“The hell he is! He’s going to concerts and restaurants while we’re defending his honour?”
The office manager, a positive thinker, sought to correct him. “It’s the honour of us all. The proper functioning of your division is involved, too. Leave the old man alone. Let him have his music. How much longer will he enjoy life? You needn’t worry. My husband and I are looking after your daughter.”
Compassion for his child welled within him. Didn’t the office manager agree she was adorable?
“She’s a good girl.” As always, the office manager was being honest. “She’s just … in a world of her own. A bit disorganized. It’s hard to tell what she wants. But don’t worry. She’ll find herself in the end …”
The resource manager shut his eyes tight.
7
Vying with the smug, lazy drawl on the cell phone was the sound of pounding music. The weasel must be at a wedding or a nightclub. Yet not even the background noise could keep the journalist from swearing roundly at his editor for having shown the company owner an advance copy of his article. “The man’s a moral scoundrel and a traitor to his profession,” he said. “Now I understand why the little bastard was in such a hurry to disappear.” He had begun to fear a stab in the back the moment his photographer had pointed out that the bakery also ran a paper products division that sold newsprint to the weekly. “So what are you telling me?” he asked the resource manager. “That you deserve moral immunity for a good price on newsprint? Why can’t your response wait a week? You’re trying to kill my article. Are you really so scared of finding out how inhuman you are or are you just worried about losing business? If the latter, I can only say I’m amazed to find such innocent capitalists. I only wish someone would think of boycotting you because of me. You needn’t worry, though. No one will. Who cares about the inhumanity of a big company when staying human nowadays is too much for anyone? People are so screwed up that they’ll even admire you for being tough. And suppose some bleeding heart is upset — so what? You think he’ll go from shelf to shelf in the supermarket boycotting your products? What crap! What’s wrong with you? You must be awfully unsure of yourselves to be so sensitive about a minor accusation. Don’t make a big issue of it. Say you’re sorry; just apologize. Only please wait a week before doing it.”
“No one is sorry and no one is apologizing or waiting,” the manager answered, shouting to make himself heard above the music. “You’ve got it all wrong. The woman left her job a month ago. At the time of the bombing she was no longer in our employ, even though we kept her on the payroll by mistake. I’ve checked it all out. We had no way of knowing she was dead and no reason to know. We expect you to be fair and withdraw your article.”
The weasel’s smug drawl bespoke no such intention. “What does that have to do with it? Do you think you can salve your consciences by firing her retroactively? If she was carrying your pay slip when she was killed, she obviously thought she worked for you. What are you trying to prove with your double-talk? Of course you were responsible! You not only owe her an apology, you owe one to her friends and relatives, who might have given her a decent burial if they’d known. It’s the least you can do for a solitary employee like her, whom I’m sure you exploited all you could. If you want to be forgiven, you’ll have to promise our readers never to be such callous shits again — that’s the only way they’ll forget what I wrote …”
The resource manager lost his temper.
“Nothing ever gets forgotten in this country. And before you go judging us and giving us orders, maybe you’ll tell me how you got involved in all this. Why didn’t the hospital get in touch with us directly after the stub was found? Why did the morgue contact the press and not us?”
“In the first place,” the lazy drawl continued, “they didn’t contact the press. They contacted me. And secondly, the emergency room had no time to deal with such matters because it was too busy fighting to save her life. She was kept in the morgue when she died because nobody claimed her body — and there, as I happen to know from other cases, she got lost in the shuffle between the police and the hospital. It’s not a question of anyone deliberately shirking his duty. It’s more one of not knowing how to deal with an anonymous corpse. It took several days for the morgue’s director, who is an acquaintance of mine, to go through the shopping bag and find that stub among the rotten fruit … And by the way, before I go on, why do you issue such skimpy pay slips, with not even the name of the recipient printed on them?”
“Because every one of our employees has a different financial arrangement. We don’t want complaints or comparisons because of stubs falling into the wrong hands.”
“Just what I thought!” the weasel chuckled. “Divide and rule! Conceal and exploit! It’s typical of you people. But I’m getting off the subject … To cut a long story short, the director of the morgue, being a pathologist and not a sociologist, didn’t know what to do and asked my advice. Over the past year we’ve become friends because of some features I wrote about the hospital’s treatment of bombing victims. I’m afraid he’s become a rather uncritical believer in the power of the press …”
“But why didn’t you contact us when you saw the stub?”
“Because by then I was enraged by your callousness and decided to teach you a public lesson. This isn’t the first time a large company like yours has turned its back on a menial or temporary employee killed or injured in a terrorist attack.”
“Just listen to yourself!” the manager shouted, grasping at last how the story got started. “You accuse us of inhumanity — yet it was you who left that woman alone in the morgue to teach us a lesson we didn’t need …”
“What do you mean alone?” The weasel laughed in amusement. “She had plenty of company.”
“You know what I mean. Unidentified. So you could run a juicy story.”
“Now you listen to me!” By now the journalist had lost his temper, too. “In cases like this I always look for the general rule — and that’s the arrogance of the haves who trample the have-nots. You needn’t worry about that woman. As far as she’s concerned, she can stay in the morgue for all eternity. I’ve seen corpses wait for weeks before being identified and buried. Some never even get that far. Don’t forget that the morgue belongs to the university’s medical school and that students use it for their anatomy lessons. All for the sake of science. A year ago I wrote a feature about it, complete with photographs — tasteful ones — all you could see were the corpses’ silhouettes. The paper was afraid to publish even that.”
“I don’t believe it,” the resource manager said bitterly. “If you’re in favour of science, what is this whole crusade for the dignity of the dead?”
The wild music suddenly stopped.
“The dignity of the dead?” The weasel sounded truly startled. “Do you really think that’s what I’m fighting for? You’ll have to excuse me, mister, but you’re missing the point. I thought you would have realized by now that I don’t give a damn for the dead. The line between life and death is clear to me. The dead are dead. Whatever dignity we accord them, or fear or guilt we have about them, are strictly our own. They have nothing to do with it. I’d think that a personnel director like you would understand that if I feel pain or sorrow, it’s for the anonymous living, not the undignified dead. You may think I’m a romantic or a mystic, but the ‘shocking inhumanity’ is yours. And so is the unforgivable ease with which you forget a worker who doesn’t show up for work. What with all the unemployed out there, you’ll find someone else, so why worry, eh? If I let her stay unidentified for a few days longer, it was only to shock our jaded readers.”