Chapter 1, part 2

The elevator lurched slightly and then debouched upon the glass and marble of the lobby. Paul made for the front of the building. Through the atrium windows he saw a knot of people, elbowing and jostling, out on the plaza, jockeying to get a better look at something in their center. There was a splash of red across the window glass.

“Hey, man, sorry,” said a security guard, stepping in front of Paul.

Paul looked at him, trying fruitlessly for a moment to connect the man significantly with his life. No: just a security guard. Okay. He took another step forward.

“Sorry,” said the security guard. “You can’t go this way. There’s all kinds of cops taking pictures and things. You got to use the back way.”

“What happened?” said Paul, trying still to see past the guard into the plaza. Was the red streak on the glass—was that—could that happen?

“It’s a crime scene,” said the security guard.

“But—”

“Look,” said the guard, as though that was all he needed to say.

“But what happened?”

“I dunno. It’s a crime scene.”

Paul’s legs were still trying to carry him forward. The guard planted himself and stood, folding his arms, his feet wide apart. “I—” said Paul.

The guard met his eyes. Another siren squalled at the curb outside.

“Right,” said Paul. He turned awkwardly, wondering if he could make it look as though he had forgotten something upstairs. Probably not. What: a little snap of the fingers, a jerk of the head, an “Oh!” at a barely audible volume. Not so hard. He tried it. Snap: jerk: “Oh!” And for good measure: “Paul, you dummy!” But he was already en route to the elevator so it lacked what actors would call motivation. He pressed the call button and stole a glance back at the lobby. The security guard was staring at him, no longer forbidding but simply perplexed, curious. Paul realized he had, to all appearances, tried repeatedly to enter a crime scene, then turned and suffered a mild epileptic fit and begun talking to himself. “Good one, Starling,” he said to himself, before realizing that talking more would not improve the situation.

The elevator door opened and three rabid, eager-looking people filed out. So the word had spread, or everyone on the east side of the building had seen. At least Paul would not be the only one to try to see past the security guard. If he were really lucky, some of these people would go into spasms on their way to the back exit. He stepped into the empty elevator.

He looked ill in the pallid light, reflected in the polished chrome of the front panel. Beat the tortoise to the finish line. The news headline above read “Johnstone to spin off consulting division.” Johnstone spun off a division every other week. He hadn’t even known Johnstone had a consulting division. Did it matter? Did he care? Who could really, in their heart of hearts, say they cared about consulting? And yet he had heard someone say—a young woman, too—that she had a passion for human resources. He had laughed then, assuming she was joking, and she glanced over at him, injured. Soon after that he’d come across the word in a P&B proposal. “We have a passion for actuarial work and we have what it takes to get your job done.” He’d read it aloud to Sheldon. “And that,” said Sheldon, “is why we are losing money.” Didn’t these people realize how ridiculous they sounded? Was Paul the only one who knew that you simply could not, could not, work in an office for any length of time and still take office work seriously?

The elevator opened and Paul stepped out before realizing that he wasn’t on his own floor. He turned for a moment in a neat circle. If only the security guard could witness this—! He was on 33. Thirty-three was still a P&B floor. Had he not even pressed the elevator button? Thirty-three was Reg’s floor. Reg would know what was going on.

Reg was not exactly Paul’s friend—they’d had a beer or two after work, with a larger group—but he was an underling in P&B’s human resources administration (as opposed to the apparently passionate human resources consulting team) and that meant he knew every shred of office gossip before almost anyone else. It was his job to type up the transcripts of exit interviews, which meant he learned of every possible scandal, every website that shouldn’t have been visited via the intranet portal, every pending sexual harassment case, every feud. Perhaps this was where the passion truly entered human resources; perhaps if you had the inside scoop like this HR became as riveting as the history of the Tudors. It still seemed, to Paul, like getting paid to gossip.

Reg was on the phone when Paul approached his grimy-beige cubicle, which was directly above Sheldon’s in P&B’s depressingly unvaried layout. Reg had the same mingy view of the lake, only he had lost less of it, so far, to the new construction on Dearborn. “Yeah, but I don’t know, Becky,” he said. Becky was one of the senior secretaries and, despite her girlish name, a mountainous woman with a permed mullet. Becky collected Barbie dolls in her spare time and—incredibly—wore a wedding band with a colossal diamond. Becky called Reg at least three times a day. He claimed to resent her but they seemed to have a strange and halfway friendly dependence on one another.

“I’ll come back,” Paul mouthed.

“No, no, no,” said Reg. “Sorry, Becky. Yeah, that’s really all I can tell you. You know I’ll call you if—well, yeah, of course. Okay. Bye. Yeah. Bye.”

Reg hung up and interlaced his fingers across his belly like a man who has just drunk the digestif of a superb meal. “She wants me,” he said.

Paul laughed, but it died in his throat. Suddenly he felt hollow. He wondered if his stomach had really stabilized as much as he thought it had. He leaned on Reg’s desk, hoping it looked casual.

“What’s up?” said Reg.

“Did you see it?” said Paul.

“I might’ve,” said Reg, coy. “Depends on which it we’re talking about.” He reached over to his mouse and clicked it idly. “Dammit,” he said. “I think the Internet’s down. Anyway. Go on.”

“Which it,” said Paul, confused. “I’m talking about the guy.”

“The guy. The guy from Johnstone?”

“The guy,” said Paul. Was he the only one who had seen? The hubbub in the plaza was real, wasn’t it? He hadn’t imagined the security guard. “The guy who—the guy who fell out of the building.”

Reg’s eyes opened wide and he started to laugh. “No one falls out of buildings.”

“You hear that?” said Paul, louder than he meant. He pointed in the general direction of the plaza below. “That’s—not fifteen minutes ago—a guy fell—a guy in a suit—fell past my window.” An inept swimmer, sinking, drowning. “I just looked up from my desk and—”

“Jesus,” said Reg. “Really?” He stared at the window as though hoping for a repeat. Several squares of paper drifted down, riding tricky drafts. “Where was I?” murmured Reg. It obviously pained him not to have witnessed the single biggest scoop of his career at P&B. “I must’ve been in the kitchen or something,” he said. He shook himself and looked at Paul again. “Hey,” he said, “are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” Paul’s voice was reedier than he wanted it to be. “I thought I might puke there for a minute.”

“Yeah,” said Reg. “I would’ve.” His phone rang the single trill of an in-office call, and he answered it automatically. “Reg Henry.”

Paul heard a woman’s voice rising and falling in rapid, agitated tones.

In a moment Reg’s mouth fell open. “Jesus!” he breathed. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Paul!” he whispered. “It was Branks! You saw—”

Branks—Arthur Branks—cofounder and still president, at 67, of a privately owned minor empire of consulting—Branks who had earned the right to smile generously at anyone in the elevator, certain of his status above them—Branks with an old-man belly still proudly covered by a three-piece suit every day, and a silver swimmer’s cap of hair—

Reg uncovered the mouthpiece and spoke into the phone. “Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll find that for you. No problem. And we’ll send out—” He clicked his mouse several times, upset. “Of all the times for the network to be down!”

Tremors took over Paul’s limbs and they were not the aftershocks of what he had seen but a very new kind of fear, a sense that something large was happening on the upper floors, something that would affect his life and his livelihood in ways he might anticipate but could never prevent.

Reg said a mild obscenity into the phone without apology. “Yeah, then, okay,” he said. “You talk to Vijay, and I’ll—okay. Okay.”

Paul found himself cupping both hands over his mouth and nose. The musty heat of his breath was strangely comforting.

“Okay,” said Reg again. “Yeah. Okay.” He hung up. His eyes met Paul’s and for once he seemed truly staggered by what he had to say. He leaned forward and beckoned Paul toward him. “Do you know what was going on upstairs?” he said. His voice was the voice of someone who has just discovered a coiled, extremely poisonous snake and does not know whether it is sleeping. “There was a meeting today. We’re being bought out.”

Paul felt his eyes stretch open. The part of his face covered by his hands was the only warm part of his body. He’d heard something like this—in an economy this bad, in a sector this fragile, there was a new rumor every day—but if Reg was saying it it was as good as fact.

“Or we’re supposed to be. It was supposed to be final negotiations today.”

“Who’s—?” managed Paul.

“Johnstone,” said Reg.

Johnstone. Why was that familiar? He’d heard of the company, of course, but— “Elevator,” he said.

“What?”

Paul took his hands off his mouth. They hovered, uncertain, around his jaw. “They were just in the elevator news. They’re spinning something off. Their consulting division.”

“Oh,” said Reg. “Well, yeah, that’s probably so they can buy us.” He looked sad about being right.

“Do we still have jobs?”

Reg shrugged. “They say so, but everyone always says that.” He narrowed his eyes and stared at the window again. Another sheet of paper drifted past; this time it blew against the glass, and the P&B logo was briefly visible. “Branks was supposed to be at that meeting, though,” said Reg, “so I wonder. I wonder.” He contemplated his phone.

It was odd, sitting on Reg’s desk with nothing to say, with Reg himself in a pensive silence. The tremors in Paul’s legs grew worse.

“Hey, I have to call insurers,” said Reg, remembering himself. “Though if he jumped——anyway, anyway, you should go.”

“Right,” said Paul. “Right. Sorry.” He rose and made his way slowly down the hall, watching the carpet pass beneath his feet, feeling that his eyes had never seemed so close to the floor before, that surely he was shrinking. Out of habit he took the long route back toward the elevators, the hall that took him past the cubicle of the Hot Compensation Consultant. The Hot Compensation Consultant was in her early thirties, he guessed, and she wore suits with skirts that hit her leg just above the knee, in the slender part that hinted at but did not reveal the swell of her thigh. There was something about a suit with a skirt, something that reminded Paul of a film noir woman—not the slinky femme fatale but the fiery, independent journalist with absolute morals and fierce loyalty. Most of the women under 40 at P&B favored the Lincoln Park Trixie look—black pants, pointy shoes, a snug sweater set—and in the world of Business Casual, few people wore suits unless they had to meet a client face to face. But not the Hot Compensation Consultant. No, she wore her tailored little jackets and skirts almost every day—never too showy, just poised—and she left her dark curly hair loose, in marked contrast to the Trixies’ locks, which were highlighted, straightened, twisted into chignons, and then carefully mussed. Plenty of people went for the Trixie look. Reg himself lusted for a blonde junior consultant named Kelly Poindexter—though he claimed he would never actually sleep with her, since so many other people in the office had already done so. Reg referred to Kelly as The Hub. Reg had no idea about the Hot Compensation Consultant. As far as Paul knew, he was the only person who found her irresistible. But this had to be wrong; she was stunning, just not by P&B conventions.

He was coming closer to her desk. He saw a mess of curly hair and a bent form in pinstriped gray wool. The Hot Compensation Consultant was sitting in her chair, facing away from her computer, with her elbows folded over her knees and her head resting on her forearms. Her shoulders shook.

Maybe it was the strangeness of the day, the tremor in his own limbs, that made Paul knock on the wall of her cube and say, “Are you all right?”

She lifted her head and met his eyes. Her face was puffy; her eyes and nose were red, and tearstreaks ran all the way down to her neck. She seemed to be summoning strength to speak.

“Oh,” said Paul, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and automatically he stepped into her cube and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. This is a Bad Idea, said some part of his mind. You don’t know this woman. You’ve only fantasized about touching her. You are not allowed to touch people in the office. You never know who will sue you. Bad, bad, bad idea.

But to his surprise the Hot Compensation Consultant put her arms around the small of his back, and she rested her head on the lower part of his belly. Paul, taken aback, patted her shoulder awkwardly, and let his fingers give in to the urge to stroke her curly hair lightly. He hoped the gesture came off as comforting. It probably didn’t. She could probably tell. Women could always tell. She was probably memorizing his belt buckle right now so that she could report him, saying: I didn’t get a good look at his face, but this is the belt buckle of a pervert.

Against his belly came the shudder of a sob, and Paul felt the damp of tears leaching into his shirt. “Uh,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

She leaned back and looked up at him, baleful and bloodshot. “No it isn’t.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Right. Sorry. It’s—I’m sorry.”

She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be calculating something. Her lips narrowed. She sniffled once, but it seemed to be an after-sob, the noise of the body getting itself back under control. “I’m Rachel,” she said.

Oh, he knew that. Rachel Greenberg, Hot Compensation Consultant. “Paul,” he said.

“Paul,” she said. “I think I knew that.”

He had no idea what to say, so he gave her what he hoped was a smile that said he was happy to meet her. He was swimming in such a wash of confusion and agitation that it probably came off as a sickly, wan smirk. She probably thought he was dying to shake himself free of her touch. He was inept, inept, hopeless. He squeezed her shoulder.

“Can you come with me?” said Rachel, rising abruptly. Without waiting for an answer she strode from her cube.

“What?” said Paul, half running after her. “Wait—what?”

She cut a brisk path between the desks, giving her eyes one or two businesslike wipes on the way. Nobody seemed to notice. The news of Branks’s fall—or else of the buyout—or at least some distant rumor of trouble—seemed to have reached every cubicle, and the very air was electric and agitated. Paul caught glimpses of hands cupped secretively over telephone mouthpieces, of neighbors standing to talk over the dividing walls in the fashion typically called prairie-dogging. The receptionist’s voice on the overhead paging system carried a note of desperation: Reginald Henry, please pick up 9252; Reginald Henry, please pick up 9252. In a second she paged someone else, then a third person, and Paul realized that she had been paging nonstop for some time. All around him the word was spreading. I saw it first, I knew it first, he thought. There was a strange sick happiness in that. He was so rarely the first to know anything, especially at P&B.

Rachel rounded a corner in the warren of hallways. They seemed to have entered a rather deserted area: only a few consultants were scattered here and there, typing glumly—they’d be the last to get the news—and one patch of fluorescent lights hadn’t even been turned on, giving the six cubes beneath it a funereal, suburban cast. Paul’s heart pounded. Rachel hadn’t looked back once to check whether he was keeping up with her. Had he heard her right? Had she asked him to come with her, or was she even now attempting to shake him from her trail? (Pervert even followed me to the bathroom! she would say in her official complaint.)

One more corner: then they were at the dark, heavy door of a conference room. It was ajar; the lights inside were off. Rachel Greenberg, the Hot Compensation Consultant, the imminent sexual-harassment plaintiff, stepped through without hesitation.

Paul followed her and then stopped, uncertain, just inside the door. The room was windowless, somewhere near the center of the building, and frigid from disuse. He made out the pale square of a whiteboard on the far wall. From deep within the building came the low creaks and whooshes of elevators in their chutes.

All at once Rachel was right next to him, pushing the door to. Paul squinted hard, and then opened his eyes wide; his pupils would have to adjust all over again—and then she seized his face in both hands and kissed him so hard he forgot to breathe.

She released him for a moment. He gulped for air. “Are you all right?” she said, low.

“Uh huh,” said Paul faintly.

“Are you going to sue me?”

“No,” said Paul, “no, but what’s—?”

She kissed him again. “Later,” she said.

He tasted lipstick, the kind expensive enough not to taste like chemicals. He licked his lips, gasping. She bore him back onto the conference table and he fell inelegantly, his knees hooked over the edge. Then she was up on the table herself, straddling him. “Good thing this is so sturdy,” she said.

“Um,” said Paul. It was a pathetic squeak.

“Please,” she said.

In the dark, his stinging eyes made out her pale face, the mass of her dark hair, the great deep shadows that were her eyes, and—as she pulled off her jacket—the white of her blouse.

“Yeah,” he said; “okay.”