Chapter 98: Seventh Floor

For a while neither of them moved.

The television had gone back to the streaming menu, a wall of little pictures asking what they wanted to watch next. Victoria sat with the phone in both hands and read the message a third time, and Lucas sat beside her and kept his face as still as he knew how.

"Observation," she said, without looking up. "You didn’t ask who she was."

He didn’t answer.

"Most people would have. I said a name you’ve never heard me say, and you didn’t ask who she was, or why she’d call the chair, or why she’d care where I am on Monday." She put the phone down on the coffee table, screen up, and looked at him. "That’s all. That’s my observation. I’m not asking what it means."

"I can’t," he said.

"I know you can’t. I just figured it out." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a second. "Your call last night. I’m not asking. Don’t tell me. I’d rather work it out wrong on my own than have you break something for me."

[Warning: Objective under pressure. Silence is compliant. Confirmation is not.]

He stayed quiet. It was the hardest quiet he’d ever kept, harder than the elevator with Kevin, harder than the barber’s chair. She was sitting a foot away from him in a sweater with a hole in the cuff, frightened in the careful way she got frightened, and he knew the name, and he knew the tabs, and he knew the tea.

"Okay," she said finally. She picked up the phone again. "I’m going to call my lawyer, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Then I’m going to call the general counsel, because that’s what she’s going to tell me to do. And then I’m going to tell the chair I haven’t heard from anyone and that I’ll stay home on Monday, which I was going to do anyway, because they’re deciding about me and it’s tacky to be in the building."

"Do you want me to go?"

"No." Then, after a second: "Yes. Not because of you. Because I’m going to be on the phone until one in the morning sounding like a CEO, and I don’t want you to see me do that in this sweater."

Frank drove him home in the silver Ford. He didn’t talk until they were on Spruce Street.

"For what it’s worth," Frank said, eyes on the road, "she called me before she called the lawyer. Told me to put somebody on the lobby Monday at her building and somebody on yours."

"Mine?"

"Yours. I said I’d handle it." Frank pulled over in front of Lucas’s building and looked up at it the way he looked at everything, roof first. "Still boring. Good."

Reed called at ten on Sunday morning.

"Miller knows about both calls," he said. "Yours and the chair’s. He is not happy. Mrs. Abernathy’s lawyer is less happy, because nobody told him his client was making phone calls on Friday nights. The interview was supposed to be at Vertex on Monday afternoon. Now it’s at the annex at eight in the morning, with Miller in the room as well as Hoyt."

"Because of the chair."

"Because she asked a board chair to keep the CEO out of the building. Miller’s going to want to know why before anyone else gets to ask her." Reed coughed. "Your job hasn’t changed. You go to work tomorrow. You’re on seven. You sit at your desk and you learn whatever Treasury Operations is."

"Do you know what Treasury Operations is?"

"Money moving from one place to another, slowly, with forms." Reed sounded almost cheerful about it. "You’ll be bored by Wednesday. That’s the best thing that could happen to you."

Lucas spent Sunday doing the most ordinary things he could think of. He went to the laundromat on Fifth and read the canal book while his shirts went round. He called his mother, who wanted to know if he’d ironed anything. He texted Camilla a photo of a dog in a raincoat he’d seen outside the laundromat, and she sent back Andre says that dog looks like you, and then, a minute later, He means it nicely.

Victoria sent one text all day, at six.

Observation: I was on the phone until 2:10. I’m fine. I’m staying home tomorrow. Frank says a man on your corner is called Sam and he does crosswords.

Observation, he wrote back. I’ll wave at Sam.

Don’t wave at Sam. Sam is working.

Monday morning, Sam was there. He was a heavyset man in a Phillies cap on the bench across the street with a folded newspaper and a pencil, and he didn’t look up when Lucas came out of the building. Lucas didn’t wave.

At the Market Street tower Theo was on the desk again. He looked at the green STAFF badge and grinned before he could stop himself.

"Morning, Mr. Vintage."

"Morning, Theo."

"Seven, right? They told me." Theo leaned over a little. "Seven’s quiet. Bunch of people who like spreadsheets more than they like people. You’ll fit in fine. I mean that as a compliment."

The badge reader turned green on the first try. He’d half expected it not to.

Treasury Operations was a long room on the seventh floor with windows on the wrong side for the river and a carpet that was blue instead of gray. There were maybe fifteen desks. Most of them had two monitors and a person who didn’t look up. At the end of the room, in a glass office with the door open, a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a beaded chain was eating oatmeal out of a mug.

"You’re Lucas," she said, before he’d knocked. "Sit. I’m Joan. I’m almost done with this."

He sat. She finished the oatmeal, put the mug on a coaster that said BALANCE, and looked at him properly.

"I’m going to say a few things," she said, "and then I’m going to give you to Rafael, who’ll show you where the coffee is and what the cash position report looks like. First thing. I asked for you."

He didn’t know what to say to that. "Thank you."

"Don’t thank me yet. I asked for you because I read the summary they’re allowed to show managers, and in the summary it says you reported a thing nobody had caught. In this department, that’s the whole job. Money moves, and somebody has to say when it moved wrong. Most people in this building would rather not be that person. I’d like one more person who would."

"Okay."

"Second thing. You can’t approve anything. Not a wire, not a sweep, not a transfer between our own accounts. You prepare, someone else releases. That’s the condition and I’m not going to argue with it, and you’re not either."

"I wasn’t going to."

"Good. Third thing." She took off her glasses and let them hang on the chain. "People are going to talk about you. On this floor they’ll do it quietly. If anyone does it to your face, you come to me. Not because you can’t handle it. Because I’d like to."

[Status Update: Vertex Holdings. Assigned Supervisor: Joan Mercer. Disposition: Favorable.]

Rafael turned out to be a man about Lucas’s age with a beard and very neat handwriting who walked him through the cash position report like it was a recipe: here’s where the bank balances come in at seven, here’s where you check them against yesterday’s forecast, here’s where you write down why anything’s off by more than fifty thousand. Lucas spent the morning setting up the key on his phone with someone from Oyelaran’s team and checking balances that were off by nothing at all. It was the most peaceful he’d felt in a month.

At ten-thirty Priya came up from nine carrying his plant. It was a pothos in a yellow pot, and it was enormous now, trailing nearly to the floor.

"Kevin said you asked," she said, setting it on the corner of his desk. "I didn’t know if they’d let me bring it up. Nobody stopped me."

"Thank you for keeping it alive."

"It was easy. I talked to it about you. It’s very supportive." She looked around the room, at the blue carpet and the bent heads. "It’s so quiet up here. Is it always this quiet?"

"I’ve been here three hours."

"Well, if it’s always this quiet, come down for lunch sometime. We miss being loud at you."

He didn’t look at his phone until eleven-fifty, and when he did, there was a text from Reed, sent at 11:41.

She’s done for today. Three and a half hours. More tomorrow. I’ll call after work. Don’t call me.

[Quest Complete: Blank Line.]

[Reward: 250 AP. Total: 9,150.]

He read it, put the phone face down, and went back to a forecast for the payroll account that was off by eighteen dollars and forty cents. He found it in an hour. It was a bank fee nobody had coded. Rafael looked at his note and said, "Huh," which on the seventh floor seemed to count as applause.

Around one, Rafael took him on what he called the tour, which was a walk down the row of desks saying names. Lucas tried to keep them. Carol Pruitt, who ran the bank relationships and had a photo of a horse on her monitor. A young man named Owen who said "Welcome" without taking off his headphones. Nick Sorensen, investments, who stood up to shake his hand and asked whether he followed the Eagles. Glen Hadley, the senior manager on the far side of the room, who had been at Vertex longer than anyone on the floor except Joan, and who looked at the green badge and then at Lucas’s face and said, pleasantly, "So you’re the one."

"I’m the one," Lucas said, because Reed had said to smile and walk, and there was nowhere to walk.

"Well. Joan picks her people." Hadley sat back down. "Don’t let her make you do the payroll reconciliation every month. She’ll try."

Lucas ate lunch at his desk, a sandwich from the cart downstairs, and watched the room the way he’d learned to watch streets. Nobody watched him back. Fifteen people looking at numbers. It should have been the safest room in the building.

At three-ten Victoria texted.

Observation: the committee finished at 2:30. I’m still CEO. I stay recused from everything to do with you, the close, and the investigation until it’s over. The chair says the vote wasn’t close.

He sat at his desk on the seventh floor with the plant at his elbow and let out a breath he felt all the way down to his shoes.

Observation, he wrote. I’m very glad.

Observation: me too. I cried in the shower. Don’t tell Frank.

Frank already knows. Frank knows everything.

That’s true and it’s terrible.

Reed called at ten past five, while Lucas was walking to the bus.

"Long day," Reed said. "I’ll keep it short, because I’m only allowed to tell you the part that’s about you, and Miller signed off on that part an hour ago." He waited for a truck to pass on his end. "She asked for the card. She did it because a director’s office asked her to, two years ago, for outside advisers on the Halcyon work. She thought it was routine. She did a hundred of those."

"Okay."

"She’d forgotten it was still live. It was in her desk drawer with a hundred other things nobody ever asked her to give back. Then, the night of the close, someone she knew called her and asked her to bring the card down to him in the lobby, because his own badge wouldn’t open the fourth floor after hours and he said he’d left a binder in the library. She thought she was doing him a favor. She handed it to him at eleven-thirty. She went home."

Lucas stood very still on the corner. The bus was coming. He let it come.

"She knows him," he said.

"She’s known him for nine years. She told Miller his name this morning. That’s why she wanted Victoria out of the building." Reed was quiet for a second. "He still works there, Lucas. Treasury Operations. He was at his desk today, about forty feet from yours."