Security(46)

I didn’t care about the interview. I didn’t want the job. I was a private consultant, coordinating the protection of actors and pop stars, heiresses and tycoons. The money was profane, and I never had to meet the people I was protecting. I designed routes for limousines, rewrote schedules for meathead bodyguards, and taught defense techniques. I had a reputation—made from a decade and a half alternating between the CIA and the Secret Service—and I was coasting on that reputation. I was bored, but I didn’t know it. I was sitting in a room with six other interviewees, a room with smooth black walls and a bowl of floating white flowers in the midst of a dozen high--priced chairs, a Monet (not a reproduction) behind the receptionist’s elephantine desk. Water poured down one black wall but didn’t pool anywhere. It recycled invisibly back to the top. No magazines to read, no clock. Modern decorating aesthetics equate beauty with empty space.

I was offended, sitting there, that six other interviewees were vying for the position. Destin Management Group had gone through some trouble to contact me. My number was unlisted, my address classified. I am offended, still, at the memory: we sat in that black room in our black suits with our black ties and shoes, profiling one another out of habit. Seven men contacted through unofficial channels. We were called that way, placed that way—in a room with nothing to read and no clock to hear ticking—to communicate to us that not one of us was special.

But one of us had brought a book. I remember it had a black cover, a black cat backlit in green. One of us was reading while the rest envied him his book, yet the rest of us recognized this as an enormous error—his reading, not our envy—because there was certainly a camera or two or five trained on our behavior, on our watchfulness, and this man leisurely flipping pages was failing the test. A man across from me smiled at our peer’s obvious failure. But a smile, too, was a failure. We were all so alike. We were virtually identical. Standing out in any way was an error, for safety is the provenance of ghosts, and though the water wall’s trickle provoked the need to urinate, only I sat patiently, not moving, while one by one the others visited the men’s room.

“Anybody know if they’re interviewing somebody right now?” said the man across from me, the one who’d smiled.

Another of us responded; another joined in. I said nothing. I knew that the current head of security for Destin Management Group was watching us. I knew, because it was what I would have done: observe who can and cannot be still and attentive and unmoving and quiet until such a time as action is called for.

We weren’t waiting for the interview. This was the interview.

I truly didn’t want the job. It meant a bump in pay, but not one worth the fantastic amount of work it would be to set up the gratuitous safety measures legendarily demanded by Destin at all his many new properties—paranoid son of a murdered diplomat, spoiled child with a god complex—but I wanted the offer of the job. That was all I wanted.

She appeared at the receptionist’s desk, and my breath stopped. Suddenly, she was there. I would never describe the feeling, both because it would sound like it always sounds when someone describes the sensation of love at first sight, and because I had no one to describe the feeling to: it was a hollowing out all through me, and yet a filling up. It was the end of a wait I’d never known I was enduring. It was senseless. It made perfect sense.

The walls were black, and so was Tessa’s hair, and so were her clothes, her boots. I would learn she had ten of the same black skirt and blazer, twenty white blouses, four pairs of the same black--heeled boots. Her black hair glowed darker than the walls. Royal blue in it, thanks to the room’s shadows. Like fine, clean water in a mountain’s valley. Like a lake it would be fatal to try to reach.

She smiled at the receptionist, setting a file on the desk. She whispered, “He’s the one,” and she winked at the receptionist and disappeared again. I would learn there was a hallway Tessa had designed in the administration wing of Destin Management Group headquarters, to make such subtle entrances and exits possible. I would learn she’d wanted to major in architecture, but Destin’s offer of a guaranteed job after graduation swayed her, because she had a horror of ever returning to the destitute dependency of her early childhood. I would learn it was my file she’d set in front of the receptionist, as I was called moments later and led to a back room, where I sat opposite an aged but fit man who gestured to a monitor beside us, to a specific monitor on which my fellow interviewees were being dismissed. And he said to me, with no facial expression to speak of, “Tell me what mistakes these men made, and what mistake you made.”

I stated baldly that I had stared at Tessa in blatant distraction after he’d selected me as his successor. I acknowledged my own mistake, one I would repeat. And repeat.

I listed the other applicants’ bathroom breaks, conversations, smiles, the book—how these errors demonstrated a need to be occupied and moving and active with something other than the task exactly at hand.

He nodded. Then he said, “Do you want the job?”

“Bri?” Tessa whispers.

“Yeah?”

“You love riding.”

He kisses the underside of her neck, where the skin is so pale one can—up close—trace the veins under Tessa’s skin. “It’s not that I love it,” he says. “It’s in me. I’ve been doing it so long, it’s part of me. It’s how I got somewhere.” He kisses her lips. Tessa’s been tasting them as he speaks. “If you absolutely need me to quit riding, I’ll quit.”