What then? What could the problem be? He went through Friday in his mind in search of irritants. What had he said, or done, to set this Monday morning frost? He’d seen that everyone had shared the fun with champagne and cakes. He’d been his usual self, the Prince of Irony and Idleness. What had he done to give offence? Something was irking them, no doubt of that. And, truth to tell, something was irking him as well. His conscience was not entirely clear. Again he ran Friday through his mind and recognized exactly what it was that had stained his day. The subway fight with Joseph. The viciousness of fists and keys. The parting kick. The pleasure that he’d taken in such a squalid triumph. Yet these were private acts, less public than the time he’d spent with Anna. Who could know and disapprove of what had happened out of sight and underground and to an ill-dressed clod who had no contact with Big Vic? Why would anybody care?
Again Rook shuffled through the Friday pack. The pretext that he’d used to get down to the marketplace. The orange that he’d peeled. The tugging and the ripping of the laurel stems. The shaming bout of asthma in the presence of those men. The creaky birthday lunch. The gleeful coda to the day: Anna laughing on his bed, delighted by his mordancy, his teasing hands, that clowning routine with his underpants, ‘Ourselves, Ourselves, Ourselves’. And yes (I raise my head above the parapet again), the mocking column that I, the Burgher, wrote about the taxi and the boss’s coddled fish. All the workers in Big Vic would have seen and laughed at that … and thought, perhaps, the Burgher’s source was Rook? For that was just like Rook, to feed the babblers of the press. So, then — they would not look him in the eyes because they thought he had betrayed a fishy confidence? Again, ‘Ridiculous!’
A firmer possibility occurred to Rook. He need not search his diary or his conscience any more. Of course! The staff’s solemnity could have only one cause. By God, the old man’s dead! he thought. ‘No sign of life’ indeed! Rook almost felt relieved, as all that morning’s oddities were now explained. The missing Fix It list, the closed, locked door, the empty schedule, those phrases, ‘It’s been cancelled … He’ll not be down today.’ What apart from death, or at least a major stroke perhaps, would keep Victor from his work? If he had tumbled, say, and cracked a hip, his memos would be flying plumply from his bed like pigeons from a loft. While there was air left in his lungs and sufficient power in his arm to hold a pen, nothing would stop him orchestrating his affairs.
So that was it. The stick had snapped at last. Victor had died, and no one on the staff was senior enough to let Rook know. Or else, perhaps — this was a possibility — they thought he knew and were embarrassed by his lack of gravity or grief, his flippancy. ‘It’s not for us to say,’ the women on Reception had insisted. And they were right. Rook had been the boss’s eyes and ears, his fixer and his messenger. He was as close, as intimate, as anyone could be to such a cube of ice. No wonder nobody could face him with the news. No doubt the Finance Manager or the Group MD would come up from the floor below to inform Rook personally that there had been ‘a sad event’. Or Anna, even. She was senior enough. Rook sat and waited, hoping it was Anna who would come. He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his chest. He felt — for the first time since the Friday night — that he would benefit from sleep.
Rook’s door was open. There was no need for Anna to knock so formally on the stained veneer. Yet she was wise enough to knock and wait. He woke from his half-sleep and waved her in. Already he had prepared an elegiac face; already he was searching in his mind for what the death of Victor meant to him. Advancement? Displacement? Something in the will? At least it meant that this was no time to close the office door and push his hands beneath the bands of Anna’s skirt and blouse.
Anna did not look at Rook. Her expression was the same as those worn by the Reception staff, by the accountant as he hurried to his room, by the commissionaire who had ignored Rook’s airy greeting as he had entered Big Vic from the mall. Now he was sure he had identified the truth. She looked so shocked, so drained, so unlike the face upon the pillow. ‘Come in. What’s wrong?’
‘Bad news,’ she said. She looked as if her knees would give. He held her in his arms. It didn’t matter what the staff might think. Her tears fell on his jacket and his tie.
‘Sit down. Sit down,’ he said. He wished to cry himself. He felt so nervous and so powerful. He could not focus on the old man’s death.
‘What’s wrong?’
She took deep breaths, and then she looked him in the face at last. ‘I wish it wasn’t me who had to tell you this,’ she said.
‘I know.’ And then, ‘No need to tell me, Anna. I can guess.’
‘Guess what?’
‘It’s Victor, isn’t it? He’s ill. He’s dead.’
She shook her head. She almost laughed. ‘He isn’t dead. You’ll wish he was. It’s you … It’s us!’ She wiped her face, and took deep breaths until she found her usual even voice: ‘He says you’ve got to go. He seems to know that we’ve been meeting out of work. How can he know? It’s not his business anyhow. This isn’t sane!’
She handed him an office memorandum. Victor had put it on her desk, unsealed. Some office rubber-neck had read it and spread the news. It only took one prying clerk, one internal phone call, to circulate bad news throughout Big Vic, from the atrium to the 27th floor. Victor had written the memorandum — in pencil — late on the previous Friday night, his birthday night. It instructed Anna to tell Rook: ‘His out-of-work contacts and activities are not morally compatible with the trust invested in him. They have no place in an organizaion such as mine where relationships between all members of the office staff, producers, clients, and customers, should be based on propriety and honesty. He is dismissed. Please inform him that he has until midday to clear his desk, and that there can be no further contact between us except through the mediation of lawyers.’ There was an envelope for Rook — a formal note of termination.
‘He’s mad,’ she said. She understood the comforts of hyperbole. ‘He’s old and mad and wicked! He’s shut himself away up there like a gutless little kid. Does he think he owns us all? Can’t we have “contacts, out of work” without the nod from him?’
But Rook was in no doubt what Victor meant by ‘contacts and activities’. Someone — he hadn’t got an inkling who, not yet — had spilled the beans. Victor knew now all about the pitch money which the soapies had paid each quarter and which had made Rook so rich and careless.
‘He isn’t mad,’ he said. ‘And this hasn’t got anything to do with you, or us.’
‘We’ll fight for you! Come on!’
She was prepared to head an office strike, to draft petitions, risk her job, give Victor merry hell. She was prepared to burrow into Rook, and make a warren at his heart. Rook shook his head. Why fight to lose? Who’d be his ally when the word got out about the scheme he’d run, the money that he’d made, the cynicism of his office jocularity? If he made merry hell, then Victor or his lawyers might make hell of some less cheerful kind. They could inform the police and then the charge might be extortion or embezzlement. He’d end up in a cell. The old man hiding in his room had struck a distant deal with Rook that robbed him of his work but not his liberty.