Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“Not for ovah a week now. But Dimitri come in every night, him and that Mata Hari girl he been datin’.”

“Does Tatyana box?”

“Naw. She just stretches and do that yoga stuff while he in trainin’.”

“But no Twill?”

Gordo shook his head and shrugged.

I got up to the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building at a few minutes before 7:00. Now and then I try to get into the office before Mardi. It’s a kind of competition for us. Though usually quiet, and always reserved, Mardi is likely to give me a certain look when I come in and she’s already there. The look says, You see? I am the better worker here. So now and then I like to come in early to stick out my tongue at her.

But when I turned the corner headed toward my office I forgot about the silly rivalry.

Standing there beside my office door was a medium-sized white man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He was five-seven or — eight but with bad posture and a sagging belly, though he was not overweight.

When he saw me approaching, the man forced a hopeful look into his depressed features. As I came up to him he said, “Mr. McGill?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Stent,” he said. “Hiram Stent.”

His features were what I could only call indistinct. There was no ridged border between his lips and the surrounding skin. His eyes were murky, neither brown nor green. And Hiram Stent’s skin was tan but not from day labor or last summer’s visits to the beach. His leathery rind came from long hours of overexposure and a little too much alcohol that worked to cure this finish from the inside out.

“Oh yeah.” I was working the first of seven keys on the office door. “Mardi gave you an early appointment. But you know, Mr. Stent, we don’t open till ten.”

“I didn’t know so I came early so I wouldn’t miss you or anything.”

I was pretty adept at the locks and so the door soon came open and I ushered my scruffy would-be client in.

I crossed past Mardi’s big blond desk and went to the metal door that protected the greater part of my office suite from the outside world. I placed my electronic card next to the little screen at the right side of the door. This caused a virtual number pad to appear. On this pad I entered the seventeen-digit code and the heavy door swung open.

“After you, Mr. Stent.”

As he went by I noticed two things: a scent and his shoes. The odor had a dry earthy bouquet that I remembered from when I was a happy child with a mother and a father playing in the dirt. The shoes were the real giveaway though; black at one time, they were now turning gray and wearing thin, almost shapeless from many more miles of walking than they were designed for. Those soles knew the pavement from long association and little or no respite.

“This way,” I said to my visitor.

I led him down the long aisle of empty cubicles toward my office.

“You have a large staff,” he said, looking from side to side at the empty desks.

“Only the receptionist and my son.”

“Then why all these offices?”

“I have the ambition of being a big fish one day. I figure if I have the room to grow there’s a chance it might happen.”

By then I was shepherding him into my office.

I went behind my extra-large ebony desk and sat with my back to the window that looked down the isle of Manhattan to the swirly new World Trade Center.

“Sit,” I told my guest, and he perched on the closest red and boxy office chair that Mardi said looked better with my black desk.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. McGill,” Hiram Stent said.

The man’s physical presence was a puzzle in itself. The hair on top of his head had turned a dirty blond. The tier under that was the brown of a pecan shell and there was a spotty ridge below that which was almost all gray. These layers showed that Mr. Stent was much in the sun, a natural brunet, and very possibly under great strain. He was no more than forty but some of those years had been long and hard.

I was silent while studying the middle-aged man.

He was getting nervous.

“I’d like to hire you, Mr. McGill,” he said.

“How did you find your way to me?” I asked.

“What do you mean, um, I took the number six train.”

“I’m asking you where you heard my name. I don’t advertise.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “I heard your name from a man called Rooster.”

“Red Rooster Collins?”

“I don’t know his full name.”

“Black man, red hair and tall?”

“That’s him.”

Rooster was a man I knew; not an important man but a well-connected one. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic and so often spent his time, when off his meds, in places that might house a man like Stent.

“How can I help you, Mr. Hiram Stent?”

There was a story behind his vague features, the burning coal of a problem that turned his stomach and kept him up at night. But when asked he was struck dumb.

“Why did you want to see me?” I said, hoping that a rearticulation of the question would loosen his tongue.

“My name is Hiram Stent,” he said. “I was the CFO of Lipsky, Van der Calm, Tryman, and Wills for twelve years.” He said these words and stopped, hoping to have made some kind of impact.

“Chief financial officer,” I said to urge him on.

“They’re an investment company,” he said, “specializing in midsized corporations and family businesses.”

“Okay.”

“Because,” he said, and then he cleared his throat. “Because most of the work is done on computers and the phone, Charles Wills decided that the firm should move to Wyoming, where real estate is cheap and so we could either lower costs or increase our assets. The downtown Manhattan landlord was raising the rent from six to sixteen thousand a month.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I noted.

“I guess it is. That’s why they decided to relocate. They offered to take me with them.”

“But you didn’t go,” I surmised.

“My wife didn’t like the idea and I... I thought that I could, I could get another job easily enough. I mean, I have an MBA and twelve years’ experience working for LVTW.”

“But that was the time of the market slump,” I said.

“Exactly, the economic slump,” he said, grabbing onto the phrase like it was a lifeline. “I couldn’t get work anywhere, anywhere. And even when things got better no one wanted a CFO who’d been unemployed for three years. I only knew how LVTW worked and I was too old for most entry positions. My wife took the kids and left to go stay with her family while I was job hunting. She connected with an old boyfriend...”

I didn’t need to ask anything; his story was as obvious as a pair of worn shoes.

“I kept looking,” he said. “When I asked Lois to come back she said no. When I called again she’d had her number disconnected. Her mother wouldn’t tell me where she went. I haven’t seen my children for two years.”

There were tears in his reptilian eyes.

“After a while I lost the condo on Thirty-third and now I stay in a rooming house on Flatbush in Brooklyn when I can get enough money together...”

“So why are you here, Mr. Stent?”

“Lois’s old boyfriend is a handyman. He doesn’t make much. I was being paid nearly two hundred thousand when LVTW moved out west. If I had that kind of money now I could buy a plane ticket and go down to Florida and get my family back.”

His tone was plaintive, his dreams the dreams of a child. I felt for the guy.

“But why are you here?” I asked.

“I need to get back on my feet, Mr. McGill,” he said. It seemed to me that he’d lost the thread of his purpose.

“And how could I help with that?”