CHAPTER ONE #2
There was nothing coming off him. No cologne, no soap, no warm skin, no scent at all, not even the particular nothing of a very clean man. The hair came up along my forearms. My stomach dropped like the floor had gone soft under it, and my body had its opinion a good while before I had one.
He also did not blink on the rhythm a person blinks on. I have no better way to put it. Something in the timing was missing.
“Please do not be alarmed by the quiet. I have the floor to myself.” He turned his head a few degrees toward the glass. “I find that other people leave a residue.”
“A residue.” I heard myself say it back to him.
“Voices. Warmth. The smell of them. It accumulates.”
“I don’t look at it that way.”
“No. You have been outside all day.” He said it as though that answered something. “What did you eat today, Ms. Russo?”
“Coffee. Black, since about seven.”
“That is not eating. Mireille, is the temperature comfortable for our guest?”
“She’s warm,” the woman said, without looking up from the pages. “She’s been outside all day.”
“Mireille has been with me a long time.” He did not look at her while he said it. “She was recommended to me. As you were.”
“Nobody recommended me. I got assigned.”
“Somebody assigned you.” He let that stand in the air where I could see all of it. “That is a person, Ms. Russo, and that person had a reason.”
“I would like to offer you a permanent position with this company. As a matter of family.”
And there it was. The first thing in that whole afternoon that was wrong. Not frightening. Wrong the way a stair that is not there is wrong.
Some back part of me was still in that elevator, running the coat and the rings. A man across that table was doing something to the air and I was thinking about a sleeve. I set my heel down hard.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will.”
“I’ve got a job.” It came out with more heat on it than I meant to spend.
“You have a route. It is not the same thing.”
Nothing in that room was alive except me. Not the orchids, not the air. I have stood in freezer trailers and been warmer.
For a second I wanted to pick that book up off the table and put the corner of it through his teeth. The wanting was clean and simple and it came out of somewhere I do not keep things.
“Mireille. The pages.”
She turned to a place beyond the middle, pressed the book flat with the heel of her hand, and left it open. Facing him. Which made it upside down to me.
Six years of holding a clipboard across a desk while a man signs. Six years of reading a line of type the wrong way up to be sure a number had not been changed before I let go of a crate. Nobody turns that off to be polite in an office.
I read entry six hundred four upside down, out of habit, and I was three lines in before I understood what I was doing.
Names. Column after column of them, the handwriting changing every few lines, ink gone brown at the top and blacker further down, every one of them put there by somebody’s hand. Partway into the third line was a name I had been introduced to in that room.
On the facing page a line had been ruled straight through a name, hard enough to open the paper.
I did not decide to keep it. I kept it. Two pages, the number in the corner, the shape of the ink.
It was not evidence. I did not want it to be evidence. I wanted it to be mine, and when I logged the drop out on the curb I put not one word of it in the file.
Mireille was watching me. Not the book. My eyes, going the wrong way across a page that was upside down, and she let me get all the way to the end of the line. Then she looked at her hands and said nothing at all to him.
“Sign here. Then do not come back to this building. Mireille, telephone Marchetti and Ward. Ms. Russo is finished for the day.”
“I’ve got two more stops on my—”
“You do not.”
I signed. My name on a line under a printed time. The pen Mireille handed me was heavy and cold, a black fountain pen with teeth marks in the cap. Something about it almost caught. Then she had it back.
She tore off my receipt and folded it around the courier tag. I put both in my trouser pocket.
He never came nearer than those two feet. He never touched the case, the book, the pen, or my hand.
The case stayed on the table, the empty gym bag folded beside it. The container goes with the contents when a client pays for the container, and that client had paid for everything. It was a good case. It was mine ten minutes ago and it was theirs now.
I said it again to myself going down, in the words a person uses on a thing they are not getting back. A good case. Not mine.
“Badge.” The woman at reception put her hand out without looking up. “That was quick.”
“It was.”
“They don’t keep people.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning nobody up there has been here longer than I have.” She was typing again. “And I started in March.”
The heat came over me at the revolving door like a hand on the face. Pratt Street was doing what it does at that hour, a delivery bike coming off the light with the throttle wide open, the glare off the harbor savage and white, warm rope and diesel and hot concrete.
I got my phone out and logged the drop with both hands free, which had not happened since morning. My shoulder was still holding the shape of the strap. That is what bearing a weight all day does to a body. The weight goes and the body keeps working the job.
On the curb my arm lifted an inch off my side, the way it does when somebody comes past close. There was nobody. My skin had produced that elevator on its own.
And I was still carrying him, too. A stranger in an elevator had said a handful of sentences to me and I stood on a curb in the sun going through them in order. My mouth was dry. It had nothing to do with the heat.
If he had come out of that lobby right then and told me to get in a car, I would have asked where we were going from inside the car. I knew that about myself, standing there in the sun, the way a person knows her own handwriting.
Across Pratt, in front of the garage entrance, a man in a blue windbreaker was standing exactly where he had been standing when I went in.
A windbreaker. In that heat.
He was not on a phone. He was not smoking, not checking a watch, not doing any of the things people’s hands do when they are actually waiting for somebody. I started east and his head came around and stayed with me.
Watching. That is my word, and I picked it on the sidewalk, not later.
My phone buzzed. The delivery confirmation, loading the way it always loads, the green check, the client field, the time received.
I stopped walking. A man hit my shoulder going past and said, “Watch it,” and I let him go by.
The screen said RECEIVED 15:05, and at five past three I had been standing on Fleet Street with the bag still on my shoulder and this building four blocks away.