Chapter 3
GIANNI
Spackman doesn't knock. He's the only man in the building who doesn't.
"You rang."
"Sit."
He doesn't. He stands inside the door with his hands in his pockets and looks at the desk, at the pages, at the glass of Amaro I poured twenty minutes ago and haven't touched.
"Your office manager came out of here looking like she'd been hit by a bus," he says. "Should I be worried about the bus?"
"No."
"Because she was pink to the collar and walking like the floor was moving." He finally sits. "And you've got a drink you're not drinking. In thirteen years I've seen that twice."
"Tell me about the street."
He lets it go. That's why he's still alive and other men aren't.
"Grey sedan, west side, since July. Black Suburban on the corner of Forty-eighth since Monday. They're not hiding, Gianni. They're advertising."
"Because the twenty-eighth is four weeks out and they want me sleeping badly."
"Are you?"
"I don't sleep badly. I sleep early." I go to the window. The man in the sedan lifts a cup to his mouth and puts it down. "How's Marino?"
"Loud. Busy with the unions. Same as last week, only more of it." Spackman studies my back. "That's not why you called me up."
"No."
I turn around.
"I need you to look at somebody. Off the books. Off the system. Nothing written down."
"Who?"
"Violet Wolfe."
He doesn't react, which is a reaction. "The office manager."
"Eighth floor. Eleven months. I want the whole life. School, employers, the mother, the credit file, where she was before New York and who she was standing next to."
"Any particular reason, or is this a question I don't ask?"
"She knows something she shouldn't."
A long pause. When Spackman speaks again the voice is different. Flatter. The one he used for thirteen years on the other side of the table.
"Then why is she still on payroll?"
The light on Forty-eighth changes. Nobody moves.
"Because I want to be wrong."
"That's not an answer I like."
"It's the one you've got."
He stands. At the door he stops with his hand on the frame.
"If somebody built her, they built her clean, and clean takes time to pull apart. I'd rather be slow than noticed." A beat. "And your hand's shaking."
"I know."
"That's twice," he says, and goes.
When the door shuts, I sit down with the pages.
Eleven months. That's what she said. A woman on eight thinking about my hands while I walked past her desk and didn't look.
I didn't look on purpose. Looking is the first step to touching, and I don't touch soft things. So I walked past her desk eleven months running and kept my eyes on the elevator, and I called it discipline.
Then she put forty-seven pages in my inbox and told me, in writing, that she'd been looking the whole time.
That's not an invitation. It's a door with the lock already off.
I've been fixing eleven months since Friday.
She thinks the glasses do something. The blouses.
They don't. A fence tells you one thing: somebody planted something they didn't want in the road.
Under all of it she's soft everywhere a woman is meant to be.
Heavy in the breast, wide and deep through the hips, a waist that goes in like a hand was made to go around it, a mouth that's been the whole problem since four o'clock.
I stood five inches from that mouth and breathed her in and did not put mine on it, and I would like a medal, and there isn't one.
Twenty-five years across tables from men who'd have opened me up on a dock for the fun of it. Hands like stone. Tonight a copy editor in flat shoes put a crack in me by objecting to my line reading.
You put the stress in the wrong place.
I laughed. Out loud, alone, an hour ago, standing at this window. Like an idiot.
I have no business touching her. Let's say it plainly while nobody's here.
Men who get close to me get audited or photographed or buried. My mother lit candles for thirty years for a husband who was already in a barrel. She was lighting them the week she died. That's the standing offer. That's what a woman gets on my arm.
Soft things don't survive me. Not pity. Arithmetic.
So I should have said no. I had the word. I handed it to her instead and watched her not use it, and God help me, nothing in my life has felt that good.
Page one hundred and twelve.
Not the marked pages. There are eleven of those and I could say them from memory and none of them is why I sent that Post-it down to eight.
It's an ordinary passage. Her don has a man brought to him in the back of a restaurant. A page of dialogue that's too clever, men in that room don't talk like that, she'll cut it, and then this:
"He listened to all of it. He didn't raise his voice, because he never had to. When the man was finished, the don turned the ring on his right hand once, with his thumb, the way another man might check a watch. Then he said, quietly, that Tommaso should go out and wait in the car."
I read that Friday at nine-fifty-one. I haven't been comfortable since.
Four people know I do that. Spackman. My mother, and she's in Greenwood.
The other two are dead for the same reason they noticed.
It isn't a habit. It's the last second of a decision, and it happens where a man can see it if he's close enough to be looking, and by then it's not usually much use to him.
She put it in a romance novel. In italics. As a flourish.
Her file bothered me in month two. Too clean. I let it sit, because a clean file isn't a crime and I had a grand jury to think about. Page one hundred and twelve is what turned a curiosity into a problem.
Either she's the most observant person in this building and it's never once occurred to her that any of it is dangerous, because to her it's character. Or somebody sat her down and told her.
The second one has an old shape. Put someone soft inside the perimeter. Let her file the expense reports. One day she's in your office with the door closed and there's a wire in her bag.
Except a plant doesn't accidentally send the operation to a company-wide list. A plant doesn't shake so hard her glasses move. A plant doesn't forget herself and correct your grammar.
Unless she's very good.
The clean move is a severance package, a non-disclosure, a car home. Never think about it again.
I turn the last page over. The blank one.
Finish it. I want to see how it ends.
There's the whole disease in one line. I want to know what she knows.
I want to know who she is. And under both, running hotter than either: I want to be in the room when she writes the next part, because in four months of the worst pressure of my life she's the only thing that's made me feel anything at all.
I fold the corner of one hundred and twelve down.
Thirty-four floors under me a woman with green eyes and a name I'm no longer sure of is on a train, thinking about my mouth.
She wrote me as a dangerous man a determined woman could save. It's beautifully done. It's the worst research in the manuscript.
I'm not the man she wrote.
I'm the one on page one hundred and twelve.
His name wasn't Tommaso. She got that part wrong. She got everything else right.
And he never came back from the car.