and stared at them.

He thought of Gabe’s knowledge of the meeting between Mr. Patterson and Alfred and how he had correctly judged the shoe situation; he considered how Gabe had provided him with coffee the previous morning, had driven him home and somehow won Ruth over. Convincing himself that Gabe had never let him down, Lou shook the open container, and one small white glossy pill rolled out onto the palm of his sweaty hand. He played with it for a while, rolled it around in his fingers, licked it; when nothing drastic happened, he popped it into his mouth and quickly downed it with a glass of water.

Lou held on to the boardroom table with both hands, gripping it so hard that his sweaty prints were visible on the glass surface. He waited. Nothing happened. He lifted his hands from the table and studied them as though the effects would be seen on his palms. Still nothing out of the ordinary happened, no unusual trip, nothing life-threatening, apart from his head, which continued to pound.

At seven forty-five there was still no sign of Arthur Lynch. Lou tapped his pen against the table impatiently, no longer caring about how he’d appear to the people on the other side of the camera. Already paranoid beyond reason, Lou began to convince himself that there was
no meeting at all, that Alfred had somehow orchestrated this so that he could conduct the dinner by himself and negotiate the deal. Lou wasn’t going to allow Alfred to sabotage any more of his hard work. He stood quickly, grabbed his overcoat, and charged for the door. He’d pulled it open and had one foot over the threshold when he heard a voice coming from the plasma behind him.

“I’m very sorry for keeping you waiting, Mr. Suffern.”

The voice stalled Lou in his march. He closed his eyes and sighed, kissing his dream of Cliff’s office with the three-hundred-sixty-degree view of Dublin good-bye. He quickly thought about what to do: run and make it in time for dinner, or turn around and face the music. Before he had time to make the decision, the sound of another voice in the office almost stopped his heart.

“No problem, Mr. Lynch, and please call me Lou. I understand how things can run overtime, so no apologies are needed. Let’s get down to business, shall we? We have a lot to discuss.”

“Certainly, Lou. And call me Arthur, please. We do have a lot to get through, but before I introduce you to these two gentlemen beside me, would you like to finish your business up there? I see you have company?”

“No, Arthur, it’s just me here in the office,” Lou heard himself say. “Everyone else has deserted me.”

“Oh, I thought I could see a man there by the door.”

Spotted, Lou slowly turned around and, quite impossibly, came face-to-face with himself. He was still seated
at the boardroom table, in the same place where he had been waiting before making a run for the door. The face that greeted him was also a picture of shock. The ground swirled beneath Lou, and he clutched the door frame to stop himself from falling.

“Lou? Are you there?” Arthur asked, and both heads turned to face the plasma.

“Erm, yes, I’m here,” Lou at the table stammered. “I’m sorry, Arthur, that gentleman is a…colleague of mine. He’s just leaving, I believe he has an important
dinner
meeting to get to.” Lou turned around and threw his counterpart at the door a warning look. “Don’t you?”

Lou simply nodded and left the room, his knees and legs shaking with his every step. At the elevators, he held on to the wall as he tried to catch his breath and let the dizziness subside. The elevator doors opened and he fell inside, thumping the ground-floor button before hunkering down in the corner of the space, moving farther and farther away from himself on the fourteenth floor.

At eight p.m., as Lou was in the boardroom of the Patterson Development offices negotiating with Arthur Lynch, Lou entered the restaurant just as Alfred and the team of men were being led to their tables. He offered his cashmere coat to the host, adjusted his tie, smoothed down his hair, and made his way to the tables, one hand in his pocket, the other swinging by his side. His body was loose again, nothing rigid, nothing contained. In order to function he needed to feel the swing of his body, the casual motion of a man who personally doesn’t care
about the decision either way, but who would do his best to convince you otherwise, because his only concern is you.

“Pardon me, gentlemen, for being a little delayed,” he said smoothly to the men whose noses were already buried deep in their menus.

They all looked up, and Lou was exceptionally happy to see the expression on Alfred’s face: a wave of emotions ranging from surprise to disappointment to resentment to anger. Each look told Lou that this mix-up had indeed been planned by Alfred. Lou made his way around the table greeting the dinner guests, and by the time he reached Alfred, his coworker had regained his smug face.

“Patterson is going to kill you,” Alfred spoke quietly from the side of his mouth. “But at least one deal will be done tonight. Welcome, my friend.” He shook Lou’s hand, his anticipation of Lou’s sacking tomorrow lighting up his face.

“It’s all been taken care of,” Lou simply replied, turning to take his place a few seats away.

“What do you mean?” Alfred asked harshly, for a moment forgetting where he was, his tight grip around Lou’s arm preventing him from moving away.

Lou looked around at the table and smiled, then leaned down and discreetly removed each of Alfred’s fingers from his arm. “I said, it’s all been taken care of,” Lou repeated.

“You canceled the conference call? I don’t get it.” Alfred smiled nervously. “Let me in on it.”

“No, no, it’s not canceled. Don’t worry, Alfred, let’s pay our guests some attention now, shall we?” Lou flashed his pearly whites and finally moved to his chair. “Now, gentlemen, what looks good on this menu? I can recommend the foie gras; I’ve had it here before, and it’s a treat.” He smiled at the team and immersed himself in the pleasure of deal making.

At nine twenty p.m., after the visual conference call with Arthur Lynch, an exhausted yet exhilarated and triumphant Lou stood outside the window of the Saddle Room restaurant. He was wrapped up in his coat as the December wind picked up, his scarf tight around his neck, yet he didn’t feel the cold as he watched himself through the window, suave and sophisticated and holding everyone’s attention as he told a story. Everybody’s face was interested, all but Alfred, and after five minutes of his animated hand gestures and facial expressions, all the men started laughing. Lou could tell from his body movements that he was telling the story of how he and his colleagues had wandered into what turned out to be a gay bar in London instead of the lap-dancing bar they had expected. Looking at himself telling the story, he decided then and there never to tell it again. He looked like a prat.

He felt a presence beside him, and he didn’t need to turn around to know who it was.

“You’re following me?” he asked, still watching through the window.

“Nah, just figured you’d come here,” Gabe responded,
shivering and stuffing his hands into his pockets. “How are you doing in there? Entertaining the crowd as usual, I see. Ah, it’s the one about the three blondes in the elevator. You do like telling that joke, don’t you?”

“What’s going on, Gabe?”

“Busy man like you? You got what you wished for. Now you can do everything. Mind you, it’ll wear off by the morning, so watch out for that.”