We hang up, and I stare at my own reflection in the black glass of my office. I look like a man who’s lost part of his soul. I didn’t know a person’s face could change so much just from being sad and down.
There’s no point wallowing in self-pity since it’s of my own doing, so I pull up the file of contacts Bea keeps in that frightening color-coded universe she calls order, skim to City—Permits, and dial the possible clerk she “lubricated.”
“Department of Buildings, Tori speaking.”
“Hi, Tori. Noah King.”
Silence. Then a small squeak.“Oh. Oh! The Noah King.”
I ignore the urge to be insufferable. “You took a Chanel bag from my assistant.”
She inhales loudly.“No one took anything. She offered. I refused. Several times. She insisted. It was—she said it was a thank-you, and it wasn’t a bribe.”
“I’m not accusing you,” I say more softly. “I’m asking for it back.”
She exhales.“You want me to give back the vintage Chanel bag that I can resell for fifteen grand?”
“Yes. I’ll give you the money back.”
I can hear the gears in her head turning.“Make it twenty, and you’ve got a deal.”
Looks like Tori has mastered the art of being lubricated.
“Deal. Bring it to my office by the end of today.”
“It will cost you extra.”
I smile silently at her business antics. “I’ll double it if you stay at my office at Beatrice’s desk until she is back.”
“Hold on,”she says without asking any more questions, and puts me on hold. The phone beeps back a minute later.“For the past twenty years of working for the city, I’ve got six weeks of unused days off. You gotta make sure she’s back within that time.”
Damn, Tori is all business.
“She will be back.”
“Great.”She starts coughing into the phone. Then louder. A few moments later, it sounds like her lungs are about to comeout of her body. Then she starts yelling to someone in her office.“Joe? Hey, Joe? I think I’m coming down with something.”Joe yells something back, something close to ‘get the fuck outta here before you get everyone sick.’“All right,”she yells back to him, and then quieter to me,“I’ll be there in an hour.”
She hangs up without waiting for my reply, and I realize that Tori is very much like Beatrice, and it’s no wonder the bag was traded for favors.
Tori, a dark-haired woman in her forties, with narrow eyes hiding behind giant glasses, shows up in under an hour, wearing a grin that says she just hustled me for sport. Pushing through the door without knocking, she heads straight to me.
“Mr. King.” She slaps a dust bag on my desk with no pleasantries. “Bag’s in there. You’ve got me for as long as you need me. But make it under six weeks. I want to take a full day at a spa with that money you are about to pay me,” she says, extending her arm with an open hand.
I pull the drawstring of the bag open and there it is. Black lambskin, chevron quilting, the kind of faint patina you can’t fake.
I pull the top drawer of my desk open and give her the cashier’s check I got ready before her arrival. “It’s half, the other half you will get at the end of our term.”
“Works for me,” she says, snatching the check from my hand.
“Thank you,” I say, and for once the words don’t feel like a foreign language.
She eyes me like she’s cataloging me for parts. “Where am I sitting?”
“Beatrice’s desk,” I say. “She left you a how-to. Color codes and seating chart of my neuroses.”
“Noted.” She pivots on a dime and vanishes through the door before I can even blink. But then her face appears for a moment. “I knew she was too good for you.”
And she vanishes again.
