“But why them?” Fitch’s drunkenness seemed to have miraculously vanished. “There’s a million other companies doing this stuff. If not worse. Why are you so obsessed with them?”
“Because they’re here,” Myles said. “And they’re all that’s left. The others are gone.”
McGee rewarded him with a partial smile. “And everyone’s afraid they’ll leave, too. So they don’t say anything, don’t hold them accountable. Why do you think the city keeps giving them tax breaks? They move another plant down south to get away from unions, and the city gives them more handouts. The company threatens bankruptcy so they can slash wages, and then they give their executives a two-hundred-percent raise. No one says a word. The city council wouldn’t give them a jaywalking ticket, they’re so afraid they’ll pack up HQ.”
“City councils don’t give out tickets,” Holmes said.
“It’s a parasite,” McGee said, ignoring him, “destroying this place.”
“You actually think this is stuff they’ve just got lying around?” Holmes said. “All these revealing documents?”
“Filed under D,” Fitch said with a deep, throaty air of mystery, “for diabolical plans.”
“That,” McGee said, turning to Holmes, “is where you come in.”
“No,” Holmes said, “no, it isn’t.”
It was all a simple matter of locks, she said. And locks had simple answers: picks. “You,” she said, coming up to Holmes’s side, “just have to teach me how.”
“Have you forgotten where I woke up this morning? Me and Myles?” Holmes looked over to find Myles had returned to his staring game.
“Since when are you afraid of getting in a little trouble?”
“There’s trouble for a purpose,” Holmes said, “and there’s trouble that’s just stupid. His interview—” Holmes pointed to Fitch, who promptly rose from the sofa, eager to sneak away. “What did it accomplish?”
“If it’d worked,” McGee said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“What makes you think they have this stuff at all? These reports? These memos? Why on earth would they keep them?” And why, Holmes wondered, looking around the room, had everyone else fallen so silent? Fitch diving back into his cup. Myles off in a daydream. April at the sink, bent over her sweatshirt. Why was no one taking his side?
“Because they’re arrogant,” McGee said. “Because they think they’ll never get caught. Especially your new friend.” McGee nodded toward Fitch, and he swallowed deeply. “If Ruth Freeman really doesn’t fear the truth, like she says, then she’s got no need for a shredder.”
“What if you get caught?” April said.
“I’ll make sure I don’t.”
“What’s there to say?” Myles finally lowered his eyes from the painting. “It’s not like we can talk you out of it.”
And of course, Myles was right. McGee wasn’t asking their permission. She was informing them of what she’d already decided.
“This isn’t us,” Holmes said. “This isn’t what we do.”
“Like you said,”—McGee turned back to Holmes—“what we do isn’t working.”
April had drifted over from the sink. “I should get going.” The ball of pink cotton cupped in her hands looked like a dead rabbit.
“It’s early.” McGee’s smile reappeared. As if she were trying to remind them this was just a party, an innocent party.
Was it early? To Holmes, the hour suddenly felt ancient, as if they’d been frozen in these positions not just for the evening but for eternity, like a dark parlor scene painted by an old master in a world before industrial ruins — before trash could be glued to a canvas and passed off as art. It was time for some new kind of scene. A landscape, a seascape. A nude. It didn’t matter. He’d gladly settle for even less than that, for a vase of cut flowers, a still life with fruit.
Twelve
She called herself Zolska Zhronakhovska. For her hair, she found a dye to turn the brown hay-colored blond. She had April cut her bangs straight across and iron out the waves. From the front, it looked as though she were wearing half an iceberg lettuce on her head.
She practiced speaking so it sounded as if her mouth were full of ice cubes. Only ever the simplest of words. Yes. No. Okey-dokey.
According to the placard, the woman in the basement was the “Head of Facilities Maintenance,” a fancy title for someone whose office was a cage. The woman’s name was Dorothy, and Dorothy shared the cage with mops and buckets and jugs of pastel cleaning fluid. Dorothy was slim as a cigarette. Her red plaid shirt fit her like a cape.
Beneath the low-hanging fluorescent strips, Dorothy asked McGee questions about her experience and about her immigration status, and McGee smiled and scratched her head and blinked. At the thrift store, April had dug up a pair of toothpaste-white orthopedic shoes. McGee’s pleated, acid-washed jeans closed at the ankle with zippers and bows.
“Okey-dokey,” she said, knowing perfectly well the legal formalities were a bluff.
Dorothy pointed to a square in the calendar. McGee would start the next night.
Never had she ridden in anything capable of moving so fast without seeming to move at all. When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, McGee thought at first that she’d forgotten to press the button and was still in the basement.
But the view had changed. Dorothy’s cage was gone. There was a tiny black woman squatting with a rag before a set of double glass doors. Beyond the doors was a suite of inner offices.
McGee was right where she’d intended to be.
But already there’d been complications. This was a forty-story office tower, and not until after Dorothy had hired her had it occurred to McGee to wonder what the odds would be that she’d be assigned the precise floor she wanted. One in forty, April had pointed out in her innocently helpful way. And sure enough, McGee had shown up tonight for her first night of work, and Dorothy had handed her a scrap of paper bearing the number twenty-four. From there she was supposed to work her way up, not down. McGee had no contingency plan, and the sight of the number twenty-four had shut off something in her brain. If she’d been capable of thinking anything, she might have thought to turn around and walk home — give up right then and there. But she’d managed to suppress her instinct to flee, and then she’d managed to suppress the unwanted information too, crumpling the number in her pocket and getting on the elevator and pressing the button for three instead.
Now here she was, her brain still numb, with a woman glaring at her, annoyed by the interruption. The woman’s ID badge said her name was Calice.
“What is it?” Calice said, already turning back to her work.
Trembling slightly, McGee picked a bottle at random from her cart. “Okey-dokey.”
“What are you doing?” Calice said as McGee approached the glass.
McGee smiled, and she was raising the spray bottle to the glass when Calice grabbed her arm. She was small but strong.
“No, no, no,” Calice said. “What are you doing?”
It was difficult to guess the woman’s age. There were no wrinkles anywhere on her face, but her hair was threaded with gray.
“This is my floor.” Calice’s teeth were big and square and clenched. She took McGee by the arm and led her over to the elevator. Calice pointed at the forty numbered lights above the elevator doors. The third bulb was lit. Calice motioned toward that one, then pointed at herself.
“You see?” she said.
Every last bit of moisture in McGee’s mouth had evaporated, but she swallowed deeply anyway. “Okey-dokey,” she said, turning around again and squirting a faint yellow mist onto the glass.