Her savior, it turned out, was Darius’s partner, calling from the lobby to say Darius was needed downstairs.
Darius looked apologetic as he headed toward the elevator, as if this were a date they’d both be disappointed to end prematurely. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
The moment he was gone, she sank into one of the waiting room chairs, nearly numb with exhaustion.
Darius must have run out of time or found someone else to bother. He never came back, and McGee was able to return her cart to the basement without running into him. Without looking over her shoulder, she was cruising out the door, a cool sheath of paper cutting into her belly.
Over breakfast that afternoon, McGee gave April the details.
“You’re crazy if you’re thinking about going back,” April said. “What if he does it again?”
McGee had already wondered the same thing. “He probably does that to everybody,” she said. “He’s just lonely. There are forty floors and I don’t know how many people cleaning.”
“Is it worth the risk?” April gestured toward the manila folder McGee had left on the table, which contained Ruth Freeman’s files. “Was what you got that great?”
McGee lifted her empty cup and watched a few coffee grounds slide across the bottom. “Worthless.”
She’d spent the last several hours going through every page. Reports about budgets and memos about policy changes and personnel moves. It was the most boring pile of nothing McGee had ever forced in front of her eyes.
April sat silently across the table, looking as if she were afraid to speak.
“Two hundred pages,” McGee said. “Probably more. All completely useless.”
“What are you going to do?” April said in her tiniest voice, the one she reserved for her friends’ darkest moods.
McGee had been asking herself the same thing all morning. “Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place.”
§
By the end of her first full week, McGee had begun to develop a routine. There was a logic to cleaning. If she waited to dust until after she’d vacuumed, she ended up spilling filth back onto her clean floors. And trash bins were better emptied all at once. Collect them all — do that first, before exhaustion set in, and then dump the bags near the elevator. Otherwise she ended up carrying all that extra weight, hour after hour.
On her sixth night, Darius appeared as she was wiping down the conference room table. She wasn’t happy to see him, but she wasn’t afraid, either. By then she’d already done what she needed to: picked, copied, and returned. Three nights in a row now, she’d pulled it off, getting in and out of Ruth Freeman’s files without any trouble. Stealing, it turned out, was easy. The problem remained finding something worth taking. As with the first files she’d brought home, the stashes from the last two nights had been useless: memos and spreadsheets and mountains of meaningless data. If Ruth Freeman’s main job was obfuscation, she was incredibly good at it.
All night, as she cleaned, McGee’s thoughts had been returning to that conversation days before with Apriclass="underline" what if there was nothing in this batch of files, either? Then she’d have to move on. There was no shortage of files. The main filing room was down the corridor from the photocopier, a space bigger than her whole apartment, row upon row of cabinets. In Ruth Freeman’s office, with its few drawers, McGee could copy everything. But confronted with an entire room of files, where would she even begin?
As usual, Darius announced his presence that night when her back was turned, as if hoping to catch her by surprise. “Here you are,” he said, leaning in the doorway.
As if she weren’t in the same place as always.
For a change, though, he didn’t seem especially happy to have found her. He looked tired, the jamb doing most of the work of keeping him upright.
She brushed past him, refusing to meet his eye. Out in the corridor, she began on the windows. He seemed distracted, watching without his usual enthusiasm. Next thing she knew, he was slumping down in the corner with a dramatic sigh.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Violet—” He looked up pitifully, giving McGee a meaningful look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand. She moved on to the next set of windows, wishing she could get even farther away. She’d had enough of Violet, the girl Darius liked to pretend was such a nuisance. His latest report, several nights before, was he’d finally told her to quit stopping by in her skimpy clothes. As if that were the problem, not Darius himself.
“I didn’t see her for two days,” he said now, trailing McGee with his eyes. “Two days,” he repeated, pausing, as if to allow time for applause. “I don’t know,” he said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’d started thinking maybe everything would be all right.”
McGee remembered him having said the exact same thing the night he broke it off with her, too, that maybe now his problem was solved. She hadn’t believed it any more then than she did now.
“Yesterday I got home from work,” Darius said, “and I saw something in the stairwell. One of those things you put in your hair, you know what I mean? One of those things.” He made a vague circle with his hands. “It looked like something I’d seen her wear. I thought maybe she’d dropped it. So I brought it upstairs. I wanted to leave it outside her door, but I don’t know,” he said. “I must’ve hit the knob or something.”
Right, McGee thought. Or something.
“She must’ve heard me. She opened the door, and then I had to go in, and …”
He trailed off, but McGee had no trouble filling in the details he’d left out.
It seemed to McGee as if they were hours into his sordid soap opera before Darius finally excused himself to go to the men’s room. In the sudden silence, she thought she could feel her nerves stretching out, returning to a state of calm. Each breath seemed to carry all the way to her toes.
Knowing she had only a minute or two, she moved quickly, hurrying from the lobby to Ruth Freeman’s corridor. Past the old lady’s office she went, past the photocopier room.
She let herself into the main filing room with her key. She flicked on the light.
She’d been here before. She knew what the room contained. But she needed to see it again. She needed to see it now, to measure it, to think about what it would really mean to try to find something here. A couple hundred cabinets, at least. Labeled, but the labels helped only if you knew what you were looking for. Even if she managed five hundred pages a night, it would take her decades to get through it all.
She made it back to her cart just ahead of Darius.
She let him load the heavy bags of trash into the elevator. Once they reached the basement, he picked them up again and carried them out to the loading dock. As he tossed the trash into the Dumpster, McGee stashed her papers underneath.
For a moment afterward, while Darius collected a few Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers from the pavement and tossed them into the bin, she allowed herself to watch him with a smug sort of pleasure. No matter how close he followed, he’d never catch her.
As he came toward her now, she gazed at the files just visible underneath the Dumpster, daring him to look. But was that it? A game of chicken, until hopefully, maybe, she got lucky? Found something useful?
Darius sat down beside her on the loading dock. McGee sucked on her cigarette as if it were made of pure oxygen. But no matter how deep she pulled the smoke into her lungs, calm kept eluding her.
“She came downstairs again.” Darius toed a loose bolt onto the railing at the edge of the dock. “This morning.”