Always (5 page)

All rather disingenuous, of course, given the demographics of attacks against women, but at the beginning it’s important to keep things simple and not scare them to death.

“In the next class we’re going to role-play a little. We’ll learn how attackers think and what they look for, and what you can do about that. Meanwhile, I’d like you to do something for me before the next class. Make a list of all the reasons you wanted to learn self-defense in the first place. All the things you or your mother or your friends worry about. Put them in a column. In the column next to them put what you’d be willing to do to your attacker to stop it. So, for example, decide if you would rather be raped than feel the rapist’s eyeball burst all over your hand. Decide if you would rather blow someone’s head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun rather than let them pinch your backside. Decide whether you’d be willing to let a teenager torture your cat instead of dislocating her shoulder, whatever. It won’t be easy. But think about it as clearly and fully as possible, and decide. ”

I WOKE EARLY, STILL ON ATLANTA TIME, SHOWERED, REREAD BETTE’S FAX, SAW
her note at the end, and called. I was shunted straight to her voice mail, which surprised me. Bette was almost always at work. It’s how I imagine her: behind her big teak desk, lizard brown and stick thin, chin wattles hidden by pearls, her Prada and Chanel suits always two years out of date. Seven years ago she had looked sixty-five; she still did. I dialed her home number and she picked up on the first ring.

“Aud? Well, hell, somebody call Ripley’s. You did as I asked for a change.” Her incongruously lush, Lauren Bacall voice was always startling. “You signed those papers I gave you last week?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I spent a hell of a lot of your money making those adoption papers watertight. Sign or not, you’re getting a bill.”

I ignored that. Laurence had probably paid her already.

“Well, you talked to OSHA yet?”

“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

Silence, one of her go-for-broke silences. I knew what was coming.

“So. When you going to get around to telling me about that envelope from Norway?”

“Bette . . .”

“Now don’t ‘Bette’ me, not this time. I didn’t trouble you with it last year because your friend just died. I didn’t trouble you with it when you came in for your year-end taxes because you still looked thin and peaky. I didn’t even trouble you with it last month, when you were here to talk about your will and power-of-this and power-of-that, because of that mess with your student. But, look, sweetie, it’s been a year—”

“Not quite.” Not until the seventeenth.

“—you’re looking good again, and I need to know just what it is I’m holding in my safe. It smells bad, for one thing.”

The day I had written that letter, had bled all over the envelope, Julia had still been alive. Twelve hours earlier she had sat on my lap in her blue dress . . . Or had it been grey? And I couldn’t remember how she’d worn her hair.

I heard the faint tick-tick that meant Bette was fiddling with her big clasp earrings, which also meant she was frowning.

“It was a kind of insurance. I don’t need it anymore.” Most of the people named in the letter were now dead.

DORNAN AND I
ate breakfast in the hotel’s huge dining room cantilevered out over Elliott Bay. There wasn’t much to see; the bay was draped in low cloud and fine rain like mist. I ate bacon and eggs and sausage. Dornan, tourist book on one side and maps on the other, crunched happily on toast. His fireplace, he said, had a remote control, and someone had thoughtfully provided a teddy bear. “Of course, I didn’t find it until I crawled under the covers, when I got the fright of my life.” I added a little salt to my eggs. “Do you have a bear?”

“I have little rubber ducks in my shower.”

“I went for a walk this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a proper morning. Bless the time difference. Did you know there’s a nice park near here? And dozens upon dozens of little espresso carts selling latte and Frappuccino—Frappuccino in this weather.”

It would be in the high sixties today, about twenty degrees cooler than in Atlanta. I ate some more sausage.

“What do you want to do? It’s not the sort of day to play tourist in the outdoors,” he said.

He had lived most of his life in summers like this, in Dublin, and I had grown up in Norway and England. But I’d been in Atlanta since I was eighteen, and Dornan only a few years less. Sometimes the body acclimatizes so thoroughly that we forget things have ever been different.

“I have some business. We could meet for dinner. You?”

“I consulted the very nice concierge, who tells me that once you’re downtown you can ride the buses for free.” Free was a magic word for Dornan. “I thought that if I might persuade you to drop me somewhere I’d spend the day doing my research: eating and drinking and absorbing whatever it is that makes Seattle . . . well, whatever it is.”

The name of the very nice concierge turned out to be Pascalle, and after breakfast she told me that, yes, the Audi A8L Quattro I had ordered had arrived twenty minutes earlier, and here were the keys.

THE AUDI
felt like a banker’s car: beautifully machined, competent but not compassionate, giving the driver a sense of admiration but not involvement. The six-speed transmission had very sensitive shift-mapping, matching revs on the downshifts, moving for an instant to neutral and selecting the lowest gear. It was almost as seamless as a manual transmission. I switched briefly to the hybrid manu-matic, then switched back. Too fussy. So was the MMI, the multimedia interface. I turned off the navigation and turned on the radio. Rain spattered the windshield and was automatically wiped away. I rolled up all the windows except the one on the driver’s side.

THE OCCUPATIONAL
Safety and Health Administration deals mainly with employers, the leaseholders rather than owners of any particular piece of real estate. The offices of Region Ten, OSHA, were on Third Avenue. The lobby was the kind one would expect of an office building in any big city, hard floors, steel-doored elevators, people carrying briefcases. But every other person walking across the echoing space carried a go cup, and business attire was casual, Eddie Bauer slacks speckled with rain. Many, I guessed, had used public transport and then walked. In my Armani suit I cut through the crowd like a hammerhead among trout.

The OSHA suite was on the seventh floor. I lied to a perfectly nice man called Michael Zhao, expressing extreme concern for my cross-shipping facility on Diagonal Avenue South, in the Duwamish district, professing an overwhelming affinity for statistics, and asked for CFR citation and OMB control numbers regarding intermodal containers, confined and enclosed spaces, conveyors, docks and loading docks. I smiled winsomely and asked if he’d be willing to let me take a peek at the records for my place, and had he any experience himself of walk-through inspections? He talked happily for two hours.

The EPA, on Sixth, was another matter. It was a much bigger operation, for one thing. The woman I eventually found my way to was about fifty with faded red hair and shoulders that slumped more from weariness than habitual bad posture. Her nameplate read Antonia Merrill. I nodded sympathetically at the empty cubicles around her and said, “It looks as though this year’s budget cuts are hitting you hard. I’m hoping I can help you with at least part of your workload.”

KARENNA BEAUCHAMPS CORNING,
my local property manager, had an office suite on the twenty-third floor of Two Union Square. The door to Corning’s suite was frosted glass, the handle substantial. The young man at the front desk looked up when I walked in.

“Good morning?” he said, not sounding too sure. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t carrying a briefcase. He glanced at his appointment book.

“Which is Ms. Corning’s office?”

“It’s the first on the l—That is, is she expecting you?”

“No, but I doubt I’ll take more than an hour of her time. If she has any other appointments, it would be best to cancel them. I take my coffee with cream, no sugar.” He paled before he flushed.

The door to Corning’s office was solid-framed oak. She looked up from her keyboard, and then past me. “Where’s Gary?”

“At the front desk.” I shut the door and took a seat opposite. She frowned.

“Is he all right?”

“My name is Aud Torvingen. Of Total Enterprises.”

Her frown flickered, then deliberately eased into a smile that was just a touch quizzical. It was nicely done. “Ms. Torvingen. I’m surprised, of course, but . . .”

She waited for me to apologize for the inconvenience. “Diagonal Avenue South,” I said. “Revenue from my property there is sixty percent below that of comparable properties.”

She smiled. “It does sound bad, doesn’t it? But Seattle has been hit harder than many cities by the recent slowdowns. The last two years have been hard on the import and export of goods in particular, which will of course have a great impact on cross-shipping facilities.” My silence seemed to encourage her. “In addition, I’m afraid your property has suffered by comparison with the recent upgrades undertaken by most of your competitors. You may recall that I recommended we follow suit some time ago. As it is, we had to let it on a short-term lease to a movie production company. ”

She held her up her hand, as though I were about to interrupt her.

“But, you’re probably thinking, there’s been no shortage of tenants. And that’s true. But while it was certainly the case ten years ago that a company that signed a lease would have been a sure thing, times change. Productivity is the key in this business, as in many others, of course, and companies will spend a great deal to abandon a seemingly profitable position if they can increase their long-term productivity by breaking a lease and moving to new premises. Particularly if there’s been trouble with regulatory agencies.” She smiled and picked up the phone. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Does that usually work?”

She stopped, finger an inch above the intercom button. “Excuse me?”

“The smile and the patter, does it usually work?” There was a tap at the door and Gary came in. The spoon on the saucer rattled a little as he put the coffee on the desk. He left without saying a word and I realized I hadn’t thanked him.

“I’m sorry?” Corning said, staring at the gently steaming cup.

“I’m not particularly interested in an apology. You’re fired. I have already instructed my attorney to that effect.” I stirred and sipped. Just the right amount of cream. “However, I would like to know why you have let one of your valued clients lose money hand over fist for more than eighteen months. Or perhaps I’m not the only one?”

Her eyelids swelled slightly. “It is not within my power to control calls to OSHA and the EPA.”

“You’ve been in this business for a long time and know everyone in the relevant local bureaucracies—city, county, state, and federal. It is within your power to mediate with those agencies. It is within your power to apprise me of developments. It is within your power to negotiate with the leaseholders towards a satisfactory outcome.”

“The regulations—”

“Don’t matter much, as you know. If they did, the relevant agencies would have prevented you from leasing the facility anew each time and taking your percentage.”

“If you’re suggesting—”

“What I want from you is a full and frank explanation of the situation and I’d like it by Monday. Do you think that’s possible?”

“The situation is extremely—”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can of course find out for myself, though in trying to duplicate what you already know I might inadvertently dig up all kinds of information you would rather keep private, and which I would have no compunction in turning over to the authorities. Take a minute to think it over while I finish this excellent coffee.” I sipped while she wrestled with whatever conscience she had left.

"It’s possible.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.” I stood. “Monday. Nine o’clock sharp.”

Walking down Third Avenue to the car, I passed a chocolate boutique. I stopped and ordered a dozen truffles which I sent, along with an apology for my rudeness and thanks for the coffee, to Gary.

NEXT ON
my list was the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where my mother and her new husband would be staying. The hotel was set back a good twenty yards from the street behind a U-shaped driveway. Even on a sunny day the huge building would keep the doorway in shade.

The events manager was in his early twenties and a zealot. He declared he would show me around personally, and proceeded to do so, leaving no function room unturned, beginning with the ballroom, “which, should you choose to celebrate your special day with us, is as you see more than adequate to accommodate a wedding party of up to three hundred.” From there we admired the “sweeping staircase, perfect for those unforgettable moments.” He actually clasped his hands to his chest. He regurgitated the publicity brochures while I noted guest and staff exits, elevator and stair distance, and window placement. He did pause in his flow when I insisted on sitting at four different tables in the formal Georgian Room, “just to get the feel of the place.” I found two tables that gave a view of all entrances and exits. The tiny private dining area, “The Petite, for more intimate dining, ” gave me a few concerns, but Shuckers, the pub-like oyster bar, was easy enough to parse. Then it was on to the lounges, the Terrace, and the Garden, “winner for three years in a row of the Seattle Best Martini Award, a light and airy atrium featuring innovative finger foods, an assortment of cocktails, and jazz from nine till one a.m.” Perhaps in the evening, with the right lighting and a band to disguise the echo, it would feel less like a grandiose greenhouse.