The Assistants(11)

“With lime,” he mouthed through the glass walls of his office.

That meant tequila. Before noon. It was going to be a long day.

A lesser man than Glen Wiles would have crumbled beneath the stress of such a meeting, but fortunately Wiles, like Robert, thrived on pressure, ambition, and cutthroat competition. On money, basically. So much money. Glen Wiles was a blundering brute, whereas Robert was a stickler for good manners, but aside from that, they were pretty much on the same page. Politically, they were two sides of the same coin, and that coin had better be free of government regulation of any kind.

When I brought them their drinks Robert had been talking about the islands—which he abruptly stopped doing the moment I entered the room.

“Thank you, Tina,” he said, and then waited for me to exit before finishing his sentence.

I didn’t understand half of what upset Robert about the islands on a daily basis, but taxes were his only true archenemy—that much I understood. Reporters from the liberal papers were always criticizing Robert for his “offshore tax havens” and “abuse of tax loopholes,” so I knew not to discuss the Caymans or Bermuda with anyone. I’m pretty sure it was in my employment contract that just uttering the words Cayman Islands or Bermuda in a voice louder than a whisper could get me fired immediately.

I returned to my desk, watching the tiny rainbow speckles in the carpet, imagining myself as one of those hear-no-evil monkeys with his nimble monkey thumbs lodged in his ear holes. A g-chat message from Emily was waiting for me when I sat down.

I have to talk to you about Kevin Handsome, she’d written.

And when I hadn’t written back, she’d added: Seriously.

Almost immediately Kevin then g-chatted me. Hiya.

Hiya, I wrote back, as I always did.

Then Emily chatted again. I won’t be ignored.

I blocked her because this was more social multitasking than a woman no longer in her twenties could handle, but a second later my phone started to ring.

“I’m going to kill you,” I said aloud while reaching over to smack the silence button—but my fingers came to a halt. It wasn’t Emily. My caller ID informed me of the worst: it was Margie Fischer.

Margie Fischer was the Titan Corporation’s long-suffering head of accounting. She controlled Titan’s purse strings. That was her job, watching the numbers, and everyone did their best to stay out of her way (even Robert, I was pretty sure). Margie was gruff and couldn’t have cared less what was appropriate in terms of social interaction, which made people very nervous. You could never be sure what would come out of her mouth, but more often than not, it would be a scolding of some sort. Once she’d caught me in the Titan cafeteria taking a whiff of the half-and-half before pouring it into my coffee and she boomed from behind me, “What are you sticking your nose in that for!”

I stuttered an explanation of how I was only checking to make sure it was fresh, but Margie wasn’t having it.

“You think anybody wants to use that now that you’ve stuck your face into it?” Her voice was like a cannon blast. Heads from as far away as the action station turned.

Never one to think clearly under pressure, the best defense I could come up with in the moment was, “Nobody but me uses the half-and-half anyway. Everyone around here uses skim.”

Margie’s face dropped.

This was the absolute wrong thing to say for a slew of reasons, not the least of which was that Margie, who had in fact been waiting for the half-and-half, was on the heavy side. A less-polite person might describe her as very fat. I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling Margie fat to her face, or even behind her back—but I may as well have done just that with my half-and-half comment. She’d had it in for me ever since.

And now she was calling me for no good reason I could think of.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I pressed my desk-phone’s mute button ever so gently and watched the accusatory red light above the keypad blink on and off like a soundless alarm. I must not have moved or breathed for a full minute after the blinking stopped because I was light-headed and seeing spots when my cell phone’s vibration snapped me back to reality.

It was a text message from Emily: Margie Fischer from accounting jst called me. We’re fkd.

I immediately texted back: What did she say?

Emily wrote: I didn’t answr.

So how do you know we’re fkd? I was about to write back, but of course we were. How could we not be? If there was anyone at Titan capable of figuring out our expense account scheme, it was Margie.

Kevin’s chat momentarily averted my attention: Coffee break later today?

Then a burly voice behind me said, “Knock knock.”

My cell phone was still in my hand. Margie pointed at it with her thick, stubby pointer finger. “You must be texting with Emily,” she said. “Is that why neither of you could answer your desk phones?”

I slipped my cell into my bag and glanced quickly at Robert, who was still busy barking at Wiles in his office, then swiveled my chair away from him to face Margie. “Hi there,” I said as cheerfully as I could while resisting my gag reflex. “What can I do for you?”

I guessed Margie Fischer was probably in her sixties, but it was difficult to tell because she dressed like an old Jewish man from Long Island, which adds a decade no matter what your age.

“I was calling to confirm our lunch date today at Michael’s,” she said. “Is one o’clock still good for you and Emily?”