Outside, without warning, it began to hail. For a moment he sat there, transfixed by the white pellets striking his desk. Then he slowly rose to shut the window and phoned his ex-wife to make another date with his daughter. She, however, claimed not to know where the child was or when she would return. “What do you want from her now?” she asked impatiently. “Your day with her was yesterday. If you had someone substitute for you, that’s your problem, not mine. She and I have plans to spend today and tomorrow together. You can wait for your turn again next week.”
“You’re being vindictive. We had a terrible accident here. I told you. An employee of ours was killed …”
She hung up.
He returned to his calculations, but his concentration had gone. His ex-wife’s success at packing more and more violence into her sentences was positively frightening. Taking out the phone numbers he had copied down, he dialled the young lady from the Immigration Ministry. Her cell phone identified him at once.
“You’ll have to be more patient,” she scolded by way of saying hello. “We’ve only just managed to trace the name of the woman’s former husband, her son’s father. We’re looking for someone at the embassy to track down his address and arrange to have him informed in person. We’ve had bad experiences with phone messages getting lost, so please bear with us.” She hoped that the authorities would know by the end of the day what to do with the body.
“Of course,” he apologized warmly. He dealt with human resources himself and knew these things took time. But that wasn’t why he was calling. There was something important he had forgotten to mention. The woman’s keys were in his possession. He had been given them by the morgue. If anyone at the Immigration Ministry or National Insurance had need of them, he wanted her to know that he had them.
But the Immigration Ministry did not need the woman’s keys. The one urgent matter was deciding where to bury her. Her clothing and personal effects could wait.
“You might try looking for the man who came with her to this country.”
“Her Jewish friend, you mean …”
“Precisely. You’ve done your homework. Friend or lover.”
“Lover?” She had a refreshing laugh. “What could we do with a lover? We need a next-of-kin who’s legally responsible. The only one we know of is her son.”
“Isn’t he a bit young?”
“Young people can participate in decisions, too, you know.”
“You’re right. How could I have forgotten him? Yes, that’s logical. We’ll have to locate him. Just keep me — I mean us — in the picture.”
“Don’t worry. We can use every bit of assistance. You’re in our computer.” Graciously, she ended the conversation.
Today’s world, the resource manager reflected, could be run perfectly well by secretaries, computers, and cell phones. He was about to return to his figures when he was summoned to the owner’s office.
The owner was out, having gone for a medical examination. At his computer sat his office manager, composing the company’s response to the weekly. The editor had agreed to display it in a sidebar if it was kept to eighty words.
Looking over her slim, hunched shoulder, the human resources manager read with a sinking heart and eyes blurred with anger.
I wish to thank the distinguished journalist for his shocking and instructive exposé of our company’s shameful oversight regarding the death of one of our temporary employees in the recent market bombing. A thorough investigation has revealed the failure to be due to administrative and human errors by our personnel manager. In his name and mine, and that of the entire staff, I wish to apologize and express my deep sorrow. I have given him instructions to cooperate closely with National Insurance in all arrangements and matters of compensation having to do with the dead woman and her family.
He pointed a finger at the screen and counted the words under his breath.
“Ninety-nine,” he said. “Since we’re limited to eighty, I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Delete that unfair, inaccurate, unnecessary sentence that makes me want to scream. Here, this one blaming me for what happened. You’ll be left with exactly the right number of words.”
He ran his finger across the lines on the screen, this time counting out loud.
The office manager turned to look at him. She had a gentleness that set her off from the brash young secretaries.
“But how can I? If there’s an apology with no explanation, we’ll be admitting our inability to locate the source of our error.”
“In that case,” he hissed, “do me a favour and skip the sidebar. You can publish a full response in next week’s edition — an accurate and detailed one. I’ll dictate to you verbatim the full story of an elderly night shift supervisor’s cowardly infatuation with a lonely foreign worker.”
“God, no!” She laid a restraining hand on his arm. Her pale, wrinkled face had the remains of an ancient, forgotten beauty. “We couldn’t possibly say anything so embarrassing.”
“But why accuse me?”
“In the first place, I’m not accusing you. He is.”
“Then why is he picking on me?”
He was doing it, said the office manager, because he wanted the resource manager to be his full partner. Hadn’t he promised to make the woman his business? Then let the blame be his business, too. After all, not only was it in his jurisdiction, he was still young — here today and gone tomorrow, if offered a better job elsewhere. Who would remember any of this when he was gone? It wouldn’t harm him to take some of the responsibility. The owner, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere — at least not until the Angel of Death delivered the coup de grâce, as he once put it. His world began and ended in this room, from which he could see the chimneys built by his ancestors. He mustn’t be left with the guilt, especially since he was already so tormented by it.
The resource manager listened attentively. Instead of arguing, he felt his outrage yielding. Although he had known the office manager to be an efficient organizer, he had never imagined her to be capable of an original thought. For a moment his mind dwelt on her tall, jaunty husband, whose eyes twinkled with humour. Was it he, with his rugby-ball head, who was behind all this? What, he asked her, changing the subject, were her husband’s impressions of his daughter?
“He told you. She has too many gaps in her education.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said impatiently. “I’m not talking about maths and trigonometry. I’m talking about her.”
The old office manager smiled awkwardly. How much time, she parried, had they spent with her?
But the resource manager was insistent. “I liked your husband,” he said. “He’s a real person.”
Her lined face lit up with pleasure. She looked down at the desk, choosing her words carefully.
“I think that he … like me … thinks your daughter is a lovely child and far from … unintelligent. It’s just that …”
“What?”
“She seems to give up too quickly, to surrender without a fight …”
“Give up on what?”
“Herself … the world … perhaps you too. It’s self-destructive. My husband says you have to fight for her harder, not to despair of her so easily.”
“Despair of her?” The human resources manager was startled. Yet before he could protest, they had slipped past his defences. “I see,” he sighed. “I understand … in fact, I agree. He’s right.”
Anxious to get away from this tactful, truthful woman, he dropped his objections to the response to the local weekly.
4