You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (6 page)

‘Oh, fine. Nothing much happening. I broke up with Nikki, of course.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Tony. Who the bloody hell is Nikki?’

‘My girlfriend.’

‘I thought that was Sarah.’

‘Sarah? Bugger me, that’s going back a bit. How long is it since you last called me, anyway?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Nor me. Is it hurting yet?’

‘Don’t think so. But I was talking to someone just now, and I suddenly got this really bad headache, and I was wondering, was it just the phone, or what?’

‘I see. So, do you want me to carry on talking? I could tell you about my new MP3 player, it’s got—’

‘No, thanks, I think that’ll do. How’s your mum, by the way?’

‘Oh, fine. How’s your lot?’

‘Same as usual. Right, sorry to have bothered you.’

Not the phone, then. Colin was also inclined to discount the alien theory, at least for the time being. How about a fault on the other end of the line; something wrong with her phone? The obvious way of testing that hypothesis would be to call Cassie back, but he shied away from that. Probably best to let the whole thing go, pretend it hadn’t happened. He was really good at doing that, turning a blind mind’s eye to things he couldn’t or didn’t want to try to understand. It was, he reckoned, a skill that came with living in a house with a bloody great big tree growing right up through it.

About that tree— No, this wasn’t the time or the place. He’d lived with it for twenty-five years, and had long since learned the knack of not seeing it. He’d asked about it exactly twice; once the other night, and once when he was seven, the first time he’d had a little friend back for tea. The little friend had said, ‘Why have you got a tree growing up through the middle of your house?’ and Colin had realised that he didn’t know the answer.

Looking back, he realised he’d assumed it was perfectly normal, that everybody had trees growing up through their houses, but the little friend’s reaction gave the lie to that assumption, so he’d asked Dad, who hadn’t replied. Furthermore, he’d not replied with such a ferocious scowl that Colin had resolved never to raise the subject ever again; and for eighteen years he’d kept to his resolution, even when he noticed - he was eight or nine at the time - that although the stupid thing’s trunk went all the way up into the loft (he’d been up there one time with Dad, to hold the torch for him while he saw to a jammed ballcock) there was nothing to be seen of it from outside the house. Which was odd, even to a kid who’d still believed in Father Christmas when his classmates had already discovered tobacco, strong drink and the opposite sex. Trees don’t just stop, unless someone goes out of his way to trim bits off them, and he couldn’t remember ever having seen Dad coming down out of the roof with secateurs or a pruning saw, let alone bits of amputated tree.

Still. It couldn’t be important, could it? He’d lived with it this long and nothing had come of it. There was probably a perfectly rational explanation that he alone was too stupid to see, and he’d only embarrass himself by admitting his ignorance.

Colin went home. Dinner, telly, bed. When he was asleep (he snored) his father, quiet as a little mouse, crept up to the top landing, opened the loft-flap, pulled down the folding aluminium ladder and climbed up it. Over his shoulder was an empty sack.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Ms Schwartz-Alberich,’ the stranger said, with a patronising grin. ‘Come in, take a seat. Thanks for your time.’

Connie folded herself neatly into the small, straight chair on the other side of the desk, and put down the buff-coloured file she’d brought in with her.

‘Your time, actually,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Anyhow, what can I do for you?’

The stranger’s grin didn’t increase or diminish, but its curvature shifted slightly. Good, Connie thought, I’ve annoyed him. She was a great believer in Potter’s Law (the first muscle stiffened is the first point won). ‘First,’ he said, in that salad-dressing voice of his, ‘I’d like to make it absolutely clear that there’s nothing at all sinister about this. We’re not looking to make any compulsory redundancies or anything like that -‘ he lifted his head, and the morning light glanced off the steel rims of his glasses ‘- at this stage. This is purely a routine exercise to help us to get to know you, and vice versa. Are you okay with that?’

Ah, Connie thought, threats. Threats I can handle. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘What a very good idea. Fire away.’

‘Now then.’ The stranger looked at her, blinked like a lizard. ‘You’ve been with the firm for let’s see—’ Glance down at dossier open on desk. Connie could, of course, read upside-down words almost as easily as right-way-up ones, a skill she’d learned long ago when she first began attending meetings with colleagues, clients and other enemies. ‘Gracious,’ the stranger said, ‘thirty-two years.’

‘Thirty-four,’ Connie replied. ‘Look, it says on your bit of paper, nineteen seventy-one. Two thousand and five take away one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-one is thirty-four.’ She smiled pleasantly.

‘Thirty-four years.’ The stranger moved his sleeve to cover the dossier. ‘Quite a long time, then.’

Connie shrugged. ‘Actually, I’m a relative newcomer, compared with John or Dennis or Cas.’ Dropping the first names of the ex-partners was a tactic that she’d been planning to save till later, but since the hostility level was escalating rather more sharply than she’d anticipated she thought that she might as well deploy it straight away. It only takes one trick, as her whist-playing aunt used to say. ‘And Benny Shumway’s been here, what, forty-seven years, and Peter—’

‘Quite.’ The stranger frowned. ‘I see that you’ve spent most of your time at the San Francisco office.’

‘Seventeen years,’ Connie replied promptly. ‘And I was sorely pissed off when young Dennis ordered me home, trust me. Still, I can’t blame him, what with all hell breaking loose.’

‘Ah.’ The stranger looked at her again. ‘You liked it out there.’

‘Well, I was more or less running the office, wasn’t I?’ Connie said. ‘Sure, Kurt Lundqvist was nominally in charge most of that time, being a partner and all, but of course he wasn’t doing any work, or anything else much.’

‘You liked being your own boss?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ Connie replied. ‘More a case of being able to get on with my work without people interfering. Much more efficient.’

The stranger nodded. His dossier obviously told him how successful and profitable the San Francisco office had been during her tenure there, because he changed the subject. ‘So, has it been hard adjusting to being back here again?’

‘Nah.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve known all of this crowd for yonks -apart from young Cassie, of course - and the work’s exactly the same, over there or back here. But the coffee and doughnuts were better.’

Meanwhile, she was guessing at his age. Difficult to tell with someone so reptilian, but almost certainly the unfashionable side of forty. Not that it mattered, but she liked to ground her assessment of people in basic data, and as she got older herself she found age increasingly significant. ‘Fine,’ the reptile said. ‘Now I’d like to talk a bit about how you feel about your place in the team.’

‘Which team?’

He frowned. ‘Well, JWW, of course. I don’t—’

‘Sorry,’ Connie said brightly, ‘thought you were talking about the pub quiz. We have a showdown with Mortimers twice a year; deadly serious stuff, as you’d expect. We lost last year, so obviously next time it’ll be to the death. Sorry, I interrupted you.’

So he didn’t know who Mortimers were; she could tell from his expression. Interesting.

‘We like to think of JWW as a team,’ the reptile said, broadening his smile until Connie was sure that his teeth were about to fall out. ‘All of us pulling together, working for common goals on a level playing field. We believe—’

‘Sports imagery,’ Connie interrupted. ‘I get you. Jolly good. Go on.’

He subsided for a moment or so, just a little. ‘Ms Schwartz-Alberich,’ he said, ‘where do you see yourself in, say, five years time?’

‘Oh that’s an easy one,’ Connie said cheerfully. ‘Let’s see, quarter past eleven, so at this precise moment, five years from now, I’ll be wheeling my little wire trolley round Tesco’s, filling it up with cat food. I haven’t got a cat,’ she added, ‘but I’ve always promised myself I’ll get one when I retire. Mysterious old hags living alone in remote country cottages always have cats, it’s traditional.’

The reptile blinked. ‘Ah. So you’re planning to retire at—’

‘Sixty,’ Connie said promptly. ‘Till then, I guess I’m just clinging on limpet-fashion for my pension.’ She smiled. ‘And there you have it.’

‘I see.’ The stranger breathed out slowly through his nose. ‘Well, I appreciate your frankness. Of course, we like to see a fresh, achievement-oriented attitude in our team players, which—’

‘Well, of course you do,’ Connie chirruped. ‘And if you care to look at your bit of paper there, top left-hand corner, more or less where your watch is, you’ll see exactly how much I achieved for the firm in the last fiscal year. Fourteen per cent up on the previous year, and that was when Dennis was doing most of it himself. I like to keep busy,’ she added. ‘It helps pass the time.’

‘Impressive,’ the stranger said sourly. ‘Nevertheless, one thing we do insist on in our team is commitment, a hundred and ten per cent—’

‘Absolutely,’ Connie interrupted. ‘I’ve always said, there’s nothing so boring as sitting behind a desk picking your nose all day. Trouble with me is, I work so fast - wonderful powers of concentration, it’s a knack I was born with, I guess - I get through it all so quickly that it’s hard to make it stretch out to five-thirty sometimes. We’re all a bit like that here, really.’

‘Moving on,’ the stranger said, ‘what would you say is your greatest weakness?’

Connie thought for a moment. ‘Kryptonite,’ she said. ‘Other than that, I can handle most things.’ She paused. ‘That’s the green kryptonite,’ she went on. ‘The red stuff used to bother me a bit but these days I can just sort of shrug it off, mostly.’

Long silence. ‘Thank you,’ the reptile said, ‘this has been extremely useful, and I hope—’

‘Oh, is that it?’ Connie pulled a sad face. ‘Pity. It’s ever so much more fun than what you actually pay me for. Can we have another go soon, please? Oh, hang on,’ she added, ‘you’re supposed to ask me if there’s anything I want to ask you. It says so, look, on your bit of—’

‘Another time, perhaps,’ the reptile said. ‘I’ve got an appointment at half-past.’

‘But it’s only twenty-five—’

‘Thank you so much for your time.’

Connie stood up. ‘Not a bit of it. Ah well, back to the coalface. Nice meeting you, Mr—’

Mister didn’t say anything; not, at least, until her hand was on the door handle. Then he called out, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot.’

‘Yes?’

‘Here,’ he said. He was holding out a little plastic bag, sealed with sticky tape. ‘For you.’

‘Oh.’ Connie hesitated, then went back and took it from him. About the size and feel of a large apple turnover. ‘What’s this for?’

‘Appropriate occasions,’ the reptile answered, and in his small round eyes there was a tiny flicker of satisfaction snatched from the jaws of frustration. ‘Goodbye.’

Back in her office, Connie ripped the bag open and retrieved from it a baseball cap, one-size-fits-all. It was fluorescent green, and on the front was a bright orange logo made up of the letters JWW, hideously twisted together, as though they’d been melted in a fire. Under the logo was printed, also in orange: The A Team

Connie stared at it for a full five seconds before shoving it in the bottom drawer of her desk, which she then locked. Hmm, she thought, that’s right. Like the old saying goes: never underestimate a bastard.

‘Well,’ Cassie demanded, ‘how did it go?’

Connie handed her a mug of tea and sat down. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it was fun.’

‘Fun.’

‘Fun.’ Connie nodded. ‘Thinking about it, I could’ve been just a teeny bit stroppier if I’d really tried, but I’d have had to set fire to his tie or squirt shaving foam up his nose, something like that.’

‘You were stroppy.’

‘Very stroppy.’ Connie ladled two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a pencil.

‘It was basically, “If you want to fire me, here’s two dozen perfectly good excuses, and if you don’t, piss off playing silly games and let me get on with some work.” I remain unfired. You’ve got to be firm with these people, or else they’ll make your life a misery.’

‘I see,’ Cassie said neutrally.

‘On the other hand,’ Connie conceded, ‘he did give me a baseball cap.’

Cassie blinked. ‘A what?’

‘Here, see for yourself.’ Connie removed it from the drawer, using thumb and forefinger-tip only, and laid it on the desktop like a cat delivering a nicely matured dead mouse. ‘In particular I’d like to draw your attention to the colour.’

Cassie frowned. ‘It’s revolting.’

Connie nodded. ‘There are some pretty sick minds in this world,’ she said. ‘It’s also about twenty years behind the times, isn’t it? I thought all this crap went out with paintball weekends and motivational t’ai chi on the roof every morning.’

‘I believe it sort of goes in cycles,’ Cassie said absently; it was taking her longer than she’d have anticipated to get over the fluorescent greenness of the thing.

‘Ah, well.’ Connie improvised a pair of forceps out of two biros and put the cap away where it couldn’t do any more harm. ‘So on balance,’ she went on, ‘I’d have to put it down as a draw. Not that I’m bothered, really. It’s like what they say about being a successful knife-fighter.’

‘Really?’ Cassie looked at her. ‘What do they say about being a successful knife-fighter?’

Connie smiled. ‘You can only do it if you don’t really care if you lose. Like me; if they fire me, so what? I miss out on a bit of pension, but that’s okay, I hardly ever spent anything all the years I was in America - company apartment, obscene bonuses - so if they chuck me out tomorrow, all it means is that I get to be a little old lady in a country cottage a few years ahead of schedule. Compared to Third World debt or the ozone layer, it’s no big deal. You, on the other hand—’