Chapter Four
Cait
She called her supervisor, Diane, from the car on the way back to Pilsen.
"How was it?" Diane asked. Diane had been with Chicago Workers Alliance for twenty-two years and had the voice of someone who had heard every possible answer to that question.
"Different," Cait said.
A pause. "Different how."
"He went back to the source data on his own methodology. Before our four o'clock."
Another pause, longer this time. "That's unusual."
"Yes."
"Does that change anything?"
Cait watched the city go by outside the window.
The South Side at five-thirty in November: the light already gone, the streetlights doing their inadequate best, a woman walking fast with a bag of groceries, a bar with its door propped open despite the cold.
She had grown up four miles from here. Her father had driven this stretch of road for twenty years to get to the electrical union hall on Halsted.
"It means he's serious," she said. "Or that he's good at performing seriousness. I'm not sure which yet."
"Keep them separate until you are," Diane said.
"I know."
"Cait."
"I know," she said again. "I will."
She hung up and looked at her legal pad, which was open on her knee with the page facing up in the moving car, the handwriting from the afternoon meeting dense and fast and full of her own shorthand.
Three hundred and forty. She had written that number at the top of the first page that morning, before she walked into the building, the way she always wrote the number at the top of the first page.
Not as a statistic. As a practice. A way of keeping the thing the thing.
She had been doing this work for six years.
She had walked into a hundred rooms like the one this morning, or rooms that looked like it from the outside: a table, two sides, a gap between them that everyone pretended not to see.
She had sat across from corporate lawyers and private equity partners and investment bankers and the occasional CEO who had flown in to signal that the decision was already made and the meeting was a courtesy.
She had learned to read the room fast, to find the person with the actual authority, to aim at them and nowhere else.
Garrett Knox had the actual authority. That had been clear in the first three minutes, from the way everyone else at the table watched him rather than each other, from the way Dubowski had reached for his folder and then stopped reaching when Knox said he had already read it.
The lawyer had checked his phone under the table.
The union men had watched Cait. Knox had watched no one and everyone at once, which was a specific skill, the skill of a person who had learned to take in a room while appearing to look only at one point in it.
She had noticed his hands. She noticed most people's hands in these rooms, because hands were where the fidgeting happened, the pen-clicking and the paper-straightening and the phone-checking that told you how comfortable someone actually was.
His hands had been still throughout. Not rigid, not forced.
Simply still, the way the hands of someone are still when they are not performing calm but are actually calm.
She had found that more unsettling than aggression would have been. Aggression she knew how to answer.
The car pulled onto her street. She paid the driver, got out, stood on the pavement for a moment with the cold coming off the lake and the amber light from her neighbour's window making a square on the footpath.
Three hundred and forty.
She went inside.
Her flat was the second floor of a two-storey building that had belonged to a Puerto Rican family for forty years before the current landlord bought it and converted it.
She paid eleven hundred dollars a month for two rooms and a kitchen with a window that faced the alley, which was not beautiful but was honest, and she had lived there for four years and knew every sound the building made.
She put the kettle on. She opened her laptop.
She had three emails from the plant's workers she had been in contact with since the acquisition announcement, asking for updates, asking what the meeting had produced, asking if there was any news.
She answered all three the same way: that the meeting had happened, that she had presented the alternative analysis, that she would have more information by the end of the week.
She did not tell them that Knox had gone back to the source data.
She did not tell them that she had not entirely known what to make of him, which was unusual. She generally knew what to make of people within the first quarter-hour.
She made tea. She sat at her kitchen table.
She opened the folder, her copy, and went back to the infrastructure contract data on page twenty-two.
She had presented it as a single point of leverage today, the strongest one, the one most likely to give him pause.
What she had not said, because you never showed the full hand in the first meeting, was that she had two more data points behind it.
The second was a state grant for workforce retraining available under a programme that Ashford Meridian had never accessed because they were not aware it existed.
The third was a comparable partial restructure from a facility in Indiana that had returned to profitability in fourteen months, not seventeen.
She would give him the state grant on Friday. The Indiana case she would hold for the second week, if there was a second week.
There would be a second week. She was fairly sure of that now.
She turned to a blank page on the legal pad. She wrote his name at the top: Garrett Knox. Below it she wrote: serious or performing seriousness. Below that she drew a line and left the space empty.
She would fill it in when she knew.