David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Which’d make him a potential weak link.’

‘The sort who’s very shy and nervous around you but tries to be very bluff and hearty and outgoing but can’t manage it and so it’s excruciating for everyone. A jaw you could plow snow with.’

‘So Yeagle might be one of our boys if we’re going to fine-target Mel’s efforts in the initial stages.’

‘Plus eyebrows out to here. I kid you not. Tolkien-like eyebrows on a thirty-eight-year-old man. Very intense smile he feigns into trying to make it look like a wicked grin or grimace by drawing these incredible brows down. The sort that shakes your hand with both of his. A GS-13 but a Group Manager since second quarter ’78, so he may have something on the ball but I haven’t seen it. Not the sort of hard driver you’d expect from a Group Manager in an Exams Post.’

‘Glendenning promoted him?’

‘Yeagle’s records are sketchy. You might have somebody there pull down Yeagle’s whole file; his one here’s sketchy that I could find.’ Sylvanshine’s thumb was bleeding slightly and he looked about him for something unimportant to blot it on. Both he and Reynolds knew how very very different the substance and form of Sylvanshine’s report would be if he were speaking to Merrill Lehrl, and though there was no doubt that this irked Reynolds to some degree it in no way made up for the jocularity and its implication. They both knew accounts were not yet square. Sometimes Sylvanshine pictured himself and Reynolds as partners in a kind of courtly dance, very stately and prescribed, so that the tiniest variations were what communicated personality. ‘He and Sheehan are mildly interesting counterpoints in glad-handing. Can’t say I like either of them. Yeagle wore the same tie three days last week. Carries the pipe around with him even when it’s not going. Something that might have been a condiment stain on the tie. Don’t like him, that odd pendulous jaw. Saw him dab at a nostril with the back of his hand the other day.’

Throat-noise on the other end. Tiny bits of some conversation at the fringe of their bandwidth were audible in silences; they made Sylvanshine think of strands of hair in a dusty brush. The sink was piled with dishes and half-full cartons of Chinese take-out he’d sworn to himself he’d clean up two days ago; looking at the sink made it hard to inhale.

‘Tell Mel the best I can do is indications. Yeagle not yet a known quantity. Seems ineffectual, but that may be part of some larger strategic presentation. Recommend an Informal soonest after Mel gets in — loosen him up, get him talking. Possible. That’s as far out on the limb as I can go with Call Me Gary at this point.’

‘Anything re Glendenning himself yet then?’

‘Haven’t gotten in to see him. Busy guy. Constant motion. Seems purposefully busy instead of ineffectually or flailingly busy, which if it’s true it’s worth noting for Mel.’

‘Thanks.’

Not the thumb exactly, but it was true that Sylvanshine was now sucking the edge of his thumb. ‘Seen him in the halls of what-was-it, whatever building his and Sheehan’s offices are in. Disorienting place, the photos don’t do it justice for sheer podular confusion. Looks more like a small college or community college campus than anything. You do know my father taught at a community college.’

‘So when you saw Glendenning in these unrecalled halls then…’

‘Not much thus far. Tall silvery guy. Silver hair rigidly parted. The sort of older man you’d say “distinguished” or “formerly handsome.” Medium-tallish I’d say. Nose looked a bit big but that was in moving profile.’

‘Hey Claude, seriously, is there some process by which you decide I want to hear aesthetic appraisals? Is there reasoning by which somewhere inside you decide this is useful data to have in Mel’s head when he starts working with these people? Don’t strain now, but think about it and sometime tell me the process by which you decide I have to wait through incidentals on dress and carriage before I hear material that’s going to help me do my job here.’

‘ Your job, is the point. Boil it down. Reduce to fact-pattern, relevance. My job’s the raw data. Do I recall right? Was I the one who asked for the field first? Am I confused?’

But the distressed sounds were only Reynolds trying to get under the knot with his fingers to do the top button, which he had always had trouble with. Sylvanshine waited the normal interval looking at his thumb and trying to see if he could taste any actual blood — which taste always made him think of touching a nine-volt to his tongue as a kid but the exact association evaded him — and listened to at least try to identify the gender of the ghostly conversation on the line, and finally said:

‘Though his secretary — one of them, he seems to have two though one might be an Admin or liaison with the Group Managers — sent a memo, it’s in Mel’s in-box, Welcome and heard some fine things from Henzke re the skill of the turnaround at 0104—that’s Philly Collections, the Auto—’

‘You have to tell me that, I wasn’t there?’

‘—Henzke re the Collections turnaround at Philly, etc., please call Mrs. Oooley — that’s the head secretary — Mrs. Oooley soonest on your arrival and processing—’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? He has to go through orientation like some turdnagel?’

‘I don’t have it, it’s still in Mel’s box, which by the way it’s a good in-box, same size and same row as the ADDs’ and over the GM’s although it’s got Mel’s name on tape over some other fellow’s name but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything unless it’s still like that when he comes. And I’ve got SS putting his name on his door in that one building; I gave them the stencil personally tell him, and told them about the elevator thing so it’s on the ground floor. Tell him the door’s locked and the window outside’s locked and you can’t see through but from the distance of the doors on either side tell him it seems spacious. Unfortunately nearest loo’s third floor; have him advise if we want to risk making a fuss about that, but it’s corner just as requested. No boiling down there, you know he’ll want that. Tell him the doors on either side are 15 and 16.4 and change, respectively, which is almost Philly-sized.’

‘You let them see you using a tape measure on the surrounding doors?’

‘Don’t be a maroon. I’ve got a front door key already and keys to two of the remaining four. At night before returning to field-quarters you and I need to have a good long talk about before you see it and get your shorts in a tangle. Angler’s Cove apartment complex. Enough said? Makes the first Rome apartment look lavish, to give you an—’

‘The memo was from the secretary or from Glendenning personally you’re saying.’

‘The bad news is it’s not in the main building, where Glendenning and the DDs’ officers are, whatever it’s called. They’ve got an odd nomenclature for facilities here just like Chicago.’

‘This is still Mel’s office you’re talking about.’

‘I’m going right down my notes just as field protocol you might recall states and the way you did in Rome. I’m afraid it’s in the outbuilding where they do the Corporates; it’s also got the UNIVAC in there. The building’s a bit of a madhouse I’m afraid. The first floor where all the offices for the keypunch people are. You just need to get Mel ready for this so he doesn’t come and see where they put him and start shitting little green men about it.’

‘And you may recall initial field-briefing calls are to be ten to twelve minutes, if you’ve memorized the protocol.’ Sylvanshine knew just what Reynolds was doing physically at this minute but he couldn’t think of what the right word for it was, even to himself. Nor was he talking about losing his license in the bank’s drive-through yesterday, which really when you came down to it might be Merrill Errol Lehrl’s concern but was not Reynolds’s concern by any stretch of the imagination, though he knew what he’d say. Sometimes Sylvanshine’s thumbnails had funny little white calciumoid lines in them, sometimes they didn’t. He worried about it at odd moments, what the lines signified. Not adjusting, smoothing, smoothing his tie, which if it was Saturday would be either the light green or the light blue with the little red lozenge shapes in it, both of which were faux silk and butt-smooth at all times anyway. It was an unconscious gesture Reynolds had, and worked as a tell in cards, and Sylvanshine had sacrificed all sorts of opportunities to score off bringing it to Reynolds’s attention because he didn’t want Reynolds conscious of his unconscious gestures in any way, since reading them equaled power. In Martinsburg Sylvanshine had the bigger bedroom because the lease was in his name, but in field-quarters Reynolds always got the bigger room. This time, Angler’s Cove’s squalor aside, the bedrooms were exactly the same size, the door-distance wasn’t the only thing Claude had measured, and he knew what Reynolds’s face would do when he saw. Merrill Errol Lehrl always arranged his own quarters.