Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

On their way out of the bar, Mike and Mary Beth did not talk. Instead, she clutched his elbow and wondered if he had taken her interruptions as an attempt to sabotage the sale. She was a little bit angry, and the feeling suited her. She steamed over his attention to work, his morbid insistence on reminding people of their own upcoming death, as if he could never see beyond himself. He viewed every marriage, every partnership, in terms of its eventual collapse. Mike’s philosophy of sales meant convincing people to buy life insurance by thinking about nothing except death.

To Mike, twenty-plus years of selling insurance meant that the unthinkable always morphed into the inevitable. He would not even consider the alternatives. As they took the escalator down one level toward the raucous party sounds drifting out of the main ballroom, Mary Beth turned to Mike, and asked him, “Why don’t you ever draw more lines on that graph?” and when Mike gave her a questioning look, she continued. “In the whole time I’ve worked for you, all the times I’ve watched you close, you’ve never drawn a line on that graph for children.”

Mike stammered the beginnings of a defense, but Mary Beth raised her index finger, and he fell silent. “Someday you’ll realize that scaring the shit out of people maybe isn’t the best sales technique.”

“Death and taxes,” Mike said. “Why shouldn’t I be realistic with these people? I’m sorry, but the unthinkable happens. More often than you could ever believe.”

CADENCE WILLEFORD sold bomb-detection machines, behemoths the size of a delivery van, to large international airports in the U.S. They were designed to sniff the plastics, leathers, and ripstop nylons of checked baggage for the subatomic chemical taint left by certain types of Czech-manufactured high-tech explosives. Her job was to keep the nation’s airline passengers safe in the skies.

The job meant travel, big city to big city, three weeks out of four. And travel meant she’d adopted certain behaviors. She drank bourbon on the rocks, because her career meant selling $30-million machines to committees of older white men who were easily impressed by a woman who could hold her liquor. The men who bought the machines liked to jokingly offer questions about mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, and because she had a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins (she never mentioned that it was in English) and wore severe suits in navy or charcoal, their jackets winged with lapels that looked primed for takeoff like the vertical doors of an Italian sports car, they assumed she knew what she was talking about. She didn’t.

The technology was beyond her. It had taken only a few weeks for her to realize that she would never have to talk about subatomic particles and molecular traces and chemical off-gases. All she had to do was talk about liability, the implied question of who would be responsible for another Lockerbie, and the fact that the ED60 system was the only one of its kind, and she’d somehow accomplished the hardest part, which was to sell the first machine to the first airport. The others she could sell on fear; Cincinnati is protected, why not Denver? The rest fell in line, and she got a commission check from her company and a royalty for every year that the annual service contract was renewed. It was a more-than-comfortable living but not exactly a vocation. No one ever dreamed as a teenager about a life spent selling machines designed to detect the residue of explosive compounds.

Her professional life—hotel to hotel, airport to airport—left her catching bits of breaking news wherever she could, taking up residence in a frequent-flyer lounge to watch live coverage of a high-speed police chase, the aftermath of a tornado, the attempted rescue of a child trapped in an abandoned well.

She reconstructed each vagabond month from her day planner and a stack of wrinkled credit card receipts. Her vacations were financed with frequent-flyer miles and hotel points. On weekdays, she had become accustomed to deciphering what city she was in based on the newspaper she found in front of her hotel-room door. But sometime in the last year or so, the chains had all begun to deliver USA Today, so she was never sure where she was except that on this New Year’s Eve she was in Chicago, in a room on the twenty-seventh floor of the InterContinental Hotel. And because it was New Year’s Eve and a Monday, she decided to take some time off, relax.

Since Cadence wasn’t trying to make a sale, she’d been wasting time with this guy Chadley. A boy, really. A temporary measure. Cadence no longer trusted her own judgment—her judgment had led her to Richard MacMurray, and she was still questioning the wisdom of that decision. So for the past two months, Cadence had depended on a simple strategy to fill the hours that had once belonged to Richard; on Thursday nights, she met girlfriends to drink wine, eat prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and cornmeal-dipped calamari, and pretend to discuss the novel of the month. She stuffed her social calendar with happy hours and dinners out, reconnecting with the friends she had neglected as the infection that was her relationship with Richard grew. On one of those outings, Chadley made his move.

Chadley had presented himself on the first of December, a day to notice the oncoming winter’s lengthening darkness. Cadence tagged along with a bunch of younger coworkers to after-work drinks, standing in the crush at a bar that offered a view of the Georgetown waterfront. The event showed up on the shared electronic calendar of her department. Cadence often suspected that her presence wasn’t truly welcome, merely tolerated, and now the kids who worked for her didn’t have the temerity to disinvite her.

But hanging out for a half hour bought her some street credibility at work. She’d throw down her credit card for a couple of rounds for her team and leave early. It was, like so much of what happened in her adopted city, an elaborate charade. She figured on escaping in a taxi, undoing the damage of cocktails with a salad and, later, forty-five minutes on the treadmill that dominated the corner of her bedroom nearest her overstuffed closet.

The crowd made her anxious; she knew she was being appraised, hip deep in a line of men and women a decade younger. The conversations around her were about where to find the best bargain happy hour, who needed a summer share in a beach house at Dewey, and, for the younger women, how to avoid further inflaming the married creeps from marketing who populated middle management. Socializing with her coworkers might be less stilted if Cadence had adopted one of the staff assistants to mentor; she could choose from a horde of entry-level college graduates who came and went in regular cycles each September and June. They referred to themselves as cogs.

She had been preparing excuses for her departure when this boy wandered over, tilting toward her to ask loudly, “So here’s a typical Washington question. What is it you do? Who do you work for?” A wave of his drink came spilling over the edge of his glass, nearly hitting her, and she jumped about a foot backward. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry. I’m somewhat drunk.”

It felt like the first honest thing she’d been told in months. She decided then to answer him in kind. “I sell humongous, multi-million-dollar machines to the quasi-governmental entities that run our largest international airports,” she said.

“What kind of machines?”

“The kind that detect the subatomic residues of certain nonmetallic explosive compounds on passenger baggage.”

The look on his face told her he either did not understand or did not believe her.

“You sell freedom,” he said.

“Exactly. I sell the concept of safety. You can stop kids from shoving a .22 down their pants, and you can stop the guy from getting on board the plane with a parachute and a few sticks of dynamite, and you can reinforce the airframe so that a blast at altitude would require so much explosive that the mere bulk of it would make even the most narcoleptic security guard turn his head. You can train the pilot and the flight attendants in close combat techniques and put air marshals on every flight, and still no one is going to have faith.”