Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Freshman year, in a fit of lunacy, he ran for class treasurer and was soundly defeated by some jock, a very public humiliation. When the election results came in, he went to his single in Swing and closed the door and ignored his classmates’ knocking.

It was a great embarrassment, but a useful one, he later decided. He loved politics but learned, that night, that some people aren’t meant to run for office. Some people get their picture taken, and some stand off to the side. He was the guy off to the side. He was the political junkie who could advise the simpler, denser, popular kid how to run and win. The popular kids, the charismatic, attractive ones with that hail-fellow-well-met gift that he so lacked, realized that he could be useful.

Will had been given a nickname, but it was not one he would have chosen. Freshman year, some hateful frat bro, noticing his slightly waddling gait, started calling him Penguin. As in, “Where’s Penguin?” And “Let’s get Penguin to do it.” He wanted to be liked, more than anything, but the best he could do was be the guy you have to be nice to.

He didn’t rush a frat; he knew better. When, during the fall of his junior year, a popular guy on his floor in Dorsey decided to run for student president against another popular kid, Will approached him and offered his services to “manage” his campaign. The kid, Peter Green, at first thought Will was kidding, then thought it over and said sure. Peter won, and when he gave his victory speech — really more like rambling, semicrocked ad-libbed remarks — he said, “And, hey, I owe you big, Penguin — I mean, Will.” It was nothing but a slip of the tongue on Peter’s part, Will told himself, and he pretended to laugh along with everyone else.

By senior year Will became president of the debating club, the Forensics Society — because no one else wanted the drudgery of the job. Which was something to put on his résumé when he applied for jobs on Capitol Hill. Along with dean’s list all eight semesters.

He knocked softly on her open office door. Senator Susan Robbins was sitting behind her glass-topped wooden desk, on the phone. She held up an index finger, gave him an even gaze as she said, “Yes, Chuck. Can do. Will do.”

Will waited in the doorway. She was a striking woman, with her auburn hair and cobalt-blue eyes. When she was in her twenties and thirties she must have been a knockout. At sixty-two she was still beautiful.

She was wearing her cerulean-blue suit, the one she wore when she was in combat mode. She always wore jewel-tone suits, whether skirts or pantsuits. Turquoise meant she was in a conciliatory mood. Emerald was for high-visibility hearings, when the TV cameras were there. Ruby was for evening functions and fund-raisers. He was probably the only person in the world who knew what Susan Robbins’s suit colors signified. He was probably the only one who cared.

She toyed with the coiled cord, swung it like a little lasso. “I understand,” she said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Bye.”

She put the phone down. “Come,” she said.

He entered and sat in the chair beside her desk. The senator had twenty-five years on him, and sometimes he felt like one of her sons: the good son. She had a fraught relationship with her older son and practically no relationship at all with her younger one. He wondered what it must have been like to have Susan Robbins as a mother. It couldn’t have been easy. As a boss she could be, well, a lot, but he felt toward her a fierce protectiveness, an abiding loyalty, as sticky as epoxy.

“Isn’t there some clever way to find my laptop?” she said. “Online, I mean.”

She was talking, he assumed, about Find My Mac, a feature on some Macs that allows you to use iCloud to locate a missing or stolen computer or iPhone. He was moderately surprised she knew about this. Unfortunately, their IT guy had disabled it on Susan’s MacBook, at her insistence, for security reasons.

“In theory, but it’s turned off.”

“So there’s no way to find it online?”

“Right. Our best bet is to contact whoever must have taken yours and arrange a swap.”

“But I have no idea whose computer this is.” She pointed to the laptop flat on the desk in front of her, a shimmering silver oblong. “It’s locked. How do we find out who it belongs to?”

Will reached out for it. She lifted it from the desk and handed it to him.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“I don’t think you realize how sensitive this is.” In a quieter voice, she went on: “If anyone finds out — it could be a felony. Not ‘it could be’; it is a felony.”

Will felt queasy. “But you’d never get prosecuted.”

“Don’t be so sure. The atmosphere today, it’s a career ender for sure. There must be some way to hack into it, to find out who owns it, right?”

Will put a palm up like a traffic cop. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s handled. ”

Tanner Roast occupied a large warehouse space on a side street in Brighton, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston. On one end were the loading bays and on the other a door marked only TANNER. As you entered, you smelled the coffee roasting.

Roasting coffee smells nothing like a coffeehouse. The air in a roastery could smell like wet straw. It was an organic, often not a pleasant smell. Tanner loved it.

But a single bad bean can spoil a whole lot, and you wouldn’t know until you started cupping. Which was what they were doing this morning, Tanner and his crew, which included his roaster, Sal Persico. Sal, a tatted giant of a man, was daintily removing small glass tumblers from a dishwasher. He had multiple piercings and full-sleeve tattoos and hands as big and ungainly-looking as baseball gloves but which were in fact precision instruments. He was an ex-con and looked like it.

When he’d first applied for work, he handed the employment application to Tanner with a kind of hangdog look. Tanner quickly discovered why: Sal had checked the box — the one you tick if you have a criminal record. Tanner asked Sal about the incident that had gotten him imprisoned for three years. Sal told him about the armed robbery he was dragged into as a teenager and sounded not just contrite but embarrassed at his own stupidity. “Well, you’ll find our coffee is better than the swill they serve at Cedar Junction,” Tanner had said. He told Sal he didn’t care about the felony as long he was as good at roasting as Tanner had heard.

They never again talked about the armed robbery. Sal was deeply grateful to Tanner. But Tanner wasn’t being magnanimous. He really didn’t give a damn about Sal’s conviction history. Tanner trusted his ability to size people up, and Sal was a good person. He also turned out to be the Mozart of coffee roasters, a true genius at it.

“Just six today,” he told Tanner, placing the cups in a line next to the Mahlkönig EK 43 grinder. “All Guatemalans.”

“I need to check something,” he told Sal. “Ready in ten?” Sal nodded.

His office, off the adjoining room, was decorated with a cheaply framed poster of red coffee berries growing and a map of the world with pinholes all over it. On another wall was an antique café mirror advertising Maxwell House coffee, which he used sometimes for shaving and sometimes just to sneak a glimpse at whoever was sitting in the visitor chair. He was a sales guy; he always studied his customers closely.

He’d been a top salesman at EMC, a big data-storage company in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, before he and Sarah had taken the plunge and invested their entire nest egg in a start-up venture called Tanner Roast. He loved coffee, loved the people he worked with, and counted himself lucky to be in a business he found so cool.