The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (7 page)

Back to Bendini, Lambert & Locke and asshole lawyer guy. I didn’t have the time to whip up as good a concoction for him. First off, El Injerto is no longer available, due to rebel activity in that region. You can get it black market, but it’s up to 1,500 euros a pound, and that kind of price gouging is reserved for rappers who think eating contraband whale at a sushi restaurant is cool. I have a backup pound of Diablo Gold Coast from Colombia—Juan Valdez, baby.
Not only is this an amazing coffee, but it’s also inexpensive. Only twenty-two bucks a pound. Yeah, I know you can buy a pound of that free-trade Starbucks dreck for eight bucks a pop, but you might as well brew up a pile of hobo whiskers and call it a day.

So, I grind up the Diablo, pour some boiling Fiji water into a French press, and brew it black and strong. It’s inky and oily and
smells
like the victors of the Spanish American war
looked
. He takes one sip and raises an eyebrow. Now, some people say they like black coffee because they think it makes them manly, like saying you like cigars, even though they taste like rolled turds, no matter how expensive they are. But this guy is a true connoisseur of black coffee. Thank God, because if he hadn’t been, he might have been coughing up blood by now. He takes another sip, like a lion sucking marrow from the leg of a twitching gazelle.

“Intern maggot?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you are not at my desk at oh-seven hundred every single fucking day of the week with this coffee, I will personally see to it that the only job you ever get in the state of New York is the monkey shit shovel boy at the Bronx Zoo. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“John.”

“See you tomorrow, James.”

That afternoon, the admin who brought me up to the Barracks comes to tell me I’m being assigned to a different department—asshole lawyer’s department: Wills and Trusts. When I ask her if this means I can move out of my dank ass dungeon office, she just laughs and tells me not to push my dumb luck.

If you’ve ever wondered why death is so fucking complicated—not for the dead guy but for the family he left behind—it is because even the most expensive law firms love to charge exorbitant fees to
handle their Wills and Trusts but hate to do the actual work. They know that when you are dead, you aren’t going to do shit to them and neither is your blubbering, grief-stricken family. So they don’t care about fucking things up royally. My assignment was to update as many wills and trust documents as possible, based on the reams of legal addendum notes that someone bothered to type up after client meetings but never bothered to actually execute in the Wills and Trusts. You wouldn’t believe how many of the beneficiaries in these older wills were people who were already deceased. That’d be a kicker at the reading, right? Welcome to probate hell. Your golden goose just took it in the ass.

I gather up a truckload of the ancient file boxes that have been left to rot, sneak them out through the service entrance in a laundry cart, and take them back to HR, Inc. Now, with this type of shit, Bob is a fucking rock star. He has a team all ready for me, and these guys work ’round the clock popping dexies as they tackle the mind-numbing task of updating these documents. Bob may not be the best with providing intel—and never forget that is by choice—but he sure as hell is the king of field support. And with the paper-pushing cage match they had going over at the firm, I needed it more than with any other gig.

Needless to say, when I show up thirty-six hours later with no fewer than two hundred files updated and looking tip-top, I make an impression on Hartman
and
asshole lawyer guy. Normally, I am not into making impressions, but this gig, and probably my life, depend on me winning one of the three slots. So, through the weekend and over the next few days, I keep impressing them with the work. Hundreds of delinquent files that had been collecting dust and roach wings are now viable, and the partners can bill for the work! I am making them some money now, and with their base rate of $750/hour, I am making them
a lot of fucking money
.

I
am sitting in my cube, admiring the work Bob and his crack team have done for me that day, when none other than Bendini, one of the partners, walks up with asshole lawyer guy. Of course, asshole lawyer guy is playing the part of congenial business guy so that he can suck up to his boss. Bendini ignores him and gently places his hand on my shoulder. He is probably in his early sixties and looks like what I always imagined Geppetto, Pinocchio’s puppet maker “father,” had looked like. He is thin and fit, but his skin has some serious city miles on it. He wears a thick, old-timey mustache that is always in need of a trim. His watery blue eyes are shockingly kind, and I find myself depressed that I never had a real grandfather. This is the way he is looking at me, like a benevolent grandfather. He offers his hand. I stand and shake it.

“What’s your name, son?”

“John.”

“My son’s name is John.”

Fuck. Memory hook.

“It’s a good name.”

You can hear asshole lawyer guy’s eyes rolling a mile away.

“John, I’m having a hard time believing you’re just an intern.”

Double fuck. I know he doesn’t know why I’m there, but he’s complimenting me the way you compliment someone you believe is an undiscovered talent or star.

“I enjoy working here.”

“Well, you are doing a standout job. We’ve billed into six figures since you’ve been in Wills and Trusts.”

These guys love money more than their own children.

“My father was in Wills and Trusts.”

“He must have been a force to be reckoned with in your . . . hometown.”

Hometown
was well seasoned with snooty condescension. I’m not from the actual hometown he was referring to, but I felt offended and then congratulated myself for owning it.

“Thank you for saying so.”

“I came over to congratulate you on securing one of our three intern positions.”

Yes. Hell yes. There are three days left in the competition and I am already in. This will put me on many shit lists and radar screens, but FUCK IT, this is my last gig. They are never going to see me again. Now more than ever I am tempted to try to have a little bit of fun on this assignment, even though I know that’s a bad idea. You can’t assign fun to the murder of another human being. It just doesn’t work that way. I am telling you this because I don’t want you to ever get cocky. Ego is your worst enemy, and people will stroke it when you blow them away with your work ethic. But you have to let it go because it can start to cloud your judgment.

“Thank you, sir. I’m honored.”

“You’re welcome. A man of few words. Good.”

I just smile. I would be an idiot to speak after what he just said.

“I’ll see you around the floor.”

They both walk off, asshole lawyer yipping in Bendini’s ear like an annoying lapdog. Bendini looks back at me as they walk. It’s the look of a man who just found a diamond in the rough.

A
fter turning in my four hundreth viable file, Alice walks into my cube. She makes herself comfortable on my small desk, which improves my entire cube decor exponentially.

“Well, this is certainly an improvement on your previous assignment.”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I believe I owe you some beers and wings, counselor.”

She just got the associate position, beating out the Yalie douche. Now she’ll have infinitely more access than she did as an intern.

“Damn right you do. But we’ll have plenty of time for that, now that we’re working together.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s right. Evidently you’ve raised more than a few eyebrows around here with your hard work
and
new revenue stream.”

“And you’re here to make sure I don’t fuck it up.”

“No. I’m just here to help you turn over more volume. Greed is an insatiable mistress. Plus, I’ve been working for Bendini for most of my internship, and he thinks we’d make a great team.”

“Is that so?”

“Of course, you’ll still have to work in this Roach Motel, and I’ll have a cool junior associate’s office. Oh, and I’ll kind of be your boss slash slave driver. Technically.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Good answer.”

This is working out better than I expected.

As we begin work going through a fresh batch of files, I can’t believe my luck. I need intel and access, and Alice is my golden ticket. She is one of Bendini’s favorites, so I can use her to move closer to the center of his circle and eventually get a closer look at
all
of the partners. The only problem is, it’s all I can do to keep from constantly looking at
her
. This is dangerous territory. Alice is pretty, but pretty I can handle. It’s the raw sexuality that, like some exotic oil, seeps out of the invisible cracks in her conventionally beautiful facade that worries me. Oh, and let’s not forget that she is brilliant, interesting, and has the kind of dark, twisted sense of humor I like. I just have to work through it. Sleeping with office colleagues tends to make you a D-list watercooler celebrity. Suddenly all of your coworkers become that hair-plugged creep and his merry band of star fuckers on TMZ, making cracks about your office love affair over caramel macchiatos.

Rule #5: Don’t shit where you eat.

Bob has a saying about office romances: “If you fuck their brains out, you might as well blow their brains out.” To this day, I can’t prove it, but I’m sure Bob whacked a girl I was seeing on Job #17—“Eva.” She had nothing whatsoever to do with my assignment. She did work in the same office, but in a separate division twenty-eight floors above where I was working. And we never even saw each other at work, so it wasn’t like our little tryst was an egregious security breach. I met her at a coffee shop down the street—a rare gem that served real Turkish coffee. It wasn’t until after our second date that we even realized we worked in the same building. But Bob found out about it because his mission in life is to crawl up your ass and watch your
every move in an effort to, as he says, “minimize human error.” I think he does it to live vicariously through us, because he sold his youth to some cigar-chewing war dog on Parris Island.

Basically, like Bob, you are not allowed to be human. And dealing with Bob’s controlling bullshit is, without question, the most difficult part of this job. I would rather shoot my way out of a pitch-dark subbasement with one exit and a pellet gun than have to deal with that anymore. I remember the conversation we had about Eva. He said he was concerned that I was “distracted.” I reminded him of the sixteen flawless assignments preceding that one. He said I was getting cocky. I reminded him that I was twenty years old and needed something other than my AR-15 to cuddle at night. He said, “Get a pro, like everyone else.” And he handed me a slip of paper with a phone number.

That was the last time we spoke about Eva. He had not told me flat out to stop seeing her, so I did the stupid thing and ignored what I now understand was a warning. Two weeks later, after the assignment was finished, I tried to call her several times. Eventually I went to her apartment. The smell hit me when I walked up to her door. I know that smell. It’s sweet and sickening. A bottle fly—a huge, lazy black sucker that will travel hundreds of miles to dine exclusively on rotting flesh—buzzed past my ear and crawled under the door.

I stared at that door for a long time, imagining what Eva looked like in there, bloated with her face twisted in some final expression of agony and terror. And I thought long and hard about killing Bob. But when I walked out into the street, I felt like I was surrounded by buildings that seemed to be closing in on me, mocking me with their power, reminding me that they could crush me like an ant. At that moment I realized how insignificant I was, how utterly vulnerable and exposed. I would never kill Bob, but he had the power to erase me and what little identity or existence I had managed to carve out after all these years.

So I called the number on the slip of paper.

I know what you’re thinking. Sex with prostitutes is not only disgusting, but it’s a sign of failure, an overt confession that you no longer have the sand to attract even the most desperate of potential mates. And you’re right. But not in the way you think. The truth is that when your whole world is already a total fabrication and you’re a liar to everyone you meet, intimacy with an emotional cripple who has no feeling from the waist down is a primordial kick in the nuts. Fucking for real gives you hope that you can love someone, or be loved, on any level. Faking it will empty you like a gutted fish. As soon as I learned this, I burned the slip of paper.

The truth is that I am a killer. What I do is evil. And the fact that I brought a normal person into my carnival of madness is unforgivable. If I could apologize to Eva, I would. I can blame Bob all I want, but I am the one who opened that door. And by doing so, I killed her.

Rule #6: Don’t kid yourself.

I see assassins in movies all the time saying the people they kill have it coming. That’s Hollywood’s way of attempting to make people like us “relatable” and “sympathetic.” Look at
Grosse Pointe Blank
. John Cusack actually says that to Minnie Driver.

“If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there.”

That may be true and it often is. Look at the partner I am trying to zero in on at Bendini, Lambert & Locke. He is selling out the names of people who, for better or worse, are helping the police bring in people even more evil than me—people who truly erode the foundation of society and destroy every form of innocence. Without question, that fucker has it coming. Problem is, God almighty is not
going to strike him down with a lightning bolt. Unlike Job—who never did a damn thing wrong—this guy will not be attacked by a swarm of flesh-eating locusts on Central Park South. I will take his life, most likely in a brutal way that will damage me further and damage the people who have to clean up the mess. There is nothing good or noble or even cool about that. We are not antiheroes with a silver lining. And we are sure as hell not relatable or sympathetic.