Strangers: A Novel(25)
I have no idea where they came from. Probably from the struggles yesterday during my unsuccessful attempts to flee.
A quick glance out of the window. There’s still no sign of the silver Audi. I’ll just have to hurry in the shower.
Normally I can count on the cascading water to clear my thoughts, but normally seems to be a thing of the past. I’m barely under the shower for two minutes before my head starts pounding, as if I were getting the flu. Just what I needed. It was only a lie to explain the client appointments I missed, but now my body seems to think it has to turn the lie into a truth.
I take a deep breath, but the only result is that I feel sick.
Very quickly.
Very intensely.
And then the world goes dark.
12
The headquarters of Gabor Energy Engineering are located a few miles outside the city limits. It takes roughly half an hour before the modern eight-story building appears in front of me. I try to remember the details of my drive here, but in vain. My thoughts were revolving around Joanna the entire time.
My parking permit opens the barrier to the underground parking garage. I park the car, walk the thirty feet to the elevator, swipe my company ID on the reader, go up to the fourth floor. Routine, all of it. If it weren’t for the chaos in my head.
As I exit the elevator, Nadine walks toward me. Nadine, of all people. She stops, raises an eyebrow. “Hi, Erik. Everything OK?”
“Yeah, all good,” I say as complacently as possible. “There was something urgent I had to take care of.”
“Problems?”
“No.” None that I’m going to tell my ex-girlfriend about, at least.
I can see that she doesn’t believe me, but I hope she’ll leave it at that.
“You’re to report to the boss once you’re here.”
Hans-Peter Geiger is the vice president in charge of IT, office administration, and accounting. All in all, he’s a fairly agreeable guy. After the shitty day I had yesterday though, I do wonder what he might want from—
“The Godfather,” Nadine interrupts my train of thought.
The Godfather. That’s what we call G.E.E.’s proprietor and top executive. “Gabor?” I ask incredulously, and feel something tightening in my stomach. Conversations with Gabor tend to veer in directions I don’t find entirely comfortable. He’s a difficult man with strange viewpoints. “Do you know what he wants?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “No. Frau Schultheiss called you at around ten or so. And when she couldn’t reach you she called me. I said you weren’t at work yet and would probably be here a bit later.”
I try not to let on how much it annoys me that everyone turns to Nadine whenever they can’t reach me. The question is whether they only do so because she’s the department secretary, or because we were an item for so long.
“Five minutes after that,” Nadine continues, “she called back and said you should report to Gabor immediately after you arrive.”
Report to Gabor immediately … the tightening in my stomach intensifies. Could it have something to do with me having called in sick today? No, I don’t think so. Gabor has more than a hundred employees; he doesn’t concern himself with such trivial issues. It has to be something else. Well, I guess I’m going to find out very shortly.
In my office, I take a small suitcase out of my closet. My emergency luggage. It’s always there, all packed and ready to go, with all the essentials for last-minute business trips of two or three days’ duration. Toiletries, fresh underwear, socks. There’s also a spare shirt hanging in the closet.
I freshen up a bit in the bathroom next door and put on the shirt. Twenty minutes after arriving at the office, I head to the eighth floor to see Gabor.
As I enter the lobby, Eva Schultheiss looks me over in a way that seems to say she takes personal affront at my turning up here. Does she perhaps know the reason why Gabor has summoned me, I wonder?
“There you are at last,” she says indignantly. “You’ll have to wait, he’s in with someone right now.”
“No problem,” I respond, attempting a smile. I know that falling out of favor with Gabor’s secretary isn’t a smart move.
She reaches for the telephone, announces my arrival, and points toward the two leather armchairs by the opposite wall. “Take a seat.”
I nod and sink into one of the armchairs. Watch Frau Schultheiss tap around on the keyboard, a grave expression on her face.
* * *
Damn it, what the hell’s happening in my life all of a sudden? For two months now I haven’t been able to rid myself of the suspicion that Gabor’s trying to keep me down. And I only got wind of the fact that apparently I’m not even going to be involved in the closing of an important contract, by pure coincidence.
About three months ago, Gabor had been having problems with his private laptop. It had crashed. Instead of informing someone from first-level support, he’d summoned me, the head of the IT department.
It had been a malfunction in the energy saving mode, a minor issue, which had turned off the monitor.
I’d only caught sight of the open email for a few seconds before Gabor quickly closed it. But it was long enough for me to suspect something was going on that I wasn’t meant to know about.
The sender of the email, HvR, had been cryptic, and the subject line had read Phoenix completion.