Chapter 5
At six o’clock that evening, when Roz Ferraro’s shift ended, she went out to the basement garage through the rear door, as she did every day — carrying her cloth bag in one hand and dragging one foot slightly, because she had spent eight hours standing and sorting mail.
Her car was parked in the farthest corner, in the space reserved for longtime employees, beside a concrete pillar where the paint had peeled away. She opened the trunk, placed her bag inside, and when she looked up, Gerard Whitlock was standing a few steps away, his coat draped over one arm and his leather briefcase held in the other hand, as though he too had only just come out to his car.
At that hour, the basement garage was nearly empty. The overhead lights hummed.
He asked how her husband was doing. She said he was the same. He asked how many sessions there were that week. She said three — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And she said it in the voice of someone who had answered the same question so many times that it was no longer an answer at all, only a habit.
He nodded and said insurance didn’t cover nearly as much as it used to, that he knew of several cases where people were struggling just as badly.
Then he opened his briefcase, took out a thin white envelope, and held it toward her.
She looked at the envelope. He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to, because this wasn’t the first time, and they both knew it.
The first time had been in the spring of the previous year, when he had called her upstairs and told her that management needed to keep track of staffing conditions in the basement area and among the outside contractors; that she knew more than anyone else; and that the company would provide a small allowance for her help.
She had thought it was ordinary enough. Who came and went, who called in sick, who worked overtime, who belonged in which area, which bus route each person took. Things no one had any reason to hide. Things she believed someone else would eventually report, even if she didn’t.
The money in the envelope each month was so small that it seemed almost meaningless — less than the cost of one prescription, only slightly more than the gasoline she used driving to three dialysis sessions every week. And because it was so little, she had never once thought of it, during the past year, as money meant to buy anything at all.
She took the envelope. She folded it in half. She slipped it into the inside pocket of her coat, fastened the button, then closed the trunk.
He wished her a good evening. She answered with something, then opened the car door, sat down, and started the engine.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Whitlock walking toward his own car without hurry, the leather briefcase still in his hand, and he didn’t look back even once. She backed out of the space, drove up the ramp, and left the building.
Inside her coat pocket, the envelope lay flat and thin, almost weightless.
At that same moment, on the thirty-third floor, Mave was putting the tea cart away in the storage room, removing her apron, and arranging the trays neatly so the morning shift would have less work to do.
She was closing the metal cabinet when someone knocked at the door.
She turned around. Standing in the doorway was a man she had never seen before. Wearing a dark overcoat, his posture straight, both hands held in front of his stomach — and there was nothing in his face that allowed her to guess what this was about.
He said her name. “Miss Dunlevy.”
Then he said that Mr. Baranti wanted to see her.
Mave stood still. She looked down at her hands and saw that she was holding a cleaning cloth, and she placed it very carefully on the edge of the sink, as though putting it in the proper place was the final important thing she still had time to do.
She took the notebook from the pocket of her apron and slipped it into her coat pocket. She put on her gloves. Then she followed the man into the corridor and toward the elevator.
May you like
And throughout that entire walk, she could think of only one thing: that this had come sooner than she had expected, and that she hadn’t had time to say goodbye to Roz.
The man took her up in the executive elevator, a place she had never set foot in during her three years working in that building. She stood tucked into one corner, her hands clasped together in front of her stomach, watching the numbers climb.
